Peter Watts - Firefall

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 comes 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: