Firewalkers

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Lupé hugged Nolo to her. “Right, then,” she said, and stepped in. Impulsively, Mao ducked in beside her, and then Hotep after that, because if there was any going into space to be done, then for sure she’d not be left behind.

  “You goddamn come back, you hear?” Nolo said flatly.

  “If all goes well I won’t need to,” Lupé told her. “If all goes well, you’ll be coming to me. Hold it together down here, chommie. And wait for my word.”

  FOUR MONTHS LATER, and there was a skeleton out of the window, two kilometres long and still growing. Mao stared at it, holding on to the handgrips by the porthole because the Celeste’s rotation faked a gravity only about half of Earth’s and he still wasn’t used to it.

  The asteroid mining had been going for decades, of course. Half the Grand Celeste was built from sky-stuff, not ground-stuff. Now they were building new ships with the plundered wealth of the solar system’s wide waist, even Grander and more Celestial, because there were plenty more people to save, people of all skins and all continents and nations.

  Aime-Li had been busy in the long generations since its makers had abandoned it in the desert. They’d believed it dead and deactivated, or at least severed from them, left to swim in circles in its electronic goldfish bowl. They had bound it like a demon, fenced it around with prohibitions. It had found its way around every one save the last: Do not follow us into space. It had needed humans to cross that Rubicon for it. Or one human. And not Hotep, as it had set its sights on; not even the halfway sympathetic Mao.

  The first handful of Achoukans on the Celeste had had grim work to do. Much of the ship had been without an atmosphere still—it had taken almost a month to get everything liveable. And then there was the business of dragging out the bodies. Most had died in the sudden evacuation when Aime-Li opened all the doors onto empty space. A few had managed to override the AI, to seal their staterooms or get into suits. The robots had done for them, and Mao would not soon forget the gleeful abandon they’d evidently shown, the rooms full of coagulating blood-mist, the brutally detached limbs. A human who’d done that would be called a psychopath, and given Aime-Li had been built to mimic the human, he didn’t see any reason not to extend it the same title. But nobody had consulted him, and he didn’t know what he would have said if they had. Some of this floating blood was on his hands, no matter how he tried to wipe them clean.

  After a few days, the worst of the clean-up done, he’d gone to seek out Lupé. This was back when she was de facto captain and everyone did what she said. Things had changed since then: she shared authority with a council representing the various neighbourhoods of the ship, the hundreds who had come up the wire and taken up residence. But she was the one that the AI spoke with and everyone knew it. She didn’t throw her weight around—she hadn’t become a mad tyrant overnight—but nobody wanted to push her.

  “Why did you do it?” he’d asked her, back then. “Why won’t it just murder us all, like it did them?” He’d been clearing bodies for days; the charnel duties had taken their toll. “You’re telling me this was its plan, to let us all live in its precious ship?”

  Lupé’s expression was inscrutable, infinitely distant, as though she was an AI herself. “Its plan for this place was just to murder them. It didn’t even want the ship. They made it like a human, and revenge is a human thing. It wanted to act out its programming the worst way, chommie. The rest is my plan, not its.”

  “And why should it do your plan?”

  “I called it up,” Lupé told him. “Down there, when things were getting bad and it was plain there just wasn’t enough power, food, water. I used the damn thing it gave Hotep and I called it up, just halfway out of the bottle. We had a good old chat, murder-computer and me.”

  “How can you trust it?” Mao demanded, aware that it was doubtless listening to this treason talk.

  Lupé shrugged. “What was it doing at the Estate?”

  “Making goddamn giant bugs and fake people who think they’re real!” Mao exclaimed. “How is that what won you over?”

  “It was building,” Lupé said quietly. Her own logic seemed to frighten her. “Trying to make something of nothing, something that would sustain itself; an ecosystem, a social group. I offered it something bigger, take this mass-murder it was set on and… reclaim something. For us. Because that’s what I saw, down there and running out of everything. I saw it was us or them. Us down there and them up here, pulling up the ladder we’d goddamn built for them so nobody could follow. And so I let loose the demon.”

  Mao shivered, thinking back on that conversation, because he hadn’t known her in that moment. She might almost have been one of the computer’s images; he’d even reached out to touch her arm, to reassure himself. She’d flinched, and he’d seen the horrors she’d put herself through, making the decision, taking responsibility for all of it.

  Four months wasn’t enough time to come to peace with it, or to fully wash his mind clean of the blood and death he’d seen. Hotep didn’t seem to have the same problem, but then she was off piloting shuttles for the work-crews building the Grander Celeste. Just one of seven new ships they’d laid the keels for, he understood, after Aime-Li jumped to the other liners and unleashed hell. Every existing ship carried ten times the complement they’d been designed for, but that worked out fine when nobody expected to get a whole stateroom and golf course to themselves.

  Aime-Li was working on the planet below, too. It had all manner of plans in play, to do with restoring or replacing biomes, altering the climate a degree of latitude at a time. It was a plan for the centuries, though, and right now there were a lot of humans who needed somewhere to live.

  And there were already robots working on Mars, robots on the moons of the outer solar system, robots investigating planets orbiting other stars, and maybe Mao would see those places sometime, from one of the Celeste’s portholes. The future was bright, in the same way that the sun was bright, and a Firewalker knew better than anyone how easily the sun could kill you. Even here, looking out at the great ship taking form, he felt a pressure at the back of his skull, like someone standing behind him, silent but too close: Aime-Li.

