Peter Watts - Firefall

Sometimes he opened his eyes to see Moore looming over him, moving shiny blinking chopsticks in front of his face. Once or twice an invisible roaring giant stood on his chest, pressing him deep into the soft earth at his back (the sparse bands of new-grown grass on the bulkhead bowed low against the wall, every blade in uniform alignment); other times he was as weightless as a dandelion seed. Sometimes he could almost move, and the creatures gathered at his side would startle and pull back. Other times he could barely roll his eyes in their sockets.

Sometimes he woke up.

Something sat at his side, a vaguely humanoid blur at the edge of eyesight. Brüks tried to turn his head, unfix his gaze from the ceiling. All he could see was pipes and paint.

“It’s only me.” Moore’s voice.

Is it. Is it really.

“I guess you weren’t expecting it,” said the blur. “I’m actually surprised that Sengupta didn’t tell you. It’s the kind of thing she’d enjoy spreading around.”

He tried again. Failed again. His cervical vertebrae seemed—fused, somehow. Corroded together.

“Maybe she doesn’t know.”

Brüks swallowed. That much he could do, although his throat remained dry.

The blur shifted and rustled. “It’s a mandatory procedure where I come from. Too many scenarios when conscious involvement—compromises performance. Whatever the military is these days, you don’t get into it unless you…”

A cough. A reset.

“The truth is, I volunteered. Back when everything was still in beta, before it was policy.”

Do you get to decide, Brüks wondered, when it comes and goes? Is it a choice, or is it a reflex?

“You may have heard we just go to sleep. Lose all awareness, let the body run on autopilot. So we won’t feel bad about pulling the trigger, afterward.” Brüks heard a note of bitterness in the old man’s voice. “It’s true enough, these days. But we first-gen types, we—stayed awake. They said it was the best they could do at the time. They could cut us out of the motor loop but they couldn’t shut down the hypothalamic circuitry without compromising autonomic performance. There were rumors floating around that they could do that just fine, that they wanted us awake—for debriefing afterward, experienced observer in the field and all—but we were such hot shit we didn’t really care. The sexy bleeding edge, you know. First explorers on the post-Human frontier.” Moore snorted softly. “Anyway. After a few missions that didn’t quite go according to plan, they rolled out the Nirvana Iteration. Even offered me an upgrade, but it—I don’t know. Somehow it just seemed important to keep the lights on.”

Why are you telling me this? What does it matter, now that you’ve thrown the world’s lifeline into the sun?

“What I’m saying is, I was there. The whole time. Only as a passenger—I wasn’t running anything—but I didn’t go away . I’m not like Valerie’s mercenaries, I was—watching, at least. If that makes you feel any better. Just wanted you to know that.”

It wasn’t you. That’s what you’re saying. It’s not your fault.

“Get some rest.” The blur stretched at his side; the Colonel’s face resolved briefly in Brüks’s field of focus, faded again to the sound of receding footsteps.

Which paused.

“Don’t worry,” Moore said. “You won’t be seeing it again.”

The next time he woke up Sengupta was leaning over him.

“How long?” Brüks tried, and was relieved to hear the words come out.

She said: “Can you move yet try to move.”

He sent commands down his legs, felt his toes respond. Tried wiggling his fingers: his knuckles were rusted solid.

“Not eashily,” he said.

“It’ll come back it’s just temporary.”

“Wha’ she do to me?”

“I’m working on that listen—”

“It’s like some kind of ass-fac—ass- backwards Crucifix Glitch.” His tongue fought its way around the words. “How the hell did she—baysh— baselines don’t glitch, we don’t have the shircuits—”

“I said I’m working on it. Look we got other things to worry about right now.”

You’ve got other things, maybe— “Whersh Jim?”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you he’s up there in the attic he’s up there with Portia I think — ”

“Whah!”

“Well how do we know how far that shit spread huh it coulda coated the whole inside of the array and we never woulda known. Coulda grown all the way up to our front door and got inside .”

His sympathetic motor nerves were still working at least: Brüks could feel the hairs rising along his forearms.

“Anybody take sh—take samples ?”

“That’s not what I do I’m a math maid not a bucket boy I don’t even know the protocols.”

“You couldn’t look them up?”

“It’s not what I do.”

Brüks sighed. “What about Jim?”

Sengupta stared past him. “No help he just keeps reading those letters from home over and over. I told him but I don’t think he even cares.” She shook her head (she did it so effortlessly ), added: “He comes down here sometimes checks up on you. He’s been shooting you up with all sorts of GABA and spasmolytics he says you should be good to go by now.”

He flexed his fingers; not too bad, this time. “It’s coming back, I guess. Body’s just out of practice.”

“Yah it’s been a while. Anyway I gotta get back.” She stepped across the hab, turned back at the base of the ladder. “You gotta get back in the game Dan things are getting weird.”

They were, too.

She’d never called him by name before.

He’d stopped slurring his words by the time Sengupta had departed; five minutes later he could roll from side to side without too much discomfort. He bent knees and arms in small hard-won increments, ratcheting each joint against the brittle resistance of his own flesh. At some critical angle his right elbow cracked and pain splintered down his arm like an electrical shock: but the limb worked afterward, bent and straightened at his command with nothing but a dull arthritic aching in the joint. Encouraged, he forced his other limbs past their breaking points and reclaimed them for his own.

Reclaimed from what ? he wondered.

The medical archives reenacted the corruption of his flesh in fast-forward: a body flooded with acetylcholine, Renshaw cells compromised, ATP drawn down to the fumes by fibrils that just wouldn’t stop clenching. No ATP to cut in and ask myosin for this dance; nothing to break the actin-myosin bond. Gridlock. Tetany. A charley horse that froze the whole damn body.

The mechanism was simple enough: once the action potentials started hammering that fast it could only end one way. But this didn’t seem to be drug induced. Valerie hadn’t spiked his coffee or slipped anything into his food. His medical telemetry hadn’t picked up the trail until long minutes after Brüks had been hit, but as far as he could tell those signals had come from his own brain: CNS to alpha-motor to synaptic cleft, boom boom boom.

Whatever this was, he’d inflicted it on himself.

He took his time in checking out. Time to extract the catheters and stretch his limbs; time to boot his defossilized corpus back into some semblance of an active state. Time to refuel: his convalescence had left him ravenous. Almost an hour had passed by the time he climbed out of M&R in search of whatever the galley might serve up.

He was halfway across the Hub before he noticed the light bleeding from the spoke.