Firefall

by Peter Watts

  “That is fucked,” Brüks said, quietly awed.

  Lianna shrugged. “Like I said, a bad superconductor. We got spares, though; faster’n fabbing a replacement.”

  He followed her through the ceiling. “So you never told me why you were so old school,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Fear of vivisection. When superconductors go bad. We covered this.”

  “The reason that stuff goes bad is because it’s crappy old tech. Internal augs are less failure-prone than your own brain.”

  “So they’ll work flawlessly when some spambot hacks in and leaves me with an irresistible urge to buy a year’s supply of bubble bath for cats.”

  “Hey, at least the augs are firewalled. It’s way easier to hack a raw brain, if that’s what you’re worried about.

  “Then again,” she added, “I don’t think it is.”

  He sighed. “No. I guess it isn’t.”

  “What, then?”

  They emerged into the southern hemisphere. Their reflections, thin as eels, slid across the mirrorball as they passed.

  “Know what a funnel-web spider is?” Brüks asked at last.

  After the barest hesitation: “I do now.” And a moment later, “Oh. The neurotoxins.”

  “Not just any neurotoxins. This one was special. Pharm refugee maybe, or just some open-source hobby that got loose. Might have even been beneficial under other circumstances, for all I know. The little fucker got away. But I felt a nip, right about here”—he spread the fingers of one hand, tapped the webbing between thumb and forefinger with the other—“and I was flat on my back ten seconds later.” He snorted softly. “Taught me not to go sampling without gloves, anyway.”

  They crossed the equator, single file. No one in the northern hemisphere.

  “Didn’t kill you, though,” Lianna observed shrewdly.

  “Nah. Just induced the mother of all allergic responses to nanopore antiglials. Any kind of direct neural interface finishes what that little bugger started.”

  “They could fix that, you know.” Lianna bounced off the deck and glided along the forward ladder, Brüks clambering in her wake.

  “Sure they could. I could take some proprietary drug for the rest of my life and let FizerPharm squeeze my balls every time they change their terms and conditions. Or I could get my whole immune system ripped out and replaced. Or I can take a couple of pills every day.”

  The attic.

  A warren of pipes and conduits, an engineering subbasement at the top of the ship. Plumbing, docking hatches, great wraparound bands full of tools and spacesuits and EVA accessories. Stone Age control panels in the catastrophic event that anyone might need to take manual control. A stale breeze caressed Brüks’s face from some overhead ventilator; he tasted oil and electricity. Up ahead the docking airlock bulged to starboard like a tinfoil hubcap three meters across; a smaller lock, merely man-size, played sidekick across the compartment. Spacesuits drifted in their alcoves like dormant silver larvae. Portals and panels crowded the spaces between struts and LOX tanks and CO2 scrubbers: lockers, bus boards, a head gimbaled for variable gee.

  Lianna cracked one of the lockers and began rummaging about inside.

  Yet another ladder climbed farther forward, out of the attic and up along a spire of dimly lit scaffolding. Afferent sensor array up there, according to the map. Maneuvering thrusters. And the parasol: that great wide conic of programmable metamaterial the Crown would hide behind when the sun got too close. Photosynthetic, according to the specs. Brüks didn’t know whether it would shuttle enough electrons to run whatever backup drive the Bicamerals were putting together, but at least hot showers were always an option.

  “Got it.” Lianna held up a greasy-looking gray washer, smiling.

  For a moment. The look of triumph drained from her face while Brüks watched; the expression left behind was bloodless and terrified.

  “Lee...?”

  She sucked in breath, and didn’t let it out. She stared past his right shoulder as if he were invisible.

  He spun, expecting monsters. Nothing to see but the airlock. Nothing to hear but the clicks and sighs of the Crown of Thorns, talking to itself.

  “Do you hear that?” she whispered. Her eyes moved in terrified little saccades. “That—ticking...”

