Firefall

by Peter Watts

  "So you don't think Rorschach is hostile?"

  Long silence—long enough to make me wonder if I'd been detected.

  "Hostile," Szpindel said at last. "Friendly. We learned those words for life on Earth, eh? I don't know if they even apply out here." His lips smacked faintly. "But I think it might be something like hostile."

  Michelle sighed. "Isaac, there's no reason for—I mean, it just doesn't make sense that it would be. We can't have anything it wants."

  "It says it wants to be left alone," Szpindel said. "Even if it doesn't mean it."

  They floated quietly for a while, up there past the bulkhead.

  "At least the shielding held," Szpindel said finally. "That's something." He wasn't just talking about Jack; our own carapace was coated with the same stuff now. It had depleted our substrate stockpiles by two thirds, but no one wanted to rely on the ship's usual magnetics in the face of anything that could play so easily with the electromagnetic spectrum.

  "If they attack us, what do we do?" Michelle said.

  "Learn what we can, while we can. Fight back. While we can."

  "If we can. Look out there, Isaac. I don't care how embryonic that thing is. Tell me we're not hopelessly outmatched."

  "Outmatched, for sure. Hopelessly, never."

  "That's not what you said before."

  "Still. There's always a way to win."

  "If I said that, you'd call it wishful thinking."

  "If you said that, it would be. But I'm saying it, so it's game theory."

  "Game theory again. Jesus, Isaac."

  "No, listen. You're thinking about the aliens like they were some kind of mammal. Something that cares, something that looks after its investments."

  "How do you know they aren't?"

  "Because you can't protect your kids when they're lightyears away. They're on their own, and it's a big cold dangerous universe so most of them aren't going to make it, eh? The most you can do is crank out millions of kids, take cold comfort in knowing that a few always luck out through random chance. It's not a mammal mind-set, Meesh. You want an earthbound simile, think of dandelion seeds. Or, or herring."

  A soft sigh. "So they're interstellar herring. That hardly means they can't crush us."

  "But they don't know about us, not in advance. Dandelion seed doesn't know what it's up against before it sprouts. Maybe nothing. Maybe some spastic weed that goes over like straw in the wind. Or maybe something that kicks its ass halfway to the Magellanic Clouds. It doesn't know, and there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all survival strategy. Something that aces against one player blows goats against a different one. So the best you can do is mix up your strategies based on the odds. It's a weighted dice roll and it gives you the best mean payoff over the whole game, but you're bound to crap out and choose the wrong strategy at least some of the time. Price of doing business. And that means—that means—that weak players not only can win against stronger ones, but they're statistically bound to in some cases."

  Michelle snorted. "That's your game theory? Rock Paper Scissors with statistics?"

  Maybe Szpindel didn't know the reference. He didn't speak, long enough to call up a subtitle; then he brayed like a horse. "Rock Paper Scissors! Yes!"

  Michelle digested that for a moment. "You're sweet for trying, but that only works if the other side is just blindly playing the odds, and they don't have to do that if they know who they're going up against in advance. And my dear, they have so very much information about us..."

  They'd threatened Susan. By name.

  "They don't know everything," Szpindel insisted. "And the principle works for any scenario involving incomplete information, not just the ignorant extreme."

  "Not as well."

  "But some, and that gives us a chance. Doesn't matter how good you are at poker when it comes to the deal, eh? Cards still deal out with the same odds."

  "So that's what we're playing. Poker."

  "Be thankful it's not chess. We wouldn't have a hope in hell."

  "Hey. I'm supposed to be the optimist in this relationship."

  "You are. I'm just fatalistically cheerful. We all come into the story halfway through, we all catch up as best we can, and we're all gonna die before it ends."

  "That's my Isaac. Master of the no-win scenario."

  "You can win. Winner's the guy who makes the best guess on how it all comes out."

  "So you are just guessing."

  "Yup. And you can't make an informed guess without data, eh? And we could be the very first to find out what's gonna happen to the whole Human race. I'd say that puts us into the semifinals, easy."

