Scratch Monkey

by Charles Stross

  A squishing of soft gaskets and a clicking of latches bought her back to full awareness. Yawning, her ears popping from the pressure differential, Oshi pulled herself hand-over-hand into the cramped, dim-lit space of the factory. It was building a duplicate gatecoder, unpacked and expanded for operational status. Placentory airlocks covered the walls of the control room, lending it an appearance like the inside of an insect's compound eye. Behind them the automated nanofactories worked in a haze of straw-coloured fluid, reconstructing humanity. She felt oppressed by the implication of their existence; being here is like being a spectator during a birth, she thought. It was an alien feeling, a reminder that humans were – when it came down to definitions – merely a more compact kind of replicant factory. Breeders.

  Sweating uncomfortably, she hung head-down above the placentory windows. Wisdom dumped a mass of raw life support data across her field of vision; she stared in fascination at the graphics, indicators of life being bootstrapped. Briefly she harboured a conceit that she was actually a machine, at home among the uterine technologies of the medicentre.

  Childbearing was something Oshi had never expected to undergo. When she had been a child she had expected to die, insofar as she had expected anything: and later, her Superbright owners had deliberately supressed any maternal inclinations she might have succumbed to. They had stripped her down and tuned her up like a machine, to become the mother of battle, not the mother of soldiers. Now she was to be both, but only by proxy. She sighed and looked at her dim reflection in the wall screen. There were bags under her eyes; this was the second day running that she'd had bloody diarrhoea. She wasn't going to die, but she felt like it. She felt ancient – a very soft machine.

  “Talk to me,” she said. “Online systems?”

  “You called?” answered the machine.The voice came from the wall behind her. Her neck twinged in irritation; she resisted the urge to turn her head.

  “Is this a sentient sub-system?”

  “Class structure undefined,” replied the voice. Good, she thought. So the medical monitor system was dumb.

  “List neobirths in progress,” she requested. The lights dimmed and the wall in front of her lit up in cool red relief. There were nine tanks; in four of them floated a perfectly formed adult skeleton at the centre of a haze of blood-tinged connective tissues.

  “Components present are derived from download specifications comprising alpha twelve program. Calceous support-structures already formed for initial batch of four. Cellular assembly progressing nominally on basal infrastructure. Individual subjects are referenced to your contacts database as Boris, Raisa, Mikhail, Lorma, Mai Winh ...” the control system continued, listing about twenty names; Boris had been very explicit in his requests. This was to be the strategic command crew, travelling together on one ship. It looked about right, Oshi noted; all the bones were adult-sized. High-speed downloading required a radically new way of growing tissues; the gatecoder fiddled with tissue differentiation mechanisms to build a new body as fast as possible. The skeleton came first, plugged into support systems, then a cardiovascular network capable of supporting the rapid growth of new organs. Twenty years of growth could be compressed into a matter of weeks.

  “Speed it up,” Oshi ordered. “I want them hatched as soon as possible. Don't accept any instructions from anyone but myself, delivered in person in this room, until the current downloads are reborn. Then prepare a download schedule for all uploads nominated by Mikhail, to follow at the optimum interval relative to one another. Distribution between gatecoder modules according to optimum load balance and tactical bias. Send it to me via wisdom when it's ready. Further directives will follow.” She finished at a gabble, sweat standing out on her brow. We're committed now. Five hundred soldiers coming down the chute, and nowhere to go but out.

  She straightened up, and left the room as fast as possible. Which was why she wasn't there when the control system spoke quietly to the empty air: “Alert. There is an error condition associated with subject Raisa Marikova. Codon error: illegal nanostructure is associated with subject's homoeobox structure. Phenotype error: subject homoeobox specification contains abnormal neurological structure. Do you want me to proceed ..?”

  There was no reply.

  The Gatecoder waited for a long time, repeating the message occasionally. Finally, when it received no further instructions and could wait no longer, it resolved the problem by checking its default decision set. Then it began to put together the first body.

  The chosen vehicle was an in-system shuttle. It was a stubby cylinder, propelled by a pulsed fusion reaction; fast, simple, brutally non-virtual. Oshi suited up to inspect it from outside, floating in the vacuum of the main docking area. She hung before it, suspended on monofilament cables from the docking hub and the side wall like a spider webbing the bell of an enormous flower.

  The Bronstein was a true space ship; not some hyped-up atmospheric shockwave rider, but a freighter capable of going anywhere in the system. It could operate with or without a human crew, having been designed for maintaining the cloud of drone platforms dispersed throughout the Ridgegap system. Decades ago, those platforms had pumped a steady stream of raw materials down into the gravity well of Turing. Some had been assembled into this colony. Others had been diverted in-system to the venusiform world Wirth, their impact showering the clouds of that planet with tailored algae. Days ago Oshi had given the order to have the Bronstein and its sister ships powered up and readied for flight. Where to go was an interesting question; the Ultrabright attack craft was driftings towards a parking orbit around Turing, its monster engine powered down. But if it changed its mind and began to move once they'd launched on a rendezvous course, things could get very unpleasant indeed.

  Sensors on the inside of her helmet visor monitored her breathing mix: a concealed fan churned quietly, forcing dry air past her sweating face. Too many things could go wrong in deep space. Planetary life was inherently fail-safe: big, comforting biospheres could recover from those little course-corrections that triggered mass extinctions. But this fleet of attacking minnows was inherently vulnerable. All the target had to do was move out of their reach and ...

  Stop worrying, she berated herself. It's a dumb attack drone, just a million times bigger than anything we'd build. If it doesn't see us it's not going to come looking. We're fleas, we can sneak up on it. Or die trying. She had a sudden, ghastly vision: eighty ships launched into the void with insufficient reaction mass to return and nothing much to go back to anyway. The enemy ship, listening to the orders of a silent voice, fired up its black-hole powered drive, squashed atoms into fragments of exotic energy, accelerated outwards. The eighty ships drifted endlessly out into the Kuiper belt on a long, slow orbit that took their mummified crews ten thousand years out into the starry night before falling back sunwards.

  Oshi tugged on her monofilament reels, adjusting her position relative to the wall of the docking bay. The ugly vision receded. She chuckled tiredly to herself and spooled in some cable, dragging herself round the command module of the spaceship. A spider, dangling from a fullerene fibre web. The airlock swung into view. She closed in, motors humming in her suit as she zeroed in on it. Presently the lock turned into a trapdoor, swinging up beneath her feet to latch into place with a metallic clank.

  There was a puff of vapour as the cramped lock chamber flooded with air; snowflakes glittered briefly in the chill. Oshi waited for pressure equalization, then checked the gas mix before she opened the inner lock door. Uneasily aware of her vulnerability, she commanded her wisdom to log all changes to the life-support environment while she was aboard the ship. Safety in paranoia, she thought ironically. If only there was some other way ...

  The interior of the Bronstein wasn't configured for gravity: under the stress of even half a gee the hull would concertina like a tube of foil. Still, there was enough volume for one person to live in for years. Its cylindrical segments were split by hexagonal blue grids with spidery furniture clip
ped to them. Storage lockers lined every outer wall, adding to the shielding thickness of the hull. Oshi made her way to the command module and let the gentle hammock tie her into place. The main display sparked into life, shifting colours like a rainbow. She grinned, hollow-eyed before the light that washed across her face.

  “List shipboard systems status,” she requested.

  “Ship personna is not active at present. General status is green for launch level three and holding at T minus one thousand seconds. Exceptions to status occur in three subsystems –” the bootstrap autopilot rattled on emotionlessly, flashing through entity-relation diagrams with faulty nodes highlighted in blinking red. Oshi followed it with half her mind. Bronstein, she mused; what would you say if you'd lived to see this day ... She'd learned about him, and the others the ships were named after, under the tuition of the Superbrights. Lev Bronstein had been in the grave for over fourteen hundred years. An interesting historical curio, prophet of a religion that exploded from birth to death in less than two centuries: someone had seen fit to resurrect his memories for this ship. Like the sister-craft, the Kennedy and the Thatcher and the Hitler ... the entire fleet was named after the charismatic dictators of an historical era. Had they ever dreamed of their heirs overrunning the galaxy, taking the stars by storm? Oshi blinked and concentrated on the ship-status readings.

  “– anomaly in flow-rate through coolant circuit three indicative of probable pump fail-urrre ...” the voice of the autopilot suddenly slurred, like a mechanical transcription device running down. “ Service interrupt: systems coming up. Sentience will be resumed shortly. Incoming message: hello Oshi.”

  “You again.” Oshi glared at the face in the display tank, relieved that it wasn't a major systems failure.

  “Me.” The disembodied head nodded. “Had some trouble with synchronicity; we're living at a fluctuating timebase in here. There's only a thousand of us drawing unlimited process time allocation, but the rest of Pascal is a real meat farm. It was never intended to hold a billion evacuees. Seriously thrashing, halfway to hyperslow time already. We're waiting for your status, Oshi.”

  “Oh, that.” Oshi rubbed her brow wearily. “The status ...” all of a sudden a flicker of fire returned to her eyes. “Looks good. Downloads are proceeding: if the tapeworm doesn't learn to sing in time, well ... I've got a little treat in store for it when we leave. What's new at your end?” She watched the display alertly.

  Boris looked away from her with disembodied eyes. “We think it's turning critical. We're not sure yet, but we figure we know where the Ultrabright ship's come from. System about fifty light years core-ward. Anyway there's a bit of inference ... we figure it's getting ready to listen for something. That's why it's drifting; when it fires up that drive it kicks out enough hard radiation to obscure an incoming broadcast. It's waiting for a download. A big download. Real soon now.”

  “How long?” Oshi asked calmly. Palms sweating, brute metabolism scavenging excitement from glands and nerves she had long since ceased to pay attention to –

  “We don't know.” Boris spoke slowly and clearly. “Best guess is within six months. It's in high orbit around Turing now. It just made an aerobraking pass – should have seen that coming. The astrophysics team think it's generating another black hole. They also expect Wirth to detonate pretty soon. The hole it dropped through Wirth's lithosphere is evaporating, losing energy through Hawking radiation. When it goes it will release the mass energy of the last hundred kilotonnes of mass in about a hundred milliseconds. When that happens, we loose our last assets apart from the colony and Pascal Dreamtime.We need to launch soon, Oshi.”

  “Ahh.” Oshi watched Boris through half-closed eyes. “Two days should suffice, I think.”

  “Good.”

  “What has Mik come up with?” she asked, opening her eyes.

  “Same as before: we hijack the ship, download our entire Dreamtime into it, and move it on out of the system. But the specifics are a lot more concrete now. We've got a think tank running a simulation of what an Ultrabright berserker looks like from the inside. We've got five hundred soldiers uploaded and unfrozen, in training. They'll run the attack drones locally. We need the meat-body fleet on site; Pascal will be thirty light-seconds away when we make rendezvous. That's too far for remote control, and we can't be sure of taking out the berserker with a one minute time lag in the loop. Anyway, Lorma's team have been working on the architecture. It probably follows a standard Expansion processor design: modular, scalable, universal symbolic microcode at the bottom of the abstraction stack. We've been inventing viruses. Really low-level stuff designed to tip it into NP-stasis. Idea is, we get just one drone in where it counts then patch into the main communications bus. Then reboot, and we find ourselves in posession of one portable Dreamtime.”

  “What happens if we're wrong, and there's already an Ultrabright downloaded into it?” asked Oshi.

  Boris stared at her. “Then God eats our brains, of course.” His head faded from view in a blur of increasing granularity, phasing into a featureless blob of voxels. “I'll let you get the pre-flight finished. Call me when you're ready.”

  Oshi looked at herself in the mirror and pulled a face. Stress and radiation sickness had drawn strange lines across her forehead. She shut her mouth and glanced aside; the feeling that she was being watched persisted until she looked up. I'm g etting too old for this sort of thing, she thought. Need a new body. New identity, new life. Rinse the old memories down the bit bucket. She didn't dare think about what she'd do, if – when – she convinced her inner censor that she had completed her task. What she'd do when it discharged her from Superbright indenture. It hovered over her like a sword suspended by a hair: a sense of being watched by the ghost of her own lost past ...

  Somewhere below her a wire-cage hauled a large cargo pod towards the open front end of the Bronstein. She felt the jolt as docking spines meshed, but she had a distraction: Wisdom was downloading the control set for the ship in a flurry of memes and data objects. Oh Ivan she thought, this would have been something for you. You always loved flying. A few metres away, a tank full of partly congealed skeletons and nanoassemblers was plugging itself into the shipboard blood supply. Oshi looked round again, found herself trapped in the spartan sanitary module between the exercise controllers and the lavatory. A moment of fear shook her to the core: am I losing my memory already?

  She grunted in self-denial, then squeezed through the hatch of the cramped module and made her way to the bridge.

  The flight deck was a cramped cylinder two metres in diameter and five metres long. Free-fall webs hung opposite a wall-sized screen; there were no physical controls. She anchored herself at the mid-point and looked at it. At present the screen was feeding through a view from the hull retinas; an expanse of grey hull metal. It was as if the ship lay at the bottom of a well the size of a world, with stars visible in the sky beyond the top of the shaft.

  As she shuffled into place, a window blinked for attention. She stared at it in mild annoyance, broken out of her reverie by the golden flash. “Yes?” she asked.

  “Oshi.” The voice didn't belong to Boris. She jolted upright, attentive.

  “Who is it?” she asked, trying to sound calm. The screen cleared to show a pale face. Raisa.

  “Me, Oshi. I wondered if you were lonely.”

  Oshi bit back an acid reply, recognising her agressive sarcasm for what it was. “Not particularly,” she said as casually as possible, trying to drown the thunder of her heart in a well of calm.

  “Then maybe your biotelemetry is lying. How's it been?”

  She stared at Raisa's image. “What do you expect me to say? Do you remember what happened, or did anyone tell you?” Her mask slipped for a second and her reflection shimmered in the screen, naked in its anger and pain. “I saw your corpse. The tapeworm tried to use it as a lure for me.” She stared at her until her image blurred again: with growing surprise she realised that the problem was not in the screen bu
t in her tear ducts.

  “Oshi, what can I say?” Raisa's tone of sympathy sounded transparently insincere; Oshi wondered for a moment what she'd seen in the woman. She felt curiously distant from her emotions as she watched her.

  “You can start by not saying anything about it,” she suggested. “If you had anything else you wanted to talk about ...”

  She hesitated for a second or two. “I did,” Raisa said. “But it's also about what we're doing. About the plan.”

  “Yes, well. So you've got plans. Who hasn't?” Oshi tried to keep sarcasm out of her voice.

  “Stop fooling. I mean the long-term plan, Oshi, where we're all going. Out of this system – the stuff Boris is feeding us. There's a problem. I don't see how the hell we're going to get away with it in the long term. You follow me?”

  “Yes. But if all goes well we will meet in another two months, in the flesh. Maybe we can talk about it then?”

  “Oshi!” Raisa's face twisted with exasperation. “It's not like that. I'm not doing this to mess up your ego! Look, I'm trying to help everybody. Not just in the colony, but outside it; everyone. Hijacking a starship is cool. It may work ... but what then? We're going to be sitting at ground zero. The Superbrights will try to stop us. If what you told me is true ... where do we go from here? Your old masters won't take kindly to a starship full of renegades spreading the news of their crimes. Have you ever seen what happens when someone declares war on the Superbrights?”

  She paused expectantly. Oshi felt himself gripped by a nauseous tension. “I can't do anything about that yet, Raisa. Got too much to think about as it is. Maybe later?”

  “They'll have booby-trapped the colony. Somehow. They're insidious. Even if they never heard of us, there'll be some kind of trap.”