The Freeze-Frame Revolution

  Sure it would be a solid petasec before that mattered. The Chimp was never one to procrastinate. Once you know what needs to be done, why wait?

  “Chimp.”

  “Hello, Sunday.”

  I tagged the supergiant. “Are we building a hub?”

  “Yes. Do you still want to be on deck when it happens?”

  “Damn right I do.”

  Yuki’s eyes glittered. “Kind of exciting, right?”

  The window closed in my head. Yuki returned her attention to the Teredo board. “In the meantime, though, I’m going to hunt down this ice monster once and for all.”

  “Feeling lucky?” I wondered.

  “Mark my words.” She met my eye. “The Lord has delivered it into my hands.”

  This is how they told it to me when I was a child, before I learned to talk in numbers. This is the way I still remember it best. Maybe you don’t know anything but the numbers. Tough. This is the way I remember it to you:

  Imagine a hose. It doesn’t matter what’s inside: water, coolant—blood, if your tastes run to the organic—so long as it’s under pressure. A flexible tube, strained to the limit, anchored at one end.

  Chop through it at the other.

  It spurts. It convulses. It thrashes back and forth, spewing fluid in great arcing gouts. We call that a wormhole, of the nonrelativistic kind: fixed to a gate on one side but at panicky loose ends on the other.

  It writhes that way for centuries, millennia sometimes, bashing against spacetime until another gate boots up further down the road. That new gate calls to it, somehow. The loose end hears the hail, snaps forward across the continuum and locks on for dear life. Or maybe it’s the other way around; maybe the newborn gate reaches out with some infinite elastic hand and snatches the wormhole to its bosom in the blink of an eye. You can look at it either way. The equations are time-symmetric.

  Of course, those loose ends aren’t choosy; they’ll close the circuit with anything that fits, whether we approve the union or not. If some natural-born black hole wanders into range before we boot the next stepping stone, that’s it: a dead-end marriage, monogamy unto Heat Death. The gates are designed to put up stop signs in such cases, shut down gracefully and direct any travelers back the way they came, although I don’t know if that’s ever happened. We take steps to see it doesn’t: scan the route ahead for lensing artifacts, steer clear of any reefs that might prove too seductive.

  Sometimes, though, you want to run aground.

  Because that’s the problem with building a daisy chain: each gate only goes two ways. If you don’t like the scenery when you emerge from the front door, you can either loop around and dive through the back—head on down the road, for as long as it lasts—or go back the way you came. Eriophora spins a lone thin thread round and round the Milky Way. Any gods who follow in our wake can explore this infinitesimal spiral and no more.

  That’s no way to conquer a galaxy.

  You need more than on-ramps and off-ramps; you need interchanges and overpasses, a way to string all your isolated single-lane superhighways together. So every now and then we seek out one of those bad-boy singularities. We find something with the right mass, the right spin, the right charge. We build not one gate but many: powered by the singularity, but not wormholed to it. They reach further than the usual kind, they could never consummate union with the daisies in our chain: their roots may be cheek-to-jowl but their gaping hungry mouths erupt into spacetime thousands of lightyears apart, like the ends of spokes extending from a common hub.

  Other webs. Other gates, built by other rocks on other paths. Those are the nodes to which they might connect. Thus do our pathetic one-dimensional threads form a network that truly spans the galaxy, that connects not just A to B to C but C to Z, A to Ω. It is these spiderwebbed cracks in spacetime that make our lives worthwhile.

  Not that we ever get to enjoy the fruits of our labors, of course. Never for us, the luxury of FTL. The gods and gremlins who come after might hop between stars in an instant—but whether we’re bound for a single gate or a whole nest, we crawl.

  Now we crawled toward a supernova. At the moment it wasn’t much to look at but in a few thousand years it would fall so hard off the Main Sequence that any unshielded life within a hundred lightyears would go straight back to raw carbon. It would vomit half its mass into the void; cool; collapse. By the time we arrived it would be ripe for the taking.

  It would be a big build, the biggest we’d ever done. We’d have to boot up the Uterus. The Chimp would need a lot of us on deck. Twelve, maybe fifteen meat sacks all awake at once, presuming to act for the thir—twenty-seven thousand who weren’t. With a little luck and my own special influence, we could even decide which twelve or fifteen.