  Michelle didn't answer for a very long time. When she did, I couldn't hear her words.

  Neither could Szpindel: "Sorry?"

  "Covert to invulnerable, you said. Remember?"

  "Uh huh. Rorschach's Graduation Day. "

  "How soon, do you think?"

  "No idea. But I don't think it's the kind of thing that's gonna slip by unnoticed. And that's why I don't think it attacked us."

  She must have looked a question.

  "Because when it does, it won't be some debatable candy-ass bitch slap," he told her. "When that fucker rises up, we're gonna know."

  A sudden flicker from behind. I spun in the cramped passageway and bit down on a cry: something squirmed out of sight around the corner, something with arms, barely glimpsed, gone in an instant.

  Never there. Couldn't be there. Impossible.

  "Did you hear that?" Szpindel asked, but I'd fled to stern before Michelle could answer him.

  ***

  We'd fallen so far that the naked eye didn't see a disk, barely even saw curvature any more. We were falling towards a wall, a vast roiling expanse of dark thunderclouds that extended in all directions to some new, infinitely-distant horizon. Ben filled half the universe.

  And still we fell.

  Far below, Jack clung to Rorschach's ridged surface with bristly gecko-feet fenders and set up camp. It sent x-rays and ultrasound into the ground, tapped enquiring fingers and listened to the echos, planted tiny explosive charges and measured the resonance of their detonations. It shed seeds like pollen: tiny probes and sensors by the thousands, self-powered, near-sighted, stupid and expendable. The vast majority were sacrificial offerings to random chance; only one in a hundred lasted long enough to return usable telemetry.

  While our advance scout took measure of its local neighborhood, Theseus drew larger-scale birdseye maps from the closing sky. It spat out thousands of its own disposable probes, spread them across the heavens and collected stereoscopic data from a thousand simultaneous perspectives.

  Patchwork insights assembled in the drum. Rorschach's skin was sixty percent superconducting carbon nanotube. Rorschach's guts were largely hollow; at least some of those hollows appeared to contain an atmosphere. No earthly form of life would have lasted a second in there, though; intricate topographies of radiation and electromagnetic force seethed around the structure, seethed within it. In some places the radiation was intense enough to turn unshielded flesh to ash in an instant; calmer backwaters would merely kill in the same span of time. Charged particles raced around invisible racetracks at relativistic speeds, erupting from jagged openings, hugging curves of magnetic force strong enough for neutron stars, arcing through open space and plunging back into black mass. Occasional protuberances swelled and burst and released clouds of microparticulates, seeding the radiation belts like spores. Rorschach resembled nothing so much as a nest of half-naked cyclotrons, tangled one with another.

  Neither Jack below nor Theseus above could find any points of entry, beyond those impassable gaps that spat out streams of charged particles or swallowed them back down. No airlocks or hatches or viewports resolved with increasing proximity. The fact that we'd been threatened via laser beam implied some kind of optical antennae or tightcast array; we weren't even able to find that much.

  A central hallmark of von Neumann machines was self-replica
tion. Whether Rorschach would meet that criterion—whether it would germinate, or divide, or give birth when it passed some critical threshold—whether it had done so already—remained an open question.

  One of a thousand. At the end of it all—after all the measurements, the theorizing and deduction and outright guesswork—we settled into orbit with a million trivial details and no answers. In terms of the big questions, there was only one thing we knew for sure.

  So far, Rorschach was holding its fire.

  ***

  "It sounded to me like it knew what it was saying," I remarked.

  "I guess that's the whole point," Bates said. She had no one to confide in, partook of no intimate dialogs that could be overheard. With her, I used the direct approach.

  Theseus was birthing a litter, two by two. They were nasty-looking things, armored, squashed egg-shapes, twice the size of a human torso and studded with gardening implements: antennae, optical ports, retractable threadsaws. Weapons muzzles.

