by Peter Watts
Still, I had to ask. “Anyone—I know?” Between coughs.
“No. Please focus, Sunday.”
The whine intensified. A roach resolved from the gloom, wheeled past the new vacancy, pulled up at my side. I fell into it. Chimp drove me to the nearest tube.
“Why me?”
“She trusts you.”
“What—Jesus, Chimp, you want to slow down on these turns?” I could run the roach myself, even hung-over, but not at the speeds evidently deemed necessary under current circumstances. “If I’d had lunch any time in the past thousand years I’d have lost it by now.”
“The situation may be time-sensitive,” Chimp said apologetically.
We careened around one last corner and into one of the tube’s many maws. The roach locked down, the capsule started up: ten times faster, but somehow easier on the gut. Gentler curves. I let my stomach settle as I magleved toward the approaching clusterfuck. By the time the tube disgorged me I could almost walk a straight line.
I ditched the roach—walking onstage under my own steam would make for a better entrance, I figured—and closed the last dozen meters on foot. The corridor bent gently to port. I heard them before they came into view: low voices, exasperated voices, male and female. Silences.
Enter, Stage Left: Sunday Ahzmundin.
Gurnier, said the caption over the redheaded black man standing next to a hole in the bulkhead (the detached access panel leaned to one side). Laporta, said the one floating over the black-haired brown woman slouched sideways in her roach.
Introductions complete.
“Where’s Burkhart?”
Laporta gestured vaguely starboard. “Went to get his face fixed.”
Gurnier: “So you know this idiot?”
“Same tribe,” I said carefully.
“But you’re friends. Right?”
I took a breath. “I guess. What’s she done?”
“Other than stabbing Burk in the face with a welding torch?” Laporta unfolded herself from the roach and squinted into the crawlway; from my position I could see nothing but pipes and padding in there. “We don’t really know. We were getting set to turn in, Burk remembered he’d left his totem back on the bridge, came back to get it and there she was.”
Totem. Right. Rock worshipers.
“She say anything?”
“Told us to fuck off in no uncertain terms.”
“Anything on the diagnostics?”
“Nope.”
“No eyes in there,” Gurnier said. Course not: everything in those trunks was part of Chimp’s nervous system anyway. If anything happened in there, he’d feel it.
“Crazy bitch,” Laporta remarked. “Keeps going on about how we’ve outlived our usefulness and how the whole ’spore program—how’d she put it, Oz?—”
“Humanity’s head up the galaxy’s ass,” Gurnier remembered.
“That’s it.” Laporta shook her head. “I mean, how’d she ever get on board with an attitude like that?”
“We boarded a long time ago.”
“Have I changed? Have you?” She took silence for assent.
“We’re ’spores. We don’t change.”
I spread my hands, conceding the point. “Guess I better talk to her.”
“She’s all yours,” Gurnier said. “We’re going down.”
“Before some other batshit thing comes along,” Laporta added.
“Mind if I take your jumper?” I shivered briefly; Chimp hadn’t given me time to get dressed.
She peeled down, handed it over.
“Anything else?” “Actually, yeah.”
They waited.
“You folks ever seen a guy with a tarantula?”
“Lian.”
“Sunday? What are you doing up?”
“Chimp thawed me. What’s going on in there?”
“Come in. Find out.”
She’d blocked her feed. No way to see what was in there but to see what was in there. I bent down to the opening.
“Toggle off,” she said. “I’m inviting you in. Nothing else.”
I sighed, killed my BUD, climbed inside with naked eyes. No headroom to speak of. I moved forward on hands and knees in gray oily twilight. The trunk line—a wide, flat conduit pulling double-duty as a floor—was rubbery elastomer. Everything else was pipes and fiber, brackets, braces and humming prickly electricity.
Lian crouched like an animal in a burrow, four meters in. Her face looked surprisingly haggard for someone who’d just had a few epochs’ sleep.
She’d opened the trunk line.
“Sorry about this. Dragging you out of bed and all.”
“You planned that?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t plan on getting caught. But . . . well, I’m glad you’re here. If it had to be anyone.”
She’d spliced in a bypass around a 30-cm length of fiber; it looked sensory, although I couldn’t tell for sure without my interface. But it was a bypass without a function: the main line was still intact. Probably she just hadn’t got around to cutting it before Burkhart caught her.
I looked up—“What?”—just as her finger landed gently on my lip: shhhh.
“If you can’t figure it out,” she said, “I’m not gonna tell you. Just because I trust you doesn’t mean—”
“I killed my BUD, Li. Like you asked.”
“You think it doesn’t have audio pickups in the corridor? You don’t think it can hear us even with—”
“Then what am I doing here? If you aren’t even going to—”
“I don’t know, okay? I panicked. And—and I could really use a friend right now.”
I sighed. “Fine. We can go someplace dark. Someplace he can’t listen in, if that’s so important. But then you damn well tell me what’s going on. Right?”
She thought a moment. Her head bobbed up and down.
