James Corey - Abaddon's Gate

“You’re going to get killed,” Tilly said. She looked like she might start crying. “You told security. You did your part. Let it go. You’re a minister, not a cop.”

“I’ll need an EVA pack. Do you know where they keep those? Are they near the airlocks?”

“You’re insane,” Tilly said. “I can’t be part of this.”

“It’s okay,” Anna said. “I’ll be back.”

“Naomi,” Holden said again. “Come in. Please. Please respond.”

The silent radio felt like a threat. Miller had paused, his face bleak and apologetic. Holden wondered how many other people had looked at that exact expression on Miller’s face. It seemed designed to go with words like There’s been an accident and The DNA matches your son’s . Holden could feel his hands trembling. It didn’t matter.

“ Rocinante . Naomi, come in .”

“Doesn’t mean anything,” Miller said. “She could be just fine, but the comm array went down. Or maybe she’s busy fixing something.”

“Or maybe she’s dying by centimeters,” Holden said. “I’ve got to go. I have to get back to her.”

Miller shook his head.

“It’s a longer trip back out than it was getting here. You can’t go as fast anymore. By the time you get back, she’ll have figured out whatever needed figuring.”

Or she’ll be dead , Miller didn’t say. Holden wondered what it meant that the protomolecule could put Miller on its hand like a puppet and the detective could still be thoughtful enough to leave out the possibility that everyone on the Roci was gone.

“I have to try.”

Miller sighed. For a moment, his pupils flickered blue, like there were tiny bathypelagic fish swimming in the deep trenches of his eyeballs.

“You want to help her? You want to help all of them? Come with me. Now. You run back home, we won’t get to find out what happened. And you may not get the chance to come back here. Plus, you can bet your friends are regrouping back there, and they can still gently rip your arms off if they catch you.”

Holden felt like there were two versions of himself pulling at his mind. Naomi might be hurt. Might be dead. Alex and Amos too. He had to be there for them. But there was also a small, quiet part of himself that knew Miller was right. It was too late.

“You can tell the station that there are people on those ships,” he said. “You can ask it to help them.”

“I can tell a rock that it ought to be secretary-general. Doesn’t mean it’s gonna listen. All this?” Miller waved his hands at the dark walls. “It’s dumb. Utilitarian. No creativity or complex analysis.”

“Really?” Holden said, his curiosity peeking through the panic and anger and fear. “Why not?”

“Some things, it’s better if they’re predictable. No one wants the station coming up with its own bad ideas. We should hurry.”

“Where are we going?” Holden said, pausing for a few deep breaths. He’d been at low g for too long without taking the time for exercise. His cardio had suffered. The dangers of growing rich and lazy.

“I’m going to need you to do something for me,” Miller replied. “I need access to the… shit, I don’t know. Call ’em records.”

Holden finished his panting, then straightened and nodded for Miller to resume their walk. As they moved down the gently sloping corridor he said, “Aren’t you already plugged in?”

“I’m aware. The station is in lockdown, and they didn’t exactly give me the root password. I need you to open it up for me.”

“Not sure what I can do that you can’t,” Holden said. “Other than be a charming dinner guest.”

Miller stopped at another seeming dead end, touched the wall, and a portal irised open. He gestured Holden through, then followed and closed the door behind them. They were in another large chamber, vaguely octagonal and easily fifty meters long on each face. More of the insectile mechs littered the space, but the glass pillars were not in evidence. Instead, at the center of the chamber stood a massive construct of glowing blue metal. It was octagonal, a smaller version of the dimensions of the room, but only a few meters wide on each face. It didn’t glow any brighter than the rest of the room, but Holden could feel something coming off of it, an almost physical pressure that made walking toward it difficult. His suit said that the atmosphere had changed, that it was rich with complex organic chemicals and nitrogen.

“Sometimes, having a body at all means you’ve got a certain level of status. If you aren’t pretty damn trusted, you don’t get to walk around in the fallen world.”

“The fallen world?”

Miller shuddered and leaned his hand out against the wall. It was a profoundly human gesture of distress. The glowing moss of the wall didn’t respond at all. Miller’s lips were beginning to turn black.

“Fallen world. The substrate. Matter. ”

“Are you all right?” Holden asked.

Miller nodded, but he looked like he was about to vomit. “There’s time’s I start knowing things that are too big for my head. It’s better in here, but there’re going to be some questions that don’t fit in me. Just thinking with all this crap connected to the back of my head is a full contact sport, and if I get too much, I’m pretty sure they’ll… ah… call it reboot me. I mean, sure, consciousness is an illusion and blah blah blah, but I’d rather not go there if we can help it. I don’t know how much the next one would remember.”

Holden stopped walking, then turned and gave Miller a hard shove. Both of them staggered backward. “You seem pretty real to me.”

Miller held up his finger. “Seem. Good verb. You ever wondered why I leave as soon as anyone else shows up?”

“I’m special?”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t go that far.”

“Fine,” Holden said. “I’ll bite. Why doesn’t anyone else see you?”

“I’m not sure we’ve got time for this, but…” Miller took off his hat and scratched his head. “So your brain has a hundred billion brain cells and about five hundred trillion synapses.”

“Will this be on the test?”

“Don’t be an asshole,” Miller said conversationally, and put his hat back on. “And that shit is custom grown. No two brains are exactly alike. Guess how much processing power it takes to really model even one human brain? More than every human computer ever built put together, and that’s before we even start getting to the crap that goes on inside the cells.”

“Okay.”

“Now picture those synapses as buttons on a keyboard. Five hundred trillion buttons. And say that a brain looking at something and thinking, ‘That’s a flower’ punches a couple billion of those keys in just the right pattern. Except it ain’t near that easy. It isn’t just a flower, it’s a pile of associations. Smells, the way a stem feels in your fingers, the flower you gave your mom once, the flower you gave your girl. A flower you stepped on by accident and it made you sad. And being sad brings on a whole pile of other associations.”

“I get it,” Holden said, holding up his hands in surrender. “It’s complicated.”

“Now picture you need to push exactly the right buttons to make someone think of a person, hear them speaking, remember the clothes they wore and the way they smelled and how they would sometimes take off their hat to scratch their head.”

“Wait,” Holden said. “Are there bits of protomolecule in my brain?”

“Not exactly. You may have noticed I’m non-local.”

“What the hell does that even mean?”

“Well,” Miller said. “Now you’re asking me to explain microwaves to a monkey.”