by Peter Watts
They say it was even closer than we thought. All those other spires popping up across the city, those were just beta releases. Tweaks, test runs, short-lived and self-terminating. That Central Park fucker, though: That was the mass-production model. It would’ve been shooting replicators. And then you’re not just talking about Manhattan, or New York, or even the whole tristate area. You’re kissing the whole damn planet good-bye. That’s what they say, anyhow. Of course, they don’t really know anything.
Actually, Roger, I don’t think they even know that much. I don’t think we have won. In fact, this is just the beginning. I’m pretty sure your bosses know that, too.
Because Gould had access to Hargreave’s feed. Gould knows what I saw, Gould knows stuff I haven’t told you here today. And if Gould knows, your bosses do, too.
Personally, I think of it as kind of a group home, a mansion with many rooms. And one of the residents wakes up in the middle of the night—hears a noise upstairs, maybe—and goes to investigate. He doesn’t bother waking the others. It’s probably just squirrels, or the cat knocked over a lamp or something. No point disturbing anyone else.
But it’s not squirrels, and it’s not a cat—or if it is, it’s a cat that’s figured out how to use the shotgun on the mantel, and now a gunshot’s gone off in the attic. Maybe there was a scream when the bullet hit, maybe someone shouted out a warning. And all the other gardening tools in all the other rooms, they’re waking up now. They want to know what happened. They want to know where their friend is. Maybe they’re even putting in a call to their owners to come have a look-see.
Hargreave would probably have some really valuable insights right about now, don’t you think?
Well, yes. As far as we know. But come on, Roger; you can’t have forgotten that Hargreave was never in it alone. It’s right there in the name of his company, for chrissake.
So tell me. What do you know about a dude called Karl Rasch?
BLACKBODY
Emergency Forensic Session on the Manhattan Incursion CSIRA BlackBody Council
Pre-Testimony Interview, Partial Transcript, 27/08/2023
Subject: Nathan Gould
Excerpt begins:
You remember those constellations I told you about, the ones that kept showing up in the static: clusters of blue stars, little sapphire pinpricks connected by a network of dim glowing filaments, rotating slowly in midair. Ceph starglobe, remember?
I bet your guys are going over it right now. The suit kept playing it so it’s gotta be important, right? Some kind of star map. Interstellar trade routes or invasion plans. Maybe the location of the Ceph homeworld. You’ve been poring over that shit ever since you tossed my place; nine, ten hours now? Trying to line up those sparkles with our own star maps, trying to figure out where a planet would have to be in the Milky Way to have that particular constellation hanging in its sky. How many possible matches you got so far? Few thousand, maybe?
I’ll give you a hint. You’re looking in the wrong direction.
One of those stars is under New York. Central Park, if you really want to narrow it down. There’s another under Ling Shan. And you know there’s a shitload more. Dozens more. If you’d waited another ten minutes before kicking in my door—hell, if you’d just asked nicely instead of waving those fucking guns in my face—I could’ve given you a list.
No big deal, though.
I’ve got a feeling everyone’s gonna know exactly where the rest of those stars are, real soon now.
Excerpt ends.
Emergency Forensic Session on the Manhattan Incursion Excerpted Testimony of Dr. Lindsey Aiyeola Before the CSIRA Blackbody Council, Unknown Location, sometime between September 1 and 6, 2023.
(Names of all BBC members redacted.)
Excerpt Begins:
Aiyeola: Alcatraz—Prophet, whatever he calls himself now—there is nothing in his file to suggest any aptitude or special training in the behavioral sciences. Certainly nothing to suggest he was capable of the sort of psychological insights sprinkled throughout his interview—and yes, some of them were quite astute.
In hindsight, we made the right decision by using an inexperienced and uninformed interviewer. Lieutenant Gillis couldn’t give away much because he didn’t know much—and on those occasions when he did bluff or dissemble, Prophet saw right through him. In fact, Prophet was in control of a great deal of the interview process.
BB 1: And yet according to your own report, you were manipulating him. You encouraged him to ramble, to go off on tangents, not only to acquire information about brain function but also in the hope that he’d inadvertently reveal things he might not be likely to in a more formal setting.
Aiyeola: That’s true. And we believe we obtained a great deal of useful information, but—well, we also have to consider the possibility that we were being played, at least in the later stages of the process. The subject’s abilities varied throughout the course of the interviews but the overall trend was upward. Certainly we weren’t slipping anything past him by the end of the interrogation. The question is, how much of the earlier information just “slipped out” and how much was deliberately fed to us.
BB 2: Excuse me, but I’ve only just been brought into the loop concerning the esteemed Mr. Alcatraz. Would you be so kind as to give me some examples of these “abilities”?