  Bates was summoning her troops. We floated before the primary fab port at the base of Theseus' spine. The plant could just as easily have disgorged the grunts directly into the hold beneath the carapace—that was where they'd be stored anyway, until called upon—but Bates was giving each a visual inspection before sending it through one of the airlocks a few meters up the passageway. Ritual, perhaps. Military tradition. Certainly there was nothing she could see with her eyes that wouldn't be glaringly obvious to the most basic diagnostic.

  "Would it be a problem?" I asked. "Running them without your interface?"

  "Run themselves just fine. Response time actually improves without spam in the network. I'm more of a safety precaution."

  Theseus growled, giving us more attitude. The plating trembled to stern; another piece of local debris, no longer in our path. We were angling towards an equatorial orbit just a few miniscule kilometers above the artefact; insanely, the approach curved right through the accretion belt.

  It didn't bother the others. "Like surviving traffic in a high speed lane," Sascha had said, disdainful of my misgivings. "Try creeping across and you're road kill. Gotta speed up, go with the flow." But the flow was turbulent; we hadn't gone five minutes without a course correction since Rorschach had stopped talking to us.

  "So, do you buy it?" I asked. "Pattern-matching, empty threats? Nothing to worry about?"

  "Nobody's fired on us yet," she said. Meaning: Not for a second.

  "What's your take on Susan's argument? Different niches, no reason for conflict?"

  "Makes sense, I guess." Utter bullshit.

  "Can you think of any reason why something with such different needs would attack us?"

  "That depends," she said, "on whether the fact that we are different is reason enough."

  I saw playground battlefields reflected in her topology. I remembered my own, and wondered if there were any other kind.

  Then again, that only proved the point. Humans didn't really fight over skin tone or ideology; those were just handy cues for kin-selection purposes. Ultimately it always came down to bloodlines and limited resources.

  "I think Isaac would say this is different," I said.

  "I guess." Bates sent one grunt humming off to the hold; two more emerged in formation, spinelight glinting off their armor.

  "How many of these are you making, anyway?"

  "We're breaking and entering, Siri. Not wise to leave our own house unguarded."

  I inspected her surfaces as she inspected theirs. Doubt and resentment simmered just beneath.

  "You're in a tough spot," I remarked.

  "We all are."

  "But you're responsible for defending us, against something we don't know anything about. We're only guessing that—"

  "Sarasti doesn't guess," Bates said. "The man's in charge for a reason. Doesn't make much sense to question his orders, given we're all about a hundred IQ points short of understanding the answer anyway."

  "And yet he's also got that whole predatory side nobody talks about," I remarked. "It must be difficult for him, all that intellect coexisting with so much instinctive aggression. Making sure the right part wins."

  She wondered in that instant whether Sarasti might be listening in. She decided in the next that it didn't matter: why should he care what the cattle thought, as long as they did what they were told?

  All she said was, "I thought you jargonauts weren't supposed to have opinions."

  "That wasn't mine."

  Bates paused. Returned to her inspection.

  "You do know what I do," I said.

  "Uh huh." The first of the current pair passed muster and hummed off up the spine. She turned to the second. "You simplify things. So the folks back home can understand what the specialists are up to."

  "That's part of it."

  "I don't need a translator, Siri. I'm just a consultant, assuming things go well. A bodyguard if they don't."

  "You're an officer and a military expert. I'd say that makes you more than qualified when it comes to assessing Rorschach's threat potential."

  "I'm muscle. Shouldn't you be simplifying Jukka or Isaac?"

  "That's exactly what I'm doing."

  She looked at me.

  "You interact," I said. "Every component of the system affects every other. Processing Sarasti without factoring you in would be like trying to calculate acceleration while ignoring mass."

  She turned back to her brood. Another robot passed muster.

  She didn't hate me. What she hated was what my presence implied.

  They don't trust us to speak for ourselves, she wouldn't say. No matter how qualified we are, no matter how far ahead of the pack. Maybe even because of that. We're contaminated. We're subjective. So they send Siri Keeton to tell them what we really mean.

