by Peter Watts
Not exactly a Sunset Moment.
“It’s a gradient pump,” I said.
“I see.”
Maybe it did, or maybe it was flowchart filler. “Any gradient would work, in principle. Ionic, thermal, gravitic. Any time you’ve got energy flowing from A to B, you can siphon some off in between.”
“Gravitic,” the Chimp guessed. Maybe not filler after all.
“Yeah. Glade’s right above the Higgs Conduit, right? There’s a gravity gradient—in some spots it’s so strong the tree trunks actually spread out to handle simultaneous vectors from different directions. And these sequences”—I gestured at the workbench display—“seem to code for a metabolic chain that exploits that gradient.”
“I have no records of any such processes ever evolving on Earth.”
“Why would they? Back on Earth you could have a single organism stretching from sea level to the edge of space and the raw gradient would barely be competitive even if you could figure out some way to make Krebs cycle work across a few hundred kliks.” Just say the lines. “But everything’s squashed here, right? You’re going from one gee to a thousand in the space of fourteen kilometers, and that’s before you split your center of mass in two.” Don’t pause. Don’t hesitate. Don’t leave any opening for buts or what-ifs. “Whole different set of rules. More energy. Everything from tissue growth to waste-O2 production amps up.”
They were good answers, plausible answers. True answers, even. But each question I answered might incite others; each follow-up would make it that much harder to keep the flowchart veering toward evolution and away from engineering.
The silence stretched. I resisted the urge to hold my breath. It all came down to cost-benefit, to the number of layers the Chimp would peel back before diminishing returns told it to take the rest on faith.
“Do you have any recommendations?” it asked at last.
I resisted another urge: to slump, this time, to relax. To realize that our Earthbound progenitors had done their job well.
For all the blinding speed with which it could count on its fingers, the Chimp just wasn’t very smart.
I started at the extremes, let the flowchart talk me back to the middle.
“We could leave it alone. It’s still doing its job and the mutant cycle only works across extreme grav gradients anyway, so we don’t have to worry about it popping up anywhere else. Maybe we should just stay out of its way.”
Two corsecs; a thousand scenarios. “Operational variance is too high. There are too many unquantified variables in the Glade for reliable long-term management.”
A creature of confidence limits, this machine. Couldn’t abide anything more than two standard deviations off the mean.
“Then torch the place. Burn it to bedrock.”
Only one corsec this time; a simpler simulation, all those complicating variables turned to ash. “That would reduce life-support capacity by eight percent.”
“Reseed afterward. We could take an eight percent hit for a few centuries.”
“There’s no guarantee the mutation wouldn’t reappear.”
“Not with the original genome, no. Not unless we shut down the gradient so it couldn’t get a foothold.” Which would, of course, mean shutting down the drive. Like the Chimp would ever go for that in a billion years.
“We could modify the local genome,” it suggested.
“We could,” I admitted, as though I were only now considering it. “Break a few S-bonds, straighten some kinks to allow the edits. Maybe seed a retrovirus up front to slow growth. Buy us some time to gene-drive a proper fix.”
This time the pause went on forever. “I can’t calculate how long that would take.”
“’Course not. Genes are messy, they interact all over the place in a single cell. We’re talking about a multispecies ecosystem with precise operational constraints. You’d have better luck asking me for hard numbers on a three-digit N-body problem.”
“But it can be done.”
“Sure, through trial and error. Tweak one variable, let it cook, correct for overshoots and chaotic interactions, repeat.”
“How long to cook?”
“You in a hurry?”
“I’d like to restore equilibrium as soon as possible.”
“If you’re impatient we could do it all right now. Edit the hell out of the whole forest in a single generation. Just don’t expect me to deal with the second- and third-order interaction effects that’ll be cropping up every few megasecs, guaranteed.”
Chimp remained silent.
“We’re already dealing with a hell of an unforeseen complication here,” I reminded it. “You don’t want to add any new variables to the mix if you can help it. So don’t change the deck schedule; just keep thawing us out for the usual builds the way you always have. No point in leaning any harder on life support than we have to, especially while we’re trying to fix it.”
“It may still be necessary to intervene between builds, if changes happen too quickly.”
“We err on the side of caution. We’ve got specs for lithobes that take three hundred years to breed and bacilli that take twenty minutes. We can tweak gen time enough to be sure nothing goes too far off the rails between shifts. Then we just . . . seal it up, leave it alone. Let it bake.”
More silence. Maybe Chimp was double-checking my results, running his own genetic predictions against mine. It was welcome to. Without specific tweak specs—much less any post-app data to run them against—it might as well be rolling dice as building models. The extant mutations were the only parts of the puzzle solid enough to sink analytical teeth into, and anyone smart enough to hang a Calvin Cycle off a gravity gradient wouldn’t be dumb enough to leave footprints behind. I had nothing to worry about.
Right.
“I’ll adjust the duty roster for ecogenetics expertise on upcoming thaws,” the Chimp said at last.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ll give you a list.”
HOW DO YOU EVEN DO IT?
