Peter Watts - Firefall

“You’re saying I’m like that?”

“You use your Chinese room the way they used vision. You’ve reinvented empathy, almost from scratch, and in some ways—not all obviously, or I wouldn’t have to tell you this—but in some ways yours is better than the original. It’s why you’re so good at synthesis.”

I shook my head. “I just observe, that’s all. I watch what people do, and then I imagine what would make them do that.”

“Sounds like empathy to me.”

“It’s not. Empathy’s not so much about imagining how the other guy feels. It’s more about imagining how you’d feel in the same place, right?”

Pag frowned. “So?”

“So what if you don’t know how you’d feel?”

He looked at me, and his surfaces were serious and completely transparent. “You’re better than that, friend. You may not always act like it, but—I know you. I knew you before .”

“You knew someone else. I’m Pod-man , remember?”

“Yeah, that was someone else. And maybe I remember him better than you do. But I’ll tell you one thing.” He leaned forward. “ Both of you would’ve helped me out that day. And maybe he would’ve got there with good ol’-fashioned empathy while you had to cobble together some kind of improvised flowchart out of surplus parts, but that just makes your accomplishment all the greater. Which is why I continue to stick it out with you, old buddy. Even though you have a rod up your ass the size of the Rio Spire.”

He held out his glass. Dutifully, I clinked it against my own. We drank.

“I don’t remember him,” I said after a while.

“What, the other Siri? Pre-Pod Siri?”

I nodded.

“Nothing at all?”

I thought back. “Well, he was wracked by convulsions all the time, right? There’d be constant pain. I don’t remember any pain.” My glass was almost empty; I sipped to make it last. “I—I dream about him sometimes, though. About— being him.”

“What’s it like?”

“It was—colorful. Everything was more saturated, you know? Sounds, smells. Richer than life.”

“And now?”

I looked at him.

“You said it was colorful. What changed?”

“I don’t know. Maybe nothing. I just—I don’t actually remember the dreams when I wake up any more.”

“So how do you know you still have them?” Pag asked.

Fuck it I thought, and tipped back the last of my pint in a single gulp. “I know.”

“How?”

I frowned, taken aback. I had to think for a few moments before I remembered.

“I wake up smiling,” I said.

IT WENT BAD from the moment we breached. The plan had called for precise havoc along the new beachhead, subtly arranged to entrap some blood-cell-with-waldoes as it sought to repair the damage. Our job had been to set the trap and stand back, trusting Sarasti’s assurances that we would not have long to wait.

We had no time at all. Something squirmed in the swirling dust the moment we breached, serpentine movement down the hole that instantly kicked Bates renowned field initiative into high gear. Her grunts dived through and caught a scrambler twitching in their crosshairs, clinging to the wall of the passageway. It must have been stunned by the blast of our entry, a classic case of wrong-place-wrong-time. Bates took a split-second to appraise the opportunity and the plan was plasma.

One of the grunts plugged the scrambler with a biopsy dart before I even had a chance to blink. We would have bagged the whole animal right then if Rorschach ’s magnetosphere hadn’t chosen that moment to kick sand in our faces. As it was, by the time our grunts staggered back into action their quarry was already disappearing around the bend. Bates was tethered to her troops; they yanked her down the rabbit hole (“ Set it up! ” she yelled back at Sascha) the moment she let them loose.

I was tethered to Bates. I barely had a chance to exchange a wide-eyed look with Sascha before being yanked away in turn. Suddenly I was inside again; the sated biopsy dart bounced off my faceplate and flashed past, still attached to a few meters of discarded monofilament. Hopefully Sascha would pick it up while Bates and I were hunting; at least the mission wouldn’t be a total loss if we never made it back.

The grunts dragged us like bait on a hook. Bates flew like a dolphin just ahead of me, keeping effortlessly to the center of the bore with an occasional tweak of her jets. I careened off the walls just behind, trying to stabilize myself, trying to look as though I too might be in control. It was an important pretense. The whole point of being a decoy is to pass yourself off as an original. They’d even given me my own gun, pure precaution of course, more for comfort than protection. It hugged my forearm and fired plastic slugs impervious to induction fields.

Just Bates and I, now. A pacifist soldier, and the odds of a coin toss.

Gooseflesh prickled my skin as it always had. The usual ghosts scrabbled and clawed through my mind. This time, though, the dread seemed muted. Distant. Perhaps it was just a matter of timing, perhaps we were moving so quickly through the magnetic landscape that no one phantom had a chance to stick. Or maybe it was something else. Maybe I wasn’t so afraid of ghosts because this time we were after monsters .

The scrambler seemed to have thrown off whatever cobwebs our entrance had spun; it surged along the walls now at full speed, its arms shooting ahead like a succession of striking snakes, slinging the body forward so fast the drones could barely keep it in sight, a writhing silhouette in the fog. Suddenly it leapt sideways, sailing across the width of the passageway and down some minor tributary. The grunts veered in pursuit, crashing into walls, stumbling—

—stopping—

—and suddenly Bates was braking hard, shooting back past me as I flailed with my pistol. I was past the drones in the next instant; my leash snapped tight and snapped back, bringing me to a dead drifting stop. For a second or two I was on the front line. For a second or two I was the front line, Siri Keeton, note taker, mole, professional uncomprehender. I just floated there, breath roaring in my helmet, as a few meters further on the walls—

Squirmed…

Peristalsis , I thought at first. But this motion was utterly unlike the slow, undulating waves that usually rippled along Rorschach ’s passageways. So hallucination , I thought instead—and then those writhing walls reached out with a thousand whiplike calcareous tongues that grabbed our quarry from every direction and tore it to pieces …

Something grabbed me and spun me around. Suddenly I was locked against the chest of one of the grunts, its rear guns firing as we retreated back up the tunnel at full speed. Bates was in the arms of the other. Seething motion receded behind us but the image stayed stuck to the backs of my eyes, hallucinatory and point-blank in its clarity:

Scramblers, everywhere. A seething infestation squirming across the walls, reaching out for the intruder, leaping into the lumen of the passageway to press their counterattack.

Not against us. They had attacked one of their own. I’d seen three of its arms ripped off before it had disappeared into a writhing ball in the center of the passageway.

We fled. I turned to Bates— Did you see —but held my tongue. The deathly concentration on her face was unmistakable even across two faceplates and three meters of methane. According to HUD she’d lobotomized both grunts, bypassed all that wonderful autonomous decision-making circuitry entirely. She was running both machines herself, as manually as marionettes.