“So it’s over, is it?” Gregor asks aloud, in the stilted serial speech to which humans are constrained.
“Yep. Any minute now—”
The air-raid sirens begin to wail. Pigeons spook, exploding outward in a cloud of white panic.
“Oh, look.”
The entity behind Gregor’s eyes stares out across the river, marking time while his cancers call home. He’s always vague about these last hours before the end of a mission—a destructive time, in which information is lost—but at least he remembers the rest. As do the hyphae of the huge rhizome network spreading deep beneath the park, thinking slow vegetable thoughts and relaying his sparky monadic flashes back to his mother by way of the engineered fungal strands that thread the deep ocean floors. The next version of him will be created knowing almost everything: the struggle to contain the annoying, hard-to-domesticate primates with their insistent paranoid individualism, the dismay of having to carefully sterilize the few enlightened ones like Sagan . . .
Humans are not useful. The future belongs to ensemble intelligences, hive minds. Even the mock-termite aboriginals have more to contribute. And Gregor, with his teratomas and his shortage of limbs, has more to contribute than most. The culture that sent him, and a million other anthropomorphic infiltrators, understands this well: he will be rewarded and propagated, his genome and memeome preserved by the collective even as it systematically eliminates yet another outbreak of humanity. The collective is well on its way toward occupying a tenth of the disk, or at least of sweeping it clean of competing life-forms. Eventually it will open negotiations with its neighbors on the other disks, joining the process of forming a distributed consciousness that is a primitive echo of the vast ramified intelligence wheeling across the sky so far away. And this time round, knowing why it is being birthed, the new God will have a level of self-understanding denied to its parent.
Gregor anticipates being one of the overmind’s memories: it is a fate none of these humans will know save at secondhand, filtered through his eusocial sensibilities. To the extent that he bothers to consider the subject, he thinks it is a disappointment. He may be here to help exterminate them, but it’s not a personal grudge: it’s more like pouring gasoline on a troublesome ant heap that’s settled in the wrong backyard. The necessity irritates him, and he grumbles aloud in Brundle’s direction: “If they realized how thoroughly they’d been infiltrated, or how badly their own individuality lets them down—”
Flashes far out over the ocean, ruby glare reflected from the thin tatters of stratospheric cloud.
“—They might learn to cooperate someday. Like us.”
More flashes, moving closer now as the nuclear battlefront evolves.
Brundle nods. “But then, they wouldn’t be human anymore. And in any case, they’re much too late. A million years too late.”
A flicker too bright to see, propagating faster than the signaling speed of nerves, punctuates their conversation. Seconds later, the mach wave flushes their cinders from the bleached concrete of the bench. Far out across the disk, the game of ape and ant continues; but in this place and for the present time, the question has been answered. And there are no human winners.
Afterword—“Missile Gap”
In late 2004, Gardner Dozois—then editor of
Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine—asked me if I’d like to write a novella for him. Like many such invitations, it came with strings attached; he was commissioning long stories for an anthology titled One Million A.D. I find tales of the very distant future hard to write. How do you find a way to connect with deep time? Few of us have even a tenuous grasp on the meaning of a single century, let alone a century of centuries of centuries! The sum total of recorded human history is less than six thousand years; few of our institutions have lasted even one millennium without major change. A million years is somewhere between four and twenty times the life span of our entire species (the paleontologists are a little vague on precisely when Homo sapiens sapiens first showed up on the scene). Given that the focus of almost all fiction is the human condition, and that the human condition doesn’t scale well across even centuries (much less deep geological time), I decided to approach the subject indirectly.
Rogue Farm
It was a bright, cool March morning: mare’s tails trailed across the southeastern sky toward the rising sun. Joe shivered slightly in the driver’s seat as he twisted the starter handle on the old front-loader he used to muck out the barn. Like its owner, the ancient Massey Ferguson had seen better days; but it had survived worse abuse than Joe routinely handed out. The diesel clattered, spat out a gobbet of thick blue smoke, and chattered to itself dyspeptically. His mind as blank as the sky above, Joe slid the tractor into gear, raised the front scoop, and began turning it toward the open doors of the barn—just in time to see an itinerant farm coming down the road.
