Peter Watts - Firefall

Hidden in his tent, Sarasti took up the slack. “Scramblers also use Rorschach ’s EM for metabolic processes. Some pathways achieve proton transfer via heavy-atom tunneling. Perhaps the ambient radiation acts as a catalyst.”

“ Tunneling ?” Susan said. “As in quantum ?”

Cunningham nodded. “Which also explains your shielding problems. Partly, at least.”

“But is that even possible ? I mean, I thought those kind of effects only showed up under cryonic—”

“ Forget this,” Cunningham blurted. “We can debate the biochemistry later, if we’re still alive.”

“What do we debate instead, Robert?” Sarasti said smoothly.

“For starters, the dumbest of these things can look into your head and see what parts of your visual cortex are lighting up. And if there’s a difference between that and mind-reading, it’s not much of one.”

“As long as we stay out of Rorschach —”

“That ship has sailed . You people have already been there. Repeatedly. Who knows what you already did down there for no better reason than because Rorschach made you?”

“Wait a second,” Bates objected. “None of us were puppets down there. We hallucinated and we went blind and—and crazy even, but we were never possessed .”

Cunningham looked at her and snorted. “You think you’d be able to fight the strings? You think you’d even feel them? I could apply a transcranial magnet to your head right now and you’d raise your middle finger or wiggle your toes or kick Siri here in the sack and then swear on your sainted mother’s grave that you only did it because you wanted to. You’d dance like a puppet and all the time swear you were doing it of your own free will, and that’s just me , that’s just some borderline OCD with a couple of magnets and an MRI helmet.” He waved at the vast unknowable void beyond the bulkhead. Shreds of mangled cigarette floated sideways in front of him. “Do you want to guess what that can do? For all we know we’ve already given them Theseus ’ technical specs, warned them about the Icarus array, and then just decided of our own free will to forget it all.”

“ We can cause those effects,” Sarasti said coolly. “As you say. Strokes cause them. Tumors. Random accidents.”

“ Random? Those were experiments , people! That was vivisection ! They let you in so they could take you apart and see what made you tick and you never even knew it.”

“ So what ?” the vampire snapped invisibly. Something cold and hungry had edged into his voice. Human topologies shivered around the table, skittish.

“There’s a blind spot in the center of your visual field,” Sarasti pointed out. “You can’t see it. You can’t see the saccades in your visual timestream. Just two of the tricks you know about. Many others.”

Cunningham was nodding. “That’s my whole point . Rorschach could be—”

“Not talking about case studies. Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don’t experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies . Whole species is agnosiac by default. Rorschach does nothing to you that you don’t already do to yourselves.”

Nobody spoke. It was several silent seconds before I realized what had happened.

Jukka Sarasti had just given us a pep talk.

He could have shut down Cunningham’s tirade—could have probably shut down a full-scale mutiny—by just sailing into our midst and baring his teeth. By looking at us. But he wasn’t trying to frighten us into submission, we were already nervous enough. And he wasn’t trying to educate us either, fight fear with fact; the more facts any sane person gathered about Rorschach , the more fearful they’d become. Sarasti was only trying to keep us functional , lost in space on the edge of our lives, facing down this monstrous enigma that might destroy us at any instant for any reason. Sarasti was trying to calm us down: good meat, nice meat . He was trying to keep us from falling apart. There there.

Sarasti was practicing psychology .

I looked around the table. Bates and Cunningham and the Gang sat still and bloodless.

Sarasti sucked at it.

“We have to get out of here,” Cunningham said. “These things are way beyond us.”

“We’ve shown more aggression than they have,” James said, but there was no confidence in her voice.

“ Rorschach plays those rocks like marbles. We’re sitting in the middle of a shooting gallery. Any time it feels like—”

“It’s still growing. It’s not finished.”

“That’s supposed to reassure me?”

“All I’m saying is, we don’t know ,” James said. “We could have years yet. Centuries.”

“We have fifteen days,” Sarasti announced.

“Oh shit ,” someone said. Cunningham, probably. Maybe Sascha.

For some reason everyone was looking at me.

Fifteen days. Who knows what had gone into that number? None of us asked aloud. Maybe Sarasti, in another fit of inept psychology, had made it up on the spur of the moment. Or maybe he’d derived it before we’d even reached orbit, held it back against the possibility—only now expired—that he might yet send us back into the labyrinth. I’d been half blind for half the mission; I didn’t know.

But one way or another, we had our Graduation Day.

The coffins lay against the rear bulkhead of the crypt—on what would be the floor during those moments when up and down held any meaning. We’d slept for years on the way out. We’d had no awareness of time’s passage—undead metabolism is far too sluggish even to support dreams—but somehow the body knew when it needed a change. Not one of us had chosen to sleep in our pods once we’d arrived. The only times we’d done so had been on pain of death.

But the Gang had taken to coming here ever since Szpindel had died.

His body rested in the pod next to mine. I coasted into the compartment and turned left without thinking. Five coffins: four open and emptied, one sealed. The mirrored bulkhead opposite doubled their number and the depth of the compartment.

But the Gang wasn’t there.

I turned right. The body of Susan James floated back-to-back with her own reflection, staring at an inverse tableau: three sealed sarcophagi, one open. The ebony plaque set into the retracted lid was dark; the others shone with identical sparse mosaics of blue and green stars. None of them changed. There were no scrolling ECGs, no luminous peak-and-valley tracings marked cardio or cns. We could wait here for hours, days, and none of those diodes would so much as twinkle. When you’re undead, the emphasis is on the second syllable.

The Gang’s topology had said Michelle when I’d first arrived, but it was Susan who spoke now, without turning. “I never met her.”

I followed her gaze to the name tag one of the sealed pods: Takamatsu . The other linguist, the other multiple.

“I met everyone else,” Susan continued. “Trained with them. But I never met my own replacement.”

They discouraged it. What would have been the point?

“If you want to—” I began.

She shook her head. “Thanks anyway.”

“Or any of the others—I can only imagine what Michelle—”