Firefall

  “Made? I thought they were just you know. Really territorial.”

  “Nobody’s that territorial. Someone must’ve amped their responses to keep them from ganging up on us.” Brüks shrugged. “Like the Crucifix Glitch, only—deliberate.”

  “How do you know that I haven’t seen that anywhere.”

  “Like you said, Rak: it’s the only the model that fits. How do you think the line could even breed if their default response was to eviscerate each other on sight? Call it the, the Divide and Conquer Glitch.” He smiled bitterly. “Oh, we were good.”

  “They’re better,” Sengupta said. “Look I don’t care how helpless Carnage thinks that thing is I’m not taking my fucking eyes off it. And I’m firewalling every onboard app and every subroutine I can find until I check every last one for logic bombs.”

  Now there’s a quick weekend project. Aloud: “Anything else?”

  “I don’t know I’m working on it but how do I know she hasn’t already figured everything I could think of? No matter what I do I could be playing right into her hands.”

  “Well, for starters,” Brüks suggested, “what about welding the airlocks shut? You can’t hack sheet metal.”

  Sengupta took her eyes off the horizon, turned her head. For a moment Brüks even thought she might look at him.

  “When it’s time to leave, we cut a hole,” he continued. “Or blow one. I assume this isn’t a rental. If it is, I’m pretty sure the damage deposit’s already a write-off.”

  He waited for the inevitable put-down.

  “That’s a great idea,” Sengupta said at last. “Brute-force baseline thinking shoulda thought of it myself. Fuck safety protocols. I’ll do the Hold and the spokes you do the attic.”

  The docking hatch wouldn’t take a weld: it was too reactive, its reflexes almost the stuff of living systems. Clenched tight it could withstand the point-blank heat of lasers and still dilate on command like a dark-adjusting eye. Brüks had to make do with bulkhead panels from the attic, strip them from their frames and weld them into place across the airlock’s inner wall.

  Jim Moore appeared at his side, wordlessly helped him maneuver the panels into place. “Thanks,” Brüks grunted.

  Moore nodded. “Good idea. Although you could probably fab a better—”

  “We’re keeping it low-tech. In case Valerie hacked the fabbers.”

  “Ah.” The Colonel nodded. “Rakshi’s idea, I’m guessing.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Moore held the panel steady at one end while Brüks set the focus. “Serious trust issues, that one. Doesn’t like me at all.”

  “You can’t really blame her, given the way you folks—manipulated her.” Brüks lined up the keyhole, fired. Down at the tip of the welder, metal flared bright as a sun with an electrical snap; but the lensing field damped that searing light down to a candle flame. The tang of metal vapor stung Brüks’s sinuses.

  “I don’t think she knows about that,” Moore said mildly. “And that wasn’t me in any case.”

  “Someone like you, anyway.” Aim. Fire. Snap.

  “Not necessarily.”

  Brüks looked up from the weld. Jim Moore stared back impassively.

  “Jim, you told me how it works. Herded into the service of agendas they’d never support in a thousand years, remember? Somebody thought that up.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” Moore’s eyes focused on some spot just past Brüks’s left shoulder.

  You’re barely even here, Brüks thought. Even now, half of you is caught up in some kind of—séance...​

  “There’s a whole other network out there,” Moore was saying. “Orthogonal to all the clouds, interacting with them like—I don’t know, the way dark matter interacts with baryonic matter maybe. Weak effects, and subtle. Very tough to trace, but omnipresent. Ideally suited for the kind of tweaks we use to marshal our forces, as we like to say. And do you know what’s really remarkable about it, Daniel?”

  “Tell me.”

  “As far as we know, nobody built the damn thing. We just discovered it. Turned it to our own ends. The theorists say it could just be an emergent property of networked social systems. Like your wife’s supraconscious networks.”

  “Uh-huh,” Brüks said after a moment.

  “You don’t buy it.”

  He shook his head. “A stealth supernet fine-tuned for the manipulation of pawns with a specific skill set suited to military applications. And it just emerged?”

  Moore smiled faintly. “Of course. No complex finely tuned system could ever just evolve. Something must have created it.”

  Ouch, Brüks thought.

  “I’ll admit I’ve heard that argument before,” Moore said. “I just never thought I’d hear it from a biologist.”

  Evidently half of him was enough.

  HE AWOKE TO the sound of jagged breathing. Shadows moved across the skin of his tent.

  “Rak?”

  The flap split down the middle. She crawled inside like some heartbroken infant returning to the womb. Even in here, cheek to jowl, she would not look at his face; she squirmed around and lay down with her back to him, curled up, fists clenched.

  “Uh...,” Brüks began.

  “I told you I didn’t like him I never did and now look,” Sengupta said softly. “We can’t trust him roach, I never really liked him but you could count on him at least you knew where he stood. Now he’s just—gone all the time. Don’t know what he is anymore.”

  “He lost his son. He blames himself. People deal with it in different ways.”

  “It’s more than that he lost his kid years ago.”

  “But then he got him back. In a small way, for a little while. Can you imagine what that must be like—to, to deal with the loss of someone you loved only to find out that they’re still out there somewhere, and they’re talking and it doesn’t matter if they’re talking to you or not it’s still them, it’s new, you’re not just playing a sim or wallowing in the same old video she’s actually out there and—”

  He caught himself, and wondered if she’d noticed.

  I could have her back, he told himself. Not in the flesh maybe, not here in the real world but real time at least, better than this thin graveside monologue Jim clings to. All I have to do is knock on Heaven’s door...​

  Which was, of course, the one thing he’d sworn to never do.

  “He says Siri’s alive,” Sengupta whispered. “Says he’s coming home.”

  “Maybe he is. That clip from the transmission, right near the beginning, you know? The coffin.”

  She ran her finger across the inside of the tent. Words wrote themselves in her wake: Point of view matters: I see that now, blind, talking to myself, trapped in a coffin falling past the edge of the solar system.

  Brüks nodded. “That’s the one. If you take that at face value, he’s not on board Theseus anymore.”

  “Lifeboat,” Sengupta said. “Shuttle.”

  “Sounds like he’s coasting in. It’ll take him forever, but there’ll be a hibernaculum on board.” He rested a hand on her shoulder. “Maybe Jim’s not wrong: maybe his son’s coming home.”

  He lay there, breathing in the scent of oil and mold and plastic and sweat, watching his breath ruffle her hair.

  “Something’s coming,” she said at last. “Maybe not Siri.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It just sounds wrong the way it talks there are these tics in the speech pattern it keeps saying Imagine you’re this and Imagine you’re that and it sounds so recursive sometimes it sounds like it’s trying to run some kind of model...”

  Imagine you’re Siri Keeton, he remembered. And gleaned from a later excerpt of the same signal: Imagine you’re a machine.

  “It’s a literary affectation. He’s trying to be poetic. Putting yourself in the character’s head, that kind of thing.”

  “Why do you have to put yourself in your own head though eh why do you have to imagine what it’s like to be you?” She sh
ook her head, a sharp little jerk of denial. “All those splines and filters and NCAs they take out so much you know, you can’t hear the words without them but you can’t hear the voice unless you strip them away. So I went back through all the steps I looked for some sweet spot where you might be able to hear and I don’t know if I did the signal’s so weak and there’s so much fucking noise but there’s this one little spot forty-seven minutes in where you can’t make out the words but you can sort of make out the voice, I can’t be sure you can never be sure but I think the harmonics are off.”

  “Off how?”

  “Siri Keeton’s male I don’t think this is male.”

  “A woman’s voice?”

  “Maybe a woman. If we’re lucky.”

  “What are you saying, Rakshi? You’re saying it might not be human?”

  “I don’t know I don’t know but it just feels wrong and what if it’s not a—a literary affectation what if it’s some kind of simulation? What if something out there is literally trying to imagine what it’s like to be Siri Keeton?”

  “The voice of God,” Brüks murmured.

  “I don’t know I really don’t. But whatever it is it’s got its hooks into a professional killer with a zombie switch in his brain. And I don’t know why but I know a hack a when I see one.”

  “How could it know enough to hack him? How would it even know he exists?”

  “It must’ve known Siri and Siri knew him. Maybe that’s enough.”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted after a bit. “Hacking a human mind over a six-month time lag, it seems—”

  “That’s enough touching,” she said.

  “What?”

  She shrugged his hand off her shoulder. “I know you gerries like to touch and have meat sex and everything but the rest of us don’t need people to get us off if you don’t mind. I’ll stay here but it doesn’t mean anything okay?”

  “Uh, this is my—”

  “What?” she said, facing away.

  “Nothing.” He settled back down, maneuvered his back against the wall of the tent. It left maybe thirty centimeters between them. He might even be able to sleep, if neither of them rolled over.

  If he felt the least bit tired.

  Rakshi wasn’t sleeping, either, though. She was scratching at her own commandeered side of the tent, bringing up tiny light shows on the wall: a little animatic of the Crown, centered on the rafters where MOORE, J. clung to a ghost, or danced on the strings of some unknowable alien agenda, or both; the metal landscape the drone traversed in search of countermeasures; the merest smudge of infrared where a sleeping monster hid in the shadows. There really weren’t any safe places, Brüks reflected. Might as well feign what safety you could in numbers. The company of a friend, the warmth of a pet, it was all the same; all that mattered was the simple brain-stem comfort of a body next to yours, huddled against the night.

  Sengupta turned her face a little: a cheekbone, the tip of a nose in partial eclipse. “Roach?”

  “I really wish you’d stop calling me that.”

  “What you said before, about losing people. Different people deal in different ways that’s what you said right?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “How do you deal?”

  “I—” He didn’t quite know how to answer. “Maybe the person you lose comes back, someday. Maybe someday someone else fits into the same space.”

  Sengupta snorted softly, and there was an echo of the old derision there: “You just sit around and wait?”

  “No, I—get on with my life. Do other things.” Brüks shook his head, vaguely irritated. “I suppose you’d just whip up some customized ConSensus playmate—”

  “Don’t you fucking tell me what I’d do.”

  Brüks bit his lip. “Sorry.”

  Stupid old man. You know where the hot buttons are and still you can’t help pushing the damn things.

  There was a bright side, though, to Colonel Carnage’s deepening insanity, to Valerie’s lethal waiting games, to ghosts haunting the ether and uncertain fates waiting to pounce: at least Rakshi wasn’t hunting him anymore. He wondered at that thought, a little surprised at Sengupta’s place atop his own personal hierarchy of fear. She was just a human being, after all. Unarmed flesh and blood. She wasn’t some prehistoric nightmare or alien shapeshifter, no god or devil. She was just a kid—a friend even, insofar as she could even think in those terms. An innocent who didn’t even know his secret. Who was Rakshi Sengupta, next to monsters and cancers and a whole world on the brink? What was her grudge, next to all these other terrors closing in on all sides?

  It was a rhetorical question, of course. Sure the universe was full of terrors.

  She was the only one he’d brought upon himself.

  His own hunt wasn’t going so well.

  Of course, Portia wasn’t quite so visible a target as Daniel Brüks. Brüks couldn’t subsist on the ambient thermal energy of bulkhead atoms vibrating at room temperature, couldn’t flatten himself down to paper and wrap himself around a water pipe to mask even that meager heatprint. He’d wondered about albedo or spectro, wondered if a probe built of very short wavelengths might be able to pick up the diffraction gratings that Portia used to talk—perhaps it used them as camouflage as well—but the improvised detectors he fabbed turned up nothing. Which didn’t mean they didn’t work, necessarily. Maybe it only meant that Portia kept to the Crown’s infinite fractal landscape of holes and crannies too small for bots and men.