How do you stage a mutiny when you’re only awake a few days in a century, when your tiny handful of coconspirators gets reshuffled every time they’re called on deck? How do you plot against an enemy that never sleeps, that has all those empty ages to grind its brute-force way down every avenue, stumble across every careless clue you might have left behind? An enemy with eyes that span your whole world, an enemy that can see through your eyes, hear through your ears in glorious hi-def first-person? Sure, those channels come with off switches; use them too often and you might as well be sending up an alarm—Conspiracy In Progress! Mission Risk Critical!—to any idiot abacus wired in to the network.
How do you even begin?
In more ways than I’d ever imagined.
It was so much more than words posing as music. It was words posing as other words, the lyrics to long-dead songs resurrected and revised to embed new meaning in old verses. It was plans buried in hieroglyphs, messages encoded in chess moves and game dialog. Graffiti copied and commandeered for purposes of subtle cartography: three dots and a peculiar squiggle to say 1425 scanned and clear; 1470 in progress; someone wanna call dibs on 2190? We whispered secret messages down the aeons, sang songs and painted on cave walls and let the Chimp chalk it all up to the quirky evolution of island cultures.
Between builds, we sent messages in bottles. Within builds the revolution found ways to speak privately in real time. Eri’s natural blind spots—the radio shadows, the nooks and corners blocking the views of cameras—provided an initial foothold. We built out from those: equipment caches rearranged to make room for Francine’s art installation, or an improvised maze for a time-wasting tournament of Capture the Flag while we waited for the vons to process the latest asteroid. Embedded cameras were sparsely distributed along most service crawlways by design; that left a good chunk of the ship’s nervous system vulnerable to infiltration. Some spots were more transparent than blind: looped footage of empty corridors on endless replay, spliced into the m
ain feed so the dead could walk the halls while the Chimp saw nothing. Proximity sensors that cut back to live feed whenever an unsuspecting roach or bot happened to pass the same way. We double agents smiled for the cameras and moved in the light; the zombies from the Glade, all those Missing and Presumed Deads, crept undetected like mice through the walls.
We slept away the gigasecs as we always had, summoned back to life when the variables got too messy or the Knowable proved Unprovable or the Chimp suffered an episode of insecurity from the noise we bled into its sensory nerves. We took cues from songs and orders from the Glade: Lian slept through as many builds as she woke up for, but she always left notes on the kitchen table.
The first order of business was finding Enemy HQ.
Eriophora first shipped out with maybe a hundred nodes, each big enough to run the Chimp on its own, each clearly mapped on the schematics. New ones were always being produced, though. Nothing escapes the Diaspora’s redundancy imperative. We didn’t know how many there were by now, didn’t know where most of them lived. Any one of them could be acting hypervisor at any time—the place where the Chimp actually lived, as it were—and they handed that duty off to one another without fanfare or warning. Sometimes a node developed a fault, or just wore out; sometimes the Chimp would relocate itself next to some subsystem especially vital to a particular mission, to minimize latency during the crunch. So we wandered the halls, quizzing our Artificial Stupidity on matters trivial or profound, noting the infinitesimal time lag preceding each response. We’d pass those notes between us, plot them on maps of latency vs. location, triangulate relentlessly on our oppressor.
Also fruitlessly, for the most part. We’d spend half a millennium getting a fix on the Ghost of Chimp Present, only to wake up and discover that it had relocated again while we’d slept. A few thousand lightyears away, a few thousand centuries ago, you would have called it shoveling sand against the tide.
Not that it would have done us much good even if we had tracked down the little fucker. Some other node would’ve picked up the baton the moment we pulled the plug. There were so very many Ghosts of Chimp Yet to Come, and no way to get to them all.
We were working on it, though.
“We’re wasting our time,” Jahaziel Cauthorn opined a few centuries later. “Latency cues? Depending on how spaghettied the circuits are we could get a signal to the core and back faster than we could ping the next room.”
He was a new recruit, freshly outraged and looking for fast fixes. I’d brought him down to the Glade—showing him around the bioremediation protocols, far as the Chimp was concerned—to introduce him to Lian Wei and her undead council before they disappeared under a blanket of murder vines for another few gigs.
He’d just about crapped his pants when the forest first came at him. He recovered quickly, though. The pheromones did their job, the weeds kept their distance, and ten minutes later he was spritzing them for the sheer childish glee of watching them recoil.
“It’s more of an averages thing,” Li told him now.
“Yeah, and by the time you’ve got all those averages he’s pulled up stakes and moved on.” Jahaziel looked around. “Why don’t we just ask him where he is?”
Li turned to me. “You wanna take this?”
I grabbed the baton. “You don’t think that might tip it off, Jaz?”
“Tell him we need it for, I dunno, diagnostic purposes. Why wouldn’t he buy it? He’s stupid.”
“Except the Chimp isn’t the enemy.”
“I can’t believe you’re still defending that thing,” he said.
I had another kind of pheromone in my arsenal, something I’d cooked up while studying the forest. An attractant. I imagined dousing Jahaziel with the stuff and just—standing back.
Instead, I said, “You want to go to war against a gun, you’re welcome to try. I’d rather go to war against the assholes who’re pointing it at me.” He opened his mouth. “Shut up and listen. If it was just us against the Chimp, we’d’ve won already. But it wasn’t the Chimp’s idea to hide Easter Island. He doesn’t even remember doing it.”
