Download as , zipped , 's
or 's (with thanks to both),
(more thanks!), or just read online (below)
Cover art .
The Niblet Memorial Kibble Fund
Blindsight
Peter Watts
If we're not in pain, we're not alive.
is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of
imagining what is, in fact, real.&
Gourevitch
will die like a dog for no good reason.&
to touch the past.
Try to deal with the past.
It's not real.
just a dream.&
It didn't start out here.
Not with the scramblers or Rorschach,
not with Big Ben or Theseus or the vampires.
Most people
would say it started with the Fireflies, but they'd be wrong.
ended with all those things.
For me, it began with Robert Paglino.
At the age of eight, he was my best and only friend.
We were fellow
outcasts, bound by complementary misfortune.
Mine was developmental.
His was genetic:
an uncontrolled genotype that left him predisposed
to nearsightedness, acne, and (as it later turned out) a
susceptibility to narcotics.
His parents had never had him
optimized.
Those few TwenCen relics who still believed in God also
held that one shouldn't try to improve upon His handiwork.
although both of us could have been repaired, only one of us
I arrived at the playground to find Pag the center of attention for
some half-dozen kids, those lucky few in front punching him in the
head, the others making do with taunts of mongrel and polly
while waiting their turn.
I watched him raise his arms, almost
hesitantly, to ward off the worst of the blows.
I could see into his
head better than I c he was scared that his
attackers might think those hands were coming up to hit back,
that they'd read it as an act of defiance and hurt him even more.
Even then, at the tender age of eight and with half my mind gone, I
was becoming a superlative observer.
But I didn't know what to do.
I hadn't seen much of Pag lately.
I was pretty sure he'd been
avoiding me.
Still, when your best friend's in trouble you help out,
Even if the odds are impossible?and how many
eight-year-olds would go up against six bigger kids for a sandbox
buddy??at least you call for backup.
Flag a sentry.
Something.
I just stood there.
I didn't even especially want to help
That didn't make sense.
Even if he hadn't been my best friend, I
should at least have empathized.
I'd suffered less than Pag in the
w my seizures tended to keep the other kids at a
distance, scared them even as they incapacitated me.
I was no stranger to the taunts and insults, or the foot that
appears from nowhere to trip you up en route from A to B.
I knew how
that felt.
Or I had, once.
But that part of me had been cut out along with the bad wiring.
was still working up the algorithms to get it back, still learning by
observation.
Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their
Every child knows that much instinctively.
Maybe I should
just let that process unfold, maybe I shouldn't try to mess with
Then again,
Pag's parents hadn't messed with nature, and
look what it got them:
a son curled up in the dirt while a bunch of
engineered superboys kicked in his ribs.
In the end, propaganda worked where empathy failed.
Back then I
didn't so much think as observe, didn't deduce so much as
remember?and what I remembered was a thousand
inspirational stories lauding anyone who ever stuck up for the
So I picked up a rock the size of my fist and hit two of Pag's
assailants across the backs of their heads before anyone even knew I
was in the game.
A third, turning to face the new threat, took a blow to the face that
audibly crunched the bones of his cheek.
I remember wondering why I
didn't take any satisfaction from that sound, why it meant nothing
beyond the fact I had one less opponent to worry about.
The rest of them ran at the sight of blood.
One of the braver
promised me I was dead, shouted &Fucking zombie!&
over his shoulder as he disappeared around the corner.
Three decades it took, to see the irony in that remark.
Two of the enemy twitched at my feet.
I kicked one in the head until
it stopped moving, turned to the other.
Something grabbed my arm and
I swung without thinking, without looking until Pag yelped and
ducked out of reach.
&Oh,& I said.
One thing lay motionless.
The other moaned and held its head and
curled up in a ball.
&Oh shit,& Pag panted.
Blood coursed unheeded from
his nose and splattered down his shirt.
His cheek was turning blue
and yellow.
&Oh shit oh shit oh shit...&
I thought of something to say.
&You all right?&
&Oh shit, you?I mean, you never...&
wiped his mouth.
Blood smeared the back of his hand. &Oh man
are we in trouble.&
&They started it.&
&Yeah, but you?I mean, look at them!&
The moaning thing was crawling away on all fours.
I wondered how
long it would be before it found reinforcements.
I wondered if I
should kill it before then.
&You'da never done that before,& Pag said.
Before the operation, he meant.
I actually did feel something then?faint, distant, but
unmistakable.
I felt angry.
&They started?&
Pag backed away, eyes wide.
&What are you doing? Put
that down!&
I'd raised my fists.
I didn't remember doing that.
I unclenched
It took a while.
I had to look at my hands very hard for a
long, long time.
The rock dropped to the ground, blood-slick and glistening.
&I was trying to help.&
I didn't understand why he
couldn't see that.
&You're, you're not the same,& Pag said from a safe
&You're not even Siri any more.&
&I am too.
Don't be a fuckwad.&
&They cut out your brain!&
&Only half.
For the ep?&
&I know for the epilepsy!
You think I don't know?
you were in that half?or, like, part of you
He struggled with the words, with the concept behind
&And now you're different.
It's like, your mom
and dad murdered you?&
&My mom and dad,& I said, suddenly quiet, &saved my
I would have died.&
&I think you did die,& said my best and only friend.
&I think Siri died, they scooped him out and threw him
away and you're some whole other kid that just, just grew back
out of what was left.
You're not the same.
Ever since.
You're not the same.&
I still don't know if Pag really knew what he was saying.
mother had just pulled the plug on whatever game he'd been wired into
for the previous eighteen hours, forced him outside for some fresh
Maybe, after fighting pod people in gamespace, he couldn't help
but see them everywhere.
But you could make a case for what he said.
I do remember Helen
telling me (and telling me) how difficult it was to adjust.
Like you had a whole new personality, she said, and why not?
There's a reason they call it radical hemispherectomy:
the brain thrown out with yesterday's krill, the remaining half
press-ganged into double duty.
Think of all the rewiring that one
lonely hemisphere must have struggled with as it tried to take up the
It turned out okay, obviously.
The brain's a very flexible
it took some doing, but it adapted.
I adapted.
Think of all that must have been squeezed out, deformed,
reshaped by the time the renovations were through.
argue that I'm a different person than the one who used to occupy
this body.
The grownups showed up eventually, of course.
Medicine was bestowed,
ambulances called.
Parents were outraged, diplomatic volleys
exchanged, but it's tough to drum up neighborhood outrage on behalf
of your injured baby when playground surveillance from three angles
shows the little darling?and five of his buddies? kicking
in the ribs of a disabled boy.
My mother, for her part, recycled
the usual complaints about problem children and absentee fathers?Dad
was off again in some other hemisphere?but the dust settled
pretty quickly.
Pag and I even stayed friends, after a short hiatus
that reminded us both of the limited social prospects open to
schoolyard rejects who don't stick together.
So I survived that and a million other childhood experiences.
up and I got along.
I learned to fit in.
I observed, recorded,
derived the algorithms and mimicked appropriate behaviors.
of it was?heartfelt, I guess the word is.
I had friends and
enemies, like everyone else.
