Питер Уоттс - The Freeze-Frame Revolution

But now two of that circle had failed her. She’d vetted them a lot more carefully than she’d vetted me; I’d forced her hand, after all. I was almost a snap decision.

I watched Aki’s vitals flattening on the headboard. I could feel Lian’s eyes on me. It wasn’t hard to guess what she was thinking.

Two failures already.

Three, if you counted Mosko.

Baird Stoller had never even pretended to be on our side. Aki Sok did her best, then took her lumps when it wasn’t good enough. Ekanga Mosko was a whole other thing. Recruited, committed, trusted with the secrets of the sanctum—then caught copying specs down in the Glade, loading himself up with secrets to buy his way back into the Chimp’s good graces after miraculously coming back from the dead.

Lian didn’t kill him. She didn’t deprecate him either. Waste of good coffin space, she said. She found a small inescapable crevice in some remote corner of the Glade where the gravitic tug-o-war was enough to pull your guts out through your inner ears. She ran a line from an irrigation pipe, set it to bleed a continuous trickle down the rock face. Hooked a portable food processor up to an outsize amino tank, parked it on the lip of the precipice, set it to drop protein bricks into the gap at regular intervals. Woke up every few years just to keep it stocked.

Mosko spent the rest of his life in that crevice. Maybe his stomach acclimated to the nausea before his brain turned to pudding, before he lost the ability even to beg, before he devolved into a mindless mewling thing covered in sores and compulsively licking the rocks to slake his endless thirst. Maybe he only lasted a few months. Maybe he lived for decades, died alone while the rest of us slept our immortal sleep, mummified and crumbled to dust and finally vanished altogether between one of my heartbeats and the next. An object lesson, way past its best-before date.

That’s the story I heard, anyway. I slept through the whole time frame, from recruitment to betrayal to dissolution. I found the crevice—found a crevice, anyway—but the plumbing and the processor had long since been retired, if they’d ever even existed. For all I knew Kaden had just been yanking my chain about the whole thing, got some of hir buddies in on the joke for added verisimilitude. A joke. A warning. That would be just hir style.

There had been an Ekanga Mosko listed on the manifest. Astrophysics specialist. Different tribe, but Eri definitely shipped out with meat of that name on board. The official record said he’d died when a bit of bad shielding had failed around the outer core: a blast of lethal radiation, an emergency vent to spare the rest of the level from contamination.

Of course I asked Lian about it. She laughed and laughed. “I’d have to be pretty damn good to plant evidence that far down without getting burned to ash, wouldn’t you say?”

She never actually denied it, though.

The Chimp went behind our backs a couple of times. It waited until we were all tucked in, waited another gigasec or so for good measure, then sent one of its sock puppets into the Glade for a look around.

It didn’t get very far, mind you. The forest had a habit of taking down those bots even before we’d tweaked the vines near the entrance for extra aggression. The Chimp’s scouts made it in a few meters and maybe—if they were lucky— managed to bite off a quick tissue sample and retreat before the vines dragged them to the deck and swarmed them like a nest of boa constrictors.

We found the wreckage of one afterward, just inside the hatch: carapace crushed, innards stuffed with the dried husks of old fruiting bodies, a gnarled tumorous lump barely even recognizable as technology.

Some of us worried that the Chimp was on to us—or was at least getting suspicious—but the model didn’t really fit. The Chimp knew what kind of botanicals it was dealing with, after all. It would’ve been easy enough to custom-fab some kind of armored flame-spewing bunker-buster to cut through the front-line defenses, if it thought there was anything behind worth rooting out. The fact that it settled for disposable off-the-shelf drones was more consistent with a simple sampling effort: rote confirmation of a theory so well-established that basic cost-benefit didn’t justify the design and construction of a new model.

It had no reason to think we were lying. It probably just wanted to see for itself. Hell, it didn’t even try to hide its actions: the telemetry from at least two probes was sitting right there in the op logs, waiting for anyone with a couple of megasecs to kill.

Then again, neither did the Chimp go out of its way to raise the subject. So we didn’t either. It became our mutual unspoken secret, that awkward truth that everyone knows but no one speaks aloud for fear of ruining the vibe at the family get-together.

In a weird way, I suppose that made the Chimp a coconspirator.

“I enter the Black Cauldron,” Yukiko Kanegi said. “Alert for the ice monster.” By which she meant The Chimp’s somewhere around the ventral mass cache.

“You catch a glimpse of it in your torchlight before it disappears,” I told her. By which I meant Not any more. Fucker’s gone.

Social alcove halfway between core and crust, starboard equatorial, a half-hearted half-gee holding us down. The game board sat on its stand between us: a multilevel dungeon two meters across and almost as high, each wall and chamber and booby-trap fabbed lovingly by hand. Gaetano had acquired a taste for role-playing strategy games over the past few gigs. This was his ode to that ancient pastime, a physical game of his own design. You moved your pieces manually through the labyrinth (the levels came apart and snapped back together for easy access) seeking treasure, avoiding traps, fighting monsters. Dice with fifty facets decided the outcome of probabilistic encounters. It was quite charming when you got into it.

Gaetano called it Teredo . I never asked why.

If you flipped the lower half of that dungeon upsidedown in your mind, and imagined that certain other elements were stretched just so , you might notice a certain topological equivalence to the way E riophora was laid out. You might almost use it as a kind of map.

Yuki’s character had ventured into the Black Cauldron: either a spring-fed subterranean lake patrolled by blind, ravenous predators or—if you lacked imagination—a lens of rubbery silicon glued into a depression and decorated with tiny plastic stalagmites. It was her piece, but it was following in my footsteps.

“Fuck,” she said now, meaning: Fuck . “I check for traps.” Did it see you coming? Is it on to us?

I made a show of rolling the dice, pretended to take note of whatever number came up. “You find no traps.” Don’t think so. Just changed nodes again.

“Dammit. I was that close . I, um, check for, whaddya call it. Spoor.”

“There’s a frost t rail on the rock, straight line, bearing one nine seven degrees.” According to the pings he’s now somewhere in this direction.

“How wide is the frost trail?” How far? Not that she had any real hope I could give her an exact range; latency pings don’t follow a straight line at the best of times. You could always take a stab at an educated guess, though.

“Maybe twenty centimeters?” Twenty kliks?

Her eyes followed an invisible line back from her game piece, came to rest on a larger cavern deep in the bowels of the dungeon. She pursed her lips. “Maybe it’s spawning.”

The Uterus.

I let a coy smile flicker across my game face. “Maybe.”