Firefall

by Peter Watts

  "We can afford to bide our time. We can afford to not push it."

  "Ah. So even though we could maybe handle it now, you want to wait until it graduates from covert to invulnerable." Szpindel shuddered, set down his coffee. "Where'd you get your military training again? Sporting Chance Academy?"

  Bates ignored the jibe. "The fact that Rorschach's still growing may be the best reason to leave it alone for a while. We don't have any idea what the—mature, I guess—what the mature form of this artefact might be. Sure, it hid. Lots of animals take cover from predators without being predators, especially young ones. Sure, it's—evasive. Doesn't give us the answers we want. But maybe it doesn't know them, did you consider that? How much luck would you have interrogating a Human embryo? Adult could be a whole different animal."

  "Adult could put our asses through a meatgrinder."

  "So could the embryo for all we know." Bates rolled her eyes. "Jesus, Isaac, you're the biologist. I shouldn't have to tell you how many shy reclusive critters pack a punch when they're cornered. Porcupine doesn't want any trouble, but he'll still give you a faceful of quills if you ignore the warning."

  Szpindel said nothing. He slid his coffee sideways along the concave tabletop, to the very limit of his reach. The liquid sat there in its mug, a dark circle perfectly parallel to the rim but canted slightly towards us. I even thought I could make out the merest convexity in the surface itself.

  Szpindel smiled faintly at the effect.

  James cleared her throat. "Not to downplay your concerns, Isaac, but we've hardly exhausted the diplomatic route. And at least it's willing to talk, even if it's not as forthcoming as we'd like."

  "Sure it talks," Szpindel said, eyes still on the leaning mug. "Not like us."

  "Well, no. There's some—"

  "It's not just slippery, it's downright dyslexic sometimes, you noticed? And it mixes up its pronouns."

  "Given that it picked up the language entirely via passive eavesdropping, it's remarkably fluent. In fact, from what I can tell they're more efficient at processing speech than we are."

  "Gotta be efficient at a language if you're going to be so evasive in it, eh?"

  "If they were human I might agree with you," James replied. "But what appears to us as evasion or deceit could just as easily be explained by a reliance on smaller conceptual units."

  "Conceptual units?" Bates, I was beginning to realize, never pulled up a subtitle if she could help it.

  James nodded. "Like processing a line of text word by word, instead of looking at complete phrases. The smaller the units, the faster they can be reconfigured; it gives you very fast semantic reflexes. The down side is that it's difficult to maintain the same level of logical consistency, since the patterns within the larger structure are more likely to get shuffled."

  "Whoa." Szpindel straightened, all thoughts of liquids and centipetal force forgotten.

  "All I'm saying is, we aren't necessarily dealing with deliberate deception here. An entity who parses information at one scale might not be aware of inconsistencies on another; it might not even have conscious access to that level."

  "That's not all you're saying."

  "Isaac, you can't apply Human norms to a—"

  "I wondered what you were up to." Szpindel dove into the transcripts. A moment later he dredged up an excerpt:

  Request information on environments you consider lethal. Request information on your response to the prospect of imminent exposure to lethal environments.

  GLAD TO COMPLY. BUT YOUR LETHAL IS DIFFERENT FROM US. THERE ARE MANY MIGRATING CIRCUMSTANCES.

  "You were testing it!" Szpindel crowed. He smacked his lips; his jaw ticced. You were looking for an emotional response!"

  "It was just a thought. It didn't prove anything."

  "Was there a difference? In the response time?"

  James hesitated, then shook her head. "But it was a stupid idea. There are so many variables, we have no idea how they—I mean, they're alien..."

  "The pathology's classic."

  "What pathology?" I asked.

  "It doesn't mean anything except that they're different from the Human baseline," James insisted. "Which is not something anyone here can look down their nose about."

  I tried again: "What pathology?"

  James shook her head. Szpindel filled me in: "There's a syndrome you might have heard about, eh? Fast talkers, no conscience, tend to malapropism and self-contradiction. No emotional affect."

  "We're not talking about human beings here," James said again, softly.

  "But if we were," Szpindel added, "we might call Rorschach a clinical sociopath."

  Sarasti had said nothing during this entire exchange. Now, with the word hanging out in the open, I noticed that nobody else would look at him.

  ***

  We all knew that Jukka Sarasti was a sociopath, of course. Most of us just didn't mention it in polite company.

  Szpindel was never that polite. Or maybe it was just that he seemed to almost understand Sarasti; he could look behind the monster and regard the organism, no less a product of natural selection for all the human flesh it had devoured in eons past. That perspective calmed him, somehow. He could watch Sarasti watching him, and not flinch.

  "I feel sorry for the poor son of a bitch," he said once, back in training.

  Some would have thought that absurd. This man, so massively interfaced with machinery that his own motor skills had degraded for want of proper care and feeding; this man who heard x-rays and saw in shades of ultrasound, so corrupted by retrofits he could no longer even feel his own fingertips without assistance—this man could pity anyone else, let alone an infra-eyed predator built to murder without the slightest twitch of remorse?

  "Empathy for sociopaths isn't common," I remarked.

  "Maybe it should be. We, at least—" he waved an arm; some remote-linked sensor cluster across the simulator whirred and torqued reflexively— "chose the add-ons. Vampires had to be sociopaths. They're too much like their own prey—a lot of taxonomists don't even consider them a subspecies, you know that? Never diverged far enough for complete reproductive isolation. So maybe they're more syndrome than race. Just a bunch of obligate cannibals with a consistent set of deformities."

  "And how does that make—"

  "If the only thing you can eat is your own kind, empathy is gonna be the first thing that goes. Psychopathy's no disorder in those shoes, eh? Just a survival strategy. But they still make our skin crawl, so we—chain 'em up."

  "You think we should've repaired the Crucifix glitch?" Everyone knew why we hadn't. Only a fool would resurrect a monster without safeguards in place. Vampires came with theirs built in: without his antiEuclideans Sarasti would go grand mal the first time he caught close sight of a four-panel window frame.

  But Szpindel was shaking his head. "We couldn't have fixed it. Or we could have," he amended, "but the glitch is in the visual cortex, eh? Linked to their omnisavantism. You fix it, you disable their pattern-matching skills, and then what's the point in even bringing them back?"

  "I didn't know that."

  "Well, that's the official story." He fell silent a moment, cracked a crooked grin. "Then again, we didn't have any trouble fixing the protocadherin pathways when it suited us."

  I subtitled. Context-sensitive, ConSensus served up protocadherin γ-Y: the magical hominid brain protein that vampires had never been able to synthesize. The reason they hadn't just switched to zebras or warthogs once denied Human prey, why our discovery of the terrible secret of the Right Angle had spelled their doom.

  "Anyway, I just think he's—cut off." A nervous tic tugged at the corner of Szpindel's mouth. "Lone wolf, nothing but sheep for company. Wouldn't you feel lonely?"

  "They don't like company," I reminded him. You didn't put vampires of the same sex together, not unless you were taking bets on a bloodbath. They were solitary hunters and very territorial. With a minimum viable pred-prey ratio of one to ten—and human prey spread so
sparsely across the Pleistocene landscape—the biggest threat to their survival had been competition from their own kind. Natural selection had never taught them to play nicely together.

  That didn't cut any ice with Szpindel, though. "Doesn't mean he can't be lonely," he insisted.

  "Just means he can't fix it."

  WE DID IT with mirrors, great round parabolic things, each impossibly thin and three times as high as a man. Theseus rolled them up and bolted them to firecrackers stuffed with precious antimatter from our dwindling stockpiles. With twelve hours to spare she flung them like confetti along precise ballistic trajectories, and when they were safely distant she set them alight. They pinwheeled off every which way, gamma sleeting in their wake until they burned dry. Then they coasted, unfurling mercurial insect wings across the void.

  In the greater distance, four hundred thousand alien machines looped and burned and took no obvious notice.

  Rorschach fell around Ben barely fifteen hundred kilometers from atmosphere, a fast endless circle that took just under forty hours to complete. By the time it didn't return to our sight, the mirrors were all outside the zone of total blindness. A closeup of Ben's equatorial edge floated in ConSensus. Mirror icons sparkled around it like an exploding schematic, like the disconnected facets of some great expanding compound eye. None had brakes. Whatever high ground the mirrors held, they wouldn't hold it for long.

  "There," Bates said.

  A mirage wavered stage left, a tiny spot of swirling chaos perhaps half the size of a fingernail held at arms-length. It told us nothing, it was pure heat-shimmer—but light bounced towards us from dozens of distant relayers, and while each saw scarcely more than our last probe had— a patch of dark clouds set slightly awry by some invisible prism— each of those views refracted differently. The Captain sieved flashes from the heavens and stitched them into a composite view.

  Details emerged.

  First a faint sliver of shadow, a tiny dimple all but lost in the seething equatorial cloud bands. It had just barely rotated into view around the edge of the disk— a rock in the stream perhaps, an invisible finger stuck in the clouds, turbulence and shear stress shredding the boundary layers to either side.

  Szpindel squinted. "Plage effect." Subtitles said he was talking about a kind of sunspot, a knot in Ben's magnetic field.

  "Higher," James said.

  Something floated above that dimple in the clouds, the way a ground-effect ocean-liner floats above the depression it pushes into the water's surface. I zoomed: next to an Oasa subdwarf with ten times the mass of Jupiter, Rorschach was tiny.

  Next to Theseus, it was a colossus.

  Not just a torus but a tangle, a city-sized chaos of spun glass, loops and bridges and attenuate spires. The surface texture was pure artifice, of course; ConSensus merely giftwrapped the enigma in refracted background. Still. In some dark, haunting way, it was almost beautiful. A nest of obsidian snakes and smoky crystal spines.

  "It's talking again," James reported.

  "Talk back," Sarasti said, and abandoned us.

  ***

  So she did: and while the Gang spoke with the artefact, the others spied upon it. Their vision failed over time—mirrors fell away along their respective vectors, lines-of-sight degraded with each passing second—but ConSensus filled with things learned in the meantime. Rorschach massed 1.8×1010 kg within a total volume of 2.3×108 cubic meters. Its magnetic field, judging by radio squeals and its Plage Effect, was thousands of times stronger than the sun's. Astonishingly, parts of the composite image were clear enough to discern fine spiral grooves twined around the structure. ("Fibonacci sequence," Szpindel reported, one jiggling eye fixing me for a moment. "At least they're not completely alien.") Spheroid protuberances disfigured the tips of at least three of Rorschach's innumerable spines; the grooves were more widely spaced in those areas, like skin grown tight and swollen with infection. Just before one vital mirror sailed out of range it glimpsed another spine, split a third of the way along its length. Torn material floated flaccid and unmoving in vacuum.

  "Please," Bates said softly. "Tell me that's not what it looks like."

  Szpindel grinned. "Sporangium? Seed pod? Why not?"

  Rorschach may have been reproducing but beyond a doubt it was growing, fed by a steady trickle of infalling debris from Ben's accretion belt. We were close enough now to get a clear view of that procession: rocks and mountains and pebbles fell like sediment swirling around a drain. Particles that collided with the artefact simply stuck; Rorschach engulfed prey like some vast metastatic amoeba. The acquired mass was apparently processed internally and shunted to apical growth zones; judging by infinitesimal changes in the artefact's allometry, it grew from the tips of its branches.

  The procession never stopped. Rorschach was insatiable.

  It was a strange attractor in the interstellar gulf; the paths along which the rocks fell was precisely and utterly chaotic. It was as though some Keplerian Black Belt had set up the whole system like an astronomical wind-up toy, kicked everything into motion, and let inertia do the rest.

  "Didn't think that was possible," Bates said.

  Szpindel shrugged. "Hey, chaotic trajectories are just as deterministic as any other kind."

  "That doesn't mean you can even predict them, let along set them up like that." Luminous intel reflected off the major's bald head. "You'd have to know the starting conditions of a million different variables to ten decimal places. Literally."

  "Yup."

  "Vampires can't even do that. Quanticle computers can't do that."

  Szpindel shrugged like a marionette.

  All the while the Gang had been slipping in and out of character, dancing with some unseen partner that—despite their best efforts— told us little beyond endless permutations of You really wouldn't like it here. Any interrogative it answered with another— yet somehow it always left the sense of questions answered.