Aiyeola: His linguistic skills have improved significantly over a very short period of time. His memory has become eidetic. According to his file he was originally right-handed; he is now functionally ambidextrous. Levels of comprehension, retention, and recall are increasing literally by the—to make a long story short, he is simply becoming smarter. There’s some indication that the growth in his abilities is following a sigmoid curve, in which case they’re bound to level off at some point. At the moment, though, we’re not entirely certain where that might be.
And of course, there is the troubling fact that he still insists on referring to himself as “Prophet,” although he is fully aware that he is not Laurence Barnes, and that Laurence Barnes is dead.
BB 3: Why would Alcatraz “feed” us anything that wasn’t true? I’ve seen the man’s record: He wasn’t top of his class, but he’s a good marine. I see no reason to question his loyalty.
Aiyeola: That was a different person, sir. We don’t know who or what Alcatraz is anymore. We don’t know what’s going on in there, beyond the fact that his integration with alien technology has probably changed his—well, his outlook. We do know, thanks to Dr. Gould, that he was privy to specific information about Charybdis technology—his ability to hack the City Hall hive is difficult to explain any other way than by accessing some kind of memory archive from the N2’s previous occupant—and that he was not as forthcoming on that subject as he might have been. I will also admit that I find his remarks to Lieutenant Gillis about having to “choose a side” more than a little worrisome.
BB 1: In light of your position that he may have some special knowledge of the Ceph, what do you think of his take on their motives?
Aiyeola: He made a number of good points, sir. Certainly the Manhattan Incursion doesn’t make any tactical sense as a conventional invasion, and even Hargreave’s Gardener Hypothesis leaves a number of issues unresolved. Prophet’s take makes more sense, but it’s all pure conjecture at this point.
BB 1: Do you agree that the Ceph are not primarily interested in invasion?
Aiyeola: I believe that when we are talking about the Ceph the very concept of invasion is almost certainly inadequate.
BB 1: Would you care to elaborate on that, please.
Aiyeola: Are we invading an anthill when we build a drive-through bank machine on top of it? Probably, from the ants’ point of view. And if some small fraction of those ants survive—if they manage to get out of the way and set up a new colony somewhere else—are we incompetent invaders because we haven’t exterminated all of them? Have they beaten us, if the bulldozers came and went and left some ants alive? No, because we weren’t trying
to wipe out an anthill. We were putting up an ATM. But you can’t explain currency, finance, automated tellers to an ant. It’s impossible for them to comprehend our acts as anything other than a devastating attack by a god-like force that the ants—for some mysterious reason—were able to fend off.
BB 3: So your opinion is that we’re irrelevant to them.
Aiyeola: I have no idea whether we are or not. All I’m saying is, given such a vast gulf in technology and biology, it might well be physically impossible to ever fully understand what happened in Manhattan. What might happen in the future.
BB 2: I think that what Dr. Aiyeola is suggesting is that we concentrate on the immediate tactical threat, and not waste valuable resources on an impossible quest to comprehend the incomprehensible.
Aiyeola: Excuse me, [REDACTED], that’s by no means what I’m suggesting. I said might. I profoundly hope that someday we are in a position to understand Ceph motivations. Unfortunately I can only think of one way to do that.
BB 3: And that is?
Aiyeola: Become very much smarter.
BB 1: Alcatraz may prove useful in that regard. Assuming we can crack that particular nut.
BB 2: Well, whatever the Ceph are doing here, we can safely assume it matters a great deal to them. They wouldn’t have gone to the enormous cost and trouble of launching such a large-scale—
Aiyeola: With all due respect, sir, we have no way of knowing what constitutes an “enormous cost” to the Ceph. This is a species with an interstellar reach, a species that can teleport macroscopic objects—including, apparently, living organisms—over interplanetary distances. This whole campaign might have been a trivial investment to them—perhaps no more expensive than bending over to retrieve a dropped set of car keys. All we know for certain is that Hargreave stole their technology.
Maybe the Ceph just wanted it back.
Maybe they got it.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Biologist, author, and convicted felon, Peter Watts (author of Blindsight and the Rifters trilogy) appears to be especially popular with people who have never met him. At least, pretty much every award his work has received comes from overseas (with the exception of a recent Hugo, which probably won on a sympathy vote in the wake of recent encounters with the Department of Homeland Security). His science fiction, oddly enough, has been used as a core text in science and philosophy courses as well as the usual gamut of SF electives; he only wishes his actual science had been taken half as seriously, back in the day. Both he and his cat have appeared in the prestigious journal Nature.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Editor’s Note
Epigraph
Prophecy
Assault and Battery
Charybdis
Crash
Family Values
Anatomy
Trinity
Polar
Hive
Aquarium
Pilgrimage
Rearguard
Prism
Erection
Blackbody
About the Author
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