Firefall

  Icarus shrank away. The sun burst back into view around it. Five blue sparks still flickered even in the light of that blinding corona: five bright dots in a dwindling black disk in a sea of fire. Stabilizing thrusters, Brüks realized distantly, and wondered why they burned so long and so bright, and wished that the answer hadn’t come to him so quickly.

  The newborn gravity kept putting on weight. It pulled Brüks ever harder against his restraints, leaned him out of the alcove and angled over the deck. His knees did not buckle under the strain; his body did not collapse. He was breathing statuary, and some gut sense stronger than logic knew that he would not crumple if those straps gave way: he would topple to the deck and shatter.

  The spacesuits beside him had disappeared. Rotting corpses hung in their stead, slivers of gray flesh dangling through the mesh, maggots dripping like rice grains from empty eye sockets. Grinning mandibles clicked and clattered and uttered incomprehensible sounds. REM paralysis, one part of Brüks said to another, although he was not asleep. Hallucination. The corpses laughed like something less dead, coughing through mud.

  Floaters swarmed in his eyes. Half-visible in the encroaching fog, Jim Moore stood against the deck without benefit of webs or incantations or anything but the crushing awareness of his own actions. Darkness closed in. With the last few synapses sparking in his cache, Brüks wondered what Luckett might have said in the face of such a toll.

  Probably that everything was going according to plan.

  You have to understand, Deen, this is the fifth attack on Venezuela’s jet-stream injection program so far this year. Stratospheric sulfates are still down by three percent and even if there aren’t any further attacks, we’ll be lucky if they recover by November. Any agro who can’t afford seriously drought-hardened transgenics is going to have a disastrous summer. Clones and force-grown crops from higher lats should be able to pick up the slack—as long as we don’t suffer a repeat of last year’s monoculture collapse—but local shortages are pretty much inevitable.

  We’re well aware that the Venezuelan program is technically illegal (you think none of us have read the GBA?) but I don’t have to tell you about the benefits of stratospheric cooling. And even if geoengineering is a short-term solution, you gotta use what you can or you don’t live long enough to reach the long term. Of course, Caracas isn’t doing itself any favors with their idiotic adherence to an outmoded judicial system. Personal culpability? What are these [EPITHET AUTOREDACT] going to come up with next, witch-dunking?

  So I can speak for the whole department when I say that we sympathize completely. And if you folks over in Human Rights want to blacklist them again, go right ahead. But the bottom line is, You can’t ask us to withdraw support for Venezuela. The world just can’t afford to see even modest climate-mitigation efforts sabotaged like this.

  I know how bad the optics are. I know how tough it is to sell an alliance with a regime whose neuropolitics are rooted in the Middle Ages. But we’re just going to have to take this dick in our mouths and swallow whatever comes out. Stratospheric cooling is one of the few things keeping this planet from falling on its side right now, and as you know that technology takes a lot of power.

  If it makes you feel any better, consider the fact that if this had happened twenty, twenty-five years ago we wouldn’t even be having this conversation; we didn’t have enough joules in hand back then to be able to afford these kinds of options. We’d probably be tipping into another Dark Ages by now.

  Thank God for Icarus, eh?

  —Fragment of internal UN communiqué

  (correspondents unknown): recovered from corrupted source released during a scramble competition between unidentified subsapient networks, 1332:45 23/08/2091

  HE WOKE UP weightless. Unseen hands guided him like a floating log through the Hub, through a southern hemisphere that didn’t move any more than he could. Rakshi Sengupta called in from somewhere far away, and she did not bray or bark but spoke in tones as soft as any cockroach: “This is taking too long we’re gonna start falling back if we don’t restart the burn in five minutes tops.”

  “Three minutes.” Moore’s voice, much closer. “Start your clock.”

