The Freeze-Frame Revolution

by Peter Watts

  “Different tribe?” Viktor suggested. Chimp did that sometimes, dropped a member from one tribe into rotation with another as a hedge against any disaster that might decimate a social group. Easier to integrate into a group you already know, or something.

  I raised my eyes to the heavens. “Chimp? You know who I’m talking about?”

  “No one named Tarantula Boy was assigned to Eriophora,” Chimp reported.

  “That’s not his name, that’s just what he was.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  “Dark hair? Average height? Whitish?” I strained for details. “Really nice guy?”

  Viktor rolled his eyes.

  “He kept a tarantula on his shoulder! That doesn’t narrow the field a bit?”

  “Sorry,” Chimp said. “I’m not getting any hits.”

  “It would have been contraband,” Viktor pointed out. “He’d’ve cranked his personal privacy settings at the very least.”

  He had a point. Eri’s biosphere was fine-tuned for ecological balance and perpetual motion. Mission Control, clinically obsessive, would have taken a very dim view of anything it considered even remotely invasive.

  Lian stood, flickered.

  “Li? Turning in?”

  She shook her head. “Think I might just—go for a walk, first. Take in something real for a change.”

  “Caves and tunnels,” Viktor remarked. “You’re welcome to ’em.”

  “Who knows.” She managed a smile. “Maybe I’ll find Easter Island.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  She vanished.

  “Another nomad,” Park said.

  “Another?”

  “You do realize she’s following in your footsteps.” Which I hadn’t. Although I did tend to wander the corridors after a build, shoot the shit with Chimp before bedding down.

  “Anyone notice anything off about her?” I asked.

  Viktor stretched, yawned. “Like?”

  I wondered how I’d feel if someone spread news of my private breakdown all over the tribe, and opted for discretion. “She didn’t seem kind of—subdued?”

  “Maybe. After you made that crack about getting shot at by gremlins.”

  “Then again,” Park added, “you’d expect that sort of reaction from someone who’s been shot at by gremlins.”

  “I—what?”

  “She was on deck when—” Park saw it in my face. “You don’t know.”

  “Know what?”

  “Something took a shot at us,” Viktor explained. “Few builds back.”

  “What!”

  “Hit us, too,” Park added. “Big divot on the starboard side. Twenty meters deep. Half a degree to the left and we’d be out of the finals.”

  “Fuck.” It came out a whisper. “I had no idea.”

  Park frowned. “Don’t you check the mission logs?”

  “I would have, if I’d known.” I shook my head. “Also someone could’ve told me, you know?”

  “We just did,” Viktor pointed out.

  “It was five hundred years ago.” Park shrugged. “Hundred lightyears away.”

  “Five hundred years is nothing,” Viktor said. “Call me in a few billion. Then we’ll talk.”

  “Yeah, but—” Obvious, suddenly, why all my reassuring words had fallen so flat. “Jeez. Maybe we should build some guns or something.”

  Park snorted. “Right. Chimp would really smile on that.”

  We had a legend, we denizens of Eriophora, of a cavern—deep aft, almost as far back as the launch thrusters themselves—filled with diamonds. Not just ordinary diamonds, either: the uncut, hexagonal shit. Lonsdaleite. The toughest solid in the whole damn solar system—back when we shipped out, at least—and laser-readable to boot.

  Build your backups out of anything less and you might as well be carving them from butter.

  Nothing’s immortal on a road trip of a billion years. The universe runs down in stop-motion around you, your backups’ backups’ backups need backups. Not even the error-correcting replication strategies cadged from biology can keep the mutations at bay forever. It was true for us meatsicles cycling through mayfly moments every thousand years; it was just as true for the hardware. It was so obvious I never even thought about it. By the time I did, the Chimp was on his eighty-third reincarnation.

  Not enough that his nodes bred like flies and distributed themselves to every far corner of the asteroid. Not enough that the circuits themselves were almost paleolithically crude; when your AI packs less than half the synapse count of a human brain, fiddling around at nano scales is just grandstanding. Things still fall apart. Conduits decay. Circuits a dozen molecules thick would just evaporate over time, even if entropy and quantum tunneling didn’t degrade them down to sponge first.