  He heard the sigh of recycled air breathed into cramped spaces, the soft rustle of empty spacesuits stirring in the breeze. He heard faint muffled sounds of movement from below: a scrape, a hard brief footfall. Brüks looked around the compartment, swept his eyes past alcoves and airlocks—

  Now he heard something: sharp, soft, arrhythmic. Not a ticking so much as a clicking, a sound like, like a clicking tongue, perhaps. A hungry sound, from overhead.

  His stomach dropped away.

  He didn’t have to look. He didn’t dare to. Somehow he could feel her up there in the rafters: a dark predatory shadow, watching from places where the light couldn’t quite reach.

  The sound of teeth tapping together.

  “Shit,” Lianna whispered.

  She can’t be up there, Brüks thought. He’d checked the board before leaving the Commons. He always checked. Valerie’s icon had been down in her hab where it always was, a green dot among gray ones. She must have really moved.

  Of course, they could do that.

  Now those clicking teeth were so loud he didn’t know how he could have missed them. There was no pattern to that sound, no regular predictable rhythm. The silences between clicks stretched forever, drove him insane with trivial suspense; or snapped unexpectedly closed after a split second.

  “Let’s—” Brüks swallowed, tried again. “Let’s get...”

  But Lianna was already headed aft.

  The Hub was bright light and sterile reflections: the soft glow of the walls chased Brüks’s fears back to the basement where they belonged. He looked at Lianna a bit sheepishly as they rounded the mirrorball.

  Lianna did not look sheepish at all. If anything, she looked more worried than she had in the attic. “She must have hacked the sensors.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She wiggled her fingers in midair; INTERCOM appeared on the bulkhead. Sengupta was astern near the Hold; Moore was back in the Dorm.

  Valerie’s icon glowed reassuring green, down in her own private hab with the grays.

  “Ship doesn’t know where she is anymore,” Lianna said. “She could be anywhere. Other side of any door you open.”

  “Why would she do that?” Brüks glanced up at the hole in the ceiling as Lianna grabbed the ladder. “What was she even doing up there?”

  “Did you see her?”

  He shook his head. “Couldn’t look.”

  “Me, neither.”

  “So for all we know, she wasn’t even up there.”

  She managed a nervous laugh. “You wanna go back and check?”

  Here among the bright lights and the gleaming machinery, it was hard not to feel utterly ridiculous. Brüks shook his head. “Even if she is up there, so what? It’s not like she’s confined to quarters. It’s not like she did anything other than—grind her teeth.”

  “She’s a predator,” Lianna pointed out.

  “She’s a sadist. She’s been pushing my buttons since day one; I think she just gets off on it. Jim’s right: if she wanted to kill us we’d be dead already.”

  “Maybe this is how she kills us,” Lianna said. “Maybe she mambos.”

  “Mambos.”

  “Voodoo works, Oldschool. Fear messes up your cardiac rhythms. Adrenaline kills heart cells. You can literally scare someone to death if you hack the sympathetic nervous system the right way.”

  So voodoo’s real, Brüks mused.

  Chalk one up for organized religion.

  . . .

  Moore was heading down when Brüks was heading out.

  “Hey, Jim.”

  “Daniel.”

  It didn’t happen often anymore. Whether at meals or after, during the Crown’s bright bl
ue day or the warmer shadows of its night cycle, the Colonel always seemed to be deep in ConSensus these days. He never talked about what he did there. Cramming for Icarus, of course. Reviewing the telemetry Theseus had sent before disappearing into the fog. But he kept those details to himself, even when he came out to breathe.

  Brüks stopped at the foot of the Commons ladder. “Hey, you want to see a movie?”

  “A what?”

  “The Silences of Pone. Like a game you can only watch. Lee says it’s one of—you know, back when they couldn’t just induce desired states directly. They had to manipulate you into feeling things. With plot and characters and so on.”

  “Art,” Moore said. “I remember.”

  “Pretty crude by current standards but apparently it won a whole bunch of awards for neuroinduction back in the day. Lee found it in the cache, set up a feed. Says it’s worth watching.”