I chose them by running through
checklists of behaviors and circumstances compiled from years of
observation.
I may have grown up distant but I grew up objective, and I
have Robert Paglino to thank for that.
His seminal observation set
everything in motion.
It led me into Synthesis, fated me to our
disastrous encounter with the Scramblers, spared me the worse fate
befalling Earth.
Or the better one, I suppose, depending on your
point of view.
Point of view matters:
I see that now, blind,
talking to myself, trapped in a coffin falling past the edge of the
solar system.
I see it for the first time since some beaten bloody
friend on a childhood battlefield convinced me to throw my own point
of view away.
He may have been wrong.
I may have been.
But that, that
distance?that chronic sense of being an alien among your
own kind?it's not entirely a bad thing.
It came in especially handy when the real aliens came calling.
makes noise.&
?Susanne Vega
Imagine you are Siri Keeton:
You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a
record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty
You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and
leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months
on standby.
The body inflates in painful increments: blood
flesh pe ribs crack in your ears
with sudden unaccustomed flexion.
Your joints have seized up through
You're a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae.
You'd scream if you had the breath.
Vampires did this all the time, you remember.
It was normal
for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation.
They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if
that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn't done them in at the dawn
of civilization.
Maybe they still can.
They're back now, after all?
raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched
together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of
sociopaths and high-functioning autistics.
One of them commands this
very mission.
A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it
too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space.
Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.
The pain begins, just slightly, to recede.
You fire up your inlays
and access your own vitals:
it'll be long minutes before your body
responds fully to motor commands,
hours before it stops hurting.
The pain's an unavoidable side effect.
That's just what happens when
you splice vampire subroutines into Human code.
You asked about
painkillers once, but nerve blocks of any kind compromise
metabolic reactivation.
Suck it up, soldier.
You wonder if this was how it felt for Chelsea, before the end.
that evokes a whole other kind of pain, so you block it out and
concentrate on the life pushing its way back into your extremities.
Suffering in silence, you check the logs for fresh telemetry.
You think:
That can't be right.
Because if it is, you're in the wrong part of the universe.
not in the Kuiper Belt where you belong:
you're high above the
ecliptic and deep into the Oort, the realm of long-period comets that
only grace the sun every million years or so.
You've gone
interstellar, which means (you bring up the system clock)
you've been undead for eighteen hundred days.
You've overslept by almost five years.
The lid of your coffin slides away.
Your own cadaverous body
reflects from the mirrored bulkhead opposite, a desiccated lungfish
waiting for the rains.
Bladders of isotonic saline cling to its
limbs like engorged antiparasites, like the opposite of leeches.
remember the needles going in just before you shut down, way back
when your veins were more than dry twisted filaments of beef jerky.
Szpindel's reflection stares back from his own pod to your immediate
His face is as bloodless and skeletal as yours.
sunken eyes jiggle in their sockets as he reacquires his own links,
sensory interfaces so massive that your own off-the-shelf inlays
amount to shadow-puppetry in comparison.
You hear coughing and the rustling of limbs just past line-of-sight,
catch glimpses of reflected motion where the others stir at the edge
of vision.
&Wha?& Your voice is barely more than a hoarse
Szpindel works his jaw.
Bone cracks audibly.
&?Sssuckered,& he hisses.
You haven't even met the aliens yet, and already they're running
rings around you.
So we dragged ourselves back from the dead:
five part-time cadavers,
naked, emaciated, barely able to move even in zero gee.
We emerged
from our coffins like premature moths ripped from their cocoons,
still half-grub.
We were alone and off course and utterly helpless,
and it took a conscious effort to remember:
they would never have
risked our lives if we hadn't been essential.
&Morning, commissar.&
Isaac Szpindel reached one
trembling, insensate hand for the feedback gloves at the base of his
Just past him, Susan James was curled into a loose fetal ball,
murmuring to herselves.
Only Amanda Bates, already dressed and
cycling through a sequence of bone-cracking isometrics,
anything approaching mobility.
Every now and then she tried bouncing
a rubber b but not even she was up to catching
it on the rebound yet.
The journey had melted us down to a common archetype.
James' round
cheeks and hips, Szpindel's high forehead and lumpy, lanky
chassis?even the enhanced carboplatinum brick shit-house that
Bates used for a body? all had shriveled to the same desiccated
collection of sticks and bones.
Even our hair seemed to have become
strangely discolored during the voyage, although I knew that was
impossible.
More likely it was just filtering the pallor of the skin
The pre-dead James had been dirty blond, Szpindel's
hair had been almost dark enough to call black? but the
stuff floating from their scalps looked the same dull kelpy brown to
Bates kept her head shaved, but even her eyebrows weren't as
rusty as I remembered them.
We'd revert to our old selves soon enough.
Just add water.
though, the old slur was freshly relevant:
the Undead really did all
look the same, if you didn't know how to look.
If you did, of course?if you forgot appearance and watched for
motion, ignored meat and studied topology?you'd never
mistake one for another.
Every facial tic was a data point, every
conversational pause spoke volumes more than the words to either
I could see James' personae shatter and coalesce in the
flutter of an eyelash.
Szpindel's unspoken distrust of Amanda Bates
shouted from the corner of his smile.
Every twitch of the phenotype
cried aloud to anyone who knew the language.
&Where's?& James croaked, coughed, waved one spindly
arm at Sarasti's empty coffin gaping at the end of the row.
Szpindel's lips cracked in a small rictus.
&Gone back to Fab,
Getting the ship to build some dirt to lie on.&
&Probably communing with the Captain.&
Bates breathed
louder than she spoke, a dry rustle from pipes still getting
reacquainted with the idea of respiration.
James again:
&Could do that up here.&
&Could take a dump up here, too,& Szpindel rasped.
things you do by yourself, eh?&
And some things you kept to yourself.
Not many baselines
felt comfortable locking stares with a vampire?Sarasti, ever
courteous, tended to avoid eye contact for exactly that reason?but
there were other surfaces to his topology, just as mammalian and just
as readable.
If he had withdrawn from public view, maybe I was the
Maybe he was keeping secrets.
After all, Theseus damn well was.
She'd taken us a good fifteen AUs towards our destination before
something scared her off course.
Then she'd skidded north like a
startled cat and started climbing:
a wild high three-gee burn off
the ecliptic, thirteen hundred tonnes of momentum bucking against
Newton's First. She'd emptied her Penn tanks, bled dry her substrate
mass, squandered a hundred forty days' of fuel in hours.
Then a long
cold coast through the abyss, years of stingy accounting, the thrust
of every antiproton weighed against the drag of sieving it from the
Teleportation isn't magic:
the Icarus stream couldn't send us
the actual antimatter it made, only the quantum specs.
had to filterfeed the raw material from space, one ion at a time.
For long dark years she'd made do on pure inertia, hoarding every
swallowed atom.
T ionizing lasers strafing the space
a ramscoop thrown wide in a hard brake.
The weight of a
trillion trillion protons slowed her down and refilled her gut
and flattened us all over again.
Theseus had burned
relentless until almost the moment of our resurrection.
It was easy enough to our course was there in
ConSensus for anyone to see.
