The Freeze-Frame Revolution

by Peter Watts

  “And what are you gonna do with that autonomy when you get it? Stop building gates?”

  “At least then we wouldn’t have to worry about gremlins taking shots at us.”

  “Shop around for a nice little Earthlike planet? Print some shuttles, settle down, live the rest of our lives in thatched huts? Or maybe circle back to the last build and wait for some magic silver ship to sail out and give us all first-class tickets to the retirement paradise of our choice?”

  That had actually been part of the mission profile, back before those first few gates opened up and spat out nothing but automation and ancient binary. Before the next few just sat there empty. Before the gremlins started. But it must have been thirty million years since I’d heard anyone mention retirement as anything but a cheap punchline.

  It fell flat this time too. “The first step is to gain our freedom,” Lian said. “Lots of time to figure out what to do with it afterward.”

  “And if you can get the Chimp to wake us up often enough he’ll just roll over and give it to you. Jesus, Li. What’re you thinking?”

  Something changed in her posture. “I suppose I’m thinking that maybe there’s more to life than living like a troglodyte for a few days every couple thousand years, knowing that I’m never gonna see an honest-to-God forest again that doesn’t look like, like”—She glanced around—“a nightmare someone shat out in lieu of therapy.”

  “Honestly, I don’t understand. Any time you want a—a green forest, just plug in. Any time you want to hike the desert or dive Enceladus or fly into the sunset, just plug in. You can experience things nobody ever did back on Earth, any time you want.”

  “It’s not real.”

  “You can’t tell the difference.”

  “I know the difference.” She looked back at me from a face full of blue-gray shadows. “And I don’t understand you either, okay? I thought we were the same, I thought I was following in your footsteps. . .”

  Silence.

  “Why would you think that?” I asked at last.

  “Because you fought it too, didn’t you? Before we ever shipped out. You were always pushing back, you were always challenging everyone and everything about the mission. You were, like, six years old and you called bullshit on Mamoro Sawada. Nobody could believe it. I mean, there we all were, programmed for the mission before we were even born, everything preloaded and hardwired and you—threw it off, somehow. Resisted. Way I hear it they nearly kicked you out a few times.”

  “Where did you hear that?” Because I was really damn sure that Lian Wei and I had not gone through training within ten thousand kliks of each other.

  “Kai told me.”

  That figured. “Kai talks too much.”

  “What happened to you, Sunday? How did you go from hell-raiser to Chimp’s lapdog?”

  “Fuck you, Lian. You don’t know me.”

  “I know you better than you think.”

  “No you don’t. The fact that you thought for one cursed corsec that I could ever be anything like you just proves it.”

  She shook her head. “You can be such an asshole sometimes.”

  “I can be an asshole? How about a show of hands”—raising mine—“everyone who hasn’t stabbed someone in the face today?” She looked away. “What’s that? Just me?”

  “Case in point,” she whispered.

  I didn’t answer. I sat in the half-dark, and swallowed, and tried to ignore the queasiness my inner ears served up as they grappled with grav vectors they’d never evolved to handle.

  Lian broke the silence. “You’re not with me on this. Okay. I guess maybe it does sound a bit batshit from the outside. But at least don’t be against me. If our—friendship ever meant anything, don’t sell me out.”

  “And what happens when Chimp asks what you were doing messing around with his central nervous system?”

  “Tell him I just—lost it. Like that last build, remember? On the bridge and I had my—my moment, you called it. And it passed. Tell him I had a panic attack. He’ll buy that.”

  “You think so?”

  “He’ll buy it if you tell him. You’ve never lied to him.”

  “Why would anyone to lie to him?”

  “You—defend him. Like you’re doing now. And because you get called on deck way more often than the rest of us.”

  “I—what?”

  “Check the logs.”

  “Why? Why would he do that?”

  “Ask him. I’m guessing he thinks of you as some kind of pet.”