  “That woman is getting to you,” the Colonel remarked.

  “This whole fucking voyage is getting to me. You in?”

  He shook his head. “Still reviewing the telemetry.”

  “You’ve been doing that for a week now. You hardly come up for air.”

  “There’s a lot of telemetry.”

  “I thought they went in and went dark.”

  “They did.”

  “Almost immediately, you said.”

  “Almost is a relative term. Theseus had more eyes than a small corporation. Take a lifetime to sift through even a few minutes of that feed.”

  “For a baseline, maybe. Surely the Bicams have everything in hand.”

  Moore looked at him. “I thought you didn’t approve of blind faith in higher powers.”

  “I don’t approve of breaking your back pushing boulders uphill when you’re eyeprinted for the heavy lifter across the street, either. You said it yourself. They’re a hundred steps ahead of us. We’re just here to enjoy the ride.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “How so?”

  “We’re here. They’re stuck in decompression for the next six days.”

  “Right,” Brüks remembered. “Field-tested.”

  “Why they brought us along.”

  Brüks grimaced. “They brought me along because I happened to stumble onto the highway and they didn’t have the heart to see me turn into roadkill.”

  The Colonel shrugged. “Doesn’t mean they can’t make the most of an opportunity when it presents itself.”

  Brüks’s fingertips tingled in remembrance. Opportunities, he realized with sudden dull surprise.

  I’m missing one.

  It was a window in the crudest possible sense: a solid pane of transparent alloy, set into the rear bulkhead. You couldn’t zoom it or resize it or lay a tactical false-color overlay across its surface. You couldn’t even turn it off, unless someone on the other side brought down the blast shield. It was a clear, impenetrable hole in the ship: a circular viewport into an alien terrarium where, out past the ghostly reflection of his own face, strange hyperbaric creatures built monstrous artifacts out of sand and coral. Their eyes twinkled like green stars in the gloom.

  Six of the monks were resting, suspended in medical cocoons like dormant grubs waiting out the winter. The others moved purposeful as ants across a background of shadows and half-built machinery: a jumbled cityscape of tanks and stacked ceramic superconductors and segments of pipe big enough to walk through without ducking. Brüks was pretty sure that the patchwork sphere coming together near the center of the Hold was shaping up to be the fusion chamber.

  Two of the Bicamerals huddled off to one side in some sort of wordless back-to-back communion. A glistening gelatinous orb floated beside them. Someone else (Evans, that was it) seized a nearby hand tool and lobbed it to starboard. It spun lazily end over end until Chodorowska reached up and snatched it from the air, without ever taking her eyes off the component in her other hand.

  She’d never even looked. Which was not to say she hadn’t seen it coming.

  But of course, there was no her. Not right now, anyway. There was no Evans or Ofoegbu, either.

  There was only the hive.

  How had Moore put it? Cognitive subspecies. But the Colonel didn’t get it. Neither did Lianna; she’d shared her enthusiastic blindness with Brüks over breakfast that very morning, ticked off in hushed and reverent tones the snips and splices that had so improved her masters: No TPN suppression, no Semmelweis reflex. They’re immune to inattentional blindness and hyperbolic discounting, and, Oldschool, that synesthesia of theirs—they reset millions of years of sensory biases with that trick. Randomized all the errors, just like that. And it’s not just the mundane sensory stuff, it’s not just feeling color and tasting sounds. They can literally see time...​

  As if those were good things.

  In a way, of course, they were. All those gut feelings, right or wrong, that had kept the breed alive on the Pleistocene savanna—and they were wrong, so much of the time. False negatives, false positives, the moral algebra of fat men pushed in front of onrushing trolleys. The strident emotional belief that children made you happy, even when all the data pointed to misery. The high-amplitude fear of sharks and dark-skinned snipers who would never kill you; indifference to all the toxins and pesticides that could. The mind was so rotten with misrepresentation that in some cases it literally had to be damaged before it could make a truly rational decision—and should some brain-lesioned mother abandon her baby in a burning house in order to save two strangers from the same fire, the rest of the world would be more likely to call her a monster than laud the rationality of her lifeboat ethics. Hell, rationality itself—the exalted Human ability to reason—hadn’t evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will.

  Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.

  Fossil feelings. Better off without them, once you’d outgrown the savanna and decided that Truth mattered after all. But Humanity wasn’t defined by arms and legs and upright posture. Humanity had evolved at the synapse as well as at the opposable thumb—and those misleading gut feelings were the very groundwork on which the whole damn clade had been built. Capuchins felt empathy. Chimps had an innate sense of fair play. You could look into the eyes of any cat or dog and see a connection there, a legacy of common subroutines and shared emotions.

  The Bicamerals had cut away all that kinship in the name of something their stunted progenitors called Truth, and replaced it with—something else. They might look human. Their cellular metabolism might lie dead on the Kleiber curve. But to merely call them a cognitive subspecies was denial to the point of delusion. The wiring in those skulls wasn’t even mammalian anymore. A look into those sparkling eyes would show you nothing but—

  “Hey.”

  Lianna’s reflection bobbed upside down next to his in the window. He turned as she reached past and unhooked her pressure suit from its alcove. “Hey.”

  His eyes wandered back to the window. The back-to-back Bicamerals had ended their joint trance; they turned, simultaneously plunged their hands into the wobbling sphere at their side (Water, Brüks realized: it’s just a blob of water), dried off on a towel leashed to the bulkhead.

  “I didn’t know,” he said, too quietly. As if afraid they’d hear him through the bulkhead. “How they work. What they—are.”

  “Really.” She checked her suit O2. “I would’ve thought the eyes’d be a giveaway.”

  “I just assumed that was for night vision. Hell, I know people who retro fluorescent proteins as a fashion statement.”

  “Yeah, now. Back in the day they were—”

  “Diagnostic markers. I figured it out.” After Moore had inspired him to go back and actually look at the thing that had left all those corpses twisted like so much driftwood in the Oregon desert. It still lingered in his own blood, after all—and it had been almost too e
asy, the way the lab had taken that chimera apart and spread-eagled every piece for his edification. Streptococcal subroutines lifted from necrotizing myelitis; viral encephalitides laterally promoted from their usual supporting role in limbic encephalitis; a polysaccharide in the cell wall with a special affinity for the nasal mucosa. A handful of synthetic subroutines, built entirely from scratch, to glue all those incompatible pieces together and keep them from fighting.

  But it had been the heart of that piecemeal bug that had betrayed the hive to Brüks’s investigations: a subroutine targeting a specific mutation of the p53 gene. He hadn’t got any direct hits when he’d run a search on that mutation, but the nearest miss was close enough to spill the secret: a tumor antagonist patented almost thirty years before.

  As if someone had weaponized an anticancer agent.

  “Doesn’t it bother you?” he wondered now.

  The suit had swallowed her to the waist. “Why should it?”

  “They’re tumors, Lee. Literally. Thinking tumors.”

  “That’s a pretty gross oversimplification.”

  “Maybe.” He wasn’t clear on the details. Hypomethylation, CpG islands, methylcytosine—black magic, all of it. The precise and deliberate rape of certain methylating groups to turn interneurons cancerous, just so: a synaptic superbloom that multiplied every circuit a thousandfold. It was no joyful baptism, as far as Brüks could tell. There’d be no ecstasy in that rebirth. It was a breakneck overgrowth of weedy electricity that nearly killed its initiates outright, pulled sixty-million-year-old circuits out by the roots.

  Lianna was right: the path was subtle and complex beyond human imagining, controlled with molecular precision, tamed by whatever drugs and dark arts the Bicamerals used to keep all that overgrowth from running rampant. But when the rites and incantations had been spoken, when the deed had been done and the patient sewn up, it all came down to one thing: