by Peter Watts
This was not entirely untrue. The receptionist really was a paragon of diligence when it came to clear and accurate communication. In terms of time-keeping, though, it had its own standards of punctuality.
Once the receptionist showed up for work, Graser 172 would be living three hundred corsecs in the future.
The Chimp brought me back for another of its moments of insecurity, born of infinitesimal but increasing discrepancies between where we were and where we should be.
It brought me back for a build that wasn’t, around a star whose location and metallicity shouted optimal even though the vons, once deployed, could barely scrape together enough material for a fueling station, much less a gate. It was almost as though someone else had been there before us and made off with all the best stuff. We even looked around for a gate someone else might have built, but came up empty.
It brought me back for a handful of builds I’ve almost forgotten, resurrected me for reasons so trivial that all I remember now is my irritation with Viktor’s end-of-time rhapsodies and my greater irritation at the Chimp’s slavish adherence to trigger thresholds.
Most of the time, though, I slept while the Chimp built an army of vons. I watched the replay, ages afterward.
I’d never seen anything like it before.
I was used to the usual dance: the harvesters shot from our hanger bays, a scavenger swarm sent ahead at meat-killing delta-vees to scoop up dust and rocks and tumbling mountains full of precious metal. Once they’d mined enough treasure they transformed, linked arms and fused together and turned into printers or refineries or assembly-lines: a factory floor, a piecemeal cloud five hundred kilometers across. The Hawking Hoop would coalesce in its heart; more harvesters and rock-wranglers would be birthed around its edges. They’d forage out, half a lightyear sometimes, bring back ores and alloys in an accelerating escalation of mass and complexity.
Eventually the build would reach some critical inflection point and turn inward: harvesters would stop eating comets and start on each other, cannibalizing the factory from the outside in, recycling deprecated components into last-minute coils or condensers. The uneaten survivors would weld everything tight, line up safely to one side and shut down, waiting for Eriophora to catch up and boot the gate. Perhaps offering up some rudimentary machine prayer that we wouldn’t miss the needle’s eye when—a few megasecs down the road—we blew through at sixty thousand kps.
It took anywhere from a hundred gigasecs to ten thousand, and it was damned impressive the first hundred times you watched the replay. But that was just the construction of a single gate, floating at some safe and benign distance from some safe and benign star. The biggest productions had a cast of less than ten thousand—maybe a hundred heavies holding court to a swirling retinue of harvesters.
The Nemesis build took half a million. We were ringside from the second act.
No cheating, this time. No counting on robots to go ahead and do all the work while we cruised by later to kickstart the fruits of their labor. Oh, the vons still launched while we were parsecs out. They still raced ahead and scoured the neighborhood for raw material. This time, though, they were eating for nine, and every one of those gates would be within kissing distance of the event horizon. The usual boot protocol was a complete nonstarter. Try threading Eri through one of those needles at twenty percent lightspeed and we’d be diving down Nemesis’ throat in the next nanosecond.
The plan was to build a whole brood of black holes from scratch—stunted, disposable, one for each portal—instead of using the larger one at the heart of Eri’s drive. We’d lay each in turn like a microscopic egg, nudge it into a precise orbit that would carry it through its assigned needle’s-eye. Each singularity would give its life in turn to boot its gate; we’d hide behind Nemesis each time it happened. Nemesis’ own lethal emissions would be as gentle sunlight on a spring day, next to the glare of those annihilations.
We would do this nine times.
The gates weren’t finished by the time we fell into orbit. Their exposed guts glinted in the starlight; fabbers clambered around encrusted scaffolding like monstrous crabs, like mechanical scavengers feasting on interstellar road kill. No hurry, though. It would take almost four gigasecs to scrape up the energy for a single boot, thirty-five more to finish the builds themselves: almost five years, meat on deck for at least half that time.
The Chimp could have probably done it on its own but it was a big build, an important build, and it wasn’t taking chances. We had complementary weaknesses, meat and machines. Metal had faster reflexes and a more delicate touch by far; but we weren’t as vulnerable to rads or EMPs.
Not that we’re invulnerable, mind you. It’s just that organic life has a kind of momentum that keeps you moving even after your cells have been shredded. If some unexpected blast of radiation didn’t turn us to ash outright, we’d still have hours or days to keep up the pace; metal would have sparked and died in an instant. We were the backups to the backups, awake but relegated to the bench as a hedge against the chance that some catastrophic failure might fratz the machinery but leave us standing.
They were long odds. But we were cheap insurance.
In theory we’d survive even if the claim came in; our coffins could put us down and patch us up before our insides turned to mush. We’d be benched for the rest of the build, but there’d be plenty of time for repairs before we were needed on deck again.
Thus did we spend five years, parked in the shadow of the behemoth.
It was such a small behemoth: twenty suns, contained in a horizon only one hundred twenty kilometers across. Not even a speck, on cosmological scales.
The reach it had, though. The terrible, terrible reach.