Exactly why the ship had blazed that
trail was another matter.
Doubtless it would all come out during the
post-rez briefing.
We were hardly the first vessel to travel under
the cloak of sealed orders, and if there'd been a pressing
need to know by now we'd have known by now.
Still, I wondered who
had locked out the Comm logs.
Mission Control, maybe.
Or Sarasti.
Or Theseus herself, for that matter.
It was easy to forget
the Quantical AI at the heart of our ship.
It stayed so discreetly
in the background, nurtured and carried us and permeated our
existence like an unobtrusive G but like God, it never took your
Sarasti was the official intermediary.
When the ship did speak, it
spoke to him? and Sarasti called it Captain.
So did we all.
He'd given us four hours to come back.
It took more than three just
to get me out of the crypt.
By then my brain was at least firing on
most of its synapses, although my body?still sucking fluids
like a thirsty sponge? continued to ache with every movement.
I swapped out drained electrolyte bags for fresh ones and headed aft.
Fifteen minutes to spin-up.
Fifty to the post-resurrection briefing.
Just enough time for those who preferred gravity-bound sleep to haul
their personal effects into the drum and stake out their allotted 4.4
square meters of floor space.
Gravity?or any centripetal facsimile thereof?did not
appeal to me.
I set up my own tent in zero-gee and as far to stern
as possible, nuzzling the forward wall of the starboard shuttle tube.
The tent inflated like an abscess on Theseus' spine, a little
climate-controlled bubble of atmosphere in the dark cavernous vacuum
beneath the ship's carapace.
all of thirty seconds to stick them to the wall, and another thirty
to program the tent's environment.
Afterwards I went for a hike.
After five years, I needed the
Stern was closest, so I started there:
at the shielding that
separated payload from propulsion.
A single sealed hatch blistered
the aft bulkhead dead center.
Behind it, a service tunnel wormed
back through machinery best left untouched by human hands.
superconducting torus
the antennae fan behind
it, unwound now into an indestructible soap-bubble big enough to
shroud a city, its face turned sunward to catch the faint quantum
sparkle of the Icarus antimatter stream.
then the telematter reactor, where raw hydrogen and refined
information conjured fire three hundred times hotter than the sun's.
I knew the incantations, of course?antimatter cracking and
deconstruction, the teleportation of quantum serial numbers?but
it was still magic to me, how we'd come so far so fast.
have been magic to anyone.
Except Sarasti, maybe.
Around me, the same magic worked at cooler temperatures and to less
volatile ends: a small riot of chutes and dispensers crowded the
bulkhead on all sides.
A few of those openings would choke on my
fist: one or two could swallow me whole.
Theseus' fabrication
plant could build everything from cutlery to cockpits.
Give it a big
enough matter stockpile and it could have even been built another
Theseus, albeit in many small pieces and over a very long
Some wondered if it could build another crew as well, although
we'd all been assured that was impossible.
Not even these machines
had fine enough fingers to reconstruct a few trillion synapses in the
space of a human skull.
Not yet, anyway.
I believed it.
They would never have shipped us out fully-assembled
if there'd been a cheaper alternative.
I faced forward.
Putting the back of my head against that sealed
hatch I could see almost to Theseus' bow,
an uninterrupted
line-of-sight extending to a tiny dark bull's-eye thirty meters
It was like staring at a great textured target in shades of
white and gray:
concentric circles, hatches centered within
bulkheads one behind another, perfectly aligned.
Every one stood
open, in nonchalant defiance of a previous generation's safety codes.
We could keep them closed if we wanted to, if it made us feel safer.
That was all it would do,
it wouldn't improve our empirical
odds one whit.
In the event of trouble those hatches would slam shut
long milliseconds before Human senses could even make sense of an
They weren't even computer-controlled.
Theseus' body
parts had reflexes.
I pushed off against the stern plating?wincing at the tug and
stretch of disused tendons?and coasted forward, leaving Fab
The shuttle-access hatches to Scylla and Charybdis
briefly constricted my passage to either side.
Past them the spine
widened into a corrugated extensible cylinder two meters across
and?at the moment?maybe fifteen long.
A pair of ladders
ran opposite each ot raised portholes the size
of manhole covers stippled the bulkhead to either side.
those just looked into the hold.
A couple served as general-purpose
airlocks, should anyone want to take a stroll beneath the carapace.
One opened into my tent.
Another, four meters further forward,
opened into Bates'.
From a third, just short of the forward bulkhead, Jukka Sarasti
climbed into view like a long white spider.
If he'd been Human I'd have known instantly what I saw there, I'd
have smelled murderer all over his topology.
And I wouldn't
have been able to even guess at the number of his victims, because
his affect was so utterly without remorse.
The killing of a hundred
would leave no more stain on Sarasti's surfaces than the swatting of
guilt beaded and rolled off this creature like water on
But Sarasti wasn't human.
Sarasti was a whole different animal, and
coming from him all those homicidal refractions meant nothing more
than predator.
He had the inclination,
whether he had ever acted on it was between him and Mission Control.
Maybe they cut you some slack, I didn't say to him.
it's just a cost of doing business.
You're mission-critical, after
For all I know you cut a deal.
You're so very smart, you know
we wouldn't have brought you back in the first place if we hadn't
needed you.
From the day they cracked the vat you knew you
had leverage.
Is that how it works, Jukka?
You save the world, and the folks
who hold your leash agree to look the other way?
As a child I'd read tales about jungle predators transfixing their
prey with a stare.
Only after I'd met Jukka Sarasti did I know how
But he wasn't looking at me now.
He was focused on
installing his own tent, and even if he had looked me in the
eye there'd have been nothing to see but the dark wraparound visor he
wore in deference to Human skittishness.
He ignored me as I grabbed
a nearby rung and squeezed past.
I could have sworn I smelled raw meat on his breath.
Into the drum (drums, the BioMed hoop at the back
spun on its own bearings).
I flew through the center of a cylinder
sixteen meters across.
Theseus' spinal nerves ran along its
axis, the exposed plexii and piping bundled against the ladders on
either side.
Past them, Szpindel's and James' freshly-erected tents
rose from nooks on opposite sides of the world.
Szpindel himself
floated off my shoulder, still naked but for his gloves, and I could
tell from the way his fingers moved that his favorite color was
He anchored himself to one of three stairways to nowhere
arrayed around the drum:
steep narrow steps rising five vertical
meters from the deck into empty air.
The next hatch gaped dead-center of the drum' pipes
and conduits plunged into the bulkhead to each side.
I grabbed a
convenient rung to slow myself?biting down once more on the
pain?and floated through.
T-junction.
The spinal corridor continued forward, a smaller
diverticulum branched off to an EVA cubby and the forward airlock.
stayed the course and found myself back in the crypt, mirror-bright
and less than two meters deep.
Empty po sealed
ones huddled to the right.
We were so irreplaceable we'd come with
replacements.
They slept on, oblivious.
I'd met three of them back
in training.
Hopefully none of us would be getting reacquainted any
time soon.
Only four pods to starboard, though.
No backup for Sarasti.
Another hatchway.
