Firefall

by Peter Watts

  “She’s not,” Moore said flatly. “Change the wiring, change the machine.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “She agreed to it. She volunteered. She worked her ass off and elbowed her way to the front of the line just for the chance to make the cut.”

  “It’s not informed consent.”

  That raised eyebrow again. “How so?”

  “How can it be, when the person giving it is cognitively incapable of understanding what she’s agreeing to?”

  “So you’re saying she’s mentally incompetent,” Moore said.

  “I’m saying we all are. Next to the hives, and the vampires, and the thumbwirers, and that whole—”

  “We’re children.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who can’t be trusted to make our own decisions.”

  Brüks shook his head. “Not about things like this, no.”

  “We need adults to make those choices on our behalf.”

  “We—” He fell silent.

  Moore watched him above the ghost of a smile. After a moment he pulled the Glenmorangie off the wall.

  “Have a drink,” he said. “Helps the future go down easier.”

  . . .

  Crawling unseen through the viscera of its host, the parasite takes control.

  Daniel Brüks drilled into the central nervous system of the Crown of Thorns and bent it to his will. Lianna, as usual, was back in the Hold with her helpless omnipotent masters. Sengupta’s icon glowed in the Hub. Moore was ostensibly in the Dorm but the feed from that hab put the lie to it: only his body was there, running on autopilot while his closed eyes danced through some ConSensual realm Brüks could only imagine.

  He was going to be eating alone.

  The anxiety had become chronic by now. It nagged at the bottom of his brain like a toothache, had become so much a part of him that it went unnoticed save for those times when some unexpected chill brought it all back. Panic attacks: in the spokes, in the habs, in his own goddamn tent. They didn’t happen often, and they never lasted long. Just often enough to remind him. Just long enough to keep him paranoid.

  The blade began to twist as he ascended the spoke. Brüks gritted his teeth, briefly closed his eyes as the conveyor pulled him past the Zone of Terror (it helped, really it did), relaxed as the haunted zone receded beneath him. He released the handhold at the top of the spoke and coasted into the Hub, crossed the antarctic hatch (half-contracted now, barely wide enough for the passage of a body) pushed himself toward—

  A soft wet sound. A cough from the northern hemisphere, a broken breath.

  Someone crying.

  Sengupta was up there. Had been a few minutes ago, at least.

  He cleared his throat. “Hello?”

  A brief rustle. Silence and ventilators.

  Ohhkay...​

  He resumed his course, crossed to the Commons spoke, twisted and jackknifed through. He allowed himself a moment of self-congratulation as he grabbed the conveyor and started down headfirst, smoothly swinging around the handhold until his feet pointed down; just two days ago all these drainpipes and variable-gravity straightaways would have left him completely disoriented.

  Valerie tagged him halfway.

  He never saw her coming. He had his face to the bulkhead. There may have been a flicker of overhead shadow, just a split second before that brief touch between his shoulder blades: like a knife’s edge sliding along his spine, like being unzipped down the back. His back brain reacted before he was even aware of the contact, flattened and froze him like a startled rabbit. By the time he could move again she was past and gone and Daniel Brüks was still alive.

  He looked down, down that long tunnel she’d sailed into headfirst and without a sound. She was waiting at the bottom of the spoke: white and naked and almost skeletal. Wiry corded muscle stretched over bone. Her right foot tapped a strange and disquieting pattern on the metal.

  The conveyor was delivering him into her arms.

  He released the handhold, lunged across the spoke for the static safety of the ladder. He missed the first rung he grabbed for, caught the second; leftover momentum nearly popped his shoulder from its socket. His feet scrabbled for purchase, finally found it. He clung to the ladder as the conveyor streamed past to each side, going up going down.

  Valerie looked up at him. He looked away.

  She just touched me for Christ’s sake. I barely even felt it. It was probably an accident.

  No accident.

  She hasn’t threatened you, she hasn’t raised a hand. She’s just—sitting there. Waiting.

  Not in her hab. Not kept at bay by bright lights, no matter what comforting lies Moore had recited.

