Firefall Read online

  But now something lurked at the furthest edge of our backyard, calling into the void. Maybe it was talking to some other solar system. Maybe it was talking to something closer, something en route.

  "It's not the kind of situation we can safely ignore," my father said.

  "What about probes?"

  "Of course. But we can't wait for them to report back. The follow-up's been fast-tracked; updates can be sent en route."

  He gave me a few extra seconds to digest that. When I still didn't speak, he said, "You have to understand. Our only edge is that as far as we know, Burns-Caulfield doesn't know we're on to it. We have to get as much as we can in whatever window of opportunity that grants us."

  But Burns-Caulfield had hidden itself. Burns-Caulfield might not welcome a forced introduction.

  "What if I refuse?"

  The timelag seemed to say Mars.

  "I know you, son. You won't."

  "But if I did. If I'm the best qualified, if the job's so vital…"

  He didn't have to answer. I didn't have to ask. At these kind of stakes, mission-critical elements didn't get the luxury of choice. I wouldn't even have the childish satisfaction of holding my breath and refusing to play—the will to resist is no less mechanical than the urge to breathe. Both can be subverted with the right neurochemical keys.

  "You killed my Kurzweill contract," I realized.

  "That's the least of what we did."

  We let the vacuum between us speak for a while.

  "If I could go back and undo the—the thing that made you what you are," Dad said after a while, "I would. In a second."

  "Yeah."

  "I have to go. I just wanted to give you the heads-up."

  "Yeah. Thanks."

  "I love you, son."

  Where are you? Are you coming back?

  "Thanks," I said again. "That's good to know."

  ***

  This is what my father could not unmake. This is what I am:

  I am the bridge between the bleeding edge and the dead center. I stand between the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain.

  I am the curtain.

  I am not an entirely new breed. My roots reach back to the dawn of civilization but those precursors served a different function, a less honorable one. They only greased the wheels of social stability; they would sugarcoat unpleasant truths, or inflate imaginary bogeymen for political expedience. They were vital enough in their way. Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force on all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives. There have always been those tasked with the rotation of informational topologies, but throughout most of history they had little to do with increasing its clarity.

  The new Millennium changed all that. We've surpassed ourselves now, we're exploring terrain beyond the limits of merely human understanding. Sometimes its contours, even in conventional space, are just too intricate for our brains to track; other times its very axes extend into dimensions inconceivable to minds built to fuck and fight on some prehistoric grassland. So many things constrain us, from so many directions. The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain-stem imperative of self-interest. Subtle and elegant equations predict the behavior of the quantum world, but none can explain it. After four thousand years we can't even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer. We have such need of intellects greater than our own.

  But we're not very good at building them. The forced matings of minds and electrons succeed and fail with equal spectacle. Our hybrids become as brilliant as savants, and as autistic. We graft people to prosthetics, make their overloaded motor strips juggle meat and machinery, and shake our heads when their fingers twitch and their tongues stutter. Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind.

  And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith—

  —Or you use information theory to flatten it for you, to squash the tesseract into two dimensions and the Klein bottle into three, to simplify reality and pray to whatever Gods survived the millennium that your honorable twisting of the truth hasn't ruptured any of its load-bearing pylons. You hire people like me; the crossbred progeny of profilers and proof assistants and information theorists.

  In formal settings you'd call me Synthesist. On the street you call me jargonaut or poppy. If you're one of those savants whose hard-won truths are being bastardized and lobotomized for powerful know-nothings interested only in market share, you might call me a mole or a chaperone.

  If you're Isaac Szpindel you'd call me commissar, and while the jibe would be a friendly one, it would also be more than that.

  I've never convinced myself that we made the right choice. I can cite the usual justifications in my sleep, talk endlessly about the rotational topology of information and the irrelevance of semantic comprehension. But after all the words, I'm still not sure. I don't know if anyone else is, either. Maybe it's just some grand consensual con, marks and players all in league. We won't admit that our creations are beyond us; they may speak in tongues, but our priests can read those signs. Gods leave their algorithms carved into the mountainside but it's just li'l ol' me bringing the tablets down to the masses, and I don't threaten anyone.

  Maybe the Singularity happened years ago. We just don't want to admit we were left behind.

  THE THIRD WAVE, they called us. All in the same boat, driving into the long dark courtesy of a bleeding-edge prototype crash-graduated from the simulators a full eighteen months ahead of schedule. In a less fearful economy, such violence to the timetable would have bankrupted four countries and fifteen multicorps.

  The first two waves came out of the gate in even more of a hurry. I didn't find out what had happened to them until thirty minutes before the briefing, when Sarasti released the telemetry into ConSensus. Then I opened wide; experience flooded up my inlays and spilled across my parietal cortex in glorious high-density fast forward. Even now I can bring those data back, fresh as the day they were recorded. I'm there.

  I'm them.

  I am unmanned. I am disposable. I am souped-up and stripped-down, a telematter drive with a couple of cameras bolted to the front end, pushing gees that would turn meat to jelly. I sprint joyously toward the darkness, my twin brother a stereoscopic hundred klicks to starboard, dual streams of backspat pions boosting us to relativity before poor old Theseus had even crawled past Mars.

