Питер Уоттс: The Freeze-Frame Revolution

We arrived at our destination. The door slid open.

“Spooky,” I said.

“Uh huh.” She gave me a small smile. “Happens, sometimes. W hen you get too close.”

Which was a rebuke, of course.

For forgetting what it was. For humanizing the enemy.

Chimp had taken to assigning us manual hardware checks. Brute-force stuff, mainly: making sure that plugs were securely seated in their sockets, that sort of thing. Maybe he was just being extra careful as we geared up for this Mother of All Builds. Maybe it had something to do with the steady drip-drip-drip of random static into certain sensory pathways down through the ages, maybe even the extra few meters of fiberop that Kai and Jahaziel had spliced into the lines a few builds back. Nothing corrupting, mind you, nothing to contaminate vital telemetry. Just a little extra distance-traveled, an extra microsecond of latency to make the Chimp furrow its brow and double-check the connections.

That’s what Lian and I were doing. Checking the Uterus. We emerged on the equatorial deck, glanced with feigned indifference at a bit of Painter graffiti just inside the entrance. An appropriation of another tribe’s culture so we could hide a number in plain sight:

172.

Someone had plugged in the grasers since I’d last been on deck. Black shiny cables sprouted from the apex of each cone, drooped across the gap, joined others in medusa nests con verging on each of the buses mounted around the mezzanine. We visited each bus in turn: a series of black boxes, indistinguishable one from another except for arbitrary labels stamped into the metal and my backbrain. We pried open each casing, manually checked each connection; closed each lid and moved to the next.

If I hadn’t already known the target I might have missed it: the subtle shift in Lian’s body language, the way she hunched her shoulders and turned her back to Chimp’s main line of sight. I did the same, leaning close to block the view of any shipboard eyes. Lian popped the lid, started checking connections.

“Hmm. That one’s a bit loos e.” She pulled the plug, slipped a pocket microscope off her belt, turned it on the socket.

I looked away.

I don’t know exactly what Lian did. Maybe she did the install by touch. Maybe the same hack that identified her as Doron Levi spliced some equally fictitious image into the feed from her visual cortex. But I heard the click of the connection sliding back home, and let my gaze wander back to the bus as Lian closed the lid. “That should do it.”

Lynchpin installed.

“Yes,” the Chimp replied, and sent a few milliamps down the line just to be sure. “The numbers are good.”

If you followed the beam path of Graser 172, extended it through the center of the firing chamber and on out the other side, it would hit an unremarkable patch of bulkhead and bedrock. There was nothing especially critical at that precise point, should the graser fire by itself. There didn’t have to be. Whole cubic meters of the surrounding rock would turn instantly to magma. Any circuitry embedded in that matrix—optical, electronic, quantum—would simply evaporate.

We’d tracked the Chimp to an uncharted node about four meters to the left of the bullseye, and maybe a meter behind the bulkhead. That was its ringside seat for the upcoming build, a location from which it could preside over events with minimal latency. If Graser 172 fired by itself, the Chimp would die.

Of course, Graser 172 was never supposed to fire by itself. The whole array would fire together, in perfect harmony: every high -energy photon balanced against every other, all forces converged and canceled in a moment of impossible creation. Kilometers of robust circuitry, atomic clocks accurate down to Planck, existed for no other reason but to keep everything precisely in sync.

Precise doesn’t do it justice, though. Precise is far too coarse a word. No single clock would be able to fire all those beams at the same instant; the most miniscule variation in latency would throw the whole array out of sync, and the cables extending to each graser were of different lengths. No, the only solution was to build identical clocks into each graser, stamped right into the trigger assembly, each circuit matched to the angstrom. Use a master clock to keep them calibrated, for sure—but when the countdown starts, let the locals handle the firing sequence.

What none of that arcane circuitry understood was that all signals the master clock sent to 172 now passed through the plug-in Lian had just installed. That plug-in was dormant now. It would stay that way until a magnetic key with a unique and specific signature passed within ten meters or so: then it would awaken and begin its assigned duties as 172’s receptionist. It would screen 172’s calls, schedule 172’s appointments, reply with 172’s voice after just enough of a delay to reassure callers that their signals had gone all the way up the line and been properly understood.

This was not entirely untrue. The receptionist really was a paragon of diligence when it came to clear and accurate communication. In terms of time-keeping, though, it had its own standards of punctuality.

Once the receptionist showed up for work, Graser 172 would be living three hundred corsecs in the future.

The Chimp brought me back for another of its moments of insecurity, born of infinitesimal but increasing discrepancies between where we were and where we should be.

It brought me back for a build that wasn’t, around a star whose location and metallicity shouted optimal even though the vons, once deployed, could barely scrape together enough material for a fueling station, much less a gate. It was almost as though someone else had been there before us and made off with all the best stuff. We even looked around for a gate someone else might have built, but came up empty.

It brought me back for a handful of builds I’ve almost forgotten, resurrected me for reasons so trivial that all I remember now is my irritation with Viktor’s end-of-time rhapsodies and my greater irritation at the Chimp’s slavish adherence to trigger thresholds.

Most of the time, though, I slept while the Chimp built an army of vons. I watched the replay, ages afterward.

I’d never seen anything like it before.

I was used to the usual dance: the harvesters shot from our han ger bays, a scavenger swarm sent ahead at meat-killing delta-vees to scoop up dust and rocks and tumbling mountains full of precious metal. Once they’d mined enough treasure they transformed, linked arms and fused together and turned into printers or refineries or assembly-lines: a factory floor, a piecemeal cloud five hundred kilometers across. The Hawking Hoop would coalesce in its heart; more harvesters and rock-wranglers would be birthed around its edges. They’d forage out, half a lightyear sometimes, bring back ores and alloys in an accelerating escalation of mass and complexity.

Eventually the build would reach some critical inflection point and turn inward: harvesters would stop eating comets and start on each other, cannibalizing the factory from the outside in, recycling deprecated components into last -minute coils or condensers. The uneaten survivors would weld everything tight, line up safely to one side and shut down, waiting for Eriophora to catch up and boot the gate. Perhaps offering up some rudimentary machine prayer that we wouldn’t miss the needle’s eye when—a few megasecs down the road—we blew through at sixty thousand kps.

It took anywhere from a hundred gigasecs to ten thousand, and it was damned impressive the first hundred times you watched the replay. But that was just the construction of a single gate, floating at some safe and benign distance from some safe and benign star. The biggest productions had a cast of less than ten thousand—maybe a hundred heavies holding court to a swirling retinue of harvesters.