The Freeze-Frame Revolution

by Peter Watts

  And so the Children of Eri would simply sleep away eternity, never again to be called on deck—barring some unforeseen need whose likelihood was just high enough to spare them from outright extermination. In that, at least, I could take some measure of comfort.

  I might have also taken comfort from the thought that it wouldn’t even matter, if everything went according to plan. Once we were running the place we’d be able to thaw out whoever we pleased, whenever we liked. At the time, though, my gut wasn’t quite ready to believe in such rosy scenarios.

  “Thank you for being honest with me,” Chimp said—and as the lid came down, I swear I heard something approaching real sadness in that synthetic voice. I remember thinking that maybe the machine was experiencing regret at the need to put down its pets. Maybe a bit of heartbreak that those in its care should prove so ungrateful.

  Now, of course, I know better.

  THE TEST FIRE WENT OFF without a hitch. Chimp trickled a few Watts into the Uterus, watched all emitters fire one more time in perfect sync, and started a thirty-minute countdown to our first live birth in a star’s age. Sometime in the next fifteen minutes it would have noted the passage of Ellin Ballo’s transponder through the mezzanine, en route to the bomb shelter; from that point on, Graser 172 ran just slightly ahead of its time. (Ellin could have actually been the one to do that, for all the difference it made. But no way was Lian going to sit this one out.)

  The Chimp failed to report anything amiss.

  We drifted into the shelter in ones and twos, going through motions, obeying protocols, taking unnecessary refuge behind extra layers of rock and shielding in the hope that any catastrophic malfunction would fall somewhere between lethally radioactive and outright asteroid-smashing destruction. Yukiko and Jahaziel were already there when I arrived, networked into some private game, but they were playing on autopilot; nobody’s mind was on anything but imminent assassination. Kaden arrived after me. Ghora.

  “Glad you could make it,” I said.

  Ghora offered up a grim smile that said, Wouldn’t miss it.

  Lian, wearing Ellin’s transponder, arrived a few moments later: almost ancient by now, all sinew and white hair and focused bloodlust. She moved as if spring-loaded—an exile on day pass from the heavy zone—and glanced around the compartment. “Guess we’re all here.”

  All those decades in the dark, I mused for the thousandth time. Planning, maneuvering, sacrificing everything for this one imminent goal. What happens when we achieve it, Li? How will it feel to have used so much of your life straining against these chains that it was almost spent by the time you broke them?

  Ghora turned back to the door: a slab half a meter thick, with another half-meter’s worth of shielding recessed into the bulkheads beyond to seal it in once it had sealed us in. He hesitated at the sound of approaching footsteps.

  Andalib Laporta squeezed past. “Just in time, I see.”

  Andalib was not part of the revolution.

  We’d done what we could to stack the shift with allies but the Chimp had its own selection algos, and there was a limit to how much even a favored pet could slip into the mix before it started looking suspicious. We’d settled for tweaking the huddle roster: conspirators in the port bomb shelter, innocent uninitiated in the starboard.

  Andalib was not supposed to be here.

  “Will Cory be joining us?” I asked her. They’d been together since Carina, and they were both on deck.

  “Please,” she said. “Speak not that shithead’s name in my presence.”

  Ohhhkay.

  Ghora pulled the hatch closed. From behind, the sound of last-ditch shielding grinding into place.

  Six hundred corsecs to go. Ten minutes. We watched tactical readouts on the wall, glanced occasionally at the Chimp-eye in the ceiling. We exchanged meaningful looks.

  Andalib was looking strangely at the ancient being in our midst. She didn’t seem to recognize Lian Wei, although we’d all met during training. A long time ago, though. And people aged at different rates depending on who thawed, how often. Maybe it wouldn’t be an issue. Maybe Andalib assumed Lian was from another tribe, chalked her presence up to Chimp’s cultural-exchange program.

  I hoped like hell she wouldn’t try introducing herself.

  “Ignition in five hundred corsecs.”

  The Chimp, counting down to its own annihilation.