  And for once we knew exactly where the Chimp would be.

  That was when we’d take the fucker down.

  We had a deadline now. So far the Lian Liberation Army had played a waiting game: gathering intel, studying the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses, laying low until some unpredictable opportunity presented itself. Now the clock was running. Now there were signposts on the road, reminding us of now-or-never creeping relentlessly over the event horizon. Suddenly revolution was imminent. There wasn’t much time to dick around.

  Only two hundred thousand years.

  The mission continued in the meantime. Fleets of vons went on ahead to build gates for us to ignite and abandon a century or two down the road. Occasional gremlins broke the monotony. Liquid tentacles—bifurcating and flowing like branches growing in timelapse—hurling themselves out of the portal after us, only to freeze and shatter like icicles. Something almost organic, crawling out around the edges of the hoop and taking root. A flock of schooling tiles, bright as candle-flame but so thin they nearly vanished when they turned edge-on. They swarmed and linked into mosaics, changed color and pattern and for a few moments I allowed myself a flicker of hope that they might be trying to communicate—that our long-lost descendants had remembered us at last, that they were here to take us home and please God, we could call the whole thing off. But if they ever truly spoke, it was only amongst themselves.

  Each time I awoke, our destination had leapt that much closer. It aged in increments, an apocalyptic step-function counting down to detonation. Sometime when I was down it ran out of helium to fuse, fell back on carbon. Sodium appeared in its spectrum. Magnesium. Aluminum. Every time I woke up it had heavier atoms on its breath.

  None of us were on deck for core collapse—still too far out for the rads to do much harm but why take the chance when Eri was up the whole time, staring down the inferno, immortalizing every emission from gamma to neutrino for our later edification? Buried in basalt, we slept away the cataclysm: the fusion of neon, of oxygen, the spewing of half the periodic table into the void. The collapse of nickel into iron and that final fatal moment of ignition, that blink of a cosmic eye in which a star outshines a galaxy. Eriophora saved it all for posterity. For us.

  When I awoke after the transfiguration, I didn’t even wait to climb out of my coffin. I called up the archives and compressed all those incandescent millennia into moments, let them wash across the back of my brain again, and again, until I was left exhausted from the sheer wonder of it all. In the blinding glorious light of such death and rebirth I even forgot what it meant to us, here in this speck of rock.

  I forgot, for a few precious moments, that we were at war.

  Kaden and Kallie were already at the tac tank when I arrived. They must’ve replayed the explosion in their own heads as I had in mine but there they were, transfixed by the luminous aurorae in that display: that intricate web of cooling gas, the tiny blinding dot of x-rays at its heart, the darker dot hiding inside the brighter one. Who cared if every shimmer was an artifact, if our naked eyes—staring out some porthole at the same vista—would see nothing but space and stars? The limits were in our senses, not the reality; human vision is such a pathetic instrument for parsing the universe.

&
nbsp; “Doron?” I asked. The manifest had brought all four of us on deck this time around; a binary with a lot of comets and a few too many organics to trust Chimp alone with the goldilocks protocols.

  “On his way,” Kaden said. “Just checking the Glade.”

  That was actually my job. Not that it mattered. I’d just been too preoccupied with the light show.

  “God,” Kallie said softly. “It’s gorgeous.”

  Kaden nodded. “’Tis. Really nice spot for a—oh, shit.”

  I joined them at the tank. “What?”

  Se tagged a dim red dot lurking stage left. “That dwarf. It’s not just passing by. It’s falling onto orbit.”

  Se was right. By the time we arrived on the scene, the newborn hole would have its very own companion star.

  I shrugged. “It’s a cluster. Bound to happen sooner or later.”

  “The accretion disk is gonna be a motherfucker, is all I’m saying.”

  “Hey, at least we won’t be wanting for raw materials,” Kallie said.

  “We should give it a name.” Kaden thought a moment. “Oculus Dei.”

  “Latin? Seriously?” Through the open hatch, the faint whine of Doron’s approaching roach floated up the corridor.

