Firefall

  She paused some precise number of milliseconds.

  “I don’t have to kill intelligent beings to pay the rent.”

  “Nobody’s saying you’d have to—”

  “Now let’s look out there, shall we? Infectious zombieism running rampant in at least twenty countries I know of. Realists and Rearguard Catholics taking shots at any heretics they can lay their crosshairs on. Food poisoning on the rise for anyone who can’t afford a consumables-class printer. They haven’t even bothered tracking species extinction rates for a decade now, and—oh, and have you heard about that new weaponized echopraxia that’s going around? Jitterbug, they call it. Used to be pure monkey-see-monkey-do, but they say it’s mutating. Now you get to die dancing, bring a friend along for the ride.”

  “The difference,” he said grimly, “is that when the power fails out here, you can curl up under a blanket. If it fails in Heaven you’re brain-dead in five minutes. You’re helpless in there, Rhona, and it’s all just a house of cards waiting for...”

  She didn’t answer. He couldn’t finish.

  He wondered how much she’d changed already, how much of her remained behind that gentle, utterly unyielding and unreal voice. Was he even talking to an intact brain, or to some hybrid emulation of neurons and arsenide? How much of his wife had been replaced over the past two years? That incremental cannibalism, that ongoing fossilization of flesh by minerals—it had always scared the living shit out of him.

  And she embraced it.

  “I’ve seen things,” he told her. “World-shaking things.”

  “We all have. It’s a shaky world.”

  “Will you just shut up and listen to me? I’m not talking about the goddamned news feeds, I’m talking about things that—I’ve seen things that—I know why you went away now, you know? I finally get it. I never did before, but right now I swear I’d join you in a second if I could. But I can’t. It doesn’t feel like transcendence to me, it doesn’t feel like rising into some better world, it feels like being—replaced. I mean, I can’t even stand to have a ConSensus augment in my head. It’s like anything that changes what I am kills what I am. Do you understand?”

  “Of course. You’re scared.”

  He nodded miserably.

  “You’ve always been scared, Dan. As long as I’ve known you. You’ve spent your whole life being an asshole just to keep people from finding out. Lucky for you I could see through it, mmm?”

  He said nothing.

  “Know what else I see?”

  He didn’t. He didn’t have a clue.

  “That’s what makes you brave.”

  It took a moment for that to sink in. “What?”

  “You think I don’t know? Why you keep mouthing off to the wrong people? Why you sabotaged your own career every step of the way? Why you can’t help but face off against anybody who has any power over you?”

  Climbing an endless ladder toward a hungry monster. Charging into a leghold labyrinth with living walls. Biting the head off a girl half his size when she told him he couldn’t go home.

  Maybe not such a proud moment, that last one...​

  “You’re saying I overcame my fear,” he began.

  “I’m saying you gave in to it! Every time! You’re so scared of being seen as a coward you’d jump off a cliff just to prove you weren’t! You think I never saw it? I was your wife, for God’s sake. I saw your knees knocking every time you ever stood up to the schoolyard bully and got your teeth kicked in for your troubles. Your whole damn life has been one unending act of overcompensation, and you know something, love? It’s just as well. Because people need to stand up now and then, and who else is going to?”

  It didn’t sink in at first. All he could do was frown and replay and try to figure out when the conversation had switched tracks like that.

  “That has to be the most heartwarming definition of asshole I’ve ever heard,” he said at last.

  “I liked it.”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, though. I still can’t—follow you...”

  “Follow me.” Her voice was flat with sudden insight. “You think...”

  She won’t come out, and I can’t go in—

  “Dan.” A window opened on the wall. “Look at me.”

  He looked away.

  He looked back.

  He saw something that resembled a pickled fetus more than it did a grown woman. He saw arms and legs drawn close against the body in defiance of the cuffs at wrists and ankles, of the contractile microtubes that pulled them straight three times a day in a rearguard battle against atrophy and the shortening of tendons. He saw a shriveled face and a hairless scalp and a million carbon fibers sprouting from the base of the skull, floating like a nimbus around her head.

