Peter Watts: Blindsight

Two months after Firefall, the Institute cancelled my contract.

I was actually surprised it had taken them so long. It had cost us so much, this overnight inversion of global priorities, these breakneck measures making up for lost initiative. Not even our shiny new post-scarcity economy could withstand such a seismic shift without lurching towards bankruptcy. Installations in deep space, long since imagined secure by virtue of their remoteness, were suddenly vulnerable for exactly the same reason. Lagrange habitats had to be refitted for defense against an unknown enemy. Commercial ships on the Martian Loop were conscripted, weaponised, and reassigned; some secured the high ground over Mars while others fell sunward to guard the Icarus Array.

It didn’t matter that the Fireflies hadn’t fired a shot at any of these targets. We simply couldn’t afford the risk.

We were all in it together, of course, desperate to regain some hypothetical upper hand by any means necessary. Kings and corporations scribbled IOUs on the backs of napkins and promised to sort everything out once the heat was off. In the meantime, the prospect of Utopia in two years took a back seat to the shadow of Armageddon reaching back from next Tuesday. The Kurzweil Institute, like everyone else, suddenly had other things to worry about.

So I returned to my apartment, split a bulb of Glenfiddich, and arrayed virtual windows like daisy petals in my head. Everyone Icons debated on all sides, serving up leftovers two weeks past their expiry date:

Disgraceful breakdown of global security.

No harm done.

Comsats annihilated. Thousands dead.

Random collisions. Accidental deaths.

(who sent them?)

We should have seen them coming. Why didn’t we —

Deep space. Inverse square. Do the math.

They were stealthed !

(what do they want ?)

We were raped!

Jesus Christ. They just took our picture .

Why the silence?

Moon’s fine. Mars’s fine.

(Where are they?)

Why haven’t they made contact?

Nothing’s touched the O’Neills.

Technology Implies Belligerence!

(Are they coming back?)

Nothing attacked us.

Yet

Nothing invaded .

So far.

(But where are they?)

(Are they coming back ?)

(Anyone?)

The text window blossomed directly in my line of sight, eclipsing the debate. I read it twice. I tried to remember the last time he’d called from the field, and couldn’t.

I muted the other windows. “Dad?”

“Son,” he replied after a moment. “Are you well?”

“Like everyone else. Still wondering whether we should be celebrating or crapping our pants.”

He didn’t answer immediately. “It’s a big question, all right,” he said at last.

“I don’t suppose you could give me any advice? They’re not telling us anything at ground level.”

It was a rhetorical request. His silence was hardly necessary to make the point. “I know,” I added after a moment. “Sorry. It’s just, they’re saying the Icarus Array went down, and—”

“You know I can’t — oh.” My father paused. “That’s ridiculous. Icarus’s fine.”

“It is?”

He seemed to be weighing his words. “The Fireflies probably didn’t even notice it. There’s no particle trail as long as it stays offstream, and it would be buried in solar glare unless someone knew where to search.”

It was my turn to fall silent. This conversation felt suddenly wrong .

Because when my father went on the job, he went dark. He never called his family.

Because even when my father came off the job, he never talked about it. It wouldn’t matter whether the Icarus Array was still online or whether it had been shredded and thrown into the sun like a thousand kilometers of torn origami; he wouldn’t tell either tale unless an official announcement had been made. Which — I refreshed an index window just to be sure — it hadn’t.

Because while my father was a man of few words, he was not a man of frequent, indecisive pauses — and he had hesitated before each and every line he’d spoken in this exchange.

I tugged ever-so-gently on the line — “But they’ve sent ships.” — and started counting.

One one-thousand, two one-thousand —

“Just a precaution. Icarus was overdue for a visit anyway. You don’t swap out your whole grid without at least dropping in and kicking the new tires first.”

Nearly three seconds to respond.

“You’re on the moon,” I said.

Pause. “Close enough.”

“What are you — Dad, why are you telling me this? Isn’t this a security breach?”

“You’re going to get a call,” he told me.

“From who? Why?”

“They’re assembling a team. The kind of — people you deal with.” My father was too rational to dispute the contributions of the recons and hybrids in our midst, but he’d never been able to hide his mistrust of them.

“They need a synthesist,” he said.

“Isn’t it lucky you’ve got one in the family.”

Radio bounced back and forth. “This isn’t nepotism, Siri. I wanted very much for them to pick someone else.”

“Thanks for the vote of conf—”

But he’d seen it coming, and preempted me before my words could cross the distance: “It’s not a slap at your abilities and you know it. You’re simply the most qualified, and the work is vital.”

“So why—” I began, and stopped. He wouldn’t want to keep me away from some theoretical gig in a WestHem lab.

“What’s this about, Dad?”

“The Fireflies. They found something.”

“ What ?”

“A radio signal. From the Kuiper. We traced the bearing.”

“They’re talking ?”

“Not to us.” He cleared his throat. “It was something of a fluke that we even intercepted the transmission.”

“Who are they talking to?”

“We don’t know.”

“Friendly? Hostile?”

“Son, we don’t know . The encryption seems similar, but we can’t even be sure of that. All we have is the location.”

“So you’re sending a team.” You’re sending me. We’d never gone to the Kuiper before. It had been decades since we’d even sent robots. Not that we lacked the capacity. We just hadn’t bothered; everything we needed was so much closer to home. The Interplanetary Age had stagnated at the asteroids.

But now something lurked at the furthest edge of our backyard, calling into the void. Maybe it was talking to some other solar system. Maybe it was talking to something closer, something en route .

“It’s not the kind of situation we can safely ignore,” my father said.

“What about probes?”

“Of course. But we can’t wait for them to report back. The follow-up’s been fast-tracked; updates can be sent en route.”

He gave me a few extra seconds to digest that. When I still didn’t speak, he said, “You have to understand. Our only edge is that as far as we know, Burns-Caulfield doesn’t know we’re on to it. We have to get as much as we can in whatever window of opportunity that grants us.”

But Burns-Caulfield had hidden itself. Burns-Caulfield might not welcome a forced introduction.

“What if I refuse?”

The timelag seemed to say Mars .

“I know you, son. You won’t.”

“But if I did . If I’m the best qualified, if the job’s so vital…”