Firefall

by Peter Watts

  "But they're not really aliens. At least not intelligent ones. War implies intelligence."

  "Ants wage war all the time. Proves nothing except that they're alive."

  "Are scramblers even alive?" I asked.

  "What kind of question is that?"

  "You think Rorschach grows them on some kind of assembly line. You can't find any genes. Maybe they're just biomechanical machines."

  "That's what life is, Keeton. That's what you are." Another hit of nicotine, another storm of numbers, another sample. "Life isn't either/or. It's a matter of degree."

  "What I'm asking is, are they natural? Could they be constructs?"

  "Is a termite mound a construct? Beaver dam? Space ship? Of course. Were they built by naturally-evolved organisms, acting naturally? They were. So tell me how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything but natural?"

  I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. "You know what I mean."

  "It's a meaningless question. Get your head out of the Twentieth Century."

  I gave up. After a few seconds Cunningham seemed to notice the silence. He withdrew his consciousness from the machinery and looked around with fleshly eyes, as if searching for some mosquito that had mysteriously stopped whining.

  "What's your problem with me?" I asked. Stupid question, obvious question. Unworthy of any synthesist to be so, so direct.

  His eyes glittered in that dead face. "Processing without comprehension. That's what you do, isn't it?"

  "That's a colossal oversimplification."

  "Mmm." Cunningham nodded. "Then why can't you seem to comprehend how pointless it is to keep peeking over our shoulders and writing home to our masters?"

  "Someone has to keep Earth in the loop."

  "Seven months each way. Long loop."

  "Still."

  "We're on our own out here, Keeton. You're on your own. The game's going to be long over before our masters even know it's started." He sucked smoke. "Or perhaps not. Perhaps you're talking to someone closer, hmm? That it? Is the Fourth Wave telling you what to do?"

  "There is no Fourth Wave. Not that anyone's told me, anyway."

  "Probably not. They'd never risk their lives out here, would they? Too dangerous even to hang back and watch from a distance. That's why they built us."

  "We're all self-made. Nobody forced you to get the rewire."

  "No, nobody forced me to get the rewire. I could have just let them cut out my brain and pack it into Heaven, couldn't I? That's the choice we have. We can be utterly useless, or we can try and compete against the vampires and the constructs and the AIs. And perhaps you could tell me how to do that without turning into a—an utter freak."

  So much in the voice. Nothing at all on the face. I said nothing.

  "See what I mean? No comprehension." He managed a tight smile. "So I'll answer your questions. I'll delay my own work and hold your hand because Sarasti's told us to. I guess that superior vampire mind sees some legitimate reason to indulge your constant ankle-nipping, and it's in charge so I'll play along. But I'm not nearly that smart, so you'll forgive me if it all seems a bit naff."

  "I'm just—"

  "You're just doing your job. I know. But I don't like being played, Keeton. And that's what your job is."

  ***

  Even back on Earth, Robert Cunningham had barely disguised his opinion of the ship's commissar. It had been obvious even to the topologically blind.

  I'd always had a hard time imagining the man. It wasn't just his expressionless face. Sometimes, not even the subtler things behind would show up in his topology. Perhaps he repressed them deliberately, resenting the presence of this mole among the crew.

  It would hardly have been the first time I'd encountered such a reaction. Everyone resented me to some extent. Oh, they liked me well enough, or thought they did. They tolerated my intrusions, and cooperated, and gave away far more than they thought they did.

  But beneath Szpindel's gruff camaraderie, beneath James's patient explanations—there was no real respect. How could there be? These people were the bleeding edge, the incandescent apex of hominid achievement. They were trusted with the fate of the world. I was just a tattletale for small minds back home. Not even that much, when home receded too deeply into the distance. Superfluous mass. Couldn't be helped. No use getting bothered over it.

  Still, Szpindel had only coined commissar half-jokingly. Cunningham believed it, and didn't laugh. And while I'd encountered many others like him over the years, those had only tried to hide themselves from sight. Cunningham was the first who seemed to succeed.

