“Maybe you weren’t solely responsible,” Clausen said. “But you were certainly complicit. You and everyone else who pursued the dream of artificial intelligence. Driving the world toward the edge of that cliff, without a thought for the consequences. You had no idea what you were unleashing.”
“I’m telling you, we unleashed nothing. It didn’t work.”
They were walking along a suspended gangway now, crossing from one side to the other of some huge space somewhere inside the rig. “Take a look down,” Da Silva said. Gaunt didn’t want to; he’d never been good with heights and the drainage holes in the floor were already too large for comfort. He forced himself anyway. The four walls of the cubic chamber held rack upon rack of coffin-sized white boxes, stacked thirty high and surrounded by complicated plumbing, accompanied by an equally complex network of access catwalks, ladders, and service tracks. Even as Gaunt watched, a robot whirred up to one of the boxes and extracted a module from one end of it before tracking sideways to deal with another coffin.
“In case you thought we were yanking your chain,” Clausen said. “This is real.”
The hibernation arrangements for the original Few could not have been more different. Like an Egyptian pharaoh buried with his worldly possessions, Gaunt had required an entire crypt full of bulky, state-of-the-art cryopreservation and monitoring systems. At any one time, per his contract with Sleepover, he would have been under the direct care of several living doctors. Just housing a thousand of the Few needed a building the size of a major resort hotel, with about the same power requirements. By contrast, this was hibernation on a crushing, maximally efficient industrial scale. People in boxes, stacked like mass-produced commodities, tended by the absolute minimum of living caretakers. He was seeing maybe less than a thousand sleepers in this one chamber, but from that point on Gaunt had no doubt whatsoever that the operation could be scaled up to encompass billions.
All you needed were more rooms like this. More robots and more rigs. Provided you had the power, and provided the planet did not need anyone to do anything else, it was eminently doable.
There was no one to grow crops or distribute food. But that didn’t matter because there was almost no one left waking to need feeding. No one to orchestrate the intricate, flickering web of the global finance system. But that didn’t matter because there was no longer anything resembling an economy. No need for a transport infrastructure because no one traveled. No need for communications, because no one needed to know what was going on beyond their own sector. No need for anything, really, save the absolute, life-and-death essentials. Air to breathe. Rations and medicine for less than half a million people. A trickle of oil, the world’s last black hiccough, to keep the helicopters running.
Yes, it could be done. It could easily be done.
“There’s a war,” Da Silva said. “It’s been going on, in some shape or form, since before you went under. But it’s probably not the kind of war you’re thinking of.”
“And where do these people come into it, these sleepers?”
“They have no choice,” Clausen said. “They have to sleep. If they don’t, we all die.”
“We, as in …?”
“You, me. Us,” Da Silva said. “The entire human species.”
They collected Nero and the corpse from a sick bay several levels down from the freezer chamber. The corpse was already bagged, a silver-wrapped mummy on a medical trolley. Rather than the man Gaunt had been expecting, Nero turned out to be a tall, willowy woman with an open, friendly face and a mass of salmon-red curls.
“You’re the newbie, right?” she asked, lifting a coffee mug in salute.
“I guess,” Gaunt said uneasily.
“Takes some adjustment, I know. Took a good six months before I realized this wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to me. But you’ll get there eventually.” One of Nero’s hands was bandaged, a white mitten with a safety pin stuck through the dressing. “Take it from me, though. Don’t go back inside the box.” Then she glanced at Clausen. “You are giving him a chance about this, aren’t you?”
“Of course,” Clausen said. “That’s the deal.”
“Occurs to me sometimes maybe it would be easier if there weren’t a deal, you know,” Nero said. “Like, we just give them their duties and to hell with it.”
“You wouldn’t have been too pleased if we hadn’t given you the choice,” Da Silva said. He was already taking off his coat, settling in for the stay.
“Yeah, but what did I know back then? Six months feels like half a lifetime ago now.”
“When did you go under?” Gaunt asked.
“Twenty ninety-two. One of the first hundred million.”
“Gaunt’s got a head start on you,” Clausen said. “Guy was one of the Few. The original Few, the first two hundred thousand.”
“Holy shit. That is some head start.” Nero narrowed her eyes. “He up to speed on things yet? My recollection is they didn’t know what they were getting into back then.”
“Most of them didn’t,” Clausen said.
“Know what?” Gaunt asked.
“Sleepover was a cover, even then,” Nero said. “You were being sold a scam. There was never any likelihood of an immortality breakthrough, no matter how long you slept.”
“I don’t understand. You’re saying it was all a con?”
“Of a kind,” Nero said. “Not to make money for anyone, but to begin the process of getting the whole of humanity into hibernation. It had to begin small, so that they had time to work the wrinkles out of the technology. If the people in the know had come out into the open and announced their plans, no one would have believed them. And if they had been believed, there’d have been panic and confusion all over the world. So they began with the Few, and then expanded the operation slowly. First a few hundred thousand. Then half a million. Then a million … and so on.” She paused. “Establishing a pattern, a normal state of affairs. They kept the lid on it for thirty years. But then the rumors started spreading, the rumors that there was something more to Sleepover.”
