by Peter Watts
Praise for The Freeze-Frame Revolution
“Peter Watts is a brilliant bastard of a science fiction writer, whose grim scenarios are matched by their scientific speculation; in his latest, a novella called The Freeze-Frame Revolution, Watts imagines a mutiny that stretches out across aeons, fought against a seemingly omnipotent AI. This is definitely vintage Watts, from the Elder Gods the Eri discovers as it traverses the wormholes it creates, to the imaginative tortures the mutineers use to punish those who betray the rebellion.”
—Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother and Walkaway
“A gripping story of a deep human future—the dependent relationship between human and AI tangles and grows with the delicious creep of suspense to the very last page. Watts is a poet when it comes to science.”
—Justina Robson, author of Keeping it Real
“If you ever doubted that the core of all good science fiction is still the human heart, here comes Peter Watts to ram the point home. The Freeze Frame Revolution is the purest driven high concept SF, told across scales of time and space to daunt all but the very finest Space Opera practitioners, and yet it remains as vivid and carnal and profane as the headiest of high-end literature.”
—Richard Morgan, author of Altered Carbon
“Darkness and awesome technology lurk in The Freeze-Frame Revolution.”
—Vernor Vinge, author of A Fire Upon the Deep
“Watts takes familiar-seeming SF tropes and accelerates them towards lightspeed, until they become something chillingly other. A gripping tale where galactic timescales collide with biology and age-old human dilemmas.”
—Hannu Rajaniemi, author of Summerland and The Quantum Thief
“Fast, rich, and cool—The Freeze-Frame Revolution fascinates!”
—Greg Bear, author of Eon and Take Back the Sky
“In The Freeze-Frame Revolution, Peter Watts takes us millions of years into the future and hundreds of light-years away, where an isolated fragment of humanity must confront exotic physics, unfathomable entities, and the unforeseen consequences of their own technologies . . . A brilliant, thoughtful story bursting with radical ideas.”
—David D. Levine, author of the Arabella of Mars trilogy
“The Freeze-Frame Revolution is a slow-motion rebellion as heart-stopping as any roller coaster ride and will delight readers across the science fiction spectrum. It was a joy to read and I found myself unable to put it down once I got started.”
—K. B. Wagers, author of Before the Throne
“Entertaining and provocative, brilliant and ambitious, The Freeze-Frame Revolution is compelling science fiction with heart.”
—Foreword, starred review
“Peter Watts is a triple threat: exacting hard science extrapolation, an imagination that runs hot enough to give you contact burns, and a gift for thrusting his characters in situations that will expand the mind while shattering even the most guarded of reader hearts.”
—A. M. Dellamonica, author of Indigo Springs
Praise for Peter Watts
“A new book from crazy genius Watts is always cause for celebration . . . Watts is one of those writers who gets into your brain and remains lodged there like an angry, sentient tumor.”
—io9
“[Watts] asks the questions that the best science fiction writers ask, but that the rest of us may be afraid to answer.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Watts displays a gleefully macabre inventiveness combined with scientific rigour.”
—Nalo Hopkinson, author of Brown Girl in the Ring
“Peter Watts is some precisely engineered hybrid of Lucius Shepard and Gregory Benford, lyrical yet hard-edged, purveyor of sleek surfaces and also the ethical and spiritual contents inside.”
—Locus
Also by Peter Watts
Rifters trilogy
Starfish (1999)
Maelstrom (2001)
βehemoth (2004)
Firefall series
Blindsight (2006)
Echopraxia (2014)
Short fiction
Beyond the Rift (2013)
The Freeze-Frame Revolution
Copyright © 2018 by Peter Watts
This is a work of fiction. All events portrayed in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form without the express permission of the author and the publisher.
Cover and interior design by Elizabeth Story
“Grav Profile” © 2018 by Peter Watts
Tachyon Publications LLC
1459 18th Street #139
San Francisco, CA 94107
www.tachyonpublications.com
[email protected]
Series Editor: Jacob Weisman
Project Editor: Jill Roberts
Print ISBN: 978-1-61696-252-4
Digital ISBN: 978-1-61696-010-0
First Edition: 2018
In memory of Banana/Chip.
They hated each other.
BACK WHEN WE FIRST SHIPPED OUT I played this game with myself. Every time I thawed, I’d tally up the length of our journey so far; then check to see when we’d be if Eriophora were a time machine, if we’d been moving back through history instead of out through the cosmos. Oh look: all the way back to the Industrial Revolution in the time it took us to reach our first build. Two builds took us to the Golden Age of Islam, seven to the Shang Dynasty.
I guess it was my way of trying to keep some kind of connection, to measure this most immortal of endeavors on a scale that meat could feel in the gut. It didn’t work out, though. Did exactly the opposite in fact, ended up rubbing my nose in the sheer absurd hubris of even trying to contain the Diaspora within the pitiful limits of earthbound history.
