Firefall

by Peter Watts

  "Our suits can be shielded."

  "Oh, you mean like Mandy's drones?"

  "I'd really rather you didn't call me that," Bates remarked.

  "The point is, Rorschach kills you whether you're meat or mechanical."

  "My point is that it kills meat differently," James replied. "It takes longer."

  Szpindel shook his head. "You'd be good as dead in fifty minutes. Even shielded. Even in the so-called cool zones."

  "And completely asymptomatic for three hours or more. And even after that it would take days for us to actually die and we'd be back here long before then, and the ship could patch us up just like that. We even know that much, Isaac, it's right there in ConSensus. And if we know it, you know it. So we shouldn't even be having this argument."

  "That's your solution? We saturate ourselves with radiation every thirty hours and then I get to cut out the tumors and stitch everyone's cells back together?"

  "The pods are automatic. You wouldn't have to lift a finger."

  "Not to mention the number those magnetic fields would do on your brain. We'd be hallucinating from the moment we—"

  "Faraday the suits."

  "Ah, so we go in deaf dumb and blind. Good idea."

  "We can let light pass. Infrared—"

  "It's all EM, Suze. Even if we blacked out our helmets completely and used a camera feed, we'd get leakage where the wire went through."

  "Some, yes. But it'd be better than—"

  "Jesus." A tremor sent spittle sailing from the corner of Szpindel's mouth. "Let me talk to Mi—"

  "I've discussed it with the rest of the gang, Isaac. We're all agreed."

  "All agreed? You don't have a working majority in there, Suze. Just because you cut your brain into pieces doesn't mean they each get a vote."

  "I don't see why not. We're each at least as sentient as you are."

  "They're all you. Just partitioned."

  "You don't seem to have any trouble treating Michelle as a separate individual."

  "Michelle's—I mean, yes, you're all very different facets, but there's only one original. Your alters—"

  "Don't call us that." Sascha erupted with a voice cold as LOX. "Ever."

  Szpindel tried to pull back. "I didn't mean—you know I didn't—"

  But Sascha was gone. "What are you saying?" said the softer voice in her wake. "Do you think I'm just, I'm just Mom, play-acting? You think when we're together you're alone with her?"

  "Michelle," Szpindel said miserably. "No. What I think—"

  "Doesn't matter," Sarasti said. "We don't vote here."

  He floated above us, visored and unreadable in the center of the drum. None of us had seen him arrive. He turned slowly on his axis, keeping us in view as we rotated around him.

  "Prepping Scylla. Amanda needs two untethered grunts with precautionary armament. Cams from one to a million Angstroms, shielded tympanics, no autonomous circuitry. Platelet boosters, dimenhydrinate and potassium iodide for everyone by 1350."

  "Everyone?" Bates asked.

  Sarasti nodded. "Window opens four hours twenty-three." He turned back down the spine

  "Not me," I said.

  Sarasti paused.

  "I don't participate in field ops," I reminded him.

  "Now you do."

  "I'm a synthesist." He knew that. Of course he knew, everyone did: you can't observe the system unless you stay outside the system.

  "On Earth you're a synthesist," he said. "In the Kuiper you're a synthesist. Here you're mass. Do what you're told."

  He disappeared.

  "Welcome to the big picture," Bates said softly.

  I looked at her as the rest of the group broke up. "You know I—"

  "We're a long way out, Siri. Can't wait fourteen months for feedback from your bosses, and you know it."

  She leapt from a standing start, arced smoothly through holograms into the weightless core of the drum. But then she stopped herself, as if distracted by some sudden insight. She grabbed a spinal conduit and swung back to face me.

  "You shouldn't sell yourself short," she said. "Or Sarasti either. You're an observer, right? It's a safe bet there's going to be a lot down there worth observing."

  "Thanks," I said. But I already knew why Sarasti was sending me into Rorschach, and there was more to it than observation.

  Three valuable agents in harm's way. A decoy bought one-in-four odds that an enemy would aim somewhere else.

