Upgraded

by Peter Watts

  The girl took no part in the discussion. She stood apart. She was a baby barely able to control the mutations of her own flesh, dressed in a suit nearly identical to everyone else’s suit. In a cabin full of chatter and hand gestures, she ordered the skimmer’s wall to become clear. The Ship’s slick gray hull raced beneath them, and nobody else noticed. Then her hyperfiber arm lifted, bent at first and then straight, and one finger was pointed at the wrong place and then the right place. The correction was made instantly, without anyone’s help.

  One of the boys asked Gleem, “What are you doing?”

  She didn’t answer. Really, if he didn’t appreciate what her arm meant, then he was too ignorant to survive long as a Remora.

  The oldest girl said, “Oh, that’s where it’s going to crash.”

  Everyone but Gleem turned towards Orleans.

  “Of course it is,” said the baby, laughing at all of them. “Don’t you see? The old coward already has us making a nice safe spiral around the crash site!”

  The epiphany was tiny. Nothing about any recent day was better or worse, certainly not special, and the passenger couldn’t recall so much as one novel thought inside the boredom. He ate and breathed and wept and begged for death, and his dreams were ordinary or they were forgotten. And then he was awake again, hungry enough to endure the simple salted paste—the easiest food that could be made by machinery that was shepherding its energy. He ate until the immortal stomachs stopped complaining, and he drank sweetened water, and he evacuated his bowels twice before realizing that he hadn’t screamed or sobbed once, much less complained about this unyielding hell of existence.

  Why wasn’t he shrieking in agony?

  The question posed itself, and the same voice tried to give a worthy answer.

  “Because you have come to terms with your fate.”

  But no, that wasn’t the case. What he realized at last—what he should have appreciated from the first moment inside this tomb—was that he had resources beyond count. The lifesuit was tough but idiotic. But the body inside the suit was infused with phages and nanotools and genetic materials, modern as well as ancient. Every emergency pathway was a finger. The mechanisms that could rebuild a body might be fooled by that same body. Apply willpower to these armies of cells and their modern scaffolding, and quite a lot might be accomplished.

  The day passed quietly.

  And the next twenty days too.

  Then another question was posed. This time the suit spoke, with a voice that could never sound concerned or particularly curious.

  “What are doing now?” asked the lifesuit.

  “I am doing nothing,” the passenger said.

  “But you are,” it maintained. “You have slowed your circulation, and the acidity in your blood is a mistake.”

  “Maybe you should stop me,” he said.

  “When you harm yourself, I will.”

  But these matters of hearts and blood were only practice. They were the exploratory fumblings of a child. What he wanted would take eons, if it ever came. But that was the better fate than wild misery.

  Every waking moment was spent in furious concentration.

  And in his dreams, the passenger was blood moving where it wished, and little bones breaking where they needed to break, and single cells mutated in their deep genetics, producing wonderful little cancers, happy as could be, that were born eager to remake their world.

  The dead eye saw familiar stars but no tumbling gray ball. The asteroid stood between the eye and the Great Ship.

  The day ended with a hard jolt that shook worse by the moment. The eye and body rose up out of the slag. There were moments when any wrong impact would send it tumbling wildly into space. Every other velocity was the wrong velocity. But instead of being lost, the ancient lifesuit rose straight out of the crater, hovering for a long moment before beginning a slow, patient fall back into the quiet, grim pool of red iron.

  No warning was offered.

  One moment, the illusion of timeless cold space held sway. Then the blue light slashed into the asteroid, devastating the far hemisphere. That entire world was accelerated, heaved into the lifesuit. Like a hand, the crater swept up what it had already held for untold ages. The dead eye remained pointed upwards, outwards. The universe was stripped its stars. Nothing existed but violet plasmas infused with a mist of iron, every atom carrying away a billion years of aimless drifting.

  The acceleration diminished for a moment. And then it returned, doubling and doubling again.

  Hyperfiber fought to endure.