For starters, the Chimp didn’t thaw anyone out until the seventh gate, almost six thousand years into the mission; I slept through almost all of human civilization, didn’t even wake up until the fall of the Minoans. I think Kai may have been on deck for the Pyramid of Cheops, but by the time Chimp called me back from the crypt we were all the way into the last Ice Age. After that we were passing through the Paleolithic: five thousand gates built—only three hundred requiring meat on deck—and we’d barely finished our first circuit of the Milky Way.
I gave up after Australopithecus. It had been a stupid game, a child’s game, doomed from the start. We were just cavemen. Only the mission was transcendent.
I don’t know exactly what moved me to pick up that kiddie pastime again. I’d learned my lesson the first time around, and space itself has only grown vaster in the meantime. But I gave it another shot, after everything went south: called up the clocks, subtracted the centuries. We’ve been around the disk thirty-two times now, left over a hundred thousand gates in our wake. We’ve scoured so many raw materials that God, looking down from overhead, could probably trace out our path by the jagged spiral of tiny bubbles sucked clean of ice and gravel.
Sixty-six million years, by the old calendar. That’s how long we’ve been on the road. All the way back to the end of the Cretaceous.
Give or take a few millennia, the revolution happened on the day one of Eriophora’s pint-sized siblings punched Earth in the face and wiped out the dinosaurs.
I don’t know why, but I find that kind of funny.
IT WAS THE MONOCERUS BUILD that broke her. The gremlin came out of the gate a split-second after we booted it up: as if the fucking thing had been waiting the whole time, hunger and hatred building with every second of every century we’d been crawling across the void to set it free. Maybe it was whatever Humanity turned into, after Eriophora
shipped out. Maybe it was something that came along after, something that swallowed Humanity whole and raced along our conquered highways in search of loose ends to devour.
It doesn’t matter. It never matters. We birthed the gate; the gate birthed an abomination. This one stirred something in me, a faint familiar echo I couldn’t quite put my finger on. That happens more often than you might think. Rack up enough gigasecs on the road and you’re bound to start seeing the same models in your rear-view eventually.
The usual protocols saved us. Deceleration in the wake of a boot is just another word for suicide: the radiation erupting from a newborn wormhole would turn us to ash long seconds before the occasional demon had a chance to gulp us down. So we threaded that needle as we always did: rode our bareback singularity through a hoop barely twice as wide as we were, closed the circuit at sixty thousand kps, connected there to here without ever slowing down. We trusted the rules hadn’t changed, that math and physics and the ass-saving geometry of distance-squared would water down the wavefront before it caught up with us.
We outran the rads, and we outran the gremlin, and as two kinds of uncertain death redshifted to stern Chimp threw a little yellow icon onto the corner of my eye—
Medical Assistance?
—and I didn’t know why, until I turned to Lian and saw that she was shaking.
I reached out. “Lian, are you—”
She waved me away. Her breathing was fast and shallow. Her pulse jumped in her throat.
“I’m okay. I’m just. . .”
Medical Assistance?
I could see a fragile kind of control trying to assert itself. I saw it struggle, and weaken, and not entirely succeed. But her breathing slowed.
Medical Assistance? Medical Assistance?
I killed the icon.
“Lian, what’s the problem? You know it can’t catch us.”
She gave me a look I’d never seen before. “You don’t know what they can do. You don’t even know what they are. You don’t know anything.”
“I know they’d have maybe ten kilosecs to get up to twenty percent lightspeed from a standing start to even try to catch up. I know anything that could pull that off would’ve been able to squash us like a bug long before now, if it wanted to. You know that too.”
She used to, anyway.
“Is that how you do it?” A small giggle, a sound too close to the edge of hysteria.
“Do?”
“Is that how you deal with it? If it never happened, it never will?”
Five of us on deck for the build, and I have to be the one at her side when she loses it. “Li, where’s this coming from? Ninety-five percent of the time the gate just sits there.”
“As if that’s any better.” She spread her hands, a paradoxical gesture of defeat and defiance. “How long have we been doing this?”
“You know as well as I do.”
“Furthering the Human Empire. Whatever it’s turned into by now.” As if this was any kind of news. “So we build another gate and nothing comes out. They’re extinct? They don’t care? They just forgot about us?”
I opened my mouth.
“Or—” she went on, “we build a gate and something tries to kill us. Or we—”
“Or we build a gate,” I said firmly, “and something wonderful happens. Remember the bubbles? Remember those gorgeous bubbles?” They’d boiled through the hoop like rainbows, iridescent and beautiful, dancing around each other as they grew to the size of cities and then just faded away.
Their invocation got me a small, broken smile. “Yeah. What were those things?”
“They didn’t eat us. That’s my point. Didn’t even try. We’re still alive, Lian. We’re doing fine—better than fine, we’ve overperformed on any axis you could name. And we’re exploring the galaxy. How can you have forgotten how amazing that is? Back on Earth—they never could’ve dreamed of the things we’ve seen.”
