by Peter Watts
Rakshi Sengupta didn’t know it yet, but she was gunning for Backdoor Brüks.
She was waiting at the mouth of his tent.
“Roach. Got something for you.”
He tried to read her eyes, but they were averted. He tried to read her body language, but it had always been a cipher to him.
He tried to keep the wariness out of his voice. “What you got?”
“Just watch.” She called a window to the adjacent bulkhead.
She doesn’t know. She couldn’t know.
She’d have to look into my eyes for that …
“What are you looking at?”
“No—nothing. Just—”
“Look at the window,” Sengupta said.
I am so sorry, he thought. Oh God, I am so very sorry.
He forced his eyes to the bulkhead: an over-the-shoulder view of a diagnostic chair, facing a flatscreen. A tropical savanna glowed there, lit by the grimy yellow light of a fading afternoon (Africa, Brüks guessed, although there were no telltale animals in frame). Telemetry framed the tableaux on every side: ribbons of heart rate, respiration, skin galvanics. A translucent brain scan glowed to the left, writhing with the iridescence of neurons firing in real time.
Someone sat in that chair, almost totally eclipsed by its back. The top of their skull crested above a padded headrest, wrapped in the superconducting spiderweb of a tomo matrix. The tip of one armrest peeked into view; a hand rested there. The rest of the person existed only by inference. Fragments of a body, almost lost among the bright flayed images of its own electricity.
Sengupta wiggled a finger: the still life began to move. A chrono readout ticked out the time at one second per second: 03/05/2090—0915:25.
“What do you see?” Not Sengupta talking. Someone in the video, speaking off stage.
“Grassland,” said the person in the chair, face still hidden, voice instantly recognizable.
Valerie.
The grasses dissolved into storm-tossed waves; the yellowish sky hardened down to wintry blue. The horizon didn’t change position, though; it still bisected the scene halfway up the frame.
Something tapped faintly on the soundtrack, like fingernails on plastic.
“What do you see?”
“Ocean. Subarctic Pacific, Oyashio Current, early Feb—”
“Ocean’s fine. Basic landscape, that’s all we want. One word.”
A hint of motion, center right: Valerie’s fingers, just visible, drumming against the armrest.
A salt flat, shimmering in summer heat. The edge of a mesa rose in the hazy distance, a dark terrace that split-leveled the horizon.
“What now?”
“Desert.” Tick … tick tick tick … tap …
Brüks glanced at Sengupta. “What is—”
“Shhhh.”
Same salt flat: the mesa had magically disappeared. Now a skeletal tree rose from the cracked earth, halfway to the horizon: leafless, yellow as old bone, a crown of naked branches atop a stripped featureless trunk almost too straight for nature. The trunk’s shadow reached directly toward the camera, like an unbroken phantom extension of the object itself.
“Now?”
“Desert.”
“Good, good.”
Down in the glass brain, a smattering of crimson pinpoints swept briefly across the visual cortex and disappeared.
“Now?”
Same picture, higher magnification: the tree was front and center now, its trunk straight as a flagpole, close enough to vertically split the horizon and a good chunk of the sky above. The speckles reappeared, a faint red rash staining the soap-bubble rainbows swirling across the back of Valerie’s brain. Her fingers had stopped moving.
“Same. Desert.” There wasn’t a trace of expression in her voice.
Right angles, Brüks realized. They’re turning the landscape into a natural cross …
“Now.”
“Same.”
It wasn’t. Now the branches were out of frame: all that remained was the white of the land, the hard crystalline blue of the sky and the hypothetical razor-edged line between, splitting the world side to side. And that impossibly straight vertical trunk, splitting it top to bottom.
They’re trying to trigger a glitch …
No longer a mere rash, glowing across the back of the vampire’s skull: a pulsing tumor. And yet her voice remained empty and untroubled; her body rested unmoving in the chair.
Her face still unseen. Brüks wondered why the archivists had been so afraid to record it.
