Peter Watts - Firefall

“You’d think he’d have mentioned it,” I murmured. It was gorgeous, a holographic ornament. Perhaps even Rorschach might be a work of art through eyes like these…

“I don’t think they parse sight like we do.” Bates opened another window. Mundane graphs and contour plots sprang from the table. “They don’t even go to Heaven, from what I hear. VR doesn’t work on them, they—see the pixels, or something.”

“What if he’s right?” I asked. I told myself that I was only looking for a tactical assessment, an official opinion for the official record. But my words came out doubtful and frightened.

She paused. For a moment I wondered if she, too, had finally lost patience with the sight of me. But she only looked up, and stared off into some enclosed distance.

“What if he’s right,” she repeated, and pondered the question that lay beneath: what can we do ?

“We could engineer ourselves back into nonsentience, perhaps. Might improve our odds in the long run.” She looked at me, a rueful sort of half-smile at the corner of her mouth. “But I guess that wouldn’t be much of a win, would it? What’s the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you’re alive?”

I finally saw it.

How long would it take an enemy tactician to discern Bates’ mind behind the actions of her troops on the battlefield? How long before the obvious logic came clear? In any combat situation, this woman would naturally draw the greatest amount of enemy fire: take off the head, kill the body. But Amanda Bates wasn’t just a head: she was a bottleneck, and her body would not suffer from a decapitation strike. Her death would only let her troops off the leash. How much more deadly would those grunts be, once every battlefield reflex didn’t have to pass through some interminable job stack waiting for the rubber stamp?

Szpindel had had it all wrong. Amanda Bates wasn’t a sop to politics, her role didn’t deny the obsolescence of Human oversight at all. Her role depended on it.

She was more cannon fodder than I. She always had been. And I had to admit: after generations of generals who’d lived for the glory of the mushroom cloud, it was a pretty effective strategy for souring warmongers on gratuitous violence. In Amanda Bates’ army, picking a fight meant standing on the battlefield with a bull’s-eye on your chest.

No wonder she’d been so invested in peaceful alternatives.

“I’m sorry,” I said softly.

She shrugged. “It’s not over yet. Just the first round.” She took a long, deep breath, and turned back to her study of slingshot mechanics. “ Rorschach wouldn’t have tried so hard to scare us off in the first place if we couldn’t touch it, right?”

I swallowed. “Right.”

“So there’s still a chance.” She nodded to herself. “There’s still a chance.”

The demon arranged his pieces for the end game. He didn’t have many left. The soldier he placed in the bridge. He packed obsolete linguists and diplomats back in their coffin, out of sight and out of the way.

He called the jargonaut to his quarters—and although it would be the first time I’d seen him since the attack, his summons carried not the slightest trace of doubt that I would obey. I did. I came on command, and saw that he had surrounded himself with faces.

Every last one of them was screaming.

There was no sound. The disembodied holograms floated in silent tiers around the bubble, each contorted into a different expression of pain. They were being tortured, these faces; half a dozen real ethnicities and twice as many hypothetical ones, skin tones ranging from charcoal to albino, brows high and slanted, noses splayed or pointed, jaws receding or prognathous. Sarasti had called the entire hominid tree into existence around him, astonishing in their range of features, terrifying in their consistency of expression.

A sea of tortured faces, rotating in slow orbits around my vampire commander.

“My God, what is this?”

“Statistics.” Sarasti seemed focused on a flayed Asian child. “ Rorschach ’s growth allometry over a two-week period.”

“They’re faces …”

He nodded, turning his attention to a woman with no eyes. “Skull diameter scales to total mass. Mandible length scales to EM transparency at one Angstrom. One hundred thirteen facial dimensions, each presenting a different variable. Principle-component combinations present as multifeature aspect ratios.” He turned to face me, his naked gleaming eyes just slightly sidecast. “You’d be surprised how much gray matter is dedicated to the analysis of facial imagery. Shame to waste it on anything as—counterintuitive as residual plots or contingency tables.”

I felt my jaw clenching. “And the expressions ? What do they represent?”

“Software customizes output for user.”

An agonized gallery pled for mercy on all sides.

“I am wired for hunting,” he reminded gently .

“And you think I don’t know that,” I said after a moment.

He shrugged, disconcertingly human. “You ask.”

“Why am I here, Jukka? You want to teach me another object lesson ?”

“To discuss our next move.”

“What move? We can’t even run away.”

“No.” He shook his head, baring filed teeth in something approaching regret.

“Why did we wait so long?” Suddenly my sullen defiance had evaporated. I sounded like a child, frightened and pleading. “Why didn’t we just take it on when we first got here, when it was weaker …?”

“We need to learn things. For next time.”

“Next time? I thought Rorschach was a dandelion seed. I thought it just—washed up here—”

“By chance. But every dandelion is a clone. Their seeds are legion.” Another smile, not remotely convincing—“And maybe it takes more than one try for the placental mammals to conquer Australia.”

“It’ll annihilate us. It doesn’t even need those spitballs, it could pulverize us with one of those scramjets. In an instant.”

“It doesn’t want to.”

“How do you know ?”

“They need to learn things too. They want us intact. Improves our odds.”

“Not enough. We can’t win.”

This was his cue. This was the point at which Uncle Predator would smile at my naiveté, and take me into his confidence. Of course we’re armed to the teeth , he would say. Do you think we’d come all this way, face such a vast unknown, without the means to defend ourselves? Now, at last, I can reveal that shielding and weaponry account for over half the ship’s mass…

It was his cue .

“No,” he said. “We can’t win.”

“So we just sit here. We just wait to die for the next—the next sixty-eight minutes…”

Sarasti shook his head. “No.”

“But—” I began.

“Oh,” I finished.

Because of course, we had just topped up our antimatter reserves. Theseus was not equipped with weapons. Theseus was the weapon. And we were, in fact, going to sit here for the next sixty-eight minutes, waiting to die.

But we were going to take Rorschach with us when we did.

Sarasti said nothing. I wondered what he saw, looking at me. I wondered if there actually was a Jukka Sarasti behind those eyes to see, if his insights—always ten steps ahead of our own—hailed not so much from superior analytical facilities as from the timeworn truth that it takes one to know one .

Whose side, I wondered, would an automaton take?

“You have other things to worry about,” he said.