Firefall

  “Thirty-five total degrees of arc,” the invisible voice reported calmly. “Three-point-five degrees axial. Rep twenty-three, oh-nine-nineteen.” The recording ended.

  Brüks let out his breath.

  “Has to be real,” Sengupta grunted.

  “What?”

  “Horizon’s not real. It’s, it’s between. They don’t glitch on hypotheticals.”

  He thought he understood: vampires were immune to horizons. No matter how flat, no matter how perfect, they were zero thickness. You couldn’t build a cross with a horizon, not one that stopped Valerie and her buddies at least: for that, you’d need something with depth.

  “Really hard to get this,” Sengupta remarked. “The explosion scrambled the records.”

  “Explosion?”

  “Simon Fraser.”

  Realist attack, he remembered. A couple of months before he’d gone on sabbatical; the bomb had taken out a lab working on spindle emulation. He hadn’t heard anything about the vamp program being targeted, though.

  “There would’ve been backups,” he guessed.

  “For the footage sure. But how do you know it’s her, huh? You never see her face. The embeds just give a subject code. Gait recognition not so great when your target’s tied down.”

  “The voice,” Brüks said.

  “That’s what I used. Now try trawling the cloud with a random voice sample, no stress data, no contextuals.” Sengupta jerked her chin. “Like I said. Hard. But I got it now it’s getting easier all the time.”

  “They tortured her,” Brüks said softly. We tortured her. “Does—does Jim know about this?”

  Sengupta barked out a humorless laugh. “I wouldn’t tell that asshole what time zone he was in.”

  You don’t have to do this, Brüks thought. You don’t have to work so hard turning all that pain into anger. You could be free, Rakshi. Fifteen-minute tweak and they’d cut the grief right out of you, the same way they wired in the love. Twenty-five minutes and you’d forget you’d ever been in pain.

  But you don’t want to forget, do you? You want the grief. You need it. Your wife’s dead, she’ll be dead forever but you can’t accept that, you’re clinging to Moore’s Law like a life jacket in a hurricane. Maybe they can’t bring her back now but maybe in five years, maybe ten, and in the meantime you’ll make do on hope and hate even if you haven’t figured out where they belong.

  He closed his eyes while she smoldered at his side.

  God help me when you do.

  Back in the Hub, she’d stripped the sun naked. It seethed and roiled overhead, close enough to touch (which he did, just for the surrealistic hell of it: a gentle push off the grille, a weightless drift, and Daniel Brüks could kiss the sky). But the curve of its edge was as clean and sharp as if razored: no flares, no prominences, no great gouts of plasma to dwarf a dozen Jupiters and fuck with Earthly broadcasts.

  “Where’s the corona?” he asked, thinking: Filters.

  “Ha that’s not the sun that’s the sun side.”

  Of Icarus, she meant: the sun and Icarus face-to-face, the light of one bouncing off the disk of the other into the eye of some remote camera, massively shielded, floating out front on the breath of a trillion hydrogen bombs.

  “Perfect reflector if you crank it up high enough,” Sengupta said. “Won’t do much for the rads but if you’re talking about thermal and visible spectrum I could turn this place into the coldest spot from here to the Oort.”

  “Wow,” Brüks said.

  “That’s nothing look at this.”

  The sun—the sun’s reflection—darkened by degrees. Those brilliant writhing coruscations began to dim: the sunspots, the weather systems, the looping cyclones of magnetic force began to fade from sight, sink into some colder cosmic background. Within moments the sun was a pale phantom on a dark mirror.

  Something else was there, though: other currents, convecting like a pot of molten glass brought to a rolling boil. Liquid mass upwelled near the center of the disk, swirled outward in an endless bloom of turbulent curlicues, cooled and slowed and stagnated near the darker perimeter. It was as though the solar photosphere had been stripped away to reveal some other, completely separate weather system churning beneath.

  Except, Brüks realized after a moment, he wasn’t looking at the sun at all, not even in reflection. This was—

  “That’s Icarus,” he murmured. A great convex solar cell a hundred kilometers across: transparent or opaque, solid or liquid, its optical properties slaved to the whims of a glorified thermostat and Rakshi Sengupta’s little finger. Darker now, just a few degrees closer to blackbody status, the convection currents swirled ever faster as it worked to dump the excess heat.

