Peter Watts - Firefall

I is not the working mind, you see. For Amanda Bates to say “I do not exist” would be nonsense; but when the processes beneath say the same thing, they are merely reporting that the parasites have died. They are only saying that they are free.

SARASTI, YOU BLOODSUCKER.

My knees pressed against my forehead. I hugged my folded legs as though clinging to a branch over a chasm.

You vicious asshole. You foul sadistic monster.

My breath rasped loud and mechanical. It nearly drowned out the blood roaring in my ears.

You tore me apart, you made me piss and shit myself and I cried like some gutted baby and you stripped me naked, you fucking thing, you night crawler, you broke my tools, you took away anything I ever had that let me touch anyone and you didn’t have to you babyfucker, it wasn’t necessary but you knew that didn’t you? You just wanted to play. I’ve seen your kind at it before, cats toying with mice, catch and release, a taste of freedom and then pouncing again, biting, not hard enough to kill—not just yet—before you let them loose again and they’re hobbling now, maybe a leg snapped or a gash in the belly but they’re still trying , still running or crawling or dragging themselves as fast as they can until you’re on them again , and again because it’s fun, because it gives you pleasure you sadistic piece of shit. You send us into the arms of that hellish thing and it plays with us too, and maybe you’re even working together because it let me escape just like you do, it let me run right back into your arms and then you strip me down to some raw half-brained defenseless animal , I can’t rotate or transform I can’t even talk and you—

You—

It wasn’t even personal, was it? You don’t even hate me. You were just sick of keeping it all in, sick of restraining yourself with all this meat, and nobody else could be spared from their jobs. This was my job, wasn’t it? Not synthesist, not conduit. Not even cannon fodder or decoy duty. I’m just something disposable to sharpen your claws on.

I hurt so much. It hurt just to breathe.

I was so alone .

Webbing pressed against the curve of my back, bounced me forward gently as a breeze, caught me again. I was back in my tent. My right hand itched. I tried to flex the fingers, but they were embedded in amber. Left hand reached for right, and found a plastic carapace extending to the elbow.

I opened my eyes. Darkness. Meaningless numbers and a red LED twinkled from somewhere along my forearm.

I didn’t remember coming here. I didn’t remember anyone fixing me.

Breaking. Being broken. That’s what I remembered. I wanted to die. I wanted to just stay curled up until I withered away.

After an age, I forced myself to uncoil. I steadied myself, let some miniscule inertia bump me against the taut insulated fabric of my tent. I waited for my breathing to steady. It seemed to take hours.

I called ConSensus to the wall, and a feed from the drum. Soft voices, harsh light flaring against the wall: hurting my eyes, peeling them raw. I killed visual, and listened to words in the darkness.

“—a phase?” someone asked.

Susan James, her personhood restored. I knew her again: not a meat sack, no longer a thing .

“We have been over this.” That was Cunningham. I knew him too. I knew them all. Whatever Sarasti had done to me, however far he’d yanked me from my room, I’d somehow fallen back inside.

It should have mattered more.

“—because for one thing, if it were really so pernicious, natural selection would have weeded it out,” James was saying.

“You have a naïve understanding of evolutionary processes. There’s no such thing as survival of the fittest . Survival of the most adequate , maybe. It doesn’t matter whether a solution’s optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternatives.”

I knew that voice too. It belonged to a demon.

“Well, we damn well beat the alternatives .” Some subtle overdubbed harmonic in James’ voice suggested a chorus: the whole Gang, rising as one in opposition.

I couldn’t believe it. I’d just been mutilated, beaten before their eyes—and they were talking about biology ?

Maybe she’s afraid to talk about anything else , I thought. Maybe she’s afraid she might be next.

Or maybe she just couldn’t care less what happens to me.

“It’s true,” Sarasti told her, “that your intellect makes up for your self-awareness to some extent. But you’re flightless birds on a remote island. You’re not so much successful as isolated from any real competition.”

No more clipped speech patterns. No more terse phrasing. The transient had made his kill, found his release. Now he didn’t care who knew he was around.

“You?” Michelle whispered. “Not we ?”

“ We stop racing long ago,” the demon said at last. “It’s not our fault you don’t leave it at that.”

“Ah.” Cunningham again. “Welcome back. Did you look in on Ke—”

“No.” Bates said.

“Satisfied?” the demon asked.

“If you mean the grunts, I’m satisfied you’re out of them,” Bates said. “If you mean—it was completely unwarranted, Jukka.”

“It isn’t.”

“You assaulted a crewmember. If we had a brig you’d be in it for the rest of the trip.”

“This isn’t a military vessel, Major. You’re not in charge.”

I didn’t need a visual feed to know what Bates thought of that. But there was something else in her silence, something that made me bring the drum camera back online. I squinted against the corrosive light, brought down the brightness until all that remained was a faint whisper of pastels.

Yes. Bates. Stepping off the stairway onto the deck

“Grab a chair,” Cunningham said from his seat in the Commons. “It’s golden oldies time.”

There was something about her.

“I’m sick of that song,” Bates said. “We’ve played it to death.”

Even now, my tools chipped and battered, my perceptions barely more than baseline, I could see the change. This torture of prisoners, this assault upon crew, had crossed a line in her head. The others wouldn’t see it. The lid on her affect was tight as a boilerplate. But even through the dim shadows of my window the topology glowed around her like neon.

Amanda Bates was no longer merely considering a change of command. Now it was only a matter of when.

The universe was closed and concentric.

My tiny refuge lay in its center. Outside that shell was another, ruled by a monster, patrolled by his lackeys. Beyond that was another still, containing something even more monstrous and incomprehensible, something that might soon devour us all.

There was nothing else. Earth was a vague hypothesis, irrelevant to this pocket cosmos. I saw no place into which it might fit.

I stayed in the center of the universe for a long time, hiding. I kept the lights off. I didn’t eat. I crept from my tent only to piss or shit in the cramped head down at Fab, and only when the spine was deserted. A field of painful blisters rose across my flash-burned back, as densely packed as kernels on a corncob. The slightest abrasion tore them open.

Nobody tapped at my door, nobody called my name through ConSensus. I wouldn’t have answered if they had. Maybe they knew that, somehow. Maybe they kept their distance out of respect for my privacy and my disgrace.