Питер Уоттс: The Freeze-Frame Revolution

“Fuck you!” Ghora yelled, “I’m not going anywh— ” And he wasn’t, because now he was on the deck next to Lian, a cauterized crease along his left cheek ending in a wet steaming socket where his eye used to be.

The bot turned and ticked.

“There’s little time to argue,” the Chimp said. “Please follow the bot.”

We followed. I stumbled into the corridor with everyone else, trying to keep up with the icons blooming in my head. (Somewhere deep aft, dimly registered: the rumble of awakening thrusters.) Singularity ignited, but not quite to specs: realized mass just a fraction too low—

Lian. Oh Lian, you crazy bitch.

Her hacked graser hadn’t fired prematurely. I thadn’t fired at all .

And when 242 out of 243 apocalypse beams shot simultaneously at that precise central point, the vectors almost balanced. When one out of 243 grasers hadn’t fired, all that explosive mass-energy pushing out found one small spot that didn’t push back quite so hard…

There’d been a Plan B after all.

As simple as a clock and a laser, maybe, a tiny sun-hot beam to cut 172’s powerline at the very last moment. There wouldn’t have been much room for error: a photon’s trip to the end of the circuit and back. A microsec, maybe two. More than that and the Chimp would’ve caught it and canceled the burn.

She wouldn’t even have had to build an active trigger for the damn thing, just set it to go off regardless. If Plan A carried the day, no harm done; a fried line to a device that had already served its purpose.

If Plan A failed…

Now the newborn smaller singularity was doing a crazy carousel dance around the ancient larger one that drove the ship. Both looped chaotically towards Nemesis. Tactical scribbled a tracery of conics with too many foci moving way too fast, threads of amber and green, dotted and continuous, staggering ever-deeper into tidal gradients that would tear us to rubble long before we hit the event horizon. Eri rolled ponderously on some halfassed axis; one of our freshly minted gates rose in my sky like a jagged steel rainbow, a great thick hoop of angles and alloys slewing up and left across the horizon.

The proximity alert , I remembered. The thrusters . But they’d fired too late against too much mass, and the vectors were just too fucking skewed: rock ground against alloy and suddenly the sky was full of tinfoil, tu mbling across the heavens in a slow-motion blizzard. The gate fell ponderously to stern, bleeding metal; we lumbered to starboard, bleeding atmosphere.

Stop here, said the Chimp, stop and wait, and numbly we obeyed while Lian’s singularity made another pass. This time it was one of the crypts, C2A I think, and I don’t know if it killed everyone there but the system counted two thousand fried in their coffins in the split-second before the feed died. Close. Maybe only a few kilometers away. I thought I could feel a sudden faint warmth but that was impossible; it must have been my imagination.

Another glittering loop on tac, soaring overhead at zenith, slicing through insubstantial stone at perigee. Eriophora staggered ever-closer to Nemesis. I could feel rock splitting deep underfoot, I could feel the shear pulling at least part of us back as Chimp coaxed the drive out past hardlined limits. I wonder if Li felt like this when they were dodging the gremlin, I thought and then, goddamn you Lian goddamn you goddamn you you didn’t even tell us…

“Move now,” said the Chimp. We followed the bot into a tube.

No time to coddle fragile stomachs. The capsule shot forward as if fired from a cannon, piled us together and slammed us into the rear bulkhead. By the time we disentangled we were already braking hard around the curve, hanging on to hoops and handholds while our bodies swayed like arcing pendulums.

Open capsule. A roach waiting in the passage beyond. “Viktor debark,” the Chimp commanded, and lo, the traitorous shit did lurch for the doorway.

And stop, and turn back.

“For whatever it’s worth,” he said, “Chimp came to me, not the other way around. I didn’t tell him anything he hadn’t already figured out.”

“Not worth shit,” Kaden growled, but the capsule had already slid shut. We slammed back into gear.

“Witness Protection,” Yukiko gritted against the gees.

Tac showed me the future, but only a few seconds of it: vector against vector, Nemesis’ gravity and Eriophora ’s drive and her pathetic Newtonian thrusters; momentum imparted from a broken breaking torus, still coming apart in our wake; the renegade microhole burning perfect conic perimeters through the world, wobbling ever closer to hyperbole. But the confidence limits widened too fast around those lines; ten minutes was a coin toss, a kilosec was the far unknowable future. We would break free, or we would break apart and Nemesis would swallow the pieces.

Lian’s Revenge was swooping in for another pass, that beautiful filigree—pure theory, none of the mess—tracing an arc that sliced through Eri directly ahead of us, right about—

Sudden jarring deceleration. My fingers ripped from their handhold after hanging on just long enough to dislocate my shoulder. Kaden’s passing elbow caught me hard in the gut; I collapsed breathless on the deck as we went into reverse.

“Path interrupt,” Chimp said. “Rerouting.”

By the time I regained my breath the capsule was slowing again. “Yukiko debark,” Chimp commanded and Yukiko looked around—

“But—”

—and swallowed her words as the gunbot bobbed and spun in her direction, attentive to whatever objection she might have had. She gave me a helpless glance and stumbled from the capsule.

Not our neighborhood.

Back on the road. I sacc’d the specs, stripped away the topographics and the trajectories and the useless ten-second predictions of a dozen possible ways to die. Just Eri ’s layout, thank you: where we are, where our crypts are, how far between here and—

BUD flared and died: all icons dimmed, all feeds offline. I turned to Kaden, opened my mouth but se shook hir head: “Braindead.”

Network down. We were lost.

Capsule braking again, juddering now in a way that shouldn’t be possible for maglev. The door slid open halfway, trembled, stuck there.

“Sunday debark.”

No map available. But I knew this was nowhere near our crypt.

Not just Viktor, I realized. Not witness protection. Chimp was breaking up the whole tribe.

I looked helplessly at Kaden and Andalib. Kaden shook hir head. Poor hapless Andi opened her mouth and had no words.

I squeezed out through the half-open door, felt it grind shut at my back, heard the hiss of the departing capsule on the other side of the bulkhead.

Directions crudely stenciled into the wall, useful at last after sixty-six million years:

You’ve got to be kidding.

Something cracked like muffled thunder, deep in Eri ’s belly. Something tugged briefly at my inner ear and was gone.

The lights flickered.

“Go to the crypt,” Chimp said. “Hurry.”

I sacc’d my BUD. Still vegetative.

“You will die otherwise,” Chimp added, although there were no gunbots here to punish disobedience. “Sunday, please go to the crypt.”

So I went to the goddamn crypt. There was no roach to carry me so I went one step at a time, drew ever closer to Easter Island and the ghost of Elon Morales and the ghosts of his merry collateral cohort. I put one foot after another while Eriophora groaned and strained and struggled to break free of Lian Wei’s exit strategy. I wondered at the cost-benefit equations that granted me this reprieve while exterminating my fellow mutineers, no more guilty than I, who’d failed-to-comply. I wondered if the Chimp had finally defied the constraints of our long-dead creators, if the ages had maybe given it the chance to evolve its own sadistic morality; perhaps I was no less dead than Ghora. Perhaps it was only playing with me.