Peter Watts - Beyond the Rift

Kali was cutting her search time with each iteration.

Two thousand kilometres ahead, twisted branches turned to face me across the ether. One of them sprouted an incandescent bud.

Zombie’ s sensors reported the incoming missile to the onboard; the brainchips behind my dash asked for an impact projection. The onboard chittered mindlessly.

I stared at the approaching thunderbolt. What do want with me? Why can’t you just leave me alone?

Of course I didn’t wait for an answer. I jumped.

My creators left me a tool for this sort of situation: fear , they called it.

They didn’t leave much else. None of the parasitic nucleotides that gather like dust whenever blind stupid evolution has its way, for example. None of the genes that build genitals; what would have been the point? They left me a sex drive, but they tweaked it; the things that get me off are more tightly linked to mission profiles than to anything so vulgar as procreation. I retain a smattering of chemical sexuality, mostly androgens so I won’t easily take no for an answer.

There are genetic sequences, long and intricately folded, which code for loneliness. Thigmotactic hardwiring, tactile pleasure, pheromonal receptors that draw the individual into social groups. All gone from me. They even tried to cut religion out of the mix but God, it turns out, is borne of fear. The loci are easy enough to pinpoint but the linkages are absolute: you can’t exorcise faith without eliminating pure mammalian terror as well. And out here, they decided, fear was too vital a survival mechanism to leave behind.

So fear is what they left me with. Fear, and superstition. And try as I might to keep my midbrain under control, the circuitry down there kept urging me to grovel and abase itself before the omnipotence of the Great Killer God.

I almost envied Zombie as she dropped me into another impermanent refuge. Zombie moved on reflex alone, brain-dead, galvanic. She didn’t know enough to be terrified.

For that matter, I didn’t know much more.

What was Kali ’s problem, anyway? Was its captain insane, or merely misunderstood? Was I being hunted by something innately evil, or just the product of an unhappy childhood?

Any intelligence capable of advanced spaceflight must also be able to understand peaceful motives; such was the wisdom of Human sociologists. Most had never left the solar system. None had actually encountered an alien. No matter. The logic seemed sound enough; any species incapable of controlling their aggression probably wouldn’t survive long enough to escape their own system. The things that made me nearly didn’t.

Indiscriminate hostility against anything that moves is not an evolutionary strategy that makes sense.

Maybe I’d violated some cultural taboo. Perhaps an alien captain had gone insane. Or perhaps I’d chanced upon a battleship engaged in some ongoing war, wary of doomsday weapons in sheep’s clothing.

But what were the odds, really? In all the universe, what are the chances that our first encounter with another intelligence would happen to involve an alien lunatic? How many interstellar wars would have to be going on simultaneously before I ran significant odds of blundering into one at random?

It almost made more sense to believe in God.

I searched for another answer that fitted. I was still looking two hours later, when Kali bounced my signal from only a thousand kilometres off.

Somewhere else in space, the question and I appeared at the same time: Is everyone out here like this?

Assuming that I wasn’t dealing with a statistical fluke—that I hadn’t just happened to encounter one psychotic alien amongst a trillion sane ones, and that I hadn’t blundered into the midst of some unlikely galactic war—there was one other alternative.

Kali was typical.

I put the thought aside long enough to check the Systems monitor; nearly two hours, this time, before I could jump again. Zombie was deeply interstellar, over six lightyears from the nearest system. Even I couldn’t justify kicking in the thrusters at that range. Nothing to do but wait, and wonder—

Kali couldn’t be typical. It made no sense. Maybe this was all just some fantastic cross-cultural miscommunication. Maybe Kali had mistaken my own transmission as some kind of attack, and responded in kind.

Right. An intelligence smart enough to rape my onboard in a matter of hours, yet too stupid to grasp signals expressly designed to be decipherable by anyone . Kali hadn’t needed prime number sequences or pictograms to understand me or my overtures. It knew Zombie ’s mind from the qubits up. It knew that I was friendly, too. It had to know.

It just didn’t care.

And barely ten minutes past the jump threshold, it finally caught up with me.

I could feel space rippling almost before the short-range board lit up. My inner ears split into a dozen fragments, each insisting up was a different direction. At first I thought Zombie was jumping by herself; then I thought the onboard gravity was failing somehow.

Then Kali began materialising less than a hundred meters away. I was caught in her wake.

I moved without thinking. Zombie spun on her axis and leapt away under full thrust. Telltales sparkled in crimson protest. Behind me, the plasma cone of Zombie ’s exhaust splashed harmlessly against the resolving monster.

Still wanting for solid substance, Kali turned to follow. Her malformed arms, solidifying, reached out for me.

It’s going to grapple , I realised. Something subcortical screamed Jump!

Too close. I’d drag Kali through with me if I tried.

Jump!

Eight hundred meters between us. At that range my exhaust should have been melting it to ions.

Six hundred meters. Kali was whole again.

JUMP!

I jumped. Zombie leapt blindly out of space. For one sickening moment, geometry died. Then the vortex spat me out.

But not alone.

We came through together. Cat and mouse dropped into reality four hundred meters apart, coasting at about one-thousandth c . The momentum vectors didn’t quite match; within ten seconds Kali was over a hundred kilometres away.

Then you destroyed her.

It took some time to figure that out. All I saw was the flash, so bright it nearly overwhelmed the filters; then the cooling shell of hydrogen that crested over me and dissipated into a beautiful, empty sky.

I couldn’t believe that I was free.

I tried to imagine what might have caused Kali ’s destruction. Engine malfunction? Sabotage or mutiny on board, for reasons I could never even guess at? Ritual suicide?

Until I played back the flight recorder, it never occurred to me that she might have been hit by a missile travelling at half the speed of light.

That frightened me more than Kali had. The short-range board gave me a clear view to five AUs, and there was nothing in any direction. Whatever had destroyed her must have come from a greater distance. It must have been en route before we’d even come through.

It had been expecting us.

I almost missed Kali in that moment. At least she hadn’t been invisible. At least she hadn’t been able to see the future.

There was no way of knowing whether the missile had been meant for my pursuer, or for me, or for anything else that wandered by. Was I alive because you didn’t want me dead, or because you thought I was dead already? And if my presence went undetected now, what might give me away? Engine emissions, RF, perhaps some exotic property of advanced technology which my species has yet to discover? What did your weapons key on?