Peter Watts: The Island

«That's, uh…»

«Half the mass of Mercury,» the chimp adds helpfully.

I whistle through my teeth. «And that's one organism?»

«I don't know yet.»

«It's got organic pigments. Fuck, it's talking . It's intelligent.»

«Most cyclic emanations from living sources are simple biorhythms,» the chimp points out. «Not intelligent signals.»

I ignore it and turn to Dix. «Assume it's a signal.»

He frowns. «Chimp says —»

« Assume . Use your imagination.»

I'm not getting through to him. He looks nervous.

He looks like that a lot, I realize.

« If someone were signaling you,» I say, « then what would you do?»

«Signal…» Confusion on that face, and a fuzzy circuit closing somewhere «…back?»

My son is an idiot.

«And if the incoming signal takes the form of systematic changes in light intensity, how —»

«Use the BI lasers, alternated to pulse between 700 and 3000 nanometers. Can boost an interlaced signal into the exawatt range without compromising our fenders; gives over a thousand Watts per square meter after diffraction. Way past detection threshold for anything that can sense thermal output from a red dwarf. And content doesn't matter if it's just a shout. Shout back. Test for echo.»

Okay, so my son is an idiot savant .

And he still looks unhappy — «But Chimp, he says no real information there, right?» — and that whole other set of misgivings edges to the fore again: He .

Dix takes my silence for amnesia. «Too simple, remember? Simple click train.»

I shake my head. There's more information in that signal than the chimp can imagine. There are so many things the chimp doesn't know. And the last thing I need is for this, this child to start deferring to it, to start looking to it as an equal or, God forbid, a mentor .

Oh, it's smart enough to steer us between the stars. Smart enough to calculate million-digit primes in the blink of an eye. Even smart enough for a little crude improvisation should the crew go too far off-mission.

Not smart enough to know a distress call when it sees one.

«It's a deceleration curve,» I tell them both. «It keeps slowing down . Over and over again. That's the message.»

Stop. Stop. Stop. Stop.

And I think it's meant for no one but us.

We shout back. No reason not to. And now we die again, because what's the point of staying up late? Whether or not this vast entity harbors real intelligence, our echo won't reach it for ten million corsecs. Another seven million, at the earliest, before we receive any reply it might send

Might as well hit the crypt in the meantime. Shut down all desires and misgivings, conserve whatever life I have left for moments that matter. Remove myself from this sparse tactical intelligence, from this wet-eyed pup watching me as though I'm some kind of sorcerer about to vanish in a puff of smoke. He opens his mouth to speak, and I turn away and hurry down to oblivion.

But I set my alarm to wake up alone.

I linger in the coffin for a while, grateful for small and ancient victories. The chimp's dead, blackened eye gazes down from the ceiling; in all these millions of years nobody's scrubbed off the carbon scoring. It's a trophy of sorts, a memento from the early incendiery days of our Great Struggle.

There's still something — comforting, I guess — about that blind, endless stare. I'm reluctant to venture out where the chimp's nerves have not been so thoroughly cauterised. Childish, I know. The damn thing already knows I'm up; it may be blind, deaf, and impotent in here, but there's no way to mask the power the crypt sucks in during a thaw. And it's not as though a bunch of club-wielding teleops are waiting to pounce on me the moment I step outside. These are the days of dйtente, after all. The struggle continues but the war has gone cold; we just go through the motions now, rattling our chains like an old married multiplet resigned to hating each other to the end of time.

After all the moves and countermoves, the truth is we need each other.

So I wash the rotten-egg stench from my hair and step into Eri's silent cathedral hallways. Sure enough the enemy waits in the darkness, turns the lights on as I approach, shuts them off behind me — but it does not break the silence.

Dix.

A strange one, that. Not that you'd expect anyone born and raised on Eriophora to be an archetype of mental health, but Dix doesn't even know what side he's on. He doesn't even seem to know he has to choose a side. It's almost as though he read the original mission statements and took them seriously , believed in the literal truth of the ancient scrolls: Mammals and Machinery, working together across the ages to explore the Universe! United! Strong! Forward the Frontier!

Rah.

Whoever raised him didn't do a great job. Not that I blame them; it can't have been much fun having a child underfoot during a build, and none of us were selected for our parenting skills. Even if bots changed the diapers and VR handled the infodumps, socialising a toddler couldn't have been anyone's idea of a good time. I'd have probably just chucked the little bastard out an airlock.

But even I would've brought him up to speed.

Something changed while I was away. Maybe the war's heated up again, entered some new phase. That twitchy kid is out of the loop for a reason. I wonder what it is.

I wonder if I care.

I arrive at my suite, treat myself to a gratuitous meal, jill off. Three hours after coming back to life I'm relaxing in the starbow commons. «Chimp.»

«You're up early,» it says at last, and I am; our answering shout hasn't even arrived at its destination yet. No real chance of new data for another two months, at least.

«Show me the forward feeds,» I command.

DHF428 blinks at me from the center of the lounge: Stop. Stop. Stop.

Maybe. Or maybe the chimp's right, maybe it's pure physiology. Maybe this endless cycle carries no more intelligence than the beating of a heart. But there's a pattern inside the pattern, some kind of flicker in the blink. It makes my brain itch.

«Slow the time-series,» I command. «By a hundred.»

It is a blink. 428's disk isn't darkening uniformly, it's eclipsing . As though a great eyelid were being drawn across the surface of the sun, from right to left.

«By a thousand.»

Chromatophores , the chimp called them. But they're not all opening and closing at once. The darkness moves across the membrane in waves .

A word pops into my head: latency .

«Chimp. Those waves of pigment. How fast are they moving?»

«About fifty-nine thousand kilometers per second.»

The speed of a passing thought.

And if this thing does think, it'll have logic gates, synapses — it's going to be a net of some kind. And if the net's big enough, there's an I in the middle of it. Just like me, just like Dix. Just like the chimp. (Which is why I educated myself on the subject, back in the early tumultuous days of our relationship. Know your enemy and all that.)

The thing about I is, it only exists within a tenth-of-a-second of all its parts. When we get spread too thin — when someone splits your brain down the middle, say, chops the fat pipe so the halves have to talk the long way around; when the neural architecture diffuses past some critical point and signals take just that much longer to pass from A to B — the system, well, decoheres . The two sides of your brain become different people with different tastes, different agendas, different senses of themselves.