21st Century Science Fiction (89 page)

Okay, let’s say it’s only got a
ten
-thousandth the synaptic density, that’s still—

A
hundred
thousandth. The merest mist of thinking meat. Any more conservative and I’d hypothesize it right out of existence.

Still twenty billion human brains.

Twenty
billion.

I don’t know how to feel about that. This is no mere alien.

But I’m not quite ready to believe in gods.

• • • •

I round the corner and run smack into Dix, standing like a golem in the middle of my living room. I jump about a meter straight up.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

He seems surprised by my reaction. “Wanted to—talk,” he says after a moment.

“You
never
come into someone’s home uninvited!”

He retreats a step, stammers: “Wanted, wanted—”

“To talk. And you do that in
public.
On the bridge, or in the commons, or—for that matter, you could just
comm
me.”

He hesitates. “Said you—
wanted
face to face. You said,
cultural tradition
.”

I did, at that. But not
here
. This is
my
place, these are my
private quarters
. The lack of locks on these doors is a safety protocol, not an invitation to walk into my home and
lie in wait
, and stand there like part of the fucking
furniture
. . .

“Why are you even
up
?” I snarl. “We’re not even supposed to come online for another two months.”

“Asked Chimp to get me up when you did.”

That fucking machine.

“Why are
you
up?” he asks, not leaving.

I sigh, defeated, and fall into a convenient pseudopod. “I just wanted to go over the preliminary data.” The implicit
alone
should be obvious.

“Anything?”

Evidently it isn’t. I decide to play along for a while. “Looks like we’re talking to an, an island. Almost six thousand klicks across. That’s the thinking part, anyway. The surrounding membrane’s pretty much empty. I mean, it’s all
alive
. It all photosynthesizes, or something like that. It eats, I guess. Not sure what.”

“Molecular cloud,” Dix says. “Organic compounds everywhere. Plus it’s concentrating stuff inside the envelope.”

I shrug. “Point is, there’s a size limit for the brain, but it’s
huge
, it’s . . .”

“Unlikely,” he murmurs, almost to himself.

I turn to look at him; the pseudopod reshapes itself around me. “What do you mean?”

“Island’s twenty-eight million square kilometers? Whole sphere’s seven quintillion. Island just happens to be between us and 428, that’s—one in fifty-billion odds.”

“Go on.”

He can’t. “Uh, just . . . just
unlikely
.”

I close my eyes. “How can you be smart enough to run those numbers in your head without missing a beat, and stupid enough to miss the obvious conclusion?”

That panicked, slaughterhouse look again. “Don’t—I’m not—”

“It
is
unlikely. It’s
astronomically
unlikely that we just happen to be aiming at the one intelligent spot on a sphere one-and-a-half AUs across. Which means . . .”

He says nothing. The perplexity in his face mocks me. I want to punch it.

But finally, the lights flicker on: “There’s, uh, more than one island? Oh! A
lot
of islands!”

This creature is part of the crew. My life will almost certainly depend on him some day.

That is a very scary thought.

I try to set it aside for the moment. “There’s probably a whole population of the things, sprinkled though the membrane like, like cysts I guess. The chimp doesn’t know how many, but we’re only picking up this one so far so they might be pretty sparse.”

There’s a different kind of frown on his face now. “Why
Chimp?
”

“What do you mean?”

“Why call him Chimp?”

“We call it
the
chimp.” Because the first step to humanising something is to give it a name.

“Looked it up. Short for
chimpanzee.
Stupid animal.”

“Actually, I think chimps were supposed to be pretty smart,” I remember.

“Not like us. Couldn’t even
talk.
Chimp can talk.
Way
smarter than those things. That name—it’s an insult.”

“What do you care?”

He just looks at me.

I spread my hands. “Okay, it’s not a chimp. We just call it that because it’s got roughly the same synapse count.”

“So gave him a small brain, then complain that he’s stupid all the time.”