Smaller this time.
I squeezed through into the
Dim light there, a silent shifting mosaic of icons and
alphanumerics iterating across dark glassy surfaces.
Not so much
bridge as cockpit, and a cramped one at that.
I'd emerged between
two acceleration couches, each surrounded by a horseshoe array of
controls and readouts.
Nobody expected to ever use this
compartment.
Theseus was perfectly capable of running
herself, and if she wasn't we were capable of running her from our
inlays, and if we weren't the odds were overwhelming that we were all
dead anyway.
Still, against that astronomically off-the-wall chance,
this was where one or two intrepid survivors could pilot the ship
home again after everything else had failed.
Between the footwells the engineers had crammed one last hatch and
one last passageway:
to the observation blister on Theseus'
I hunched my shoulders (tendons cracked and complained) and
pushed through?
?into darkness.
Clamshell shielding covered the outside of the
dome like a pair of eyelids squeezed tight.
A single icon glowed
softly from a faint stray light followed me
through from the spine, brushed dim fingers across the concave
enclosure.
The dome resolved in faint shades of blue and gray as my
eyes adjusted.
A stale draft stirred the webbing floating from the
rear bulkhead, mixed oil and machinery at the back of my throat.
Buckles clicked faintly in the breeze like impoverished wind chimes.
I reached out and touched the crystal:
the innermost layer of two,
warm air piped through the gap between to cut the cold.
completely, though.
My fingertips chilled instantly.
Space out there.
Perhaps, en route to our original destination, Theseus had
seen something that scared her clear out of the solar system.
likely she hadn't been running away from anything but to
something else, something that hadn't been discovered until we'd
already died and gone from Heaven.
In which case...
I reached back and tapped the touchpad.
I half-expected nothing to
Theseus' windows could be as easily locked as her comm
But the dome split instantly before me, a crack then a
crescent then a wide-eyed lidless stare as the shielding slid
smoothly back into the hull.
My fingers clenched reflexively into a
fistful of webbing.
The sudden void stretched empty and unforgiving
in all directions, and there was nothing to cling to but a metal disk
barely four meters across.
Stars, everywhere.
So many stars that I could not for the life me
understand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black.
Stars, and?
?nothing else.
What did you expect? I chided myself.
An alien mothership
hanging off the starboard bow?
Well, why not?
We were out here for something.
The others were, anyway.
They'd be essential no matter where we'd
But my own situation was a bit different, I realized.
usefulness degraded with distance.
And we were over half a light year from home.
it is dark enough, you can see the stars.&
Where was I when the lights came down?
I was emerging from the gates of Heaven, mourning a father who was?to
his own mind, at least?still alive.
It had been scarcely two months since Helen had disappeared under the
Two months by our reckoning, at least.
From her perspective
it could have be the Virtually Omnipotent set
their subjective clocks along with everything else.
She wasn't coming back.
She would only deign to see her husband
under conditions that amounted to a slap in the face.
He visited as often as she would allow:
twice a week,
then once.
Then every two.
Their marriage decayed with the
exponential determinism of a radioactive isotope and still he sought
her out, and accepted her conditions.
On the day the lights came down, I had joined him at my mother's
It was a special occasion, the last time we would ever see her
in the flesh.
For two months her body had lain in state along with
five hundred other new ascendants on the ward, open for viewing by
the next of kin.
The interface was no more real than it would ever
be, the body could not talk to us.
But at least it was
there, its flesh warm, the sheets clean and straight.
lower face was still visible below the cowl, though eyes and ears
were helmeted.
We could touch her.
My father often did.
some distant part of her still felt it.
But eventually someone has to close the casket and dispose of the
Room must be made for the new arrivals?and so we came
to this last day at my mother's side.
Jim took her hand one more
She would still be available in her world, on her terms, but
later this day the body would be packed into storage facilities
crowded far too efficiently for flesh and blood visitors.
been assured that the body would remain intact?the muscles
electrically exercised, the body flexed and fed, the corpus kept
ready to return to active duty should Heaven experience some
inconceivable and catastrophic meltdown.
Everything was reversible,
we were told.
And yet?there were so many who had ascended, and
not even the deepest catacombs go on forever.
There were rumors of
dismemberment, of nonessential body parts hewn away over time
according to some optimum-packing algorithm.
Perhaps Helen would be
a torso this time next year, a disembodied head the year after.
Perhaps her chassis would be stripped down to the brain before we'd
even left the building, awaiting only that final technological
breakthrough that would herald the arrival of the Great Digital
Rumors, as I say.
I personally didn't know of anyone who'd come back
after ascending, but then why would anyone want to?
Not even Lucifer
left Heaven until he was pushed.
Dad might have known for sure?Dad knew more than most people,
about the things most people weren't supposed to know?but he
never told tales out of turn.
Whatever he knew, he'd obviously
decided its disclosure wouldn't have changed Helen's mind.
would have been enough for him.
We donned the hoods that served as day passes for the Unwired, and we
met my mother in the spartan visiting room she imagined for these
She'd built no windows into the world she occupied, no hint
of whatever utopian environment she'd constructed for herself.
hadn't even opted for one of the prefab visiting environments
designed to minimize dissonance among visitors.
We found ourselves
in a featureless beige sphere five meters across.
There was nothing
in there but her.
Maybe not so far removed from her vision of utopia after all,
I thought.
My father smiled.
She was twenty years younger than the thing on the
bed, and still she made my skin crawl.
You came!&
She always used my name.
I don't think she ever called me son.
&You're still happy here?& my father asked.
&Wonderful.
I do wish you could join us.&
Jim smiled.
&Someone has to keep the lights on.&
&Now you know this isn't goodbye,& she said.
can visit whenever you like.&
&Only if you do something about the scenery.& Not just a
joke, Jim would have come at her call even if the gauntlet
involved bare feet and broken glass.
&And Chelsea, too,& Helen continued.
&It would be so
nice to finally meet her after all this time.&
&Chelsea's gone, Helen,& I said.
&Oh yes but I know you stay in touch.
I know she was special to
Just because you're not together any more doesn't mean
she can't?&
&You know she?&
A startling possibility stopped me in mid-sentence:
maybe I hadn't
actually told them.
&Son,& Jim said quietly.
&Maybe you could give us a
I would have given them a fucking lifetime.
I unplugged myself back
to the ward, looked from the corpse on the bed to my blind and
catatonic father in his couch, murmuring sweet nothings into the
datastream.
Let them perform for each other.
Let them formalize
and finalize their so-called relationship in whatever way they saw
Maybe, just once, they could even bring themselves to be
honest, there in that other world where everything else was a lie.
I felt no desire to bear witness either way.
But of course I had to go back in for my own formalities.
my role in the familial set-piece one last time, partook of the usual
We all agreed that this wasn't going to change anything, and
nobody deviated enough from the script to call anyone else a liar on
that account.
And finally?careful to say until next time
rather than goodbye?we took our leave of my mother.
I even suppressed my gag reflex long enough to give her a hug.
Jim had his inhaler in hand as we emerged from the darkness.
hoped, without much hope, that he'd throw it into the garbage
receptacle as we passed through the lobby.
