by Peter Watts
IF YOU ARE GIVEN A CHOICE, YOU BELIEVE YOU HAVE ACTED FREELY.
—RAYMOND TELLER
EVERY HAB STARTED out like every other: same stand-alone life support, same snap-and-stretch frame guides to subdivide the living space to personal preference. Same basic bulkhead galley panel with a toilet on the other side. They all came with the same emergency hibe hookups, compatible with most popular pressure suits and long-distance coffins (not included). It was Boeing’s most generic all-purpose personarium, plucked off the shelf, bought in bulk, stuck on the ends of the Crown’s spokes on short notice. In the almost inconceivable event that one of those spokes should snap and send a hab tumbling off on its own, corporate guarantees ensured that the bodies therein would keep fresh and breathing (if inert) for up to a year or until atmospheric reentry, whichever came first.
Which was not to say that custom features were out of the question. The fabber in Commons could whip up food with actual taste.
Moore was the only other warm body in evidence when Brüks climbed down for breakfast. The Colonel didn’t return the other man’s smile at first—Brüks recognized the thousand-meter stare of the ConSensused—but the sound of Brüks feet on the deck brought him back to the impoverished world of mere meatspace.
“Daniel,” he said.
“Didn’t mean to disturb you,” Brüks said, which was a lie. He’d waited until the sparse constellations arrayed across the Crown’s intercom had aligned just so—Lianna or Moore in the Commons, Valerie anywhere else—before venturing forth in search of forage.
Moore waved the apology away. “I could do with a break anyway.”
Brüks told the fabber to print him up a plate of French toast and bacon. “Break from what?”
“Theseus telemetry,” Moore told him. “What little there is of it. Brushing up for the main event.”
“There’s a main event? For us?”
“How do you mean?”
Brüks one-handed his meal to the Commons table (petroleum accents faintly adulterated the aroma of syrup and butter rising from the plate) and sat down. “Dwarves among giants, right? I didn’t get the sense there’d be any kind of active role for mere baselines.”
He tried a strip of bacon. Not bad.
“They have their reasons for being here,” Moore said mildly. “I have mine.” In a tone that said, And they’re not for sharing.
“You deal with these guys a lot,” Brüks guessed.
“These guys?”
“Bicams. Post-Humans.”
“They’re not post-Human. Not yet.”
“How can you tell?” It was only half a joke.
“Because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to talk to them at all.”
Brüks swallowed a bolus of faux French toast. “They could talk to us. Some of them, anyway.”
“Why would they bother? We’re on the verge of losing them as it is. And—do you have children, Daniel?”
He shook his head. “You?”
“A son. Siri’s not exactly baseline himself, actually. Nowhere near the far shore, but even so it’s been difficult to—connect, sometimes. And maybe this comparison won’t mean much to you, but—they’re all our children, Humanity’s children, and even now we can barely keep their interest . Once they tip over that edge…” He shrugged. “How long would it take you to decide you had better things to do than talk to a bunch of capuchins?”
“They’re not gods,” Brüks reminded him softly.
“Not yet.”
“Not ever.”
“That’s denial.”
“Better than genuflection.”
Moore smiled, a bit ruefully. “Come on, Daniel. You know how powerful science can be. A thousand years to climb from ghosts and magic to technology; a day and a half from technology back up to ghosts and magic.”
“I thought they didn’t use science,” Brüks said. “I thought that was the whole point.”
Moore granted it with a small nod. “Either way, you put baselines against Bicamerals and the Bicamerals are going to be a hundred steps ahead every time.”
“And you’re comfortable with that.”
“My comfort doesn’t enter into it. Just the way it is.”
“You seem so—fatalistic about it all.” Brüks pushed his empty plate aside. “The far shore, the gulf between giants and capuchins.”
“Not fatalism,” Moore corrected him. “Faith.”
Brüks glanced sharply across the table, trying to decide if Moore was yanking his chain. The soldier stared back impassively.