“The dragons didn’t help,” Da Silva said. “It was always going to be a tall order explaining those away.”
“By the time I went under,” Nero said, “most of us knew the score. The world was going to end if we didn’t sleep. It was our moral duty, our obligation, to submit to the hibernation rigs. That, or take the euthanasia option. I took the freezer route, but a lot of my friends opted for the pill. Figured the certainty of death was preferable to the lottery of getting into the boxes, throwing the cosmic dice …” She was looking at Gaunt intently, meeting his eyes as she spoke. “And I knew about this part of the deal as well. That, at some point, there’d be a chance of me being brought out of sleep to become a caretaker. But, you know, the likelihood of that was vanishingly small. Never thought it would happen to me.”
“No one ever does,” Clausen said.
“What happened?” Gaunt asked, nodding at the foil-wrapped body.
“Gimenez died when a steam pipe burst down on Level Eight. I don’t think he felt much, it would have been so quick. I got down there as quickly as I could, obviously. Shut off the steam leak and managed to drag Gimenez back to the infirmary.”
“Nero was burned getting Gimenez back here,” Da Silva said.
“Hey, I’ll mend. Just not much good with a screwdriver right now.”
“I’m sorry about Gimenez,” Clausen said.
“You don’t need to be. Gimenez never really liked it here. Always figured he’d made the wrong decision, sticking with us rather than going back into the box. I tried to talk him round, of course, but it was like arguing with a wall.” Nero ran her good hand through her curls. “Not saying I didn’t get on with the guy. But there’s no arguing that he’s better off now than he was before.”
“He’s dead, though,” Gaunt said.
“Technically. But I ran a full blood-scrub on him after the accident, pumped him full of cryoprotectant. We don’t h
ave any spare slots here, but they can put him back in a box on the operations rig.”
“My box,” Gaunt said. “The one I was in.”
“There are other slots,” Da Silva corrected. “Gimenez going back in doesn’t preclude you following him, if that’s what you want.”
“If Gimenez was so unhappy, why didn’t you just let him go back into the box earlier?”
“Not the way it works,” Clausen said. “He made his choice. Afterward, we put a lot of time and energy into bringing him up to speed, making him mesh with the team. You think we were going to willingly throw all that expenditure away, just because he changed his mind?”
“He never stopped pulling his weight,” Nero said. “Say what you will about Gimenez, but he didn’t let the team down. And what happened to him down on Eight was an accident.”
“I never doubted it,” Da Silva said. “He was a good guy. It’s just a shame he couldn’t make the adjustment.”
“Maybe it’ll work out for him now,” Nero said. “Oneway ticket to the future. Done his caretaker stint, so the next time he’s revived, it’ll be because we finally got through this shit. It’ll be because we won the war, and we can all wake up again. They’ll find a way to fix him up, I’m sure. And if they can’t, they’ll just put him under again until they have the means.”
“Sounds like he got a good deal out of it in the end,” Gaunt said.
“The only good deal is being alive,” Nero replied. “That’s what we’re doing now, all of us. Whatever happens, we’re alive, we’re breathing, we’re having conscious thoughts. We’re not frozen bodies stacked in boxes, merely existing from one instant to the next.” She gave a shrug. “My fifty cents, that’s all. You want to go back in the box, let someone else shoulder the burden, don’t let me talk you out of it.” Then she looked at Da Silva. “You gonna be all right here on your own, until I’m straightened out?”
“Someone comes up I can’t deal with, I’ll let you know,” Da Silva said.
Nero and Da Silva went through a checklist, Nero making sure her replacement knew everything he needed to, and then they made their farewells. Gaunt couldn’t tell how long they were going to be leaving Da Silva alone out here, whether it was weeks or months. He seemed resigned to his fate, as if this kind of solitary duty was something they were all expected to do now and then. Given that there had been two people on duty here until Gimenez’s death, Gaunt wondered why they didn’t just thaw out another sleeper so that Da Silva wouldn’t have to work on his own while Nero’s hand was healing.
Then, no more than half an hour after his arrival, they were back in the helicopter again, powering back to the operations rig. The weather had worsened in the meantime, the seas lashing even higher against the rigs’ legs, and the horizon was now obscured behind curtains of storming rain, broken only by the flash of lightning.
“This was bad timing,” he heard Nero say. “Maybe you should have let me stew until this system had passed. It’s not like Gimenez couldn’t wait.”
“We were already overdue on the extraction,” Clausen said. “If the weather clamps down, this might be our last chance for days.”
“They tried to push one through yesterday, I heard.”
“Out in Echo field. Partial coalescence.”
“Did you see it?”
“Only on the monitors. Close enough for me.”
“We should put guns on the rigs.”
“And where would the manpower come from, exactly? We’re just barely holding on as it is, without adding more shit to worry about.”
The two women were sitting up front; Gaunt was in the back with Gimenez’s foil-wrapped corpse for company. They had folded back one seat to make room for the stretchered form.
“I don’t really have a choice, do I,” he said.
“Course you have a choice,” Nero answered.
