Peter Watts - Firefall

Her fingers danced and jittered in the air between them. The faintest breeze of static wafted through the hab: the moan of a distant ghost.

“That it?” Brüks asked.

“Almost but then you add the last couple of Fouriers and—”

—And a voice : thin, faint, sexless. There was no timbre to it, no cadence, no sense of any feeling behind the words. Any humanity it ever might have contained had been eroded away by dust and distance and the dull microwave rumble of a whole universe roaring in the background. There was nothing left but the words themselves, not reclaimed from static so much as built from the stuff. A whisper on the void:

Imagine you are Siri Keeton. You wake in an agony of resurrection… ​record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty…​ feel your blood, syrupy… ​forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dil… ​flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack… ​udden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You’re a stick man, frozen…​ rigor vitae. You’d scream if you had the breath.

The hab fell silent.

“What the fuck was that?” Brüks whispered after a very long time.

“I dunno,” Sengupta drummed her fingers on her thigh. “The start of a story. It’s been coming through in bits and pieces, every few years according to the timestamps. I don’t think it’s finished, either, I think it’s still—in progress.”

“But what is —”

“ I don’t know okay? It says it’s Siri Keeton. And there’s something underneath it too not words exactly I don’t know.”

“Can’t be.”

“Doesn’t matter what you or I think he thinks it’s Siri Keeton. And you know what he’s talking back to it I think he’s talking back.”

My son is alive .

“He’s got a while to wait. If that’s really coming from the Oort it’ll be a solid year before he can even think about getting an answer.”

Sengupta shrugged and looked at the wall.

He’s coming home .

NEGATIVE.

Negative.

Negative.

Torn lattices and broken nanowires and mangled microdiodes. Eviscerated smart paint. Nothing else.

For hours now he’d let worst-case scenarios play out in his imagination. Portia had expanded into the Crown . Portia had spread past the attic. Portia had oozed invisibly across every bulkhead and every surface, coated the skins of tents and of crewmembers, wrapped itself around every particle of food each of them had taken into their mouths from the moment they’d docked. Portia enveloped him like a second skin; Portia was inside him, measuring and analyzing and corroding him from the outside in and the inside out. Portia was everywhere. Portia was everything.

Bullshit.

His neocortex knew as much, even as his brain stem stole its insights and twisted them to its most paranoid ends. Whatever Portia ’s ultimate origin, it was the telematter system that had built it: lasers etching blank condensates into thinking microfilms that planned and plotted and spread across each new frontier like a plague of cognition. However far it had spread, however much or little had infiltrated the Crown, it couldn’t keep growing once severed from the engine of its creation. They hadn’t been docked that long: surely the enemy couldn’t have achieved anything but the most superficial penetration of the front line.

The samples were clean.

Which proved, of course, absolutely nothing.

Aboard Icarus it had sprung shut like a leg-hold trap—but it had had unlimited power to play with, and eight years to learn how to use it. One passive filter on the solar panels, damped by a thousandth of a percent. One short-circuited electrical line, sparking and heating the surrounding metal. That’s all it would have taken—just time, and a little Brownian energy to keep it fed.

What had Sengupta said so offhandedly, just before Portia had attacked? Little warm in there…​

It can’t sprint without stockpiling energy, he mused. Maybe it builds up a detectable heatprint before it pounces…​

Sengupta poked her head up through the floor. “Find anything?”

Brüks shook his head as she climbed onto the deck.

“Yah well I did. I found how that fucking vampire turned you to stone and better you than me, sorry but it coulda been me or Carnage either for all I know. I think she did it to all of us.”

“Did what , exactly?”

“You ever been scared roach?”

All the time . “Rakshi, we almost died —”

“ Before that.” Sengupta head jerked back, forth. “Scared for no reason scared just going to the bathroom .”

Something jumped in his stomach. “What did you find?”

She threw a camera feed onto the wall: an eye in the attic, looking down along the empty compartment to the Hub hatch. Sengupta zoomed obliquely on a patch of bulkhead beside the secondary airlock. Someone had scrawled some kind of glyph across that surface, a tangle of multicolored curves and corners that might have passed for some Cubist’s rendition of a very simple neural circuit.

“I don’t remember seeing that before,” Brüks murmured.

“Yah you do you just don’t remember it. Only lasts two hundred milliseconds pure luck this showed up on a screen grab. You see it but you don’t remember it and it scares the shit out of you.”

“Not scaring me now.”

“This is just one frame roach it’s part of an animation but the cameras don’t scan fast enough and they’re all gone now. I had to sieve like a bugger to even get this much.”

He stared at the image: a jagged little tangle of lines and arabesques, a piece of abstract graffiti maybe a hand’s-width across. It almost looked meaningful when spied from the corner of the eye, like a collection of letters on the verge of forming a word; it dissolved into gibberish when you looked at it. Even cut out of sequence, even spied from this oblique angle, it made his brain itch.

“It’s like she painted—gang signs,” he said softly. “All over the ship.”

“That’s not all she did the way she moved remember I said I didn’t like the way she moved all those little clicks and ticks—shit even that time she attacked me and then you I saw her whisper things in your ear what did she say to you huh?”

“I—don’t know,” Brüks realized. “I don’t remember.”

“Yah you do. Just like that time in Budapest, changed your wiring with vibrations like lining up a bunch of beer glasses pretty wild right?” Sengupta tapped her temple three times in rapid succession, hard. “Not even radical I mean you can’t hear a word or smell a fart without your brain rewiring at least a bit that’s how brains are everything reprograms you. She just figured out where to stamp on the floor to make you freeze up on command. Coulda happened to me just as easy.”

“It did happen to you,” Brüks said. “Why did you attack her, Rak? I saw you in the Hub, you went at her like a rabid dog. What got into you?”

“I dunno it was like she was making these noises they just really pissed me off I dunno couldn’t help myself.”

“Misophonia.” Brüks barked a soft bitter laugh. “She gave you misophonia.”

Images from Simon Fraser: Valerie strapped to a chair, tapping on the armrest…​ Even back then she was doing it. Even when they were torturing her, she was—reprogramming them…​