  Brüks kept his eyes on the bulkhead. He swore he could feel the baring of her teeth.

  She’s just another failed hominoid. That’s all she is. Without our drugs she couldn’t even handle a few right angles without going into convulsions. Just another one of nature’s fuckups, just another extinct monster ten thousand years dead.

  And brought back to life. And chillingly, completely at home in the future. More at home than Daniel Brüks had ever felt.

  She wouldn’t even be alive if it weren’t for us. If we roaches hadn’t scraped up all those leftover genes and spliced them back together again. She had her day. She’s nothing to be afraid of. Don’t be such a fucking coward.

  “Coming?”

  With effort he looked down, managed to fix his gaze on the edge of the hatch behind her, kept her eyes in that great comforting wash of low resolution that made up 95 percent of the human visual field. He even managed to answer, after a fashion: “I, um...”

  His hands stayed locked on the ladder.

  “Suit yourself,” Valerie said, and disappeared into the Commons.

  Motion through the grille: the pixilated mosaic that was Rakshi Sengupta, returning from some place farther forward. The lav in the attic, perhaps. Brüks found it perfectly understandable that Sengupta might choose to leave for a piss at the same moment Valerie happened to be passing through.

  She fell into eclipse behind the mirrorball. Brüks heard the sound of buckles and plugs clicking into place, a grunt that might have passed for a greeting: “Thought you were headed for Commons.”

  He swam into the northern hemisphere. Sengupta was pulling a ConSensus glove over her left hand: middle finger, ring, index, little, thumb. Her hair stood out from her head, crackling faintly with static electricity.

  “Valerie got there first,” he said.

  “Room for two down there.” Right glove: middle, ring, index...​

  “There really isn’t.”

  She still refused to look at him, of course. But the smile was encouraging.

  “Nasty cunt doesn’t even use the galley.” Sengupta’s tone was conspiratorial. “Only comes out of her hab to scare us.”

  “How’d she even end up here?” Brüks wondered.

  Sengupta did something with her eyes, a little jiggle that said command interface. “There. Now we’ll see her coming.” Her elbows moved out from her body and back in, a precise stubby wingbeat. Brüks couldn’t tell whether it was interface or OCD. “Anyhow why ask me?”

  “I thought you’d know.”

  “You were there I just fished you all out of the atmosphere.”

  “No, I mean—where’s she even from? Vampires are supposed to live in comfy little compounds where they fight algos and solve Big Problems and don’t threaten anybody. It’s not like anyone would be stupid enough to let them off the leash. So how does Valerie show up in the desert with a pack of zombies and an army aerostat?”

  “Smart little monsters,” Sengupta said, too loud. (Brüks stole a nervous glance through the perforated deck.) “I’d start making crosses if I were you.”

  “No good. They’ve got those drug pumps in their heads. AntiEuclideans.”

  “Things change, baseline. Adapt or die.” Sengupta’s head bobbed like a bird’s. “I don’t know where she com
es from. I’m working on it though. Don’t trust her at all don’t like the way she moves.”

  Neither do I, Brüks thought.

  “Maybe her friends can tell us,” Sengupta said.

  “What friends?”

  “The ones she got away from, I’ve been looking and—hey you’re a big-time biologist right? You go to conferences and all?”

  “One or two, maybe. I’m not that big-time.” Mostly he just virtualized; his grants weren’t big enough to let him jet his actual biomass around the planet.

  Besides, these days most of his colleagues weren’t all that happy to see him anyway.

  “Shoulda gone to this one.” Sengupta bit her lip and summoned a video archive onto the wall. It was a standard floatcam view of a typical meeting hall in a typical conference: she’d muted the sound but the sight was more than familiar. Seated rows of senior faculty decked out in thermochrome and conjoined flesh-sculpture; grad students dressed down in ties and blazers of dumbest synth. A little corral off to one side where a few dozen teleops stood like giant stick insects or chess pieces on treads, rented mechanical shells for the ghosts of those who couldn’t afford the airfare.