“If you believe that.”
“I do. Sure, Chimp’s stupid. We’re not fighting the Chimp. We’re fighting mission planners who’ve been dead for over sixty million years, and they were not stupid, and they had AGIs backing them up who were even more not-stupid.”
“Why even bother trying, then?”
“Because not even a cluster of superintelligent AGIs is infallible when it comes to predicting asymmetric social dynamics a few million years down the road. But they obviously didn’t trust us over the long haul, or they wouldn’t have programmed the Chimp to hide the archive. They wouldn’t have programmed it for this shell-game bullshit with the nodes. It’s a good bet they coded in a bunch of flags keyed to their best guess at what insurrection might look like across deep time.”
“Um.”
“Haven’t you noticed that it isn’t always as stupid as it should be? That’s because it was programmed by very smart people. We utter the wrong trigger phrase, who knows what nasty subroutines wake up? So to answer your question, the reason we do not just ask the Chimp is because the Chimp is fucking haunted, and we don’t know what those ghosts are liable to do if they notice us.”
Jahaziel said nothing. It was a welcome change.
Lian shook her head admiringly. “You get better every time you say that. I swear, even I’m believing it now.”
She was, too. It had been ages since she’d worried out loud about the Chimp’s occasional moments of unaccountable insight. All just preloaded subroutines after all. All just ghosts of Engineers past.
Of course, if you are who I think you are, you know what an idiotic mistake that was.
Unlike some of the others, I might still be able to fix that one.
Looking back, I wonder if Lian’s recruit-the-dead strategy might have actually made the Chimp feel better about itself, about the mission. All those early aeons when we didn’t die on schedule—maybe those were what bothered it all along. An anomaly. An inexplicable divergence from the mission profile. I’d feared this recent cluster of apparent fatalities might raise some kind of flag but maybe the Chimp saw it as the correction of ancient error, a return to some statistical comfort zone. Certainly the only time it ever mentioned the subject in my presence, it seemed to think of those deaths as a good thing.
That might have just been for my benefit, though.
It was the time the Chimp told me my per-capita value had increased. Those were its exact words. And I knew it was telling the truth, because Baird Stoller had just died in the line of duty.
In fact, Baird Stoller had died trying to warn the Chimp about us. It had been a clusterfuck from the word Go: his rep as a malcontent turned out to be all smoke and status, thin as words. When Viktor had tried to recruit him, the first thing he’d done was make a break for it.
Ghora tackled him just before he got out of the blind spot. They managed a cover-up with the materials at hand; freak electrical fire, Stoller dead, Ghora escaping with second-degree burns down his left side. The Chimp bought the story but ended up completely rejigging its acceptable-risk thresholds, upgraded onboard surveillance, eliminated a third of our safe zones.
I slept through the whole thing, but both sides brought me up to speed the next time I was on deck. Lintang passed on the details as we passed through one of our surviving blind spots. The Chimp expressed sorrow for my loss, ever-mindful of my admonition after Lian’s “accident.” I accepted the overture with thanks, tried to reinforce the impression that finally—after that unfortunate misunderstanding—things were on the mend.
I’d been throwing myself into the role of Sunday Ahzmundin, wounded confidante, returning to the fold. I’d nailed the shock, the anguish, the rage in the wake of Easter Island; I’d been pretty convincing with the subsequent disdain and cold shoulder. These days I was working on detente, even reconciliation. It was easier than you might think. The Chimp w
asn’t especially perceptive, for one thing; the right words would sometimes do the trick even if their tone carried no conviction.
The other thing, though, is that I wasn’t really acting.
You have to understand: even after Easter Island, I was a reluctant convert. I knew things had to change. I knew my stupid emotional attachment to a piece of software had blinded me to the fact that we were, in the end, tools to be used and discarded at the whim of some dead engineer’s utility function.
But I also knew that it wasn’t really the Chimp’s fault. He was a machine; he did what he was built to. We had to take him down but there was no pleasure in the thought, no feel-good vengeance on behalf of Elon Morales or the Three Thousand. Those circuits that had inspired him to dance—they were still in there somewhere. There would be no joy in shutting them down; just the tragic necessity of killing a rabid pet before it could hurt anyone else.
And then Baird Stoller died, and the Chimp—in pursuit of its own kind of reconciliation, I guess—revisited a metric of human worth I’d once found wanting: “It might interest you to know, Sunday, that as a result of these recent losses your per-capita value is trending upward.” Maybe it thought I’d see such things in a new light.
I threw up a little in my mouth.
I don’t know why I kept feeling—I don’t know. Disappointed. Betrayed. Surely it would have sunk in by then. Surely the evidence would have long-since convinced me that I’d been fooling myself all along, that all those conversations and bed-time stories and Sunset Moments had been shared not with a friend but a weapon: something lethal and unfeeling, something that would target-lock me the moment the right number changed in its brain. But I kept forgetting, somehow. I kept wondering if I hadn’t really seen something in that machine, back before it drowned in mission imperatives. Kept wondering if maybe I could bring it back.