  “This is not what I’m talking about,” something said with her voice, and her lips did not move.

  “Rhona, why are you—”

  “You call this change, but it isn’t,” the voice said. “Heaven isn’t the future. It’s a refuge for gutless wonders who want to hide from the future, a nature preserve for people who can’t adapt. It’s, it’s wish fulfillment for passenger pigeons. You think I was lording this over you? This is nothing but a dumping ground for useless also-rans. You don’t belong here.”

  “Useless?” Brüks blinked, stunned. “Rho, don’t ever—”

  “I ran away. I threw in the towel years ago. But you—you may be doing everything for the wrong reasons and you may be pissing yourself when you do it, but at least you haven’t given up. You could be hiding with the rest of us but you’re out there in a world with no reset button, a place you have no control over, a place where other people can take your whole life’s work and twist it to such horrible ends and there’s no way to ever take back what they did.”

  “Rhona—what—”

  “I know, Dan. Of course I know. You didn’t have to hide it from me. You couldn’t hide it from me, I’m more plugged in than you are.” The voice was gentle, and kind, and still the face of that thing did not move. “The moment they quarantined Bridgeport I knew. I almost called you then, I thought maybe you’d finally give up and come inside but—”

  A mountain smashed into the back of his skull. His forehead smacked the wall of the cubby, rebounded; he toppled backward in his chair and sprawled across the deck. A red-shifted galaxy ignited, pulsing, in his head: light-years away, an upside-down giant stood silhouetted in the doorway.

  He blinked, moaned, tried to focus. The starfield dimmed; the roaring in his head faded a little; the giant shrank down to merely life-size. Its depths were so black they almost glowed.

  Rakshi Sengupta, meet Backdoor Brüks.

  Somewhere far away, a computer called out in the voice of his dead wife. Brüks tried to bring his hand to his head; Sengupta stomped on it and leaned over him. Fresh pain erupted off the midline and shot up his arm.

  “I want you to imagine something, you fucking roach.” Sengupta’s fingers danced and dipped overhead.

  Oh God no, Brüks thought dully. Not you, too...​He let his head loll to the side, let his eyes stray somewhere anywhere else; Sengupta kicked him in the head and made him pay attention. Her fingers clenched and interlaced and bent backward so far he thought they’d break.

  “Want you to imagine Christ on the Cross—”

  He was barely even surprised when the spasms started.

  Sengupta leaned in to admire her handiwork. Even now she could not look at his face. “Oh yes I have been waiting for this I have been working for this I have—”

  A sound: sharp, short, loud. Sengupta fell instantly silent. Stood up.

  A dark stain bloomed on her left breast.

  She collapsed onto Brüks like a rag doll. They lay there a moment, cheek to cheek, like slow-dancing lovers. She coughed, tried to rise; sprawled downhill to Brüks’s side. Her dimming eyes focused, unfocused, settled finally on some point near the hatch. Jim Moore stood there like a statue, his eyes so full of grief they might as well
have been dead already.

  Something crossed Sengupta’s face in that moment. Not happiness, not quite. Not surprise. Enlightenment, maybe. After a moment, for the very first time, she looked Dan Brüks straight in the eye.

  “Oh fuck,” she whispered as her eyes went out. “Are you ever screwed.”

  “I know it doesn’t make any sense,” Moore was saying, turning the gun over in his hands. “We were never close. That may have been my fault, I suppose. Although, you know, he wasn’t what you’d call an easy child...”

  He’d pulled up a chair, sat hunched and leaning against the slant with his knees on his elbows, the light from the corridor catching him in quarter-profile. Brüks lay on the floor while Sengupta’s blood pooled against his side. It soaked through his clothing, stuck his jumpsuit to his ribs. His head throbbed. His throat was parched. He tried to swallow, was relieved and a bit surprised to find that he could.