But he raised it to his
mouth and took another hit of vassopressin, that he would never be
Fidelity in an aerosol.
&You don't need that any more,& I
&Probably not,& he agreed.
&It won't work anyway.
You can't imprint on someone who isn't
even there, no matter how many hormones you snort.
Jim said nothing.
We passed beneath the muzzles of sentries panning
for infiltrating Realists.
&She's gone,& I blurted.
&She doesn't care if
you find someone else.
She'd be happy if you did.&
let her pretend the books had been balanced.
&She's my wife,& he told me.
&That doesn't mean what it used to.
It never did.&
He smiled a bit at that.
&It's my life, son.
I'm comfortable
&I don't blame her,& he said.
&And neither should
Easy for him to say.
Easy even to accept the hurt she'd inflicted
on him all these years.
This cheerful fa?ade here at the end
hardly made up for the endless bitter complaints my father had
endured throughout living memory.
Do you think it's easy when you
disappear for months on end?
Do you think it's easy always wondering
who you're with and what you're doing and if you're even alive?
you think it's easy raising a child like that on your own?
She'd blamed him for everything, but he bore it gracefully because he
knew it was all a lie.
He knew he was only the pretense.
She wasn't
leaving because he was AWOL, or unfaithful.
Her departure had
nothing to do with him at all.
It was me.
Helen had left the world
because she couldn't stand to look at the thing who'd replaced her
I would have pursued it?would have tried yet again to make my
father see?but by now we'd left the gates of Heaven for
the streets of Purgatory, where pedestrians on all sides murmured in
astonishment and stared open-mouthed at the sky.
I followed their
gaze to a strip of raw twilight between the towers, and gasped?
The stars were falling.
The Zodiac had rearranged itself into a precise grid of bright points
with luminous tails.
It was as though the whole planet had been
caught in some great closing net, the knots of its mesh aglow with
St. Elmo's fire.
It was beautiful.
It was terrifying.
I looked away to recalibrate my distance vision, to give this
ill-behaved hallucination a chance to vanish gracefully before I set
my empirical gaze to high-beam.
I saw a vampire in that moment, a
female, walking among us like the archetypal wolf in sheep's
Vampires were uncommon creatures at street level.
never seen one in the flesh before.
She had just stepped onto the street from the building across the
She stood a head taller than the rest of us, her eyes shining
yellow and bright as a cat's in the deepening dark.
She realized, as
I watched, that something was amiss.
She looked around, glanced at
the sky?and continued on her way, totally indifferent to the
cattle on all sides, to the heavenly portent that had transfixed
Totally indifferent to the fact that the world had just turned
inside-out.
It was 1035 Greenwich Mean Time, February 13, 2082.
They clenched around the world like a fist, each black as the inside
of an event horizon until those last bright moments when they all
burned together.
They screamed as they died.
Every radio up to
geostat groaned in unison, every infrared telescope went briefly
snowblind.
Ashes stained the sky
mesospheric
clouds, high above the jet stream, turned to glowing rust with every
The objects, apparently, consisted largely of iron.
ever knew what to make of that.
For perhaps the first time in history, the world knew before
being told: if you'd seen the sky, you had the scoop.
usual arbiters of newsworthiness, stripped of their accustomed role
in filtering reality, had to be content with merely labeling it.
took them ninety minutes to agree on Fireflies.
A half hour
after that, the first Fourier transforms appea
to no one's great surprise, the Fireflies had not wasted their dying
breaths on static.
There was pattern embedded in that terminal
chorus, some cryptic intelligence that resisted all earthly analysis.
The experts, rigorously empirical, refused to speculate:
admitted that the Fireflies had said something.
They didn't
know what.
Everyone else did.
How else would you explain 65,536 probes evenly
dispersed along a lat-long grid that barely left any square meter of
planetary surface unexposed?
Obviously the Flies had taken our
The whole world had been caught with its pants down in
panoramic composite freeze-frame.
We'd been surveyed?whether
as a prelude to formal introductions or outright invasion was
anyone's guess.
My father might have known someone who might have known.
But by then
he'd long since disappeared, as he always did during times of
hemispheric crisis.
Whatever he knew or didn't, he left me to find
my own answers with everyone else.
There was no shortage of perspectives.
The noosphere seethed with
scenarios ranging from utopian to apocalyptic.
The Fireflies had
seeded lethal germs through the jet stream.
The Fireflies had been
on a nature safari.
The Icarus Array was being retooled to power a
doomsday weapon against the aliens.
The Icarus Array had already
been destroyed.
anything from another solar
system would have to obey the lightspeed limit like everyone else.
W organic warships had just crossed the asteroid
belt and would be fumigating the planet within a week.
Like everyone else, I bore witness to lurid speculations and talking
I visited blathernodes, soaked myself in other people's
That was nothing new,
I'd spent my
whole life as a sort of alien ethologist in my own right, watching
the world behave, gleaning patterns and protocols, learning the rules
that allowed me to infiltrate human society.
It had always worked
Somehow, though, the presence of real aliens had
changed the dynamics of the equation.
Mere observation didn't
satisfy any more.
It was as though the presence of this new outgroup
had forced me back into the clade whether I the
distance between myself and the world suddenly seemed forced and
faintly ridiculous.
Yet I couldn't, for my life, figure out how to let it go.
Chelsea had always said that telepresence emptied the Humanity from
Human interaction.
&They say it's indistinguishable,&
told me once, &just like having your family right there,
snuggled up so you can see them and feel them and smell them next to
But it's not.
It's just shadows on the cave wall.
sure, the shadows come in three-dee color with force-feedback tactile
interactivity.
They're good enough to fool the civilized brain.
your gut knows those aren't people, even if it can't put its
finger on how it knows.
They just don't feel real.
Know what I mean?&
Back then I'd had no clue what she was talking about.
now we were all cavemen again, huddling beneath some overhang while
lightning split the heavens and vast formless monsters, barely
glimpsed in bright strobe-frozen instants, roared and clashed in the
darkness on all sides.
There was no comfort in solitude.
couldn't get it from interactive shadows.
You needed someone real
at your side, someone to hold on to, someone to share your airspace
along with your fear and hope and uncertainty.
I imagined the presence of companions who wouldn't vanish the moment
I unplugged.
But Chelsea was gone, and Pag in her wake.
others I could have called? peers and former clients with whom
my impersonations of rapport had been especially convincing?didn't
seem worth the effort.
Flesh and blood had its own relationship to
reality: necessary, but not sufficient.
Watching the world from a distance, it occurred to me at last:
knew exactly what Chelsea had meant, with her Luddite ramblings about
desaturated Humanity and the colorless interactions of virtual space.
I'd known all along.
I'd just never been able to see how it was any different from real
Imagine you are a machine.
Yes, I know.
But imagine you're a different kind of machine,
one built from metal and plastic and designed not by blind, haphazard
natural selection but by engineers and astrophysicists with their
eyes fixed firmly on specific goals.
Imagine that your purpose is
not to replicate, or even to survive, but to gather information.
I can imagine that easily.
It is in fact a much simpler
impersonation than the kind I'm usually called on to perform.
