The Freeze-Frame Revolution

  Sometime over the past few meters my BUD had gone down. I barely noticed.

  Hopefully this was just some kind of epiphyte, some mutant overlay that embraced the trunks but didn’t actually penetrate them. Maybe we could simply strip away the new growth without damaging the old.

  I reached for the biopsy kit on my belt and turned to the bot. “I’m going to—”

  The bot staggered, lost altitude; regained it an instant later as its rotors booted up. I glanced around, kit in one hand, machete humming in the other. The bot’s carapace sparkled with the bright grainy static of boosted photons.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “The bot lost ground-effect,” Chimp reported. “The deck plating must be down.”

  “Must be? You can’t get a direct read?”

  A momentary silence. “No.”

  Maybe some kind of bioelectric interference from the overgrowth, or some rogue tendril growing through a vital seam to short out the wiring. The catwalk had pretty much run its course anyway. A few meters farther on it ended in a stairway leading down onto bedrock. Most of the forest was unfurnished by design.

  I looked into its depths. Fractured mosaics of dim light in the distance: analuciferin suns peeking through gaps in the foliage.

  “Any sign of Kaden or Dao?” I asked.

  “No,” Chimp said.

  “The bots?” Even offlined, you’d think they’d put out some kind of signature.

  “No.”

  I took a step down the stairs. The bot dipped forward a few centimeters and jerked to a halt, wobbling in mid-air.

  “Tether’s caught.”

  I turned. Range and obstruction had reduced the hatch to a couple of bright hyphens in the distance. The umbilical was stretched tight from the little drone, cutting across the curve of the catwalk. Must have tangled on something off the trail.

  I retraced my steps, Chimp’s sock puppet keeping station at my side, reeling the tether back into its belly to keep it taut and out of further trouble. The rim of the distant hatch fell in and out of piecemeal eclipse. “Chimp. Any motion between here and the hatch?”

  No answer.

  “Chimp?” I looked over my shoulder.

  The bot was trembling, as if afraid of the dark. Something brushed my right ear. The end of the severed umbilicus flicked past and vanished into the machine’s belly. Something whined faintly in there.

  “Chim—”

  Whiteout. Static on the visor. A sudden chittering—the bot stuttering towards target lock, I realized in a moment of bright perfect panic before it bounced off my chest and sent us both careening onto the deck. Something grabbed me around the leg, tightened; punctured my flesh and dug in. I screamed and flailed. I was being dragged. I reached out blindly, slapped the downed bot in passing; it fizzed and spat and fell out of reach. I cracked my head against a passing bit of rail, tore the useless visor off my face, plunged from bright static to pitch black.

  More cracks against the head. I bumped down the stairs and onto rock, squirmed and reached forward and tried to free myself, grabbed something that pulsed and stabbed me in the palm. I pulled my hand back and saw black blood against gray flesh against a dim glow filtering through the trees. Brightening.

  Glowbulbs blazed everywhere now, as blinding as nightlights can be. I was dragged through the heart of a globular cluster, an oasis of light in squirming claustrophobic darkness. I saw what had me now: fibrous, braided, so dark even in light that you’d have to squint to see more than silhouette. Studded with thorns the size of carnosaur teeth. One was hooked deep in my calf. It twitched. I screamed.

  It let go.

  It didn’t just release me: it sprang free, explosively uncoiled and convulsed off across the forest floor. Its severed stump thrashed into view, chopped free of some upstream command center, smearing sap—clear and viscous as glycerin—across the rock and trunks and stems it slapped in its death throes.

  Another dark shape in motion. This one walked on two legs, stepped over the twitching monster-vine, a blade humming softly at its side. Behind that shape lurked others.

  They stepped into the light. The machete clattered onto the rocks, just within reach.

  “Yours?” Lian said.

  She’s alive. She’s alive.

  Still dark. The bulbs hung on all sides like silver fruit, washing the forest in twilight, but none seemed to have a direct line-of-sight to her face. Lian stood over me, a collection of angles and shadows haloed in bioluminescence. Four—allies? henchmen?—stood at her side, two steps back. I thought I recognized Dao standing with two strangers to Lian’s left; Kaden, alone, on her right.

  None of them spoke. None of them moved.

  “I wondered if you. . .” Ever since Doron and his impossible quote. But it had been a head thing; I’d never felt it in my gut.

  “And here I am,” Lian said.

  The dismembered vine wriggled feebly on the ground.

  Alive.

  “Chimp—”

  “Thinks I fell overboard.” A small smile, more sensed in the voice than seen on the face.

  “So did I. So did Kai, so did—” I propped myself up on my elbows. My leg lodged a protest. “God, Li, it’s so good to see you.”

  “Good to see you too.”

  I would’ve hugged her if I’d been able to stand. “How’d you pull it off?”

  “Faked an accident. Fried some cameras, fried some sensors. Down long enough for me to make it back here.”

  “You live here now?”

  “We move around in the blind spots. We’re building more. Avoiding the bots.”

  “Your cortical links?”

  “Fried ’em. Deep-focus microwaves.”

  I winced.

  “How are you—I mean, how long—” I did some counting in my head, the news from Kai, the time since. “You’ve been down here for nine thousand years. . .”

  “Closer to ten.”

  “So you’ve got coffins.”

  She nodded.

  “That the Chimp isn’t wired into.”

  “Defeats the purpose otherwise.”

  “How?”

  “Sunday.” Her shoulders rose, fell. “We had three thousand to choose from.”

  How did you know, I wanted to ask. How did you know when I didn’t?

  I pulled myself into a sitting position, poked carefully at the hole in my leg. Stung like shit, but just a flesh wound far as I could tell. I glanced around at the killer forest. “And you did all this.” I had to admit it was a smart move. Most of the time Eriophora is desolation incarnate, her immaculate atmosphere uncorrupted by anything beyond the slow photosynthesis of gengineered plants. A single one of us, active out of turn, would leave tiny but unmistakable footprints all over that pristine background. Now, though—you could probably hide the breathing of a small army behind all this rampant metabolism.

  “Just started it, basically,” Lian said. “Tweaked a few parameters, let it bake while we slept. Could’ve used your help actually; my engineering skills don’t extend that far into the organic. There were some bugs. Vines got a bit rambunctious in the early days.”

  “They still are.”

  “Work in progress.”

  “It’s not gonna keep Chimp out forever.”

  “No,” Lian said. “You will.”

  I didn’t say anything for a moment.

  Then: “How do I do that, exactly?”

  She had no trouble reading my face. “You’re the meat-grinder.”

  “Evolutionary engineer.”

  “My point is you can sell it. We’ll give you the specs, enough details to keep that fucker out of our hair.”

  “For how long?”

  “Long as it takes. I’ll even give you a survivor, so you can call the mission a success.”

  “Just one?”

  “Dao stays with me. Another unfortunate fatality. It’s how we build up the ranks.” She gestured at her entourage. “You never noticed the uptick in industrial accid
ents over the past few gigs?”

  “I never really checked,” I admitted. “Li—this is crazy.”

  “You said that last time. But here you are.”

  Her eyes glinted in shadow. She held herself in a way I’d never seen on her before.

  “Even if you manage to stay hidden, what are you going to do from down here? Kill the Chimp?”

  “Eventually, yeah.”

  “We don’t even know where the hypervisor is at any given time. We don’t know all the places it could be. And if you get really lucky and take it out, the next one boots faster than you can spit.”

  “Why, Sunday,” Lian said mildly. “If I didn’t know better I’d be starting to wonder if you’re completely on board with this thing. “

  I tried for a lighter touch. “Levi probably shouldn’t have sent me the invite, then.”

  “You didn’t leave him much choice. Way he tells it, you were about to sell us out.”

  “I didn’t, though.”

  “No,” she said. “You didn’t.”

  “You knew I wouldn’t.” Somehow, she knew. “I mean, that was a pretty specific overture. That was for me.”

  “That was for you, someday. When we were sure. You forced our hand.”

  “Still.”

  “Of course it was for you. You’re my friend.”