  Lian’s eyes glittered in sunken sockets. Ghora shifted his weight, fists clenched at his sides. Yukiko and Jahaziel stared at the deck, all pretense of gaming abandoned.

  Poor innocent Andalib chewed her lip. I wondered how she’d react when we took back control in her name. I wondered if she would be relieved, or frightened, or grateful for her liberation.

  I wondered if she’d forgive us. If all of them would.

  “Ignition in four hundred corsecs.”

  The Chimp had one hundred seconds to live. One hundred seconds until that time-traveling graser fired prematurely, punched through a copse of clandestinely weakened grazing mirrors and baked our oppressor like a moth in magma. One hundred seconds—plus maybe a millisecond or two—until our carefully groomed successor assumed the throne, and handed us the keys to our own destiny.

  Fifty corsecs, now.

  Sixty-six million years.

  “Ignition in three hundred corsecs.”

  Lian frowned. Green icons across the board. No misfires reported.

  What the hell?

  The Chimp should have died ten seconds ago.

  We said nothing aloud, spoke volumes with our eyes: Did you time it wrong? / The timing was perfect / Then why hasn’t— / I don’t know, something’s—

  Andalib looked at us. “What?”

  “Ignition is proceeding on schedule,” the Chimp said. “Lian’s bypass has been disabled.”

  Nobody said anything for a long moment.

  “Bypass?” said Andalib.

  “I see you, Lian,” the Chimp said. “I know your face.”

  Andalib frowned. “Didn’t Lian—what—?”

  Lian closed her eyes. “Shut the fuck up. We were doing this for you.”

  “Doing what?”

  But Lian’s eyes were open again, and they blazed. She stepped forward, brazen, nothing to lose. “That right, Chimp? You know things?” She pulled a hand torch from the folds of her tunic, pointed it at the ceiling pickup. “You know this?”

  She fired. The lens slagged with a sizzle of electricity and a shimmer of heat.

  Andalib was on her feet. “What the hell? Are—”

  “This is bullshit.” Lian shook her head, disgusted, furious. “I’ve seen the code, I studied the decision trees until my eyeballs bled. It does not bother with faces while your inlays are online, and I never—”

  “So what?” Kaden spread hir hands. “The plan’s fucked. Chimp saw it coming somehow. You think shooting out one lousy camera is going to—”

  “What plan!” Andi cried.

  “Chimp did not see it coming.” Lian shook her head; her eyes glistened. “We were careful, we were so fucking careful. And it’s a moron, it’s just not smart enough to—”

  “Smarter than we are, apparently.”

  “So how do you explain—”

  “Maybe there was noise in the transponder signal—”

  “Oh Christ we are so fucked what is he gonna do to us—”

  “It had help.” Lian glared around the bomb shelter. “Someone sold us out.”

  The Chimp’s Pet. Where else would they look?

  “Listen,” I said.

  Eriophora is awash in sounds discernible only by their absence, sounds so omnipresent that they don’t even register until they fade. We all heard the silence. We all heard what was missing.

  “Jesus,” Jahaziel said. “He’s turned off the air.”

  Seven of us. Forty-five cubic meters, twenty-one percent oxygen. A meter of lead and depleted uranium blocking the exit.

  Five hours before we suffocated. Maybe.

&n
bsp; “What have you done?” Andi whispered. “What are you doing?”

  “Chimp,” said someone else. “This isn’t necessary.”

  A disembodied voice. An intercom voice.

  “There’s been enough brute force. On all sides. We can resolve this peacefully.”

  It took a moment to recognize that voice.

  “The party is armed,” Chimp pointed out. “They could do significant damage if left conscious.”

  “And if you knock them out now, they’ll be that much less inclined to see things your way the next time they return to consciousness. Unless you plan on killing them outright.”

  That voice didn’t belong to anyone who was supposed to be on deck right now.

  “And you’re not planning on doing that, because you must know these aren’t the only people who have issues with your management style. You kill these people and you’ll be dealing with blowback on every waking build for the next billion years.”

  I knew it, though.

  “Let me talk to them, Chimp. Face to face. They won’t hurt me.”

  Oh, I knew it all right.

  “Okay,” said the Chimp.

