Peter Watts - Echopraxia

Gone.

A million stars winked back into the firmament, cold dimensionless pinpricks strewn in bands and random handfuls across half the sky. But the other half remained without form and void—and now the tumor that had swallowed the sun was gnawing outward at the stars as well. Brüks looked away from that great maw and saw a black finger lancing through the starfield directly to port: a dark spire, five hundred kilometers long, buried deep in the shade. Brüks downshifted his personal spectrum a few angstroms and it glowed red as an ember, an infrared blackbody rising from the exact center of the disk ahead. Heat radiator. A hairbreadth from the center of the solar system, it never saw the sun.

He tugged nervously at the webbing holding him to the mirrorball. Sengupta was strapped into her usual couch on his left, Lianna to his right, Moore to hers. The old warrior had barely said a word to him since Brüks had broached the subject of his son. Some lines were invisible until crossed, apparently.

Or maybe they were perfectly visible, to anyone who wasn’t an insensitive dolt. Empiricists always kept their minds open to alternative hypotheses.

He sought refuge in the view outside, dark to naked eyes but alive on tactical. Icons, momentum vectors, trajectories. A thin hoop of pale emerald shrank across the forward view, drawing tight around the Crown ’s nose: the rim of her reflective parasol—erased from ConSensus in deference to an uninterrupted view—redundant now, spooling tight into stowage. The habs had already been folded back and tied down for docking. Beyond the overlays the Crown fell silently past massive structures visible only in their absence: shadows against the sky, the starless silhouettes of gantries and droplet-conveyors, endless invisible antennae belied by the intermittent winking of pilot lights strung along their lengths.

The Crown bucked. Thrusters flared like the sparks of arc welders in the darkness ahead. Down returned, dead forward. Brüks fell gently from the couch into the elastic embrace of his harness, hung there while the Crown ’s incandescent brakes gave dim form to the face of a distant cliff: girders, the cold dead cones of dormant thrusters, great stratified slabs of polytungsten. Then the sparks died, and down with them. All that distant topography vanished again. The Crown of Thorns continued to fall, gently as thistledown.

“Looks normal so far,” Moore remarked to no one in particular.

“Wasn’t there supposed to be some kind of standing guard?” Brüks wondered. There’d been an announcement, anyway, in the weeks after Firefall. While we have seen no evidence of ill will on the part of blah blah blah prudent to be cautious yammer yammer cannot afford to leave such a vital source of energy undefended in the current climate of uncertainty yammer blah.

Moore said nothing. After a moment Lianna took up the slack: “The place is almost impossible to see in the glare unless you know where to look. And there’s nothing like a bunch of big obvious heatprints going back and forth for telling the other guys where to look.”

It was as much as she’d said—to Brüks, at least—since Valerie had flexed her claws in the Hub. He took it as a good sign.

More sparks, tweaking the night in split-second bursts. Wireframes crawled all over tactical now, highlighting structures the naked eye could barely discern even as shadows. Constellations ignited on the cliff ahead, lights triggered by the presence of approaching mass, dim and elegant as the photophores of deep-sea fish. Candles in the window to guide travelers home. They rippled and flowed and converged on a monstrous gray lamprey uncoiling from the landscape beneath. Its great round mouth pulsed and puckered and closed off the port bow.

One final burst of counterthrust. The lamprey flinched, recoiled a meter or two, resumed its approach. The Crown was barely moving now. The lamprey closed on the port flank and attached itself to the docking hatch.

“We are down to fumes felching Bicams better know what they’re doing because even our chemical just ran dry,” Sengupta reported. “You want this ship to go anywhere now you gotta get out and push.”

“Not a problem,” Moore said. “We’re sitting on the biggest charger in the solar system.”

Lianna looked at Brüks and tried to smile.

“Welcome to Icarus .”

Of course, no one was going to fuck on a first date.

The sky in the Hub began to fill with handshakes and head shots: Icarus and the Crown introducing each other, coming to terms, agreeing that this little rendezvous was an intimate affair that really didn’t warrant the involvement of Earthbound engineers. Sengupta whispered sweet nothings to the station’s onboard, coaxed it into turning on the lights, booting up life-support, maybe sharing a few pages from its diary.

Naked bodies floated up from the lower hemisphere. Eulali and one of the other Bicamerals ( Haina, Brüks thought), purged of hostile microbes and decompressed at last, slumming it with the baselines. Nobody seemed to think it worthy of comment.

“No one since the last on-site op check.” Sengupta jabbed one finger at a window full of alphanumeric gibberish. “Nobody came or went any time in the last eighteen months. Boosters fired a hundred ninety-two days ago to stabilize the orbit but nothing else.”

Sudden swift movement from the corners of both eyes: the undead in formation, shooting single-file through the hatch like raptors diving for a kill. They bounced off the sky, swung around the forward ladder, disappeared through the ceiling fast and fluid as barracuda.

So much for the pack, Brüks thought nervously. What about the Alph— and didn’t finish the question, because the flesh crawling up his backbone had just given him the answer.

She was right behind him. For all he knew, she always had been.

The Bicamerals didn’t seem to notice. They hadn’t taken their eyes off tactical since they’d arrived. Brüks swallowed and forced his gaze left. He forced himself to turn. He resisted the urge to lower his gaze as Valerie came into view, forced himself to look her right in the eyes. They shone back at him. He gritted his teeth and thought very hard about leucophores and thin-film optics and finally realized: She’s not even looking at me.

She wasn’t. Those bright monster eyes burned a path right past him to the dome behind, shifted and jiggled in microscopic increments to this datum or that image, jittered fast as the eyes of zombies and with twice the intensity. Brüks could almost see the brain sparking behind those lenses, the sheets of electricity soaking up information faster than fiber. It had all of them now, monks and monsters and minions alike, all of them finally brought together under a tiny metal sky crowded with the machinery of thought: boot sequences, diagnostics, the sprawling multidimensional vistas of a thousand mechanical senses. It threatened to overflow the hemisphere entirely, a ceaseless flickering infostorm that breached the equator and started spilling aft as Brüks watched.

Crude as papyrus, he realized. All these dimensions, squashed flat and pasted across physical space: it was a medium for cavemen and cockroaches, not these cognitive giants looming on all sides. Why were they even here? Why come together in the land of the blind when ConSensus went on forever, arrayed endless intelligence throughout the infinite space within their own heads? Why settle for eyes of jelly when invisible signals could reach through bone and brain and doodle on the very synapses themsel—

Shit, he thought.

All that smart paint, so ubiquitous throughout the ship. He’d just assumed it was for ambient lighting, and a backup for backups should the implants fail in one of these overclocked brains. But now it seemed to be their preferred interface: crude, pointillist, extrinsic . Not completely unhackable, perhaps—but at least any intrusions would take place outside the head, would compromise the mech and not the meat. At least no alien, imagined or otherwise, would be rewriting the thoughts in the heads of the hive.