Peter Watts - Firefall

He moved towards me; I swear, all those agonized faces followed him with their eyes. He studied me for a moment, the flesh crinkling around his eyes. Or maybe some mindless algorithm merely processed visual input, correlated aspect ratios and facial tics, fed everything to some output subroutine with no more awareness than a stats program. Maybe there was no more spark in this creature’s face than there was in all the others, silently screaming in his wake.

“Is Susan afraid of you?” the thing before me asked.

“Su—why should she be?”

“She has four conscious entities in her head. She’s four times more sentient than you. Doesn’t that make you a threat?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then why should you feel threatened by me?”

And suddenly I didn’t care any more. I laughed out loud, with minutes to live and nothing to lose. “ Why ? Maybe because you’re my natural enemy, you fucker. Maybe because I know you, and you can’t even look at one of us without flexing your claws. Maybe because you nearly ripped my fucking hand off and raped me for no good reason—”

“I can imagine what it’s like,” he said quietly. “Please don’t make me do it again.”

I fell instantly silent.

“I know your race and mine are never on the best of terms.” There was a cold smile in his voice if not on his face. “But I do only what you force me to. You rationalize , Keeton. You defend . You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can’t reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of Holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can’t be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt—species die —and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even knowing what it is.”

“It served me well enough.” I wondered at the ease with which I had put my life into the past tense.

“Yes, if your purpose is only to transmit . Now you have to convince . You have to believe .”

There were implications there I didn’t dare to hope for. “Are you saying—”

“Can’t afford to let the truth trickle through. Can’t give you the chance to shore up your rationales and your defenses. They must fall completely. You must be inundated . Shattered. Genocide’s impossible to deny when you’re buried up to your neck in dismembered bodies.”

He’d played me. All this time. Preconditioning me, turning my topology inside-out.

I’d known something was going on. I just hadn’t understood what .

“I’d have seen right through it,” I said, “if you hadn’t made me get involved.”

“You might even read it off me directly.”

“ That’s why you—” I shook my head. “I thought that was because we were meat .”

“That too,” Sarasti admitted, and looked right at me.

For the first time, I looked right back. And felt a shock of recognition.

I still wonder why I never saw it before. For all those years I remembered the thoughts and feelings of some different, younger person, some remnant of the boy my parents had hacked out of my head to make room for me. He’d been alive . His world had been vibrant. And though I could call up the memories of that other consciousness, I could barely feel anything within the constraints of my own.

Perhaps dreamstate wasn’t such a bad word for it…

“Like to hear a vampire folk tale?” Sarasti asked.

“Vampires have folk tales?”

He took it for a yes . “A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Amanda is not planning a mutiny.”

“What? You know about—”

“She doesn’t even want to. Ask her if you like.”

“No—I—”

“You value objectivity.”

It was so obvious I didn’t bother answering.

He nodded as if I had. “Synthesists can’t have opinions of their own. So when you feel one, it must be someone else’s. The crew holds you in contempt. Amanda wants me relieved of command. Half of us is you . I think the word is project . Although,”—he cocked his head a bit to one side—“lately you improve. Come.”

“Where?”

“Shuttle bay. Time to do your job.”

“My—”

“Survive and bear witness.”

“A drone—”

“Can deliver the data—assuming nothing fries its memory before it gets away. It can’t convince anyone. It can’t counter rationalizations and denials. It can’t matter . And vampires—” he paused—“have poor communications skills.”

It should have been cause for petty, selfish rejoicing.

“It all comes down to me,” I said. “That’s what you’re saying. I’m a fucking stenographer, and it’s all on me.”

“Yes. Forgive me for that.”

“Forgive you?”

Sarasti waved his hand. All faces save two disappeared.

“I don’t know what I’m doing.”

The news bloomed across ConSensus a few seconds before Bates called it aloud: Thirteen skimmers had not reappeared from behind Big Ben on schedule. Sixteen. Twenty-eight.

And counting.

Sarasti clicked to himself as he and Bates played catch-up. Tactical filled with luminous multicolored threads, a tangle of revised projections as intricate as art. The threads wrapped Ben like a filamentous cocoon; Theseus was a naked speck in the middle distance.

I expected any number of those lines to skewer us like needles through a bug. Surprisingly, none did; but the projections only extended twenty-five hours into the future, and were reliable for only half that. Not even Sarasti and the Captain could look so far ahead with that many balls in the air. It was something, though, the faintest silver lining: that all these high-speed behemoths couldn’t simply reach out and swat us without warning. Evidently they still had to ease into the curve.

After Rorschach ’s dive, I’d been starting to think the laws of physics didn’t apply.

The trajectories were close enough, though. At least three skimmers would be passing within a hundred kilometers on their next orbits.

Sarasti reached for his injector, the blood rising in his face. “Time to go. We refit Charybdis while you’re sulking.”

He held the hypo to his throat and shot up. I stared at ConSensus, caught by that bright shifting web like a moth by a streetlight.

“ Now , Siri.”

He pushed me from his quarters. I sailed into the passageway, grabbed a convenient rung—and stopped.

The spine was alive with grunts, patrolling the airspace, standing guard over the fab plants and shuttle ’locks, clinging like giant insects to the rungs of unrolling spinal ladders. Slowly, silently, the spine itself was stretching .

It could do that, I remembered. Its corrugations flexed and relaxed like muscle, it could grow up to two hundred meters to accommodate any late-breaking need for a bigger hanger or more lab space.

Or more infantry. Theseus was increasing the size of the battlefield.

“Come.” The vampire turned aft.

Bates broke in from up front. “Something’s happening.”