  Every now and then, you have to renovate.

  And so was born The Archive: a library of backups, cubist slabs of diamond statuary larger than life, commemorations of some unsullied ancestral state. Someone back at the dawn of time named it Easter Island: curious, I pinged the archives and dredged up an entry about some scabby rock back on Earth in the middle of nowhere, known primarily for the fact that its pretech inhabitants destroyed their environment for no better reason than to build a bunch of butt-ugly statues in commemoration of long-dead ancestors.

  What else would we call it?

  So when the inventory of backup Chimps ran too low—or of grav lenses, or air conditioners, or any other vital artifact more short-lived than a proton—Eri would send lumbering copy-editors back to its own secret Easter Island where they would read mineral blueprints so vast, so stable, they might outlast the Milky Way.

  The place wasn’t always so secret, mind you. We’d trooped through it a dozen times during construction, a dozen more in training. But one day, maybe our third or fourth pass through the Sagittarius Arm, Ghora went spelunking at the end of a shift while the rest of us lay dead in the crypt; just killing time, he told me later, staving off the inevitable shut-down with a little recreational reconnaissance. He hiked down into the hi-gee zone, wormed through crawlways and crevices to where X marked the Spot, and found Easter Island scoured clean: just a dark gaping cavity in the rock, studded with the stubs of bolts and anchors sheared off a few centimeters above the substrate.

  The Chimp had relocated the whole damn archive while we’d slept between the stars.

  He wouldn’t tell us where. He couldn’t tell us, he insisted. Said he’d just been following prerecorded instructions from Mission Control, hadn’t been aware of them himself until some timer ticked over and injected new instructions into his job stack. He couldn’t even tell us why.

  I believed him. When was the last time programmers explained themselves to the code?

  “They don’t trust us,” Kai said, rolling his eyes. “Eight million years down the road and they’re afraid we might—what? Trash our own life support? Write Sawada sucks farts on their scale models?”

  We’d still go searching now and then, when there was time to kill and itches to scratch. We’d plant tiny charges in the rock, read the echoes vibrating through our worldlet in search of some undiscovered grotto. The Chimp didn’t stop us. He never had to; in all the terasecs since Ghora’s discovery, we’d never found anything.

  Maybe Lian thought she’d get lucky this time. Maybe she was just looking for an excuse to get away from us.

  Either way, I wished her luck.

  “Find it?”

  She was in the middle of the usual funeral rites, clearing out her suite for whoever got it next time around. It took me maybe two minutes to do that: a couple of favorite jumpers I’d grown inexplicably fond of over the aeons, a little standalone sculpture rig that was mine and mine alone (no matter that the rigs in Eri’s rec facilities ran at ten times the rez and twenty times the speed). A couple of books— real antiques, couldn’t even map your eye movements so you had to scroll the text manually—that Mom and Dad gave me at graduation, which I treasured beyond all reason even t
hough I’d never read them. Crappy charcoal sketches of Kai and Ishmael, legacy of an incompetent portraiture phase I went through on our third pass through Carina. That was pretty much it.

  Lian, though. Lian might have been packing for half the tribe: wall hangings, wardrobes, a local VRchive that would have been more efficiently entrusted to Eri’s own library. Matching threadbare covers festooned with Penrose tiles, for sleeping and pseudopods. Something that looked like a rock collection, for fucks’ sake. She even packed her own sex toys, although the ones that came standard in each suite could’ve kept her occupied halfway to Heat Death.

  For all I knew she’d been stuffing that junk into storage since the moment she’d left the party.

  She looked up, eyes glazed; they took a moment to find me. “Huh?”

  “Easter Island. Any luck?”

  “Oh. Nah. Maybe next time.” She jammed a final balled-up pair of socks into the trunk, brought the lid down with a definitive click. “Thought you’d all be crypted by now.”

  “On my way. Just wanted to check in, see how you were doing.”

  “Just had—you know, like you said. A moment. I’m fine.”

  “You’re sure?”