“Bugger,” swore Joe. The tractor engine made a hideous grinding noise and died. He took a second glance, eyes wide, then climbed down from the tractor and trotted over to the kitchen door at the side of the farmhouse. “Maddie!” he called, forgetting the two-way radio clipped to his sweater hem. “Maddie! There’s a farm coming!”
“Joe? Is that you? Where are you?” Her voice wafted vaguely from the bowels of the house.
“Where are you?” he yelled back.
“I’m in the bathroom.”
“Bugger,” he said again. “If it’s the one we had round the end last month . . .”
The sound of a toilet sluiced through his worry. It was followed by a drumming of feet on the staircase, then Maddie erupted into the kitchen. “Where is it?” she demanded.
“Out front, about a quarter mile up the lane.”
“Right.” Hair wild and eyes angry about having her morning ablutions cut short, Maddie yanked a heavy green coat on over her shirt. “Opened the cupboard yet?”
“I was thinking you’d want to talk to it first.”
“Too right I want to talk to it. If it’s that one that’s been lurking in the copse near Edgar’s pond, I got some issues to discuss with it.” Joe shook his head at her anger and went to unlock the cupboard in the back room. “You take the shotgun and keep it off our property,” she called after him. “I’ll be out in a minute.”
Joe nodded to himself, then carefully picked out the twelve-gauge and a preloaded magazine. The gun’s power-on self-test lights flickered erratically, but it seemed to have a full charge. Slinging it, he locked the cupboard carefully and went back out into the farmyard to warn off their unwelcome visitor.
The farm squatted, buzzing and clicking to itself, in the road outside Armitage End. Joe eyed it warily from behind the wooden gate, shotgun under his arm. It was a medium-sized one, probably with half a dozen human components subsumed into it—a formidable collective. Already it was deep into farm-fugue, no longer relating very clearly to people outside its own communion of mind. Beneath its leathery black skin he could see hints of internal structure, cyto cellular macroassemblies flexing and glooping in disturbing motions. Even though it was only a young adolescent, it was already the size of an antique heavy tank, and blocked the road just as efficiently as an Apatosaurus would have. It smelled of yeast and gasoline.
Joe had an uneasy feeling that it was watching him. “Buggerit, I don’t have time for this,” he muttered. The stable waiting for the small herd of cloned spidercows cluttering up the north paddock was still knee-deep in manure, and the tractor seat wasn’t getting any warmer while he shivered out here waiting for Maddie to come and sort this thing out. It wasn’t a big herd, but it was as big as his land and his labor could manage—the big biofabricator in the shed could assemble mammalian livestock faster than he could feed them up and sell them with an honest HAND-RAISED NOT VAT-GROWN label. “What do you want with us?” he yelled up at the gently buzzing farm.
“Brains, fresh brains for baby Jesus,” crooned the farm in a warm contralto, startling Joe half out of his skin. “Buy my brains!” Half a d
ozen disturbing cauliflower shapes poked suggestively out of the farm’s back, then retracted, coyly.
“Don’t want no brains around here,” Joe said stubbornly, his fingers whitening on the stock of the shotgun. “Don’t want your kind round here, neither. Go away.”
“I’m a nine-legged semiautomatic groove machine!” crooned the farm. “I’m on my way to Jupiter on a mission for love! Won’t you buy my brains?” Three curious eyes on stalks extruded from its upper glacis.
“Uh—” Joe was saved from having to dream up any more ways of saying fuck off by Maddie’s arrival. She’d managed to sneak her old battle dress home after a stint keeping the peace in Mesopotamia twenty years ago, and she’d managed to keep herself in shape enough to squeeze inside. Its left knee squealed ominously when she walked it about, which wasn’t often, but it still worked well enough to manage its main task—intimidating trespassers.