  Off in some distant corner, an alarm woke with a soft beeping.

  “Um...,” Brüks began.

  “Don’t worry roach just throttling up a bit to build some extra ergs don’t want Earth to fall below quota do you?”

  The beeping continued, increasingly urgent. Insistent little tags began flashing near the bottom of the display, albedo falling, absorbance and ΔT on the rise.

  “I thought we’d already tanked up.” It had been the final phase of the reconstruction: the last of the Bicams had stowed their tools and abandoned the Crown’s refitted hull for a group hug around Portia, twelve hours before. (Apparently their brains fell out of contact beyond some limited range.)

  “Got some need more that’s a lot of mass we gotta get out from under.”

  Brüks couldn’t take his eyes off the sunside view: like looking down at a blooming mushroom cloud in the wake of an airburst. He knew it was only imagination but the Hub felt—warmer...​

  He bit his lip. “Aren’t we overheating? Those tags—”

  “More product takes more power right? Basic physics.”

  “Not that much more.” Surely she hadn’t dialed down the reflectivity this far the last time, surely this was just—

  “Want to double-check my numbers roach? Don’t trust my math think you can do better?”

  —showing off...​

  The sunside sparked and vanished from the dome: NO SIGNAL pulsed above the warning icons left behind.

  “Shit,” Sengupta spat. “Stupid cambot melted.”

  “I’m impressed,” Brüks said quietly. “Now will you please just dial it back a—”

  “Quit fucking around, Rak.” Lianna ricocheted up from the southern hemisphere, bounced off the Tropic of Cancer and arced toward the forward hatchway. “We’ve got more important things to do right now.”

  “Yeah right more important than putting charge in the tank.” But her fingers twitched in the air, and the alarms dimmed a little. “Like what?”

  Lianna spun around a handhold and planted herself on the arctic circle. “Like Oldschool’s slime mold. It’s talking to us.” And disappeared through magnetic north.

  TALKING WAS GENEROUS: the images that had begun crawling across Portia’s skin were crude, chunky things, primitive mosaics built from pixels a centimeter on a side. There was no window per se, no distinct bounded area within which relevant information was neatly displayed. The mosaics simply faded into existence and out again, the oily gray of default epidermis stippling gradually into a roughly circular area of increasing contrast, a black-and-white scratchpad reminiscent of a crossword puzzle. Brüks’s secular circuitry couldn’t discern any pattern there.

  Chromatophores, he remembered. This thing could change color if it ran the right kind of computations. “What started it up?”

  “Dunno don’t bug me.” Sengupta had demoted the helmet-cam feeds to a line of thumbnails; her attention was fixed on Icarus’s own stereocams, zoomed and focused on Portia’s—what? Graphics interface? The same picture respawned in several iterations across the dome: sonar, infrared, ultrasound. The mosaic only showed up along visible wavelengths: infrared and ultraviolet filters showed nothing but plain old Portia, a monochrome porridge devoid of surface detail.

  Smack-dab in the
middle of the human visual range, Brüks thought. Wouldn’t that be a coincidence...​

  “Ha!” Sengupta barked. “Z-contours the thing’s talking in terraces...” She zoomed the view. Sure enough the white pixels were elevated, little square mesas raised a millimeter above their darker counterparts. Brüks spawned his own window and zoomed even closer: the surfaces of all that topography were fracturing, folding, each pixel splitting and resplitting into a mesh of ever finer pigeonholes.

  “It’s building diffraction gratings!” Sengupta brayed.

  “And it’s increasing pixel-res—”

  “I said shut up!”

  Brüks bit back a response and cycled through MonkCam. The Bicamerals had fallen silent around the object of their veneration, played with their instruments, passed bands of radiation invisible and otherwise over Portia’s skin. Lianna was staying out of the way; her camera panned across the backs of helmets from the compartment hatch.

