Питер Уоттс - The Freeze-Frame Revolution

I recognized it: a puzzle-piece that was all the rage a couple of years before we shipped.

“That’s wrong,” I told him.

He stopp ed, looked around at the sound of my disembodied voice. “Hmmm? Sunday?”

“That line. It’s ‘The cats of Alcubierre,’ not ‘The bats come out of there.’”

“Is it, now?”

“It’s a quantum-indeterminacy reference. Have you been singing the wrong words since we left Earth?”

“I’ve been playing with a few variants.”

“It’s a puzzle song. You change the lyrics, you break the puzzle.”

“We’re not really interested in the puzzle part. We just like—tinkering. Not just lyrics, either. We’re playing around with tunes and harmonies and shit too.”

“We?”

“Music Appreciation Club.”

“Must be a small club.”

“Maybe a dozen.”

“Pa rk. There’s never more than four or five of us on deck at the same time.”

“We leave notes when we go down. Scores, recordings. Leave comments and edits for other folks’ pieces when we’re on deck. Sometimes we get into fights, kind of, but they never really go anywhere because, you know. Ten thousand years and all. You’re so interested, why don’t you join up?”

“Music Appreciation.”

“Uh huh.”

“I’d appreciate the music just fine right now if you used the right fucking lyrics.”

I admit it, though. I was a little hurt they hadn’t told me about it before.

Turns out there were alot of things they weren’t telling me.

Another thaw. I don’t know why the Chimp even called me on deck.

Viktor was the numbers guy. I didn’t know shit about navigation beyond the pinch-hitting basics. Then again, Chimp packs ten thousand times more numerical crunching power into his most microscopic ganglion than Viktor does in his whole grapefruit-sized brain, and Chimp was at a loss. So maybe it wasn’t a question of numerical power. Maybe a more lateral approach was called for. Or maybe Chimp just brought me back to keep Viktor company.

Too bad he wasn’t in the mood for any.

“Not even a build,” he growled as he joined me in the tube. “Four lightyears from the nearest system.”

I let him rant. Chimp had felt this itch before; it was easier to scratch when there weren’t any sun-sized gravity wells around to muddy the waters.

He’d warmed up a bridge for us. Numbers swirled in the tac tank like schooling fish. It wasn’t just the numeric value of those parameters that mattered; it was their relationship one to another, a fluid dance of ever-shifting correlations mapped by their relative positions. Viktor was expert at reading the details; I could grasp the broad strokes, if I squinted.

Mostly, though, I just let myself get lost in the visual aesthetic. It reminded me of something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

“We’re now almost half a degree off course,” Chimp said.

Viktor highlighted a cluster of points. “Still well within expected range of devia tion.”

“It’s not random. There’s a consistent coreward bias to Eriophora ’s drift.”

“Why does it matter? We make way bigger deviations every time you change course for a new build.”

“The effect is increasing over time.”

“Sure is.” Viktor ran a quick scenario, and whistled in mock awe. “Why, if we don’t make any further course changes, we could be a whole ten degrees off-kilter in a mere four billion years. Horrors.”

“That assumes a continuous linear function. We don’t know if that’s true unless we can ascertain the cause.”

“And you can’t,” Vik surmised.

“I can’t.”

“You’re hoping w ecan.”

“I am.”

“Even though you asked someone else to do the same thing”—pinging the logs—“less than a hundred terasecs ago.” Viktor sighed. “You put way too much faith in human imagination.”

He got to work, though. Broke Chimp’s calculations down into bite-sized modules, picked a few at random, started rechecking the numbers. Over in the tank, little constellations flared and dimmed with his passage.

“Waste of a perfectly good thaw,” he grumbled, maybe an hour in.

“So what?” I asked him. “What are you saving yourself for?”

“Blue dwarfs.”

I pinged fo ra definition. “Uh, Vik. Those don’t exist.”

“Yet.” Another module down. So far the Chimp’s calculations were panning out.

“They can’t exist. Universe isn’t old enough yet.”

“That’s my point.”

“I don’t think even we’re gonna get that far. We’d have to make it halfway to Heat Death.”

“Why only halfway?” He fixed me with his outer eyes while his inner ones kept squeezing the data. “Why’d you think I signed on in the first place?”

“Because you were designed to?”

“Facile response, Sunday. How’d that design manifest? I want to see how it turns out.”

“It.”

“Everything. The universe. This—reality. This hologram, this model, whatever we’re in. It had a start, it’s got an e ndpoint, and the closer we get to it the clearer that becomes. If we just hang in there long enough we’ll at least get to see the outlines.”

“You want to know the purpose of existence.”

“I want to know the destination of existence. Anything less is selling out. Not to cast aspersions on your own epic quest, of course.” He eyed me. “You ever track down Tarantula Boy, by the way?”

I punched him. “Asshole. And no.” Truth be told, it had been driving me crazy. Nobody I’d asked seemed to remember the guy. I was starting to wonder if I’d hallucinated him.

“You probably run into him all the time,” Vik said. “Except you’re looking for someone with a tarantula on his head, and unbeknownst to you he rolled over and squashed the little fucker in his sleep fifty terasecs ago.”

“That would suck. Not least because it would make your epic quest so much easier than mine.”

A sudden hmmmm at something that h ad caught his inner eye. “Speaking of epic quests…”

“Have you discovered the problem?” Chimp asked.

“Not exactly. As far as I can tell—” Vik waved one hand; a bright pulse shivered across the display. “All your calculations are correct, Chimp. We’re not actually off course.”

“I don’t understand,” Chimp said.

“As far as I can tell, we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be. It’s the rest of the universe that’s out of place.”

Lateral thinking.

It’s why we’re even along for the ride.

I would never have even thought of stalking Doron Levi if he hadn’t blinded me on his way out of the bridge.

I didn’t know him well: just another ’spore, originally out of Tel Aviv, same tribe but we’d only pulled a dozen shifts together. I might have called him a friend with a few more mutual builds under our belts, but when I caught him in the act he was still just a friendly acquaintance.

Maybe I’m overstating it. It was really more of a flicker: a momentary fuzz of static at the corner of my eye, a split-second disruption of the icons in my BUD. As if someone had kicked them and shaken the pixels apart. Just for a moment, like I said. He bumped into me, and smiled an apologetic smile, and headed off to his assigned crypt.

Except that’s not where he went. He went down to one of the factory floors, where Chimp builds the vons that build the gates.

He practiced his hobby down there, some kind of multimillennial sculpture forever in-progress. The factory fabbed parts for him when it didn’t have anything better to do. I wouldn’t have given it a second thought if not for that momentary bit of interference: as though one of Eri ’s blind spots had whispered pas t, some small, dark fragment of the Leaning Glade escaped from the heavy zone to haunt the brightness of the Overworld. Which was, of course, crazy.