“You.” She raised one translucent arm, pointed at the farm. “Get off my land.
Now.”
Taking his cue, Joe raised his shotgun and thumbed the selector to full auto. It wasn’t a patch on the hardware riding Maddie’s shoulders, but it underlined the point. The farm hooted. “Why don’t you love me?” it asked plaintively.
“Get orf my land,” Maddie amplified, volume cranked up so high that Joe winced. “Ten seconds! Nine! Eight—” Thin rings sprang out from the sides of her arms, whining with the stress of long disuse as the Gauss gun powered up.
“I’m going! I’m going!” The farm lifted itself slightly, shuffling backward. “Don’t understand. I only wanted to set you free to explore the universe. Nobody wants to buy my fresh fruit and brains. What’s wrong with you people?”
They waited until the farm had retreated round the bend at the top of the hill. Maddie was the first to relax, the rings retracting into the arms of her battle dress, which solidified from ethereal translucency to neutral olive drab as it powered down. Joe safed his shotgun. “Bastard,” he said.
“Fucking A.” Maddie looked haggard. “That was a bold one.” Her face was white and pinched-looking, Joe noted: her fists were clenched. She had the shakes, he realized without surprise. Tonight was going to be another major nightmare night, and no mistake.
“The fence.” They’d discussed wiring up an outer wire to the CHP baseload from their little methane plant, on again and off again for the past year.
“Maybe this time. Maybe.” Maddie wasn’t keen on the idea of frying passersby without warning, but if anything might bring her around, it would be the prospect of being squatted by a rogue farm. “Help me out of this, and I’ll cook breakfast,” she said.
“Got to muck out the barn,” Joe protested.
“It can wait on breakfast,” Maddie said shakily. “I need you.”
“Okay.” Joe nodded. She was looking bad; it had been a few years since her last fatal breakdown, but when Maddie said
I need you, it was a bad idea to ignore her. That way led to backbreaking labor on the biofab and loading her backup tapes into the new body; always a messy business. He took her arm and steered her toward the back porch. They were nearly there when he paused.
“What is it?” asked Maddie.
“Haven’t seen Bob for a while,” he said slowly. “Sent him to let the cows into the north paddock after milking. Do you think—”
“We can check from the control room,” she said tiredly. “Are you really worried . . . ?”
“With that thing blundering around? What do you think?”
“He’s a good working dog,” Maddie said uncertainly. “It won’t hurt him. He’ll be alright; just you page him.”
After Joe helped her out of her battle dress, and after Maddie spent a good long while calming down, they breakfasted on eggs from their own hens, homemade cheese, and toasted bread made with rye from the hippie commune on the other side of the valley. The stone-floored kitchen in the dilapidated house they’d rebuilt together over the past twenty years was warm and homely. The only purchase from outside the valley was the coffee, beans from a hardy GM strain that grew like a straggling teenager’s beard all along the Cumbrian hilltops. They didn’t say much: Joe, because he never did, and Maddie, because there wasn’t anything that she wanted to say. Silence kept her personal demons down. They’d known each other for many years, and even when there wasn’t anything to say they could cope with each other’s silence. The voice radio on the windowsill opposite the cast-iron stove stayed off, along with the TV set hanging on the wall next to the fridge. Breakfast was a quiet time of day.
“Dog’s not answering,” Joe commented over the dregs of his coffee.
“He’s a good dog.” Maddie glanced at the yard gate uncertainly. “You afraid he’s going to run away to Jupiter?”
“He was with me in the shed.” Joe picked up his plate and carried it to the sink, began running hot water onto the dishes. “After I cleaned the lines I told him to go take the herd up the paddock while I did the barn.” He glanced up, looking out the window with a worried expression. The Massey Ferguson was parked right in front of the open barn doors, as if to hold at bay the mountain of dung, straw, and silage that mounded up inside like an invading odious enemy, relic of a frosty winter past.
