Peter Watts - Echopraxia

A few years to settle in, Moore had said. A few years for parties unknown to study new and unfamiliar technology, to infer the nature of the softer things behind it. Years to build whatever gears and interfaces an unlimited energy source could provide, and sit back, and wait for the owners to arrive. All that time for anything in there to figure out how to get in here .

They’re afraid, Brüks realized, and then:

Shit, t hey’re afraid?

Sengupta threw a row of camera feeds across the dome. Holds and service crawlways, mainly: tanks for the storage of programmable matter, warrens of tunnels where robots on rails slid along on endless missions of repair and resupply. Habs embedded here and there like lymph nodes, vacuoles to be grudgingly pumped full of warmth and atmosphere on those rare occasions when visitors came calling—but barren, uninviting, barely big enough to stand erect even if gravity had been an option. Icarus was an ungracious host, resentful of any parasites that sought to take up residence in her gut.

Something had done that anyway.

Sengupta grabbed that window and stretched it across a fifth of the dome: AUX/RECOMP according to the feed, a cylindrical compartment with another cylinder—segmented, ribbed, studded with conduits and access panels and eruptions of high-voltage cabling—running through its center like a metal trachea. The view brightened as they watched. Fitful sparks ignited along the walls, caught steady, dimmed to a soft lemon glow that spread across painted strips of bulkhead. Wisps of frozen vapor swirled in weightless arabesques before some reawakened ventilator sucked them away.

Brüks had educated himself on the way down. He knew what he’d find if he were to cut that massive windpipe down the middle. At one end a great black compound eye, a honeycomb cluster of gamma-ray lasers aimed along the lumen of the tube. Pumps and field coils encircled that space at regular intervals: superconductors, ultrarefrigeration pipes to bring some hypothetical vacuum down to a hairbreadth of absolute zero. Matter took on strange forms inside that chamber. Atoms would lie down, forget about Brown and entropy, take a message from the second law of thermodynamics and promise to get back to it later. They would line up head to toe and lock into place as a single uniform substrate. A trillion atoms would condense into one vast entity: a blank slate, waiting for energy and information to turn it into something new.

Theseus had fed from something a lot like this, part of the same circuit in fact. Maybe it was feeding still. And down at the far end of AUX/RECOMP, past the lasers and the magnets and the microchannel plate traps, Brüks could see something else, something—

Wrong.

That was all he could tell, at first: something just a little bit off about the far end of the compiler. It took a few moments to notice the service port just slightly ajar, the stain leaking from its edges. His brain shuffled through a thousand cue cards and tried spilled paint on for size, but that didn’t really fit. It looked too thick, too blobby for the smart stuff; and he’d seen no other surface painted that oily shade of gray on any of the other feeds.

Then someone zoomed the view and a whole new set of cues clicked into place.

Those branching, filigreed edges: like rootlets, like dendrites growing along the machinery.

“Is it still coming through?” Lianna’s voice, a little dazed.

“Don’t be stupid you don’t think I’d mention it if it was? Wouldn’t work anyway some idiot left the port open.”

But life support had been shut down until the Crown had docked, Brüks remembered. Vacuum throughout. “Maybe it was running until you pressurized the habs. Maybe we—interrupted it.”

Those little pimply lumps, like—like some kind of early-stage fruiting bodies…

“I told you I’d mention it Jesus the logs say no juice for weeks.”

“Assuming we can trust the logs,” Moore said softly.

“It looks almost like dumb paint of some kind,” Lianna remarked.

Brüks shook his head. “Looks like a slime mold.”

“Whatever it is,” Moore said, “it’s not something any of our people would have sent down. Which raises an obvious question.”

It did. But nobody asked it.

Of course, no slime mold could survive in hard vacuum at absolute zero.

“Name one thing that can,” Moore said.

“ Deinococcus comes close. Some of the synthetics come closer.”

“But active ?”

“No,” Brüks admitted. “They pretty much shut down until conditions improve.”

“So whatever that is”—Moore gestured at the image—“you’re saying it’s dormant.”

Stranger even than the thing in the window: the experience of being asked for an opinion by anyone on the Crown of Thorns . The mystery lasted long enough for Brüks to glance sideways and see monks and vampire clustered in a multimodal dialogue of clicks and phonemes and dancing fingers. The Bicamerals faced away from each other; they hovered in an impromptu knot, each set of eyes aimed out along a different bearing.

Jim may be Colonel Supersoldier to me, Brüks realized, but we’re all just capuchins next to those things…

“I said—”

“Sorry.” Brüks shook his head. “No, I’m not saying that. I mean, look at it: it’s outside the chamber, part of it anyway. You tell me if there’s some way for that machine to assemble matter off the condenser plate.”

“So it must have—grown.”

“That’s the logical conclusion.”

“In hard vacuum, near absolute zero.”

“Maybe not so logical. I don’t have another answer.” Brüks jerked his chin toward the giants. “Maybe they do.”

“It escaped .”

“If that’s what you want to call it. Not that it got very far.” The stain—or slime mold, or whatever it was—spread less than two meters from the open port before petering out in a bifurcation of rootlets. Of course, it shouldn’t have even been able to do that much.

The damn thing looked alive . As much as Brüks kept telling himself not to jump to conclusions, not to judge alien apparitions by earthly appearance, the biologist was too deeply rooted in him. He looked at that grainy overblown image and he didn’t see any random collection of molecules, didn’t even see an exotic crystal growing along some predestined lattice of alignment. He saw something organic—something that couldn’t have just coalesced from a diffuse cloud of atoms.

He turned to Moore. “You’re sure Icarus’s telematter technology isn’t just a wee bit more advanced than you let on? Maybe closer to actual fabbing? Because that looks a lot like complex macrostructure to me.”

Moore turned away and fixed Sengupta with a stare: “Did it—break out? Force open the port?”

She shook her head and kept her eyes on the ceiling. “No signs of stress or metal fatigue nothing popped nothing broken no bits floating around. Just looks like someone ran a standard diagnostic took out the sample forgot to close the door.”

“Pretty dumb mistake,” Brüks remarked.

“Cockroaches make dumb mistakes all the time.”

And one of the biggest, Brüks did not say, was building you lot.

“’Course there’s only so much you can see with a camera you gotta go in there and check to be sure.”

Up on the sky, the slime mold beckoned with a million filigreed fingers.

“So that’s the next step, right?” Brüks guessed. “We board?”

A grunted staccato from Eulali, with fingertip accompaniment. From any other primate it might have sounded like a laugh. The node spared him a look and returned her attention to the dome.