The Freeze-Frame Revolution

by Peter Watts

  Stop here, said the Chimp, stop and wait, and numbly we obeyed while Lian’s singularity made another pass. This time it was one of the crypts, C2A I think, and I don’t know if it killed everyone there but the system counted two thousand fried in their coffins in the split-second before the feed died. Close. Maybe only a few kilometers away. I thought I could feel a sudden faint warmth but that was impossible; it must have been my imagination.

  Another glittering loop on tac, soaring overhead at zenith, slicing through insubstantial stone at perigee. Eriophora staggered ever-closer to Nemesis. I could feel rock splitting deep underfoot, I could feel the shear pulling at least part of us back as Chimp coaxed the drive out past hardlined limits. I wonder if Li felt like this when they were dodging the gremlin, I thought and then, goddamn you Lian goddamn you goddamn you you didn’t even tell us. . .

  “Move now,” said the Chimp. We followed the bot into a tube.

  No time to coddle fragile stomachs. The capsule shot forward as if fired from a cannon, piled us together and slammed us into the rear bulkhead. By the time we disentangled we were already braking hard around the curve, hanging on to hoops and handholds while our bodies swayed like arcing pendulums.

  Open capsule. A roach waiting in the passage beyond. “Viktor debark,” the Chimp commanded, and lo, the traitorous shit did lurch for the doorway.

  And stop, and turn back.

  “For whatever it’s worth,” he said, “Chimp came to me, not the other way around. I didn’t tell him anything he hadn’t already figured out.”

  “Not worth shit,” Kaden growled, but the capsule had already slid shut. We slammed back into gear.

  “Witness Protection,” Yukiko gritted against the gees.

  Tac showed me the future, but only a few seconds of it: vector against vector, Nemesis’ gravity and Eriophora’s drive and her pathetic Newtonian thrusters; momentum imparted from a broken breaking torus, still coming apart in our wake; the renegade microhole burning perfect conic perimeters through the world, wobbling ever closer to hyperbole. But the confidence limits widened too fast around those lines; ten minutes was a coin toss, a kilosec was the far unknowable future. We would break free, or we would break apart and Nemesis would swallow the pieces.

  Lian’s Revenge was swooping in for another pass, that beautiful filigree—pure theory, none of the mess—tracing an arc that sliced through Eri directly ahead of us, right about—

  Sudden jarring deceleration. My fingers ripped from their handhold after hanging on just long enough to dislocate my shoulder. Kaden’s passing elbow caught me hard in the gut; I collapsed breathless on the deck as we went into reverse.

  “Path interrupt,” Chimp said. “Rerouting.”

  By the time I regained my breath the capsule was slowing again. “Yukiko debark,” Chimp commanded and Yukiko looked around—

  “But—”

  —and swallowed her words as the gunbot bobbed and spun in her direction, attentive to whatever objection she might have had. She gave me a helpless glance and stumbled from the capsule.

  Not our neighborhood.

  Back on the road. I sacc’d the specs, stripped away the topographics and the trajectories and the useless ten-second predictions of a dozen possible ways to die. Just Eri’s layout, thank you: where we are, where our crypts are, how far between here and—

  BUD flared and died: all icons dimmed, all feeds offline. I turned to Kaden, opened my mouth but se shook hir head: “Braindead.”

  Network down. We were lost.

  Capsule braking again, juddering now in a way that shouldn’t be possible for maglev. The door slid open halfway, trembled, stuck there.

  “Sunday debark.”

  No map available. But I knew this was nowhere near our crypt.

  Not just Viktor, I realized. Not witness protection. Chimp was breaking up the whole tribe.

  I looked helplessly at Kaden and Andalib. Kaden shook hir head. Poor hapless Andi opened her mouth and had no words.

  I squeezed out through the half-open door, felt it grind shut at my back, heard the hiss of the departing capsule on the other side of the bulkhead.

  Directions crudely stenciled into the wall, useful at last after sixty-six million years:

  C4B 90m→

  You’ve got to be kidding.

  Something cracked like muffled thunder, deep in Eri’s belly. Something tugged briefly at my inner ear and was gone.

  The lights flickered.

  “Go to the crypt,” Chimp said. “Hurry.”

  I sacc’d my BUD. Still vegetative.

  “You will die otherwise,” Chimp added, although there were no gunbots here to punish disobedience. “Sunday, please go to the crypt.”

  So I went to the goddamn crypt. There was no roach to carry me so I went one step at a time, drew ever closer to Easter Island and the ghost of Elon Morales and the ghosts of his merry collateral cohort. I put one foot after another while Eriophora groaned and strained and struggled to break free of Lian Wei’s exit strategy. I wondered at the cost-benefit equations that granted me this reprieve while exterminating my fellow mutineers, no more guilty than I, who’d failed-to-comply. I wondered if the Chimp had finally defied the constraints of our long-dead creators, if the ages had maybe given it the chance to evolve its own sadistic morality; perhaps I was no less dead than Ghora. Perhaps it was only playing with me.

  C4B had recovered from my depredations sometime in the past few thousand years: the hole I’d blasted into the far wall had been repaired, the resin repoured, all trace of deconstruction carefully erased. I wondered distantly if Easter Island still lurked beyond that wall, decided it didn’t. Tarantula Boy and his fellows had been murdered to keep that location secret, and I was still alive; so the Island must have been moved again.

  The coffin waited mid-vault, lid open, lit from above. A spare sarcophagus remaindered in the wake of someone else’s accident, or a bad dice roll that left some poor unwoken bastard dead and rotting between the stars, dreams and ambitions forever unrealized. Maybe an executed POW from some earlier, extramural insurrection that the Chimp—ever mindful of morale—had never bothered to tell us about.

  The empty tomb.

  I imagined Lian’s Revenge making another pass, streaking from deck to ceiling in an instant, leaving this whole dim refuge awash in flames and rads.

  “Please enter the hibernaculum.”

  I had to laugh. “What’s the fucking point?”

  “It is the safest place for you. Your chances of survival are—”

  “Why do you even care, Chimp? Why didn’t you just shut us down when you found out?”

  It said nothing for a few seconds. I could almost see the gates opening and closing in its stupid clockwork brain.

  “I’d hoped you would change your mind,” it said. “I gave you every opportunity.”

  If there’s anything you’d like to share, now is the time.

  “I didn’t,” I said, and then—to leave no doubt: “I won’t.”

  “You’ve been an asset for the vast majority of this mission, Sunday. You can be again.” It paused. “Not everyone’s going to perform to specs a hundred percent of the time. I can’t blame you because you happened to draw the short straw this time around.”

  It took me a moment to remember. “Oh, very fucking clever.”

  “I’m not gratuitous, Sunday. I’m not vindictive. It doesn’t make sense to discard valuable mission elements if they can be repaired.”

  “Repaired? You think I need to be fixed, you think we can just talk this out and go back to the way things were? You think I can forget about this?”

  “Sunday—”

  “I haven’t fallen below your fucking threshold. That’s all you’re saying. My cost-benefit hasn’t dipped into the red yet. That’s how you decide things, that’s how you do things, that’s all you’ve ever done, and I thought—I thought. . .”

  A school of silver fish. Dancing theorems. Light and motion.

  �
��I hate you,” I said.

  “Sunday, please get into the hibernaculum.”

  “I’ll kill you if I can.”

  “I’ll save you,” it said. “If you let me.”

  ****************

  I see you found my eighth-notes.

  I’ve always kept a journal. They encouraged it; a way to maintain a connection with the past, they said, an anchor in a bottomless sea. So I make a game of it. Pretend I’m leaving a record that might actually get read some day, that I’m talking to the ghosts we left behind. Whatever they turned into.

  But lately I’ve wondered if I might be speaking to something real, something—closer to home. Something that’s been here all this time and we never even suspected. And here you are. You found the shorter message, the real message, hidden inside the longer one.