  But now, six billion kilometers to stern, Mission Control turns off the tap and leaves us coasting. The comet swells in our sights, a frozen enigma sweeping its signal across the sky like a lighthouse beam. We bring rudimentary senses to bear and stare it down on a thousand wavelengths.

  We've lived for this moment.

  We see an erratic wobble that speaks of recent collisions. We see scars—smooth icy expanses where once-acned skin has liquefied and refrozen, far too recently for the insignificant sun at our backs to be any kind of suspect.

  We see an astronomical impossibility: a comet with a heart of refined iron.

  Burns-Caufield sings as we glide past. Not to us; it ignores our passage as it ignored our approach. It sings to someone else entirely. Perhaps we'll meet that audience some day. Perhaps they're waiting in the desolate wastelands ahead of us. Mission Control flips us onto our backs, keeps us fixed on target past any realistic hope of acquisition. They send last-ditch instructions, squeeze our fading signals for every last bit among the static. I can sense their frustration, their reluctance to let us go; once or twice, we're even asked if some judicious mix of thrust and gravity might let us linger here a bit longer.

  But deceleration is for pansies. We're hea
ded for the stars.

  Bye, Burnsie. Bye, Mission Control. Bye, Sol.

  See you at heat death.

  ***

  Warily, we close on target.

  There are three of us in the second wave—slower than our predecessors, yes, but still so much faster than anything flesh-constrained. We are weighed down by payloads which make us virtually omniscient. We see on every wavelength, from radio to string. Our autonomous microprobes measure everything our masters anticipated; tiny onboard assembly lines can build tools from the atoms up, to assess the things they did not. Atoms, scavenged from where we are, join with ions beamed from where we were: thrust and materiel accumulate in our bellies.

  This extra mass has slowed us, but midpoint braking maneuvers have slowed us even more. The last half of this journey has been a constant fight against momentum from the first. It is not an efficient way to travel. In less-hurried times we would have built early to some optimal speed, perhaps slung around a convenient planet for a little extra oomph, coasted most of the way. But time is pressing, so we burn at both ends. We must reach our destination; we cannot afford to pass it by, cannot afford the kamikaze exuberance of the first wave. They merely glimpsed the lay of the land. We must map it down to the motes.

  We must be more responsible.

  Now, slowing towards orbit, we see everything they saw and more. We see the scabs, and the impossible iron core. We hear the singing. And there, just beneath the comet's frozen surface, we see structure: an infiltration of architecture into geology. We are not yet close enough to squint, and radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail. But we are smart, and there are three of us, widely separated in space. The wavelengths of three radar sources can be calibrated to interfere at some predetermined point of convergence—and those tripartite echoes, hologramatically remixed, will increase resolution by a factor of twenty-seven.

  Burns-Caulfield stops singing the moment we put our plan into action. In the next instant I go blind.

  It's a temporary aberration, a reflexive amping of filters to compensate for the overload. My arrays are back online in seconds, diagnostics green within and without. I reach out to the others, confirm identical experiences, identical recoveries. We are all still fully functional, unless the sudden increase in ambient ion density is some kind of sensory artefact. We are ready to continue our investigation of Burns-Caulfield.

  The only real problem is that Burns-Caulfield seems to have disappeared...

  ***

  Theseus carried no regular crew—no navigators or engineers, no one to swab the decks, no meat wasted on tasks that machinery orders of mag smaller could perform orders of mag better. Let superfluous deckhands weigh down other ships, if the nonAscendent hordes needed to attach some pretense of usefulness to their lives. Let them infest vessels driven only by commercial priorities. The only reason we were here was because nobody had yet optimized software for First Contact. Bound past the edge of the solar system, already freighted with the fate of the world, Theseus wasted no mass on self-esteem.

  So here we were, rehydrated and squeaky-clean: Isaac Szpindel, to study the aliens. The Gang of Four—Susan James and her secondary personae— to talk to them. Major Amanda Bates was here to fight, if necessary. And Jukka Sarasti to command us all, to move us like chess pieces on some multidimensional game board that only vampires could see.

  He'd arrayed us around a conference table that warped gently through the Commons, keeping a discreet and constant distance from the curved deck beneath. The whole drum was furnished in Early Concave, tricked unwary and hung-over brains into thinking they were looking at the world through fisheye lenses. In deference to the creakiness of the nouveaux undead it spun at a mere fifth of a gee, but it was just warming up. We'd be at half-grav in six hours, stuck there for eighteen out of every twenty-four until the ship decided we were fully recovered. For the next few days, free-fall would be a rare and blesséd thing.

  Light sculptures appeared on the tabletop. Sarasti could have fed the information directly to our inlays— the whole briefing could have gone through ConSensus, without the need to assemble physically in the same place— but if you want to be sure everyone's paying attention, you bring them together.

  Szpindel leaned in conspiratorially at my side. "Or maybe the bloodsucker just gets off seeing all this meat in close quarters, eh?"

  If Sarasti heard he didn't show it, not even to me. He pointed to a dark heart at the center of the display, his eyes lost behind black glass. "Oasa object. Infrared emitter, methane class."

