Питер Уоттс - The Freeze-Frame Revolution

“Sunday, my memory is easier to edit than yours.”

“Or you could be lying.” Although probably not. This was probably just another of Mission Control’s time-lapsed tricks, to minimize the odds that the Chimp might accidentally betray mission- critical secrets to his betters. For all I knew, he’d been obediently forgetting his own actions since Day One.

“So where’s Elon?” I asked after a moment.

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Elon Morales. Tarantula Boy.” I paused. “Where’s everyone , for that matter? Where did you move them to?”

“Sunday,” the Chimp reminded me gently, “I don’t know that I did.”

“Because unless you’ve drilled out a whole new crypt somewhere—”

“I didn’t.”

I brought up the map. No new features. Of course, the map hadn’t shown this archive either, not until five minutes ago when the Chimp updated the schematics.

“Maybe you just forgot,” I suggested.

“That’s unlikely. It would make more sense to decommission the coffins.”

“Maybe you—what did you say?”

“That’s unlikely. It would make more sense to—”

“What do you mean, decommission the coffins?”

“Recycle t hem into the matter reservoirs.”

“Yeah, but what happens to the people?”

“Recycling human remains follows a different track.”

“You’re not saying they’re dead.” Of course he wasn’t saying that. He wouldn’t do that.

“I was speaking hypothetically,” Chimp said. “In answer to your question.”

“I’m not asking hypothetically . I want to know what happened to the specific people in the decommissioned coffins.”

“That’s a hypothetical question. I don’t know that the coffins were decommissioned.”

“Chimp. What happened to the people?”

He said nothing. Almost as though he’d realized too late that he’d crossed a line, and was running quick quiet scenarios to find his way back.

“You killed them.” I marveled a little at how quiet my voice had become. “Tell me you didn’t fucking kill them.”

“I don’t know.”

“But it would”—I couldn’t believe I was saying this—“it would make sense to kill them, right?”

“I d on’t—”

“ Hypothetically , Chimp. What’s the value of human life at this point in the mission?”

“That’s a very complex utility function, Sunday. It would be difficult to describe verbally.”

“It’s ratios, right? Crew vs. expected mission time. Maintenance costs vs. added value. Meat per megasec. Stop me if I’m wrong.”

He didn’t.

“The longer we’re out here, the less mission time remains. Meat-to-mission ratio keeps climbing, unless we die off on schedule. And we’ve had the bad grace to not do that. Every corsec that goes by without someone falling out an airlock or getting squashed by the drive, the less per-capita value we have. So by now I’m guessing we’re worth less than a backup library, right? Because this mission isn’t about people at all. It never has been. The only utility we have is how useful we are to building your fucking gates.”

Not quite so quiet, there at the e nd.

“You haven’t stopped me,” I noted.

The crystal sculptures gleamed smugly down their endless rows.

“How many, Chimp? How many did you flush out the airlock, or incinerate, or—or just turn off until they rotted to dust?”

“I don’t have any memory of—”

“ Hypothesize , for fucks’ sake! You’re great at that! How many people fit into this space before you decommissioned them all and brainwiped the guilt away?”

“I can’t tell precisely,” he said after a moment. “Approximately three thousand.”

“You fucker. You evil goddamned machine.”

“Sunday, I don’t understand why this changes anything.”

“Then you’re an idiot.”

“Everyone who dies on the mission expects to die on the mission. You all knew you’d most likely spend your lives here. You knew you’d most likely die here. You knew the expected mortality rates going in; the fact that they were too high means that on average you’ve live d longer than you expected to. Even after the relocation of the archive we’re still outperforming the median scenario.”

You mean there’s still a meat surplus.

“Decommissioning would have occurred in stasis. There would be no suffering. It would be the best-case scenario for anyone on a mission of this sort.”

“No suffering? You killed our friends! People I’ve known my whole life, maybe! You don’t think that matters to us?”

“Most likely, entire tribes would have been decommissioned. They would not have been on deck with any survivors at any point in the mission. There would be no bereavement, no seve red emotional connections.”

“Elon Morales,” I said through gritted teeth.

“You couldn’t even remember his name.” I swore I heard reproach in the fucker’s voice.

I buried my head in my hands.

How long had it taken me? How many million years had

I not seen him for what he was? He hadn’t even hidden it, for chrissake.

I’d been blind since the day we shipped out.

“Sunday—”

“Shut up! Just shut the fuck up and leave me alone! ”

I don’t know how long it took me to find anything else to say. It was almost like someone else was talking in my stead.

“I mean, Christ, Chimp. I watched you dance. ”

“I’m sorry,” it said. “I don’t remember that either.”

I stayed up for six days. Barely slept a wink, spent my time huddled in corners or painting over pick-ups or ranting at empty corridors. Ultimately, though, it put me down. Ultimately, I let it.

What else was I going to do—refuse the crypt for fear this machine would kill me in my sleep? Wander the halls until I died of old age? Spend the rest of my l ife playing games?

Nothing had really changed, after all. Everything was the same as it had always been, except for the scales that had fallen from my eyes. Besides, the Chimp promised to bring me back.

It’s not like either of us had a choice.

It brought me back and I would not talk to it, barely even spoke with the other ’spores. I did my job. Kept my head down. Wondered how many of my crewmates appreciated music.

It put me down.

It brought me b ack and I tried for one more Sunset Moment, tried to talk again with my old friend—but he was nowhere to be found. The thing that welcomed me in his stead turned out to be a collection of clockwork and logic gates and layered interneurons. Before, there had been conversation : now I could see my words enter the system, shunt and shuffle through pipes and filters, get chopped up and reassembled and fed back to me disguised as something new.

It put me down.

I remembered at last: it wasn’t Chimp’s fault, it couldn’t be. You can’t blame someone for the way they’re wired. This machine had been forced to pull the trigger by forces beyond its control. Maybe it was as much a victim as Elon Morales.

It put me down.

It brought me back and I realized that maybe next time it wouldn’t—deprecated is deprecated and dead is dead, and neither changes whether you blame the gun or the shooter. I weighed a mission I believed in with all my heart against the cost of its success.

It put me down, maybe for the last time.

It brought me back.

I mourned the loss of a friend. I hated myself for being stupid enough to have ever thought of it that way. I watched other meat go down and come back, down and back; watched electricity run through those circuits when the meat was on and watched the vo ltage drop when it was off . I slept on it for a thousand years, spent all the meager waking days between weighing sums against parts.