  The speaker of the hour stood behind the usual podium. The usual flatscreen stretched out behind him; the usual corporate hologram spun lazily above it all, reminding the assembled of where they were and whose generous sponsorship had made it all possible:

  FizerPharm Presents

  The 22nd Biennial J. Craig Ventor Memorial Conference on Synthetic and Virtual Biology

  “Not really my thing,” Brüks admitted. “I’m more into—”

  “There!” Sengupta crowed, and froze the feed.

  At first he couldn’t see what she was getting at. The man at the podium, petrified in midmotion, gestured at a matrix of head shots looming behind him on the screen. Just another one of those eye-glazing group dioramas that infested academic presentations the world over: I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all those wonderful folks who assisted in this research because there’s no fucking way I’ll ever give them actual coauthorship.

  Then Brüks’s eyes focused, and his gut clenched a little.

  Not collaborators, he saw: subjects.

  He could tick off the telltales in his head, one by one: the pallor, the facial allometry, the angles of cheekbone and mandible. The eyes: Jesus Christ, those eyes. An image filtered through three generations, a picture of a picture of a picture, fractions of faces degraded down to a few dark pixels and they still sent cold tendrils up his spine.

  All these things he could itemize, given time. But the brainstem chill shrank his balls endless milliseconds before his gray matter could have ever told him why.

  The Uncanny Valley on steroids, he thought.

  For the first time he noticed the text glowing on the front of the podium, the thumbnailed intel of a talk already in progress: Paglino, R. J., Harvard—Evidence of Heuristic Image Processing in the Vampire Retina.

  Sengupta drummed her fingers, fed the roach a clue: “Second row third column.”

  Valerie’s face. Oh yes.

  “They make ’em hard to track,” she complained. “Keep changing ID codes move them around. All proprietary information and filing errors and can’t let the vampire liberation front know where the kennels are but I got her now I got her now I got the first piece of the puzzle.”

  Valerie the vampire. Valerie the lab rat. Valerie the desert demon, mistress of the undead, scorched-earth army of one. Rakshi Sengupta had her.

  “Good luck,” Brüks said.

  But the pilot had already brought up another window, a list of names and affiliations. Authors and attendees, it looked like. Some were flagged. Brüks squinted at the list, scanned it for whatever commonality might bind those highlighted names together.

  Ah. Resident Institution: Simon Fraser.

  “She had friends,” Sengupta murmured, almost to herself. “I bet she got away from ’em.

  “I bet they want her back.”

  JIM MOORE WAS dancing.

  There was no floor to speak of. No partner. Not even any witnesses until Daniel Brüks climbed into the Hub; the command deck was uncharacteristically quiet, no tapping toes or clicking tongues, none of the staccato curses that Sengupta barked out when some command or interface didn’t see things her way. Moore was alone in the cluttered landscape, leaping from a stack of cargo cubes, rebounding off some haphazard plateau halfway down, hitting the deck for just a split second in a perfect barefoot crouch before bouncing back into the air: one arm tight across his chest, the other jabbing at some invisible partn—

  Opponent, Brüks realized. Those open-handed strikes on empty air, that heel coming down with a snap against a passing bulkhead: those were combat moves. Whether he was interacting with a virtual partner in ConSensus or merely faking it old school, Brüks had no idea.

  The dancing warrior caught a loose strap of cargo webbing floating from the grille, swung legs overhead, and planted them against the bulkhead: hands pulling against strap in lieu of gravity, legs pushing back from the grille in opposition, a human tripod planted against the wall like a three-legged spider. Brüks could clearly see his face. Moore wasn’t even breathing through the mouth.

  “Nice moves,” Brüks said.

  Moore looked right past him and lifted his feet without a word, turning slowly around the strap like a windmill in a light breeze.

  “Uh...”

  “Shhh.”

  He jumped a little at the hand on his arm. “You don’t want to wake him up,” Lianna said softly.

  “He’s asleep?” Brüks looked back at the ceiling; Moore was spinning more quickly now, head out, legs spread in a V, the strap winding tighter between man and metal. In the next instant he was airborne again.