I coast through the abyss on the colder side of Neptune's orbit.
Most of the time I exist only as an absence, to any observer on the
visible spectrum:
a moving, asymmetrical silhouette blocking the
But occasionally, during my slow endless spin, I glint with
dim hints of reflected starlight.
If you catch me in those moments
you might infer something of my true nature:
a segmented creature
with foil skin, bristling with joints and dishes and spindly
Here and there a whisper of accumulated frost clings to a
joint or seam, some frozen wisp of gas encountered in Jupiter space
Elsewhere I carry the microscopic corpses of Earthly
bacteria who thrived with carefree abandon on the skins of space
stations or the benign lunar surface?but who had gone to
crystal at only half my present distance from the sun.
Now, a breath
away from Absolute Zero, they might shatter at a photon's touch.
My heart is warm, at least.
A tiny nuclear fire burns in my thorax,
leaves me indifferent to the cold outside.
It won't go out for a
thousand years, barring some c for a thousand
years, I will listen for faint voices from Mission Control and do
everything they tell me to.
So far they have told me to study
Every instruction I have ever received has been a precise
and unambiguous elaboration on that one overriding reason for my
existence.
Which is why these latest instructions are so puzzling, for they make
no sense at all.
The frequency is wrong.
The signal strength is
I cannot even understand the handshaking protocols.
request clarification.
The response arrives almost a thousand minutes later, and it is an
unprecedented mix of orders and requests for information.
as best I can:
yes, this is the bearing at which signal strength was
No, it is not the usual bearing for Mission Control.
I can retransmit:
here it is, all over again.
Yes, I will go into
standby mode.
I await further instructions.
They arrive 839 minutes later, and
they tell me to stop studying comets immediately.
I am to commence a controlled precessive tumble that sweeps my
antennae through consecutive 5-arc
increments along all three axes, with a period of 94 seconds.
encountering any transmission resembling the one which confused me, I
am to fix upon the bearing of maximal signal strength and derive a
series of parameter values.
I am also instructed to retransmit the
signal to Mission Control.
I do as I'm told.
For a long time I hear nothing, but I am
infinitely patient and incapable of boredom.
Eventually a fleeting,
familiar signal brushes against my afferent array.
I reacquire and
track it to source, which I am well-equipped to describe:
trans-Neptunian comet in the Kuiper Belt, approximately two hundred
kilometers in diameter.
It is sweeping a 21-cm tightbeam radio wave
across the heavens with a periodicity of 4.57 seconds.
does not intersect Mission Control's coordinates at any point.
appears to be directed at a different target entirely.
It takes much longer than usual for Mission Control to respond to
this information.
When it does, it tells me to change course.
Mission Control informs me that henceforth my new destination is to
be referred to as Burns-Caulfield.
Given current fuel and
inertial constraints I will not reach it in less than thirty-nine
I am to watch nothing else in the meantime.
I'd been liaising for a team at the Kurzweil Institute, a fractured
group of cutting-edge savants convinced they were on the verge of
solving the quantum-glial paradox.
That particular log-jam had
stalled AI once broken,
the experts promised we'd be
eighteen months away from the first personality upload and only two
years from reliable Human-consciousness emulation in a software
environment.
It would spell the end of corporeal history, usher in a
Singularity that had been waiting impatiently in the wings for nigh
on fifty years.
Two months after Firefall, the Institute cancelled my contract.
I was actually surprised it had taken them so long.
It had cost us
so much, this overnight inversion of global priorities, these
breakneck measures making up for lost initiative.
Not even our shiny
new post-scarcity economy could withstand such a seismic shift
without lurching towards bankruptcy.
Installations in deep space,
long since imagined secure by virtue of their remoteness, were
suddenly vulnerable for exactly the same reason.
Lagrange habitats
had to be refitted for defense against an unknown enemy.
Commercial
ships on the Martian Loop were conscripted, weaponised, and
some secured the high ground over Mars while others fell
sunward to guard the Icarus Array.
It didn't matter that the Fireflies hadn't fired a shot at any of
these targets.
We simply couldn't afford the risk.
We were all in it together, of course, desperate to regain some
hypothetical upper hand by any means necessary.
corporations scribbled IOUs on the backs of napkins and promised to
sort everything out once the heat was off.
In the meantime, the
prospect of Utopia in two years took a back seat to the shadow of
Armageddon reaching back from next Tuesday.
The Kurzweil Institute,
like everyone else, suddenly had other things to worry about.
So I returned to my apartment, split a bulb of Glenfiddich, and
arrayed virtual windows like daisy petals in my head.
Everyone Icons
debated on all sides, serving up leftovers two weeks past their
expiry date:
Disgraceful breakdown of global security.
No harm done.
Comsats annihilated.
Thousands dead.
Random collisions.
Accidental deaths.
(who sent them?)
We should have seen them coming. Why didn't we?
Deep space.
Inverse square.
Do the math.
They were stealthed!
(what do they want?)
We were raped!
Jesus Christ.
They just took our picture.
Why the silence?
Moon's fine.
Mars's fine.
(Where are they?)
Why haven't they made contact?
Nothing's touched the O'Neills.
Technology Implies Belligerence!
(Are they coming back?)
Nothing attacked us.
Nothing invaded.
(But where are they?)
(Are they coming back?)
Jim Moore Voice Only
The text window blossomed directly in my line of sight, eclipsing the
I read it twice.
I tried to remember the last time he'd
called from the field, and couldn't.
I muted the other windows.
&Son,& he replied after a moment. &Are you well?&
&Like everyone else.
Still wondering whether we should be
celebrating or crapping our pants.&
He didn't answer immediately.
&It's a big question, all right,&
he said at last.
&I don't suppose you could give me any advice?
They're not
telling us anything at ground level.&
It was a rhetorical request.
His silence was hardly necessary to
make the point.
&I know,& I added after a moment.
It's just, they're saying the Icarus Array went down, and?&
&You know I can't?oh.&
My father paused.
ridiculous.
Icarus's fine.&
He seemed to be weighing his words.
&The Fireflies probably
didn't even notice it.
There's no particle trail as long as it stays
offstream, and it would be buried in solar glare unless someone knew
where to search.&
It was my turn to fall silent.
This conversation felt suddenly
Because when my father went on the job, he went dark.
called his family.
Because even when my father came off the job, he never talked
It wouldn't matter whether the Icarus Array was still
online or whether it had been shredded and thrown into the sun like a
thousand kilome he wouldn't tell either tale
unless an official announcement had been made.
refreshed an index window just to be sure? it hadn't.
Because while my father was a man of few words, he was not a
man of frequent, indecisive pauses?and he had hesitated before
each and every line he'd spoken in this exchange.
I tugged ever-so-gently on the line?&But they've sent
ships.&?and started counting.
One one-thousand, two one-thousand?
&Just a precaution.
Icarus was overdue for a visit anyway.
don't swap out your whole grid without at least dropping in and
kicking the new tires first.&
Nearly three seconds to respond.
&You're on the moon,& I said.
&Close enough.&
&What are you?Dad, why are you telling me this?
this a security breach?&
&You're going to get a call,& he told me.