My patience is just about drained. “Do you have a point or are you just blowing CO
₂
in—”

“Why not make him smarter?”

“Because you can never predict the behavior of a system more complex than you. And if you want a project to stay on track after you’re gone, you don’t hand the reins to anything that’s guaranteed to develop its own agenda.” Sweet smoking Jesus, you’d think
someone
would have told him about Ashby’s Law.

“So they lobotomized him,” Dix says after a moment.

“No. They didn’t
turn
it stupid, they
built
it stupid.”

“Maybe smarter than you think. You’re so much smarter, got
your
agenda, how come
he’s
still in control?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” I say.

“What?”

I let a grim smile peek through. “You’re only following orders from a bunch of other systems
way
more complex than you are.” You’ve got to hand it to them, too; dead for stellar lifetimes and those damn project admins are
still
pulling the strings.

“I don’t—
I’m
following?—”

“I’m sorry, dear.” I smile sweetly at my idiot offspring. “I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to the thing that’s making all those sounds come out of your mouth.”

Dix turns whiter than my panties.

I drop all pretense. “What were you thinking, chimp? That you could send this sock-puppet to invade my home and I wouldn’t notice?”

“Not—I’m not—it’s
me
,” Dix stammers. “
Me
talking.”

“It’s
coaching
you. Do you even know what ‘lobotomised’
means?
” I shake my head, disgusted. “You think I’ve forgotten how the interface works just because we all burned ours out?” A caricature of surprise begins to form on his face. “Oh, don’t even fucking
try
. You’ve been up for other builds, there’s no way you couldn’t have known. And you know we shut down our domestic links too, or you wouldn’t even be sneaking in here. And there’s nothing your lord and master can do about that because it
needs
us, and so we have reached what you might call an
accommodation
.”

I am not shouting. My tone is icy, but my voice is dead level. And yet Dix almost
cringes
before me.

There is an opportunity here, I realize.

I thaw my voice a little. I speak gently: “You can do that too, you know. Burn out your link. I’ll even let you come back here afterwards, if you still want to. Just to—talk. But not with that thing in your head.”

There is panic in his face, and, against all expectation it almost breaks my heart. “
Can’t
,” he pleads. “How I
learn
things, how I
train
. The
mission
. . .”

I honestly don’t know which of them is speaking, so I answer them both: “There is more than one way to carry out the mission. We have more than enough time to try them all. Dix is welcome to come back when he’s alone.”

They take a step towards me. Another. One hand, twitching, rises from their side as if to reach out, and there’s something on that lopsided face that I can’t quite recognize.

“But I’m your
son
,” they say.

I don’t even dignify it with a denial.

“Get out of my home.”

• • • •

A human periscope. The Trojan Dix. That’s a new one.

The chimp’s never tried such overt infiltration while we were up and about before. Usually, it waits until we’re all undead before invading our territories. I imagine custom-made drones never seen by human eyes, cobbled together during the long dark eons between builds; I see them sniffing through drawers and peeking behind mirrors, strafing the bulkheads with X-rays and ultrasound, patiently searching
Eriophora
’s catacombs millimeter by endless millimeter for whatever secret messages we might be sending each other down through time.

There’s no proof to speak of. We’ve left tripwires and telltales to alert us to intrusion after the fact, but there’s never been any evidence they’ve been disturbed. Means nothing, of course. The chimp may be stupid, but it’s also cunning, and a million years is more than enough time to iterate through every possibility using simpleminded brute force. Document every dust mote; commit your unspeakable acts; put everything back the way it was afterwards.

We’re too smart to risk talking across the eons. No encrypted strategies, no long-distance love letters, no chatty postcards showing ancient vistas long lost in the red shift. We keep all that in our heads, where the enemy will never find it. The unspoken rule is that we do not speak, unless it is face to face.

Endless idiotic games. Sometimes I almost forget what we’re squabbling over. It seems so trivial now, with an immortal in my sights.

