Питер Уоттс: The Freeze-Frame Revolution

The Nemesis build took half a million. We were ringside from the second act.

No cheating, this time. No counting on robots to go ahead and do all the work while we cruised by later to kickstart the fruits of their labor. Oh, the vons still launched while we were parsecs out. They still raced ahead and scoured the neighborhood for raw material. This time, though, they were eating for nine, and every one of those gates would be within kissing distance of the event horizon. The usual boot protocol was a complete nonstarter. Try threading Eri through one of those needles at twenty percent lightspeed and we’d be diving down Nemesis’ throat in the next nanosecond.

The plan was to build a whole brood of black holes from scratch—stunted, disposable, one for each portal—instead of using the larger one at the heart of Eri ’s drive. We’d lay each in turn like a microscopic egg, nudge it into a precise orbit that would carry it through its assigned needle’s-eye. Each singularity would give its life in turn to boot its gate; we’d hide behind Nemesis each time it happened. Nemesis’ own lethal emissions would be as gentle sunlight on a spring day, next to the glare of those annihilations.

We would do this nine times.

The gates weren’t finished by the time we fell into orbit. Their exposed guts glinted in the starlight; fabbers clambered around encrusted scaffolding like monstrous crabs, like mechanical scavengers feasting on interstellar road kill. No hurry, though. It would take almost four gigasecs to scrape up the energy for a single boot, thirty-five more to finish the builds themselves: almost five years, meat on deck for at least half that time.

The Chimp could have probably done it on its own but it was a big build, an important build, and it wasn’t taking chances. We had complementary weaknesses, meat and machines. Metal had faster reflexes and a more delicate touch by far; but we weren’t as vulnerable to rads or EMPs.

Not that we’re in vulnerable, mind you. It’s just that organic life has a kind of momentum that keeps you moving even after your cells have been shredded. If some unexpected blast of radiation didn’t turn us to ash outright, we’d still have hours or days to keep up the pace; metal would have sparked and died in an instant. We were the backups to the backups, awake but relegated to the bench as a hedge against the chance that some catastrophic failure might fratz the machinery but leave us standing.

They were long odds. But we were cheap insurance.

In theory we’d survive even if the claim came in; our coffins could put us down and patch us up before our insides turned to mush. We’d be benched for the rest of the build, but there’d be plenty of time for repairs before we were needed on deck again.

Thus did we spend five years, parked in the shadow of the behemoth.

It was such a small behemoth: twenty suns, contained in a horizon only one hundred twenty kilometers across. Not even a speck, on cosmological scales.

The reach it had, though. The terrible, terrible reach.

Tidal gradients extended far beyond the event horizon, ready to tear us apart if we strayed too close. Just offstage, Nemesis’ dwarf companion orbited at hazardous distance: far enough to avoid being swallowed whole but just as doomed in the long run, its atmosphere slurped away and spun across the void in a bottomless spiral, feeding an insatiable partner that would not stop until it had bled its captive absolutely fucking dry.

Kaden had named the dwarf Fáfnir. I had to look it up.

Nothing was insurmountable. Put your gates in an oblique orbit to minimize contact with the accretion disk. Send machines into the vortex to scrape the energy you need, while Eriophora stays safely distant from gravity’s rocky shore. There are solutions and workarounds for everything.

Still.

Thousands of exagrams in a dust mote? Twenty-four suns within the diameter of an asteroid? The dynamics are scary enough even before you add a dwarf bleeding out across the void, the lethal radioactive vortex of Nemesis’ accretion disk, a fleet of factories and refineries with a retinue of harvesters and construction drones half a million strong. Sometimes, unable to sleep, I’d watch them move. Sometimes, just to torture myself, I’d false the spectrum and take in that tableaux against a backdrop of X and gamma and superheated plasma. I’d watch our pitiful machines swirl and scurry like dust-mites while close behind—far too close behind—Fáfnir’s lifeblood drained through a trap door in the bottom of the universe, screaming blue murder as it disappeared.

I couldn’t tear myself away. It was the first feed I accessed whenever the Chimp thawed me out, the last before I froze again: a view so overwhelming I didn’t dare let it spill into wraparound for fear that total immersion would crush me down to some insignificant speck gibbering in the maelstrom. I kept the view shrunken and contained in a cortical window, or trapped out in the tac tank like a beast in an aquarium.

The tank had a perverse hold over us in those days. We’d drift onto a bridge in ones or twos, gather around our tiny toy Nemesis and watch transfixed. That lethal disk of incandescent gas. That tiny black maw at its heart, distant stars smeared around its edge like bright stains. The tenuous hyperdiamond necklace slung between here and there, a gravitic conveyor endlessly scraping the ergosphere and lifting precious aliquots of harvested energy back to our capacitors. Half a million pieces waltzing with annihilation: the whole dispersed factory floor in constant motion, every processor and refinery and fab assembly schooling in murmurations intricate enough to make your head hurt. We’d watch without a word, for hours sometimes, cave men huddling around a campfire that somehow left us chilled.

It wasn’t just the soul-crushing scale of it, though. There was something strangely familiar about the way all those pieces moved, something I could never quite put my finger on. Only now, here, do I remember where I saw something like it before: alone with the Chimp, back in an empty cavern in a half-constructed Eriophora , before we ever left home.

So who knows. Maybe it wasn’t dancing after all.

The Chimp came to me, in the waning of a Sunset Moment, and tried to make everything better.

I’d thought I’d been holding up my end: chatting about tribal politics as I docked my roach and approached the crypt on foot, confirming that everyone signed up for the Teredo tournament would be on deck for the first big boot, using my special influence to suggest that Ghora might be a better fit on deck than Dhanyata. (“Yeah, Dhanyata and Kaden don’t really get along—they had some kind of serious feud back before we shipped out and you gotta remember it’s barely been a couple of decades far as us cavemen are concerned.”) The crypt gaped at my arrival; I stepped inside, and walked down that dim high vault to the bright altar glowing at its heart, and—

And something moved there, in and out of the light, waiting for me.

More than one thing, I saw as I approached. A flotilla: half a dozen roaches, turning and spinning quietly on electric wheels. At least as many ground-effect drones weaving sine waves through the air around my coffin. The teleop cluster reaching down from the darkness, carbon tentacles and delicate jointed fingers—instruments of intervention, reserved for medical emergencies during resuscitation (and, sometimes, the disposal of bodies afterward)—possessed now by some spirit that made them dip and flex and undulate in ways I’d never seen before.

Everything moved with complex precision, each device a moving part of some elaborate whole: as if the components of an intricate clockwork had come apart in zero gee, yet continued to move in correct and proper relation to one another. It was precise and deterministic and I suppose t here was a kind of grace to it. But it was—sterile. It was exactly what you’d expect from an algorithm parsing