I gestured to the trunk line—“Close that up”—and backed away on hands and knees, heading ass-first back to the access. “I know just the place.”
Eriophora’s riddled with blind spots: shadows in crawlways and corners, in the spaces behind looming machinery where no one had any reason to put a camera. There are even places—near powerlines whose massive currents swamp the milliamp signals connecting artificial brains to natural ones—where Chimp is blind to our cortical links.
We weren’t going to any of those places. We were going deeper, shooting at breakneck speeds through vacuum tunnels with superconductor ribs, and I was half-blind, and I didn’t like it.
There are times you kill your link: during stasis, during sleep, sometimes in your quarters during sex or games or touring. Times you don’t want to be distracted by the autonomic tics and tocs of this great stone beast we live in.
Not on shift, though. Not out in the open. Naked eyes don’t see anything, just—images, without annotation. I felt disabled: like I could take one wrong turn and be lost forever, like I might forget the names of people I’d known my whole life. Like I could look at some common object and not even know what it was.
It wasn’t even as though this self-imposed blindness bought us any privacy; Chimp had pickups in this capsule as in every other. The only thing denied by Lian’s small defiance was a couple of redundant first-person viewpoints.
Evidently there was some kind of principle involved.
Now we were decelerating, our bodies tugged invisibly forward as we coasted into a terminus deep in the heavy zone. Lian tapped her temple and her eyes flickered with those darting saccades that said online. I booted up my own link, tried not to take too much relief from the familiar garden of reawakened icons. They wouldn’t last.
That was the whole point.
You gain about thirty percent down there. It’s not intolerable—all the serious tidal shit happens further in, near the core where you go from thirteen gees to three hundred in barely two kliks—but it’s not pleasant. Our destination was barely fifty meters along the corridor but it felt like twice that by the time we arrived. Or m
aybe it was something else, maybe some other kind of inertia weighed us down. Maybe, now the journey was ended and our excuses almost gone, we just didn’t want to break the silence.
The deck slanted here, like a steel beach: a broad basement door at the waterline marked our destination. The name of that place was stenciled right into the alloy. It also hung in midair a virtual meter ahead of me, thanks to my reawakened link:
Forest Access—17T
The hatch slid smoothly back into the bulkhead at our approach. Its bearings did not complain. It did not squeak or grind against its rail. As though it had just been built yesterday, as though it hadn’t been waiting ten thousand frozen years or more for the chance to move. That hatch opened like a mouth, and it was dark inside.
Lian turned, broke our fragile silence: “After you.”
We went in.
Forget everything they might have told you about Eri’s forests.
The genes tweaked for maximum bifurcation. The dim bulbous fruit alight with glowing bacteria, their TNA straitjacketed with sulfur bonds and secondary loops to impede mutation. Big concave leaves, black as Heat Death, curving around those microbial nightlights like hands cupped around a candle flame. The faint blue suns scattered here and there—some a meter across, some ten or more—pulsing with their own bioluminescence. Blind, deaf gardener bots with cockroach brains, sniffing their way along the branches—not even linked in, just mass-fabbed and set loose to recycle carbon and scrape nutrients from dead rock. The plumbing that collects our freeze-dried waste and distributes it to hungry rootlets. All the tricks that let you cram an ecosystem into a couple dozen caverns, slowed down so it might last forever: a bottled biosphere that would barely sustain a handful at regular rates of metabolism, but keeps thirty thousand of us alive just so long as we only take a breath every decade or so.
Forget all that.
Take one look and you’ll see how they really did it. They built their forests from the blood vessels of slaughtered giants: flushed out the blood and replaced it with tar. They pumped that shiny black sludge through the heart, the aorta, out into branching arteries and veins and the endless recursive capillary beds that connected the one to the other. After it hardened they burned away the surrounding meat with lasers and acetylene. They took what was left—obsidian plexii, branches, bones—broke it into pieces and installed them wherever they’d fit: vast misty caverns too big to see across, modest little grottoes barely seventy meters end-to-end.
Then they draped it all in blue Christmas lights.
We call it the forest because they’re technically contiguous: each chamber connects to others by ducts and tunnels drilled through the rock, stringing everything together in the name of systems integration and the interconnectedness of all things. Everything has to be stable, you see. No mission so epic can afford to keep all its life-support eggs in one basket but you can’t have all those pocket ecosystems going off in pursuit of their own selfish equilibria, either. So all is connected. There’s enough flowthrough to keep everything on the same page—even if all those tunnels do come with their own dropgates, the better to instantly isolate one glade from the others should some cataclysm break us into pieces.
I know this better than most. One of my specialties is Life Support.
I’ve always thought of Eriophora’s forests as a—a refuge, I guess. They’re where Kai and I always seem to hash out our differences. It’s nicely atmospheric for sex. There’s warmth in the darkness, a softness to the nightlight glow of bacteria in their bulbs. The air smells of life instead of rock and metal.