  He was almost certain it couldn’t launch an open attack without letting some tell slip beforehand: the heat signature of muscle analogs building a charge, the reallocation of mass sufficient to construct an appendage at some given set of coordinates. It could run, though, in some sort of postbiological baseline state, powered by the subtle energy resonating from the crude mass of the real substrate into the superconducting intelligence of the false one. It could think and plan forever in that mode, if Bicameral calculations had been right. It could hide.

  The less he found, the more he feared. Something nearby was watching him; he felt it in his gut.

  “Ship’s too damn noisy,” he confided to Sengupta. “Thermally, allometrically. Portia could be anywhere, everywhere. How would we know?”

  “It’s not,” she told him.

  “Why so sure? You were the one who warned me, back when—”

  “I thought it might have got in yah. Maybe it did. But not enough to get everywhere it didn’t coat everything. It didn’t swallow us.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It wanted to keep us in Icarus. It wouldn’t have tried to stop us from leaving if we were still inside it. It’s not everywhere.”

  He thought. “It could still be anywhere.”

  “Yah. But not enough to take over, just a—a little bit. Lost and alone.”

  There was something in her voice. Almost like sympathy.

  “Yah well why not?” she asked, although he had said nothing. “We know how that feels.”

  . . .

  Sailing up the center of the spine, navigating through the grand rotating bowl of the southern hemisphere, up through the starboard rabbit hole with the mirrorball gleaming to his left: Daniel Brüks, consummate parasite, finally at home in the weightless intestines of the Crown of Thorns. “I checked the numbers three times. I don’t think Portia—”

  He stopped. His own face looked down at him across half the sky.

  Oh fuck—

  Rakshi Sengupta was a presence near the edge of vision, a vague blur of motion and color more felt than seen. He had only to turn his head and she would come into focus.

  She knows she knows she knows—

  “I found the fucker,” she said, and there was blood and triumph and terrible promise in her voice. He could not bring himself to face her. He could only stare at that incriminating portrait in front of him, at his personal and professional lives scrolling across the heavens big as the zodiac: transcripts, publications, home add
resses; Rhona, ascendant; his goddamn swimming certificate from the third grade.

  “This is him. This is the asshole who killed my—who killed seven thousand four hundred eighty-two people. Daniel. Brüks.”

  She was no longer talking like Rakshi Sengupta, he realized at some horrible remove. She was talking like someone else entirely.

  “I said I would find him. And I found him. And here. He. Is.”

  She’s talking like Shiva the fucking Destroyer.

  He floated there, dead to rights, waiting for some killing blow.

  “And now that I know who he is,” Shiva continued, “I am going to survive that thing on the hull and I am going to survive that thing in Colonel Carnage’s head and I am going to make it back to Earth. And I will hunt this fucker down and make him wish he had never been born.”

  Wait, what—?

  He forced back his own paralysis. He turned his head. His pilot, his confidante, his sworn nemesis came into focus. Her face, raised to the heavens, crawled with luminous reflections of his own damnation.

  She spared him a sidelong glance; her lips were parted in a smile that would have done Valerie proud. “Want to come along for the ride?”

  She’s toying with me? This is some kind of twisted—

  “Uh, Rakshi—” He coughed, cleared a throat gone drier than Prineville, tried again. “I don’t know—”

  She raised one preemptive hand. “I know, I know. Priorities. Counting chickens. We have other things to do. But I’ve had friends wiped by the storm troopers for hacking some senator’s diary, and then this asshole racks up a four-digit death toll and those same storm troopers protect him, you know what I mean? So yah, there are vampires and slime molds and a whole damn planet coming apart at the seams but I can’t do anything about that.” Her gaze on the ground, she pointed to the sky. “This I can do something about.”

  You don’t know who I am. I’m right here in front of you and you’ve dredged up my whole sorry life and you’re not putting it together how can you not be putting it together?

  “Bring back a little balance into the social equation.”

  Maybe it’s the eye contact thing. He suppressed a hysterical little giggle. Maybe she just never looked at me in meatspace...​