  The stone rolled from the tomb. The hatch swung open. The bot that floated through had accessories I’d never seen on a bot before, and one I had. It took up station just inside the entrance, panned its laser back and forth across our trapped asses as if keeping a beat.

  Viktor Heinwald brought up the rear.

  “You fucker,” Lian said. “You Judas. You miserable traitorous piece of shit.”

  “I just saved your lives,” Viktor said gently.

  “You only changed the way it kills us.”

  The bot hovered off Judas’ shoulder like a guardian angel, its soft tick tick ticking barely discernible above the breathing of meat and reawakened ventilators.

  “Come on,” he said. “It’s over. Let’s just sit it out and go to bed.”

  “Fuck that,” Ghora snarled. “We’re deprecated the moment we hit the crypt.”

  “That’s not necessarily true,” the Chimp said. “I don’t demand perfection. I don’t even desire it; your initiative and unpredictability are essential elements of the mission. All I ask is that you learn from your mistakes. Ignition in one hundred corsecs.”

  Lian ignored it. “Why did you do it, Vik? What could that goddamn machine possibly offer to make you sell us out after all this? Shorter shifts? Better VR?”

  “Blue dwarfs,” I realized. “Heat Death.”

  Viktor said nothing.

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” I shook my head, astonished I hadn’t seen it all along. “Did it sweeten the deal for you, Vikky? Maybe promised to extend your downs, optimize your ups, stretch you out far as you could go—all the way to the end of time? Did you believe that miserable fucker?”

  Ghora looked from Viktor to me, me to Viktor. Yukiko looked like she was starting to catch on.

  “Man, when they built you they really got it right.” I resisted the urge to whistle in appreciation. “You’re even more optimized than me.”

  “Sunday,” Lian said.

  “He wants to be deprecated,” I told her. “Wants to know how it plays out. That’s his whole life, his—epic quest. It’s how he justifies the fact that he didn’t just walk away when he had the chance.” I had to smile. Had I really been arrogant enough to think myself the only one who’d had doubts? The only one who needed a bit of extra incentive? “He wants to know how the story ends, and we were about to tear it up halfway through.”

  She looked at me strangely. “I’m glad.”

  “Glad?”

  “That it wasn’t you. I’d hoped, if it came to that. . .” Lian nodded, slowly. Her gaze flickered, steadied. She turned it on her betrayer. “And are you feeling better now, Vik? Safer, now that your epic quest is back on track?”

  “Ignition in forty corsecs.”

  “Oh for fucks’ sake Chimp just shut up!” Yuki barked.

  “No, no, let it talk.” Li smiled faintly. She seemed strangely calm for someone who’d just watched so many centuries of careful conspiracy crumble to dust. “Enjoy that feeling, Vik.” She stepped toward him: the bot surged forward a few centimeters, muzzle quivering.

  Lian didn’t take her eyes off Viktor. “Enjoy it while it lasts. Which should be another—”

  “Ignition in twenty corsecs.”

  “—more or less.”

  Viktor frowned. “Li, you do understand, yes? I disabled the time-jump.”

  “I believe you,” she said. “But I bet that’s all you did.”

  “What?”

  “Ignition in ten corsecs.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” She put a hand on his cheek. “We’re dead anyway. All we get to choose is the exit strategy.”

  “Five. . .”

  She stood on tiptoe, whispered—

  “. . .four. . .”

  “I forgive you.”

  “. . .three. . .”

  —and kissed him.

  “. . .two. . .”

  Viktor blanched. “Chimp—”

  “. . .one. . .”

  And something kicked us hard in the side.

  There’s a sound in the archives: mournful and lonely, like the sinking of a ship or the slow cracking fall of a giant redwood. It’s the voice of a sea creature, vaster than anything that ever lived on land. Once, long long ago, it filled the ocean with its sounds. Back then people seemed to think of it as a kind of song.

  The sound Eriophora made was a little like what might have come from such a creature, screaming in pain.

