by Peter Watts
A dot on the map: MOORE, J. floated safely distant in the attic. Other readouts formed a sparse mosaic across the bulkhead; Brüks couldn’t understand them all but he was pretty sure that one or two involved the blocking of intercom feeds.
She turned as his feet hit the deck, stared expectantly at his lapel.
“Jim,” he said.
“Yah.”
“You said he’d—changed…”
“Don’t have to take my word for it you saw it yourself he’s been changing ever since we left LEO.”
Brüks shook his head. “He was only—distracted before. Preoccupied. Never delusional.”
Sengupta ran her fingers down the wall; file listings flew by too fast for Brüks to make out. “He was transmitting into the Oort did you know that? Even before we left Earth he broke the law hell he helped make that law after Firefall nobody else could get away with it but man, he’s the great Jim Moore and he was—sending messages…”
“What kind of messages?”
“To Theseus.”
“Well, of course. He was with Mission Control.”
“And it talked back.”
“Rakshi. So what?”
“It’s talking to him now,” Sengupta said.
“Uh—what? Through all the interference?”
“We’re out of the solar static already most of it anyhow. But he’s been collecting those signals for way longer some of the timestamps go back seven years and they change. All the early stuff that’s all just telemetry you know? Lot of voice logs too but mainly just data, all the sensor records contingency analyses and about a million different scenarios that vampire that Sarasti was running when they were closing on target. It was dense there was noise all over the signal but the streams were redundant so you can make it out if you run it through the right filters right? And then Theseus goes dark you don’t hear anything for a while and then there’s this—”
She fell silent.
“There’s what, Rak?” Brüks prompted gently.
She took a breath. “There’s this other signal. Not tightbeam. Omnidirectional. Washing over the whole innersys.”
“He said Theseus went dark,” Brüks remembered. “They went in and lost contact and that was all anybody knew.”
“Oh he knew. It’s really thin and it’s so degraded you can barely make it out even with every filter and noise-correction algorithm in the arsenal I don’t think you’d even see it if you didn’t already know it was there but Colonel Carnage, man, he knew. He picked it out, and it’s … it’s…”
Her fingers danced and jittered in the air between them. The faintest breeze of static wafted through the hab: the moan of a distant ghost.
“That it?” Brüks asked.
“Almost but then you add the last couple of Fouriers and—”
—And a voice: thin, faint, sexless. There was no timbre to it, no cadence, no sense of any feeling behind the words. Any humanity it ever might have contained had been eroded away by dust and distance and the dull microwave rumble of a whole universe roaring in the background. There was nothing left but the words themselves, not reclaimed from static so much as built from the stuff. A whisper on the void:
Imagine you are Siri Keeton. You wake in an agony of resurrection … record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty … feel your blood, syrupy … forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dil … flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack … udden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You’re a stick man, frozen … rigor vitae. You’d scream if you had the breath.
The hab fell silent.
“What the fuck was that?” Brüks whispered after a very long time.
“I dunno,” Sengupta drummed her fingers on her thigh. “The start of a story. It’s been coming through in bits and pieces, every few years according to the timestamps. I don’t think it’s finished, either, I think it’s still—in progress.”
“But what is—”
“I don’t know okay? It says it’s Siri Keeton. And there’s something underneath it too not words exactly I don’t know.”
“Can’t be.”
“Doesn’t matter what you or I think he thinks it’s Siri Keeton. And you know what he’s talking back to it I think he’s talking back.”
My son is alive.
“He’s got a while to wait. If that’s really coming from the Oort it’ll be a solid year before he can even think about getting an answer.”
Sengupta shrugged and looked at the wall.
He’s coming home.
ANY SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY IS INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM NATURE.
—STELLA ROSSITER
NEGATIVE.
Negative.
Negative.
Torn lattices and broken nanowires and mangled microdiodes. Eviscerated smart paint. Nothing else.
For hours now he’d let worst-case scenarios play out in his imagination. Portia had expanded into the Crown. Portia had spread past the attic. Portia had oozed invisibly across every bulkhead and every surface, coated the skins of tents and of crewmembers, wrapped itself around every particle of food each of them had taken into their mouths from the moment they’d docked. Portia enveloped him like a second skin; Portia was inside him, measuring and analyzing and corroding him from the outside in and the inside out. Portia was everywhere. Portia was everything.
Bullshit.
His neocortex knew as much, even as his brain stem stole its insights and twisted them to its most paranoid ends. Whatever Portia’s ultimate origin, it was the telematter system that had built it: lasers etching blank condensates into thinking microfilms that planned and plotted and spread across each new frontier like a plague of cognition. However far it had spread, however much or little had infiltrated the Crown, it couldn’t keep growing once severed from the engine of its creation. They hadn’t been docked that long: surely the enemy couldn’t have achieved anything but the most superficial penetration of the front line.
The samples were clean.
Which proved, of course, absolutely nothing.
Aboard Icarus it had sprung shut like a leg-hold trap—but it had had unlimited power to play with, and eight years to learn how to use it. One passive filter on the solar panels, damped by a thousandth of a percent. One short-circuited electrical line, sparking and heating the surrounding metal. That’s all it would have taken—just time, and a little Brownian energy to keep it fed.
What had Sengupta said so offhandedly, just before Portia had attacked? Little warm in there …
It can’t sprint without stockpiling energy, he mused. Maybe it builds up a detectable heatprint before it pounces …
Sengupta poked her head up through the floor. “Find anything?”
Brüks shook his head as she climbed onto the deck.
“Yah well I did. I found how that fucking vampire turned you to stone and better you than me, sorry but it coulda been me or Carnage either for all I know. I think she did it to all of us.”
“Did what, exactly?”
“You ever been scared roach?”
All the time. “Rakshi, we almost died—”
“Before that.” Sengupta head jerked back, forth. “Scared for no reason scared just going to the bathroom.”
Something jumped in his stomach. “What did you find?”
She threw a camera feed onto the wall: an eye in the attic, looking down along the empty compartment to the Hub hatch. Sengupta zoomed obliquely on a patch of bulkhead beside the secondary airlock. Someone had scrawled some kind of glyph across that surface, a tangle of multicolored curves and corners that might have passed for some Cubist’s rendition of a very simple neural circuit.
“I don’t remember seeing that before,” Brüks murmured.
“Yah you do you just don’t remember it. Only lasts two hundred milliseconds pure luck this showed up on a screen grab. You see it but you don’t remember it and it
scares the shit out of you.”
“Not scaring me now.”
“This is just one frame roach it’s part of an animation but the cameras don’t scan fast enough and they’re all gone now. I had to sieve like a bugger to even get this much.”
He stared at the image: a jagged little tangle of lines and arabesques, a piece of abstract graffiti maybe a hand’s-width across. It almost looked meaningful when spied from the corner of the eye, like a collection of letters on the verge of forming a word; it dissolved into gibberish when you looked at it. Even cut out of sequence, even spied from this oblique angle, it made his brain itch.
“It’s like she painted—gang signs,” he said softly. “All over the ship.”
“That’s not all she did the way she moved remember I said I didn’t like the way she moved all those little clicks and ticks—shit even that time she attacked me and then you I saw her whisper things in your ear what did she say to you huh?”
“I—don’t know,” Brüks realized. “I don’t remember.”
“Yah you do. Just like that time in Budapest, changed your wiring with vibrations like lining up a bunch of beer glasses pretty wild right?” Sengupta tapped her temple three times in rapid succession, hard. “Not even radical I mean you can’t hear a word or smell a fart without your brain rewiring at least a bit that’s how brains are everything reprograms you. She just figured out where to stamp on the floor to make you freeze up on command. Coulda happened to me just as easy.”
