Питер Уоттс - The Freeze-Frame Revolution

Each time I awoke, our destination had leapt that much closer. It aged in increments, an apocalyptic step-function counting down to detonation. Sometime when I was down it ran out of helium to fuse, fell back on carbon. Sodium appeared in its spectrum. Magnesium. Aluminum. Every time I woke up it had heavier atoms on its breath.

None of us were on deck for core collapse—still too far out for the rads to do much harm but why take the chance when Eri was up the whole time, staring down the inferno, immortalizing every emission from gamma to neutrino for our later edification? Buried in basalt, we slept away the cataclysm: the fusion of neon, of oxygen, the spewing of half the periodic table into the void. The collapse of nickel into iron and that final fatal moment of ignition, that blink of a cosmic eye in which a star outshines a galaxy. Eriophora saved it all for posterity. For us.

When I awoke after the transfiguration, I didn’t even wait to climb out of my coffin. I called up the archives and compressed all those incandescent millennia into moments, let them wash across the back of my brain again, and again, until I was left exhausted from the sheer wonder of it all. In the blinding glorious light of such death and rebirth I even forgot what it meant to us, here in this speck of rock.

I forgot, for a few precious moments, that we were at war.

Kaden and Kallie were already at the tac tank when I arrived. They must’ve replayed the explosion in their own heads as I had in mine but there they were, transfixed by the luminous aurorae in that display: that intricate web of cooling gas, the tiny blinding dot of x-rays at its heart, the darker dot hiding inside the brighter one. Who cared if every shimmer was an artifact, if our naked eyes—staring out some porthole at the same vista—would see nothing but space and stars? The limits were in our senses, not the reality; human vision is such a pathetic instrument for parsing the universe.

“Doron?” I asked. The manifest had brought all four of us on deck this time around; a binary with a lot of comets and a few too many organics to trust Chimp alone with the goldilocks protocols.

“On his way,” Kaden said. “Just checking the Glade.”

That was actually my job. Not that it mattered. I’d just been too preoccupied with the light show.

“God,” Kallie said softly. “It’s gorgeous .”

Kaden nodded. “’Tis. Really nice spot for a—oh, shit.”

I joined them at the tank. “What?”

Se tagged a dim red dot lurking stage left. “That dwarf. It’s not just passing by. It’s falling onto orbit.”

Se was right. By the time we arrived on the scene, the newborn hole would have its very own companion star.

I shrugged. “It’s a cluster. Bound to happen sooner or later.”

“The accretion disk is gonna be a motherfucker, is all I’m saying.”

“Hey, at least we w on’t be wanting for raw materials,” Kallie said.

“We should give it a name.” Kaden thought a moment. “Oculus Dei.”

“Latin? Seriously?” Through the open hatch, the faint whine of Doron’s approaching roach floated up the corridor.

“So what’s your suggestion?”

I felt myself drawn back into the display, into that pulsing black heart at its center. “Nemesis,” I murmured. Just outside, I could hear Doron parking his roach.

“Charlotte,” Kallie said, and giggled.

Kaden looked at her. “Why Charlotte?”

“I’m with Sunday,” Doron said, joining the party. “I think Nemesis is perfect.”

Except it wasn’t Doron.

It was Lian.

My heart rate must’ve spiked.

She’d put on another ten years in the past ten th ousand— must’ve been staying up extra late to keep the end-game on track. Her hair was more silver than black now. She looked strong, though. Burly. Not the waif who’d shipped out with us at all. An elemental born of the Glade, corded with muscle. Coreward grav does that to you.

Still Lian, though. I didn’t know how the Chimp missed it.

Kaden turned. “Glad you could make it, Dor.” A slight emphasis on the name, the merest subtext of Don’t fuck it up, Sunday. Just play along . “How’s the Glade?”

“On schedule,” Lian repor ted. “Have to run the samples to be sure, but based on morpho I’d say maybe another hundred terasecs before we can reintegrate.”

No exclamations from the Chimp. No mention of the unlikely odds that a long-dead crew member might suddenly appear on deck, like some kind of Boltzmann body spontaneously reassembled out of quantum foam.

“It is beautiful.” Lian joined us at the tank. “What do you say? Nemesis?”

“Works for me,” Kaden said.

“Sure.” Kallie spread her hands. “But I still say Charlotte’s more whimsical.”

“Got that, Chimp?”

“Yes, Doron. Listed as Nemesis.”

I pinged my innerface, checked the personnel icons: Levi, D. floated in virtual space a few centimeters above Lian’s head.

Lian’s face, though. Lian’s voice .

She looked at me. “I think Chimp’s got us pulling plugs down in the Uterus. Wanna get that out of the way before things get busy?”

Right. I’d forgotten why we were up in the first place: a gate to build, and some Chimp -defeating uncertainty about where to put it.

“Sure,” I said.

Why doesn’t it see?

“Well then.” Lian swept a theatrical hand toward the door. “ After you.”

“See that verse I wrote for Cats of Alcubierre ?” she asked. By which she meant, You up to speed on the timestamp hack?

“Yeah. I like it. Feels like it wants to be a bit longer, though.” You should crank up the jump. Give us more time.

“I think so too.” She pulled one closed hand from her pocket, opened it just enough to let me glimpse the tiny device in her palm. One of a kind. The key to the cage, the lynchpin of the rebellion. Lian Wei’s custom-fabbed time machine.

I’d never seen it before.

She slipped hand back into pocket. “I figure maybe five minutes, by the time it’s ready to perform.”

We were in the tube, dropping aft and up, curving out across Eri ’s isogravs. The things it did to my inner ears added to my sense of disquiet.

It was supposed to be Do ron. Doron and me, installing the hack.

“You know I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” Lian said. Levi, D. floated obstinately over her head.

“Uh huh.” Doron must still be down in the Glade. Lian had cloned his transponder. I wondered how long they’d been doing that.

“New look?” she asked innocently.

I shot her a glance. “Uh, yeah. I guess.”

“Thought so. Had a weird flash when I hit the bridge. Thought you were someone else. You know, from behind.”

“Really.”

“Just for a moment. The clothes, you know. ’Course, soon as I saw your face…”

“Right.” I nodded to show I understood. As far as the Chimp was concerned, transponders were definitive. They were the facial-recognition of Artificial Stupidity, the telltale that confirmed ID above all others. Of course the Chimp knew our faces, our voices. It could use them to identify us, the same way we’d use mods or clothing to identify someone from behind. But when that person turned toward us, we knew them by their face; no matter if they happened to be wearing someone else’s clothes.

The Chimp was even simpler. Once it had an innerface ID, it ignored biometrics entirely. Why waste the cycles?

“So who’d you think I was?” I asked as we decelerated.

“Lian Wei,” she replied.