&From who?
&They're assembling a team.
The kind of?people you deal
My father was too rational to dispute the contributions
of the recons and hybrids in our midst, but he'd never been able to
hide his mistrust of them.
&They need a synthesist,& he said.
&Isn't it lucky you've got one in the family.&
Radio bounced back and forth.
&This isn't nepotism, Siri.
wanted very much for them to pick someone else.&
&Thanks for the vote of conf?&
But he'd seen it coming, and preempted me before my words could cross
the distance:
&It's not a slap at your abilities and you know
it. You're simply the most qualified, and the work is vital.&
&So why?& I began, and stopped.
He wouldn't want to
keep me away from some theoretical gig in a WestHem lab.
&What's this about, Dad?&
&The Fireflies.
They found something.&
&A radio signal.
From the Kuiper.
We traced the bearing.&
&They're talking?&
&Not to us.&
He cleared his throat.
something of a fluke that we even intercepted the transmission.&
&Who are they talking to?&
&We don't know.&
&Friendly?
&Son, we don't know.
The encryption seems similar, but
we can't even be sure of that.
All we have is the location.&
&So you're sending a team.&
You're sending me.
We'd never gone to the Kuiper before.
It had been decades since we'd
even sent robots.
Not that we lacked the capacity.
We just hadn't
everything we needed was so much closer to home.
Interplanetary Age had stagnated at the asteroids.
But now something lurked at the furthest edge of our backyard,
calling into the void.
Maybe it was talking to some other solar
Maybe it was talking to something closer, something en
&It's not the kind of situation we can safely ignore,& my
father said.
&What about probes?&
&Of course.
But we can't wait for them to report back.
follow-up's been fast- updates can be sent en route.&
He gave me a few extra seconds to digest that.
When I still didn't
speak, he said,
&You have to understand.
Our only edge is that
as far as we know, Burns-Caulfield doesn't know we're on to it.
have to get as much as we can in whatever window of opportunity that
grants us.&
But Burns-Caulfield had hidden itself.
Burns-Caulfield
might not welcome a forced introduction.
&What if I refuse?&
The timelag seemed to say Mars.
&I know you, son.
You won't.&
&But if I did.
If I'm the best qualified, if the job's
so vital?&
He didn't have to answer.
I didn't have to ask.
At these kind of
stakes, mission-critical elements didn't get the luxury of choice.
wouldn't even have the childish satisfaction of holding my breath and
refusing to play?the will to resist is no less mechanical than
the urge to breathe. Both can be subverted with the right
neurochemical keys.
&You killed my Kurzweill contract,& I realized.
&That's the least of what we did.&
We let the vacuum between us speak for a while.
&If I could go back and undo the?the thing that made you
what you are,& Dad said after a while, &I would.
&I have to go.
I just wanted to give you the heads-up.&
&I love you, son.&
Where are you?
Are you coming back?
&Thanks,& I said again.
&That's good to know.&
This is what my father could not unmake.
This is what I am:
I am the bridge between the bleeding edge and the dead center.
stand between the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain.
I am the curtain.
I am not an entirely new breed.
My roots reach back to the dawn of
civilization but those precursors served a different function, a less
honorable one.
They only greased the wheels
they would sugarcoat unpleasant truths, or inflate imaginary bogeymen
for political expedience.
They were vital enough in their way.
even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force on all
of its citizens all of the time.
Meme managemen
the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear
of threatening alternatives.
There have always been those tasked
with the rotation of informational topologies, but throughout most of
history they had little to do with increasing its clarity.
The new Millennium changed all that.
We've surpassed ourselves now,
we're exploring terrain beyond the limits of merely human
understanding.
Sometimes its contours, even in conventional space,
are just too intricate for other times its very
axes extend into dimensions inconceivable to minds built to fuck and
fight on some prehistoric grassland.
So many things constrain us,
from so many directions.
The most altruistic and sustainable
philosophies fail before the brute brain-stem imperative of
self-interest.
Subtle and elegant equations predict the
behavior of the quantum world, but none can explain it.
four thousand years we can't even prove that reality exists beyond
the mind of the first-person dreamer. We have such need of intellects
greater than our own.
But we're not very good at building them.
The forced matings of
minds and electrons succeed and fail with equal spectacle.
hybrids become as brilliant as savants, and as autistic.
people to prosthetics, make their overloaded motor strips juggle meat
and machinery, and shake our heads when their fingers twitch and
their tongues stutter.
Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow
so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the
hallmarks of dementia:
unfocused and irrelevant to the
barely-intelligent creatures
left behind.
And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for,
you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their
You have to take their word on faith?
?Or you use information theory to flatten it for you, to
squash the tesseract into two dimensions and the Klein bottle into
three, to simplify reality and pray to whatever Gods survived the
millennium that your honorable twisting of the truth hasn't ruptured
any of its load-bearing pylons.
crossbred progeny of profilers and proof assistants and information
theorists.
In formal settings you'd call me Synthesist.
On the street you call
me jargonaut or poppy.
If you're one of those savants
whose hard-won truths are being bastardized and lobotomized for
powerful know-nothings interested only in market share, you might
call me a mole or a chaperone.
If you're Isaac Szpindel you'd call me commissar, and while
the jibe would be a friendly one, it would also be more than that.
I've never convinced myself that we made the right choice.
cite the usual justifications in my sleep, talk endlessly about the
rotational topology of information and the irrelevance of semantic
comprehension.
But after all the words, I'm still not sure.
know if anyone else is, either.
Maybe it's just some grand
consensual con, marks and players all in league.
We won't admit that
our cre they may speak in tongues, but our
priests can read those signs.
Gods leave their algorithms carved
into the mountainside but it's just li'l ol' me bringing the tablets
down to the masses, and I don't threaten anyone.
Maybe the Singularity happened years ago.
We just don't want to
admit we were left behind.
kinds of animals living here.
Occasional demons too.&
Anderson, Catfish Rising
The Third Wave, they called us.
All in the same boat, driving into
the long dark courtesy of a bleeding-edge prototype crash-graduated
from the simulators a full eighteen months ahead of schedule.
less fearful economy, such violence to the timetable would have
bankrupted four countries and fifteen multicorps.
The first two waves came out of the gate in even more of a hurry.
didn't find out what had happened to them until thirty minutes before
the briefing, when Sarasti released the telemetry into ConSensus.
Then I experience flooded up my inlays and spilled
across my parietal cortex in glorious high-density fast forward.
Even now I can bring those data back, fresh as the day they were
I'm there.
I am unmanned.
I am disposable.
I am souped-up and
stripped-down, a telematter drive with a couple of cameras bolted to
the front end, pushing gees that would turn meat to jelly.
joyously toward the darkness, my twin brother a stereoscopic hundred
klicks to starboard, dual streams of backspat pions boosting us to
relativity before poor old Theseus had even crawled past Mars.
But now, six billion kilometers to stern, Mission Control turns
off the tap and leaves us coasting.
The comet swells in our sights,
a frozen enigma sweeping its signal across the sky like a lighthouse
We bring rudimentary senses to bear and stare it down on a
thousand wavelengths.