Now the world on the screen began to come apart. The salt flat behind the tree came unstuck just a little at the bottom (the tree stayed in place, like a decal on glass), shrank up from the lower edge of the display like old curling parchment and revealed a strip of azure beneath: as if more sky had been hiding under the sand.
“Now?”
The desert pixels compressed a little further, squeezed tighter against the skyline—
“Same.”
—compressed from landscape to landstrip, the undersky pushing it up from below, the horizon holding it down from above—
“Now?”
“S-same. I…”
Scarlet auroras squirmed across Valerie’s brain. SKIN GALV and RESP shuddered along their time series.
CARDIAC beat strong and steady and did not change at all.
“And now?”
The ground was almost all sky, now. The desert had been reduced to a bright squashed band running across the screen like a flatlined EEG, like a crossbeam at Calvary. The tree trunk cut it vertically at right angles.
“I—sky, I think, I—”
“Now?”
“—know what you’re doing.”
“Now?”
The flattened desert shrank some critical fraction further; horizontal and vertical axes split quadrants of sky with borders of nearly equal thickness.
Valerie began to convulse. She tried to arch her back; something stopped her. Her fingers fluttered, her arms shook against the padded arms of the chair; for the first time Brüks realized that she was strapped into the thing.
Fireworks exploded across her brain. Her heart, so immutably stable until now, threw jagged spikes onto the time series and shut down completely. The body paused for a moment in midconvulsion, frozen in bone-breaking tetany for an endless moment; then the chair’s defibrillators kicked in and it resumed dancing to the rhythm of new voltage.
“Thirty-five total degrees of arc,” the invisible voice reported calmly. “Three-point-five degrees axial. Rep twenty-three, oh-nine-nineteen.” The recording ended.
Brüks let out his breath.
“Has to be real,” Sengupta grunted.
“What?”
“Horizon’s not real. It’s, it’s between. They don’t glitch on hypotheticals.”
He thought he understood: vampires were immune to horizons. No matter how flat, no matter how perfect, they were zero thickness. You couldn’t build a cross with a horizon, not one that stopped Valerie and her buddies at least: for that, you’d need something with depth.
“Really hard to get this,” Sengupta remarked. “The explosion scrambled the records.”
“Explosion?”
“Simon Fraser.”
Realist attack, he remembered. A couple of months before he’d gone on sabbatical; the bomb had taken out a lab working on spindle emulation. He hadn’t heard anything about the vamp program being targeted, though.
“There would’ve been backups,” he guessed.
“For the footage sure. But how do you know it’s her, huh? You never see her face. The embeds just give a subject code. Gait recognition not so great when your target’s tied down.”
“The voice,” Brüks said.
“That’s what I used. Now try trawling the cloud with a random voice sample, no stress data, no contextuals.” Sengupta jerked her chin. “Like I said. Hard. But I got it now it’s getting easier all the time.”
“They tortured her,” Br�
�ks said softly. We tortured her. “Does—does Jim know about this?”
Sengupta barked out a humorless laugh. “I wouldn’t tell that asshole what time zone he was in.”
You don’t have to do this, Brüks thought. You don’t have to work so hard turning all that pain into anger. You could be free, Rakshi. Fifteen-minute tweak and they’d cut the grief right out of you, the same way they wired in the love. Twenty-five minutes and you’d forget you’d ever been in pain.
But you don’t want to forget, do you? You want the grief. You need it. Your wife’s dead, she’ll be dead forever but you can’t accept that, you’re clinging to Moore’s Law like a life jacket in a hurricane. Maybe they can’t bring her back now but maybe in five years, maybe ten, and in the meantime you’ll make do on hope and hate even if you haven’t figured out where they belong.
He closed his eyes while she smoldered at his side.
God help me when you do.
Back in the Hub, she’d stripped the sun naked. It seethed and roiled overhead, close enough to touch (which he did, just for the surrealistic hell of it: a gentle push off the grille, a weightless drift, and Daniel Brüks could kiss the sky). But the curve of its edge was as clean and sharp as if razored: no flares, no prominences, no great gouts of plasma to dwarf a dozen Jupiters and fuck with Earthly broadcasts.
