Питер Уоттс - The Freeze-Frame Revolution

— used to watch you dance —

without any real understanding of what dancing is , what it means, without any recollection of the time when it breathed life and wonder into a thousand glittering facets of self. A time when, just maybe, it had some kind of soul.

This was not that. This was a collection of lifeless objects jiggling on threads, and it almost broke my heart to realize what else it was:

A peace offering.

“Do you like it?” the Chimp asked from the darkness.

“I—” And trailed off. “I appreciate the sentiment.”

“I would like to repair our relationship,” it said.

“Repair.”

“We don’t talk as much as we used to. When we do talk, there is less intimacy.”

“Uh huh.” I couldn’t help myself. “Any wild guesses as to why that might be?”

He didn’t seem to notice. “Our relationship changed when you rediscovered the hardware archive.”

“When I found out you’d killed three thousand people, you mean.”

“If you say so.” He wasn’t even being snippy; he honestly didn’t remember. “I accept that you hold me responsible for that. But I also have faith in you, Sunday. I know that you’re vitally invested in the mission, and that you are vital to its success. We still work together, despite everything. And our relationship has improved since then.”

I trod carefully. “It—takes time.”

“Until now I’ve let our relationship heal naturally. You’ve been quicker to engage in conversation. I welcome that. I’m accelerating that process now because I need your help.”

“With?”

“I’ve noted activities over the past hundred gigasecs that may indicate attempts at sabotage. I would like them to stop.”

I bit my lip. Hoped that my sudden increase in heart rate wasn’t enough to send up any flags, that the Chimp would write it off as an understandable reaction to news of Enemies in Our Midst. Bots and roaches and teleops continued to walt zand orbit before me, surrealistic and absurd.

“What sort of activities?” My voice carefully steady.

“Inventory disappears temporarily. Fabricators run but I can’t find records of anything being produced.”

“Describe the missing inventory.”

“I can’t. The mass-balance checksums indicate that something’s missing, but all stockpiles are at expected levels.”

“This isn’t just another order from Mission Control you were told to forget about afterward?”

“If I ever carried out such commands in the past, they didn’t leave detectable inconsistencies in the record. I think so meone’s actively hiding their activities from the mission logs. The most likely reason is that those activities aren’t in the best interests of the mission.”

I took a breath, and a chance: “How do you know it isn’t me?”

“I don’t. But it’s unlikely. You’ve never lied to me.”

“What do you need me for? You don’t have enough eyes and ears already?”

“My eyes and ears may be compromised. Yours would not be.”

“You want me to spy on my friends.”

“I trust you, Sunday. I hope you know you can trust me.”

“To do what?”

“To act in the best interests of the mission.”

I could have refused. The Chimp would have gone ahead anyway, looking for tro uble, his suspicions heightened by my refusal to play informant.

I could have played along, pretended to cooperate. Whispered a warning to a fellow mutineer as we passed through a blind spot, hoped the word would spread before someone passed me a note or Chimp started wondering why his pet periscope kept blanking her visual feed.

Right.

I even considered dismissing the Chimp’s suspicions outright: You’re crazy, you’re senile, you’re suffering from bit rot and entropy artifacts. I know these people, none of them would ever— But of course I didn’t know these people. I hadn’t even met most them, for all the millions of years we’d been stuck on the same rock. Not even a bit-rotten Chimp would believe that I could see into thirty thousa nd souls.

(Twenty-seven thousand. But who’s counting.)

“Sunday?” He’d noticed my silence. “If there’s anything you’d like to share, now is the time.”

“There’s no need to spy,” I said. “I know what’s going on.”

And I told him everything.

I told him about the Rock Worshippers. I told him about Lian—how Gurnier and Laporta and Burkhart had seen the vulnerability in her, tried to recruit her under cover of dead zones and turned backs. How she’d reacted (“badly—well, you saw that much”), and how it had fed her paranoia even though she’d quailed at the prospect of outright rebellion. How she’d confided it all to me—not trusting the Children of Eri , not trusting the Chimp—and how I’d calmed her down and smoothed everything over.

Through it all, Chimp’s dismembered body parts never stopped dancing.

“Thank you,” he said when I’d finished.

I nodded.

“It would be helpful if, in future, you provided me with such information as soon as you acquire it,” he added.

“It was teras ago. It was three people. It was all secondhand, from a—well, you know Lian wasn’t the most reliable source. I don’t know who else might have been involved, or what they were planning. All I know is that at least some of them—objected to you.”

“Do you know why?”

“I only know what she told me. For all I know they figured out Easter Island for themselves, decided that your strategic little cull was against the will of their Rock God.”

Chimp was silent for a moment. “I don’t understand their belief in that deity.”

“Nothing to understand. We’re humans. Superstition’s just—wired into us, on some level.”

“Most gods are not so local. I’m the obvious candidate for anyone who needs to find external meaning in shipboard events.”

Fuck. How long had this machine been thinking we should worship it?

“You can’t deny we’ve blown past every metric of mission success from the day we launched. We’ve been—unaccountably lucky. The Children are just looking for a way to square that, and you can’t. Not unless you learned how to fuck with the laws of probability while no one was looking.”

Chimp said nothing.

“For all I know the whole rebellion fizzled and they just lost interest.”

“I can’t afford to assume that.”

“You could always ask them.”

“I couldn’t trust their replies. Also reviving them would be an u nacceptable risk; I have no way of knowing how far their plans have progressed.”

I’d feared as much. I’d counted on it.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Deprecation is the safest option.”

“The whole tribe?”

“As you say, there’s no way of knowing how many were involved.”

“But just deprecate. Not kill.”

“It’s the safest option,” it repeated. “Members of that tribe might have attributes that prove vital to future operations. In the meantime they can’t disrupt the mission so long as they’re in stasis.”

And so the Children of Eri would simply sleep away eternity, never again to be called on deck—barring some unforeseen need whose likelihood was just high enough to spare them from outright extermination. In that, at least, I could take some measure of comfort.

I might have also taken comfort from the thought that it wouldn’t even matter, if everything went according to plan. Once we were running the place we’d be able to thaw out whoever we pleased, whenever we liked. At the time, though, my gut wasn’t quite ready to believe in such rosy scenarios.