“It did happen to you,” Brüks said. “Why did you attack her, Rak? I saw you in the Hub, you went at her like a rabid dog. What got into you?”
“I dunno it was like she was making these noises they just really pissed me off I dunno couldn’t help myself.”
“Misophonia.” Brüks barked a soft bitter laugh. “She gave you misophonia.”
Images from Simon Fraser: Valerie strapped to a chair, tapping on the armrest … Even back then she was doing it. Even when they were torturing her, she was—reprogramming them …
He couldn’t help laughing.
“What?” Sengupta said. “What?”
“You know the secret of a good memory?” He bit back on another laugh. “You know what really kicks the hippocampus into overdrive, burns tracks into your brain faster and deeper than anything this side of direct neuroinduction?”
“Roach you gotta—”
“Fear.” Brüks shook his head. “All that time, playing the monster. I thought she was just into sadistic games, you know? I thought she just got off on scaring us. But she was never that—gratuitous. She was only cranking up the baud rate…”
Sengupta smacked her lips and looked out the window.
He snorted softly. “Even that time in the attic, Lee and I—we couldn’t even look. We just knew she was up there, but we were facing each other, Rak. We were each terrified by something to our left but we were facing each other—” Of course we were, it’s obvious. Why didn’t I see it before? “I bet she wasn’t there at all, it was just—temporoparietal hallucinations. Night hags. Sensed-presence bullshit.”
“Roach remembers.” Sengupta was almost whispering. “Roach is starting to wake up…”
“She was moving us around like checkers.” Brüks didn’t know whether to be awed or terrified. “The whole time…”
“And what else did she program into us huh? We gonna start seeing things that aren’t there or go walking naked on the hull?”
Brüks thought about it. “I don’t—think so. Not if she hacked us all the same way, anyway. Basic things, sure. Fear. Lust. Stuff that’s universal.” He smiled, a bit grimly, at the thought of the Crown’s surviving denizens sprouting preprogrammed hard-ons and spiked nipples. And that is really not a picture I need in my head right now. “You want to hack higher-level behavior, you’re getting into formative childhood experiences, specific memory pathways. Too many individual differences for one-size-fits-all.”
Sengupta clicked her teeth. “That’s old roach talking new roach should know better. Who knows what that—”
“She couldn’t hack the Bicamerals,” he said slowly.
“What?”
“These tricks—they exploit classic pathways, they’d never work on someone who’d remixed their brain circuitry. She had to get them out of the way.” A thousand pieces fell suddenly, blindingly into place. “That’s why she attacked the monastery, that’s why she didn’t just knock on the front door with an offer. She wanted to goad them into getting noticed. She knew how the roaches would respond, right down to a weaponized biological just lethal enough to keep the hive out of the way for the trip but not lethal enough to derail the mission completely. Fuck.” He sucked in his breath at the thought.
“You see the problem,” Sengupta said.
I don’t see anything but problems. “Which one in particular?”
“She’s a vampire she’s prepost-Human all wrapped up into one. These fuckers solve NP-complete problems in their heads and they drop us like go stones and she’s stupid enough to just accidentally get locked outside when we leave?”
Brüks shook his head. “She burned. I saw her. Ask Jim.”
“You ask him.” She turned, her eyes lifting from the deck the moment his face fell from view. “Go on. He’s right up there.”
“No hurry,” Brüks said after a moment. “I’ll see him when he comes down.”
To stern the transplanted parasol held back the sun: a great black shield, coruscations of flame still flickering intermittently past its edges. Ahead, the stars: one at least crawled with life and chaos, too distant yet to draw the eye, more hypothesis than hope but closing, closing. That was something.
In between:
A metal spine webbed in scaffolding, lumpy with metal tumors. Spokes and habs and cauterized stumps sweeping one way across the sky; a weighted baton sweeping the other to balance the vectors. The Hub. The Hold: a cylindrical cavern abutting the shield to stern, its back end ragged and gaping into space. Once it had been full of cargo and components and thinking cancers: now it was packed with tonnes of uranium and precious micrograms of antihydrogen and great toroidal superconductors big as houses.