  And that’s all of us, Brüks thought distantly. Just Jim, and Rakshi, and me. No vampires left, no undead bodyguards. Bicamerals all gone. Lianna dead. Oh God, Lianna. You poor kid, you poor beautiful innocent corpse. You didn’t deserve this; your only crime was faith...​

  One of the axial hatches passed around him. In the next instant he was swinging around an unaccustomed right angle: the Crown’s spokes, rigged for thrust, still laid back along her spine. Rungs scrolled past his face as Moore pushed him headfirst to stern.

  All our children, gone. Smarter, stronger, leaner. All those souped-up synapses, all those Pleistocene legacy issues stripped away. Where did it get them? Where are they now? Dead. Gone. Turned to plasma.

  Where we’ll be, probably, before long...​

  Maintenance & Repair. Moore folded out the medbed and strapped him in just as the Crown began clearing her throat. By the time he turned to leave, weight was seeping back into the world. Brüks tried to turn his head, and almost succeeded. He tried to clear his throat, and did.

  “Uh...​Jim...” It was barely above a whisper. The Colonel paused at the ladder, a vague silhouette in the corner of Brüks’s eye. The ongoing burn seemed to sink him into the deck.

  “...Th-thanks,” Brüks managed.

  The silhouette stood silently in the burgeoning gravity.

  “That wasn’t me,” he said finally, and climbed away.

  Moore was not the only one to visit. Lianna returned to him from the grave, a dark flickering plasma who smiled down on his frozen features and shook her head and whispered You poor man, so lost, so arrogant before the sun called her back home. Chinedum Ofoegbu stood for hours at his side and spoke with fingers and eyes and sounds that stuttered from the back of his throat, and somehow Brüks understood him at last: not the ululating cipher, not the intelligent hive cancer, but a kind old man whose fondest childhood memory was the family of raccoons he’d surreptitiously befriended with a few handfuls of kibble and subtle sabotage inflicted on the latch of the household organics bin. Wait—you had a childhood? Brüks tried to ask, but Ofoegbu’s face and hands had disappeared under eruptions of buboes and great ropy tumors, and he could no longer get out the words.

  Rhona even came back from Heaven, though she’d sworn she never would. She stood with her back to him, and fumed; he tried to turn her around and make her smile, but when she did the expression was bitter and furious and her eyes were full of sparks. Oh, do you miss her? she raged. You miss your mindless puppet, your sweet adoring ego-slave? Or is it just the fact that you’ve lost the one small fake part of your whole small fake life where you had some kind of control? Well, the chains are off, Dan, they’re off for good. You can rot out here for all I care.

  But that’s not what I meant, he tried, and I never thought of you that way, and—when he finally ran out of denials and had nothing else to say: Please. I need you. I can’t do it on my own...​

  Of course you can’t, she sneered. You can’t do anything on your own, can you? I’ll give you that much: you’ve actually turned incompetence into a survival strategy. Whatever would you do if you actually lost your excuses, if you augged up like everyone else? How would you ever survive without your disability to invoke when you can’t keep up?

  He wondered what Heaven could possibly be like, to make her so vindictive. He would have asked but Rhona had turned into Rakshi Sengupta right in front of his fossiled eyes, and her train of thought seemed to have jumped to a whole different track. You gotta stay away from the bow, she whispered urgently, glancing nervously over her shoulder. You gotta stay out of the attic, he’s in there now and maybe something else. I wish you’d come back this could be bad and I’m only good with numbers, you know? I’m not so hot in meatspace.

  You’re doing fine, Brüks tried to say. You’re
even starting to talk like one of us roaches. But all he could manage was a croak and a cough and whatever Rakshi heard seemed to scare her more than his silence had.

  Sometimes he opened his eyes to see Moore looming over him, moving shiny blinking chopsticks in front of his face. Once or twice an invisible roaring giant stood on his chest, pressing him deep into the soft earth at his back (the sparse bands of new-grown grass on the bulkhead bowed low against the wall, every blade in uniform alignment); other times he was as weightless as a dandelion seed. Sometimes he could almost move, and the creatures gathered at his side would startle and pull back. Other times he could barely roll his eyes in their sockets.