  "WE WERE PROBABLY fractured during most of our evolution," James once told me, back when we were all still getting acquainted. She tapped her temple. "There's a lot of room up here; a modern brain can run dozens of sentient cores without getting too crowded. And parallel multitasking has obvious survival advantages."

  I nodded. "Ten heads are better than one."

  "Our integration may have actually occurred quite recently. Some experts think we can still revert to multiples under the right circumstances."

  "Well, of course. You're living proof."

  She shook their head. "I'm not talking about physical partitioning. We're the state of the art, certainly, but theoretically surgery isn't even necessary. Simple stress could do something like it, if it was strong enough. If it happened early in childhood."

  "No kidding."

  "Well, in theory," James admitted, and changed into Sascha who said, "Bullshit in theory. There's documented cases as recently as fifty years ago."

  "Really." I resisted the temptation to look it up on my inlays; the unfocused eyes can be a giveaway. "I didn't know."

  "Well it's not like anyone talks about it now. People were fucking barbarians about multicores back then—called it a disorder, treated it like some kind of disease. And their idea of a cure was to keep one of the cores and murder all the others. Not that they called it murder, of course. They called it integration or some shit. That's what people did back then: created other people to suck up all the abuse and torture, then got rid of them when they weren't needed any more."

  It hadn't been the tone most of us were looking for at an ice-breaking party. James had gently eased back into the driver's seat and the conversation had steered closer to community standards.

  But I hadn't heard any of the Gang use alter to describe each other, then or since. It had seemed innocuous enough when Szpindel had said it. I wondered why they'd taken such offence—and now, floating alone in my tent with a few pre-op minutes to kill, there was no one to see my eyes glaze.

  Alter carried baggage over a century old, ConSensus told me. Sascha was right; there'd been a time when MCC was MPD, a Disorder rather than a Complex, and it had never been induced deliberately. According to the experts of that time, multiple personalities arose spontaneously from unimaginable cauldrons of abuse—fragmentary personae offered up to suffer rapes and beatings while the child behind took to some unknowable sanctuary in the folds of the brain. It was both survival strategy and ritual self-sacrifice: powerless souls hacking themselves to pieces, offering up quivering chunks of self in the desperate hope that the vengeful gods called Mom or Dad might not be insatiable.

  None of it had been real, as it turned out. Or at least, none of it had been confirmed. The experts of the day had been little more than witch doctors dancing through improvised rituals: meandering free-form interviews full of leading questions and nonverbal cues, scavenger hunts through regurgitated childhoods. Sometimes a shot of lithium or haloperidol when the beads and rattles didn't work. The technology to map minds was barely off the ground; the technology to edit them was years away. So the therapists and psychiatrists poked at their victims and invented names for things they didn't understand, and argued over the shrines of Freud and Klein and the old Astrologers. Doing their very best to sound like practitioners of Science.

  Inevitably, it was Science that turned them all into road kill; MPD was a half-forgotten fad even before the advent of synaptic rewiring. But alter was a word from that time, and its resonance had persisted. Among those who remembered the ta
le, alter was codespeak for betrayal and human sacrifice. Alter meant cannon fodder.

  Imagining the topology of the Gang's coexisting souls, I could see why Sascha embraced the mythology. I could see why Susan let her. After all, there was nothing implausible about the concept; the Gang's very existence proved that much. And when you've been peeled off from a pre-existing entity, sculpted from nonexistence straight into adulthood—a mere fragment of personhood, without even a full-time body to call your own—you can be forgiven a certain amount of anger. Sure you're all equal, all in it together. Sure, no persona is better than any other. Susan's still the only one with a surname.

  Better to direct that resentment at old grudges, real or imagined; less problematic, at least, than taking it out on someone who shares the same flesh.

  I realized something else, too. Surrounded by displays documenting the relentless growth of the leviathan beneath us, I could not only see why Sascha had objected to the word; I could also see why Isaac Szpindel, no doubt unconsciously, had spoken it in the first place.

  As far as Earth was concerned, everyone on Theseus was an alter.

  ***

  Sarasti stayed behind. He hadn't come with a backup.