  "I get it," I said after a moment.

  "Do you."

  "It's not about trust, Major. It's about location. Nobody gets a good view of a system from the inside, no matter who they are. The view's distorted."

  "And yours isn't."

  "I'm outside the system."

  "You're interacting with me now."

  "As an observer only. Perfection's unattainable but it isn't unapproachable, you know? I don't play a role in decision-making or research, I don't interfere in any aspect of the mission that I'm assigned to study. But of course I ask questions. The more information I have, the better my analysis."

  "I thought you didn't have to ask. I thought you guys could just, read the signs or something."

  "Every bit helps. It all goes into the mix."

  "You doing it now? Synthesizing?"

  I nodded.

  "And you do this without any specialized knowledge at all."

  "I'm as much of a specialist as you. I specialize in processing informational topologies."

  "Without understanding their content."

  "Understanding the shapes is enough."

  Bates seemed to find some small imperfection in the battlebot under scrutiny, scratched at its shell with a fingernail. "Software couldn't do that without your help?"

  "Software can do a lot of things. We've chosen to do some for ourselves." I nodded at the grunt. "Your visual inspections, for example."

  She smiled faintly, conceding the point.

  "So I'd encourage you to speak freely. You know I'm sworn to confidentiality."

  "Thanks," she said, meaning On this ship, there's no such thing.

  Theseus chimed. Sarasti spoke in its wake: "Orbital insertion in fifteen minutes. Everyone to the drum in five."

  "Well," Bates said, sending one last grunt on its way. "Here we go." She pushed off and sailed up the spine.

  The newborn killing machines clicked at me. They smelled like new cars.

  "By the way," Bates called over her shoulder, "you missed the obvious one."

  "Sorry?"

  She spun a hundred-eighty degrees at the end of the passageway, landed like an acrobat beside the drum hatch. "The reason. Why something woul
d attack us even if we didn't have anything it wanted."

  I read it off her: "If it wasn't attacking at all. If it was defending itself."

  "You asked about Sarasti. Smart man. Strong Leader. Maybe could spend a little more time with the troops."

  Vampire doesn't respect his command. Doesn't listen to advice. Hides away half the time.

  I remembered transient killer whales. "Maybe he's being considerate." He knows he makes us nervous.

  "I'm sure that's it," Bates said.

  Vampire doesn't trust himself.

  ***

  It wasn't just Sarasti. They all hid from us, even when they had the upper hand. They always stayed just the other side of myth.

  It started pretty much the same way it did for anything else; vampires were far from the first to learn the virtues of energy conservation. Shrews and hummingbirds, saddled with tiny bodies and overclocked metabolic engines, would have starved to death overnight if not for the torpor that overtook them at sundown. Comatose elephant seals lurked breathless at the bottom of the sea, rousing only for passing prey or redline lactate levels. Bears and chipmunks cut costs by sleeping away the impoverished winter months, and lungfish—Devonian black belts in the art of estivation—could curl up and die for years, waiting for the rains.

  With vampires it was a little different. It wasn't shortness of breath, or metabolic overdrive, or some blanket of snow that locked the pantry every winter. The problem wasn't so much a lack of prey as a lack of difference from it; vampires were such a recent split from the ancestral baseline that the reproductive rates hadn't diverged. This was no woodland-variety lynx-hare dynamic, where prey outnumbered predators a hundred to one. Vampires fed on things that bred barely faster than they did. They would have wiped out their own food supply in no time if they hadn't learned how to ease off on the throttle.

  By the time they went extinct they'd learned to shut down for decades.

  It made two kinds of sense. It not only slashed their metabolic needs while prey bred itself back to harvestable levels, it gave us time to forget that we were prey. We were so smart by the Pleistocene, smart enough for easy skepticism; if you haven't seen any night-stalking demons in all your years on the savannah, why should you believe some senile campfire ramblings passed down by your mother's mother?