Peter Watts - Firefall

Szpindel pointed up at the Gang’s tent. “What Susan said. Atmosphere’s still under construction and we get a free ride until the owners show up.”

“Free?”

“Free ish . And I know we’ve only seen a fraction of a fraction of what’s inside. But something obviously saw us coming. It yelled at us, as I recall. If they’re smart and they’re hostile, why aren’t they shooting?”

“Maybe they are.”

“If something’s hiding down the hall wrecking your robots, it’s not frying them any faster than the baseline environment would do anyway.”

“What you call a baseline environment might be an active counterintrusion measure. Why else would a habitat be so uninhabitable?”

Szpindel rolled his eyes. “Okay, I was wrong. We don’t know enough to make a few smart guesses.”

Not that we hadn’t tried. Once Jack’s sensor head had been irreparably fried, we’d relegated it to surface excavation; it had widened the bore in infinitesimal increments, patiently burning back the edges of our initial peephole until it measured almost a meter across. Meanwhile we’d customized Bates’s grunts—shielded them against nuclear reactors and the insides of cyclotrons—and come perigee we’d thrown them at Rorschach like stones chucked into a haunted forest. Each had gone through Jack’s portal, unspooling whisker-thin fiberop behind them to pass intelligence through the charged atmosphere.

They’d sent glimpses, mostly. A few extended vignettes. We’d seen Rorschach ’s walls move, slow lazy waves of peristalsis rippling along its gut. We’d seen treacly invaginations in progress, painstaking constrictions that would presumably, given time, seal off a passageway. Our grunts had sailed through some quarters, staggered through others where the magnetic ambience threw them off balance. They’d passed through strange throats lined with razor-thin teeth, thousands of triangular blades in parallel rows, helically twisted. They’d edged cautiously around clouds of mist sculpted into abstract fractal shapes, shifting and endlessly recursive, their charged droplets strung along a myriad converging lines of electromagnetic force.

Ultimately, every one of them had died or disappeared.

“Any way to increase the shielding?” I wondered.

Szpindel gave me a look.

“We’ve shielded everything except the sensor heads,” Bates explained. “If we shield those we’re blind.”

“But visible light’s harmless enough. What about purely optical li—”

“We’re using optical links, commissar,” Szpindel snapped. “And you may have noticed the shit’s getting through anyway.”

“But aren’t there, you know—” I groped for the word—“bandpass filters? Something that lets visible wavelengths through, cuts out the lethal stuff on both sides?”

He snorted. “Sure. It’s called an atmosphere, and if we’d brought one with us—about fifty times deeper than Earth’s—it might block some of that soup down there. Course, Earth also gets a lot of help from its magnetic field, but I’m not betting my life on any EM we set up in that place.”

“If we didn’t keep running into these spikes ,” Bates said. “That’s the real problem.”

“Are they random?” I wondered.

Szpindel’s shrug was half shiver. “I don’t think anything about that place is random. But who knows? We need more data.”

“Which we’re not likely to get,” James said, walking around the ceiling to join us, “if our drones keep shorting out.”

The conditional was pure formality. We’d tried playing the odds, sacrificing drone after drone in the hope that one of them would get lucky; survival rates tailed exponentially to zero with distance from base camp. We’d tried shielding the fiberop to reduce aperture leakage; the resulting tethers were stiff and unwieldy, wrapped in so many layers of ferroceramic that we were virtually waving the bots around on the end of a stick. We’d tried cutting the tethers entirely, sending the machines out to explore on their own, squinting against the radiant blizzard and storing their findings for later download; none had returned. We’d tried everything.

“We can go in ourselves,” James said.

Almost everything.

“Right,” Szpindel replied in a voice that couldn’t mean anything but wrong .

“It’s the only way to learn anything useful.”

“Yeah. Like how many seconds it would take your brain to turn into synchrotron soup.”

“Our suits can be shielded.”

“Oh, you mean like Mandy’s drones?”

“I’d really rather you didn’t call me that,” Bates remarked.

“The point is, Rorschach kills you whether you’re meat or mechanical.”

“ My point is that it kills meat differently ,” James replied. “It takes longer.”

Szpindel shook his head. “You’d be good as dead in fifty minutes. Even shielded. Even in the so-called cool zones.”

“And completely asymptomatic for three hours or more. And even after that it would take days for us to actually die and we’d be back here long before then , and the ship could patch us up just like that. We even know that much, Isaac, it’s right there in ConSensus. And if we know it, you know it. So we shouldn’t even be having this argument.”

“That’s your solution? We saturate ourselves with radiation every thirty hours and then I get to cut out the tumors and stitch everyone’s cells back together?”

“The pods are automatic. You wouldn’t have to lift a finger.”

“Not to mention the number those magnetic fields would do on your brain . We’d be hallucinating from the moment we—”

“Faraday the suits.”

“Ah, so we go in deaf dumb and blind. Good idea.”

“We can let light pass. Infrared—”

“It’s all EM , Suze. Even if we blacked out our helmets completely and used a camera feed, we’d get leakage where the wire went through.”

“Some, yes. But it’d be better than—”

“Jesus.” A tremor sent spittle sailing from the corner of Szpindel’s mouth. “Let me talk to Mi—”

“I’ve discussed it with the rest of the gang, Isaac. We’re all agreed.”

“ All agreed? You don’t have a working majority in there, Suze. Just because you cut your brain into pieces doesn’t mean they each get a vote.”

“I don’t see why not. We’re each at least as sentient as you are.”

“They’re all you . Just partitioned.”

“You don’t seem to have any trouble treating Michelle as a separate individual.”

“Michelle’s—I mean, yes, you’re all very different facets , but there’s only one original. Your alters—”

“ Don’t call us that .” Sascha erupted with a voice cold as LOX. “ Ever .”

Szpindel tried to pull back. “I didn’t mean—you know I didn’t—”

But Sascha was gone. “What are you saying?” said the softer voice in her wake. “Do you think I’m just, I’m just Mom , play-acting? You think when we’re together you’re alone with her ?”

“Michelle,” Szpindel said miserably. “No. What I think—”

“Doesn’t matter,” Sarasti said. “We don’t vote here.”

He floated above us, visored and unreadable in the center of the drum. None of us had seen him arrive. He turned slowly on his axis, keeping us in view as we rotated around him.

“Prepping Scylla . Amanda needs two untethered grunts with precautionary armament. Cams from one to a million Angstroms, shielded tympanics, no autonomous circuitry. Platelet boosters, dimenhydrinate and potassium iodide for everyone by 1350.”