  She nodded, straightened, pointed at the suitcase: it rolled to attention. “In a way, prey are lucky. Running for your life instead of running for your dinner.” A weak smile. “Better motivation, right?”

  I’d checked the logs, of course. The gremlin had charged through the gate like some monstrous mutant phage. It had wobbled—perfectly reflective, like shuddering mercury—extruding and resorbing a thousand needle-like projections as if trying them on for size: twenty-centimeter stilettos to pin your hand to the bulkhead, thousand-meter javelins that could puncture a moon.

  It had sent two of them after us.

  We’d been almost thirty lightsecs away by then. We should have been untouchable. One missile went wide and fell astern; but the other flew straight for our tailpipe, closing at a crawl but closing. Chimp crunched numbers and bent our wormhole a smidge to the left—just a fraction of a fraction of a degree but enough to push those stress contours out past the hardlined channels. Rock had cracked, split under the torque. Once you’ve gone relativistic the most infinitesimal change in bearing can break you apart; Eri was bleeding from self-inflicted wounds before that javelin even caught up with us. Even then it wasn’t quite enough; it grazed us in passing, boiled away and left a five-kilometer scar along our starboard flank.

  I’d been blissfully undead for centuries to either side. Lian Wei had been right there, watching it all happen.

  “So, that thing that took a shot at us—you know it doesn’t really change anything, right?”

  She looked at me. “How’s that?”

  “I mean we’ve still got the edge. Even Angryblob couldn’t get to us until we booted the gate from this end. By the time they charge up and charge through we’re ten million kliks away.”

  The suitcase followed her into the corridor. I followed them both. Behind us, the hatch sealed with a soft hiss; behind that, Lian’s abandoned quarters began shutting down for the long sleep.

  “And yeah, that thing really put the fear of God into us, and something could come through with beamed weapons or faster missiles. Anything’s possible. But think about this: over a hundred thousand builds and we’ve only been hit once, and even then we got away pretty much unscathed. You gotta admit those are pretty good odds.”

  “How do you know it was just once?”

  “The logs, of course.”

  “And you trust them.”

  “Li. They’re the logs.”

  “And they can’t be corroborated because Chimp handles most builds on his own.”

  “You’re saying he—why would he doctor the record?”

  “Because he’s programmed for the good of the mission, and the mission might suffer if we spent every waking hour wondering if something was going to kill us. Maybe we’ve almost died in our sleep a thousand times and he’s rewriting history to protect morale.”

  “Li, he saved our lives. You know that better than anyone. And even if you’re right—even if we’ve been under the gun more than the logs show—that’s just that many more times he saved us.”

  A bank of lockers rounded into view, a gunmetal honeycomb stretching deck-to-ceiling along the curve of the corridor.

  “So you trust him,” Lian said. “Now there’s a surprise.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Even though he could be lying to us.” She hefted her luggage from the floor with a soft grunt and slotted it into an empty locker at waist height. Sealed it, locked it with her thumb.

  “You said it yourself. He’s programmed for the good of the mission.” From behind the locker door, the faintest hiss of air being sucked away. “You know he’d die for us.”

  “Probably.” She turned back down the corridor.

  “Hey, we’re still alive.” I fell in beside her again. “He’s obviously doing something right.”

  We walked in silence for a bit, passed strange graffiti splashed across the bulkhead.

  “Painters are at it again, I see,” Lian said.

  I nodded. “Still don’t know who those fuckers are.” Other than some tribe who’d taken to tagging the walls with weird-ass hieroglyphs. Chimp wouldn’t tell us who. Maybe they’d told him to keep their identity hush-hush. No Painter had ever passed through the tribe during any of Chimp’s cultural exchanges—or at least, no one who admitted to being one—which I’d always found a bit suspicious.

  “I’m probably overthinking it,” Lian said, and it took me a second to remember: Chimp. Gremlins. Prey.

  I took the concession, gave a little back: “I’d say you’ve got cause. I’d have been crapping my pants if I’d been on

  deck when all that went down.”

  “Sunday. . .” She stopped.

  “Yeah?”

  “Just—thanks.”

  “For?”

  “For checking in. No one else would’ve even thought about it.”