  On the display it was—nothing. Our apparent destination was a black disk, a round absence of stars. In real life it weighed in at over ten Jupiters and measured twenty percent wider at the belly. It was directly in our path: too small to burn, too remote for the reflection of distant sunlight, too heavy for a gas giant, too light for a brown dwarf.

  "When did that show up?" Bates squeezed her rubber ball in one hand, the knuckles whitening.

  "X-ray spike appears during the '76 microwave survey." Six years before Firefall. "Never confirmed, never reacquired. Like a torsion flare from an L-class dwarf, but we should see anything big enough to generate that kind of effect and the sky's dark on that bearing. IAU calls it a statistical artefact."

  Szpindel's eyebrows drew together like courting caterpillers. "What changed?"

  Sarasti smiled faintly, keeping his mouth closed. "The metabase gets—crowded, after Firefall. Everyone skittish, looking for clues. After Burns-Caulfield explodes—" He clicked at the back of his throat. "Turns out the spike might arise from a subdwarf object after all, if the magnetosphere's torqued enough."

  Bates: "Torqued by what?"

  "Don't know."

  Layers of statistical inference piled up on the table while Sarasti sketched background: even with a solid bearing and half the world's attention, the object had hidden from all but the most intensive search. A thousand telescopic snapshots had been stacked one on another and squeezed through a dozen filters before something emerged from the static, just below the three-meter band and the threshold of certainty. For the longest time it hadn't even been real: just a probabilistic ghost until Theseus got close enough to collapse the waveform. A quantum particle, heavy as ten Jupiters.

  Earthbound cartographers were calling it Big Ben. Theseus had barely passed Saturn's orbit when it showed up in the residuals. That discovery would have been moot for anyone else; no other ship caught en route could have packed enough fuel for anything but the long dejected loop back home. But Theseus' thin, infinitely attenuate fuel line reached all the way back to the sun; she could turn on the proverbial dime. We'd changed course in our sleep and the Icarus stream tracked our moves like a cat after prey, feeding us at lightspeed.

  And here we were.

  "Talk about long shots," Szpindel grumbled.

  Across the table, Bates flicked her wrist. Her ball sailed over my head; I heard it bounce off the deck (not the deck, something in me amended: handrail). "We're assuming the comet was a deliberate decoy, then."

  Sarasti nodded. The ball riccocheted back into my line of sight high overhead and disappeared briefly behind the spinal bundle, looping through some eccentric, counterintuitive parabola in the drum's feeble grav.

  "So they want to be left alone."

  Sarasti steepled his fingers and turned his face in her direction. "That your recommendation?"

  She wished it was. "No, sir. I'm just saying that Burns-Caulfield took a lot of resources and effort to set up. Whoever built it obviously values their anonymity and has the technology to protect it."

  The ball bounced one last time and wobbled back towards the Commons. Bates half-hopped from her seat (she floated briefly), barely catching it on its way past. There remained a new-born-animal awkwardness to her movements, half Coriolis, half residual rigor. Still: a big improvement in four hours. The rest of the Humans were barely past the walking stage.

  "Maybe it wasn't much trouble for them at all, eh?" Szpindel w
as musing. "Maybe it was dead easy."

  "In which case they might or might not be as xenophobic, but they're even more advanced. We don't want to rush into this."

  Sarasti turned back to the simmering graphics. "So?"

  Bates kneaded the recovered ball with her fingertips. "The second mouse gets the cheese. We may have blown our top-of-the-line recon in the Kuiper, but we don't have to go in blind. Send in our own drones along separate vectors. Hold off on a close approach until we at least know whether we're dealing with friendlies or hostiles."

  James shook her head. "If they were hostile, they could have packed the Fireflies with antimatter. Or sent one big object instead of sixty thousand little ones, let the impact take us out."

  "The Fireflies only imply an initial curiosity," Bates said. "Who knows if they liked what they saw?"

  "What if this whole diversion theory's just so much shit?"

  I turned, briefly startled. James's mouth had made the words; Sascha had spoken them.

  "You wanna stay hidden, you don't light up the sky with fucking fireworks," she continued. "You don't need a diversion if nobody's looking for you, and nobody's looking for you if you lie low. If they were so curious, they could've just snuck in a spycam."

  "Risks detection," the vampire said mildly.

  "Hate to break it, Jukka, but the Fireflies didn't exactly slip under the rad—"

  Sarasti opened his mouth, closed it again. Filed teeth, briefly visible, clicked audibly behind his face. Tabletop graphics reflected off his visor, a band of writhing polychrome distortions where eyes should be.

  Sascha shut up.

  Sarasti continued. "They trade stealth for speed. By the time you react, they already have what they want." He spoke quietly, patiently, a well-fed predator explaining the rules of the game to prey that really should know better: the longer it takes me to track you down, the more hope you have of escaping.

  But Sascha had already fled. Her surfaces had scattered like a flock of panicked starlings, and the next time Susan James' mouth opened, it was Susan James who spoke through it. "Sascha's aware of the current paradigm, Jukka. She's simply worried that it might be wrong."