Peter Watts - Firefall

“I said I wasn’t going to come back out, love. I said I didn’t want you to spend all our time together trying to change my mind.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I’m glad you did come by,” she said after a while. “It’s good to see you.”

“I can’t see you,” he said softly.

“Dan. What would be the point?”

He shook his head.

“Is it important? I could show you—something. If that would make it any easier.”

“Rho, you can’t stay in there.”

“I’m not having this argument again, Dan.”

“ This is not the same argument! Things have changed …”

“I know. I’m in Heaven, not Andromeda. I can see everything out there that I want to. Upheaval, rebellion, environmental collapse. Plus ça change .”

“It’s a loss worse since Icarus went down.”

“Yeah,” she said slowly. “Icarus.”

“Everything’s stretched to the breaking point, there’re outages and brownouts everywhere you look. Took me four tries to even find you, did you know that? And Heaven’s hardly the most obscure address on the planet. The whole network’s—forgetting things…”

“Dan, it’s been forgetting things for ages. That’s why we call it the Splinternet.”

“I didn’t know you called it that,” he said, vaguely surprised.

“How is an elephant like a schizophrenic?”

“I—what?”

“An elephant never forgets.”

He said nothing.

“That’s an AI joke,” she said after a while.

“Could be the worst one I’ve ever heard.”

“I got a million of ’em. You sure you want me to come back out?”

More than ever .

“But really, how long do you think you could stay sane if you remembered everything you’d ever experienced? It’s good to forget, no matter what kind of network you are. It’s not a breakdown, it’s an adaptation .”

“That’s bullshit, Rho. Losing network addresses is a good thing? What’s next, the voltage protocols? What happens when the grid forgets to shunt power to Timmins?”

“There are risks,” she said gently. “I get it. The backups could fail. The Realists could strike. The AIRheads probably still want me for war crimes just on general principles, and I can’t say I really blame them. Every day in here could be my last, and how’s that any different from life out there?” Some tiny lens sent her the sight of Daniel Brüks opening his mouth; she rushed on, preempting him: “I’ll tell you. I don’t have anything anyone could want. I’m not a threat to anyone. My footprint’s a tiny fraction of yours, even factoring in your kink for spending so much time in tents. I can experience literally everything in here that you can out there, and a billion other things besides. Oh, and one other thing.”

She paused some precise number of milliseconds.

“I don’t have to kill intelligent beings to pay the rent.”

“Nobody’s saying you’d have to—”

“Now let’s look out there, shall we? Infectious zombieism running rampant in at least twenty countries I know of. Realists and Rearguard Catholics taking shots at any heretics they can lay their crosshairs on. Food poisoning on the rise for anyone who can’t afford a consumables-class printer. They haven’t even bothered tracking species extinction rates for a decade now, and—oh, and have you heard about that new weaponized echopraxia that’s going around? Jitterbug, they call it. Used to be pure monkey-see-monkey-do, but they say it’s mutating. Now you get to die dancing, bring a friend along for the ride.”

“The difference,” he said grimly, “is that when the power fails out here, you can curl up under a blanket. If it fails in Heaven you’re brain-dead in five minutes. You’re helpless in there, Rhona, and it’s all just a house of cards waiting for…”

She didn’t answer. He couldn’t finish.

He wondered how much she’d changed already, how much of her remained behind that gentle, utterly unyielding and unreal voice. Was he even talking to an intact brain, or to some hybrid emulation of neurons and arsenide? How much of his wife had been replaced over the past two years? That incremental cannibalism, that ongoing fossilization of flesh by minerals—it had always scared the living shit out of him.

And she embraced it.

“I’ve seen things,” he told her. “World-shaking things.”

“We all have. It’s a shaky world.”

“Will you just shut up and listen to me? I’m not talking about the goddamned news feeds, I’m talking about things that—I’ve seen things that—I know why you went away now, you know? I finally get it. I never did before, but right now I swear I’d join you in a second if I could. But I can’t. It doesn’t feel like transcendence to me, it doesn’t feel like rising into some better world, it feels like being— replaced . I mean, I can’t even stand to have a ConSensus augment in my head. It’s like anything that changes what I am kills what I am. Do you understand?”

“Of course. You’re scared.”

He nodded miserably.

“You’ve always been scared, Dan. As long as I’ve known you. You’ve spent your whole life being an asshole just to keep people from finding out. Lucky for you I could see through it, mmm?”

He said nothing.

“Know what else I see?”

He didn’t. He didn’t have a clue.

“That’s what makes you brave.”

It took a moment for that to sink in. “What?”

“You think I don’t know? Why you keep mouthing off to the wrong people? Why you sabotaged your own career every step of the way? Why you can’t help but face off against anybody who has any power over you?”

Climbing an endless ladder toward a hungry monster. Charging into a leghold labyrinth with living walls. Biting the head off a girl half his size when she told him he couldn’t go home.

Maybe not such a proud moment, that last one…​

“You’re saying I overcame my fear,” he began.

“I’m saying you gave in to it! Every time! You’re so scared of being seen as a coward you’d jump off a cliff just to prove you weren’t! You think I never saw it? I was your wife, for God’s sake. I saw your knees knocking every time you ever stood up to the schoolyard bully and got your teeth kicked in for your troubles. Your whole damn life has been one unending act of overcompensation, and you know something, love? It’s just as well . Because people need to stand up now and then, and who else is going to?”

It didn’t sink in at first. All he could do was frown and replay and try to figure out when the conversation had switched tracks like that.

“That has to be the most heartwarming definition of asshole I’ve ever heard,” he said at last.

“I liked it.”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, though. I still can’t—follow you…”

“Follow me.” Her voice was flat with sudden insight. “You think…”

She won’t come out, and I can’t go in—

“Dan.” A window opened on the wall. “Look at me.”

He looked away.

He looked back.

He saw something that resembled a pickled fetus more than it did a grown woman. He saw arms and legs drawn close against the body in defiance of the cuffs at wrists and ankles, of the contractile microtubes that pulled them straight three times a day in a rearguard battle against atrophy and the shortening of tendons. He saw a shriveled face and a hairless scalp and a million carbon fibers sprouting from the base of the skull, floating like a nimbus around her head.