  “’Spores. You know.” I shrugged. “We’re designed for solitude.”

  “Yeah.” She laid a hand on my shoulder. “That’s kind of my point.”

  THIS IS HOW YOU KNOW that something has gone seriously wrong aboard Eriophora: you wake up, and you don’t know why.

  “What. . .”

  Mouth dry, eyelids like sandpaper, whole body twitching with the tiny convulsions of a nervous system dragged back online after all its synapses have rusted shut.

  “My interface. . .”

  “I’m sorry, Sunday. This is an emergency resurrection; there wasn’t time to prebrief you.”

  “How . . . fast. . . ?”

  “A little over two hours.”

  Your cells could rupture, coming back that fast. Your brain could get frostbite.

  I opened my mouth, closed it again. A wracking cough hovered at the back of my throat, threatened to blow my chest open if I let it out.

  “Relax,” Chimp said. “You’re in no danger. “

  I kept my eyes closed and swallowed on a throat lined with broken glass. Something nudged my cheek. I took the nipple in my mouth, sucked reflexively, reveled in a flood of sweet salty warmth.

  “I need help with a personnel issue.” A pause; a small staticky pop behind my eyes. Sparse icons, blooming in my head.

  “You’re online,” Chimp confirmed.

  I’d only been down for six terasecs. Not even a thousand years. If this was a build, surely someone else was on rotation. . .

  Right: there it was. Ozmont Gurnier, Burkhart Schidkowski, Andalib Laporta. Not our Tribe. Children of Eri, they called themselves. Rock worshippers.

  Lian Wei.

  Chimp was cross-fertilizing again.

  But the build had gone off without a hitch, according to the logs. Dirt-common red dwarf, a whole lot of comets and asteroids (which was why Chimp had decrypted a crew; mass distribution had exceeded some programmed complexity threshol
d). A standard pass-through hoop that booted without incident; nothing charging out the gate after us, for good or ill. The shift was already over. Everyone had already packed up and headed for bed.

  So why. . .

  I opened my eyes, stared up from my coffin into blurry darkness and a circle of bright overlapping halos.

  “Lian Wei is upset,” Chimp told me. “I’m hoping you can calm her.”

  My throat had soaked up those electrolytes like a meaty sponge. I cleared it experimentally. Much better.

  “Upset how?”

  “She’s arguing with the other ’spores. She’s increasingly hostile.”

  “Ab—” A residual cough. “About what?”

  “I think about me.”

  The halos resolved into a circular constellation of ceiling lights. One of Chimp’s eyes stared down from its center, a tiny dark heart in a bright ring.

  I brought one hand toward my face. My elbow felt like an exploding schematic: here’s the socket, here’s the little cartilaginous bearing within, here are the vectors that’ll make the whole assembly go sproing! in an agonizing explosion of springs and hinges if you push it just a little further. . .

  I’d never experienced intramortem arthritis before. You only get it if they bring you back too fast.

  An icon was flashing, a window into someone else’s first-person: Schidkowski, according to the subtitle. He was staring along a service crawlway infested with plumbing and fiber. A figure crouched in shadow a couple meters farther in. Something sparked in its hand. I caught a blur of motion—movement into light, a coiled spring released—

  Lian, stabbing Burkhart Schidkowski in the face.

  The window closed.

  It looked worse than it was, Chimp insisted as I what-the-fucked my way out of the sarcophagus, and slipped, and hung on tight to keep from falling. Lian was armed with nothing more lethal than a splicing torch. She’d been futzing around in the trunk line when they’d found her, delivered a nasty burn to the side of Schidkowski’s head—fried the toggle on his interface—but nothing worse. He’d withdrawn, she’d retreated back up the tunnel, everyone was sitting tight until the Mediator showed up.

  A faint whine in the dark distance. I turned, squinted. Thirty meters away another coffin jutted from a bulkhead built of coffins, a teleop sucking its insides clean with a hose. Probably a stranger. Chimp kept members of each tribe spaced wide in the crypt—in different crypts entirely, even—so that when a seal broke, a circuit failed, someone died in their sleep and rotted away in the long dark, the ’spore waking up next to them would give less of a shit.