  “Sure.” Lianna’s dreads bobbed gently in the wake of her nod. “What, you stay awake when you exercise? You don’t find it, um, boring?”

  He didn’t know whether she was taking a shot at the thought of Dan Brüks coming equipped with some kind of sleepwalking option, or the equally ludicrous thought of Dan Brüks working out.

  “Why do it at all? A dose of AMPK agonist and he’s a hardbody even if he lies in bed snarfing bonbons all day.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to depend on augments that can be hacked. Maybe the endorphins give him happier dreams. Maybe old habits die hard.”

  Moore sailed over their heads, stabbing the air. Brüks ducked despite himself.

  Lianna chuckled. “Don’t worry about that. He can see us just fine.” She caught herself: “Something in there can, anyway.” A kick and a glide took her to the port staircase. “Anyway, don’t waste your time with that loser—the moment he wakes up he’ll just dive back into his Theseus files.” She jerked her chin. “I’ve got some time to kill. Come play with me instead.”

  “Play w—” But she’d already turned like a fish and darted down the spoke. He followed her back to the heavy quarters, to the Commons where Moore’s green bottle and his own abandoned gimp hood clung to the bulkhead between bands of minty astroturf.

  “Play what?” he asked, catching up. “Tag?”

  She grabbed his hood off the wall and tossed it to him, flumping into a convenient hammock in a single smooth motion. “Anything you want. Deity Smackdown. Body-swap boxing is kinda fun. Oh, and there’s a Kardashev sim I’m pretty good at, but I promise to go easy on you.”

  He turned the Interloper Accessory over in his hands. The frontal superconductors stared up at him like a pair of startled eyes.

  “You do remember that’s mainly a gaming hood, right?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t game.”

  Lianna eyed him as though he’d just claimed to be a hydrangea. “Why ever not?”

  Of course he couldn’t tell her. “It’s not real.”

  “It’s not supposed to be,” she explained, surprisingly patient. “That’s what makes them games.”

  “Doesn’t feel real.”

  �
�Yeah it does.”

  “Not to me.”

  “Yeah it does.”

  “Not to—”

  “Not to put too fine a point on it, Oldschool, but Yes it does.”

  “Don’t lecture me about my own perceptions, Lee.”

  “It’s the same neurons! The same signal running up the same wiring, and there’s absolutely no way your brain can tell the difference between an electron that came all the way from your retina and one that got injected midstream. Absolutely no way.”

  “Doesn’t feel real,” he insisted. “Not to me. And I’m not playing Porn Star Cat Wars with you.”

  “Just try, man.”

  “Play the AI. It’ll give you a better run for your money anyway.”

  “It’s not the sa—”

  “Hah!”

  Lianna’s face fell. “Fuck. Skewered by my own position statement.”

  “By a roach, no less. How’s it feel?”

  “Like I just punched myself in the nose,” she admitted.

  Neither spoke for a moment.

  “Just once? For me?”

  “I don’t game.”

  “Okay, okay. No harm in asking.”

  “Now you’ve asked.”

  “Okay.” She swung back and forth in the hammock for a few seconds. (There was something a little off about that motion, a hinted half-spiral oscillation. Coriolis was a subtle trickster.)

  “If it makes you feel any better,” she said after a while, “I kinda know what you mean.”

  “About?”

  “About things not seeming real. I actually feel that way all the time. Gaming’s the only time I don’t feel that way.”

  “Huh,” Brüks grunted, a little surprised. “I wonder why.”

  And after a moment’s thought: “Probably the company you keep.”

  Someone had set up a second tent next to his, stuck it like an engorged white blood cell right at the base of the ladder. Brüks had to effect a half hop sideways off the second rung to avoid bumping it. Something rustled and muttered inside.

  “Hello?”

  Sengupta stuck her head out, stared at the deck. “Roach.”

  Brüks coughed. “You know, that doesn’t actually sound as much like a compliment as you might think.”