  The hatch slammed shut. Red icons sprayed across my BUD like arterial spatter. Down tilted, and split into two parts. The weaker pulled us off-balance, whispered up the wall and across the ceiling and faded away. The stronger did not move, and kept us anchored to the deck.

  I heard a soft thump at my side and turned to see Lian Wei sprawled bonelessly across the floor, a perfect cauterized hole smoking in the center of her forehead. Viktor’s bot hovered restless at the door, guiltless and lethal. So this is what happens, I thought distantly, when cost-benefit drops below threshold. Somehow I’d expected greater subtlety.

  “Stay calm,” Chimp told us against the rising shouts and panic, against muffled sirens sounding out in the corridor. “Stay calm. Stay—”

  I didn’t recognize that alarm. I’d never heard it bef—yes, yes I had. Way back in training: a proximity alert. I’d never heard it used in-flight, though.

  “There’s been an incident,” Chimp reported and I thought, No shit, really? because I’d been tagging those bloody icons fast as I could, opening one window and then another, building an ever-growing palimpsest of catastrophe in my head.

  Down in the Uterus: a great smoking hole in the firing chamber, rads off the scale. The log said Singularity achieved but it wasn’t floating in the core like it was supposed to be, and it hadn’t left via the birth canal as it had been designed to. It had shot out at an angle, punched a proton-sized hole through the containment hoops, exited stage right leaving a scalding mix of Hawking and gamma in its wake. It had slipped effortlessly through seven kilometers of solid rock and escaped into the void.

  How the fuck—

  The hatch unlocked, swung wide. “Please follow the bot,” Chimp said with utmost calm. “We have a small window of—”

  Another exploding icon: aft ventral bridge suddenly offline, and a heat spike under one of the fab caches. Something about a forest fire, an instantaneous explosive ignition of five hundred thousand cubic meters of air and cellulose and vaporized machinery. . .

  “Fuck you!” Ghora yelled, “I’m not going anywh—” And he wasn’t, because now he was on the deck next to Lian, a cauterized crease along his left cheek ending in a wet steaming socket where his eye used to be.

  The bot turned and ticked.

  “There’s little time to argue,” the Chimp said. “Please follow the bot.”

  We followed. I stumbled into the corridor with everyon
e else, trying to keep up with the icons blooming in my head. (Somewhere deep aft, dimly registered: the rumble of awakening thrusters.) Singularity ignited, but not quite to specs: realized mass just a fraction too low—

  Lian. Oh Lian, you crazy bitch.

  Her hacked graser hadn’t fired prematurely. It hadn’t fired at all.

  And when 242 out of 243 apocalypse beams shot simultaneously at that precise central point, the vectors almost balanced. When one out of 243 grasers hadn’t fired, all that explosive mass-energy pushing out found one small spot that didn’t push back quite so hard. . .

  There’d been a Plan B after all.

  As simple as a clock and a laser, maybe, a tiny sun-hot beam to cut 172’s powerline at the very last moment. There wouldn’t have been much room for error: a photon’s trip to the end of the circuit and back. A microsec, maybe two. More than that and the Chimp would’ve caught it and canceled the burn.

  She wouldn’t even have had to build an active trigger for the damn thing, just set it to go off regardless. If Plan A carried the day, no harm done; a fried line to a device that had already served its purpose.

  If Plan A failed . . .

  Now the newborn smaller singularity was doing a crazy carousel dance around the ancient larger one that drove the ship. Both looped chaotically towards Nemesis. Tactical scribbled a tracery of conics with too many foci moving way too fast, threads of amber and green, dotted and continuous, staggering ever-deeper into tidal gradients that would tear us to rubble long before we hit the event horizon. Eri rolled ponderously on some halfassed axis; one of our freshly minted gates rose in my sky like a jagged steel rainbow, a great thick hoop of angles and alloys slewing up and left across the horizon.

  The proximity alert, I remembered. The thrusters. But they’d fired too late against too much mass, and the vectors were just too fucking skewed: rock ground against alloy and suddenly the sky was full of tinfoil, tumbling across the heavens in a slow-motion blizzard. The gate fell ponderously to stern, bleeding metal; we lumbered to starboard, bleeding atmosphere.