  “Now, though...​he’s half a light-year away, and for the first time in his life I feel that we’re actually able to talk...”

  Pale nebulae clouded Sengupta’s open eyes. Brüks could see them clearly even in this dim light; could even turn his head a little to bring them into proper focus. Not Valerie’s best-laid glitch, not the total paralysis the vampire had layered down with weeks of graffiti and subtle gesticulation—or at least, not the same precision in the trigger stimulus. It probably was the same program, the same chain of photons to mirror neurons to motor nerves, still dozing in the back of his head should anyone sound the call to arms; Sengupta must have just improvised after the fact, gone back over old footage, figured out the basic moves and acted them out as best she could.

  “It’s as though he knew I’d be listening all those months ago, as though he knew what I’d be thinking when his words arrived...”

  She probably hadn’t even been planning for vendetta. It had probably been just another pattern-matching puzzle to keep that hyperactive brain occupied, fortuitously available when it turned out that her wife’s murderer and her adopted roach were one and the same. This rigor was half-assed and short-lived; he could feel it in his tendons. The tightness was already beginning to subside.

  Still pretty impressive, though.

  “I feel closer to Siri than I ever did when we were on the same planet,” Moore said. He leaned forward, assessed the living and the dead. “Does that make any sense to you?”

  Brüks tried to move his tongue: it barely trembled against the palate. He focused on moving his lips. A sound emerged. A groan. It contained nothing but frustration and distress.

  “I know,” Moore agreed. “And at first it felt more like just—reports, you know? Letters home, but full of facts. About the mission. I listened to that signal, oh, I would have listened forever, even if all he’d ever done was tell the tale. I learned so much about the boy, so much I never suspected.”

  Take two...​: “Jim...”

  “And then it—changed. As though he ran out of facts and had nothing left but feelings. He stopped the reportage and started talking to me...”

  “Jim—Rak—Rakshi thought—”

  “I can even hear him now, Daniel. That’s the remarkable thing. The signal’s so weak it shouldn’t even be able to penetrate the atmosphere, especially with all the broadband chatter going on. And yet I can hear him, right here in the room.”

  “Rakshi thought—your zombie switch—”

  “I think he’s trying to warn me about something...”

  “—you might have been—hacked—”

  “Something about you.”

  “She said you—you might not be in—control—”

  Moore stopped turning the gun in his hands. Looked down at it. Brüks fired every command he could, along every motor nerve in his body. His fingers wiggled.

  Moore smiled a sad little smile. “Nobody’s in control, Daniel. Do you really think you don’t have one of these zombie switches in your own head, you don’t think everyone does? We’re all just along for the ride, it’s the coming of the Lord is what it is. God’s on Its way. It’s the Angels of the Asteroids, calling the shots...”

  Angels again. Divine teleoperators, powerful creatures with neither soul nor will. God’s sock puppets.

  Jim Moore was turning into one before his eyes.

  “What if it’s not—Siri?” Brüks managed. His tongue seemed to be thawing a bit. “What if, what if it’s something else...”

  The Colonel smiled again. “You don’t think I’d know my own son.”

  “It knows your son, Jim.” Of course it knows him, it mutilated him, can’t you remember the goddamn slide show? “It knows Siri, and Siri knows you, and—and it’s smart Jim, it’s so fucking smart...”

  “So are you.” Moore eyed him curiously. “Smarter than you let on, anyway.”

  If only.

  He wasn’t smart enough to get out of this. Not smart enough to outthink some interstellar demon who could hack a man’s brain across five trillion kilometers and a six-month time lag, who could trickle its own parasitic subroutines into the host’s head and lead him around in real time. Assuming that Moore hadn’t just gone batshit crazy on his own, of course. That was probably the most parsimonious explanation.

  Not that it mattered. Brüks wasn’t smart enough to get out of that, either.

  Moore lowered his eyes. “I didn’t want to do that, you know. She was a good person, she was just—misguided. I suppose I may have overreacted. I only did it to protect you.”