Tidal gradients extended far beyond the event horizon, ready to tear us apart if we strayed too close. Just offstage, Nemesis’ dwarf companion orbited at hazardous distance: far enough to avoid being swallowed whole but just as doomed in the long run, its atmosphere slurped away and spun across the void in a bottomless spiral, feeding an insatiable partner that would not stop until it had bled its captive absolutely fucking dry.
Kaden had named the dwarf Fáfnir. I had to look it up.
Nothing was insurmountable. Put your gates in an oblique orbit to minimize contact with the accretion disk. Send machines into the vortex to scrape the energy you need, while Eriophora stays safely distant from gravity’s rocky shore. There are solutions and workarounds for everything.
Still.
Thousands of exagrams in a dust mote? Twenty-four suns within the diameter of an asteroid? The dynamics are scary enough even before you add a dwarf bleeding out across the void, the lethal radioactive vortex of Nemesis’ accretion disk, a fleet of factories and refineries with a retinue of harvesters and construction drones half a million strong. Sometimes, unable to sleep, I’d watch them move. Sometimes, just to torture myself, I’d false the spectrum and take in that tableaux against a backdrop of X and gamma and superheated plasma. I’d watch our pitiful machines swirl and scurry like dust-mites while close behind—far too close behind—Fáfnir’s lifeblood drained through a trap door in the bottom of the universe, screaming blue murder as it disappeared.
I couldn’t tear myself away. It was the first feed I accessed whenever the Chimp thawed me out, the last before I froze again: a view so overwhelming I didn’t dare let it spill into wraparound for fear that total immersion would crush me down to some insignificant speck gibbering in the maelstrom. I kept the view shrunken and contained in a cortical window, or trapped out in the tac tank like a beast in an aquarium.
The tank had a perverse hold over us in those days. We’d drift onto a bridge in ones or twos, gather around our tiny toy Nemesis and watch transfixed. That lethal disk of incandescent gas. That tiny black maw at its heart, distant stars smeared around its edge like bright stains. The tenuous hyperdiamond necklace slung between here and there, a gravitic conveyor endlessly scraping the ergosphere and lifting precious aliquots of harvested ene
rgy back to our capacitors. Half a million pieces waltzing with annihilation: the whole dispersed factory floor in constant motion, every processor and refinery and fab assembly schooling in murmurations intricate enough to make your head hurt. We’d watch without a word, for hours sometimes, cave men huddling around a campfire that somehow left us chilled.
It wasn’t just the soul-crushing scale of it, though. There was something strangely familiar about the way all those pieces moved, something I could never quite put my finger on. Only now, here, do I remember where I saw something like it before: alone with the Chimp, back in an empty cavern in a half-constructed Eriophora, before we ever left home.
So who knows. Maybe it wasn’t dancing after all.
The Chimp came to me, in the waning of a Sunset Moment, and tried to make everything better.
I’d thought I’d been holding up my end: chatting about tribal politics as I docked my roach and approached the crypt on foot, confirming that everyone signed up for the Teredo tournament would be on deck for the first big boot, using my special influence to suggest that Ghora might be a better fit on deck than Dhanyata. (“Yeah, Dhanyata and Kaden don’t really get along—they had some kind of serious feud back before we shipped out and you gotta remember it’s barely been a couple of decades far as us cavemen are concerned.”) The crypt gaped at my arrival; I stepped inside, and walked down that dim high vault to the bright altar glowing at its heart, and—
And something moved there, in and out of the light, waiting for me.
More than one thing, I saw as I approached. A flotilla: half a dozen roaches, turning and spinning quietly on electric wheels. At least as many ground-effect drones weaving sine waves through the air around my coffin. The teleop cluster reaching down from the darkness, carbon tentacles and delicate jointed fingers—instruments of intervention, reserved for medical emergencies during resuscitation (and, sometimes, the disposal of bodies afterward)—possessed now by some spirit that made them dip and flex and undulate in ways I’d never seen before.
Everything moved with complex precision, each device a moving part of some elaborate whole: as if the components of an intricate clockwork had come apart in zero gee, yet continued to move in correct and proper relation to one another. It was precise and deterministic and I suppose there was a kind of grace to it. But it was—sterile. It was exactly what you’d expect from an algorithm parsing
—used to watch you dance—
without any real understanding of what dancing is, what it means, without any recollection of the time when it breathed life and wonder into a thousand glittering facets of self. A time when, just maybe, it had some kind of soul.
This was not that. This was a collection of lifeless objects jiggling on threads, and it almost broke my heart to realize what else it was:
A peace offering.
“Do you like it?” the Chimp asked from the darkness.
“I—” And trailed off. “I appreciate the sentiment.”
“I would like to repair our relationship,” it said.
“Repair.”
“We don’t talk as much as we used to. When we do talk, there is less intimacy.”
“Uh huh.” I couldn’t help myself. “Any wild guesses as to why that might be?”
He didn’t seem to notice. “Our relationship changed when you rediscovered the hardware archive.”