17T was darker, more chaotic than most. The Leaning Glade, we called it. (What most of us called it, anyway; Kai preferred The Vomit Vale, but his inner ears were on the sensitive side and even he didn’t get woozy unless he wandered into the forward reaches where gravity smeared under your feet.) The hatch closed at our backs, swallowing us in brief darkness; it brightened to dim twilight as our eyes adjusted to analuciferin constellations glowing on all sides. We stood on a catwalk, taking deep grateful breaths half a meter above bedrock blanketed in drifts of thin soil.
We followed the path. My BUD flickered.
The catwalk forked. I nudged Lian to the right: “This way.” After a few meters I closed my eyes experimentally, experienced just the slightest uncertainty over the direction of down.
Glistening black meshes with gelatinous eyeballs glowing at their interstices. Thick ropey trunks arching up through the vault like a great charred rib cage. They leaned just a little, as though bent by wind.
BUD flickered again, faded, sparked back to life. We pushed on in the direction of that imaginary wind. The trees leaned further as we advanced; their bases thickened and spread wide across the ground, trunks buttressed against forces pulling simultaneously along different bearings. The Glade passes over the Higgs Conduit, between the core that contains our singularity and the maw where its wormhole emerges. The vectors get messy in between. Down is mostly coreward but a little forward too; how far those downs diverge depends on how fast Eri happens to be falling through the cosmos at any given moment. Twisted trees and Kai’s squicky inner ears are the price we pay for a reactionless drive.
BUD finally went down and stayed down: a victim of signal-squelching rocks and bioelectric static and drive circuitry that couldn’t possibly be expected to contain such vast energies without emitting some of its own. The dead air was our privacy alarm. As long as we were blind, we were alone.
“So what the hell were you doing, Li?”
She didn’t answer at first. She didn’t answer at all.
Instead: “You read books, right?”
“Sure. Sometimes.”
“You plug in. Tour. Watch ennies.”
“What’s your point?”
“You’ve seen the way people lived. Kids with cats, or hacking their tutors, or parasailing on their birthdays.”
“So?”
“So you don’t just see it, Sunday. You feed off it. You base your life on it. Our speech patterns, our turns of phrase—fuck, our swear words for chrissake—all lifted from a culture that hasn’t existed for petasecs.” She took a breath. “We’ve been out here so very long. . .”
I rolled my eyes. “Enough with the world-weary ancient immortal shtick, okay? The fact that we’ve been out here for sixty million years—”
“Sixty-five.”
“—doesn’t change the fact that you’ve only been awake for ten or twenty, tops.”
“My point is we’re living dead lives. Theirs, not ours. We never went hiking, or scuba diving, or—”
“Sure we have. We can. Any time we want. You just said so.”
“They cheated us. We wake up, we build their fucking gates, and we recycle their lives because they never gave us any of our own.”
I should have pitied her. Instead, surprisingly, I found myself getting angry. “Do you even remember the shape Earth was in when we left? I wouldn’t trade this life for centuries on that grubby shithole if God Itself came through the gate and offered me a ticket. I like this life.”
“You like it because they built you to. Because they’d never get any normal person to sign up for a one-way trip in a dead rock to the end of time, so they built this special model all small and twisted, like—like those plants they used to grow. In Japan or somewhere. Something so stunted it couldn’t even imagine spending its life outside a cage.”
Bonsai, I remembered. But I didn’t want to encourage her.
“You liked it here too,” I said instead. Until you broke.
“Yeah.” She nodded, and even in the dimness I got the sense of a sad smile. “But I got better.”
“Lian. What were you doing in the crawlway?”
She sighed. “I was running a bypass on one of the Chimp’s sensory trunks.”
“I saw that. What for?”
“Nothing critical. I was just going to—inject some noise into the channel.”
“Noise.”
“Static. To re
duce signal fidelity.”
I spread my palms: So?
“I was trying to take back a little control, okay? For all of us!”
“How does compromising Chimp’s—”
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
“You were increasing the uncertainty threshold,” I murmured.
“Yeah.”
Because the only reason Eri shipped out with meat on board in the first place was for those times the Chimp didn’t feel up to managing a build on his own, when he needed some of that organic human insight to get him past the unknown variables and halting states. And the less reliable his data, the less certain he’d be that he could handle it on his own. Lian was trying to tilt the algos towards human input.
In principle, it was a pretty clever hack. In practice. . .
“Li. Even if you figured out some way to keep the Chimp from just—finding your monkey wrenches and fixing them while we’re all down for the count, do you have any idea how many of those cables you’d have to jam up before you even started to make a dent in the redundant systems?”
“Somewhere between two thousand and twenty-seven hundred.” Then added: “You don’t have to cut the inputs, you just have to—fog them a little. Widen the confidence limits.”
“Uh huh. And how many of those nerves you hacked so far?”
“Five.”
Maybe I thought she’d realize how insane the whole idea was if she said it aloud. Nothing in her voice suggested she had.
“Why do you even want this? It’s not like Chimp’s fucking up the builds when we’re not there to keep an eye on him.”
“It’s not about the builds, Sun. It’s about being human. It’s about getting back a little autonomy.”