  At various junctures, where the stresses were the worst, little fissures opened up, threatening to spread.

  The suit nearly shattered.

  At a thousand points, it wanted to surrender.

  But the lasers throttled back, and wielding more data, the lasers’ aim grew surer, and the dead eye and the rest of the artifact settled into their new, very much unexpected existence.

  The youngsters wished they were closer, but there was a coward among them. They wanted to see the flash of the impact, which they did see, but through remote eyes, mechanical, indifferent to fear and caution. But Orleans insisted on distance, and at the end, when everything was a little exciting and a little fun, the old Remora was distracted, busily talking to others still farther away than they were.

  He talked about nothing important.

  Equipment lists.

  Favorite foods.

  Gossip about the cowardly humans living under their boots.

  Too late, the children realized that Orleans was using code—strings of words and subjects and probably the pauses between—sounds and nonsounds informing others about quite a lot more than the ugliness of an old rich woman.

  Five seconds after the impact, the AIs in charge heard a broadcast from Orleans. A big stern voice said, “The sky’s too hot. There’s too much debris falling. I’m taking the babies on to Rudgers.”

  On every screen, their skimmer began racing for the old patch and its new, boring lessons.

  But the babies and their teacher as well as the real skimmer were flying straight to that point where something very old had fallen from the stars.

  The suit had never quit calculating the passage of time.

  Certain days and moments were important beyond every other. There was that instant when the suit was born, and long years later, there was the instant when it and passenger were stripped from the starship. There was the day when the passenger stopped weeping. And after that, there was that first moment when a new bone formed inside the immortal body, and the suit asked about this odd structure, and the passenger offered words that, in retrospect, had no bearing on what was true.

  “I am entertaining myself, with myself,” the passenger claimed.

  Eventually quite a lot more than bones appeared. Tissues changed color, changed density. What looked random slowly revealed planning, and the details and scope of the changes impressed those little parts of the machine could feel. The passenger’s eye changed its shape and nature, becoming far more sensitive to dim light and starlight and the faint reflection of the face inside the diamond faceplate.

  Too late by a long while, the lifesuit answered that old question: What are you doing with yourself?

  Armed with an insight, it woke the passenger instantly, roughly. “You are trying to kill yourself,” it said.

  “I cannot kill myself,” he replied.

  “No, but there are emergency metabolisms. If you generate the right one, and if you subvert my means of overriding what you’re trying to accomplish—”

  “I could do that,” he said. “I considered doing that, yes.”

  “But you haven’t,” the suit said.

  “Nor will I,” said the happy passenger. “Unlikely as it seems, I’ve come to enjoy this existence. Life in its purest form. Nothing but the body and soul striving for some never-to-be-achieved perfection.”

  “Good,” was a worthy offering. So the suit said the word many times.
/>   “Yes,” the passenger agreed, every time.

  Then a feeling that wasn’t guilt and wasn’t sadness took hold of the machine. And with the same voice as always, except slower, it said to the passenger, “I have news that concerns you.”

  “What news?”

  “The reactors on which we depend . . . ”

  “Yes?”

  “One has failed. Three hundred thousand days ago, it ceased to work, and I have maintained both of us with the other reactor.”

  It was the passenger’s moment to say, “Good.”

  Then he thought harder, and with a pensive sound, he asked, “How is our other reactor doing?”

  “Poorly,” said the suit.

  Silence.

  “But it will last for this day,” the suit offered. “And for another day, and perhaps another million days. It is impossible for me to judge such things.”

  “You are lucky,” said the shapeshifting passenger.

  “I have known some good fortune, yes.”

  “Who hasn’t?” he asked, and then he began to laugh—a bright wild laugh, as if he were trying to fill Existence with his joy.

  Atoms were elegant in design, reliable of mood and simple by any fair measure, while the visible universe, taken in its entirety, looked like a single thing that did not vary from end to end.

  But between atoms and the universe lay the unmeasured, the unknown.