“The fact that something shot us,” Brüks continued deliberately. “And you yourself said they’re probably Tran.”
“I did, didn’t I?” Moore seemed to find that amusing. “Fortunately we’ve got a pretty good team of those in our own corner. Honestly, I wouldn’t worry.”
“You trust them too much,” Brüks said quietly.
“So you keep saying. You don’t know them the way I do.”
“You think you know them? You’re the one who called them giants. We don’t know their agendas any more than we know what those smart clouds are up to. At least smart clouds don’t open up your brain and dig around like, like…”
Moore didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “Lianna.”
“You know what they did to her?”
“Not exactly.”
“That’s exactly my point. No one does. Lianna doesn’t know. They shut her off for four days, and when she woke up she was some kind of Chinese Room savant. Who knows what they did to her brain? Who knows if she’s the same person?”
“She’s not,” Moore said flatly. “Change the wiring, change the machine.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“She agreed to it. She volunteered. She worked her ass off and elbowed her way to the front of the line just for the chance to make the cut.”
“It’s not informed consent.”
That raised eyebrow again. “How so?”
“How can it be, when the person giving it is cognitively incapable of understanding what she’s agreeing to?”
“So you’re saying she’s mentally incompetent,” Moore said.
“I’m saying we all are. Next to the hives, and the vampires, and the thumbwirers and that whole—”
“We’re children.”
“Yes.”
“Who can’t be trusted to make our own decisions.”
Brüks shook his head. “Not about things like this, no.”
“We need adults to make those choices on our behalf.”
“We—” He fell silent.
Moore watched him above the ghost of a smile. After a moment he pulled the Glenmorangie off the wall.
“Have a drink,” he said. “Helps the future go down easier.”
Crawling unseen through the viscera of its host, the parasite takes control.
Daniel Brüks drilled into the central nervous system of the Crown of Thorns and bent it to his will. Lianna, as usual, was back in the Hold with her helpless omnipotent masters. Sengupta’s icon glowed in the Hub. Moore was ostensibly in the Dorm but the feed from that hab put the lie to it: only his body was there, running on autopilot while his closed eyes danced through some ConSensual realm Brüks could only imagine.
He was going to be eating alone.
The anxiety had become chronic by now. It nagged at the bottom of his brain like a toothache, had become so much a part of him that it went unnoticed save for those times when some unexpected chill brought it all back. Panic attacks; in the spokes, in the habs, in his own goddamn tent. They didn’t happen often, and they never lasted long. Just often enough to remind him. Just long enough to keep him paranoid.
The blade began to twist as he ascended the spoke. Brüks gritted his teeth, briefly closed his eyes as the conveyer pulled him past the Zone of Terror (it helped, really it did), relaxed as the haunted zone receded beneath him. He released the handhold at the top of the spoke and coasted into the Hub, crossed the antarctic hatch (ha
lf contracted now, barely wide enough for the passage of a body) pushed himself toward—
A soft wet sound. A cough from the northern hemisphere, a broken breath.
Someone crying.
Sengupta was up there. Had been a few minutes ago, at least.
He cleared his throat. “Hello?”
A brief rustle. Silence and ventilators.
Ohhkay …
He resumed his course, crossed to the Commons spoke, twisted and jackknifed through. He allowed himself a moment of self-congratulation as he grabbed the conveyer and started down headfirst, smoothly swinging around the handhold until his feet pointed down; just two days ago all these drainpipes and variable-gravity straightaways would have left him completely disoriented.
Valerie tagged him halfway.
He never saw her coming. He had his face to the bulkhead. There may have been a flicker of overhead shadow, just a split second before that brief touch between his shoulder blades: like a knife’s edge sliding along his spine, like being unzipped down the back. His back brain reacted before he was even aware of the contact, flattened and froze him like a startled rabbit. By the time he could move again she was past and gone and Daniel Brüks was still alive.
He looked down, down that long tunnel she’d sailed headfirst and without a sound. She was waiting at the bottom of the spoke: white and naked and almost skeletal. Wiry corded muscle stretched over bone. Her right foot tapped a strange and disquieting pattern on the metal.
The conveyer was delivering him into her arms.
He released the handhold, lunged across the spoke for the static safety of the ladder. He missed the first rung he grabbed for, caught the second; leftover momentum nearly popped his shoulder from its socket. His feet scrabbled for purchase, finally found it. He clung to the ladder as the conveyer streamed past to each side, going up going down.
Valerie looked up at him. He looked away.
She just touched me for Christ’s sake. I barely even felt it. It was probably an accident.
No accident.
She hasn’t threatened you, she hasn’t raised a hand. She’s just—sitting there. Waiting.
Not in her hab. Not kept at bay by bright lights, no matter what comforting lies Moore had recited.
Brüks kept his eyes on the bulkhead. He swore he could feel the baring of her teeth.
She’s just another failed hominoid. That’s all she is. Without our drugs she couldn’t even handle a few right angles without going into convulsions. Just another one of nature’s fuckups, just another extinct monster ten thousand years dead.
And brought back to life. And chillingly, completely at home in the future. More at home than Daniel Brüks had ever felt.
She wouldn’t even be alive if it weren’t for us. If we roaches hadn’t scraped up all those leftover genes and spliced them back together again. She had her day. She’s nothing to be afraid of. Don’t be such a fucking coward.
“Coming?”
With effort he looked down, managed to fix his gaze on the edge of the hatch behind her, kept her eyes in that great comforting wash of low resolution that made up 95 percent of the human visual field. He even managed to answer, after a fashion: “I, um…”
His hands stayed locked on the ladder.
“Suit yourself,” Valerie said, and disappeared into the Commons.
Motion through the grille: the pixilated mosaic that was Rakshi Sengupta, returning from some place farther forward. The lav in the attic, perhaps. Brüks found it perfectly understandable that Sengupta might choose to leave for a piss at the same moment Valerie happened to be passing through.
She fell into eclipse behind the mirrorball. Brüks heard the sound of buckles and plugs clicking into place, a grunt that might have passed for a greeting: “Thought you were headed for Commons.”
He swam into the northern hemisphere. Sengupta was pulling a ConSensus glove over her left hand: middle finger, ring, index, little, thumb. Her hair stood out from her head, crackling faintly with static electricity.
“Valerie got there first,” he said.
“Room for two down there.” Right glove: middle, ring, index …
“There really isn’t.”
She still refused to look at him, of course. But the smile was encouraging.
“Nasty cunt doesn’t even use the galley.” Sengupta’s tone was conspiratorial. “Only comes out of her hab to scare us.”
“How’d she even end up here?” Brüks wondered.
Sengupta did something with her eyes, a little jiggle that said command interface. “There. Now we’ll see her coming.” Her elbows moved out from her body and back in, a precise stubby wingbeat. Brüks couldn’t tell whether it was interface or OCD. “Anyhow why ask me?”
“I thought you’d know.”
“You were there I just fished you all out of the atmosphere.”
“No, I mean—where’s she even from? Vampires are supposed to live in comfy little compounds where they fight algos and solve Big Problems and don’t threaten anybody. It’s not like anyone would be stupid enough to let them off the leash. So how does Valerie show up in the desert with a pack of zombies and an army aerostat?”
“Smart little monsters,” Sengupta said, too loud. (Brüks stole a nervous glance through the perforated deck.) “I’d start making crosses if I were you.”
“No good. They’ve got those drug pumps in their heads. AntiEuclideans.”
“Things change, baseline. Adapt or die.” Sengupta’s head bobbed like a bird’s. “I don’t know where she comes from. I’m working on it, though. Don’t trust her at all don’t like the way she moves.”
Neither do I, Brüks thought.
“Maybe her friends can tell us,” Sengupta said.
“What friends?”
“The ones she got away from, I’ve been looking and—hey you’re a big-time biologist right? You go to conferences and all?”
“One or two, maybe. I’m not that big-time.” Mostly he just virtualized; his grants weren’t big enough to let him jet his actual biomass around the planet.
Besides, these days most of his colleagues weren’t all that happy to see him anyway.
“Shoulda gone to this one,” Sengupta bit her lip and summoned a video archive onto the wall. It was a standard floatcam view of a typical meeting hall in a typical conference: she’d muted the sound but the sight was more than familiar. Seated rows of senior faculty decked out in thermochrome and conjoined flesh-sculpture; grad students dressed down in ties and blazers of dumbest synth. A little corral off to one side where a few dozen teleops stood like giant stick insects or chess pieces on treads, rented mechanical shells for the ghosts of those who couldn’t afford the airfare.
The speaker of the hour stood behind the usual podium. The usual flatscreen stretched out behind him; the usual corporate hologram spun lazily above it all, reminding the assembled of where they were and whose generous sponsorship had made it all possible:
Fizerpharm Presents
The 22nd Biennial J. Craig Ventor Memorial Conference on Synthetic and Virtual Biology
“Not really my thing,” Brüks admitted. “I’m more into—”
“There!” Sengupta crowed, and froze the feed.
At first he couldn’t see what she was getting at. The man at the podium, petrified in midmotion, gestured at a matrix of head shots looming behind him on the screen. Just another one of those eye-glazing group dioramas that infested academic presentations the world over: I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all those wonderful folks who assisted in this research because there’s no fucking way I’ll ever give them actual coauthorship.
Then Brüks’s eyes focused, and his gut clenched a little.
Not collaborators, he saw: subjects.
He could tick off the telltales in his head, one by one: the pallor, the facial allometry, the angles of cheekbone and mandible. The eyes: Jesus Christ, those eyes. An image filtered through three generations, a picture of a picture of a pictur
e, fractions of faces degraded down to a few dark pixels and they still sent cold tendrils up his spine.
All these things he could itemize, given time. But the brainstem chill shrank his balls endless milliseconds before his gray matter could have ever told him why.
The Uncanny Valley on steroids, he thought.
For the first time he noticed the text glowing on the front of the podium, the thumbnailed intel of a talk already in progress: Paglino, R. J., Harvard—Evidence of Heuristic Image Processing in the Vampire Retina.
Sengupta drummed her fingers, fed the roach a clue: “Second row third column.”
Valerie’s face. Oh yes.
“They make ’em hard to track,” she complained. “Keep changing ID codes move them around. All proprietary information and filing errors and can’t let the vampire liberation front know where the kennels are but I got her now I got her now I got the first piece of the puzzle.”
Valerie the vampire. Valerie the lab rat. Valerie the desert demon, mistress of the undead, scorched-earth army of one. Rakshi Sengupta had her.
“Good luck,” Brüks said.
But the pilot had already brought up another window, a list of names and affiliations. Authors and attendees, it looked like. Some were flagged. Brüks squinted at the list, scanned it for whatever commonality might bind those highlighted names together.
Ah. Resident Institution: Simon Fraser.
“She had friends,” Sengupta murmured, almost to herself. “I bet she got away from ’em.
“I bet they want her back.”
REALITY IS THAT WHICH, WHEN YOU STOP BELIEVING IN IT, DOESN’T GO AWAY.
—PHILLIP K. DICK
JIM MOORE WAS dancing.
There was no floor to speak of. No partner. Not even any witnesses until Daniel Brüks climbed into the Hub; the command deck was uncharacteristically quiet, no tapping toes or clicking tongues, none of the staccato curses that Sengupta barked out when some command or interface didn’t see things her way. Moore was alone in the cluttered landscape, leaping from a stack of cargo cubes, rebounding off some haphazard plateau halfway down, hitting the deck for just a split-second in a perfect barefoot crouch before bouncing back into the air: one arm tight across his chest, the other jabbing at some invisible partn—