  I tried to build the relationship all the way through training, tried to find the missing pieces. I watched him working the simulator's teleops one day, exercising the shiny new interfaces that spread him through walls and wires. He was practicing his surgical skills on some hypothetical alien the computer had conjured up to test his technique. Sensors and jointed teleops sprouted like the legs of an enormous spider crab from an overhead mount. Spirit-possessed, they dipped and weaved around some semiplausible holographic creature. Cunningham's own body merely trembled slightly, a cigarette jiggling at the corner of its mouth.

  I waited for him to take a break. Eventually the tension ebbed from his shoulders. His vicarious limbs relaxed.

  "So." I tapped my temple. "Why'd you do it?"

  He didn't turn. Above the dissection, sensors swiveled and stared back like dismembered eyestalks. That was the center of Cunningham's awareness right now, not this nicotine-stained body in front of me. Those were his eyes, or his tongue, or whatever unimaginable bastard-senses he used to parse what the machines sent him. Those clusters aimed back at me, at us—and if Robert Cunningham still possessed anything that might be called vision, he was watching himself from eyes two meters outside his own skull.

  "Do what, exactly?" he said at last. "The enhancements?"

  Enhancements. As though he'd upgraded his wardrobe instead of ripping out his senses and grafting new ones into the wounds.

  I nodded.

  "It's vital to keep current," he said. "If you don't reconfigure you can't retrain. If you don’t retrain you're obsolete inside a month, and then you're not much good for anything except Heaven or dictation."

  I ignored the jibe. "Pretty radical transformation, though."

  "Not these days."

  "Didn't it change you?"

  His body dragged on the cigarette. Targeted ventilation sucked away the smoke before it reached me. "That's the whole point."

  "Surely you were affected personally, though. Surely—"

  "Ah." He nodded; at the far end of shared motor nerves, teleops jiggled in sympathy. "Change the eyes that look at the world, change the me does the looking?"

  "Something like that."

  Now he was watching me with fleshly eyes. Across the membrane those snakes and eyestalks returned to their work on the virtual carcass, as if deciding they'd wasted enough time on pointless distractions. I wondered which body he was in now.

  "I'm surprised you'd have to ask," the meat one said. "Doesn't my body language tell you everything? Aren't jargonauts supposed to read minds?"

  He was right, of course. I wasn't interested in Cunningham's words; those were just the carrier wave. He couldn't hear the real conversation we were having. All his angles and surfaces spoke volumes, and although their voices were strangely fuzzed with feedback and distortion I knew I'd be able to understand them eventually. I only had to keep him talking.

  But Jukka Sarasti chose that moment to wander past and surgically trash my best-laid plans.

  "Siri's best in his field," he remarked. "But not when it gets too close to home."

  "THE THING IS," Chelsea said, "this whole first-person thing takes effort. You have to care enough to try, you know? I've been working my ass off on this relationship, I've been working so hard, but you just don't seem to care..."

  She thought she was breaking the news. She thought I hadn't seen it coming,
because I hadn't said anything. I'd probably seen it before she had. I hadn't said anything because I'd been scared of giving her an opening.

  I felt sick to my stomach.

  "I care about you," I said.

  "As much as you could care about anything," she admitted. "But you—I mean, sometimes you're fine, Cygnus, sometimes you're wonderful to be around but whenever anything gets the least bit intense you just go away and leave this, this battle computer running your body and I just can't deal with it any more..."

  I stared at the butterfly on the back of her hand. Its wings flexed and folded, lazy and iridescent. I wondered how many of those tattoos she had; I'd seen five of them on different body parts, albeit only one at a time. I thought about asking her, but this didn't seem like the right moment.

  "You can be so—so brutal sometimes," she was saying. "I know you don't mean to be, but... I don't know. Maybe I'm your pressure-release valve, or something. Maybe you have to submerge yourself so much on the job that everything just, just builds up and you need some kind of punching bag. Maybe that's why you say the things you do."

