Peter Watts - Firefall

So much for the pack, Brüks thought nervously. What about the Alph— and didn’t finish the question, because the flesh crawling up his backbone had just given him the answer.

She was right behind him. For all he knew, she always had been.

The Bicamerals didn’t seem to notice. They hadn’t taken their eyes off tactical since they’d arrived. Brüks swallowed and forced his gaze left. He forced himself to turn. He resisted the urge to lower his gaze as Valerie came into view, forced himself to look her right in the eyes. They shone back at him. He gritted his teeth and thought very hard about leucophores and thin-film optics and finally realized: She’s not even looking at me.

She wasn’t. Those bright monster eyes burned a path right past him to the dome behind, shifted and jiggled in microscopic increments to this datum or that image, jittered fast as the eyes of zombies and with twice the intensity. Brüks could almost see the brain sparking behind those lenses, the sheets of electricity soaking up information faster than fiber. It had all of them now, monks and monsters and minions alike, all of them finally brought together under a tiny metal sky crowded with the machinery of thought: boot sequences, diagnostics, the sprawling multidimensional vistas of a thousand mechanical senses. It threatened to overflow the hemisphere entirely, a ceaseless flickering infostorm that breached the equator and started spilling aft as Brüks watched.

Crude as papyrus, he realized. All these dimensions, squashed flat and pasted across physical space: it was a medium for cavemen and cockroaches, not these cognitive giants looming on all sides. Why were they even here? Why come together in the land of the blind when ConSensus went on forever, arrayed endless intelligence throughout the infinite space within their own heads? Why settle for eyes of jelly when invisible signals could reach through bone and brain and doodle on the very synapses themsel—

Shit, he thought.

All that smart paint, so ubiquitous throughout the ship. He’d just assumed it was for ambient lighting, and a backup for backups should the implants fail in one of these overclocked brains. But now it seemed to be their preferred interface: crude, pointillist, extrinsic . Not completely unhackable, perhaps—but at least any intrusions would take place outside the head, would compromise the mech and not the meat. At least no alien, imagined or otherwise, would be rewriting the thoughts in the heads of the hive.

A few years to settle in, Moore had said. A few years for parties unknown to study new and unfamiliar technology, to infer the nature of the softer things behind it. Years to build whatever gears and interfaces an unlimited energy source could provide, and sit back, and wait for the owners to arrive. All that time for anything in there to figure out how to get in here .

They’re afraid, Brüks realized, and then:

Shit, they’re afraid?

Sengupta threw a row of camera feeds across the dome. Holds and service crawlways, mainly: tanks for the storage of programmable matter, warrens of tunnels where robots on rails slid along on endless missions of repair and resupply. Habs embedded here and there like lymph nodes, vacuoles to be grudgingly pumped full of warmth and atmosphere on those rare occasions when visitors came calling—but barren, uninviting, barely big enough to stand erect even if gravity had been an option. Icarus was an ungracious host, resentful of any parasites that sought to take up residence in her gut.

Something had done that anyway.

Sengupta grabbed that window and stretched it across a fifth of the dome: AUX/RECOMP according to the feed, a cylindrical compartment with another cylinder—segmented, ribbed, studded with conduits and access panels and eruptions of high-voltage cabling—running through its center like a metal trachea. The view brightened as they watched. Fitful sparks ignited along the walls, caught steady, dimmed to a soft lemon glow that spread across painted strips of bulkhead. Wisps of frozen vapor swirled in weightless arabesques before some reawakened ventilator sucked them away.

Brüks had educated himself on the way down. He knew what he’d find if he were to cut that massive windpipe down the middle. At one end a great black compound eye, a honeycomb cluster of gamma-ray lasers aimed along the lumen of the tube. Pumps and field coils encircled that space at regular intervals: superconductors, ultrarefrigeration pipes to bring some hypothetical vacuum down to a hairbreadth of absolute zero. Matter took on strange forms inside that chamber. Atoms would lie down, forget about Brown and entropy, take a message from the second law of thermodynamics and promise to get back to it later. They would line up head to toe and lock into place as a single uniform substrate. A trillion atoms would condense into one vast entity: a blank slate, waiting for energy and information to turn it into something new.

Theseus had fed from something a lot like this, part of the same circuit in fact. Maybe it was feeding still. And down at the far end of AUX/RECOMP, past the lasers and the magnets and the microchannel plate traps, Brüks could see something else, something—

Wrong.

That was all he could tell, at first: something just a little bit off about the far end of the compiler. It took a few moments to notice the service port just slightly ajar, the stain leaking from its edges. His brain shuffled through a thousand cue cards and tried spilled paint on for size, but that didn’t really fit. It looked too thick, too blobby for the smart stuff; and he’d seen no other surface painted that oily shade of gray on any of the other feeds.

Then someone zoomed the view and a whole new set of cues clicked into place.

Those branching, filigreed edges: like rootlets, like dendrites growing along the machinery.

“Is it still coming through?” Lianna’s voice, a little dazed.

“Don’t be stupid you don’t think I’d mention it if it was? Wouldn’t work anyway some idiot left the port open.”

But life support had been shut down until the Crown had docked, Brüks remembered. Vacuum throughout. “Maybe it was running until you pressurized the habs. Maybe we—interrupted it.”

Those little pimply lumps, like—like some kind of early-stage fruiting bodies…​

“I told you I’d mention it Jesus the logs say no juice for weeks.”

“Assuming we can trust the logs,” Moore said softly.

“It looks almost like dumb paint of some kind,” Lianna remarked.

Brüks shook his head. “Looks like a slime mold.”

“Whatever it is,” Moore said, “it’s not something any of our people would have sent down. Which raises an obvious question.”

It did. But nobody asked it.

Of course, no slime mold could survive in hard vacuum at absolute zero.

“Name one thing that can,” Moore said.

“ Deinococcus comes close. Some of the synthetics come closer.”

“But active ?”

“No,” Brüks admitted. “They pretty much shut down until conditions improve.”

“So whatever that is”—Moore gestured at the image—“you’re saying it’s dormant.”

Stranger even than the thing in the window: the experience of being asked for an opinion by anyone on the Crown of Thorns . The mystery lasted long enough for Brüks to glance sideways and see monks and vampire clustered in a multimodal dialogue of clicks and phonemes and dancing fingers. The Bicamerals faced away from each other; they hovered in an impromptu knot, each set of eyes aimed out along a different bearing.

Jim may be Colonel Supersoldier to me, Brüks realized, but we’re all just capuchins next to those things…