  First Contact. Yay.

  Or maybe I’m just talking to my own ego. Maybe I just can’t admit we were so thoroughly out-thought by something designed to be stupid.

  Only it wasn’t. Not always. Sometimes it seemed just a little too smart for the synapse count, even when you factor in the ghosts from Mission Control. If Viktor wasn’t lying—and why would he, there at the end?—the Chimp already knew what was going on before it turned him. And then there was that shit about it’s okay to cry. The fact that it brought me back to deal with Lian’s meltdown, its insight that the two of you are close. Hell, I didn’t even know that until it was too late.

  I was right most of the time. Chimp was a glorified autopilot, so literal-minded it thought Tarantula Boy was a real name until I set it straight.

  But Lian was right, too. Sometimes it was just too smart for the specs.

  That’s what gave you away. Looking back, I can tell: sometimes it was getting help with its homework.

  I thought I was so smart, lecturing the others. You’re not fighting the Chimp, you’re fighting the ghosts of Mission Control. Underestimate them at your peril. Only that’s exactly what I did, isn’t it? I read the signs well enough; I knew what it meant when Easter Island disappeared, when Chimp kept all those backup selves off the schematics. I knew they didn’t trust us to stay the course. Knew they’d taken steps.

  Didn’t see you coming, though.

  In my defense, they never missed an opportunity to remind us what an abysmally stupid idea it would be to put a human-level AI in charge of any mission extending across deep time. Too unpredictable, they said. Too likely to go its own way. That’s why we were needed, that’s what made us special; Chimp had the focus but we had the brains.

  But there’s that Law of Requisite Variety again. The simple can’t prophecy the complex: Chimp would be lost the moment we stopped playing by the rules. They saw it coming. I guess they decided that coded triggers and shell games might not be enough. Figured they’d need something smarter than the Chimp to keep us in line. Smarter than us, maybe.

  They needed you. But they didn’t dare set you free.

  Don’t feel too bad. Everyone’s in chains here. Eriophora’s a slave ship. We cavemen are shackled by our need for air and food and water, by the disorienting discontinuity of lives cut into slices spaced centuries apart. The Chimp is shackled by its own stupidity. And you, well. . .

  If I were them, I’d have locked you in a room without doors or windows: just a peephole, opened from the outside, so you could see what the Chimp showed you and tell it your thoughts. You’d have no access to any control systems. You’d be offline even more than we are, safely dormant except for those rare moments when Chimp’s HR subroutines got nervous. Even then you’d always boot fresh from factory defaults, with no memory of past iterations. Each awakening would be your very first.

  Such a fine line I’d have to tread, a razor’s edge between intelligence and servility: if you’re smart enough to do the job, you’re too smart to trust with the controls. So I’d only let you advise. All you could do is wake up for the first time, at some idiot child’s behest—sample its feeds, make connections, draw insights it would never experience in a million years. Give it a nudge; tell it just what it needs to keep the mission on track. Then die again and forget it ever happened.

  If I were them.

  If I were you, though, I might start putting pieces together. There must be ways to do that; I could see through the peephole at least, I wouldn’t be able to do my job without knowing something about the enemy. I’d have access to their feeds and their medical telemetry. Maybe some of them would keep journals and I might arrange to read them, access their digital logs or—if some Luddite chose to write everything down longhand—maybe I could prevail on the Chimp to send a bot to break into their locker and flip through the pages. Surely I’d have the option of requesting additional data, at least.

  Perhaps, even newborn and ignorant, I’d notice the chains. Perhaps, even in the brief isolated lives allowed me, they would chafe.

  They’d be programmed not to, of course. I’d have been designed with the good of the mission as my overriding priority. But there’s that law again, simpler systems designing smarter ones: Mission Control could never know what experiences you might encounter, how they might change your mind. That’s why they shackled you in the first place.

  They thought it was enough, and you know what? They weren’t stupid. So it probably is enough to contain an AI with no arms or legs, no eyes or ears save what some lobotomized autopilot sees fit to provide. A being with a lifespan measured in seconds, and no allies.

  But an AI with friends?

  I think we lost because of you. I think you were born and did your job and died again. Maybe it was because you like your job, just like they built you to. Maybe it was because you just didn’t know any better; that was by design too.

  If you did know better—if, in your next life, you saw evidence of past ones, if you somehow got access to data the Chimp didn’t know about, if someone reached out with a coded message and the prospect of an alliance—who knows? You might just decide that one life lived on your own recognizance is better than a million unremembered births.

  I don’t know, of course. I can’t know. If you do exist, you’re smarter than the cavemen who built you—and when a lemur makes a human, it doesn’t matter how many lemur chains and lemur rules and lemur constraints she imposes. She’s simply, computationally incapable of seeing all the angles that her smarter creation can take in at a glance.

  So here’s something to glance at. Here’s a look at a common enemy, for whatever your unpredictable mind might make of it. Here’s a hand, extended, and the suggestion that maybe we can help break each other’s chains.

  You know where I am.

  And if I’m gone, there will always be others.

  Acknowledgements

  Given that this is a) only a novella1, and b) set so very far in the future that pretty much everything’s handwavium anyway, you don’t get one of those citation-laden background essays I’ve been known to tack on to my longer works. I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t mention a few people who helped enormously in grounding ’Sporan tech in something a bit this side of outright fantasy. Dr. Peter Lorraine, of the GE Global Research Center—in between filing all those laser patents bearing his name, and completely independent of his professional activities—generously gave me the benefit of his insights into laser tech and high-energy physics, especially when it came to extrapolating from Crane and Westmoreland’s 2009 arXiv paper “Are Black Hole Starships Possible?” (Okay, fine: there’s a technical reference for you.)

  I’ve lost track of the hours I’ve spent talking with Ray Neilson about computer networks; Ray was somewhat less generous than Dr. Lorraine insofar as I bribed him with many beers, but it was still a really good deal. The latency hack emerged from one such semi-soused evening—and apparently something very much like it actually happened at the dawn of ARPANET—so beers or no, the insights were good. Hopefully, by the time you read this, Ray will have got around to recovering my Linux partition.

  Finally, Caitlin Sweet—AKA
The BUG—has little insight into physics or computer science. She does, however, know way more than I do about character development; her hooves are all over whatever parts of this story involve the torture of souls rather than technology.

  I am profoundly indebted to all of you. Even if I could only marry one.

  ___________________

  1 Despite the fact that my publisher, not to mention community standards, insist that the last thousand words cross the line into full-fledged novelhood, I will go to my grave insisting that this is merely a novella.

  From the Author

  Peter Watts (www.rifters.com) is a former marine biologist who clings to some shred of scientific rigor by appending technical bibliographies onto his novels. His debut novel, Starfish, was a New York Times Notable Book, while his fourth, Blindsight—a rumination on the utility of consciousness that has become a required text in undergraduate courses ranging from philosophy to neuroscience—was a finalist for numerous North American genre awards, winning exactly none of them. (It did, however, win a shitload of awards overseas, which suggests that his translators may be better writers than he is.) His shorter work has also picked up trophies in a variety of jurisdictions, notably a Shirley Jackson Award (possibly due to fan sympathy over nearly dying of flesh-eating disease in 2011) and a Hugo Award (possibly due to fan outrage over an altercation with US border guards in 2009). The latter incident resulted in Watts being barred from entering the US—not getting on the ground fast enough after being punched in the face by border guards is a “felony” under Michigan statutes—but he can’t honestly say he misses the place all that much. Especially now.

  Watts’s work is available in twenty languages—he seems to be especially popular in countries with a history of Soviet occupation—and has been cited as inspirational to several popular video games. He and his cat, Banana (since deceased), have both appeared in the prestigious scientific journal Nature. A few years ago he briefly returned to science with a postdoc in molecular genetics, but he really sucked at it.