Peter Watts - Firefall

Michelle snorted. “ That’s your game theory? Rock Paper Scissors with statistics?”

Maybe Szpindel didn’t know the reference. He didn’t speak, long enough to call up a subtitle; then he brayed like a horse. “ Rock Paper Scissors ! Yes!”

Michelle digested that for a moment. “You’re sweet for trying, but that only works if the other side is just blindly playing the odds, and they don’t have to do that if they know who they’re going up against in advance. And my dear, they have so very much information about us …”

They’d threatened Susan. By name.

“They don’t know everything,” Szpindel insisted. “And the principle works for any scenario involving incomplete information, not just the ignorant extreme.”

“Not as well.”

“But some , and that gives us a chance. Doesn’t matter how good you are at poker when it comes to the deal, eh? Cards still deal out with the same odds.”

“So that’s what we’re playing. Poker.”

“Be thankful it’s not chess. We wouldn’t have a hope in hell.”

“Hey. I’m supposed to be the optimist in this relationship.”

“You are. I’m just fatalistically cheerful. We all come into the story halfway through, we all catch up as best we can, and we’re all gonna die before it ends.”

“That’s my Isaac. Master of the no-win scenario.”

“You can win. Winner’s the guy who makes the best guess on how it all comes out.”

“So you are just guessing.”

“Yup. And you can’t make an informed guess without data, eh? And we could be the very first to find out what’s gonna happen to the whole Human race. I’d say that puts us into the semifinals, easy.”

Michelle didn’t answer for a very long time. When she did, I couldn’t hear her words.

Neither could Szpindel: “Sorry?”

“ Covert to invulnerable , you said. Remember?”

“Uh huh. Rorschach ’s Graduation Day. ”

“How soon, do you think?”

“No idea. But I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that’s gonna slip by unnoticed. And that’s why I don’t think it attacked us.”

She must have looked a question.

“Because when it does, it won’t be some debatable candy-ass bitch slap,” he told her. “When that fucker rises up, we’re gonna know .”

A sudden flicker from behind. I spun in the cramped passageway and bit down on a cry: something squirmed out of sight around the corner, something with arms , barely glimpsed, gone in an instant.

Never there. Couldn’t be there. Impossible.

“Did you hear that?” Szpindel asked, but I’d fled to stern before Michelle could answer him.

We’d fallen so far that the naked eye didn’t see a disk, barely even saw curvature any more. We were falling towards a wall , a vast roiling expanse of dark thunderclouds that extended in all directions to some new, infinitely-distant horizon. Ben filled half the universe.

And still we fell.

Far below, Jack clung to Rorschach ’s ridged surface with bristly gecko-feet fenders and set up camp. It sent x-rays and ultrasound into the ground, tapped enquiring fingers and listened to the echos, planted tiny explosive charges and measured the resonance of their detonations. It shed seeds like pollen: tiny probes and sensors by the thousands, self-powered, near-sighted, stupid and expendable. The vast majority were sacrificial offerings to random chance; only one in a hundred lasted long enough to return usable telemetry.

While our advance scout took measure of its local neighborhood, Theseus drew larger-scale birdseye maps from the closing sky. It spat out thousands of its own disposable probes, spread them across the heavens and collected stereoscopic data from a thousand simultaneous perspectives.

Patchwork insights assembled in the drum. Rorschach ’s skin was sixty percent superconducting carbon nanotube. Rorschach ’s guts were largely hollow; at least some of those hollows appeared to contain an atmosphere. No earthly form of life would have lasted a second in there, though; intricate topographies of radiation and electromagnetic force seethed around the structure, seethed within it. In some places the radiation was intense enough to turn unshielded flesh to ash in an instant; calmer backwaters would merely kill in the same span of time. Charged particles raced around invisible racetracks at relativistic speeds, erupting from jagged openings, hugging curves of magnetic force strong enough for neutron stars, arcing through open space and plunging back into black mass. Occasional protuberances swelled and burst and released clouds of microparticulates, seeding the radiation belts like spores. Rorschach resembled nothing so much as a nest of half-naked cyclotrons, tangled one with another.

Neither Jack below nor Theseus above could find any points of entry, beyond those impassable gaps that spat out streams of charged particles or swallowed them back down. No airlocks or hatches or viewports resolved with increasing proximity. The fact that we’d been threatened via laser beam implied some kind of optical antennae or tightcast array; we weren’t even able to find that much.

A central hallmark of von Neumann machines was self-replication. Whether Rorschach would meet that criterion—whether it would germinate, or divide, or give birth when it passed some critical threshold—whether it had done so already—remained an open question.

One of a thousand. At the end of it all—after all the measurements, the theorizing and deduction and outright guesswork—we settled into orbit with a million trivial details and no answers. In terms of the big questions, there was only one thing we knew for sure.

So far, Rorschach was holding its fire.

“It sounded to me like it knew what it was saying,” I remarked.

“I guess that’s the whole point,” Bates said. She had no one to confide in, partook of no intimate dialogs that could be overheard. With her, I used the direct approach.

Theseus was birthing a litter, two by two. They were nasty-looking things, armored, squashed egg-shapes, twice the size of a human torso and studded with gardening implements: antennae, optical ports, retractable threadsaws. Weapons muzzles.

Bates was summoning her troops. We floated before the primary fab port at the base of Theseus ’ spine. The plant could just as easily have disgorged the grunts directly into the hold beneath the carapace—that was where they’d be stored anyway, until called upon—but Bates was giving each a visual inspection before sending it through one of the airlocks a few meters up the passageway. Ritual, perhaps. Military tradition. Certainly there was nothing she could see with her eyes that wouldn’t be glaringly obvious to the most basic diagnostic.

“Would it be a problem?” I asked. “Running them without your interface?”

“Run themselves just fine. Response time actually improves without spam in the network. I’m more of a safety precaution.”

Theseus growled, giving us more attitude. The plating trembled to stern; another piece of local debris, no longer in our path. We were angling towards an equatorial orbit just a few miniscule kilometers above the artefact; insanely, the approach curved right through the accretion belt.

It didn’t bother the others. “Like surviving traffic in a high speed lane,” Sascha had said, disdainful of my misgivings. “Try creeping across and you’re road kill. Gotta speed up, go with the flow.” But the flow was turbulent; we hadn’t gone five minutes without a course correction since Rorschach had stopped talking to us.