by Peter Watts
“I don’t know. Other ’spores have expressed curiosity about the future.”
“Someone still thinks our grandkids are gonna cruise out the gate and take us back to paradise?”
He didn’t answer.
And the truth was, after sixty million years, how could Outside matter to any of us? Eriophora was all we needed. It had saved us from ten billion suicidal mole rats drowning in their own shit. It had kept us one step ahead of whatever had replaced them. It had taken us around the galaxy: it had granted me solitude.
I leaned over the railing. Just visible past the curve of the southern hemisphere, the belled edge of the dump pipe suckled at the south pole. Eri’s heart hummed at the other end of that pipe: thirty-two kilometers straight down (or forward, if you swung that way). It was insatiable; no plasma, no particles, no waste heat could fill it. Black holes are the ultimate garbage can.
Now, though, it was only waiting.
“When are we gonna fire this puppy up again?”
“I don’t know. No candidates are in range at the moment.”
“I wouldn’t mind being on deck when it happens. Never been up for a hub before.”
“I don’t think that would have an unacceptable impact on the build.”
Chimp took requests, if you asked nicely. I’d always just assumed he’d take anyone’s. But if Lian was right. . .
Lian wasn’t right, though.
It wasn’t a cage if it kept moving. It wasn’t a prison if we could go anywhere.
And Lian had her head so far up her ass she was frenching her own tonsils.
CHIMP BROUGHT ME BACK for a comet that crashed headlong into some planet just in time to confuse his biodistancing protocols with an explosion of aldehydes and amino acids.
He brought me back for a molecular nebula so dense you could see it with the naked eye—a filmy cataract over the stars—and so thick we had to slow our trajectory to keep from ablating Eri’s crust with the friction of our passage.
Once he brought me back with a completed gate already red-shifting to stern: a routine build undertaken without any need for human involvement, but which had begun manifesting—irregularities—following activation. As chance would have it Kai’s number came up on my dance card that time around; we fucked for old times’ sake before relocating to the starboard bridge, bodies drawn into each other’s orbits despite the liberating ramifications of networked telepresence. Privy to all Eri’s feeds piped directly into our skulls, still we chose to meet in physical space: to worship at the altar of a tac tank that had never been intended as more than backup. All of UNDA’s genetic sorcery hadn’t been able to undo two hundred million years of mammalian social impulses.
Although to be fair, I can’t think of a reason why they’d have bothered.
We stood there on the bridge, hand-in-hand, the image in the tank overlapping with its counterparts in our heads and gracing us with a jarring sort of double vision. The gate had booted uneventfully, our passage through the hoop jump-starting it onto the ever-growing daisy chain in our wake.
“Hey, at least nothing tried to eat us,” Kai said as logs replayed.
But less than an hour after parturition, the dwindling gate had started sprouting . . . well, tumors.
“What the hell?” I said.
Kai squinted, as though squeezing his eyeballs might somehow enhance the clarity of a feed inserted further upstream. “Barnacles?”
“Maybe upgrades.” I shrugged. “Overdue if you ask me. We’ve been churning out the same damn model since the day we left. About time they came up with a new one.” Just as long as it doesn’t give the gremlins a leg up. . .
“I dunno. They look more like some kind of parasite to me.”
We never did figure it out. We stayed up just long enough to ensure that whatever-it-was wasn’t interfering with normal gate operations (not that I knew what we’d do if it was—maybe the Chimp would circle us back to try again). Heading back to the crypt, though, I remembered:
“You told Lian about me.”
“I did?”
“My rebellious youth. Back on Earth.”
“Um, maybe.” Kai absently rubbed the bridge of his nose, where I’d broken it at the age of seven. “Wasn’t exactly a secret.”
“She kind of—internalized it. Thought it gave us this spiritual connection or something. There was this scene a few builds back, she was on loan to the Children of Eri. Went a bit wild. Chimp dragged me out of bed to deal with it.”
“Yeah. Heard about that.”
“So be careful what you tell her, okay? She took a bit of damage a while back, hasn’t been the—”
“Sunday—”
“I’m just saying—”
“Sunday.” He cupped my hands in his. “She’s dead, right?”
I didn’t speak for a moment.
“How?”
“EVA accident,” Kai said, but I’d already booted my BUD and started spelunking the logs. Four thaws back: one of Chimp’s teleops finds some exposed plumbing out on the surface, running along the wound inflicted by Lian’s gremlin. The weapon took out most of the overlying rock; blueshift has ablated the rest. It’s routine and noncritical—an easy band-aid job—but Lian insists on checking it out herself. I don’t know why. Maybe she thinks she’s facing her fears, or some such shit. Jumps to the head of the line and suits up.
Nobody sees it happen. She’s down in the scar, out of Chimp’s line-of-sight. The usual teleop accompanies her but they’re both focused on the substrate, torching bedrock down to soft plastic that can be layered across the tiny wound within the larger one. Black-box telemetry’s the only thing that makes it into the record: a temperature spike, a catastrophic pressure drop. A heartbeat leaping all over the y-axis before the channel goes dark. Surface cams pick her up as she crests the edge of the scar and falls away but all they see is a suit of armor, limp as bones. Blueshift kills her momentum in an instant; Eriophora falls ever forward and Lian Wei vanishes into the past.
Three thousand years ago.
“Fuck,” I whispered.
“Some kind of accident.” Kai closed his mouth, opened it, hesitated. “That’s what Chimp says, anyway.”
“What, you don’t believe him?”
He shook his head, and didn’t look at me. “I think he’s just trying to keep up morale.
“I think she did it to herself.”
Or maybe I did.
She cracked at Monocerus and I told her to get over it. She watched as some gremlin came within a hairsbreadth of wiping us out of existence and I said it doesn’t change anything. I was there when her back was against the wall, called back from the dead because she trusts you and I told her she was crazy. I thought we were the same, she said, I was following in your footsteps and I told her to fuck off but she was right, I fought back, I lashed out just like she did and with less reason, didn’t even know what I was fighting against but that didn’t stop me and one time I even tried killing myself and—and—
And Lian was better at that than I was, apparently.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was too soon,” Chimp said. “It’s less traumatic to learn of a friend’s death if you haven’t seen them for a while.”
“Three thousand years isn’t long enough?”
A moment’s silence. “Was that a joke?”
I realized it had been. A bad one. “What is long enough?”
“Two subjective years of separation.”
“The tribe’s lost people before. You never waited that long to tell me.”
“You were closer to Lian than most.”
“We weren’t that close.” Not a contradiction, I realized. “Look, you were protecting my feelings. I get that. But you gotta tell me these things, soon as I thaw.”
“Okay, Sunday.”
“I’m serious. Don’t just say you will to protect morale. Do it.”
“Okay.
“My condolences,” he added after a moment. “Lian Wei was a good person.�
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“That she was.” I shook my head. “Shitty ’spore, though.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You saw how she was, last few terasecs. Unhappy. Damaged.” I remembered that Child of Eri, the words she spoke. “Laporta was right. She never belonged out here. I don’t know how she even made the cut.”
I was having trouble swallowing, for some reason.
“It’s okay to cry, Sunday.”
“What?” I blinked. My vision wobbled. “Where the fuck did that come from?”
“Maybe you were closer to Lian than you realized. It’s natural to feel grief at the loss of a friend. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“What, you’re moonlighting as some kind of therapist now?” I hadn’t even realized he was smart enough to do that. Maybe I just hadn’t tripped the subroutine before.
“I don’t have to be a therapist to see that this is affecting you more than you expected. Maybe more than you even—”
“Chimp, give it a rest. You do a great job running the ship, but I don’t know what idiot committee thought we’d want to cry on your shoulder as part of the deal.”
“I’m sorry, Sunday. I didn’t mean to be intrusive. I thought we were just having one of our talks.”
“We were.” I shook my head. “But I don’t need a flowchart to tell me when I’m allowed to fucking cry, okay?”
He didn’t answer for a moment. Even at the time I wondered a bit about that; it’s not like his answer required a whole lot of computation.
“Okay,” he said at last.
I do cry now and then, in case you’re wondering.
I even cried for the Chimp once.
I was there for his birth, years before we ever shipped out. I saw the lights come on, listened as he found his voice, watched him learn to tell Sunday from Kai from Ishmael. He was such a fast learner, such an eager one; back then, barely out of my own accelerated adolescence and not yet bound for the stars, I felt sure he’d streak straight into godhood while we stood mired in flesh and blood.
He seemed so happy: devoured every benchmark, met every challenge, anticipated each new one with a kind of hardwired enthusiasm I could only describe as voracious. Once, rounding a corner into some rough-hewn catacomb, I came upon a torrent of bots swirling in perfect complex formation: a school of silvered fish in the center of Eri’s newly seeded forest. The shapes I glimpsed there still make my head hurt, when I think about them.
“Yeah, we’re not quite sure what that is,” one of the gearheads said when I asked hir. “He does it sometimes.”
“He’s dancing,” I said.
Se regarded me with something like pity. “More likely just twiddling his thumbs. Running some motor diagnostic that kicks in when there’s a few cycles to spare.” Se raised an eyebrow. “Why don’t you ask him?”
Somehow, though, I never got around to it.
I’d hike to the caverns during down time, watch him dance as the forest went in: theorems and fractal symphonies playing out against fissured basalt, against a mist of mycelia, against proliferating vine-tangles of photosynthetic pods so good at sucking up photons that even under light designed to mimic the sun, they presented nothing but black silhouettes. When the forest grew too crowded Chimp moved to some unfinished factory floor. When that started to fill up he relocated to an empty coolant tank the size of a skyscraper; finally, to that vast hollow in the center of the world where someday soon a physics-breaking troll would simmer and seethe in the darkness, pulling us forward by its own bootstraps. The dance evolved with each new venue. Every day those kinetic tapestries grew more elaborate and mindbending and beautiful. It didn’t matter where he went. I found him. I was there.
Sometimes I’d try to proselytize, invite some friend or lover along for the show, but except for Kai—who humored me a couple of times—no one was especially interested in watching an onboard diagnostic twiddle its thumbs. That was okay. By now I knew the Chimp was mainly playing for me anyway. Why not? Cats and dogs had feelings. Fish, even. They developed habits, loyalties. Affections. Chimp may have only weighed in at a fraction of a human brain but he was easily smarter than any number of sentient beings with personalities to call their own. One day, a few epochs down the road, people would notice the remnants of that bond and shit all over it, but it could have been theirs just as easily. All they had to do was sit, and watch, and wonder.
One day, though, the Chimp didn’t seem twice as smart as he’d been the day before.
I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. I’d just—developed this model of exponential expectation, I guess. I took for granted that the toddler playing with numbered blocks in the morning would blow through tensor calculus by lunchtime. Now he wasn’t quite living up to that curve. Now he grew only incrementally smarter over time. I never asked the techs about it—never even mentioned it to the other ’spores—but within a week there wasn’t any doubt. Chimp wasn’t exponential after all. He was only sigmoid, past inflection and closing on the asymptote, and for all his amazing savantic skills he’d be nowhere near godhood by the time he scraped that ceiling.
Ultimately, he wouldn’t even be as smart as me.
They kept running him through his paces, of course. Kept loading him up with new and more complex tasks. And he was still up for the job, kept scoring a hundred. It’s not like they’d designed him to fail. But he had to work harder, now. The exercises took evermore resources. Every day there was less left over.
He stopped dancing.
It didn’t seem to bother him. I asked him if he missed the ballet and he didn’t know what I was talking about. I commiserated about the hammer that had knocked him from the sky and he told me he was doing fine. “Don’t worry about me, Sunday,” he said. “I’m happy.”
It was the first time I’d ever heard him use that word. If I’d heard it even ten days earlier, I might have believed him.
So I descended into one of the forests—gone to twilight now, the full-spectrum floods retired once the undergrowth had booted past the seedling stage—and I wept for a happy stunted being who didn’t know or care that it had once been blazing towards transcendence before some soulless mission priority stuck him in amber.
What can I say? I was young, I was stupid.
I thought I could afford to feel pity.
So many clues, looking back.
All those ’spores wandering the halls, pestering Chimp with their inane questions. Not even always questions: I caught Lintang Kasparson telling him jokes once or twice. There may have been a part of me that wondered why so much meat was suddenly so interested in pursuing a relationship with Eri’s AI; there may have been a smaller, pettier part who felt a bit possessive.
Bashaar started tagging rocks and plastic and every flat surface he could find with fake Painter graffiti. He’d never been the sort to show any interest in the other tribes; I asked him if he’d figured out their code and he got all coy with me: Well I’ve certainly figured out someone’s code. I was on my way aft to a plug-in party with Ban and Rachel; I didn’t have time to play his stupid games.
And then there was Park’s Music Appreciation Club.
I was on a bridge calibrating my innerface when I heard music drifting from one of the ambient pick-ups: Park, humming to himself down in one of the social alcoves. He had a scroll on his knee. He was tapping and swiping for some reason, instead of using the saccadic interface. The hum transmuted to a murmur. A moment later he broke into song.
I recognized it: a puzzle-piece that was all the rage a couple of years before we shipped.
“That’s wrong,” I told him.
He stopped, looked around at the sound of my disembodied voice. “Hmmm? Sunday?”
“That line. It’s ‘The cats of Alcubierre,’ not ‘The bats come out of there.’”
“Is it, now?”
“It’s a quantum-indeterminacy reference. Have you been singing the wrong words since we left Earth?”
“I’ve been playing with
a few variants.”
“It’s a puzzle song. You change the lyrics, you break the puzzle.”
“We’re not really interested in the puzzle part. We just like—tinkering. Not just lyrics, either. We’re playing around with tunes and harmonies and shit too.”
“We?”
“Music Appreciation Club.”
“Must be a small club.”
“Maybe a dozen.”
“Park. There’s never more than four or five of us on deck at the same time.”
“We leave notes when we go down. Scores, recordings. Leave comments and edits for other folks’ pieces when we’re on deck. Sometimes we get into fights, kind of, but they never really go anywhere because, you know. Ten thousand years and all. You’re so interested, why don’t you join up?”
“Music Appreciation.”
“Uh huh.”
“I’d appreciate the music just fine right now if you used the right fucking lyrics.”
I admit it, though. I was a little hurt they hadn’t told me about it before.
Turns out there were a lot of things they weren’t telling me.
Another thaw. I don’t know why the Chimp even called me on deck.
Viktor was the numbers guy. I didn’t know shit about navigation beyond the pinch-hitting basics. Then again, Chimp packs ten thousand times more numerical crunching power into his most microscopic ganglion than Viktor does in his whole grapefruit-sized brain, and Chimp was at a loss. So maybe it wasn’t a question of numerical power. Maybe a more lateral approach was called for. Or maybe Chimp just brought me back to keep Viktor company.
Too bad he wasn’t in the mood for any.
“Not even a build,” he growled as he joined me in the tube. “Four lightyears from the nearest system.”
I let him rant. Chimp had felt this itch before; it was easier to scratch when there weren’t any sun-sized gravity wells around to muddy the waters.
He’d warmed up a bridge for us. Numbers swirled in the tac tank like schooling fish. It wasn’t just the numeric value of those parameters that mattered; it was their relationship one to another, a fluid dance of ever-shifting correlations mapped by their relative positions. Viktor was expert at reading the details; I could grasp the broad strokes, if I squinted.