Peter Watts - Firefall

“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.”

She didn’t seem to hear him. “You should see this,” she said, and withdrew.

And poked her head out again after a few seconds: “Well come on .”

He hunkered gingerly down into the tent. Sengupta crouched at its center. Patches of flickering intelligence swarmed across the fabric: columns of numbers; crude plastic-skinned portraits rendered by some computer sketch artist struggling with insufficient eye-witness data; rows of—home addresses, from the look of it.

“What’s this?”

“Nothing you care about.” Reflected lightning played across her face. “Just some fucker going to be eating his own guts when I get hold of him.” She waved one hand and the collage disappeared.

“You do realize they’ve got a whole hab set up as a dorm,” Brüks said.

“That’s too crowded nobody uses this one.”

“ I use—” Never mind .

A roommate might not be so bad, he reflected. He’d have never sought one out—good parasites do not draw attention to themselves, no matter how lonely the lifestyle—but if things went south, maybe Valerie would eat Rakshi first. Buy him some time.

“Watch this best party trick ever .”

She threw a video feed onto the wall: rowdy voices, flashing lights, a maglev table wobbling at an insane angle thanks to the drunken asshole trying to dance on the damn thing. Campus bar. The student ambience would be a dead giveaway anywhere on the planet but Brüks was pretty sure it was somewhere in Europe. The subtitler was off but he caught snatches of German and Hungarian at least.

A couple of grad students had randomly arranged a dozen empty beer glasses on a table. A crowd of others cheered and chanted and pulled chairs away, clearing a surrounding space. Something was happening stage left, just out of camera range: an anti disturbance, a sudden contagious quelling of noise and commotion that drew eyes and spread around the circle in an instant. The camera turned toward the eye in the storm. Brüks sucked in his breath.

Valerie again.

She stalked into the cleared floor space like a spring-loaded panther, unleashed, autonomous. She wore the cheap throwaway smart-paper weave ubiquitous to lab rats and convicts the world over; it seemed absurd against the jostling background of blazers and holograms and bioluminescent tattoos. Valerie didn’t seem to notice her own violation of the dress code; didn’t notice the way the front lines pushed back against the crowd as she passed, or the way the murmuring horde fell silent when she got too close. She had eyes only for the glasses on the table.

What kind of suicidal idiot would take a vampire to a bar ? How zoned had these people been, to not be fleeing for the exits?

“Where did you get —”

“ Shut up and watch! ”

Valerie circled the table, once. She hesitated for a moment, her eyes unfocused, something that might almost have been a smile playing across her lips.

In the next instant, she sprang.

She came down on one bare foot, almost three meters from a standing start; snapped the other down with a stomp, spun and stamped again and jumped—arcing backward this time, over the table itself, flipping in midair and landing in a four-point crouch ( left foot right foot right knee left hand ) before hopping to the left ( stomp ), hand-springing forward to land chest-to-face with some semisober sessional who still had enough animal sense to turn greeny-white under a face loaded with retconned chloroplasts. Straight up now: a vertical one-meter leap with a one-legged landing; about-face ( stomp ), two diagonal steps toward the table ( stomp ). Both elbows, one knee crashing simultaneously against ancient floorboards that bounced her smoothly back into a standing position. Finis . After a moment, the camera, shaking despite the very best image-stabilization algorithms a student budget could buy, panned back to the table.

The glasses were arranged in a perfectly straight, evenly spaced line.

“Hard to find this one someone snuck her out the back door you take a vampire out without authorization and your career is over so they really kept the evidence locked up I think it was an initiation or something…”

The view hovered over the tableau for a long, disbelieving moment. Swung back to the monster who had created it. Valerie stared straight through the camera and a thousand kilometers beyond, smiled that patented bone-chilling smile. She wasn’t even breathing hard.

Everyone else was, though. Reality was finally cutting through the drinks and the drugs and the sheer idiotic bravado of spoiled children raised on promises of immortality. They were in the presence of black magic. They were in the presence of something whose most trivial efforts turned the very laws of motion into feats of telekinesis. And one sodden instant behind all that awe and stunned disbelief, perhaps, the realization of just what all that vast intelligence, all those superconducting motor skills had evolved in the service of.

Hunting.

It didn’t matter what bedtime stories these privileged brats had been told. They were not immortal in such a presence. They were only breakfast. And it was obvious to Brüks—from the way they pulled back and muttered their excuses, the way they edged for doors while keeping their backs to walls, the way even those pretending to be in charge averted their eyes as they scuttled sidelong up to Valerie and told her in weak and shaking voices that it was time to come in now—that they finally knew it.

It was also obvious, in hindsight, that Brüks had been uncharitable to the baselines who’d stolen their rat from its cage for one wild night out. Whoever they were, they hadn’t been suicidal. They hadn’t been idiots. No matter what they might have told themselves before or after, no matter who remembered having the idea.

It hadn’t really been their decision at all.

The gimp hood did amp his learning curve. Brüks had to admit that much.

Data once forced to time-share the cramped real estate between bands of astroturf stretched luxuriously around him along three axes and three hundred sixty degrees of infinite space. Options he would have had to make eye contact with on a smart-paint display leapt front and center the moment he so much as thought about them. Information that he’d normally have to read, and repeat, and review—it seemed to just stick in the brain with a glance and a swallow. He was used to cognitive enhancers, of course, but this had to be Bicameral tech; he couldn’t imagine that even surgical augments would deliver a bigger boost.