Питер Уоттс: The Freeze-Frame Revolution

Five hours before we suffocated. Maybe.

“What have you done?” Andi whispered. “What are you doing ?”

“Chimp,” said someone else. “This isn’t necessary.”

A disembodied voice. An intercom voice.

“There’s been enough brute force. On all sides. We can resolve this peacefully.”

It took a moment to recognize that voice.

“The party is armed,” Chimp pointed out. “They could do significant damage if left conscious.”

“And if you knock them out now, they’ll be that much less inclined to see things you rway the next time they return to consciousness. Unless you plan on killing them outright.”

That voice didn’t belong to anyone who was supposed to be on deck right now.

“And you’re not planning on doing that, because you must know these aren’t the only people who have issues with your management style. You kill these people and you’ll be dealing with blowback on every waking build for the next billion years.”

I knew it, though.

“Let me talk to them, Chimp. Face to face. They won’t hurt me.”

Oh, I knew it all right.

“Okay,” said the Chimp.

The stone rolled from the tomb. The hatch swung open. The bot that floated through had accessories I’d never seen on a bot before, and one I had. It took up station just inside the entrance, panned its laser back and forth across our trapped asses as if keeping a beat.

Viktor Heinwald brought up the rear.

“You fucker,” Lian said. “You Judas. You miserable traitorous piece of shit.”

“I just saved your lives,” Viktor said g ently.

“You only changed the way it kills us.”

The bot hovered off Judas’ shoulder like a guardian angel, its soft tick tick tick ing barely discernible above the breathing of meat and reawakened ventilators.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s over. Let’s just sit it out and go to bed.”

“Fuck that,” Ghora snarled. “We’re deprecated the moment we hit the crypt.”

“That’s not necessarily true,” the Chimp said. “I don’t demand perfection. I don’t even desire it; your initiative and unpredictability are essential elements of the mission. All I ask is that you learn from your mistakes. Ignition in one hundred corsecs.”

Lian ignored it. “Why did you do it, Vik? What could that goddamn machine possibly offer to make you sell us out after all this? Shorter shifts? Better VR?”

“Blue dwarfs,” I realized. “Heat Death.”

Viktor said nothing.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” I shook my head, astonished I hadn’t seen it all a long. “Did it sweeten the deal for you, Vikky? Maybe promised to extend your downs, optimize your ups, stretch you out far as you could go—all the way to the end of time? Did you believe that miserable fucker?”

Ghora looked from Viktor to me, me to Viktor. Yukiko looked like she was starting to catch on.

“Man, when they built you they really got it right.” I resisted the urge to whistle in appreciation. “You’re even more optimized than me.”

“Sunday,” Lian said.

“He wants to be deprecated,” I told her. “Wants to know how it plays out. That’s his whole life, his—epic quest. It’s how he justifies the fact that he didn’t just walk away when he had the chance.” I had to smile. Had I really been arrogant enough to think myself the only one who’d had doubts? The only one who needed a bit of extra incentive? “He wants to know how the story ends, and we were about to tear it up halfway through.”

She looked at me strangely. “I’m glad.”

“Glad?”

“That it wasn’t you. I’d hoped, if it came to that…” L ian nodded, slowly. Her gaze flickered, steadied. She turned it on her betrayer. “And are you feeling better now, Vik? Safer, now that your epic quest is back on track?”

“Ignition in forty corsecs.”

“Oh for fucks’ sake Chimp just shut up !” Yuki barked.

“No, no, let it talk.” Li smiled faintly. She seemed strangely calm for someone who’d just watched so many centuries of careful conspiracy crumble to dust. “Enjoy that feeling, Vik.” She stepped toward him: the bot surged forward a few centimeters, muzzle quivering.

Lian didn’t take her eyes off Viktor. “Enjoy it while it lasts. Which should be another—”

“Ignition in twenty corsecs.”

“—more or less.”

Viktor frowned. “Li, you do understand, yes? I disabled the time-jump.”

“I believe you,” she said. “But I bet that’s all you did.”

“What?”

“Ignition in ten corsecs.”

“Doesn’t matter.” She put a hand on his cheek. “We’re dead anyway. All we get to choose is the exit strategy.”

“Five…”

She stood on tiptoe, whispered—

“…four…”

“I forgive you.”

“…three…”

—and kissed him.

“…two…”

Viktor blanched. “Chimp—”

“…one…”

And some thing kicked us hard in the side.

There’s a sound in the archives: mournful and lonely, like the sinking of a ship or the slow cracking fall of a giant redwood. It’s the voice of a sea creature, vaster than anything that ever lived on land. Once, long long ago, it filled the ocean with its sounds. Back then people seemed to think of it as a kind of song .

The sound Eriophora made was a little like what might have come from such a creature, screaming in pain.

The hatch slammed shut. Red icons sprayed across my BUD like arterial spatter. Down tilted , and split into two parts. The weaker pulled us off-balance, whispered up the wall and across the ceiling and faded away. The stronger did not move, and kept us anchored to the deck.

I heard a soft thump at my side and turned to see Lian Wei sprawled bonelessly across the floor, a perfect cauterized hole smoking in the center of her forehead. Viktor’s bot hovered restless at the door, guiltless and lethal. So this is what happens , I thought distantly, when cost-benefit drops below threshold . Somehow I’d expected greater subtlety.

“Stay calm,” Chimp told us against the rising shouts and panic, against muffled sirens sounding out in the corridor. “Stay calm. Stay—”

I didn’t recognize that alarm. I’d never heard it bef—yes, yes I had. Way back in training: a proximity alert. I’d never heard it used in-flight, though.

“There’s been an incident,” Chimp reported and I thought, No shit, really? because I’d been tagging those bloody icons fast as I could, opening one window and then another, building an ever-growing palimpsest of catastrop he in my head.

Down in the Uterus: a great smoking hole in the firing chamber, rads off the scale. The log said Singularity achieved but it wasn’t floating in the core like it was supposed to be, and it hadn’t left via the birth canal as it had been designed to. It had shot out at an angle, punched a proton-sized hole through the containment hoops, exited stage right leaving a scalding mix of Hawking and gamma in its wake. It had slipped effortlessly through seven kilometers of solid rock and escaped into the void.

How the fuck —

The hatch unlocked, swung wide. “Please follow the bot,” Chimp said with utmost calm. “We have a small window of—”

Another exploding icon: aft ventral bridge suddenly offline, and a heat spike under one of the fab caches. Something about a forest fire , an instantaneous explosive ignition of five hundred thousand cubic meters of air and cellulose and vaporized machinery…