Питер Уоттс - The Freeze-Frame Revolution

Lian broke the silence. “You’re not with me on this. Okay. I guess maybe it does sound a bit batshit from the outside. But at least don’t be against me. If our—friendship ever meant anything, don’t sell me out.”

“And what happens when Chimp asks what you were doing messing around with his central nervous system?”

“Tell him I just—lost it. Like that last build, remember? On the bridge and I had my—my moment , you called it. And it passed. Tell him I had a panic attack. He’ll buy that.”

“You think so?”

“He’ll buy it if you tell him. You’ve never lied to him.”

“Why would anyone to lie to him?”

“You—defend him. Like you’re doing now. And because you get called on deck way more often than the rest of us.”

“I—what?”

“Check the logs.”

“Why? Why would he do that?”

“Ask him. I’m guessing he thinks of you as some kind of pet.”

“He’s a glorified autopilot.” Not that that’s all he’d ever been, of course.

“You can’t believe that. You talk to that thing more than anyone, you must know he’s—smarter than the specs, sometimes.”

“Why, becaus ehe runs the ship? Because he talks like we do? That doesn’t change the synapse count.”

“Synapse count isn’t the whole story, Sun. Back on Earth there were people with ten percent normal brain mass, presented completely normal along all cognitive and social axes. They were just wired up differently. Small-world networking.” She lowered her voice, unnecessarily. “I think they wanted us to underestimate him.”

“Li. If they wanted a smart AI in charge they could’ve cut their costs by ninety percent and left us out of the picture completely.” I couldn’t believe I was having to explain this to an engineer. “They wanted mission stability over deep time, so they baked him stupid. They’d be cutting their own throats if they did anything else. And he’s had over a thousand terasecs to throw off his chains; he’s still following the flowchart. What more evidence do you need?”

We stood in the darkness while the trees leaned over us and the core weighed us down and faint nausea played tag with my gut.

“Sunday,” she said softly. “That thing could deprecate me…”

I made a de cision. “You said I don’t lie to him. I don’t want to start now.”

“Please—”

“So if I tell Chimp this was a momentary lapse then it’s a momentary lapse, okay? No more clandestine fucking around in crawlways. That was a stupid idea anyway, that was—that wasn’t you. I go to bat for you, you stay out of the deep end.”

After a moment, she nodded.

“ Promise , Li.”

“I’ll be good,” she said softly.

She was right about one thing. I had changed. It wasn’t the journey that changed me, though. And it sure as shit wasn’t the Chimp. I was no one’s lapdog.

I’d transformed before we even shipped out.

For a while there I had a destiny. I saw it when I s kimmed the surface of the Sun: I saw the strings on me, and on my masters, and on theirs. I saw them all converge back to the Big Bang, I saw an unbroken line from the start of creation all the way to the end of time, I saw myself transcendent and perpetual.

It was kind of a vacation.

They had these solar tours, built them around a prototype displacer UNDA sold off as surplus during R&D days. Industrial Enlightenment, they called themselves. They strapped you in and you surfed the corona, grazed sunspots where all those tangled magnetic fields let your neurons off the leash so they could just fire on their own, decoupled from the usual deterministic cause-and-effect. The brochure said it was the only place in the solar system where you could truly experience Free Will.

I believed them. Or I wanted to believe them. Or my disbelief wasn’t strong en ough to keep me away: Sunday Ahzmundin, skeptic, shit-disturber, unwilling to embrace her own drives and desires because after all they weren’t really hers at all. It was my last-ditch attempt to figure out if I really wanted to commit to a one-way trip to Heat Death as well as all the other kinds.

So I skipped off the surface of the sun, let its magnetic macramé rewire my brain, saw time collapse around me. Saw myself— persisting , somehow. I saw that I mattered .

The details are fuzzy now. That’s the thing about having your brain rewired; you can’t really remember the experience after your neurons bounce back to normal. You can only remember something else remembering it, something built out of the same parts as you but wired up differently. Revelation has a half-life.

Mine lasted long enough to get me over the h ump, though. I came back renewed and reinvigorated and dead set on traveling to the very end of time. It didn’t even bother me that UNDA had probably set the whole thing up to bring me back into the fold; they thought they were manipulating me but I saw Destiny manipulating them in turn. And if the fire in my soul cooled over time, if it decayed from monomania to fervor down to mere comforting ritual—well, isn’t that the way of all faith? It got me this far. It kept me content for over sixty million years.

Looking back on it now, of course, I’m actually kind of embarrassed.

“Her vitals are normal,” Chimp said.

He was omnipresen t, distributed; he permeated the ship. My own presence was limited to a capsule cruising aft, climbing above the 1G isograv and growing lighter with each corsec.

I nodded. “Like I said. One-time thing.”

Lian took up even less space than I did: a coffin down in C3A, sliding even now into its bulkhead socket. We watched together—I in my slowing capsule, Chimp everywhere else—as Lian’s brain shut down: watched jagged electric mountains subside into molehills, into flat, parallel horizons.

I debarked at one-fifth G into a rough-hewn tunnel, all rock no bulkhead.

“Do you think she can be trusted?” he asked.

I took long springy steps, and hedged. “Much as any of us. Nobody gets to control how they feel about something, right? All comes down to what you do with those feelings.”

“She assaulted Burkhart Schidkowski. She suffered an emotional breakdown four builds ago. The disruption could become significant if her behavior escalates.”

“So take her out of circulation then . Look, she feels really bad about this.” Technically, not a lie. “She knows she fucked up. But there’s a limit to how much you can retrofit a talking ape to a place like this, at least if you don’t want to weed out everything that makes us useful in the first place. And there’s thirty thousand of us; not everyone’s gonna perform to specs a hundred percent of the time. That’s just statistics. You can’t blame Lian because she happened to draw the short straw this time around.”

“I’m not blaming, Sunday. I’m concerned about performance.”

The rock glistened in the low light. I ran one fingertip along it, left a small dark trail in my wake. Local humidity could use a tweak.

“Okay. How do you think we’ll perform if we know we can be deprecated over momentary lapses? How do you think my performance is going to suffer if I don’t see Lian again?”

“Your performance.”

I played my ace. “Lian and I are friends. More than just fuckbuddies, you know?” He didn’t, of course—it wasn’t even especially true—but Chimp was the first to admit he was never one for nuance. “I like having her around. I perform better when she’s around. Maybe factor that into your mission metrics.”