  Her friend. I thought of Monocerus. I thought of the silver gremlin. This very glade, aeons ago.

  Not a very good one.

  Maybe this time I can do better.

  I began: “How exactly are you going to do it?”

  “Watch me.”

  “Does everyone else get the same ringside seat? You gonna wake up thirty thousand people—”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “—one by one, sneak ’em all down here, fill them in on the plan? Do we all get a vote?”

  “That would take forever. We’ve already waited that long.”

  “So you’re making that call for everyone. Unilaterally.”

  “I’m not entirely alone down here.”

  “Hardly a quorum. And even if you had one—we’re one tribe, Lian. Out of six hundred.”

  “Someone has to make the call.”

  “Then what makes y—what makes us any better than the Chimp?”

  “That’s easy. Chimp’s the one who’ll deprecate you the moment your utility function drops too far. I’m the one trying to keep everyone alive.” Shades of darkness shifted across her face. “What about you, Sunday? Why are you here?”

  “I’m not interested in a—raging vendetta, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I’ve already got enough raging vendetta for a fucking army. Answer the question.”

  I’d never seen her so assured before. How many shifts had she been up while I was down? How many two-week builds, how many hidden resurrections, had it taken to grow that spine?

  “I’m waiting.”

  “Because—” I began, and stopped.

  “Because you had three thousand coffins to choose from.” It felt like a confession. It felt like a betrayal.

  “I can work with that.” She took my hand. She helped me to me feet.

  Her face came into the light.

  I wobbled, and stared. The renewed complaints from my leg barely registered.

  “Something wrong?” The edge of a smile deepened the lines on her face.

  “You’re old,” I said softly.

  “Someone’s gotta put in a few extra hours.” A fierce grin. “Chimp’s not gonna overthrow himself. Besides”—she bent to retrieve my machete from the cave floor—“given how often that thing calls you up on deck, I’m really just catching up.” She hefted the machete, sliced off a thorn from the still-twitching vine.

  I put a hand to my face.

  “Ow! What the fuck, Lian!”

  Kaden was clutching hir right arm where Lian had stabbed it with the dismembered thorn. She stabbed again as I watched, in the thigh this time. Kaden howled and went down. Dao took a step forward; one of his companions clapped a hand on his shoulder and he quieted.

  “Sorry, kid. Verisimilitude.” Lian turned and handed me my machete. “We have to get you briefed.”

  Finally I noticed: how the figures flanking Dao leaned in just a bit too close, how they didn’t so much lurk as loom. How very, very still Dao was suddenly holding himself.

  It was starting to sink in.

  Lian Wei was past the point of needing friends.

  I crutched Kaden back to the exit, hir good arm around my shoulder, our respective good legs taking the weight of our respective bad ones. Kaden’s wounds went deeper than mine; se hissed, clenched hir teeth with each step as we hobbled away from the light. Eri’s singularity, close below, added weight to every step.

  “She’s changed,” I said.

  “Had to,” se gritted. “Put this whole thing together while you were sleeping with the enemy.”

  I let hir take more of hir weight on the next step—

  “Shhhhit…”

  —and took it back, point made. “We’re all sleeping with the enemy, Kaden. Anyone who wasn’t would’ve been dead a thousand builds ago.”

  “If you say so.”

  “It’s inspiring to see you show such generosity to someone who just came within a few centimeters of slicing open your femoral artery.”

  “Like she said. Gotta sell this.” Kaden’s face turned toward me; in the dark, it might as well have been a radar dish. “She better be right about you.”

  “Right?”

  “That you don’t come around easy. But when you’re in you’re in.”

  “You think she’s wrong?”

  “Think she’s dead right. Stick by your friends, no question. Maybe even when they turn out to be mass murderers.” Se grunted. “Always were Chimp’s pet. I wasn’t the only one who found it creepy.”

  Chimp’s pet. I turned the words over in my head as we paused to catch our breath. When did they hang that cute little term of endearment around my neck?

  “So why you going along with this?”

  “You went four builds, never breathed a word. You were gonna sell us out, would’ve done it already.”