Maddie shoved him aside gently and picked up one of the walkie-talkies from the charge point on the windowsill. It bleeped and chuckled at her. “Bob, come in, over.” She frowned. “He’s probably lost his headset again.”
Joe racked the wet plates to dry. “I’ll move the midden. You want to go find him?”
“I’ll do that.” Maddie’s frown promised a talking-to in store for the dog when she caught up with him. Not that Bob would mind: words ran off him like water off a duck’s back. “Cameras first.” She prodded the battered TV set to life and grainy, bisected views flickered across the screen: garden, yard, dutch barn, north paddock, east paddock, main field, copse. “Hmm.”
She was still fiddling with the smallholding surveillance system when Joe clambered back into the driver’s seat of the tractor and fired it up once more. This time there was no cough of black smoke, and as he hauled the mess of manure out of the barn and piled it into a three-meter-high midden, a quarter of a ton at a time, he almost managed to forget about the morning’s unwelcome visitor. Almost.
By late morning the midden was humming with flies and producing a remarkable stench, but the barn was clean enough to flush out with a hose and broom. Joe was about to begin hauling the midden over to the fermentation tanks buried round the far side of the house when he saw Maddie coming back up the path, shaking her head. He knew at once what was wrong.
“Bob,” he said, expectantly.
“Bob’s fine. I left him riding shotgun on the goats.” Her expression was peculiar. “But that farm—”
“Where?” he asked, hurrying after her.
“Squatting in the woods down by the stream,” she said tersely. “Just over our fence.”
“It’s not trespassing, then.”
“It’s put down feeder roots! Do you have any idea what that means?”
“I don’t—” Joe’s face wrinkled in puzzlement. “Oh.”
“Yes.
Oh.” She stared back at the outbuildings between their home and the woods at the bottom of their smallholding, and if looks could kill, the intruder would be dead a thousand times over. “It’s going to estivate, Joe, then it’s going to grow to maturity on our patch. And do you know where it said it was going to go when it finishes growing? Jupiter!”
“Bugger,” Joe said faintly, as the true gravity of their situation began to sink in. “We’ll have to deal with it first.”
“That wasn’t what I meant,” Maddie finished. But Joe was already on his way out the door. She watched him crossing the yard, then shook her head. “Why am I stuck here?” she asked aloud, but the cooker wasn’t answering.
The hamlet of Outer Cheswick lay four kilometers down the road from Armitage End, four kilometers past mostly derelict houses and
broken-down barns, fields given over to weeds and walls damaged by trees. The second half of the twenty-first century had been cruel years for the British agrobusiness sector; even harsher if taken in combination with the decline in population and the consequent housing surplus. As a result, the dropouts of the forties and fifties were able to take their pick from among the gutted shells of once-fine farmhouses. They chose the best and moved in, squatted in the derelict outbuildings, planted their seeds and tended their flocks and practiced their DIY skills, until a generation later a mansion fit for a squire stood in lonely isolation alongside a decaying road where no cars drove. Or rather, it would have taken a generation had there been any children against whose lives it could be measured; these were the latter decades of the population crash, and what a previous century would have labeled downshifter dink couples were now in the majority, far outnumbering the breeder colonies. In this aspect of their life, Joe and Maddie were boringly conventional. In other respects they weren’t: Maddie’s nightmares, her aversion to alcohol, and her withdrawal from society were all relics of her time in Peace-force. As for Joe, he liked it here. Hated cities, hated the net, hated the burn of the new. Anything for a quiet life . . .
The Pig and Pizzle, on the outskirts of Outer Cheswick, was the only pub within about ten kilometers—certainly the only one within staggering distance for Joe when he’d had a skinful of mild—and it was naturally a seething den of local gossip, not least because Ole Brenda refused to allow electricity, much less bandwidth, into the premises. (This was not out of any sense of misplaced technophobia, but a side effect of Brenda’s previous life as an attack hacker with the European Defense Forces.)
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