Питер Уоттс - The Freeze-Frame Revolution

Sometime over the past few meters my BUD had gone down. I barely noticed.

Hopefully this was just some kind of epiphyte, some mutant overlay that embraced the trunks but didn’t actually penetrate them. Maybe we could simply strip away the new growth without damaging the old.

I reached for the biopsy kit on my belt and turned to the bot. “I’m going to—”

The bot staggered, lost altitude; regained it an instant later as its rotors booted up. I glanced around, kit in one hand, machete humming in the other. The bot’s carapace sparkled with the bright grainy static of boosted photons.

“What’s the problem?”

“The bot lost groun d-effect,” Chimp reported. “The deck plating must be down.”

“Must be? You can’t get a direct read?”

A momentary silence. “No.”

Maybe some kind of bioelectric interference from the overgrowth, or some rogue tendril growing through a vital seam to short out the wiring. The catwalk had pretty much run its course anyway. A few meters farther on it ended in a stairway leading down onto bedrock. Most of the forest was unfurnished by design.

I looked into its depths. Fractured mosaics of dim light in the distance: analuciferin suns peeking through gaps in the foliage.

“Any sign of Kaden or Dao?” I asked.

“No,” Chimp said.

“The bots?” Even offlined, you’d think they’d put out some kind of signature.

“No.”

I took a step d own the stairs. The bot dipped forward a few centimeters and jerked to a halt, wobbling in mid-air.

“Tether’s caught.”

I turned. Range and obstruction had reduced the hatch to a couple of bright hyphens in the distance. The umbilical was stretched tight from the little drone, cutting across the curve of the catwalk. Must have tangled on something off the trail.

I retraced my steps, Chimp’s sock puppet keeping station at my side, reeling the tether back into its belly to keep it taut and out of further trouble. The rim of the distant hatch fell in and out of piecemeal eclipse. “Chimp. Any motion between here and the hatch?”

No answer.

“Chimp?” I looked over my shoulder.

The bot was trembling , as if afraid of the dark. Something brushed my right ear. The end of the severed umbilicus flicked past and vanished into the machine’s belly. Something whined faintly in there.

“Chim—”

Whiteout. Static on the visor. A sudden chittering—the bot stuttering towards target lock, I realized in a moment of bright perfect panic before it bounced off my chest and sent us both careening onto the deck. Something grabbed me around the leg, tightened; punctured my flesh and dug in . I screamed and flailed. I was being dragged. I reached out blindly, slapped the downed bot in passing; it fizzed and spat and fell out of reach. I cracked my head against a passing bit of rail, tore the useless visor off my face, plunged from bright static to pitch black.

More cracks against the head. I bumped down the stairs and onto rock, squirmed and reached forward and tried to free myself, grabbed something that pulsed and stabbed me in the palm. I pulled my hand back and saw black blood against gray flesh against a dim glow filtering through the trees. Brightening.

Glowbulbs blazed everywhere now, as blinding as nightlights can be. I was dragged through the heart of a globular cluster, an oasis of light in squirming claustrophobic darkness. I saw what had me now: fibrous, braided, so dark even in light that you’d have to squint to see more than silhouette. Studded with thorns the size of carnosaur teeth. One was hooked deep in my calf. It twitched. I screamed.

It let go.

It didn’t just release me: it sprang free, explosively uncoiled and convulsed off across the forest floor. Its severed stump thrashed into view, chopped free of some upstream command center, smearing sap—clear and viscous as glycerin—across the rock and trunks and stems it slapped in its death throes.

Another dark shape in motion. This one walked on two legs, stepped over the twitching monster-vine, a blade humming softly at its side. Behind that shape lurked others.

They stepped into the light. The machete clattered onto the rocks, just within reach.

“Yours?” Lian said.

She’s alive. She’s alive.

Still dark. The bulbs hung on all sides like silver fruit, washing the forest in twilight, but none seemed to have a direct line-of-sight to her face. Lian stood over me, a collection of angles and shadows haloed in bioluminescence. Four—allies? henchmen?—stood at her side, two steps back. I thought I recognized Dao standing with two strangers to Lian’s left; Kaden, alone, on her right.

None of them spoke. None of them moved.

“I wondered if you…” Ever since Doron and his impossible quote. But it had been a head thing; I’d never felt it in my gut.

“And here I am,” Lian said.

The dismembered vine wriggled feebly on the ground.

Alive.

“Chimp—”

“Thinks I fell overboard.” A small smile, more sensed in the voice than seen on the face.

“So did I. So did Kai, so did—” I propped myself up on my elbows. My leg lodged a protest. “God, Li, it’s so good to see you.”

“Good to see you too.”

I would’ve hugged her if I’d been able to stand. “How’d you pull it off?”

“Faked an accident. Fried some cameras, fried some sensors. Down long enough for me to make it back here.”

“You live here now?”

“We move around in the blind spots. We’re building more. Avoiding the bots.”

“Your cortical links?”

“Fried ’em. Deep-focus microwaves.”

I winced.

“How are you—I mean, how long—” I did some counting in my head, the news from Kai, the time since. “You’ve been down he re for nine thousand years …”

“Closer to ten.”

“So you’ve got coffins.”

She nodded.

“That the Chimp isn’t wired into.”

“Def eats the purpose otherwise.”

“How?”

“Sunday.” Her shoulders rose, fell. “We had three thousand to choose from.”

How did you know , I wanted to ask. How did you know when I didn’t?

I pulled myself into asitting position, poked carefully at the hole in my leg. Stung like shit, but just a flesh wound far as I could tell. I glanced around at the killer forest. “And you did all this.” I had to admit it was a smart move. Most of the time Eriophora is desolation incarnate, her immaculate atmosphere uncorrupted by anything beyond the slow photosynthesis of gengineered plants. A single one of us, active out of turn, would leave tiny but unmistakable footprints all over that pristine background. Now, though—you could probably hide the breathing of a small army behind all this rampant metabolism.

“Just started it, basically,” Lian said. “Tweaked a few parameters, let it bake while we slept. Could’ve used your help actually; my engineering skills don’t extend that far into the organic. There were some bugs. Vines got a bit rambunctious in the early days.”

“They still are.”

“Work in progress.”

“It’s not gonna keep Chimp out forever.”

“No,” Lian said. “You will.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment.

Then: “How do I do that, exactly?”

She had no trouble reading my face. “You’re the meat-grinder.”

“Evolutionary engineer.”

“My point is you can sell it. We’ll give you the specs, enough details to keep that fucker out of our hair.”