“I mean, morally. I’ve seen what it’s like for you people. You’re stretched to the breaking point just keeping this operation from falling apart. Why don’t you wake up more sleepers?”
“Hey, that’s a good point,” Clausen said. “Why don’t we?”
Gaunt ignored her sarcasm. “You’ve just left that man alone, looking after that whole complex. How can I turn my back on you, and still have any self-respect?”
“Plenty of people do exactly that,” Nero said.
“How many? What fraction?”
“More than half agree to stay,” Clausen said. “Good enough for you?”
“But like you said, most of the sleepers would have known what they were getting into. I still don’t.”
“And you think that changes things, means we can cut you some slack?” Clausen asked. “Like we’re gonna say, it’s fine, man, go back into the box, we can do without you this time.”
“What you need to understand,” Nero said, “is that the future you were promised isn’t coming. Not for centuries, not until we’re out of this mess. And no one has a clue how long that could take. Meanwhile, the sleepers don’t have unlimited shelf life. You think the equipment never fails? You think we don’t sometimes lose someone because a box breaks down?”
“Of course not.”
“You go back in the box, you’re gambling on something that might never happen. Stay awake, at least there are certainties. At least you know you’ll die doing something useful, something worthwhile.”
“It would help if you told me why,” Gaunt said.
“Someone has to look after things,” Nero said. “The robots take care of the rigs, but who takes care of the robots?”
“I mean, why is it that everyone has to sleep? Why is that so damned important?”
Something flashed on the console. Clausen pressed a hand against her headphones, listening to something. After a few seconds he heard her say: “Roger, vectoring three two five.” Followed by an almost silent “Fuck. All we need.”
“That wasn’t a weather alert,” Nero said.
“What’s happening?” Gaunt asked, as the helicopter made a steep turn, the sea tilting up to meet him.
“Nothing you need worry about,” Clausen said.
The helicopter leveled out on its new course, flying higher than before—so it seemed to Gaunt—but also faster, the motor noise louder in the cabin, various indicator lights showing on the console that had not been lit before. Clausen silenced alarms as they came on, flipping the switches with the casual insouciance of someone who was well used to flying under tense circumstances and knew exactly what her machine could and couldn’t tolerate, more intimately perhaps than the helicopter itself, which was after all only a dumb machine. Rig after rig passed on either side, dark straddling citadels, and then the field began to thin out. Through what little visibility remained, Gaunt saw only open sea, a plain of undulating, white-capped gray. As the winds harried it the water moved like the skin of some monstrous breathing thing, sucking in and out with a terrible restlessness.
“There,” Nero said, pointing out to the right. “Breach glow. Shit; I thought we were meant to be avoiding it, not getting closer.”
Clausen banked the helicopter again. “So did I. Either they sent me a duff vector or there’s more than one incursion going on.”
“Won’t be the first time. Bad weather always does bring them out. Why is that?”
“Ask the machines.”
It took Gaunt a few moments to make out what Nero had already seen. Halfway to the limit of vision, part of the sea appeared to be lit from below, a smudge of sickly yellow-green against the gray and white everywhere else. A vision came to mind, half-remembered from some stiff-backed picture book he had once owned as a child, of a luminous, fabulously spired aquatic palace pushing up from the depths, barnacled in light, garlanded by mermaids and shoals of jewel-like fish. But there was, he sensed, nothing remotely magical or enchanted about what was happening under that yellow-green smear. It was something that had Clausen and Nero rattled, and they wanted to avoid it.
So did he.
�
��What is that thing?”
“Something trying to break through,” Nero said. “Something we were kind of hoping not to run into.”
“It’s not cohering,” Clausen said. “I think.”
The storm, if anything, appeared to double in fury around the glowing form. The sea boiled and seethed. Part of Gaunt wanted them to turn the helicopter around, to give him a better view of whatever process was going on under the waves. Another part, attuned to some fundamental wrongness about the phenomenon, wanted to get as far away as possible.
“Is it a weapon, something to do with this war you keep mentioning?” Gaunt asked.
He wasn’t expecting a straight answer, least of all not from Clausen. It was a surprise when she said: “This is how they get at us. They try and send these things through. Sometimes they manage.”
“It’s breaking up,” Nero said. “You were right. Not enough signal for clear breach. Must be noisy on the interface.”
The yellow-green stain was diminishing by the second, as if that magical city were descending back to the depths. He watched, mesmerized, as something broke the surface—something long and glowing and whiplike, thrashing once, coiling out as if trying to reach for airborne prey, before being pulled under into the fizzing chaos. Then the light slowly subsided, and the waves returned to their normal surging ferocity, and the patch of the ocean where the apparition had appeared was indistinguishable from the seas around it.
Gaunt had arrived at his decision. He would join these people, he would do their work, he would accept their deal, such as it was. Not because he wanted to, not because his heart was in it, not because he believed he was strong enough, but because the alternative was to seem cowardly, weak-fibered, unwilling to bend his life to an altruistic mission. He knew that these were entirely the wrong reasons, but he accepted the force of them without argument. Better to at least appear to be selfless, even if the thought of what lay ahead of him flooded him with an almost overwhelming sense of despair and loss and bitter injustice.
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