  We started forward again. The hatch beckoned in the distance, piecemeal brightness filtering through mutant undergrowth.

  I remembered two ’spores, and a third between. “Dao’s not exactly on board, is he?”

  “He’ll come around.”

  “What if he doesn’t?”

  Kaden stopped again. Turned.

  “Lian trusts you,” se said. “Don’t know why, but I guess she’s got her reasons. And I trust her, so here we are. Plus it would obviously help if we could harness that sick Chimp-Sunday dynamic of yours. Things’d go a lot easier if we had someone with a bit of pull.”

  “But.”

  “But the fact that you didn’t run to the Chimp doesn’t make you an ally. Maybe figured we’d stop you. Maybe just too chickenshit to take a side.” Se turned, and kept going, and I almost didn’t notice that se hadn’t answered my question.

  “I guess we’ll find out,” I said. One last vine, thick as my leg, squirmed off the path at our approach. “Act wounded. We’re on.”

  “Chimp! Gurney!” But one was already gliding into view down the slope, its clamshell lid gaping in anticipation of fresh meat.

  “It’s good to see you, Kaden,” Chimp remarked as I helped hir onto the pallet. “How are you feeling?”

  “Great.” Kaden winced, lay back, let the gurney close over hir. Probing snakes, thin as fiberop, swarmed hir wounds.

  “What happened?” the Chimp said.

  “What does it look like? The forest attacked hir. It attacked me. Gone completely fucking feral.”

  Kaden had nothing to add. Spinal blocks can be distracting at the best of times.

  Chimp: “How?”

  “A couple of mutations left to simmer for fifty thousand years, that’s how.” We started back up the corridor. “Don’t ask me to go back i
n after Dao.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there’s not enough left of him to make it worth the risk. Send a bot if you want him so bad.” A calculated risk, but Chimp wasn’t the impetuous sort. At the very least it would wait to hear my report.

  “Sunday.” IF vocal stress harmonics > X THEN invoke name. DO UNTIL calm.

  “What.” Into the tube. There was an infirmary a couple of levels up. Probably unnecessary—the gurney could handle a simple flesh wound—but the system was programmed to play it safe under incomplete-information scenarios.

  “You’re injured too.”

  “I’m okay. I’ll glue myself together upstairs.”

  Satisfied, it moved on. “Can you explain how low-lumen photosynthesis could generate enough energy to support such rapid movem—”

  “Look up turgor, for fucks’ sake. Those vines had gigasecs to build up hydrostatic pressure. Released it all in a split-second. Lucky it didn’t take hir whole leg off.”

  The hesitation was so slight I barely noticed it; the Chimp could have run a thousand scenarios in that time. “That would account for initial damage along any given route. But there wouldn’t be enough time to re-establish turgor pressure between multiple incursions along the same path.”

  Out of the tube and a few kilos lighter. Kaden’s gurney slid on ahead. I lingered a moment, distracted by a new scrawl of swirls and jiggles and dots (new—now there’s a relative word) the Painters must have left sometime over the past few millennia. I wondered distantly what they meant. That word popped into my mind again: feral.

  “Sunday.”

  “I know.” I picked up the pace, lowered my voice enough to release the Chimp from DO UNTIL. “Obviously they’re not being powered by the usual redox reactions.”

  “Do you know what they could be using instead?”

  I did. But it wouldn’t do to make it look too easy. Lian had cut me a tissue sample while we’d been catching up; I pulled it from my belt. “Let me run this. Then we’ll talk.”

  The infirmary was less compartment than cul-desac, an invagination of corridor containing a hardlined sarcophagus and two gurney sockets. A lab bench nestled in their midst, a horseshoe of screens and sample ports curved around a pseudopod. The sequencer was primarily intended for human tissue, but everything’s the same tinkertoy that far down. It only took a few minutes to extract the genome; maybe another twenty to extrapolate the resulting phenotypes. By the time I was finished Kaden had decided to sleep through the mandatory sixteen-hour convalescence window and availed hirself of the general anesthesia option. Chimp and I were alone again.