  Behind him, up among the crossbeams that ribbed the ceiling, one shadow stirred among others. Brüks blinked and it was gone.

  “I wonder if that was such a good idea...”

  “It was,” Brüks croaked. “Really. It—”

  Faster than he could finish: a shape detached itself from the ceiling, swayed silently against the light, and folded down over Moore like a praying mantis. Inhuman fingers, blurred in motion; silhouetted lips in motion.

  Without any fuss at all, Moore stopped moving.

  Valerie dropped soundlessly to the deck, crossed the room, stared down at Daniel Brüks as he slowly, painfully bent one knee. It was the closest thing to fight/flight left in him. She bent close and whispered—

  “The tomb at Aramathea.”

  His body unlocked.

  He gulped air. The vampire stood, stepped back, gave him a small cryptic smile.

  Brüks swallowed. “Saw you burn,” he managed. Twice.

  She didn’t even dignify it with an answer.

  We expect a trick, and we find one, and we pat ourselves on the back. We find her pinned to the hull—think we do, anyway—and just stop looking. Of course she’s out there: there she is. There goes her hab and all its tripwires. Why look any further?

  Why look inside the Crown? Why check the hatches in the shuttle...?

  He propped himself up on his elbows; the sodden jumpsuit peeled from the deck as if steeped in half-set epoxy. Valerie watched impassively as he got to his feet.

  “So what now? You give me a ten-second head start to make it sporti—”

  A blur and a hiss and he was off his feet, strangling and kicking a meter from the deck with her hand around his throat. In the next instant he was back on the floor, collapsed in a heap while Valerie grinned down with far too many teeth.

  “All this experience,” she remarked while he gasped for breath, “and you’re still an idiot.”

  Catch and release. Cat and mouse. Just having fun, he supposed. In her way.

  “Aircraft are all dead,” Valerie said. “I find a ride in the moon pool, though. Get us to the mainland at least.”

  “Us,” Brüks said.

  “Swim if you’d rather. Or stay.” She dropped her chin in the direction of the statue frozen on its chair. “If you stay you should kill him, though. Or he kills you when he unlocks.”

  “He’s my friend. He protected me, before—”

  “Only part of him. OS conflict. It resolves soon enough, it’s resolving now.” Valerie turned
toward the door. “Don’t wait too long. He’s on a mission from God.”

  She stepped into the light. Brüks looked back at his friend: Jim Moore sat staring at the floor, face unreadable. He blinked, very slowly, as Brüks watched.

  He did not cry out against his abandonment.

  Brüks followed the monster along slanting corridors and companionways, down endless flights of emergency-lit stairs into the bowels of the gyland, unto its very anus: an airlock that would have felt too small at five times the size, given present company. The chamber beyond echoed like a cave and looked a little like one, too: pipes and hoses and cylinders of compressed gas jutted like stalactites from the angled ceiling. The room was half-underwater; the ocean had breached the banks of the moon pool as the gyland listed, flooded down to some temporary equilibrium halfway up the far bulkhead. Diffuse gray-green light filtered up from outside and wriggled dimly across every surface.

  It was only a small port in the storm. There was probably a bay big enough to dock a Kraken or a Swordfish somewhere else on this floating behemoth, but here the berths were for smaller vehicles. A dozen parking racks hung from an overhead conveyor train, most of them empty. A two-person midwater scout rested snuggly in one clenched set of grappling claws, the end of a service crane still embedded in its shattered crystal snout. Another dangled precariously from the ceiling, nose submerged, tail entangled in its broken perch.

  A third, apparently intact, floated just off the flooded deck: broad shark body, whale’s flat flukes, the great saucer eyes of some mesopelagic hatchetfish bridging the snout. Aspidontus, according to the letters etched just above the countershade line. It bumped gently against the edge of the moon pool—tail to the bulkhead, nose poking out over the hole in the floor—a waist-deep wade down the flooded incline.