  The resolution on that patchy window was improving by the second now; pixels the size of thumbnails shattered into spots the size of lentils, dissolved again into swirling clusters of pinheads that collapsed into shards below the resolving power of the camera. Steps became sawtooth lines became smooth, swirling curves that swept across the display and faded into flat gray oblivion. Now Brüks could almost recognize the patterns moving there—each new geometry seemed more familiar than the last, tugged a little harder at some half-forgotten memory before giving up and giving way to the next iteration. But nothing stuck. Nothing lasted long enough to sink his teeth into—until the patterns slowed, and Rakshi and Lianna spoke a single word, a shout and a whisper uttered in the same instant:

  “Theseus.”

  Eleven minutes was all it had taken. Eleven minutes for an anaerobic time-sharing slime mold to refine its pixels from the size of sugar cubes down to units that exceeded the resolving power of the human eye. Eleven minutes from coma to conversation.

  First-contact protocols. Fibonacci sequences, golden ratios, periodic tables. The Bicamerals scribbled cryptic responses onto tacpads and held them up in turn; Brüks was not especially surprised to note that Portia’s swirling communiqués were a lot more comprehensible than the Bicamerals’ responses.

  A shadow intruded subtly from the direction of the hatch, a hint of some presence beyond the lines of sight offered up by helmet feeds and onboard eyes. Icarus was full of blind spots; its cameras had not been installed with an eye to comprehensive surveillance. Brüks noticed, and tried not to.

  Sudden surprised murmurs from the Bicamerals; a soft oooh from Lianna. Brüks scanned the feeds, where geometric primitives acted out some arcane theorem across Portia’s skin. “Lianna. Talk to me.”

  “The GUI,” she told him. “It’s gone three-D.” Her feed circled the compartment, fixing Portia from every angle. “Some kind of lenticular diffraction effect. I’m seeing that whole display in three-D, we’re all seeing it in three-D. Wherever we move. The thing’s tracking us, it’s tracking five—uh, six pairs of eyes and pointing a customized diffraction grid at each one of us simultaneously. A single display surface.”

  “Doesn’t look three-D to me,” Sengupta grumbled. “Too dumb to track the stereocam.”

  Eleven minutes to derive the precise architecture of human eyesight. It seemed an impossibly short time to intuit a whole new sensory system from scratch, without invasion, without dissection. Except Portia hadn’t done that at all, most likely. It had probably taken the tutorials long before it ever made the in-system jaunt. Wherever the place it called home, it had at the very least made a pit stop at Theseus. These probably weren’t the first Humans it had encountered.

  Maybe there’d been some dissection after all.

  “Where’s Jim?” Lianna said.

  “Right here,” Moore called in from the depths of the Crown. He’d been off-shift but he was back in the game. “I’m on my way.”

  “Uh, that’s a negative, Jim. We’d rather you stay back for now. Give us your insights from there.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You know why. This thing’s using Theseus’s contact protocols. Your stock just went up.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Moore said mildly. “I’ve been over there many times.”

  “It was never active before.” The slightest hint of exasperation tinged Lianna’s voice. “Come on, Jim, you know the rules about high-value assets better than anyone.”

  “I do,” Moore agreed. “Which means my expert opinion should prevail. I’m coming over.”

  No sound over comm. On the great surveilling compound eye, points of view shifted and bobbed.

  “Fine,” Lianna said at last. “Don’t forget to suit up.”

  Brüks and Sengupta, the last of the daycare buddies. They watched through one camera eye as Moore, fore in the attic, slid into his suit. They watched through a half-dozen others as Ofoegbu et al returned to their rituals at the altar of First Contact, as Portia continued to iterate through stolen protocols; Sengupta grunted something about building a pidgin but all Brüks could see was plasma plots and dancing stick figures.

  “Little warm in there,” Sengupta remarked. Brüks barely heard her.

  Up in one corner of the compound eye, one of the Bicamerals—AMINA, according to the feed—panned away from the shrine and floated out of the sanctum; EULALI followed a moment later. The two began to trace a path back to the docking hatch. (Brüks felt a twinge of resentment on Moore’s behalf—as though the poor dumb caveman might get lost without a couple of grown-ups to show him the way.)

