Peter Watts - Firefall

He lay there, breathing in the scent of oil and mold and plastic and sweat, watching his breath ruffle her hair.

“Something’s coming,” she said at last. “Maybe not Siri.”

“Why do you say that?”

“It just sounds wrong the way it talks there are these tics in the speech pattern it keeps saying Imagine you’re this and Imagine you’re that and it sounds so recursive sometimes it sounds like it’s trying to run some kind of model …”

Imagine you’re Siri Keeton, he remembered. And gleaned from a later excerpt of the same signal: Imagine you’re a machine .

“It’s a literary affectation. He’s trying to be poetic. Putting yourself in the character’s head, that kind of thing.”

“Why do you have to put yourself in your own head though eh why do you have to imagine what it’s like to be you ?” She shook her head, a sharp little jerk of denial. “All those splines and filters and NCAs they take out so much you know, you can’t hear the words without them but you can’t hear the voice unless you strip them away. So I went back through all the steps I looked for some sweet spot where you might be able to hear and I don’t know if I did the signal’s so weak and there’s so much fucking noise but there’s this one little spot forty-seven minutes in where you can’t make out the words but you can sort of make out the voice, I can’t be sure you can never be sure but I think the harmonics are off.”

“Off how?”

“Siri Keeton’s male I don’t think this is male.”

“A woman’s voice?”

“Maybe a woman. If we’re lucky.”

“What are you saying, Rakshi? You’re saying it might not be human?”

“I don’t know I don’t know but it just feels wrong and what if it’s not a—a literary affectation what if it’s some kind of simulation? What if something out there is literally trying to imagine what it’s like to be Siri Keeton?”

“The voice of God,” Brüks murmured.

“I don’t know I really don’t. But whatever it is it’s got its hooks into a professional killer with a zombie switch in his brain. And I don’t know why but I know a hack a when I see one.”

“How could it know enough to hack him? How would it even know he exists?”

“It must’ve known Siri and Siri knew him. Maybe that’s enough.”

“I don’t know,” he admitted after a bit. “Hacking a human mind over a six-month time lag, it seems—”

“That’s enough touching,” she said.

“What?”

She shrugged his hand off her shoulder. “I know you gerries like to touch and have meat sex and everything but the rest of us don’t need people to get us off if you don’t mind. I’ll stay here but it doesn’t mean anything okay?”

“Uh, this is my —”

“What?” she said, facing away.

“Nothing.” He settled back down, maneuvered his back against the wall of the tent. It left maybe thirty centimeters between them. He might even be able to sleep, if neither of them rolled over.

If he felt the least bit tired.

Rakshi wasn’t sleeping, either, though. She was scratching at her own commandeered side of the tent, bringing up tiny light shows on the wall: a little animatic of the Crown, centered on the rafters where MOORE, J. clung to a ghost, or danced on the strings of some unknowable alien agenda, or both; the metal landscape the drone traversed in search of countermeasures; the merest smudge of infrared where a sleeping monster hid in the shadows. There really weren’t any safe places, Brüks reflected. Might as well feign what safety you could in numbers. The company of a friend, the warmth of a pet, it was all the same; all that mattered was the simple brain-stem comfort of a body next to yours, huddled against the night.

Sengupta turned her face a little: a cheekbone, the tip of a nose in partial eclipse. “Roach?”

“I really wish you’d stop calling me that.”

“What you said before, about losing people. Different people deal in different ways that’s what you said right?”

“That’s what I said.”

“How do you deal?”

“I—” He didn’t quite know how to answer. “Maybe the person you lose comes back, someday. Maybe someday someone else fits into the same space.”

Sengupta snorted softly, and there was an echo of the old derision there: “You just sit around and wait ?”

“ No, I—get on with my life. Do other things.” Brüks shook his head, vaguely irritated. “I suppose you ’d just whip up some customized ConSensus playmate—”

“Don’t you fucking tell me what I’d do.”

Brüks bit his lip. “Sorry.”

Stupid old man . You know where the hot buttons are and still you can’t help pushing the damn things.

There was a bright side, though, to Colonel Carnage’s deepening insanity, to Valerie’s lethal waiting games, to ghosts haunting the ether and uncertain fates waiting to pounce: at least Rakshi wasn’t hunting him anymore. He wondered at that thought, a little surprised at Sengupta’s place atop his own personal hierarchy of fear. She was just a human being, after all. Unarmed flesh and blood. She wasn’t some prehistoric nightmare or alien shapeshifter, no god or devil. She was just a kid—a friend even, insofar as she could even think in those terms. An innocent who didn’t even know his secret. Who was Rakshi Sengupta, next to monsters and cancers and a whole world on the brink? What was her grudge, next to all these other terrors closing in on all sides?

It was a rhetorical question, of course. Sure the universe was full of terrors.

She was the only one he’d brought upon himself.

His own hunt wasn’t going so well.

Of course, Portia wasn’t quite so visible a target as Daniel Brüks. Brüks couldn’t subsist on the ambient thermal energy of bulkhead atoms vibrating at room temperature, couldn’t flatten himself down to paper and wrap himself around a water pipe to mask even that meager heatprint. He’d wondered about albedo or spectro, wondered if a probe built of very short wavelengths might be able to pick up the diffraction gratings that Portia used to talk—perhaps it used them as camouflage as well—but the improvised detectors he fabbed turned up nothing. Which didn’t mean they didn’t work, necessarily. Maybe it only meant that Portia kept to the Crown ’s infinite fractal landscape of holes and crannies too small for bots and men.

He was almost certain it couldn’t launch an open attack without letting some tell slip beforehand: the heat signature of muscle analogs building a charge, the reallocation of mass sufficient to construct an appendage at some given set of coordinates. It could run, though, in some sort of postbiological baseline state, powered by the subtle energy resonating from the crude mass of the real substrate into the superconducting intelligence of the false one. It could think and plan forever in that mode, if Bicameral calculations had been right. It could hide.

The less he found, the more he feared. Something nearby was watching him; he felt it in his gut.

“Ship’s too damn noisy,” he confided to Sengupta. “Thermally, allometrically. Portia could be anywhere, everywhere. How would we know?”

“It’s not,” she told him.

“Why so sure? You were the one who warned me , back when—”

“I thought it might have got in yah. Maybe it did. But not enough to get everywhere it didn’t coat everything. It didn’t swallow us.”

“How do you know?”