Peter Watts - Firefall

Jesus, Brüks thought.

“Pretty good hack right?” Admiration mingled with the fear in Sengupta’s voice. “Can you imagine what those fuckers could do if they actually could stand to be in the same room together?”

He shook his head, amazed, trying to take it in. “That’s why we made sure they couldn’t.”

“Made? I thought they were just you know. Really territorial.”

“Nobody’s that territorial. Someone must’ve amped their responses to keep them from ganging up on us.” Brüks shrugged. “Like the Crucifix Glitch, only—deliberate.”

“How do you know that I haven’t seen that anywhere.”

“Like you said, Rak: it’s the only the model that fits . How do you think the line could even breed if their default response was to eviscerate each other on sight? Call it the, the Divide and Conquer Glitch.” He smiled bitterly. “Oh, we were good.”

“They’re better,” Sengupta said. “Look I don’t care how helpless Carnage thinks that thing is I’m not taking my fucking eyes off it. And I’m firewalling every onboard app and every subroutine I can find until I check every last one for logic bombs.”

Now there’s a quick weekend project . Aloud: “Anything else?”

“I don’t know I’m working on it but how do I know she hasn’t already figured everything I could think of? No matter what I do I could be playing right into her hands.”

“Well, for starters,” Brüks suggested, “what about welding the airlocks shut? You can’t hack sheet metal.”

Sengupta took her eyes off the horizon, turned her head. For a moment Brüks even thought she might look at him.

“When it’s time to leave, we cut a hole,” he continued. “Or blow one. I assume this isn’t a rental. If it is, I’m pretty sure the damage deposit’s already a write-off.”

He waited for the inevitable put-down.

“That’s a great idea,” Sengupta said at last. “Brute-force baseline thinking shoulda thought of it myself. Fuck safety protocols. I’ll do the Hold and the spokes you do the attic.”

The docking hatch wouldn’t take a weld: it was too reactive, its reflexes almost the stuff of living systems. Clenched tight it could withstand the point-blank heat of lasers and still dilate on command like a dark-adjusting eye. Brüks had to make do with bulkhead panels from the attic, strip them from their frames and weld them into place across the airlock’s inner wall.

Jim Moore appeared at his side, wordlessly helped him maneuver the panels into place. “Thanks,” Brüks grunted.

Moore nodded. “Good idea. Although you could probably fab a better—”

“We’re keeping it low-tech. In case Valerie hacked the fabbers.”

“Ah.” The Colonel nodded. “Rakshi’s idea, I’m guessing.”

“Uh-huh.”

Moore held the panel steady at one end while Brüks set the focus. “Serious trust issues, that one. Doesn’t like me at all.”

“You can’t really blame her, given the way you folks—manipulated her.” Brüks lined up the keyhole, fired. Down at the tip of the welder, metal flared bright as a sun with an electrical snap ; but the lensing field damped that searing light down to a candle flame. The tang of metal vapor stung Brüks’s sinuses.

“I don’t think she knows about that,” Moore said mildly. “And that wasn’t me in any case.”

“Someone like you, anyway.” Aim. Fire. Snap .

“Not necessarily.”

Brüks looked up from the weld. Jim Moore stared back impassively.

“Jim, you told me how it works. Herded into the service of agendas they’d never support in a thousand years, remember? Somebody thought that up.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” Moore’s eyes focused on some spot just past Brüks’s left shoulder.

You’re barely even here, Brüks thought. Even now, half of you is caught up in some kind of—séance…​

“There’s a whole other network out there,” Moore was saying. “Orthogonal to all the clouds, interacting with them like—I don’t know, the way dark matter interacts with baryonic matter maybe. Weak effects, and subtle. Very tough to trace, but omnipresent. Ideally suited for the kind of tweaks we use to marshal our forces, as we like to say. And do you know what’s really remarkable about it, Daniel?”

“Tell me.”

“As far as we know, nobody built the damn thing. We just discovered it. Turned it to our own ends. The theorists say it could just be an emergent property of networked social systems. Like your wife’s supraconscious networks.”

“Uh-huh,” Brüks said after a moment.

“You don’t buy it.”

He shook his head. “A stealth supernet fine-tuned for the manipulation of pawns with a specific skill set suited to military applications. And it just emerged ?”

Moore smiled faintly. “Of course. No complex finely tuned system could ever just evolve . Something must have created it.”

Ouch, Brüks thought.

“I’ll admit I’ve heard that argument before,” Moore said. “I just never thought I’d hear it from a biologist.”

Evidently half of him was enough.

HE AWOKE TO the sound of jagged breathing. Shadows moved across the skin of his tent.

“Rak?”

The flap split down the middle. She crawled inside like some heartbroken infant returning to the womb. Even in here, cheek to jowl, she would not look at his face; she squirmed around and lay down with her back to him, curled up, fists clenched.

“Uh…,” Brüks began.

“I told you I didn’t like him I never did and now look,” Sengupta said softly. “We can’t trust him roach, I never really liked him but you could count on him at least you knew where he stood. Now he’s just—gone all the time. Don’t know what he is anymore.”

“He lost his son. He blames himself. People deal with it in different ways.”

“It’s more than that he lost his kid years ago.”

“But then he got him back . In a small way, for a little while. Can you imagine what that must be like—to, to deal with the loss of someone you loved only to find out that they’re still out there somewhere, and they’re talking and it doesn’t matter if they’re talking to you or not it’s still them, it’s new, you’re not just playing a sim or wallowing in the same old video she’s actually out there and—”

He caught himself, and wondered if she’d noticed.

I could have her back, he told himself. Not in the flesh maybe, not here in the real world but real time at least, better than this thin graveside monologue Jim clings to. All I have to do is knock on Heaven’s door…​

Which was, of course, the one thing he’d sworn to never do.

“He says Siri’s alive,” Sengupta whispered. “Says he’s coming home .”

“Maybe he is. That clip from the transmission, right near the beginning, you know? The coffin.”

She ran her finger across the inside of the tent. Words wrote themselves in her wake: Point of view matters: I see that now, blind, talking to myself, trapped in a coffin falling past the edge of the solar system.

Brüks nodded. “That’s the one. If you take that at face value, he’s not on board Theseus anymore.”

“Lifeboat,” Sengupta said. “Shuttle.”

“Sounds like he’s coasting in. It’ll take him forever, but there’ll be a hibernaculum on board.” He rested a hand on her shoulder. “Maybe Jim’s not wrong: maybe his son’s coming home.”