  Sometimes he woke up.

  Something sat at his side, a vaguely humanoid blur at the edge of eyesight. Brüks tried to turn his head, unfix his gaze from the ceiling. All he could see was pipes and paint.

  “It’s only me.” Moore’s voice.

  Is it. Is it really.

  “I guess you weren’t expecting it,” said the blur. “I’m actually surprised that Sengupta didn’t tell you. It’s the kind of thing she’d enjoy spreading around.”

  He tried again. Failed again. His cervical vertebrae seemed—fused, somehow. Corroded together.

  “Maybe she doesn’t know.”

  Brüks swallowed. That much he could do, although his throat remained dry.

  The blur shifted and rustled. “It’s a mandatory procedure where I come from. Too many scenarios when conscious involvement—compromises performance. Whatever the military is these days, you don’t get into it unless you...”

  A cough. A reset.

  “The truth is, I volunteered. Back when everything was still in beta, before it was policy.”

  Do you get to decide, Brüks wondered, when it comes and goes? Is it a choice, or is it a reflex?

  “You may have heard we just go to sleep. Lose all awareness, let the body run on autopilot. So we won’t feel bad about pulling the trigger, afterward.” Brüks heard a note of bitterness in the old man’s voice. “It’s true enough, these days. But we first-gen types, we—stayed awake. They said it was the best they could do at the time. They could cut us out of the motor loop but they couldn’t shut down the hypothalamic circuitry without compromising autonomic performance. There were rumors floating around that they could do that just fine, that they wanted us awake—for debriefing afterward, experienced observer in the field and all—but we were such hot shit we didn’t really care. The sexy bleeding edge, you know. First explorers on the post-Human frontier.” Moore snorted softly. “Anyway. After a few missions that didn’t quite go according to plan, they rolled out the Nirvana Iteration. Even offered me an upgrade, but it—I don’t know. Somehow it just seemed important to keep the lights on.”

  Why are you telling me this? What does it matter, now that you’ve thrown the world’s lifeline into the sun?

  “What I’m saying is, I was there. The whole time. Only as a passenger—I wasn’t running anything—but I didn’t go away. I’m not like Valerie’s mercenaries, I was—watching, at least. If that makes you feel any better. Just wanted you to know that.”

  It wasn’t you. That’s what you’re saying. It’s not your fault.

  “Get some rest.” The blur stretched at his side; the Colonel’s face resolved briefly in Brüks’s field of focus, faded again to the sound of receding footsteps.

  Which paused.

  “Don’t worry,” Moore said. “You won’t be seeing it again.”

  The next time he woke up Sengupta was leaning over him.

  “How long?” Brüks tried, and was relieved to hear the words come out.

  She said: “Can you move yet try to move.”

  He sent commands down his legs, felt his toes respond. Tried wiggling his fingers: his knuckles were rusted solid.

  “Not eashily,” he said.

  “It’ll come back it’s just temporary.”

  “Wha’ she do to me?”

  “I’m working on that listen—”

  “It’s like some kind of ass-fac—ass-backwards Crucifix Glitch.” His tongue fought its way around the words. “How the hell did she—baysh—baselines don’t glitch, we don’t have the shircuits—”

  “I said I’m working on it. Look we got other things to worry about right now.”

  You’ve got other things, maybe—“Whersh Jim?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you he’s up there in the attic he’s up there with Portia I think—”

  “Whah!”

  “Well how do we know how far that shit spread huh it coulda coated the whole inside of the array and we never woulda known. Coulda grown all the way up to our front door and got inside.”

  His sympathetic motor nerves were still working at least: Brüks could feel the hairs rising along his forearms.

  “Anybody take sh—take samples?”

  “That’s not what I do I’m a math maid not a bucket boy I don’t even know the protocols.”