“Where’s the corona?” he asked, thinking: Filters.
“Ha that’s not the sun that’s the sun side.”
Of Icarus, she meant: the sun and Icarus face-to-face, the light of one bouncing off the disk of the other into the eye of some remote camera, massively shielded, floating out front on the breath of a trillion hydrogen bombs.
“Perfect reflector if you crank it up high enough,” Sengupta said. “Won’t do much for the rads but if you’re talking about thermal and visible spectrum I could turn this place into the coldest spot from here to the Oort.”
“Wow,” Brüks said.
“That’s nothing look at this.”
The sun—the sun’s reflection—darkened by degrees. Those brilliant writhing coruscations began to dim: the sunspots, the weather systems, the looping cyclones of magnetic force began to fade from sight, sink into some colder cosmic background. Within moments the sun was a pale phantom on a dark mirror.
Something else was there, though: other currents, convecting like a pot of molten glass brought to a rolling boil. Liquid mass upwelled near the center of the disk, swirled outward in an endless bloom of turbulent curlicues, cooled and slowed and stagnated near the darker perimeter. It was as though the solar photosphere had been stripped away to reveal some other, completely separate weather system churning beneath.
Except, Brüks realized after a moment, he wasn’t looking at the sun at all, not even in reflection. This was—
“That’s Icarus,” he murmured. A great convex solar cell a hundred kilometers across: transparent or opaque, solid or liquid, its optical properties slaved to the whims of a glorified thermostat and Rakshi Sengupta’s little finger. Darker now, just a few degrees closer to blackbody status, the convection currents swirled ever faster as it worked to dump the excess heat.
Off in some distant corner, an alarm woke with a soft beeping.
“Um…,” Brüks began.
“Don’t worry roach just throttling up a bit to build some extra ergs don’t want Earth to fall below quota do you?”
The beeping continued, increasingly urgent. Insistent little tags began flashing near the bottom of the display, albedo falling, absorbance and ΔT on the rise.
“I thought we’d already tanked up.” It had been the final phase of the reconstruction: the last of the Bicams had stowed their tools and abandoned the Crown’s refitted hull for a group hug around Portia, twelve hours before. (Apparently their brains fell out of contact beyond some limited range.)
“Got some need more that’s a lot of mass we gotta get out from under.”
Brüks couldn’t take his eyes off the sunside view: like looking down at a blooming mushroom cloud in the wake of an airburst. He knew it was only imagination but the Hub felt—warmer …
He bit his lip. “Aren’t we overheating? Those tags—”
“More product takes more power right? Basic physics.”
“Not that much more.” Surely she hadn’t dialed down the reflectivity this far the last time, surely this was just—
“Want to double-check my numbers roach? Don’t trust my math think you can do better?”
—showing off …
The sunside sparked and vanished from the dome: NO SIGNAL pulsed above the warning icons left behind.
“Shit,” Sengupta spat. “Stupid cambot melted.”
“I’m impressed,” Brüks said quietly. “Now will you please just dial it back a—”
“Quit fucking around, Rak.” Lianna ricocheted up from the southern hemisphere, bounced off the Tropic of Cancer and arced toward the forward hatchway. “We’ve got more important things to do right now.”
“Yeah right more important than putting charge in the tank.” But her fingers twitched in the air, and the alarms dimmed a little. “Like what?”
Lianna spun around a handhold and planted herself on the arctic circle. “Like Oldschool’s slime mold. It’s talking to us.” And disappeared through magnetic north.
THE QUICKEST WAY OF ENDING A WAR IS TO LOSE IT.
—GEORGE ORWELL
TALKING WAS GENEROUS: the images that had begun crawling across Portia’s skin were crude, chunky things, primitive mosaics build from pixels a centimeter on a side. There was no window per se, no distinct bounded area within which relevant information was neatly displayed. The mosaics simply faded into existence and out again, the oily gray of default epidermis stippling gradually into a roughly circular area of increasing contrast, a black-and-white scratchpad reminiscent of a crossword puzzle. Brüks’s secular circuitry couldn’t discern any pattern there.