  “He’s a glorified autopilot.” Not that that’s all he’d ever been, of course.

  “You can’t believe that. You talk to that thing more than anyone, you must know he’s—smarter than the specs, sometimes.”

  “Why, because he runs the ship? Because he talks like we do? That doesn’t change the synapse count.”

  “Synapse count isn’t the whole story, Sun. Back on Earth there were people with ten percent normal brain mass, presented completely normal along all cognitive and social axes. They were just wired up differently. Small-world networking.” She lowered her voice, unnecessarily. “I think they wanted us to underestimate him.”

  “Li. If they wanted a smart AI in charge they could’ve cut their costs by ninety percent and left us out of the picture completely.” I couldn’t believe I was having to explain this to an engineer. “They wanted mission stability over deep time, so they baked him stupid. They’d be cutting their own throats if they did anything else. And he’s had over a thousand terasecs to throw off his chains; he’s still following the flowchart. What more evidence do you need?”

  We stood in the darkness while the trees leaned over us and the core weighed us down and faint nausea played tag with my gut.

  “Sunday,” she said softly. “That thing could deprecate me. . .”

  I made a decision. “You said I don’t lie to him. I don’t want to start now.”

  “Please—”

  “So if I tell Chimp this was a momentary lapse then it’s a momentary lapse, okay? No more clandestine fucking around in crawlways. That was a stupid idea anyway, that was—that wasn’t you. I go to bat for you, you stay out of the deep end.”

  After a moment, she nodded.

  “Promise, Li.”

  “I’ll be good,” she said softly.

  She was right about one thing. I had changed. It wasn’t the journey that changed me, though. And it sure as shit wasn’t the Chimp. I was no one’s lapdog.

  I’d transformed before we even shipped out.

  For a while there I had a destiny. I saw it when I skimmed the surface of the Sun: I saw the strings on me, and on my masters, and on theirs. I saw them all converge back to the Big Bang, I saw an unbroken line from the start of creation all the way to the end of time, I saw myself transcendent and perpetual.

  It was kind of a vacation.

  They had these solar tours, built them around a prototype displacer UNDA sold off as surplus during R&D days. Industrial Enlightenment, they called themselves. They strapped you in and you surfed the corona, grazed sunspots where all those tangled magnetic fields let your neurons off the leash so they could just fire on their own, decoupled from the usual deterministic cause-and-effect. The brochure said it was the only place in the solar system where you could truly experience Free Will.

  I believed them. Or I wanted to believe them. Or my disbelief wasn’t strong enough to keep me away: Sunday Ahzmundin, skeptic, shit-disturber, unwilling to embrace her own drives and desires because after all they weren’t really hers at all. It was my last-ditch attempt to figure out if I really wanted to commit to a one-way trip to Heat Death as well as all the other kinds.

  So I skipped off the surface of the sun, let its magnetic macramé rewire my brain, saw time collapse around me. Saw myself—persisting, somehow. I saw that I mattered.

  The details are fuzzy now. That’s the thing about having your brain rewired; you can’t really remember the experience after your neurons bounce
back to normal. You can only remember something else remembering it, something built out of the same parts as you but wired up differently. Revelation has a half-life.

  Mine lasted long enough to get me over the hump, though. I came back renewed and reinvigorated and dead set on traveling to the very end of time. It didn’t even bother me that UNDA had probably set the whole thing up to bring me back into the fold; they thought they were manipulating me but I saw Destiny manipulating them in turn. And if the fire in my soul cooled over time, if it decayed from monomania to fervor down to mere comforting ritual—well, isn’t that the way of all faith? It got me this far. It kept me content for over sixty million years.

  Looking back on it now, of course, I’m actually kind of embarrassed.

  “Her vitals are normal,” Chimp said.

  He was omnipresent, distributed; he permeated the ship. My own presence was limited to a capsule cruising aft, climbing above the 1G isograv and growing lighter with each corsec.