  "Did you send the Fireflies?" Sascha asked.

  "We send many things many places," Rorschach replied. "What do their specs show?"

  "We do not know their specifications. The Fireflies burned up over Earth."

  "Then shouldn't you be looking there? When our kids fly, they're on their own."

  Sascha muted the channel. "You know who we're talking to? Jesus of fucking Nazareth, that's who."

  Szpindel looked at Bates. Bates shrugged, palms up.

  "You didn't get it?" Sascha shook her head. "That last exchange was the informational equivalent of Should we render taxes unto Caesar. Beat for beat."

  "Thanks for casting us as the Pharisees," Szpindel grumbled.

  "Hey, if the Jew fits..."

  Szpindel rolled his eyes.

  That was when I first noticed it: a tiny imperfection on Sascha's topology, a flyspeck of doubt marring one of her facets. "We're not getting anywhere," she said. "Let's try a side door." She winked out: Michelle reopened the outgoing line. "Theseus to Rorschach. Open to requests for information."

  "Cultural exchange," Rorschach said. "That works for me."

  Bates's brow furrowed. "Is that wise?"

  "If it's not inclined to give information, maybe it would rather get some. And we could learn a great deal from the kind of questions it asks."

  "But—"

  "Tell us about home," Rorschach said.

  Sascha resurfaced just long enough to say "Relax, Major. Nobody said we had to give it the right answers."

  The stain on the Gang's topology had flickered when Michelle took over, but it hadn't disappeared. It grew slightly as Michelle described some hypothetical home town in careful terms that mentioned no object smaller than a meter across. (ConSensus confirmed my guess: the hypothetical limit of Firefly eyesight.) When Cruncher took a rare turn at the helm—

  "We don't all of us have parents or cousins. Some never did. Some come from vats."

  "I see. That's sad. Vats sounds so dehumanising."

  —the stain darkened and spread across his su
rface like an oil slick.

  "Takes too much on faith," Susan said a few moments later.

  By the time Sascha had cycled back into Michelle it was more than doubt, stronger than suspicion; it had become an insight, a dark little meme infecting each of that body's minds in turn. The Gang was on the trail of something. They still weren't sure what.

  I was.

  "Tell me more about your cousins," Rorschach sent.

  "Our cousins lie about the family tree," Sascha replied, "with nieces and nephews and Neandertals. We do not like annoying cousins."

  "We'd like to know about this tree."

  Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said Could it be any more obvious? "It couldn't have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them."

  "Well, it asked for clarification," Bates pointed out.

  "It asked a follow-up question. Different thing entirely."

  Bates was still out of the loop. Szpindel was starting to get it, though.. .

  Subtle motion drew my eye. Sarasti was back, floating above the bright topography on the table. The light show squirmed across his visor as he moved his head. I could feel his eyes behind it.

  And something else, behind him.

  I couldn't tell what it was. I could point to nothing but a vague sense of something out of place, somewhere in the background. Something over on the far side of the drum wasn't quite right. No, that wasn't it; something nearer, something amiss somewhere along the drum's axis. But there was nothing there, nothing I could see—just the naked pipes and conduits of the spinal bundle, threading through empty space, and—

  And suddenly, whatever had been wrong was right again. That was what finally locked my focus: the evaporation of some anomaly, a reversion to normalcy that caught my eye like a flicker of motion. I could see the exact spot along the bundle where the change had occured. There was nothing out of place there now—but there had been. It was in my head, barely subliminal, an itch so close to the surface that I knew I could bring it back if I just concentrated.

  Sascha was talking to some alien artefact at the end of a laser beam. She was going on about familial relationships, both evolutionary and domestic: Neandertal and Cro Magnon and mother's cousins twice removed. She'd been doing it for hours now and she had hours yet to go but right now her chatter was distracting me. I tried to block her out and concentrate on the half-perceived image teasing my memory. I'd seen something there, just a moment ago. One of the conduits had had—yes, too many joints on one of the pipes. Something that should have been straight and smooth but was somehow articulated instead. But not one of the pipes, I remembered: an extra pipe, an extra something anyway, something—