  “So what’s your suggestion?”

  I felt myself drawn back into the display, into that pulsing black heart at its center. “Nemesis,” I murmured. Just outside, I could hear Doron parking his roach.

  “Charlotte,” Kallie said, and giggled.

  Kaden looked at her. “Why Charlotte?”

  “I’m with Sunday,” Doron said, joining the party. “I think Nemesis is perfect.”

  Except it wasn’t Doron.

  It was Lian.

  My heart rate must’ve spiked.

  She’d put on another ten years in the past ten thousand— must’ve been staying up extra late to keep the end-game on track. Her hair was more silver than black now. She looked strong, though. Burly. Not the waif who’d shipped out with us at all. An elemental born of the Glade, corded with muscle. Coreward grav does that to you.

  Still Lian, though. I didn’t know how the Chimp missed it.

  Kaden turned. “Glad you could make it, Dor.” A slight emphasis on the name, the merest subtext of Don’t fuck it up, Sunday. Just play along. “How’s the Glade?”

  “On schedule,” Lian reported. “Have to run the samples to be sure, but based on morpho I’d say maybe another hundred terasecs before we can reintegrate.”

  No exclamations from the Chimp. No mention of the unlikely odds that a long-dead crew member might suddenly appear on deck, like some kind of Boltzmann body spontaneously reassembled out of quantum foam.

  “It is beautiful.” Lian joined us at the tank. “What do you say? Nemesis?”

  “Works for me,” Kaden said.

  “Sure.” Kallie spread her hands. “But I still say Charlotte’s more whimsical.”

  “Got that, Chimp?”

  “Yes, Doron. Listed as Nemesis.”

  I pinged my innerface, checked the personnel icons: Levi, D. floated in virtual space a few centimeters above Lian’s head.

  Lian’s face, though. Lian’s voice.

  She looked at me. “I think Chimp’s got us pulling plugs down in the Uterus. Wanna get that out of the way before things get busy?”

  Right. I’d forgotten why we were up in the first place: a gate to build, and some Chimp-defeating uncertainty about where to put it.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Why doesn’t it see?

  “Well then.” Lian swept a theatrical hand toward the door. “After you.”

  “See that verse I wrote for Cats of Alcubierre?” she asked. By which she meant, You up to speed on the timestamp hack?

  “Yeah. I like it. Feels like it wants to be a bit longer, though.” You should crank up the jump. Give us more time.

  “I think so too.” She pulled one closed hand from her pocket, opened it just enough to let me glimpse the tiny device in her palm. One of a kind. The key to the cage, the lynchpin of the rebellion. Lian Wei’s custom-fabbed time machine.

  I’d never seen it before.

  She slipped hand back into pocket. “I figure maybe five minutes, by the time it’s ready to perform.”

  We were in the tube, dropping aft and up, curving out across Eri’s isogravs. The things it did to my inner ears added to my sense of disquiet.

  It was supposed to be Doron. Doron and me, installing the hack.

  “You know I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” Lian said. Levi, D. floated obstinately over her head.

  “Uh huh.” Doron must still be down in the Glade. Lian had cloned his transponder. I wondered how long they’d been doing that.

  “New look?” she asked innocently.

  I shot her a glance. “Uh, yeah. I guess.”

  “Thought so. Had a weird flash when I hit the bridge. Thought you were someone else. You know, from behind.”

  “Really.”

  “Just for a moment. The clothes, you know. ’Course, soon as I saw your face. . .”

  “Right.” I nodded to show I understood. As far as the Chimp was concerned, transponders were definitive. They were the facial-recognition of Artificial Stupidity, the telltale that confirmed ID above all others. Of course the Chimp knew our faces, our voices. It could use them to identify us, the same way we’d use mods or clothing to identify someone from behind. But when that person turned toward us, we knew them by their face; no matter if they happened to be wearing someone else’s clothes.

  The Chimp was even simpler. Once it had an innerface ID, it ignored biometrics entirely. Why waste the cycles?

  “So who’d you think I was?” I asked as we decelerated.

  “Lian Wei,” she replied.

  We arrived at our destination. The door slid open.

  “Spooky,” I said.

  “Uh huh.” She gave me a small smile. “Happens, sometimes. When you get too close.”

  Which was a rebuke, of course.

  For forgetting what it was. For humanizing the enemy.

  Chimp had taken to assigning us manual hardware checks. Brute-force stuff, mainly: making sure that plugs were securely seated in their sockets, that sort of thing. Maybe he was just being extra careful as we geared up for this Mother of All Builds. Maybe it had something to do with the steady drip-drip-drip of random static into certain sensory pathways down through the ages, maybe even the extra few meters of fiberop that Kai and Jahaziel had spliced into the lines a few builds back. Nothing corrupting, mind you, nothing to contaminate vital telemetry. Just a little extra distance-traveled, an extra microsecond of latency to make the Chimp furrow its brow and double-check the connections.

  That’s what Lian and I were doing. Checking the Uterus. We emerged on the equatorial deck, glanced with feigned indifference at a bit of Painter graffiti just inside the entrance. An appropriation of another tribe’s culture so we could hide a number in plain sight:

  172.

  Someone had plugged in the grasers since I’d last been on deck. Black shiny cables sprouted from the apex of each cone, drooped across the gap, joined others in medusa nests converging on each of the buses mounted around the mezzanine. We visited each bus in turn: a series of black boxes, indistinguishable one from another except for arbitrary labels stamped into the metal and my backbrain. We pried open each casing, manually checked each connection; closed each lid and moved to the next.

  If I hadn’t already known the target I might have missed it: the subtle shift in Lian’s body language, the way she hunched her shoulders and turned her back to Chimp’s main line of sight. I did the same, leaning close to block the view of any shipboard eyes. Lian popped the lid, started checking connections.

  “Hmm. That one’s a bit loose.” She pulled the plug, slipped a pocket microscope off her belt, turned it on the socket.

  I looked away.

  I don’t know exactly what Lian did. Maybe she did the install by touch. Maybe the same h
ack that identified her as Doron Levi spliced some equally fictitious image into the feed from her visual cortex. But I heard the click of the connection sliding back home, and let my gaze wander back to the bus as Lian closed the lid. “That should do it.”

  Lynchpin installed.

  “Yes,” the Chimp replied, and sent a few milliamps down the line just to be sure. “The numbers are good.”

  If you followed the beam path of Graser 172, extended it through the center of the firing chamber and on out the other side, it would hit an unremarkable patch of bulkhead and bedrock. There was nothing especially critical at that precise point, should the graser fire by itself. There didn’t have to be. Whole cubic meters of the surrounding rock would turn instantly to magma. Any circuitry embedded in that matrix—optical, electronic, quantum—would simply evaporate.

  We’d tracked the Chimp to an uncharted node about four meters to the left of the bullseye, and maybe a meter behind the bulkhead. That was its ringside seat for the upcoming build, a location from which it could preside over events with minimal latency. If Graser 172 fired by itself, the Chimp would die.

  Of course, Graser 172 was never supposed to fire by itself. The whole array would fire together, in perfect harmony: every high-energy photon balanced against every other, all forces converged and canceled in a moment of impossible creation. Kilometers of robust circuitry, atomic clocks accurate down to Planck, existed for no other reason but to keep everything precisely in sync.

  Precise doesn’t do it justice, though. Precise is far too coarse a word. No single clock would be able to fire all those beams at the same instant; the most miniscule variation in latency would throw the whole array out of sync, and the cables extending to each graser were of different lengths. No, the only solution was to build identical clocks into each graser, stamped right into the trigger assembly, each circuit matched to the angstrom. Use a master clock to keep them calibrated, for sure—but when the countdown starts, let the locals handle the firing sequence.

  What none of that arcane circuitry understood was that all signals the master clock sent to 172 now passed through the plug-in Lian had just installed. That plug-in was dormant now. It would stay that way until a magnetic key with a unique and specific signature passed within ten meters or so: then it would awaken and begin its assigned duties as 172’s receptionist. It would screen 172’s calls, schedule 172’s appointments, reply with 172’s voice after just enough of a delay to reassure callers that their signals had gone all the way up the line and been properly understood.