Питер Уоттс - The Freeze-Frame Revolution

I wound down after yet another build, cleaned out my quarters, vacuum-stowed my kit. I found time to make a few edits to Park’s latest score before checking out one more time, changed some of those old clunky eighths with a few notes of my own and left it in one of the Commons.

Doron was right. It wasn’t a bad tune, with a little tweaking.

WHEN YOU’RE DEAD,you only dream what the Ch imp tells you to.

It’s not telepathy. The Chimp can’t read your thoughts. But it feeds you sounds, images. It sends numbers into your brain, faster than any caveman briefing. You spark, there in the void; you rise toward the light after centuries of darkness, and pieces just—come to you. Little bubbles of insight. They’re disconnected at first; you’re disconnected. But the story reintegrates as you do, and by the time you open your eyes and the stone rolls away you’ve dreamed the mission briefing without anyone speaking a word.

This time, I dreamed about a monster in the basement.

Chimp didn’t know what it was. It had lost contact with a bot that had been checking out some unexpected O 2spikes from the Leaning Glade. The bot had squirted off a couple of images before Chimp lost the signal: vague misshapen blobs of infrared that didn’t map onto any of the foliage that was supposed to be growing down there.

One mute bot is no big deal, especially that close to the drive; you’ve got EM gradients mucking up the spectrum along with the usual dead spots and interference. The Chimp waited for it to complete its rounds and emerge from shadow; when that didn’t happen, it sent in a second bot to bring out the first.

That one disappeared too.

Physical tethers were a last resort; leashes risk tangling up in all that black twinkly undergrowth. So the Chimp splurged on a handful of relays, little station-keeping beads that the next bot would leave in its wake like floating pearls. Each stayed scrupulously line-of-sight with its nearest neighbors, fore and aft; each spoke along invisible lasers, immune to EM interference.

It should have been foolproof.

Three bo ts down. Chimp stepped back for a bit of cost/ benefit. It could escalate a brute-force strategy which had so far proven unsuccessful, or throw in the towel and let meat do what the meat was on board to do. So the Chimp thawed out two of us—Dao Lee and Kaden Bridges, according to the manifest—and sent them in.

I didn’t know either of them.

“That was fifty kilosecs ago.” The Chimp’s voice was torqued into a simulation of concern. Apparently two was a tragedy.

Three thousand was a utility function.

“And there’s been no signal. No telemetry.”

“Nothing yet.”

“I guess I’ll go in,” I said at last.

“I’d rather you didn’t go in alone.” A delibe rate and ingratiating pause, doubtless selected from a bank of affectations stored under Meat Management . “I’ll defer to any decision that doesn’t put you in unnecessary danger.”

It couldn’t seem to utter a single sentence that didn’t rub my face in murderous irony.

“Sunday?”

The urge to laugh was gone; in its place, emptiness and faint nausea.

I sighed. “I go in with a tethered bot. Bot gets around the signal-loss issue, and I’ll be there to clear the line if it snags. Were Dao and Kaden armed?”

“N o.”

“I will be.”

“I’ll fab an appropriate weapon.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll grab a torch from Stores.”

“No. A laser would be too indiscriminate under the circumstances.”

You monster , I thought. You mass-murdering motherfucker. You liar. You impostor.

You helpless machine. You innocent puppet.

You false friend.

“Sunday,” it said again, as it always did when my silence exceeded some critical timespan.

“What.”

“It’s a chance to save your friends.”

I wanted to scream. I wanted to hit something, anything, as hard as I could. Maybe I even did.

If so, the Chimp never remarked o nit.

The Chimp gave me a machete: ceramic blade, monomolecular edge, an elastomotor in the haft that vibrated the business end and turned a merely razor-sharp edge into something that could sink cleanly through metal with a little force.

It gave the bot a pulsed thirty-megawatt, free-electron laser.

I couldn’t argue with the logic. The Glade was lined with vital trunk circuitry, pressure seals and conduits channeling vast energies. A beam weapon in human hands might wreak untold damage in a moment of panic. It would be more safely wielded by something without a limbic system, something whose reflexe snudged up against lightspeed. The Chimp would only equip me for self-defense at close range; the bot it trusted with a longer reach.

So we waited, side by side—my feet planted on the slanting deck, the bot floating precisely 1.8 meters above it—for the Chimp to open the basement door.

The corridor lights had dimmed to a level approximating the Glade itself; the visor clamped across my eyes boosted it back to broad daylight. It wasn’t strictly necessary—the lumens in the Glade, while low, were enough to find your way—but Chimp wasn’t settling for twilit grayscale. It wanted details .

The door slid open. It was way too dark in there. Something squirmed, just out of sight.

“You see that?”

“Yes,” said the bot.

“Don’t suppose you know what it is?”

“No.”

The bot’s muzzle panned back and forth and didn’t lock on.

I hadn’t got a good look: blackness melting away into blackness. Too much damn blackness; this sparse scattering of stars served up nowhere near enough light for a healthy forest.

I took a step forward. Half the stars went out. Others appeared. Impoverished constellations winked in and out of eclipse as I moved.

The lights were still on, then. There was just a lot of undergrowth in the way.

No refuge this time. No clean cool breeze to refresh the lungs. This time the air was heavy as oil. Weeds and brambles lurked in the darkness, strung across the catwalk as if some giant spider had gone on a bender, spun black threads and ropes without any sense of p urpose or design.

The visor boosted black to gray: I could see well enough to cut through the finer filaments where they crossed the path, well enough to watch the thicker ones pull away in a sluggish tangled retreat at my approach.

I looked back. A soft white glow limned the edge of the hatch we’d entered through, a rounded rectangle in the rock to guide me out again. This walkway extended from its base, veined with dark creeping tendrils.

I was almost sure they hadn’t been there when I’d crossed.

“Plants don’t move,” I said softly.

“Some do.”

“These one s,” I told it, “aren’t supposed to.”

“I don’t know. They’re not in the catalog.”

The catwalk curved gently to the right. The overbearing gravity smeared faintly across my inner ear. Chimp’s bot floated in my wake like a faithful dog (I remember those, from real life even), its umbilical unspooling behind us in the fetid air: fine as spider silk, ten times stronger. My BUD was flickering by the time I reached a familiar fork in the road.

I hadn’t been here since Lian’s tantrum. The place had really gone downhill.

The forest was still standing. That was something. The bone trees still arced overhead, their bulbs bright as ever, cupped in skeletal hands. But they were being strangled. A profusion of ropey vines twisted around their branches, massed so thickly in places you couldn’t see the trunks underneath. I thought I saw some of those wormy masses clench in the half-light. Maybe it was jus tlumens and shadows.