  Hidden fissures and incursions lurked inside every asteroid, and just as critical, distant AIs could never anticipate where the wild iron was heroically strong. Laser light was absorbed as predicted and a clean plume of million degree fire blossomed, and the old asteroid flung off most of its mass, gaining velocity. But not quite enough velocity. And when there was no place for error, the blistered core shattered where it shouldn’t and remained together where it shouldn’t, and that little world began to wobble one way and then the next.

  Too late, the AIs stopped firing.

  The shriveled asteroid rolled and fell to pieces, room-sized gobs of liquid iron and tacky red iron tumbling inside whirlwinds of plasma.

  A single wisp of hyperfiber appeared for an instant, then vanished.

  Which was horrible, and good. Debris began crashing across a larger sliver of the hull than anticipated. The old Remora had kept his crew at a cowardly distance, ensuring their survival, and that’s why they were alive to hear him explaining how that was not best, all things considered. “But one big mess does make our job easier,” he added.

  And then he fell silent.

  Obvious words, obvious questions. Nothing seemed worth saying. Even Gleem kept her human mouth silent. Their skimmer was weaving camouflage, and then the iron rain slackened and they began a sprint between the small, newborn craters. Tiny fragments kept falling far ahead of them, each impact marked by a blue flash and the idea of thunder, if not the roar. But every eye was fixed on the ancient creature still standing at the back of the cabin, apparently doing nothing.

  Orleans rather enjoyed the moment and that fine, rich energy that came from deep curiosity.

  “This is inevitable,” he began.

  A final blue flash washed over them, and then the skies cleared.

  “Little starships die every day, die and break open,” he said. “Souls get scattered across deep space, and some of the souls are immortal, in a fashion. If a lucky immortal wears escape pods and lifesuits, the soul can survive the disaster. In a fashion. Of course some pods and a few suits are rescued soon enough. But most of them are lost forever, and cheap suits usually fail after a century or ten thousand years, and those don’t matter so much to us. What matters are souls who can live and live and live. Those are the ones facing an eternity, and some sliver of them will survive, and a few retain their sanity, or they find a new sanity, and in some fashion, each of them remakes himself in small ways, or otherwise.

  “Call them our brothers.

  “The heavens are littered with Remoras. They don’t have voices that we can hear. They drift in darkness, invisible up until that moment when they find themselves helpless before the Great Ship. And we kill them. Most of them. If there’s a big lifepod ahead of us, of course it gets shattered with shaped nukes. Little suits, naked to space, are incinerated, or they’re left to poke a hole that other Remoras have to fill. We can’t save what we don’t see until it’s too late. We can’t grieve for what we’ll never know. But there are instances, and I won’t tell you how many, like today. An old lifesuit is pinned to a mass substantial enough and tough enough to be thrown ahead of us, given just enough momentum to save what might, might, might still be alive.

  “For the next little while, let’s assume we have a Remora.”

  Trajectory models were in agreement. Orleans pointed a confident finger at their destination, and the skimmer began to brake.

  “Our sibling came in too fast. Probably. But we won’t know until you go out there and look. Take the medical kits. Take hope if you want, although it won’t help, and carry cutting tools, yes. When we come to a stop, you’ll have maybe three minutes to measure our sibling’s health, and if he’s dead, we have to decide if he was a genuine Remora. Because if he was . . . ”

  Orleans paused.

  Everyone knew the rest of it. But Gleem felt it her duty to shout out, “Only Remoras put Remoras into the grave.”

  “What will you do if he is, was one of us?” another youngster asked.

  “Stand where I am and keep fooling every captain,” Orleans said. “Making camouflage is too much work to do anything else. This job is yours. All yours.”

  The second reactor was failing.

  Every day was probably the last day.

