Питер Уоттс: The Freeze-Frame Revolution

I leane dover the railing. Just visible past the curve of the southern hemisphere, the belled edge of the dump pipe suckled at the south pole. Eri ’s heart hummed at the other end of that pipe: thirty-two kilometers straight down (or forward, if you swung that way). It was insatiable; no plasma, no particles, no waste heat could fill it. Black holes are the ultimate garbage can.

Now, though, it was only waiting.

“When are we gonna fire this puppy up again?”

“I don’t know. No candidates are in range at the moment.”

“I wouldn’t mind being on deck when it happens. Never been up for a hub before.”

“I don’t think that would have an unacceptable impact on the build.”

Chimp took requests, if you asked nicely. I’d always just assumed he’d take anyone’s. But if Lian was right…

Lian wasn’t right, though.

It wasn’t a cage if it kept moving. It wasn’t a prison if we could go anywhere.

And Lian had her head so far up her ass she was frenching her own tonsils.

CHIMP BROUGHT ME BACKfor a comet that crashed headlon ginto some planet just in time to confuse his biodistancing protocols with an explosion of aldehydes and amino acids.

He brought me back for a molecular nebula so dense you could see it with the naked eye—a filmy cataract over the stars—and so thick we had to slow our trajectory to keep from ablating Eri ’s crust with the friction of our passage.

Once he brought me back with a completed gate already red-shifting to stern: a routine build undertaken without any need for human involvement, but which had begun manifesting—irregularities—following activation. As chance would have it Kai’s number came up on my dance card that time around; we fucked for old times’ sake before relocating to the starboard bridge, bodies drawn into each other’s orbits despite the liberating ramifications of networked telepresence. Privy to all Eri ’s feeds piped directly into our skulls, still we chose to meet in physical space: to worship at the altar of a tac tank that had never been intended as more than backup. All of UNDA’s genetic sorcery hadn’t been able to undo two hundred million years of mammalian social impulses.

Although to be fair, I can’t think of a reason why th ey’d have bothered.

We stood there on the bridge, hand-in-hand, the image in the tank overlapping with its counterparts in our heads and gracing us with a jarring sort of double vision. The gate had booted uneventfully, our passage through the hoop jump-starting it onto the ever-growing daisy chain in our wake.

“Hey, at least nothing tried to eat us,” Kai said as logs replayed.

But less than an hour after parturition, the dwindling gate had started sprouting… well, tumors.

“What the hell?” I said.

Kai squinted, as though squeezing his eyeballs might somehow enhance the clarity of a feed inserted further upstream. “Barnacles?”

“Maybe upgrades.” I shrugged. “Overdue if you ask me. We’ve been churning out the same damn model since the day we left. About time they came up with a new one.” Just as long as it doesn’t give the gremlins a leg up …

“I dunno. They look more like some ki nd of parasite to me.”

We never did figure it out. We stayed up just long enough to ensure that whatever-it-was wasn’t interfering with normal gate operations (not that I knew what we’d do if it was—maybe the Chimp would circle us back to try again). Heading back to the crypt, though, I remembered:

“You told Lian about me.”

“I did?”

“My rebellious youth. Back on Earth.”

“Um, maybe.” Kai absently rubbed the bridge of his nose, where I’d broken it at the age of seven. “Wasn’t exactly a secret.”

“She kind of—internalized it. Thought it gave us this spiritual connection or something. There was this scene a few builds back, she was on loan to the Children of Eri . Went a bit wild. Chimp dragged me out of bed to deal with it.”

“Yeah. Heard about that.”

“So be careful what you tell her, okay? She took a bit of damage a while back, hasn’t been the—”

“Sunday—”

“I’m just saying—”

“Sunday.” He cupp ed my hands in his. “She’s dead, right?”

I didn’t speak for a moment.

“How?”

“EVA accident,” Kai said, but I’d already booted my BUD and started spelunking the logs. Four thaws back: one of Chimp’s teleops finds some exposed plumbing out on the surface, running along the wound inflicted by Lian’s gremlin. The weapon took out most of the overlying rock; blueshift has ablated the rest. It’s routine and noncritical—an easy band-aid job—but Lian insists on checking it out herself. I don’t know why. Maybe she thinks she’s facing her fears, or some such shit. Jumps to the head of the line and suits up.

Nobody sees it happen. She’s down in the scar, out of Chimp’s line-of-sight. The usual teleop accompanies her but they’re both focused on the substrate, torching bedrock down to soft plastic that can be layered across the tiny wound within the larger one. Black-box telemetry’s the only thing that makes it into the record: a temperature spike, a catastrophic pressure drop. A heartbeat leaping all over the y-axis before the channel goes dark. Surface cams pick her up as she crests the edge of the scar and falls away but all they see is a suit of armor, limp as bones. Blueshift kills her momentum in an instant; Eriophora falls ever forward and Lian Wei vanishes into the past.

Three thousand years ago.

“Fuck,” I whispered.

“Some kind of accident.” Kai closed his mouth, opened it, hesitated. “That’s what Chimp says, anyway.”

“What, you don’t believe him?”

He shook his head, and didn’t look at me. “I think he’s just trying to keep up morale.

“I think she did it to herself.”

Or maybe I did.

She cr acked at Monocerus and I told her to get over it. She watched as some gremlin came within a hairsbreadth of wiping us out of existence and I said it doesn’t change anything . I was there when her back was against the wall, called back from the dead because she trusts you and I told her she was crazy. I thought we were the same , she said, I was following in your footsteps and I told her to fuck off but she was right, I fought back, I lashed out just like she did and with less reason, didn’t even know what I was fighting against but that didn’t stop me and one time I even tried killing myself and—and—

And Lian was better at that than I was, apparently.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It was too soon,” Chimp said. “It’s less traumatic to learn of a friend’s death if you haven’t seen them for a while.”

“Three thousand years isn’t long enough?”

A moment’s silence. “Was that a joke?”

I realized it had been. A bad one. “What is long enough?”

“Two subjective years of separation.”

“The tribe’s lost people before. You never waited that long to tell me.”

“You were closer to Lian than most.”

“We weren’t that close.” Not a contradiction, I realized. “Look, you were protecting my feelings. I get that. But you gotta tell me these things, soon as I thaw.”

“Okay, Sunday.”

“I’m serious. Don’t just say you will to protect morale. Do it.”