And shadows everywhere: webs and jigsaws cast by a hundred dim lanterns decorating the tips of antennae or the latches of access panels or mounted as porch lights around the edges of half-forgotten emergency airlocks. Sengupta had turned them all on and maxed them all out but they were waypoints, not searchlights: they didn’t so much illuminate the darkness as throw it into contrast.
No matter. Her drone didn’t need light to see.
She’d eschewed the usual maintenance ’bots that crawled spiderlike along the hull, patching and probing and healing the scars left by micrometeorites. Too obvious, she’d said. Too easy to hack. Instead she’d built one from scratch, remote-printed it on the fabricator still humming away in the refitted Hold: decompiled one of the standard bots for essential bits of lanthanum and thulium and built the rest from the Crown’s matter stockpile like Yahweh breathing life into clay. Now it made its painstaking way over a landscape of struts and conduits, shadows and darkness overlaid with false-color maps on a dozen wavelengths.
“There!” Sengupta cried for the fourth time in as many hours, and then “Fuck.”
Just another pocket of outgassing. By now Brüks had learned not to worry about the myriad leaks in the hull. The Crown of Thorns was a sieve. Most ships were. Fortunately the holes in that mesh were pretty small: it would take years for the internal air pressure to decline significantly, barring a direct hit from anything larger than a lentil. They’d die of starvation or radiation sickness long before they had to worry about asphyxiation.
“Felching hell another leak I swear…” Sengupta’s voice trailed off, rebooted: “Wait a second…”
The telltales looked the same to Brüks: the faintest wisp of yellow on infrared, the kind of heat a few million molecules might retain for a moment or two after bleeding out from some warmer core. “Looks like more
microgassing to me. Smaller than that last one, even.”
“Yeah but look where it is.”
Along one of the batwing struts where the droplet radiator sprouted from the spine. “So?”
“No atmo there no tanks or lines either.”
One long arm swept through the near distance, like the candle-lit vane of a skeletal windmill. Another.
Sengupta played with herself. Her marionette picked a careful route through dark jumbled topography. Something hunkered on the hull ahead, its visible outlines buried in shadow. Infrared showed nothing but that diaphanous micronebula dissipating across the hull.
Can’t cloak thermal emissions, Brüks remembered. Not if you’re an endotherm. “That’s not enough of a heat trace—”
“Not if you’re a cockroach. Plenty big enough if you can shut yourself off for a few decades…”
“Just LIDAR it.”
Sengupta jerked her head back and forth. “No chance nothing active there could be tripwires.”
It can’t be her, Brüks told himself. I saw her burn … “What about StarlAmp?” he wondered.
“I’m using StarlAmp we just gotta get closer.”
“But if she’s tripwired against active sensors—”
“Proximity alert I know”—Sengupta nodded and tapped and kept her eyes on the prize—“but that would be active too and I could pick it up. Plus I’m hiding a lot.”
She was: the ’bot’s eye saw struts and plating more often than shadows within shadows. Sengupta was keeping her head down on approach. At the moment they could see nothing but the looming face of some small grated butte dead ahead.
“Right around the corner now this should do it.”
The drone farted hydrogen and drifted gently out of eclipse. Still nothing but faint amorphous yellow on infrared.
On StarlAmp, though: a silver body, legs straight arms spread, wired against the side of the ship. Boosted photons rendered the body in fragments: ridges of mirrored fabric glinting in thousand-year-old starlight, creases that swallowed any hint of mass or structure. The spacesuit was a patchwork of bright strips and dark absences, the shell of some tattered mummy with half its bandages ripped away and nothing at all underneath. But the right shoulder shone pale and clear: the double-E crest boasting the unsurpassed quality of Extreme Environments, Inc., protective gear; a name tag, programmable for the easy identification of multiple users.