by Peter Watts
I felt a little sick for some reason. I swallowed it back, hefted the torch.
“Let’s find out,” I said.
The laser cut in with a hum and a snap. The resin split like an opening wound: cauterized, smoking, the polymer blackened and recoiled like something living. The Chimp was talking but I didn’t care, I wasn’t listening. The skin surrendered in an instant; the stuff behind resisted, stubborn oily gray, grudging cherry-red, a globule of molten white—finally—that beaded and broke and burned its own scar down the face of the bulkhead. I cranked the current, inched the beam up, up, pulled to the left. The stench of burning hair stung the back of my throat; rock and steel cracked and hissed and carved molten rivulets down the wall while the Chimp nattered on about Risk and Expected Payoff and the Virtues of Caution. Fuck you, Chimp, I thought or said or shouted as I pulled the torch across, down, you may not know what’s on the other side of this goddamn wall but I think I do, and I must have said at least some of that aloud because the Chimp fell silent then, the Chimp backed off and contented himself with watching me cut, and burn, and shout in triumph when that big slab of bulkhead finally gave way and slammed down onto the deck like an anchor, like some slain fucking dragon, its spilled viscera red-hot and steaming. It took a few moments before they cooled, for the fog to lift and the glint of all those colossal dark crystals beyond to shine through the hole I’d cut.
If only Ghora could see this, I thought, because I knew he’d be so proud.
I’d rediscovered Easter Island.
“Well,” I said.
The lights had come on when I’d breached the wall, presumably some autonomic reflex beyond Chimp’s conscious control. The backups squatted in orderly rows, chunky effigies of plumbing and circuitry receding beneath a dim vault of columns and arches. Some were smaller than the palm of my hand; others towered beyond reach of the light, vanished into mist and darkness like crystal mountains. Here and there I saw something familiar—the corrugated sheet of a countercurrent exchanger, a roach’s drive train grown twice life-sized—but most of those sculptures were abstract shapes to me.
“Been wondering where these got off to.”
The Chimp said nothing.
“Is this the lot?” Because a walled-off piece of crypt didn’t seem big enough to hold them all.
“I don’t know,” the Chimp said.
“You don’t know. You put them here.”
“I don’t know that either.”
“You’re saying one of us did it? Maybe Kai or Ellin set the alarm to wake them up a terasec early so they could lug everything over here for, what—a scavenger hunt?”
“It was most likely me,” he admitted. “I don’t remember doing it.”
“You don’t remember.”
“Sunday, my memory is easier to edit than yours.”
“Or you could be lying.” Although probably not. This was probably just another of Mission Control’s time-lapsed tricks, to minimize the odds that the Chimp might accidentally betray mission-critical secrets to his betters. For all I knew, he’d been obediently forgetting his own actions since Day One.
“So where’s Elon?” I asked after a moment.
“I don’t know who that is.”
“Elon Morales. Tarantula Boy.” I paused. “Where’s everyone, for that matter? Where did you move them to?”
“Sunday,” the Chimp reminded me gently, “I don’t know that I did.”
“Because unless you’ve drilled out a whole new crypt somewhere—”
“I didn’t.”
I brought up the map. No new features. Of course, the map hadn’t shown this archive either, not until five minutes ago when the Chimp updated the schematics.
“Maybe you just forgot,” I suggested.
“That’s unlikely. It would make more sense to decommission the coffins.”
“Maybe you—what did you say?”
“That’s unlikely. It would make more sense to—”
“What do you mean, decommission the coffins?”
“Recycle them into the matter reservoirs.”
“Yeah, but what happens to the people?”
“Recycling human remains follows a different track.”
“You’re not saying they’re dead.” Of course he wasn’t saying that. He wouldn’t do that.
“I was speaking hypothetically,” Chimp said. “In answer to your question.”
“I’m not asking hypothetically. I want to know what happened to the specific people in the decommissioned coffins.”