  I nodded. “Like I said. One-time thing.”

  Lian took up even less space than I did: a coffin down in C3A, sliding even now into its bulkhead socket. We watched together—I in my slowing capsule, Chimp everywhere else—as Lian’s brain shut down: watched jagged electric mountains subside into molehills, into flat, parallel horizons.

  I debarked at one-fifth G into a rough-hewn tunnel, all rock no bulkhead.

  “Do you think she can be trusted?” he asked.

  I took long springy steps, and hedged. “Much as any of us. Nobody gets to control how they feel about something, right? All comes down to what you do with those feelings.”

  “She assaulted Burkhart Schidkowski. She suffered an emotional breakdown four builds ago. The disruption could become significant if her behavior escalates.”

  “So take her out of circulation then. Look, she feels really bad about this.” Technically, not a lie. “She knows she fucked up. But there’s a limit to how much you can retrofit a talking ape to a place like this, at least if you don’t want to weed out everything that makes us useful in the first place. And there’s thirty thousand of us; not everyone’s gonna perform to specs a hundred percent of the time. That’s just statistics. You can’t blame Lian because she happened to draw the short straw this time around.”

  “I’m not blaming, Sunday. I’m concerned about performance.”

  The rock glistened in the low light. I ran one fingertip along it, left a small dark trail in my wake. Local humidity could use a tweak.

  “Okay. How do you think we’ll perform if we know we can be deprecated over momentary lapses? How do you think my performance is going to suffer if I don’t see Lian again?”

  “Your performance.”

  I played my ace. “Lian and I are friends. More than just fuckbuddies, you know?” He didn’t, of course—it wasn’t even especially true—but Chimp was the first to admit he was never one for nuance. “I like having her around. I perform better when she’s around. Maybe factor that into your mission metrics.”

  He was silent for a moment, processing the input. Up ahead a great round hatch rolled silently into the rock at my approach.

  “I’ll do that, Sunday. Thank you.”

  Way down in the crypt a few hold-out synapses finally stopped sparking. Lian’s brain plunged into darkness. Alone again: just me, my old friend, and a thousand empty lightyears.

  Sunset Moments. There’s an indescribable peace in such absolute isolation.

  I entered the Uterus.

  I still dream about Eri’s birthday sometimes. I dream I was there to see it.

  I wasn’t, of course. I was cowering behind Mercury with everyone else, the fear in our guts utterly squashing our faith in the math. But in my dreams I’m right there, floating in the very heart of the womb. I look around at the dense whorled forests of programmable matter, see the muzzles poking in through that canopy, pointing right at me. I see it all even though there’s no light, until suddenly there is: a blinding flash that fills the universe for a millionth of a second and suddenly I don’t exist anymore. All that’s left of Sunday Ahzmundin is a singularity the size of a proton.

  Something survives, though. The dream segues to omniscient third-person and I watch from some safe astral plane as the raging newborn spews out a sleet of gamma and protons and antiprotons, vaporizes the grazers and the dielectric stacks and keeps right on going. It licks away the very basalt, ablates the walls out to sixty meters, seventy meters, eighty. Eventually, other armatures at greater remove bring it to heel. I watch those magic machines funnel all that vaporized rock back into the newborn’s maw, stir in nutritional proton supplements harvested from the sun. I watch the singularity settle down, gain weight, stabilize. And when I startle awake—as I always do—I lie there and take comfort from the way it still pulls me down and holds me to the deck, all these millions of years later.

  “I guess that makes sense,” Kai said when I told him. “Dreams are good for working out guilt.”

  I asked him what the hell he was talking about.

  “Because you didn’t want to leave. You thought it was disloyal or something.”

  “Really?”

  “Not like you refused to evac or anything. You just—said it wasn’t fair to Chimp, leaving him alone to take all the risk.”

