Питер Уоттс: The Freeze-Frame Revolution

“Maybe. After you made that crack about getting shot at by gremlins.”

“Then again,” Park added, “you’d expect that sort of reaction from someone who’s been shot at by gremlins.”

“I—what?”

“She was on deck when—” Park saw it in my face. “You don’t know.”

“Know what?”

“Something took a shot at us,” Viktor explained. “Few builds back.”

“What!”

“Hit us, too,” Park added. “Big divot on the starboard side. Twenty meters deep. Half a degree to the left and we’d be out of the finals.”

“Fuck . ” It came out a whisper. “I had no idea.”

Park frowned. “Don’t you check the mission logs?”

“I would have, if I’d known.” I shook my head. “Also someone could’ve told me, you know?”

“We just did,” Viktor pointed out.

“It was five hundred years ago.” Park shrugged. “Hundred lightyears away.”

“Five hundred years is nothing, ” Viktor said. “Call me in a few billion. Then we’ll talk.”

“Yeah, but—” Obvious, suddenly, why all my reassuring words had fallen so flat. “Jeez. Maybe we should build some guns or something.”

Park snorted. “Right. Chimp would reall ysmile on that .”

We had a legend, we denizens of Eriophora , of a cavern—deep aft, almost as far back as the launch thrusters themselves—filled with diamonds. Not just ordinary diamonds, either: the uncut, hexagonal shit. Lonsdaleite. The toughest solid in the whole damn solar system—back when we shipped out, at least—and laser-readable to boot.

Build your backups out of anything less and you might as well be carving them from butter.

Nothing’s immortal on a road trip of a billion years. The universe runs down in stop-motion around you, your backups’ backups’ backups need backups. Not even the error-correcting replication strategies cadged from biology can keep the mutations at bay forever. It was true for us meatsicles cycling through mayfly moments every thousand years; it was just as true for the hardware. It was so obvious I never even thought about it. By the time I did, the Chimp was on his eighty-third reincarnation.

Not enough that his nodes br ed like flies and distributed themselves to every far corner of the asteroid. Not enough that the circuits themselves were almost paleolithically crude; when your AI packs less than half the synapse count of a human brain, fiddling around at nano scales is just grandstanding. Things still fall apart. Conduits decay. Circuits a dozen molecules thick would just evaporate over time, even if entropy and quantum tunneling didn’t degrade them down to sponge first.

Every now and then, you have to renovate.

And so was born The Archive: a library of backups, cubist slabs of diamond statuary larger than life, commemorations of some unsullied ancestral state. Someone back at the dawn of time named it Easter Island: curious, I pinged the archives and dredged up an entry about some scabby rock back on Earth in the middle of nowhere, known primarily for the fact that its pretech inhabitants destroyed their environment for no better reason than to build a bunch of butt-ugly statues in commemoration of long-dead ancestors.

What else would we call it?

So when the inventory of backup Chimps ran too low—or of grav lenses, or air conditioners, or any other v ital artifact more short-lived than a proton— Eri would send lumbering copy-editors back to its own secret Easter Island where they would read mineral blueprints so vast, so stable, they might outlast the Milky Way.

The place wasn’t always so secret, mind you. We’d trooped through it a dozen times during construction, a dozen more in training. But one day, maybe our third or fourth pass through the Sagittarius Arm, Ghora went spelunking at the end of a shift while the rest of us lay dead in the crypt; just killing time, he told me later, staving off the inevitable shut-down with a little recreational reconnaissance. He hiked down into the hi-gee zone, wormed through crawlways and crevices to where X marked the Spot, and found Easter Island scoured clean: just a dark gaping cavity in the rock, studded with the stubs of bolts and anchors sheared off a few centimeters above the substrate.

The Chimp had relocated the whole damn archive while we’d slept between the stars.

He wouldn’t tell us where. He couldn’t tell us, he insisted. Said he’d just been followin gprerecorded instructions from Mission Control, hadn’t been aware of them himself until some timer ticked over and injected new instructions into his job stack. He couldn’t even tell us why.

I believed him. When was the last time programmers explained themselves to the code?

“They don’t trust us,” Kai said, rolling his eyes. “Eight million years down the road and they’re afraid we might—what? Trash our own life support? Write Sawada sucks farts on their scale models?”

We’d still go searching now and then, when there was time to kill and itches to scratch. We’d plant tiny charges in the rock, read the echoes vibrating through our worldlet in search of some undiscovered grotto. The Chimp didn’t stop us. He never had to; in all the terasecs since Ghora’s discovery, we’d never found anything.

Maybe Lian thought she’d get lucky this time. Maybe she was just looking for an excuse to get away from us.

Eit her way, I wished her luck.

“Find it?”

She was in the middle of the usual funeral rites, clearing out her suite for whoever got it next time around. It took me maybe two minutes to do that: a couple of favorite jumpers I’d grown inexplicably fond of over the aeons, a little standalone sculpture rig that was mine and mine alone (no matter that the rigs in Eri ’s rec facilities ran at ten times the rez and twenty times the speed). A couple of books — real antiques, couldn’t even map your eye movements so you had to scroll the text manually—that Mom and Dad gave me at graduation, which I treasured beyond all reason even though I’d never read them. Crappy charcoal sketches of Kai and Ishmael, legacy of an incompetent portraiture phase I went through on our third pass through Carina. That was pretty much it.

Lian, though. Lian might have been packing for half the tribe: wall hangings, wardrobes, a local VRchive that would have been more efficiently entrusted to Eri ’s own library. Matching threadbare covers festooned with Penrose tiles, for sleeping and pseudopods. Something that looked like a rock collection , for fucks’ sake. She even packed her own sex toys, although the ones that came standard in each suite could’ve kept her occupied halfway to Heat Death.

For all I knew she’d been stuffing that junk into storage since the moment she’d left the party.

She looked up, eyes glazed; they took a moment to find me. “Huh?”

“Easter Island. Any luck?”

“Oh. Nah. Maybe next time.” She jammed a final balled-up pair of socks into the trunk, brought the lid down with a definitive click . “Thought you’d all be crypted by now.”

“On my way. Just wanted to check in, see how you were doing.”

“Just had—you know, like you said. A moment. I’m fine.”

“You’re sure?”

She nodded, straightened, pointed at the suitcase: it rolled to attention. “In a way, prey are lucky. Running for your life instead of running for your dinner.” A weak smile. “Better motivation, right?”

I’d checked the logs, of course. The gremlin had charged through the gate like some monstrous mutant phage. It had wobbled— perfectly reflective, like shuddering mercury—extruding and resorbing a thousand needle-like projections as if trying them on for size: twenty-centimeter stilettos to pin your hand to the bulkhead, thousand-meter javelins that could puncture a moon.