Maybe that means nothing to you. Immortality must be ancient news to you. But I can’t even imagine it, although I’ve outlived worlds. All I have are moments: two or three hundred years, to ration across the lifespan of a universe. I could bear witness to any point in time, or any hundred-thousand, if I slice my life thinly enough—but I will never see
everything
. I will never see even a fraction.

My life will end. I have to
choose.

When you come to fully appreciate the deal you’ve made—ten or fifteen builds out, when the trade-off leaves the realm of mere
knowledge
and sinks deep as cancer into your bones—you become a miser. You can’t help it. You ration out your waking moments to the barest minimum: just enough to manage the build, to plan your latest countermove against the chimp, just enough (if you haven’t yet moved beyond the need for human contact) for sex and snuggles and a bit of warm mammalian comfort against the endless dark. And then you hurry back to the crypt, to hoard the remains of a human lifespan against the unwinding of the cosmos.

There’s been time for education. Time for a hundred postgraduate degrees, thanks to the best caveman learning tech. I’ve never bothered. Why burn down my tiny candle for a litany of mere fact, fritter away my precious, endless, finite life? Only a fool would trade book-learning for a ringside view of the Cassiopeia Remnant, even if you
do
need false-color enhancement to see the fucking thing.

Now, though. Now, I want to
know.
This creature crying out across the gulf, massive as a moon, wide as a solar system, tenuous and fragile as an insect’s wing: I’d gladly cash in some of my life to learn its secrets. How does it work? How can it even
live
here at the edge of absolute zero, much less think? What vast, unfathomable intellect must it possess, to see us coming from over half a lightyear away, to deduce the nature of our eyes and our instruments, to send a signal we can even
detect,
much less understand?

And what happens when we punch through it at a fifth the speed of light?

I call up the latest findings on my way to bed, and the answer hasn’t changed: not much. The damn thing’s already full of holes. Comets, asteroids, the usual protoplanetary junk careens through this system as it does through every other. Infra picks up diffuse pockets of slow outgassing here and there around the perimeter, where the soft vaporous vacuum of the interior bleeds into the harder stuff outside. Even if we were going to tear through the dead center of the thinking part, I can’t imagine this vast creature feeling so much as a pinprick. At the speed we’re going we’d be through and gone far too fast to overcome even the feeble inertia of a millimeter membrane.

And yet. Stop. Stop. Stop.

It’s not us, of course. It’s what we’re building. The birth of a gate is a violent, painful thing, a spacetime rape that puts out almost as much gamma and X as a microquasar. Any meat within the white zone turns to ash in an instant, shielded or not. It’s why
we
never slow down to take pictures.

One of the reasons, anyway.

We can’t stop, of course. Even changing course isn’t an option except by the barest increments.
Eri
soars like an eagle between the stars but she steers like a pig on the short haul; tweak our heading by even a tenth of a degree, and you’ve got some serious damage at twenty percent lightspeed. Half a degree would tear us apart: the ship might torque onto the new heading, but the collapsed mass in her belly would keep right on going, rip through all this surrounding superstructure without even feeling it.

Even tame singularities get set in their ways. They do not take well to change.

• • • •

We resurrect again, and the Island has changed its tune.

It gave up asking us to
stop stop stop
the moment our laser hit its leading edge. Now it’s saying something else entirely: dark hyphens flow across its skin, arrows of pigment converging towards some offstage focus like spokes pointing towards the hub of a wheel. The bullseye itself is offstage and implicit, far removed from 428’s bright backdrop, but it’s easy enough to extrapolate to the point of convergence six lightsecs to starboard. There’s something else, too: a shadow, roughly circular, moving along one of the spokes like a bead running along a string. It too migrates to starboard, falls off the edge of the Island’s makeshift display, is endlessly reborn at the same initial coordinates to repeat its journey.

Those coordinates: exactly where our current trajectory will punch through the membrane in another four months. A squinting God would be able to see the gnats and girders of ongoing construction on the other side, the great piecemeal torus of the Hawking Hoop already taking shape.