Питер Уоттс: The Freeze-Frame Revolution

We weren’t going to any of those places. We were going deeper, shooting at breakneck speeds through vacuum tunnels with superconductor ribs, and I was half-blind, and I didn’t like it.

There are times you kill your link: during stasis, during sleep, sometimes in your quarters during sex or games or touring. Times you don’t want to be distracted by the autonomic tics and tocs of this great stone beast we live in.

Not on shift, though. Not out in the open. Naked eyes don’t see anything , just—images, without annotation. I felt disabled: like I could take one wrong turn and be lost forever, like I might forget the names of people I’d known my whole life. Like I could look at some common object and not even know what it was.

It wasn’t even as though this self-imposed blindness bought us any privacy; Chimp had pickups in this capsule as in every other. The only thing denied by Lian’s small defiance was a couple of redundant first-person viewpoints.

Evidently there was some kind of principle involved.

Now we were decelerating, our bodies tugged invisibly forward as we coasted into a terminus deep in the heavy zone. Lian tapped her temple and her eyes flickered with those darting saccades that said online. I booted up my own link, tried not to take too much relief from the familiar garden of reawakened icons. They wouldn’t last.

That was the whole point.

You gain about thirty percent down there. It’s not intolerable—all the serious tidal shit happens further in, near the core where you go from thirteen gees to three hundred in barely two kliks—but it’s not pleasant. Our destination was barely fifty meters along the corridor but it felt like twice that by the time we arrived. Or m aybe it was something else, maybe some other kind of inertia weighed us down. Maybe, now the journey was ended and our excuses almost gone, we just didn’t want to break the silence.

The deck slanted here, like a steel beach: a broad basement door at the waterline marked our destination. The name of that place was stenciled right into the alloy. It also hung in midair a virtual meter ahead of me, thanks to m yreawakened link:

Forest Access—17T

The hatch slid smoothly back into the bulkhead at our approach. Its bearings did not complain. It did not squeak or grind against its rail. As though it had just been built yesterday, as though it hadn’t been waiting ten thousand frozen years or more for the chance to move. That hatch opened like a mouth, and it was dark inside.

Lian turned, broke our fragile silence: “After you.”

We went in.

Forget everything they might have told you about Eri ’s forests.

The genes tweaked for maximum bifurcation. The dim bulbous fruit alight with glowing bacteria, their TNA straitjacketed with sulfur bonds and secondary loops to impede mutation. Big concave leaves, black as Heat Death, curving around those microbial nightlights like hands cupped around a candle flame. The faint blue suns scattered here and there—some a meter across, some ten or more—pulsing with their own bioluminescence. Blind, deaf gardener bots with cockroach brains, sniffing their way along the branches—not even linked in, just mass-fabbed and set loose to recycle carbon and scrape nutrients from dead rock. The plumbing that collects our freeze-dried waste and distributes it to hungry rootlets. All the tricks that let you cram an ecosystem into a couple dozen caverns, slowed down so it might last forever :a bottled biosphere that would barely sustain a handful at regular rates of metabolism, but keeps thirty thousand of us alive just so long as we only take a breath every decade or so.

Forget all that.

Take one look and you’ll see how they really did it. They built their forests from the blood vessels of slaughtered giants: flushed out the blood and replaced it with tar. They pumped that shiny black sludge through the heart, the aorta, out into branching arteries and veins and the endless recursive capillary beds that connected the one to the other. After it hardened they burned away the surrounding meat with lasers and acetylene. They took what was left—obsidian plexii, branches, bones—broke it into pieces and installed them wherever they’d fit: vast misty caverns too big to see across, modest little grottoes barely seventy meters end-to-end.

Then they draped it all in blue Christmas lights.

We call it theforest because they’re technically contiguous: each chamber connects to others by ducts and tunnels drilled through the rock, stringing everything together in the name of systems integration and the interconnectedness of all things . Everything has to be stable, you see. No mission so epic can afford to keep all its life-support eggs in one basket but you can’t have all those pocket ecosystems going off in pursuit of their own selfish equilibria, either. So all is connected. There’s enough flowthrough to keep everything on the same page—even if all those tunnels do come with their own dropgates, the better to instantly isolate one glade from the others should some cataclysm break us into pieces.

I know this better than most. One of my specialties is Life Support.

I’ve always thought of Eriophora ’s forests as a—a refuge, I guess. They’re where Kai and I always seem to hash out our differences. It’s nicely atmospheric for sex. There’s warmth in the darkness, a softness to the nightlight glow of bacteria in their bulbs. The air smells of life instead of rock and metal.

17T was darker, more chaotic than most. The Leaning Glade, we called it. (What most of us called it, anyway; Kai preferred The Vomit Vale , but his inner ears were on the sensitive side and even he didn’t get woozy unless he wandered into the forward reaches where gravity smeared under your feet.) The hatch closed at our backs, swallowing us in brief darkness; it brightened to dim twilight as our eyes adjusted to analuciferin constellations glowing on all sides. We stood on a catwalk, taking deep grateful breaths half a meter above bedrock blanketed in drifts of thin soil.

We followed the path. My BUD flickered.

The catwalk forked. I nudged Lian to the right: “This way.” After a few meters I closed my eyes experimentally, experienced just the slightest uncertainty over the direction of down .

Glistening black meshes with gelatinous eyeballs glowing at their inte rstices. Thick ropey trunks arching up through the vault like a great charred rib cage. They leaned just a little, as though bent by wind.

BUD flickered again, faded, sparked back to life. We pushed on in the direction of that imaginary wind. The trees leaned further as we advanced; their bases thickened and spread wide across the ground, trunks buttressed against forces pulling simultaneously along different bearings. The Glade passes over the Higgs Conduit, between the core that contains our singularity and the maw where its wormhole emerges. The vectors get messy in between. Down is mostly coreward but a little forward too; how far those downs diverge depends on how fast Eri happens to be falling through the cosmos at any given moment. Twisted trees and Kai’s squicky inner ears are the price we pay for a reactionless drive.

BUD finally went down and s tayed down: a victim of signal-squelching rocks and bioelectric static and drive circuitry that couldn’t possibly be expected to contain such vast energies without emitting some of its own. The dead air was our privacy alarm. As long as we were blind, we were alone.

“So what the hell were you doing, Li?”

She didn’t answer at first. She didn’t answer at all.