Peter Watts - Firefall

Other times he sat restlessly in the Hub while Sengupta ran numbers across the wall, this many tonnes and that many kilonewtons and so much Isp thrust. He’d tap into AUX/RECOMP and watch Valerie and Ofoegbu and Amina at work, scientific and religious paraphernalia floating about their heads as they attempted communion with an impossible slime mold from the stars. He’d capture their movements and their incantations, feed them to a private database he’d been building since before the Crown had docked. Sometimes Jim Moore would be there; other times Brüks would catch him sequestered in some far-off corner of the Crown, adrift on a sea of old telemetry that had nothing to do with his son, nothing at all, just facts on the ground.

The Colonel was always civil, these days. Never more.

When the sight of people in more productive roles failed to satisfy, Brüks abandoned Icarus’s bustling tourist district and went off by himself, cam by cam: stepped through views of empty crawlspaces and frozen habs, an endless dark maze of tunnels connecting the uninhabited and the unexplored. Sometimes there was atmosphere, and frost sparkling on bulkheads. Sometimes there was only vacuum and girders and rails along which prehensile machinery scuttled like platelets in a mechanical bloodstream.

Once there were stars where no stars should have been: a great hole bitten out of Icarus’s carapace where it would do the least damage. Brüks could see incendiary Bicameral teeth through the gap, brilliant blue pinpoints taking another bite farther down the hull. Even filtered by the camera, they made him squint.

Next stop.

Ah. AUX/RECOMP again, more crowded than before: Moore had joined Valerie and the Bicamerals at play.

Just another roach, Brüks thought. Just like me.

But you get a seat at the table just the same.

He watched in silence for a few moments.

Fuck this .

Pale blue light spilled into the attic from the open airlock, limned the edges of pipes and lockers and empty alcoves. Brüks sailed through the hatch, grabbed a strut in passing, swung to port and into the glowing mouth of the lamprey itself.

Eyes hypersaccading in an ebony face, snapping instantly into focus. A body rooted to the airlock wall by one arm, fingers clenched around a convenient handhold. Spring-loaded prosthetics below the knees; they extended absurdly and braced against a bulkhead, blocking Brüks’s way.

He braked just in time.

“Restricted access, sir,” the zombie said, eyes dancing once more.

“Holy shit. You talk.”

The zombie said nothing.

“I didn’t think there’d be—anyone in there,” Brüks tried. Nothing. “Are you awake?”

“No, sir.”

“So you’re talking in your sleep.”

Silence. Eyes, jiggling in their sockets.

I wonder if it knows what happened to the other one. I wonder if it was there…​

“I want to—”

“You can’t, sir.”

“Will you—”

“Yes, sir.”

— stop me?

“Yes but it won’t be necessary,” the zombie added.

Brüks had been wondering about lethal force. Maybe best not to push that angle.

On the other hand, the thing didn’t seem to mind answering questions…​

“Why do your ey—”

“To maximize acquisition of high-res input across the visual field, sir.”

“Huh.” Not a trick the conscious mind could use, with its limited bandwidth. A good chunk of so-called vision actually consisted of preconscious filters deciding what not to see, to spare the homunculus upstream from information overload.

“You’re black,” Brüks observed. “Most of you zombies are black.”

No response.

“Does Valerie have a melanin feti—”

“I’ve got this,” Moore said, rising into view through the docking tube. The zombie moved smoothly aside to let him pass.

“They talk,” Brüks said. “I didn’t—”

Moore spared a glance at Brüks’s face as he moved past. Then he was back on board, and heading aft. “Come with me, please.”

“Uh, where?”

“M&R. Freckle on your face I don’t like the look of.” Moore disappeared into the Hub.

Brüks looked back at the airlock. Valerie’s sentry had moved back into place, blocking the way to more exotic locales.

“Thanks for the chat,” Brüks said. “We’ll have to do it again sometime.”

“Close your eyes.”

Brüks obeyed; the insides of his lids glowed brief bloody red as Moore’s diagnostic laser scanned down his face.

“Word of advice,” the Colonel said from the other side. “Don’t tease the zombies.”

“I wasn’t teasing him, I was just chat—”

“Don’t chat with them, either.”

Brüks opened his eyes. Moore was running his eyes down some invisible midair diagnostic. “Remember who they answer to,” he added.

“I can’t imagine that Valerie forgot to swear her minions to secrecy.”

“And I can’t imagine her minions will forget to tell her any secrets you might have asked about. Whether they answered or not.”

Brüks considered that. “You think she might take offense at the melanin-fetish remark?”

“I have no idea,” Moore said quietly. “ I sure as hell did.”

Brüks blinked. “I—”

“You look at them.” There was liquid nitrogen in the man’s voice. “You see—zombies. Fast on the draw, good in the field, less than human. Less than animals, maybe; not even conscious. Maybe you don’t even think it’s possible to disrespect something like that. Like disrespecting a lawn mower, right?”

“No, I—”

“Let me tell you what I see. The man you were chatting with was called Azagba. Aza to his buddies. But he gave that up—either for something he believed in, or because it was the best of a bad lot of options, or because it was the only option he had. You look at Valerie’s entourage and you see a cheap joke. I see the seventy-odd percent of military bioauts recruited from places where armed violence runs so rampant that nonexistence as a conscious being is actually something you aspire to. I see people who got mowed down on the battlefield and then rebooted, just long enough to make a choice between going back to the grave or paying off the jump-start with a decade of blackouts and indentured servitude. And that’s pretty close to the best -case scenario.”

“What would be worst-case?”

“Some jurisdictions still hold that life ends at death,” Moore told him. “Anything else is an animated corpse. In which case Azagba has exactly as many rights as a cadaver in an anatomy class.” He stabbed the air and nodded: “I was right: it’s precancerous.”

Malawi, Brüks remembered.

“That’s why you took her on,” he realized. “Not for me, not for Sengupta. Not even for the mission. Because she killed one of your own.”

Moore looked right through him. “I would have thought that by now you’d have learned to keep your attempts at psychoanalysis to yourself.” He extracted a tumor pencil from the first-aid kit. “Any nausea? Headaches, dizziness? Loose stools?”

Brüks brought his hand to his face. “Not yet.”

“Probably nothing to worry about, but we’ll run a complete body scan just to be safe. Could be internal lesions as well.” He leaned in, pressed the pencil against Brüks’s face. Something electrical snapped in Brüks’s ear; a sudden tingling warmth spread out across his cheek.

“I’d recommend daily scans from here on in,” Moore said. “Our shielding on approach wasn’t all it could have been.” He gestured for Brüks to move to the right, unfolded the medbed from the wall. “I have to admit I’m a bit surprised this started so soon, though. Maybe you had a preexisting condition.” He stood aside. “Lie back.”