“That’s a hypothetical question. I don’t know that the coffins were decommissioned.”
“Chimp. What happened to the people?”
He said nothing. Almost as though he’d realized too late that he’d crossed a line, and was running quick quiet scenarios to find his way back.
“You killed them.” I marveled a little at how quiet my voice had become. “Tell me you didn’t fucking kill them.”
“I don’t know.”
“But it would”—I couldn’t believe I was saying this—“it would make sense to kill them, right?”
“I don’t—”
“Hypothetically, Chimp. What’s the value of human life at this point in the mission?”
“That’s a very complex utility function, Sunday. It would be difficult to describe verbally.”
“It’s ratios, right? Crew vs. expected mission time. Maintenance costs vs. added value. Meat per megasec. Stop me if I’m wrong.”
He didn’t.
“The longer we’re out here, the less mission time remains. Meat-to-mission ratio keeps climbing, unless we die off on schedule. And we’ve had the bad grace to not do that. Every corsec that goes by without someone falling out an airlock or getting squashed by the drive, the less per-capita value we have. So by now I’m guessing we’re worth less than a backup library, right? Because this mission isn’t about people at all. It never has been. The only utility we have is how useful we are to building your fucking gates.”
Not quite so quiet, there at the end.
“You haven’t stopped me,” I noted.
The crystal sculptures gleamed smugly down their endless rows.
“How many, Chimp? How many did you flush out the airlock, or incinerate, or—or just turn off until they rotted to dust?”
“I don’t have any memory of—”
“Hypothesize, for fucks’ sake! You’re great at that! How many people fit into this space before you decommissioned them all and brainwiped the guilt away?”
“I can’t tell precisely,” he said after a moment. “Approximately three thousand.”
“You fucker. You evil goddamned machine.”
“Sunday, I don’t understand why this changes anything.”
“Then you’re an idiot.”
“Everyone who dies on the mission expects to die on the mission. You all knew you’d most likely spend your lives here. You knew you’d most likely die here. You knew the expected mortality rates going in; the fact that they were too high means that on average you’ve lived longer than you expected to. Even after the relocation of the archive we’re still outperforming the median scenario.”
You mean there’s still a meat surplus.
“Decommissioning would have occurred in stasis. There would be no suffering. It would be the best-case scenario for anyone on a mission of this sort.”
“No suffering? You killed our friends! People I’ve known my whole life, maybe! You don’t think that matters to us?”
“Most likely, entire tribes would have been decommissioned. They would not have been on deck with any survivors at any point in the mission. There would be no bereavement, no severed emotional connections.”
“Elon Morales,” I said through gritted teeth.
“You couldn’t even remember his name.” I swore I heard reproach in the fucker’s voice.
I buried my head in my hands.
How long had it taken me? How many million years had
I not seen him for what he
was? He hadn’t even hidden it, for chrissake.
I’d been blind since the day we shipped out.
“Sunday—”
“Shut up! Just shut the fuck up and leave me alone!”
I don’t know how long it took me to find anything else to say. It was almost like someone else was talking in my stead.
“I mean, Christ, Chimp. I watched you dance.”
“I’m sorry,” it said. “I don’t remember that either.”
I stayed up for six days. Barely slept a wink, spent my time huddled in corners or painting over pick-ups or ranting at empty corridors. Ultimately, though, it put me down. Ultimately, I let it.
What else was I going to do—refuse the crypt for fear this machine would kill me in my sleep? Wander the halls until I died of old age? Spend the rest of my life playing games?
Nothing had really changed, after all. Everything was the same as it had always been, except for the scales that had fallen from my eyes. Besides, the Chimp promised to bring me back.
It’s not like either of us had a choice.
It brought me back and I would not talk to it, barely even spoke with the other ’spores. I did my job. Kept my head down. Wondered how many of my crewmates appreciated music.
It put me down.
It brought me back and I tried for one more Sunset Moment, tried to talk again with my old friend—but he was nowhere to be found. The thing that welcomed me in his stead turned out to be a collection of clockwork and logic gates and layered interneurons. Before, there had been conversation: now I could see my words enter the system, shunt and shuffle through pipes and filters, get chopped up and reassembled and fed back to me disguised as something new.
It put me down.
I remembered at last: it wasn’t Chimp’s fault, it couldn’t be. You can’t blame someone for the way they’re wired. This machine had been forced to pull the trigger by forces beyond its control. Maybe it was as much a victim as Elon Morales.
It put me down.
It brought me back and I realized that maybe next time it wouldn’t—deprecated is deprecated and dead is dead, and neither changes whether you blame the gun or the shooter. I weighed a mission I believed in with all my heart against the cost of its success.
It put me down, maybe for the last time.
It brought me back.
I mourned the loss of a friend. I hated myself for being stupid enough to have ever thought of it that way. I watched other meat go down and come back, down and back; watched electricity run through those circuits when the meat was on and watched the voltage drop when it was off. I slept on it for a thousand years, spent all the meager waking days between weighing sums against parts.
I wound down after yet another build, cleaned out my quarters, vacuum-stowed my kit. I found time to make a few edits to Park’s latest score before checking out one more time, changed some of those old clunky eighths with a few notes of my own and left it in one of the Commons.
Doron was right. It wasn’t a bad tune, with a little tweaking.
WHEN YOU’RE DEAD, you only dream what the Chimp tells you to.
It’s not telepathy. The Chimp can’t read your thoughts. But it feeds you sounds, images. It sends numbers into your brain, faster than any caveman briefing. You spark, there in the void; you rise toward the light after centuries of darkness, and pieces just—come to you. Little bubbles of insight. They’re disconnected at first; you’re disconnected. But the story reintegrates as you do, and by the time you open your eyes and the stone rolls away you’ve dreamed the mission briefing without anyone speaking a word.
This time, I dreamed about a monster in the basement.
Chimp didn’t know what it was. It had lost contact with a bot that had been checking out some unexpected O2 spikes from the Leaning Glade. The bot had squirted off a couple of images before Chimp lost the signal: vague misshapen blobs of infrared that didn’t map onto any of the foliage that was supposed to be growing down there.
One mute bot is no big deal, especially that close to the drive; you’ve got EM gradients mucking up the spectrum along with the usual dead spots and interference. The Chimp waited for it to complete its rounds and emerge from shadow; when that didn’t happen, it sent in a second bot to bring out the first.
That one disappeared too.
Physical tethers were a last resort; leashes risk tangling up in all that black twinkly undergrowth. So the Chimp splurged on a handful of relays, little station-keeping beads that the next bot would leave in its wake like floating pearls. Each stayed scrupulously line-of-sight with its nearest neighbors, fore and aft; each spoke along invisible lasers, immune to EM interference.
It should have been foolproof.
Three bots down. Chimp stepped back for a bit of cost/ benefit. It could escalate a brute-force strategy which had so far proven unsuccessful, or throw in the towel and let meat do what the meat was on board to do. So the Chimp thawed out two of us—Dao Lee and Kaden Bridges, according to the manifest—and sent them in.
I didn’t know either of them.
“That was fifty kilosecs ago.” The Chimp’s voice was torqued into a simulation of concern. Apparently two was a tragedy.
Three thousand was a utility function.
“And there’s been no signal. No telemetry.”
“Nothing yet.”
“I guess I’ll go in,” I said at last.
“I’d rather you didn’t go in alone.” A deliberate and ingratiating pause, doubtless selected from a bank of affectations stored under Meat Management. “I’ll defer to any decision that doesn’t put you in unnecessary danger.”
It couldn’t seem to utter a single sentence that didn’t rub my face in murderous irony.
“Sunday?”
The urge to laugh was gone; in its place, emptiness and faint nausea.
