Питер Уоттс: The Freeze-Frame Revolution

An icon was flashing, a window into someone else’s first-person: Schidkowski, according to the subtitle. He was staring along a service crawlway infested with plumbing and fiber. A figure crouched in shadow a couple meters farther in. Something sparked in its hand. I caught a blur of motion—movement into light, a coiled spring released—

Lian, stabbing Burkhart Schidkowski in the face.

The window closed.

It looked worse than it was, Chimp insisted as I what-the-fuck ed my way out of the sarcophagus, and slipped, and hung on tight to keep from falling. Lian was armed with nothing more lethal than a splicing torch. She’d been futzing around in the trunk line when they’d found her, delivered a nasty burn to the side of Schidkowski’s head—fried the toggle on his interface—but nothing worse. He’d withdrawn, she’d retreated back up the tunnel, everyone was sitting tight until the Mediator showed up.

A faint whine in the dark distance. I turned, squinted. Thirty meters away another coffin jutted from a bulkhead built of coffins, a teleop sucking its insides clean with a hose. Probably a stranger. Chimp kept members of each tribe spaced wide in the crypt—in different crypts entirely, even—so that when a seal broke, a circuit failed, someone died in their sleep and rotted away in the long dark, the ’spore waking up next to them would give less of a shit.

Still, I had to ask. “Anyone—I know?” Between coughs.

“No. Please focus, Sunday.”

The whine intensified. A roach resolved from the gloom, wheeled past the new vacancy, pulled up at my side. I fell into it. Chimp drove me to the nearest tube.

“Why me?”

“She trusts you.”

“What— Jesus , Chimp, you want to slow down on these turns?” I could run the roach myself, even hung-over, but not at the speeds evidently deemed necessary under current circumstances. “If I’d had lunch any time in the past thousand years I’d have lost it by now.”

“The situation may be time-sensitive,” Chimp said apologetically.

We careened around one last corner and into one of the tube’s many maws. The roach locked down, the capsule started up: ten times faster, but somehow easier on the gut. Gentler curves. I let my stomach settle as I magleved toward the approaching clusterfuck. By the time the tube di sgorged me I could almost walk a straight line.

I ditched the roach—walking onstage under my own steam would make for a better entrance, I figured—and closed the last dozen meters on foot. The corridor bent gently to port. I heard them before they came into view: low voices, exasperated voices, male and female. Silences.

Enter, Stage Left: Sunday Ahzmundin.

Gurnier, said the caption over the redheaded black man standing next to a hole in the bulkhead (the detached access panel leaned to one side). Laporta, said the one floating over the black-haired brown woman slouched sideways in her roach.

Introductions complete.

“Where’s Burkhar t?”

Laporta gestured vaguely starboard. “Went to get his face fixed.”

Gurnier: “So you know this idiot?”

“Same tribe,” I said carefully.

“But you’re friends. Right?”

I took a breath. “I guess. What’s she done?”

“Other than stabbing Burk in the face with a welding torch?” Laporta unfolded herself from the roach and squinted into the crawlway; from my position I could see nothing but pipes and padding in there. “We don’t really know. We were getting set to turn in, Burk remembered he’d left his totem back on the bridge, came back to get it and there she was.”

Totem. Right. Rock worshipers.

“She say anything?”

“Told us to fuck off in no uncertain terms.”

“Anything on the diagnostics?”

“Nope.”

“No eyes in there,” Gurnier said. Course not: everything in those trunks was part of Chimp’s nervous system anyway. If anything happened in there, he’d feel it.

“Crazy bitch,” Laporta remarked. “Keeps going on about how we’ve outlived our usefulness and how the whole ’spore program—how’d she put it, Oz?—”

“Humanity’s head up the galaxy’s ass,” Gurnier remembered.

“That’s it.” Laporta shook her head. “I mean, how’d she ever get on board with an attitude like that?”

“We boarded a long time ago.”

“Have I changed? Have you?” She took silence for assent.

“We’re ’spores . We don’t change.”

I spr ead my hands, conceding the point. “Guess I better talk to her.”

“She’s all yours,” Gurnier said. “We’re going down.”

“Before some other batshit thing comes along,” Laporta added.

“Mind if I take your jumper?” I shivered briefly; Chimp hadn’t given me time to get dressed.

She peeled down, handed it over.

“Anything else?” “Actually, yeah.”

They waited.

“You folks ever seen a guy with a tarantula?”

“Lian.”

“Sunday? What are you doing up?”

“Chimp tha wed me. What’s going on in there?”

“Come in. Find out.”

She’d blocked her feed. No way to see what was in there but to see what was in there. I bent down to the opening.

“Toggle off,” she said. “I’m inviting you in. Nothing else.”

I sighed, killed my BUD, climbed inside with naked eyes. No headroom to speak of. I moved forward on hands and knees in gray oily twilight. The trunk line—a wide, flat conduit pulling double-duty as a floor—was rubbery elastomer. Everything else was pipes and fiber ,brackets, braces and humming prickly electricity.

Lian crouched like an animal in a burrow, four meters in. Her face looked surprisingly haggard for someone who’d just had a few epochs’ sleep.

She’d opened the trunk line.

“Sorry about this. Dragging you out of bed and all.”

“You planned that?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t plan on getting caught. But… well, I’m glad you’re here. If it had to be anyone.”

She’d spliced in a bypass around a 30-cm length of fiber; it looked sensory, although I couldn’t tell for sure without my interface. But it was a bypass without a function: the main line was still intact. Probably she just hadn’t got around to cutting it before Burkhart caught her.

I looked up—“What?”—just as her finger landed gently on my lip: shhhh .

“If you can’t figure it out,” she said, “I’m not gonna tell you. Just because I trust you doesn’t mean—”

“I killed my BUD, Li. Like you asked.”

“You think it doesn’t h ave audio pickups in the corridor? You don’t think it can hear us even with—”

“Then what am I doing here? If you aren’t even going to—”

“I don’t know, okay? I panicked. And—and I could really use a friend right now.”

I sighed. “Fine. We can go someplace dark. Someplace he can’t listen in, if that’s so important. But then you damn well tell me what’s going on. Right?”

She thought a mome nt. Her head bobbed up and down.

I gestured to the trunk line—“Close that up”—and backed away on hands and knees, heading ass-first back to the access. “I know just the place.”

Eriophora ’s riddled with blind spots: shadows in crawlways and corners, in the spaces behind looming machinery where no one had any reason to put a camera. There are even places—near powerlines whose massive currents swamp the milliamp signals connecting artificial brains to natural ones—where Chimp is blind to our cortical links.