  “You couldn’t look them up?”

  “It’s not what I do.”

  Brüks sighed. “What about Jim?”

  Sengupta stared past him. “No help he just keeps reading those letters from home over and over. I told him but I don’t think he even cares.” She shook her head (she did it so effortlessly), added: “He comes down here sometimes checks up on you. He’s been shooting you up with all sorts of GABA and spasmolytics he says you should be good to go by now.”

  He flexed his fingers; not too bad, this time. “It’s coming back, I guess. Body’s just out of practice.”

  “Yah it’s been a while. Anyway I gotta get back.” She stepped across the hab, turned back at the base of the ladder. “You gotta get back in the game Dan things are getting weird.”

  They were, too.

  She’d never called him by name before.

  He’d stopped slurring his words by the time Sengupta had departed; five minutes later he could roll from side to side without too much discomfort. He bent knees and arms in small hard-won increments, ratcheting each joint against the brittle resistance of his own flesh. At some critical angle his right elbow cracked and pain splintered down his arm like an electrical shock: but the limb worked afterward, bent and straightened at his command with nothing but a dull arthritic aching in the joint. Encouraged, he forced his other limbs past their breaking points and reclaimed them for his own.

  Reclaimed from what? he wondered.

  The medical archives reenacted the corruption of his flesh in fast-forward: a body flooded with acetylcholine, Renshaw cells compromised, ATP drawn down to the fumes by fibrils that just wouldn’t stop clenching. No ATP to cut in and ask myosin for this dance; nothing to break the actin-myosin bond. Gridlock. Tetany. A charley horse that froze the whole damn body.

  The mechanism was simple enough: once the action potentials started hammering that fast it could only end one way. But this didn’t seem to be drug induced. Valerie hadn’t spiked his coffee or slipped anything into his food. His medical telemetry hadn’t picked up the trail until long minutes after Brüks had been hit, but as far as he could tell those signals had come from his own brain: CNS to alpha-motor to synaptic cleft, boom boom boom.

  Whatever this was, he’d inflicted it on himself.

  He took his time in checking out. Time to extract the catheters and stretch his limbs; time to boot his defossilized corpus back into some semblance of an active state. Time to refuel: his convalescence had left him ravenous. Almost an hour had passed by the time he climbed out of M&R in search of whatever the galley might serve up.

  He was halfway across the Hub before he noticed the light bleeding from the spoke.

  A snapshot of the past: a corpse, laid out on the lawn. Brüks didn’t know which element was the more incongruous.

  The lawn, he supposed. At least that was unexpected: not so much a lawn as a patchy threadbare rug of blue-green grass—rusty in the dim longwave vampires preferred—ripped from the walls of the hab and strewn hap
hazardly across the deck. Vampires had OCD, Brüks remembered vaguely. The mythical ones at least, not the ancient flesh-and-blood predators that had inspired them. Seventeenth-century folk legends had it that you could drive a vampire to distraction by the simple act of throwing salt in its path; some supernatural brain circuit would compel it to drop everything and count the grains. Brüks thought he’d read that somewhere. Probably not peer reviewed.

  For all he knew, that ridiculous superstition might have at least a rootlet in neurological reality. It certainly wasn’t any more absurd than the Crucifix Glitch; maybe some pattern-matching hiccup in those omnisavant brains, some feedback loop gone over the top. Maybe Valerie had fallen victim to the same subroutine, seen all those thousands of epiphytic blades and torn them from their bulkhead beds with her bare fingernails, counting each leaf as it fluttered to the deck in a halfhearted chlorophyllous blizzard.

  Of course, the catch was that vampires didn’t have to count: they would simply see the precise number of salt grains or grass leaves in an instant, know that grand seven-digit total without ever going through the conscious process of adding it up. Any village peasant who sacrificed two seconds scattering salt in his path would buy himself a tenth-of-a-second’s grace, tops. Not a great rate of exchange.