  Metal guts sailed past in Moore’s feed: grilles, bulkheads, conduits and plumbing turning around his axis in constant lazy rotation. Landmarks passed in faster succession than Brüks had ever seen through Bicameral feeds: the radiator bus, the T-junction leading off to the LEAR hoop, that row of fluorescent pink high-pressure tanks he’d never been able to find on any schematic. Moore moved as if he’d been born to this place; he rounded one last corner like a dolphin twisting onto a new heading and he was there. Lianna and Ofoegbu moved aside to let him enter.

  Somehow he’d missed Amina and Eulali. Probably took a short cut, Brüks thought, glancing up at the nondescript passageway floating past in their feeds. That’ll teach ’em.

  Soft ululations from the sanctum. On Lianna’s feed Moore frowned stage left, evidently squeezing some kind of intelligence from those sounds.

  “I think I see the problem,” he said after a moment.

  Somewhere—else—Eulali and Amina had stopped moving. They hesitated for a moment, looming in each other’s feeds; then Janused back-to-back, turning slowly. Signage and hazard striping adorned a hatch in the background: VPR H2 STORAGE, THRUSTER ASSEMBLY. HARD VACUUM BEYOND.

  “It’s as you said,” Moore was saying back in the sanctum. “These are standard protocols.” His helmet cam held a tight focus on Portia’s paintings. Lianna’s feed showed him from the side, visor raised, cheek eclipsed by his helmet, his profile visible past the forward edge of the seal. Just past him, the node called Ofoegbu wasn’t looking at Moore or Portia: he was looking back through the open hatchway, into the corridor beyond—

  Wait a second, Brüks thought. Shouldn’t there be—

  That shadow, hinting at an unseen presence by the hatch. Gone now.

  Moore: “It’s using the same protocols we are.”

  Valerie had been there, just a few minutes ago. Now she was gone.

  “It’s reflecting our own protocols back at us. It’s completely rote.”

  Amina and Eulali. They weren’t going to meet Jim at all, Brüks realized. I bet they’re tracking Valerie...​

  He foregrounded their feeds. They still faced in opposite directions, each presumably sharing in the wraparound vista of a conjoined visual field. Icarus drifted about them like a sharp-edged dream.

  “We’re not talking to an alien intelligence,” Moore continued. “We’re talking to a mirror.”

  Something caught Brüks’s eye, a tiny brig
ht sparkle in the upper-left corner of Amina’s feed. A faint star drifting on the recycled breeze. He skimmed the stereocam menu, selected 27E—VAPOR CORE REACTOR—EXT. CORRIDOR. Same corridor, dorsal view. Now he stared down at the tops of two open helmets; that floating star twinkled in the foreground. He zoomed the feed onto a sliver of glass—something like that, anyway—barely the size of a hangnail. A shard of something broken.

  A big place, Icarus. It went on forever, breathed through more than a thousand kilometers of ductwork. This glass speck could have come from anywhere.

  “You want to make any progress at all—” Moore said.

  No signs of stress or metal fatigue nothing popped nothing broken no bits floating around.

  ...’Course you gotta go in there and check to be sure...

  “—you’ve got to break it.”

  In the sanctum, Jim Moore extended his arm. Too late, Ofoegbu rushed to intervene. A bright little figurine sprang into existence on the palm of Moore’s hand, a hologram, an offering in the shape of a man.

  “This is my son.” Moore’s voice carried soft and clear along the channel. “Do you know him?”

  Portia’s interface imploded and disappeared.

  Holy shit holy shit—“Holy shit holy shit holy—” That was Sengupta beside him, locked in a loop, synced with another voice in Brüks’s own head.

  “Shut up,” Brüks said; amazingly, both obeyed.

  Moore’s hand didn’t move. The offering on its palm glowed steadily. Portia lay silent on its shrine while every sapient being within a hundred million kilometers held its breath.

  After an endless moment, a single bright eye opened in the middle of that surface. Light spilled from its pupil, fountained swirling across some canvas of melanin and magnetite, settled finally into an image with arms and legs. Siri Keeton looked back at himself, arms spread just slightly at his sides, palms out.

  Brüks leaned forward. “Another mirror image.”