Peter Watts - Firefall

The door swung shut.

“Hey. Hungry?”

He jumped at the hand on his arm but it was only a woman, dreadlocked and gracile and with a smile that warmed his skin instead of freezing it. Her skin was uniform chocolate, not the rainbow swirl of false color it had been the night before; but he recognized the voice.

“Lianna.” He grunted, taking her in. “You’re the first person I’ve seen here who’s actually dressed like a monk.”

“It’s a bathrobe. We’re not really into gang colors around here.” She jerked her chin down the hall. “C’mon. Breakfast.”

They selected their meals from a commons that looked reassuringly like a conventional cafeteria bar (cloned bacon, Brüks was relieved to see; he’d been afraid the Bicamerals would be vegan traditionalists), but they ate sitting on the sprawling steps of the main entrance, watching the morning shadows shorten by degrees across the desert. The quiet hiss of an idling tornado drifted over the ramparts behind them.

“That was quite the night,” Brüks said around a mouthful of egg.

“Quite the morning, too.”

He raised his eyes. Far overhead, the contrail of some passing airbus etched a line across the sky.

“Oh, it’s still up there,” Lianna remarked. “Kinda flickers in and out of the higher wavelengths if you stare hard enough.”

“I can’t see it.”

“What kind of augments you got?”

“For my eyes? Nothing.” Brüks dropped his gaze back to the horizon. “Got wired with cryptochrome back when it was the Next Big Thing, thought it would help me find my way around down in Costa Rica. You know the ads, never be lost again . Except suddenly I wasn’t just seeing Earth’s magnetic field, I was seeing a halo around every bloody tacpad and charge mat. It was distracting as hell.”

Lianna nodded. “Well, it takes some getting used to. Give sight to the blind, takes time to learn how to see.”

“More than I had the patience for. Pigment’s still sitting back there in my retina but I got it blocked after about a week.”

“Wow. You’re old school.”

He fought back a twitch of irritation: Half my age, and she’s probably already forgotten the difference between the meat she was born with and the chrome that came after . “I’ve got the usual brain boosts. Can’t very well get tenure otherwise.” Which reminds me —“I don’t suppose there’s any Cognital on the premises? I left mine back at camp.”

Lianna’s eyes widened. “You take pills ?”

“It’s the same—”

“It’d take about ten minutes to fit you with a pump and you take pills .” Her face split into a big goofy grin. “That’s not old school, that’s downright Paleolithic .”

“Glad you find it so fucking amusing, Lianna. You have the pills or not?”

“Not.” She pursed her lips. “I guess we could synthesize some. I’ll ask. Or you might ask Jim. He’s, well…”

“Old school,” Brüks finished.

“Actually, you’d be surprised how much wiring he’s got in his head.”

“I’m surprised to even find him here. Military man in a monastery?”

“Yeah, well, you were expecting us all to wear bathrobes.”

“He’s here to help you in your war against the vamps?” Brüks set his empty plate beside him on the step.

She shook her head. “He’s here to—he just needed a place to work through some stuff. Also I think he’s kinda spying on us.” She cocked her head at him: “What about you?”

“I got herded,” he reminded her.

“No, I mean, what were you even doing out in the field? There any species even left out there that haven’t been RAMrodded and digitized?”

“The extinct ones,” Brüks said shortly. Then, relenting: “Sure, you can virtualize anything in the lab. Still doesn’t tell you what it’s doing out in the wide wet world with a million unpredictable variables working on it.”

She looked out across the flats. Brüks followed her gaze. There, just off to the northwest: the ridge upon which his own home had crouched lo these past two months. He could not see it from here.

“You gonna tell me what’s going on?” he said at last.

“You got caught in the crossfire.”

“ What crossfire? Why were the zombies—”

“The vampire,” Lianna said. “Valerie, actually.”

“You’re kidding.”

She shrugged.

“So Valerie the Vampire summons her zombie forces against the Bicamerals. And now they’re all sitting together just down the hall, munching chips and cocktail wienies because—Moore said something about a common enemy.”

“It’s complicated.”

“Try me.”

“You wouldn’t understand.” She tried for a smile—“You’re behind on your Cognital”—but it fell flat.

“Look, I’m sorry I crashed your party but—”

“Dan, the truth is I don’t really know a whole lot more than you do at this point.” She spread her hands. “All I can tell you for sure is, well, you gotta trust them. They know what they’re doing.”

She stopped just short of patting him on the head.

He stood. “Glad to hear it. Then I guess I’ll leave you to your games, and thanks for the meal.”

She looked up at him. “You know that can’t happen. Jim already told you that much.”

“Are you going to tell me where my bike is, or do I have to walk?”

“You can’t leave, Dan.”

“You can’t keep me prisoner.”

“It’s not us you have to worry about.”

“Who’s us, this time? Bicamerals, vampires? Koalas?”

She pointed north across the desert, squinting. “Look out there. On that ridge.”

He did. He saw nothing at first. Then, briefly, something glinted in the morning sun: a spark on the escarpment.

“Now look up,” she said. A distant shard of brightness stabbed his eye from high to the east, a reflection of sunlight off empty sky.

“Not us,” Lianna repeated. “You.”

“Me—?”

“People like you. Baselines.”

He let it sink in.

“Valerie must have hacked a fair number of sats just getting her pieces into position. As far as anything in orbit could tell, this whole chunk of desert just dropped out of existence for a good four hours last night. That got people’s attention. Someone probably slipped a drone or two under the ceiling in time to see our engine going through its paces—and those dance steps are, shall we say, a bit beyond what passes for state-of-the-art out there.” Lianna sighed. “The Bicamerals have been spooking the wrong people for years now. Too many breakthroughs, too fast, the usual. They’ve been watching, all this time they’ve been watching. And now, as far as they can tell, we’re in some kind of gang war with a bunch of zombies.

“They are not going to let this pass, Dan. Now that they’ve caught a glimpse behind the curtain they’ll have thrown a net over the whole reserve.”

And I, Brüks reflected, don’t blame them one goddamned bit . “I’m not part of this. You said it yourself.”

“You’re a witness. They’ll debrief you.”

“So they’ll debrief me.” Brüks shrugged. “You haven’t told me anything. I haven’t seen anything they haven’t, if they deployed drones.”

“You’ve seen more than you realize. Everyone does. And they will know that, so your debriefing with be aggressive .”

“So that makes you, what? My personal guard? Here to feed me, and walk me, and make sure I don’t wander off into any of the rooms where the grown-ups are talking. And yank on my leash if I try to leave. That about sum it up?”

“Dan—”

“Look, you’re giving me a choice between a vampire with her zombie army and you baselines, as you so delicately put it.”