  The reactor’s death would result in the passenger’s death, fast at first and then very slow. He knew his flesh would seize up for lack of calories, and then it would freeze. A sequence of increasingly deep comas would claim his mind, allowing life to persist a little longer. But even the most minimal existence needed energy. Even the slightest flame flickered out after ten million years of darkness. That was why the oldest Remora tore apart his mouth and skull, using that flesh to manipulate his one eye, making a broad disk black as ink and more sensitive than ever.

  Greedy pigments absorbed every photon, or nearly so.

  The weakest starlight was visible, but that light also wobbled a few electrons that weren’t seen, that would push back into a mind, precipitating some good lazy thought that would be enjoyed and then forgotten.

  It was a strange, desperate plan, and when he was awake, he was full of doubt.

  He seriously reconsidered his plan.

  But before he could make himself blind, the reactor failed, and the suit died without a final word, and with his flesh freezing, the passenger fell into an imperfect, eternal half-death.

  Dust struck, and the lifesuit and corpse began to spin again.

  Slow memories wandered through him, bumping into one another. But sometimes he drifted close to a sun, and if that eye stared at the glare, the old mind woke long enough to remember its circumstances and an immeasurable past.

  Full life returned just twice.

  The first rebirth came when he crashed into the iron world. Cloaked in radiant energy, the Remora enjoyed several minutes of consciousness, ending with feeling grateful to find himself at the bottom of a bowl, the great eye pointing upwards, not down.

  And then after a very long darkness, he saw the simple gray ball that wasn’t simple, and then laser light and plasmas were wrapped around him, dragging the mind back into a frantic, disjointed life, and as the world around him fell to pieces, and as the Great Ship rose too fast, his final thought was a premonition.

  He was about to be rescued.

  Regardless what happened next, he was saved.

  A newborn crater stretched before them, shallow but wide. In its center, where the Ship’s hull was shiny gray after the impact, lay a chunk of what looked like trash hyperfiber, dark and broken into at least three unequal portions.


  The skimmer stopped beside the prize and hovered.

  Fourteen youngsters grabbed gear and jumped free. As he had promised, Orleans was busy weaving a fine believable picture of things that were not happening, but he also read everything that others read on the sensors. The ancient prize lay in three pieces. Two fragments were full of flesh dead long before the crash. But the dust showed complications, shifting metabolisms and invented forms familiar to any Remora. The third fragment had served as the head, presumably wearing some intricate structure erased by this catastrophic change of momentum. A bioceramic brain was nestled inside the goo—a robustly-built model matching nothing in the database—and it might well have been alive at the end. But there was an end. The crash had shattered the old mind in a thousand places, and there was no sign of thought or a soul sleeping deeply, and every memory had slipped into Nothingness.

  The fourteen of them stopped their work, just for a moment.

  Then Orleans called to them. Not quietly, but with a smooth patient voice, he said, “Put all of the body onboard. Another crew’s bringing scrap hyperfiber. They’ll build a likely mess here. For the captains’ sake. To fool everyone else.”

  Each piece of the body, shell and dust and drip, was pulled out of the crater, secured inside the cargo hold.

  Finished, the youngsters came back inside the cabin.

  Orleans told the skimmer to move again.

  Until halfway to the Rudger fissure, nobody spoke. Then Gleem approached the silent old man, her two eyes watching his six.

  “You’ve done this kind of thing before,” she guessed.

  “I’ve done every kind of thing before,” he said.

  “Have any of these falling souls lived?” she asked.

  Orleans closed every eye, and his young mouth sighed.

  “Tell me. Am I right?”

  He waited.

  “Because if you did, then they could still be living among us now. Remoras from the beginnings of space flight.”

  Nothing needed to be said.

  “Why won’t you tell me?” she asked. “Tell me that I’m right!”

  That’s when one of the other youngsters—a middle-aged boy who rarely spoke and only with a soft voice—stepped close to her. Using both arms, he tried to knock Gleem off her feet, which was almost impossible. It was a gesture, a show of theater. And then on the public channel, with a booming voice, said, “He isn’t telling us because it’s a secret!”