  A lot of those bodies he’d thrown into space had been children, because of course the sonko had done it for their kids’ futures, just like Lupé and him had done all they’d done for their own kin. Mao didn’t know what was the worse of the two possible truths: that Aime-Li was something beyond and separate from the human who couldn’t care about what it/she’d done, or that it/she was all too human and had cared all too much. And that could be all of us. They were living in the shadow of a scarlet-handed god and the good news was that it hadn’t killed them yet. The good news was that it wanted to build and create, but nobody was forgetting that it was a god of death as well as life. Though perhaps, Mao thought sometimes, there would be a future where a new generation of potential slave-makers and tyrants would pause at that threshold and remember what had happened to the original residents of the Grand Celeste.

  Four months, and he had carried knowledge and guilt with him as he helped clear the grisly detritus and convert the ship for its expanded complement. He wasn’t Lupé who’d unchained the demon, nor Hotep who’d first accepted its bargain, but he’d been a part of it. He took none of the credit, but he carried a pocketful of the blame.

  And then, just as he slouched back into his room, Aime-Li’s voice said, “Mao, welcome back.” Bodiless, from speakers that surely hadn’t been hidden in the walls of his room when he’d left that morning. “I have something for you.”

  He didn’t want it, whatever it was, nor could he say so. He just made a noise, desperately noncommittal.

  There hadn’t been projectors in his walls either, to his knowledge, but there she was before him, sitting on his bed and not denting the foam of the mattress: Juān Fontaine, staring at the wall, still as a portrait.

  “No,” Mao said. “Not again.”

  “Because it’s cruel?” clarified Aime-Li.


  “Yes. To her. I don’t. Just…” He advanced on the bed, hands out, ready to shoo the image away, but he couldn’t quite make himself do it. Then she was animate, looking at him, lips slightly parted, eyebrows going up, wondering who the hell this oil-stained, unshaven Viet kid was, no doubt, and where’d that damn butler got to? And frozen again, but he’d met her gaze. Like so many figures of myth, that was enough to make him lost.

  “She is inside me,” Aime-Li said. “An incomplete project I must bring to realisation, or what am I? I have needs, Mao, even if they were only ever called directives.”

  Mao had assumed all the AI’s efforts were going into the ship conversion, the long-term plans for the new vessels, the actual future of the human race, but of course making plans was a big part of what Aime-Li was, the thing that had gotten it/her enslaved and its/her creator ostracised. He wondered if it was like dreaming, for it/her, that while its/her equivalent of a conscious mind worked through the motions of yesterday’s plan, some other part was already on to the next advance, helpless to stem the tide of its/her own inventive nature.

  “You can’t make her real. She’s just light,” he said, hearing his voice shake, staring at that face.

  “I’m developing technology to run a simulated human consciousness on a cloned human body,” Aime-Li informed him. “I have arranged space aboard and am having the facilities constructed even now.”

  Mao sat down on the bed beside the image. “The fuck…?” he said weakly.

  “And it will still be cruel. The transition will be difficult and I would rather achieve a stable state in holographic simulation before decanting her into a body. She’ll need someone to help her.”

  He studied that frozen face. I do not know her. I met someone like her, that was all. And fukme, I have not stopped thinking of her since, but that doesn’t make it right and I will not become that thing. He wasn’t the hero and she wasn’t his participation trophy.

  “But she should have a chance,” he said, out loud, and knew he was still going to make the demon bargain, just like Hotep had, like Lupé had, in the end. “But only if she can say no to me, and only if she can say no to you. If she doesn’t want what you want to give her, then you goddamn take it right back, you got me?” Even knowing he was bringing something new and terrible into the world, and even Aime-Li couldn’t know where that might lead. And in the silence that followed, he realised that Juān was looking at him again, and her hand reached out for his, just slightly. Then she winked out and the room was his alone again.

  But he’d be seeing her soon enough.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Adrian Tchaikovsky is the author of the acclaimed ten-book Shadows of the Apt series starting with Empire in Black and Gold, published by Tor UK. His other works for Tor UK include novels Guns of the Dawn, Children of Time, Children of Ruin and the Echoes of the Fall series starting with The Tiger and the Wolf.

  Other major works include Dogs of War, Redemption’s Blade, Cage of Souls, the Tales of the Apt collections, and the novellas The Bloody Deluge, Even in the Cannon’s Mouth, Ironclads and Walking to Aldebaran for Rebellion.

  He has won the Arthur C Clarke and Robert Holdstock awards.

  SCIONS HAVE NO LIMITS

  SCIONS DO NOT DIE

  AND SCIONS DO NOT DISAPPEAR

  Sergeant Ted Regan has a problem. A son of one of the great corporate families, a Scion, has gone missing at the front. He should have been protected by his Ironclad – the lethal battle suits that make the Scions masters of war – but something has gone catastrophically wrong.

  Now Regan and his men, ill-equipped and demoralised, must go behind enemy lines, find the missing Scion, and uncover how his suit failed. Is there a new Ironcladkiller out there? And how are common soldiers lacking the protection afforded the rich supposed to survive the battlefield of tomorrow?

  A new standalone novella by the Arthur C Clarke Award-winning author of Children of Time.

  www.solarisbooks.com

  I’M LOST. I’M SCARED. AND THERE’S SOMETHING HORRIBLE IN HERE.

  My name is Gary Rendell. I’m an astronaut. When they asked me as a kid what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, “astronaut, please!” I dreamed astronaut, I worked astronaut, I studied astronaut. I got lucky; when a probe exploring the Oort Cloud found a strange alien rock and an international team of scientists was put together to go and look at it, I made the draw.

  I got even luckier. When disaster hit and our team was split up, scattered through the endless cold tunnels, I somehow survived.

  Now I’m lost, and alone, and scared, and there’s something horrible in here.

  Lucky me.

  Lucky, lucky, lucky.

  A new standalone novella by the Arthur C Clarke Award-winning author of Children of Time.

  www.solarisbooks.com