I sighed. “I go in with a tethered bot. Bot gets around the signal-loss issue, and I’ll be there to clear the line if it snags. Were Dao and Kaden armed?”
“No.”
“I will be.”
“I’ll fab an appropriate weapon.”
“Don’t bother. I’ll grab a torch from Stores.”
“No. A laser would be too indiscriminate under the circumstances.”
You monster, I thought. You mass-murdering motherfucker. You liar. You impostor.
You helpless machine. You innocent puppet.
You false friend.
“Sunday,” it said again, as it always did when my silence exceeded some critical timespan.
“What.”
“It’s a chance to save your friends.”
I wanted to scream. I wanted to hit something, anything, as hard as I could. Maybe I even did.
If so, the Chimp never remarked on it.
The Chimp gave me a machete: ceramic blade, monomolecular edge, an elastomotor in the haft that vibrated the business end and turned a merely razor-sharp edge into something that could sink cleanly through metal with a little force.
It gave the bot a pulsed thirty-megawatt, free-electron laser.
I couldn’t argue with the logic. The Glade was lined with vital trunk circuitry, pressure seals and conduits channeling vast energies. A beam weapon in human hands might wreak untold damage in a moment of panic. It would be more safely wielded by something without a limbic system, something whose reflexes nudged up against lightspeed. The Chimp would only equip me for self-defense at close range; the bot it trusted with a longer reach.
So we waited, side by side—my feet planted on the slanting deck, the bot floating precisely 1.8 meters above it—for the Chimp to open the basement door.
The corridor lights had dimmed to a level approximating the Glade itself; the visor clamped across my eyes boosted it back to broad daylight. It wasn’t strictly necessary—the lumens in the Glade, while low, were enough to find your way—but Chimp wasn’t settling for twilit grayscale. It wanted details.
The door slid open. It was way too dark in there. Something squirmed, just
out of sight.
“You see that?”
“Yes,” said the bot.
“Don’t suppose you know what it is?”
“No.”
The bot’s muzzle panned back and forth and didn’t lock on.
I hadn’t got a good look: blackness melting away into blackness. Too much damn blackness; this sparse scattering of stars served up nowhere near enough light for a healthy forest.
I took a step forward. Half the stars went out. Others appeared. Impoverished constellations winked in and out of eclipse as I moved.
The lights were still on, then. There was just a lot of undergrowth in the way.
No refuge this time. No clean cool breeze to refresh the lungs. This time the air was heavy as oil. Weeds and brambles lurked in the darkness, strung across the catwalk as if some giant spider had gone on a bender, spun black threads and ropes without any sense of purpose or design.
The visor boosted black to gray: I could see well enough to cut through the finer filaments where they crossed the path, well enough to watch the thicker ones pull away in a sluggish tangled retreat at my approach.
I looked back. A soft white glow limned the edge of the hatch we’d entered through, a rounded rectangle in the rock to guide me out again. This walkway extended from its base, veined with dark creeping tendrils.
I was almost sure they hadn’t been there when I’d crossed.
“Plants don’t move,” I said softly.
“Some do.”
“These ones,” I told it, “aren’t supposed to.”
“I don’t know. They’re not in the catalog.”
The catwalk curved gently to the right. The overbearing gravity smeared faintly across my inner ear. Chimp’s bot floated in my wake like a faithful dog (I remember those, from real life even), its umbilical unspooling behind us in the fetid air: fine as spider silk, ten times stronger. My BUD was flickering by the time I reached a familiar fork in the road.
I hadn’t been here since Lian’s tantrum. The place had really gone downhill.
The forest was still standing. That was something. The bone trees still arced overhead, their bulbs bright as ever, cupped in skeletal hands. But they were being strangled. A profusion of ropey vines twisted around their branches, massed so thickly in places you couldn’t see the trunks underneath. I thought I saw some of those wormy masses clench in the half-light. Maybe it was just lumens and shadows.