Peter Watts - Firefall

“Everyone?” Bates asked.

Sarasti nodded. “Window opens four hours twenty-three.” He turned back down the spine

“Not me,” I said.

Sarasti paused.

“I don’t participate in field ops,” I reminded him.

“Now you do.”

“I’m a synthesist .” He knew that. Of course he knew, everyone did: you can’t observe the system unless you stay outside the system.

“On Earth you’re a synthesist,” he said. “In the Kuiper you’re a synthesist. Here you’re mass. Do what you’re told.”

He disappeared.

“Welcome to the big picture,” Bates said softly.

I looked at her as the rest of the group broke up. “You know I—”

“We’re a long way out, Siri. Can’t wait fourteen months for feedback from your bosses, and you know it.”

She leapt from a standing start, arced smoothly through holograms into the weightless core of the drum. But then she stopped herself, as if distracted by some sudden insight. She grabbed a spinal conduit and swung back to face me.

“You shouldn’t sell yourself short,” she said. “Or Sarasti either. You’re an observer, right? It’s a safe bet there’s going to be a lot down there worth observing.”

“Thanks,” I said. But I already knew why Sarasti was sending me into Rorschach , and there was more to it than observation .

Three valuable agents in harm’s way. A decoy bought one-in-four odds that an enemy would aim somewhere else.

“WE WERE PROBABLY fractured during most of our evolution,” James once told me, back when we were all still getting acquainted. She tapped her temple. “There’s a lot of room up here; a modern brain can run dozens of sentient cores without getting too crowded. And parallel multitasking has obvious survival advantages.”

I nodded. “Ten heads are better than one.”

“Our integration may have actually occurred quite recently. Some experts think we can still revert to multiples under the right circumstances.”

“Well, of course. You’re living proof.”

She shook their head. “I’m not talking about physical partitioning. We’re the state of the art, certainly, but theoretically surgery isn’t even necessary. Simple stress could do something like it, if it was strong enough. If it happened early in childhood.”

“No kidding.”

“Well, in theory,” James admitted, and changed into Sascha who said, “Bull shit in theory . There’s documented cases as recently as fifty years ago.”

“Really.” I resisted the temptation to look it up on my inlays; the unfocused eyes can be a giveaway. “I didn’t know.”

“Well it’s not like anyone talks about it now . People were fucking barbarians about multicores back then—called it a disorder , treated it like some kind of disease. And their idea of a cure was to keep one of the cores and murder all the others. Not that they called it murder , of course. They called it integration or some shit. That’s what people did back then: created other people to suck up all the abuse and torture, then got rid of them when they weren’t needed any more.”

It hadn’t been the tone most of us were looking for at an ice-breaking party. James had gently eased back into the driver’s seat and the conversation had steered closer to community standards.

But I hadn’t heard any of the Gang use alter to describe each other, then or since. It had seemed innocuous enough when Szpindel had said it. I wondered why they’d taken such offence—and now, floating alone in my tent with a few pre-op minutes to kill, there was no one to see my eyes glaze.

Alter carried baggage over a century old, ConSensus told me. Sascha was right; there’d been a time when MCC was MPD, a Disorder rather than a Complex , and it had never been induced deliberately. According to the experts of that time, multiple personalities arose spontaneously from unimaginable cauldrons of abuse—fragmentary personae offered up to suffer rapes and beatings while the child behind took to some unknowable sanctuary in the folds of the brain. It was both survival strategy and ritual self-sacrifice: powerless souls hacking themselves to pieces, offering up quivering chunks of self in the desperate hope that the vengeful gods called Mom or Dad might not be insatiable.

None of it had been real, as it turned out. Or at least, none of it had been confirmed. The experts of the day had been little more than witch doctors dancing through improvised rituals: meandering free-form interviews full of leading questions and nonverbal cues, scavenger hunts through regurgitated childhoods. Sometimes a shot of lithium or haloperidol when the beads and rattles didn’t work. The technology to map minds was barely off the ground; the technology to edit them was years away. So the therapists and psychiatrists poked at their victims and invented names for things they didn’t understand, and argued over the shrines of Freud and Klein and the old Astrologers. Doing their very best to sound like practitioners of Science.

Inevitably, it was Science that turned them all into road kill; MPD was a half-forgotten fad even before the advent of synaptic rewiring. But alter was a word from that time, and its resonance had persisted. Among those who remembered the tale, alter was codespeak for betrayal and human sacrifice . Alter meant cannon fodder .

Imagining the topology of the Gang’s coexisting souls, I could see why Sascha embraced the mythology. I could see why Susan let her. After all, there was nothing implausible about the concept; the Gang’s very existence proved that much. And when you’ve been peeled off from a pre-existing entity, sculpted from nonexistence straight into adulthood—a mere fragment of personhood, without even a full-time body to call your own—you can be forgiven a certain amount of anger. Sure you’re all equal, all in it together. Sure, no persona is better than any other. Susan’s still the only one with a surname.

Better to direct that resentment at old grudges, real or imagined; less problematic, at least, than taking it out on someone who shares the same flesh.

I realized something else, too. Surrounded by displays documenting the relentless growth of the leviathan beneath us, I could not only see why Sascha had objected to the word; I could also see why Isaac Szpindel, no doubt unconsciously, had spoken it in the first place.

As far as Earth was concerned, everyone on Theseus was an alter.

Sarasti stayed behind. He hadn’t come with a backup.

There were the rest of us, though, crammed into the shuttle, embedded in custom spacesuits so padded with shielding we might have been deep-sea divers from a previous century. It was a fine balance; too much shielding would have been worse than none at all, would split primary particles into secondary ones, just as lethal and twice as numerous. Sometimes you had to live with moderate exposure; the only alternative was to embed yourself like a bug in lead.

We launched six hours from perigee. Scylla raced on ahead like an eager child, leaving its parent behind. There was no eagerness in the systems around me, though. Except for one: the Gang of Four almost shimmered behind her faceplate.

“Excited?” I asked.

Sascha answered: “Fuckin’ right . Field work, Keeton. First contact.”

“What if there’s nobody there?” What if there is, and they don’t like us?