  There were the rest of us, though, crammed into the shuttle, embedded in custom spacesuits so padded with shielding we might have been deep-sea divers from a previous century. It was a fine balance; too much shielding would have been worse than none at all, would split primary particles into secondary ones, just as lethal and twice as numerous. Sometimes you had to live with moderate exposure; the only alternative was to embed yourself like a bug in lead.

  We launched six hours from perigee. Scylla raced on ahead like an eager child, leaving its parent behind. There was no eagerness in the systems around me, though. Except for one: the Gang of Four almost shimmered behind her faceplate.

  "Excited?" I asked.

  Sascha answered: "Fuckin' right. Field work, Keeton. First contact."

  "What if there's nobody there?" What if there is, and they don't like us?

  "Even better. We get a crack at their signs and cereal boxes without their traffic cops leaning over our shoulders."

  I wondered if she spoke for the others. I was pretty sure she didn't speak for Michelle.

  Scylla's ports had all been sealed. There was no outside view, nothing to see inside but bots and bodies and the tangled silhouette swelling on my helmet HUD. But I could feel the radiation slicing through our armor as if it were tissue paper. I could feel the knotted crests and troughs of Rorschach's magnetic field. I could feel Rorschach itself, drawing nearer: the charred canopy of some firestormed alien forest, more landscape than artefact. I imagined titanic bolts of electricity arcing between its branches. I imagined getting in the way.

  What kind of creatures would choose to live in such a place?

  "You really think we'll get along," I said.

  James' shrug was all but lost under the armor. "Maybe not at first. We may have gotten off on the wrong foot, we might have to sort through all kinds of misunderstandings. But we'll figure each other out eventually."

  Evidently she thought that had answered my question.

  The shuttle slewed; we bumped against each other like tenpins. Thirty seconds of micromaneuvers brought us to a solid stop. A cheery animation played across the HUD in greens and blues: the shuttle's docking seal, easing through the membrane that served as our entrance into Rorschach's inflatable vestibule. Even as a cartoon it looked vaguely pornographic.

  Bates had been prepacked next to the airlock. She slid back the inner door. "Everybody duck."

  Not an easy maneuver, swaddled in life-support and ferroceramic. Helmets tilted and bumped. The grunts, flattened overhead like great lethal cockroaches, hummed to life and disengaged from the ceiling. They scraped past in the narrow headroom, bobbed cryptically to their mistress, and exited stage left.

  Bates closed the inner hatch. The lock cycled, opened again on an empty chamber.

  Everything nominal, according to the board. The drones waited patiently in the vestibule. Nothing had jumped out at them.

  Bates followed them through.

  We had to wait forever for the image. The baud rate was less than a trickle. Words moved back and forth easily enough—"No surprises so far," Bates reported in distorted Jews-harp vibrato—but any picture was worth a million of them, and—

  There: through the eyes of the grunt behind we saw the grunt ahead in motionless, grainy monochrome. It was a postcard from the past: sight turned to sound, thick clumsy vibrations of methane bumping against the hull. It took long seconds for each static-ridden image to accrete on the HUD: grunts descending into the pit; grunts emerging into Rorschach's duodenum; a cryptic, hostile cavescape in systematic increments. Down in the lower left-hand corner of each image, timestamps and Teslas ran down the clock.

  You give up a lot when you don't trust the EM spectrum.

  "Looks good," Bates reported. "Going in."

  In a friendlier universe machines would have cruised the boulevard, sending perfect images in crystal resolution. Szpindel and the Gang would be sipping coffee back in the drum, telling the grunts to take a sample of this or get a close-up of that. In a friendlier universe, I wouldn't even be here.

  Bates appeared in the next postcard, emerging from the fistula. In the next her back was to the camera, apparently panning the perimeter.

  In the one after that she was looking right at us.

  "Oh...okay," she said. "Come on...down..."

  "Not so fast," Szpindel said. "How are you feeling?"

  "Fine. A bit—odd, but..."