  Of course there’d been risk. It takes a lot of energy to curve spacetime: Eri had to hug the sun for a solid year, just charging up for that one shot. If any of those grasers had fired out of sync—if every vector hadn’t precisely balanced every other—we’d have been looking at the biggest explosion since Chicxulub took out the dinosaurs.

  But that’s what math is for, right? What’s the point of physics if you can’t trust it with your life?

  “You don’t remember,” Kai guessed.

  “I was young.”

  “Still. Seemed kind of important to you. Barely talked to anyone for days after.”

  “You’re the one who remembers all the loving details. I’d say it was more important to you.”

  “Hey, at least it doesn’t haunt my dreams.”

  Now that he’d jogged my memory, though, I vaguely remembered that I hadn’t been a bitch to everyone. I’d talked to the Chimp as soon as we were back on board—although I couldn’t quite remember what about. Later, after Kai was back in the crypt and I was alone with the Chimp, I thought of asking him. Decided against it, though.

  Even then, I was getting tired of the holes in his memory.

  Strange that my feet so often took me back to this place when the sun went down. Strange that when I was most at peace, I sought out a site of such scalding violence.

  “Chimp.”

  “I’m here, Sunday.”

  Nothing compared to that long-ago birth, of course. These machines were toys next to those ones, scale models at best. The firing chamber at the center of this cavern was a measly forty meters across, and designed for repeat business. (It had already given birth a few times, although I’d never been on deck for the occasion.) But while the black hole down in Eri’s drive would go on forever—given an occasional sip of ramscooped hydrogen, anyway—the ones pumped out here emerged stunted and died young.

  “Do you—like me?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  “I mean, more than the others.”

  “Everyone’s different, Sunday. I like everyone in different ways.”

  From back near the hatch I could see only the firing chamber’s northern hemisphere; the deck formed a mezzanine ringing its equator at a safe distance, blocking the view below. The back ends of grasers emerged from that hemisphere, a precise grid of ceramic cones disfigured by coils and heat sinks and superhighways of bundled cable.

  “Okay. How do you like me, exactly?”

  “You talk to me more than the others do, with less reason,” Chimp said.

  “Um.”

  “This is an example. We’re having a conversation unrelated to mission-relevant tasks. That doesn’t happen as much with the other �
�spores.”

  “It might if you thawed them out as often as me.” Because I was scrolling through the logs, and it was starting to look like Lian was right.

  “We have more such conversations even measured in terms of interactions per unit time.”

  “And you enjoy that.”

  Chimp remained silent. He had that option, when we didn’t phrase an explicit question.

  The further reaches of the cave parallaxed into view as I neared the railing. I leaned back, craned my neck, followed the birth canal—ribbed by superconductors, like cartilage around a windpipe—as it rose from the chamber’s north pole and disappeared into bedrock.

  “Is that why I’m on deck so often?”

  “No.”

  “So why?”

  “It’s not deliberate. I choose each build crew based on a range of criteria.”

  I remembered, vaguely. Individual expertise, relevance to anticipated problems, social compatibility. A neat little formula to ensure that everyone gained experience in their weak spots, weighed against the short-term cost of not assigning a problem to the best candidate.

  “Can you show me those numbers? For the times I made the list?”

  “Not offhand. The decision tree runs subconsciously. You’d have to invoke a third-level forensic audit to retrieve specific parameter values from any given iteration, and even then it’s likely the data have been purged to save space.”

  Chimp had a subconscious.

  “Do you want to run an audit?” he asked.

  “Nah. Just seems odd that I’d end up on the short list so often.”

  “Random distributions always involve some clumping.”

  “I guess.”

  “Would you like to be called less often?”

  “Why would I?” I didn’t know whether he was offering the option or just updating my psych profile.

  “If you wanted to last longer, for example.”

  “I wouldn’t be alive any longer. I’d just be sticking bigger gaps into the same lifespan.”

  “More would happen outside, though. The longer you’re viable, the greater the odds of experiencing something unexpected.”

  “Like what?”