Peter Watts: Firefall

I thought of something to say. “You all right?”

“Oh shit , you—I mean, you never …” He wiped his mouth. Blood smeared the back of his hand. “Oh man are we in trouble.”

“They started it.”

“Yeah, but you—I mean, look at them!”

The moaning thing was crawling away on all fours. I wondered how long it would be before it found reinforcements. I wondered if I should kill it before then.

“You’da never done that before,” Pag said.

Before the operation, he meant.

I actually did feel something then—faint, distant, but unmistakable. I felt angry. “They started —”

Pag backed away, eyes wide. “What are you doing ? Put that down !”

I’d raised my fists. I didn’t remember doing that. I unclenched them. It took a while. I had to look at my hands very hard for a long, long time.

The rock dropped to the ground, blood-slick and glistening.

“I was trying to help.” I didn’t understand why he couldn’t see that.

“You’re, you’re not the same ,” Pag said from a safe distance. “You’re not even Siri any more.”

“I am too. Don’t be a fuckwad.”

“ They cut out your brain !”

“Only half. For the ep—”

“I know for the epilepsy! You think I don’t know? But you were in that half—or, like, part of you was…” He struggled with the words, with the concept behind them. “And now you’re different . It’s like, your mom and dad murdered you—”

“My mom and dad,” I said, suddenly quiet, “saved my life. I would have died .”

“I think you did die,” said my best and only friend. “I think Siri died, they scooped him out and threw him away and you’re some whole other kid that just, just grew back out of what was left. You’re not the same . Ever since. You’re not the same .”

I still don’t know if Pag really knew what he was saying. Maybe his mother had just pulled the plug on whatever game he’d been wired into for the previous eighteen hours, forced him outside for some fresh air. Maybe, after fighting pod people in gamespace, he couldn’t help but see them everywhere. Maybe.

But you could make a case for what he said. I do remember Helen telling me (and telling me) how difficult it was to adjust. Like you had a whole new personality , she said, and why not? There’s a reason they call it radical hemispherectomy: half the brain thrown out with yesterday’s krill, the remaining half press-ganged into double duty. Think of all the rewiring that one lonely hemisphere must have struggled with as it tried to take up the slack. It turned out okay, obviously. The brain’s a very flexible piece of meat; it took some doing, but it adapted. I adapted. Still. Think of all that must have been squeezed out, deformed, reshaped by the time the renovations were through. You could argue that I’m a different person than the one who used to occupy this body.

The grownups showed up eventually, of course. Medicine was bestowed, ambulances called. Parents were outraged, diplomatic volleys exchanged, but it’s tough to drum up neighborhood outrage on behalf of your injured baby when playground surveillance from three angles shows the little darling—and five of his buddies—kicking in the ribs of a disabled boy. My mother, for her part, recycled the usual complaints about problem children and absentee fathers—Dad was off again in some other hemisphere—but the dust settled pretty quickly. Pag and I even stayed friends, after a short hiatus that reminded us both of the limited social prospects open to schoolyard rejects who don’t stick together.

So I survived that and a million other childhood experiences. I grew up and I got along. I learned to fit in. I observed, recorded, derived the algorithms and mimicked appropriate behaviors. Not much of it was—heartfelt, I guess the word is. I had friends and enemies, like everyone else. I chose them by running through checklists of behaviors and circumstances compiled from years of observation.

I may have grown up distant but I grew up objective , and I have Robert Paglino to thank for that. His seminal observation set everything in motion. It led me into Synthesis, fated me to our disastrous encounter with the Scramblers, spared me the worse fate befalling Earth. Or the better one, I suppose, depending on your point of view. Point of view matters : I see that now, blind, talking to myself, trapped in a coffin falling past the edge of the solar system. I see it for the first time since some beaten bloody friend on a childhood battlefield convinced me to throw my own point of view away.

He may have been wrong. I may have been. But that, that distance —that chronic sense of being an alien among your own kind—it’s not entirely a bad thing.

It came in especially handy when the real aliens came calling.

IMAGINE YOU ARE Siri Keeton:

You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate; flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You’re a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae .

You’d scream if you had the breath.

Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn’t done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They’re back now, after all—raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.

The pain begins, just slightly, to recede. You fire up your inlays and access your own vitals: it’ll be long minutes before your body responds fully to motor commands, hours before it stops hurting. The pain’s an unavoidable side effect. That’s just what happens when you splice vampire subroutines into Human code. You asked about painkillers once, but nerve blocks of any kind compromise metabolic reactivation . Suck it up, soldier.

You wonder if this was how it felt for Chelsea, before the end. But that evokes a whole other kind of pain, so you block it out and concentrate on the life pushing its way back into your extremities. Suffering in silence, you check the logs for fresh telemetry.

You think: That can’t be right .

Because if it is, you’re in the wrong part of the universe. You’re not in the Kuiper Belt where you belong: you’re high above the ecliptic and deep into the Oort, the realm of long-period comets that only grace the sun every million years or so. You’ve gone interstellar , which means (you bring up the system clock) you’ve been undead for eighteen hundred days.