Chromatophores, he remembered. This thing could change color if you ran the right current through it. “What started it up?”
“Dunno don’t bug me.” Sengupta had demoted the helmet-cam feeds to a line of thumbnails; her attention was fixed on Icarus’s own stereocams, zoomed and focused on Portia’s—what? Graphics interface? The same picture respawned in several iterations across the dome: sonar, infrared, ultrasound. The mosaic only showed up along visible wavelengths: infrared and ultraviolet filters showed nothing but plain old Portia, a monochrome porridge devoid of surface detail.
Smack dab in the middle of the human visual range, Brüks thought. Wouldn’t that be a coincidence …
“Ha!” Sengupta barked. “Z-contours the thing’s talking in terraces…” She zoomed the view. Sure enough the white pixels were elevated, little square mesas raised a millimeter above their darker counterparts. Brüks spawned his own window and zoomed even closer: the surfaces of all that topography were fracturing, folding, each pixel splitting and resplitting into a mesh of ever finer pigeonholes.
“It’s building diffraction gratings!” Sengupta brayed.
“And it’s increasing pixel-res—”
“I said shut up!”
Brüks bit back a response and cycled through MonkCam. The Bicamerals had fallen silent around the object of their veneration, played with their instruments, passed bands of radiation invisible and otherwise over Portia’s skin. Lianna was staying out of the way; her camera panned across the backs of helmets from the compartment hatch.
The resolution on that patchy window was improving by the second now; pixels the size of thumbnails shattered into spots the size of lentils, dissolved again into swirling clusters of pinheads that collapsed into shards below the resolving power of the camera. Steps became sawtooth lines became smooth, swirling curves that swept across the display and faded into flat gray oblivion. Now Brüks could almost recognize the patterns moving there—each new geometry seemed more familiar than the last, tugged a little harder at some half-forgotten memory before giving up and giving way to
the next iteration. But nothing stuck. Nothing lasted long enough to sink his teeth into—until the patterns slowed, and Rakshi and Lianna spoke a single word, a shout and a whisper uttered in the same instant:
“Theseus.”
Eleven minutes was all it had taken. Eleven minutes for an anaerobic time-sharing slime mold to refine its pixels from the size of sugar cubes down to units that exceeded the resolving power of the human eye. Eleven minutes from coma to conversation.
First-contact protocols. Fibonacci sequences, golden ratios, periodic tables. The Bicamerals scribbled cryptic responses onto tacpads and held them up in turn; Brüks was not especially surprised to note that Portia’s swirling communiqués were a lot more comprehensible than the Bicamerals’ responses.
A shadow intruded subtly from the direction of the hatch, a hint of some presence beyond the lines of sight offered up by helmet feeds and onboard eyes. Icarus was full of blind spots; its cameras had not been installed with an eye to comprehensive surveillance. Brüks noticed, and tried not to.
Sudden surprised murmurs from the Bicamerals; a soft oooh from Lianna. Brüks scanned the feeds, where geometric primitives acted out some arcane theorem across Portia’s skin. “Lianna. Talk to me.”
“The GUI,” she told him. “It’s gone three-D.” Her feed circled the compartment, fixing Portia from every angle. “Some kind of lenticular diffraction effect. I’m seeing that whole display in three-D, we’re all seeing it in three-D. Wherever we move. The thing’s tracking us, it’s tracking five—uh, six pairs of eyes and pointing a customized diffraction grid at each one of us simultaneously. A single display surface.”
“Doesn’t look three-D to me,” Sengupta grumbled. “Too dumb to track the stereocam.”
Eleven minutes to derive the precise architecture of human eyesight. It seemed an impossibly short time to intuit a whole new sensory system from scratch, without invasion, without dissection. Except Portia hadn’t done that at all, most likely. It had probably taken the tutorials long before it ever made the in-system jaunt. Wherever the place it called home, it had at the very least made a pit stop at Theseus. These probably weren’t the first Humans it had encountered.