“Living the non-dream.” She giggled again. “That’s just fucking aces, Sunday.”
I watched some biomechanical monstrosity fade behind us. I watched a swarm of icons flicker and update in the tac tank. I watched deck plating glint in the dim bridgelight.
“Why can’t they just—talk to us? Say hello now and again? Just once, even?”
“I dunno. You ever hop over to Madagascar before we shipped out, look up any tree shrews, thank them for the helping hand?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Just—” I shrugged. “I think they’ve got other priorities by now.”
“It should be over. They were supposed to call us back millions of years ago. No”—she held up a shaky hand—“we were not supposed to go on forever. How many times have we tunneled through this fucking ring already?” She threw an arm wide: Chimp, misreading the gesture, sprinkled the local starfield across the backs of our brains. “We could be the only ones left. And we still could’ve gated the whole disk ourselves by now.”
I tried for a chuckle. “It’s a big galaxy. We’ll have to go a few more circuits before there’s much chance of that.”
“And we will. You can count on it. Until the drive evaporates and the Chimp runs out of juice and the last of us rots away in the crypt like a piece of moldy fruit.” She glanced back at the tac tank, though its vistas floated in our heads as well. “We’ve done the job, Sunday. We’re way past mission expiration. Eri was never supposed to last this long. We weren’t.” She took a breath, let it out. “Surely we’ve done enough.”
“Are you talking about killing yourself?” Because I honestly didn’t know.
“No.” She shook her head. “No, of course not.”
“Then what do you want? I mean, here we are; where else can we be?”
“Maybe Madagascar?” She smiled then, absurdly. “Maybe they left us a spot. Next to the tree shrews.”
“I’m sure they did. Judging by that last one we saw.”
“Oh Jesus, Sun.” Her face collapsed in on itself. “I just want to go home.”
I gave physical contact another shot. “Lian—this is—”
“Is it really.” But at least she didn’t shake me off this time.
“There’s nowhere else. Earth, if it even still exists—it’s not ours any more. We’re—”
“Tree shrews,” she whispered.
“Yeah. Kind of.”
“Well then, maybe there’s still a warm wet forest somewhere for us to hole up in.”
“That’s you. Ever the fucking optimist.” And when she didn’t respond: “Build’s over, Lian. Time to stand down.
“I promise: Things’ll look brighter in a couple thousand years.”
Park and Viktor, jaded by builds beyond number, had sat out the boot in favor of a little cubby time. We reconvened afterward in a cerulean sky, to unwind before heading back to the crypts.
Three of us did, anyway. Lian, as usual, preferred her own setting: a sun-dappled glade in an old-growth forest generated from some long-dead South American archive. The system was smart enough to reconcile incompatible realities, strategically placed each of us in the other’s scenario without any awkward overlaps. So we sat there—sprawled on pseudopods in the stratosphere or arrayed around some grassy forest floor—sipping drugs and toasting another successful build. Park and Viktor—still gripped by the post-coital fuzzies—lay with their legs draped over each other, Park absently finger-painting onto his scroll. Lian sat cross-legged on her own ’pod (in this world, anyway; for all I knew she was squatting on a lily pad in her own).
Kallie was nowhere to be seen: “Turned in early,” Viktor said when I asked.
I tipped my glass at Park’s scroll. “New piece?”
“Clockwork in D Minor.”
“It’s pretty good,” Viktor said.
“It’s crap,” Park grunted. “But it’s getting there.”
“It is not crap.” Viktor glanced over at Lian. “Lian, you’ve heard. . .”
She just sat there, folded into herself,
staring at the flagstones.
“Li?”
“We, um, had a bit of a moment,” I explained. “After the boot.” I squirted footage of the gremlin.
Park looked up. “Huh.”
“Are those jaws?” Viktor wondered.
“Maybe some kind of waldo,” I suggested.
Viktor tapped his thumb and fingers together, claw-like. “Maybe that’s just how we say Hello these days.” And after a moment: “I don’t suppose it actually did say anything. . . ?”
“Not on any wavelength we could hear.”
“Posthuman mating ritual,” Park suggested.
“No dumber than anything else I’ve heard.” I shrugged. “If they were trying to kick our asses you’d think they’d have figured out particle beams or missiles by now. Make more sense than running after us with their mouths hanging open.”
For Lian, of course. But still she said nothing, her eyes fixed on the ground. Or maybe some nightmare she could see beneath it.
Suddenly no one else was saying anything, either.
Half-memory clicked, solidified. “You know what that really looks like? That tarantula whatsisname snuck on board.”
Blank looks.
“The front end, I mean. With the, the—fangs. And those little globule things look like eyes.”
“There’s a tarantula on board?” Park asked, after just long enough to have pinged the archive for a definition of tarantula.
“Not a regular one. Engineered. Takes it into his coffin with him between shifts. Says it’ll live a good two hundred active years if no one steps on it.”
Viktor: “Who says?”
“The guy. Tarantula Boy.” I looked around the patio. “Nobody?”