Peter Watts - Firefall

It didn’t reflect , I remembered. The mirror didn’t show it .

I headed aft, heart still pounding. The drum opened around me, Szpindel and the Gang conversing in low tones aft. Szpindel glanced up and waved a trembling hand in greeting.

“You need to check me out,” I called. My voice wasn’t nearly so steady as I’d hoped.

“Admitting you have a problem is the first step,” Szpindel called back. “Just don’t expect miracles.” He turned back to the Gang; James on top, they sat in a diagnostic couch staring at some test pattern shimmering on the rear bulkhead.

I grabbed the tip of a stairway and pulled myself down. Coriolis pushed me sideways like a flag in the breeze. “I’m either hallucinating or there’s something on board.”

“You’re hallucinating.”

“I’m serious .”

“So am I. Take a number. Wait your turn.”

He was serious. Once I forced myself to calm down and read the signs, I could see he wasn’t even surprised.

“Guess you’re pretty hungry after all that exhausting lying around, eh?” Szpindel waved at the galley. “Eat something. Be with you in a few minutes.”

I forced myself to work up my latest synopsis while I ate, but that only took half a mind; the other still shivered in residual thrall to fight-flight. I tried to distract it by tapping the BioMed feed.

“It was real ,” James was saying. “We all saw it.”

No. Couldn’t have been .

Szpindel cleared his throat. “Try this one.”

The feed showed what she saw: a small black triangle on a white background. In the next instant it shattered into a dozen identical copies, and a dozen dozen. The proliferating brood rotated around the center screen, geometric primitives ballroom-dancing in precise formation, each sprouting smaller triangles from its tips, fractalizing, rotating, evolving into an infinite, intricate tilework…

A sketchpad, I realized. An interactive eyewitness reconstruction, without the verbiage. Susan’s own pattern-matching wetware reacted to what she saw— no, there were more of them; no, the orientation’s wrong; yes, that’s it, but bigger —and Szpindel’s machine picked those reactions right out of her head and amended the display in realtime. It was a big step up from that half-assed workaround called language. The easily-impressed might have even called it mind-reading.

It wasn’t, though. It was all just feedback and correlation. It doesn’t take a telepath to turn one set of patterns into another. Fortunately.

“That’s it! That’s it !” Susan cried.

The triangles had iterated out of existence. Now the display was full of interlocking asymmetrical pentagrams, a spiderweb of fish scales.

“Don’t tell us that’s random noise ,” she said triumphantly.

“No,” Szpindel said, “It’s a Klüver constant.”

“A—”

“It’s a hallucination, Suze.”

“Of course . But something planted it in our head, right? And—”

“It was in your head all along. It was in your head the day you were born.”

“No.”

“It’s an artefact of deep brain structure. Even congenitally blind people see them sometimes.”

“None of us have seen them before. Ever .”

“I believe you. But there’s no information there, eh? That wasn’t Rorschach talking, it was just—interference. Like everything else.”

“But it was so vivid! Not that flickering corner-of-your-eye stuff we saw everywhere. This was solid . It was realer than real.”

“That’s how you can tell it wasn’t. Since you don’t actually see it, there’s no messy eyeball optics to limit resolution.”

“Oh,” James said, and then, softly: “Shit.”

“Yeah. Sorry.” And then, “Any time you’re ready.”

I looked up; Szpindel was waving me over. James rose from her chair, but it was Michelle who gave him a quick disconsolate squeeze and Sascha who grumbled past me on her way to their tent.

By the time I reached him Szpindel had unfolded the couch into a half-cot. “Lie down.”

I did. “I wasn’t talking about back in Rorschach , you know. I meant here . I saw something right now. When I woke up.”

“Raise your left hand,” he said. Then: “ Just your left, eh?”

I lowered my right, winced at the pinprick. “That’s a bit primitive.”

He eyed the blood-filled cuvette between his thumb and forefinger: a shivering ruby teardrop the size of a fingernail. “Wet sample’s still best for some things.”

“Aren’t the pods supposed to do everything?”

Szpindel nodded. “Call it a quality-control test. Keep the ship on its toes.” He dropped the sample onto the nearest countertop. The teardrop flattened and burst; the surface drank my blood as if parched. Szpindel smacked his lips. “Elevated cholinesterase inhibitors in the ret. Yum.”

For all I knew, my blood results actually did taste good to the man. Szpindel didn’t just read results; he felt them, smelled and saw and experienced each datum like drops of citrus on the tongue. The whole BioMed subdrum was but a part of the Szpindel prosthesis: an extended body with dozens of different sensory modes, forced to talk to a brain that knew only five.

No wonder he’d bonded with Michelle. He was almost synesthesiac himself.

“You spent a bit longer in there than the rest of us,” he remarked.

“That’s significant?”

A jerking shrug. “Maybe your organs got a bit more cooked than ours. Maybe you just got a delicate constitution. Your pod would’ve caught anything—imminent, so I figure—ah.”

“What?”

“Some cells along your brainpan going into overdrive. More in your bladder and kidney.”

“Tumors?”

“What you expect? Rorschach ’s no rejuve spa.”

“But the pod—”

Szpindel grimaced; his idea of a reassuring smile. “Repairs ninety-nine point nine percent of the damage, sure. By the time you get to the last zero-point-one, you’re into diminishing returns. These’re small , commissar. Chances are your own body’ll take care of ’em. If not, we know where they live.”

“The ones in my brain. Could they be causing—”

“Not a chance.” He chewed on his lower lip for a moment. “Course, cancer’s not all that thing did to us.”

“What I saw. Up in the crypt. It had these multijointed arms from a central mass. Big as a person, maybe.”

Szpindel nodded. “Get used to it.”

“The others are seeing these things?”

“I doubt it. Everyone has a different take, like—” his twitching face conveyed Dare I say it? “— Rorschach blots.”

“I was expecting hallucinations in the field,” I admitted, “but up here?”

“TMS effects—” Szpindel snapped his fingers—“they’re sticky , eh? Neurons get kicked into one state, take a while to come unstuck. You never got a TAT? Well-adjusted boy like you?”

“Once or twice,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Same principle.”

“So I’m going to keep seeing this stuff.”

“Party line is they fade over time. Week or two you’re back to normal. But out here, with that thing…” He shrugged. “Too many variables. Not the least of which is, I assume we’ll keep going back until Sarasti says otherwise.”

“But they’re basically magnetic effects.”

“Probably. Although I’m not betting on anything where that fucker’s concerned.”

“Could something else be causing them?” I asked. “Something on this ship?”