  "Odd how?" Radiation sickness announced itself with nausea, but unless we'd seriously erred in our calculations that wouldn't happen for another hour or two. Not until well after we'd all been lethally cooked.

  "Mild disorientation," Bates reported. "It's a bit spooky in here, but—must be Grey Syndrome. It's tolerable."

  I looked at the Gang. The Gang looked at Szpindel. Szpindel shrugged.

  "It's not gonna get any better," Bates said from afar. "The clock is... clock is ticking, people. Get down here."

  We got.

  ***

  Not living, not by a long shot.

  Haunted.

  Even when the walls didn't move, they did: always at the corner of the eye, that sense of crawling motion. Always at the back of the mind the sense of being watched, the dread certainty of malign and alien observers just out of sight. More than once I turned, expecting to catch one of those phantoms in the open. All I ever saw was a half-blind grunt floating down the passageway, or a wide-eyed and jittery crewmate returning my stare. And the walls of some glistening black lava tube with a hundred embedded eyes, all snapped shut just the instant before. Our lights pushed the darkness back perhaps twenty meters in either direction; beyond, mist and shadows seethed. And the sounds—Rorschach creaked around us like some ancient wooden hull trapped in pack ice. Electricity hissed like rattlesnakes.

  You tell yourself it's mostly in your head. You remind yourself it's well-documented, an inevitable consequence of meat and magnetism brought too close together. High-energy fields release the ghosts and the grays from your temporal lobe, dredge up paralyzing dread from the midbrain to saturate the conscious mind. They fuck with your motor nerves and make even dormant inlays sing like fine fragile crystal.

  Energy artefacts. That's all they are. You repeat that to yourself, you repeat it so often it loses any pretense of rationality and devolves into rote incantation, a spell to ward off evil spirits. They're not real, these whispering voices just outside your helmet, those half-seen creatures flickering at the edge of vision. They're tricks of the mind, the same neurological smoke-and-mirrors that convinced people throughout the ages that they were being haunted by ghosts, abducted by aliens, hunted by—

  —vampires—

  —and you wonder whether Sarasti really stayed behind or if he was here all along, waiting for you...

  "Ano
ther spike," Bates warned as Tesla and Seiverts surged on my HUD. "Hang on."

  I was installing the Faraday bell. Trying to. It should have been simple enough; I'd already run the main anchor line down from the vestibule to the flaccid sack floating in the middle of the passageway. I was—that's right, something about a spring line. To, to keep the bell centered. The wall glistened in my headlamp like wet clay. Satanic runes sparkled in my imagination.

  I jammed the spring line's pad against the wall. I could have sworn the substrate flinched. I fired my thrust pistol, retreated back to the center of the passage.

  "They're here," James whispered.

  Something was. I could feel it always behind me, no matter where I turned. I could feel some great roaring darkness swirling just out of sight, a ravenous mouth as wide as the tunnel itself. Any moment now it would lunge forward at impossible speed and engulf us all.

  "They're beautiful..." James said. There was no fear in her voice at all. She sounded awestruck.

  "What? Where?" Bates never stopped turning, kept trying to keep the whole three-sixty in sight at once. The drones under her command wobbled restlessly to either side, armored parentheses pointing down the passageway in opposite directions. "What do you see?"

  "Not out there. In here. Everywhere. Can't you see it?"

  "I can't see anything," Szpindel said, his voice shaking.

  "It's in the EM fields," James said. "That's how they communicate. The whole structure is full of language, it's—"

  "I can't see anything," Szpindel repeated. His breath echoed loud and fast over the link. "I'm blind."

  "Shit." Bates swung on Szpindel. "How can that—the radiation—"

  "I d-don't think that's it.."

  Nine Tesla, and the ghosts were everywhere. I smelled asphalt and honeysuckle.

  "Keeton!" Bates called. "You with us?"

  "Y-yeah." Barely. I was back at the bell, my hand on the ripcord. Trying to ignore whatever kept tapping me on the shoulder.

  "Leave that! Get him outside!"

  "No!" Szpindel floated helplessly in the passage, his pistol bouncing against its wrist tether. "No, throw me something."