“When I found out you’d killed three thousand people, you mean.”
“If you say so.” He wasn’t even being snippy; he honestly didn’t remember. “I accept that you hold me responsible for that. But I also have faith in you, Sunday. I know that you’re vitally invested in the mission, and that you are vital to its success. We still work together, despite everything. And our relationship has improved since then.”
I trod carefully. “It—takes time.”
“Until now I’ve let our relationship heal naturally. You’ve been quicker to engage in conversation. I welcome that. I’m accelerating that process now because I need your help.”
“With?”
“I’ve noted activities over the past hundred gigasecs that may indicate attempts at sabotage. I would like them to stop.”
I bit my lip. Hoped that my sudden increase in heart rate wasn’t enough to send up any flags, that the Chimp would write it off as an understandable reaction to news of Enemies in Our Midst. Bots and roaches and teleops continued to waltz and orbit before me, surrealistic and absurd.
“What sort of activities?” My voice carefully steady.
“Inventory disappears temporarily. Fabricators run but I can’t find records of anything being produced.”
“Describe the missing inventory.”
“I can’t. The mass-balance checksums indicate that something’s missing, but all stockpiles are at expected levels.”
“This isn’t just another order from Mission Control you were told to forget about afterward?”
“If I ever carried out such commands in the past, they didn’t leave detectable inconsistencies in the record. I think someone’s actively hiding their activities from the mission logs. The most likely reason is that those activities aren’t in the best interests of the mission.”
I took a breath, and a chance: “How do you know it isn’t me?”
“I don’t. But it’s unlikely. You’ve never lied to me.”
“What do you need me for? You don’t have enough eyes and ears already?”
“My eyes and ears may be compromised. Yours would not be.”
“You want me to spy on my friends.”
“I trust you, Sunday. I hope you know you can trust me.”
“To do what?”
“To act in the best interests of the mission.”
I could have refused. The Chimp would have gone ahead anyway, looking for trouble, his suspicions heightened by my refusal to play informant.
I could have played along, pretended to cooperate. Whispered a warning to a fellow mutineer as we passed through a blind spot, hoped the word would spread before someone passed me a note or Chimp started wondering why his pet periscope kept blanking her visual feed.
Right.
I even considered dismissing the Chimp’s suspicions outright: You’re crazy, you’re senile, you’re suffering from bit rot and entropy artifacts. I know these people, none of them would ever—But of course I didn’t know these people. I hadn’t even met most them, for all the millions of years we’d been stuck on the same rock. Not even a bit-rotten Chimp would believe that I could see into thirty thousand souls.
(Twenty-seven thousand. But who’s counting.)
“Sunday?” He’d noticed my silence. “If there’s anything you’d like to share, now is the time.”
“There’s no need to spy,” I said. “I know what’s going on.”
And I told him everything.
I told him about the Rock Worshippers. I told him about Lian—how Gurnier and Laporta and Burkhart had seen the vulnerability in her, tried to recruit her under cover of dead zones and turned backs. How she’d reacted (“badly—well, you saw that much”), and how it had fed her paranoia even though she’d quailed at the prospect of outright rebellion. How she’d confided it all to me—not trusting the Children of Eri, not trusting the Chimp—and how I’d calmed her down and smoothed everything over.
Through it all, Chimp’s dismembered body parts never stopped dancing.
“Thank you,” he said when I’d finished.
I nodded.
“It would be helpful if, in future, you provided me with such information as soon as you acquire it,” he added.
“It was teras ago. It was three people. It was all secondhand, from a—well, you know Lian wasn’t the most reliable source. I don’t know who else might have been involved, or what they were planning. All I know is that at least some of them—objected to you.”
“Do you know why?”
“I only know what she told me. For all I know they figured out Easter Island for themselves, decided that your s
trategic little cull was against the will of their Rock God.”
Chimp was silent for a moment. “I don’t understand their belief in that deity.”
“Nothing to understand. We’re humans. Superstition’s just—wired into us, on some level.”
“Most gods are not so local. I’m the obvious candidate for anyone who needs to find external meaning in shipboard events.”
Fuck. How long had this machine been thinking we should worship it?
“You can’t deny we’ve blown past every metric of mission success from the day we launched. We’ve been—unaccountably lucky. The Children are just looking for a way to square that, and you can’t. Not unless you learned how to fuck with the laws of probability while no one was looking.”
Chimp said nothing.
“For all I know the whole rebellion fizzled and they just lost interest.”
“I can’t afford to assume that.”
“You could always ask them.”
“I couldn’t trust their replies. Also reviving them would be an unacceptable risk; I have no way of knowing how far their plans have progressed.”
I’d feared as much. I’d counted on it.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Deprecation is the safest option.”
“The whole tribe?”
“As you say, there’s no way of knowing how many were involved.”
“But just deprecate. Not kill.”
“It’s the safest option,” it repeated. “Members of that tribe might have attributes that prove vital to future operations. In the meantime they can’t disrupt the mission so long as they’re in stasis.”