  She was waiting for me to say something now. "I've been honest," I said.

  "Yeah. Pathologically. Have you ever had a negative thought that you haven't said out loud?" Her voice trembled but her eyes—for once— stayed dry. "I guess it's as much my fault as yours. Maybe more. I could tell you were—disconnected, from the day we met. I guess on some level I always saw it coming."

  "Why even try, then? If you knew we were just going to crash and burn like this?"

  "Oh, Cygnus. Aren't you the one who says that everyone crashes and burns eventually? Aren't you the one who says it never lasts?"

  Mom and Dad lasted. Longer than this, anyway.

  I frowned, astonished that I'd even let the thought form in my head. Chelse read the silence as a wounded one. "I guess—maybe I thought I could help, you know? Help fix whatever made you so—so angry all the time."

  The butterfly was starting to fade. I'd never seen that happen before.

  "Do you understand what I'm saying?" she asked.

  "Sure. I'm a fixer-upper."

  "Siri, you wouldn't even get a tweak when I offered. You were so scared of being manipulated you wouldn't even try a basic cascade. You're the one guy I've met who might be truly, eternally unfixable. I dunno. Maybe that's even something to be proud of."

  I opened my mouth, and closed it.

  She gave me a sad smile. "Nothing, Siri? Nothing at all? There was a time you always knew exactly what to say." She looked back at some earlier version of me. "Now I wonder if you ever actually meant any of it."

  "That's not fair."

  "No." She pursed her lips. "No, it isn't. That's not really what I'm trying to say. I guess...it's not so much that you don't mean any of it. It's more like you don't know what any of it means."

  The color was gone from the wings. The butterfly was a delicate charcoal dusting, almost motionless.

  "I'll do it now," I said. "I'll get the tweaks. If it's that important to you. I'll do it now."

  "It's too late, Siri. I'm used up."

  Maybe she wanted me to call her back. All these words ending in question marks, all these significant silences. Maybe she was giving me the opportunity to plead my case, to beg for another chance. Maybe she wanted a reason to change her mind.

  I could have tried. Please don't, I could have said. I'm begging you. I never meant to drive you away completely, just a little, just to a safer distance. Please. In thirty long years the only time I haven't felt worthless was when we were together.

  But when I looked up again the butterfly was gone and so was she, taking all baggage with her. She carried doubt, and guilt for having led me on. She left believing that our incompatibility was no one's fault, that she'd tried as hard as she could, even that I had under the tragic weight of all my issues. She left, and maybe she didn't even blame me, and I never even knew who'd made that final decision.

  I was good at what I did. I was so damned good, I did it without even meaning to.

  ***

  "My God! Did you hear that!?"

  Susan James bounced around the drum like a pronking wildebeest in the half-gravity. I could see the whites of her eyes from ninety degrees away. "Check your feeds! Check your feeds! The pens!"

  I checked. One scrambler afloat; the other still jammed into its corner.

  James landed at my side with a two-footed thump, wobbling for balance. "Turn the sound up!"

  The hissing of the air conditioners. The clank of distant machinery echoing along the spine; Theseus' usual intestinal rumblings. Nothing else.

  "Okay, they're not doing it now." James brought up a splitscreen window and threw it into reverse. "There," she pronounced, replaying the record with the audio cranked and filtered.

  In the right side of the window, the floating scrambler had drifted so that the tip of one outstretched arm brushed against the wall that adjoined the other pen. In the left side, the huddled scrambler remained unmoving.

  I thought I heard something. Just for an instant: the brief buzz of an insect, perhaps, if the nearest insect hadn't been five trillion kilometers away.

  "Replay that. Slow it down."

  A buzz, definitely. A vibration.

  "Way down."

  A click train, squirted from a dolphin's forehead. Farting lips.

  "No, let me." James bulled into Cunningham's headspace and yanked the slider to the left.

  Tick tick...tick...tick tick tick...tick...tick tick tick...

  Dopplered down near absolute zero, it went on for almost a minute. Total elapsed real time was about half a second.

  Cunningham zoomed the splitscreen. The huddled scrambler had remained motionless, except for the rippling of its cuticle and the undulation of its free arms. But before I'd only seen eight arms—and now I could make out the bony spur of a ninth peeking from behind the central mass. A ninth arm, curled up and hidden from view, tick tick ticking while another creature casually leaned against the other side of the wall...

  Now, there was nothing. The floating scrambler had drifted aimlessly back to the center of its enclosure.

  James's eyes shone. "We've got to check the rest of—"

  But Theseus had been watching, and was way ahead of us. It had already searched the archives and served up the results: three similar exchanges over two days, ranging in duration from a tenth of a second to almost two.

  "They're talking," James said.

  Cunningham shrugged, a forgotten cigarette burning down between his fingers. "So do a lot of things. And at that rate of exchange they're not exactly doing calculus. You could get as much information out of a dancing honeybee."

  "That's nonsense and you know it, Robert."

  "What I know is that—"

  "Honeybees don't deliberately hide what they're saying. Honeybees don't develop whole new modes of communication configured specifically to confound observers. That's flexible, Robert. That's intelligent."

  "And what if it is, hmm? Forget for a moment the inconvenient fact that these things don't even have brains. I really don't think you've thought this through."

  "Of course I have."

  "Indeed? Then what are you so happy about? Don't you know what this means?"

  Sudden prickling on the back of my neck. I looked around; I looked up. Jukka Sarasti had appeared in the center of the drum, eyes gleaming, teeth bared, watching us.

  Cunningham followed my gaze, and nodded. "I'd wager it does..."

  ***

  There was no way to learn what they'd whispered across that wall. We could recover the audio easily enough, parse every tick and tap they'd exchanged, but you can't decipher a code without some idea of content. We had patterns of sound that could have meant anything. We had creatures whose grammar and syntax—if their mode of communication even contained such attributes—were unknown and perhaps unknowable. We had creatures smart enough to talk, and smart enough to hide that fact. No matter
how much we wanted to learn, they were obviously unwilling to teach us.

  Not without—how had I put it?— negative reinforcement.

  It was Jukka Sarasti who made the decision. We did it on his orders, as we did everything else. But after the word had come down— after Sarasti had disappeared in the night and Bates had retreated down the spine and Robert Cunningham had returned to his studies at the back of the drum—I was the one Susan James was left with. The first to speak the vile thought aloud, the official witness to posterity. I was the one she looked at, and looked away from, her surfaces hard and refractory.

  And then she started.

  ***

  This is how you break down the wall:

  Start with two beings. They can be human if you like, but that's hardly a prerequisite. All that matters is that they know how to talk among themselves.

  Separate them. Let them see each other, let them speak. Perhaps a window between their cages. Perhaps an audio feed. Let them practice the art of conversation in their own chosen way.

  Hurt them.

  It may take a while to figure out how. Some may shrink from fire, others from toxic gas or liquid. Some creatures may be invulnerable to blowtorches and grenades, but shriek in terror at the threat of ultrasonic sound. You have to experiment; and when you discover just the right stimulus, the optimum balance between pain and injury, you must inflict it without the remorse.

  You leave them an escape hatch, of course. That's the very point of the exercise: give one of your subjects the means to end the pain, but give the other the information required to use it. To one you might present a single shape, while showing the other a whole selection. The pain will stop when the being with the menu chooses the item its partner has seen. So let the games begin. Watch your subjects squirm. If—when—they trip the off switch, you'll know at least some of the information they exchanged; and if you record everything that passed between them, you'll start to get some idea of how they exchanged it.

  When they solve one puzzle, give them a new one. Mix things up. Switch their roles. See how they do at circles versus squares. Try them out on factorials and Fibonnaccis. Continue until Rosetta Stone results.