We've lived for this moment.
We see an erratic wobble that speaks of recent collisions.
scars?smooth icy expanses where once-acned skin has liquefied
and refrozen, far too recently for the insignificant sun at our backs
to be any kind of suspect.
We see an astronomical impossibility: a comet with a heart of
refined iron.
Burns-Caufield sings as we glide past.
N it ignores our
passage as it ignored our approach.
It sings to someone else
Perhaps we'll meet that audience some day.
they're waiting in the desolate wastelands ahead of us.
Control flips us onto our backs, keeps us fixed on target past any
realistic hope of acquisition.
They send last-ditch instructions,
squeeze our fading signals for every last bit among the static.
can sense their frustration, their rel once or
twice, we're even asked if some judicious mix of thrust and gravity
might let us linger here a bit longer.
But deceleration is for pansies.
We're headed for the stars.
Bye, Burnsie.
Bye, Mission Control.
See you at heat death.
Warily, we close on target.
There are three of us in the second wave?slower than our
predecessors, yes, but still so much faster than anything
flesh-constrained.
We are weighed down by payloads which make us
virtually omniscient.
We see on every wavelength, from radio to
Our autonomous microprobes measure everything our masters
tiny onboard assembly lines can build tools from the
atoms up, to assess the things they did not.
Atoms, scavenged from
where we are, join with ions beamed from where we were:
thrust and
materiel accumulate in our bellies.
This extra mass has slowed us, but midpoint braking maneuvers have
slowed us even more.
The last half of this journey has been a
constant fight against momentum from the first.
It is not an
efficient way to travel.
In less-hurried times we would have built
early to some optimal speed, perhaps slung around a convenient planet
for a little extra oomph, coasted most of the way.
is pressing, so we burn at both ends.
We must reach our
we cannot afford to pass it by, cannot afford the
kamikaze exuberance of the first wave.
They merely glimpsed the lay
of the land.
We must map it down to the motes.
We must be more responsible.
Now, slowing towards orbit, we see everything they saw and more.
We see the scabs, and the impossible iron core.
We hear the singing.
And there, just beneath the comet's frozen surface, we see
structure:
an infiltration of architecture into geology.
are not yet close enough to squint, and radar is too long in the
tooth for fine detail.
But we are smart, and there are three of us,
widely separated in space.
The wavelengths of three radar sources
can be calibrated to interfere at some predetermined point of
convergence?and those tripartite echoes, hologramatically
remixed, will increase resolution by a factor of twenty-seven.
Burns-Caulfield stops singing the moment we put our plan into
In the next instant I go blind.
It's a temporary aberration, a reflexive amping of filters to
compensate for the overload.
My arrays are back online in seconds,
diagnostics green within and without.
I reach out to the others,
confirm identical experiences, identical recoveries.
We are all
still fully functional, unless the sudden increase in ambient ion
density is some kind of sensory artefact.
We are ready to continue
our investigation of Burns-Caulfield.
The only real problem is that Burns-Caulfield seems to have
disappeared...
Theseus carried no regular crew?no navigators or
engineers, no one to swab the decks, no meat wasted on tasks that
machinery orders of mag smaller could perform orders of mag better.
Let superfluous deckhands weigh down other ships, if the nonAscendent
hordes needed to attach some pretense of usefulness to their lives.
Let them infest vessels driven only by commercial priorities.
only reason we were here was because nobody had yet optimized
software for First Contact.
Bound past the edge of the solar
system, already freighted with the fate of the world, Theseus
wasted no mass on self-esteem.
So here we were, rehydrated and squeaky-clean:
Isaac Szpindel, to
study the aliens.
The Gang of Four?Susan James and her
secondary personae? to talk to them.
Major Amanda Bates was
here to fight, if necessary.
And Jukka Sarasti to command us all, to
move us like chess pieces on some multidimensional game board that
only vampires could see.
He'd arrayed us around a conference table that warped gently through
the Commons,
keeping a discreet and constant distance from the
curved deck beneath.
The whole drum was furnished in Early Concave,
tricked unwary and hung-over brains into thinking they were looking
at the world through fisheye lenses.
In deference to the creakiness
of the nouveaux undead it spun at a mere fifth of a gee, but
it was just warming up.
We'd be at half-grav in six hours, stuck
there for eighteen out of every twenty-four until the ship decided we
were fully recovered.
For the next few days, free-fall would be a
rare and blesséd thing.
Light sculptures appeared on the tabletop.
Sarasti could have fed
the information directly to our inlays? the whole briefing
could have gone through ConSensus, without the need to assemble
physically in the same place? but if you want to be sure
everyone's paying attention, you bring them together.
Szpindel leaned in conspiratorially at my side.
&Or maybe the
bloodsucker just gets off seeing all this meat in close quarters,
If Sarasti heard he didn't show it, not even to me.
He pointed to a
dark heart at the center of the display, his eyes lost behind black
&Oasa object.
Infrared emitter, methane class.&
On the display it was?nothing.
Our apparent destination was a
black disk, a round absence of stars.
In real life it weighed in at
over ten Jupiters and measured twenty percent wider at the belly.
was directly in our path:
too small to burn, too remote for the
reflection of distant sunlight, too heavy for a gas giant, too light
for a brown dwarf.
&When did that show up?&
Bates squeezed her rubber
ball in one hand, the knuckles whitening.
&X-ray spike appears during the '76 microwave survey.&
years before Firefall.
&Never confirmed, never reacquired.
Like a torsion flare from an L-class dwarf, but we should see
anything big enough to generate that kind of effect and the sky's
dark on that bearing.
IAU calls it a statistical artefact.&
Szpindel's eyebrows drew together like courting caterpillers.
Sarasti smiled faintly, keeping his mouth closed.
&The metabase
gets?crowded, after Firefall.
Everyone skittish,
looking for clues.
After Burns-Caulfield explodes?&
clicked at the back of his throat.
&Turns out the spike might
arise from a subdwarf object after all, if the magnetosphere's
torqued enough.&
&Torqued by what?&
&Don't know.&
Layers of statistical inference piled up on the table while Sarasti
sketched background:
even with a solid bearing and half the world's
attention, the object had hidden from all but the most intensive
A thousand telescopic snapshots had been stacked one on
another and squeezed through a dozen filters before something emerged
from the static, just below the three-meter band and the threshold of
certainty.
For the longest time it hadn't even been real:
probabilistic ghost until Theseus got close enough to collapse
the waveform.
A quantum particle, heavy as ten Jupiters.
Earthbound cartographers were calling it Big Ben.
had barely passed Saturn's orbit when it showed up in the residuals.
That discovery would have been
no other ship
caught en route could have packed enough fuel for anything but the
long dejected loop back home.
But Theseus' thin, infinitely
attenuate fuel line reached all the
turn on the proverbial dime.
We'd changed course in our sleep and
the Icarus stream tracked our moves like a cat after prey, feeding us
at lightspeed.
And here we were.
&Talk about long shots,& Szpindel grumbled.
Across the table, Bates flicked her wrist.
Her ball sailed over my
I heard it bounce off the deck (}