Blindsight

Imagine you are Siri Keeton:

You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate; flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You’re a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae.

You’d scream if you had the breath.

Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn’t done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They’re back now, after all — raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.

The pain begins, just slightly, to recede. You fire up your inlays and access your own vitals: it’ll be long minutes before your body responds fully to motor commands, hours before it stops hurting. The pain’s an unavoidable side effect. That’s just what happens when you splice vampire subroutines into Human code. You asked about painkillers once, but nerve blocks of any kind compromise metabolic reactivation. Suck it up, soldier.

You wonder if this was how it felt for Chelsea, before the end. But that evokes a whole other kind of pain, so you block it out and concentrate on the life pushing its way back into your extremities. Suffering in silence, you check the logs for fresh telemetry.

You think: That can’t be right.

Because if it is, you’re in the wrong part of the universe. You’re not in the Kuiper Belt where you belong: you’re high above the ecliptic and deep into the Oort, the realm of long-period comets that only grace the sun every million years or so. You’ve gone interstellar, which means (you bring up the system clock) you’ve been undead for eighteen hundred days.

You’ve overslept by almost five years.

The lid of your coffin slides away. Your own cadaverous body reflects from the mirrored bulkhead opposite, a desiccated lungfish waiting for the rains. Bladders of isotonic saline cling to its limbs like engorged antiparasites, like the opposite of leeches. You remember the needles going in just before you shut down, way back when your veins were more than dry twisted filaments of beef jerky.

Szpindel’s reflection stares back from his own pod to your immediate right. His face is as bloodless and skeletal as yours. His wide sunken eyes jiggle in their sockets as he reacquires his own links, sensory interfaces so massive that your own off-the-shelf inlays amount to shadow-puppetry in comparison.

You hear coughing and the rustling of limbs just past line-of-sight, catch glimpses of reflected motion where the others stir at the edge of vision.

“Wha—” Your voice is barely more than a hoarse whisper. “…happ…?”

Szpindel works his jaw. Bone cracks audibly.

“…Sssuckered,” he hisses.

You haven’t even met the aliens yet, and already they’re running rings around you.

So we dragged ourselves back from the dead: five part-time cadavers, naked, emaciated, barely able to move even in zero gee. We emerged from our coffins like premature moths ripped from their cocoons, still half-grub. We were alone and off course and utterly helpless, and it took a conscious effort to remember: they would never have risked our lives if we hadn’t been essential.

“Morning, commissar.” Isaac Szpindel reached one trembling, insensate hand for the feedback gloves at the base of his pod. Just past him, Susan James was curled into a loose fetal ball, murmuring to herselves. Only Amanda Bates, already dressed and cycling through a sequence of bone-cracking isometrics, possessed anything approaching mobility. Every now and then she tried bouncing a rubber ball off the bulkhead; but not even she was up to catching it on the rebound yet.

The journey had melted us down to a common archetype. James’ round cheeks and hips, Szpindel’s high forehead and lumpy, lanky chassis — even the enhanced carboplatinum brick shit-house that Bates used for a body — all had shriveled to the same desiccated collection of sticks and bones. Even our hair seemed to have become strangely discolored during the voyage, although I knew that was impossible. More likely it was just filtering the pallor of the skin beneath. Still. The pre-dead James had been dirty blond, Szpindel’s hair had been almost dark enough to call black — but the stuff floating from their scalps looked the same dull kelpy brown to me now. Bates kept her head shaved, but even her eyebrows weren’t as rusty as I remembered them.

We’d revert to our old selves soon enough. Just add water. For now, though, the old slur was freshly relevant: the Undead really did all look the same, if you didn’t know how to look.

If you did, of course — if you forgot appearance and watched for motion, ignored meat and studied topology — you’d never mistake one for another. Every facial tic was a data point, every conversational pause spoke volumes more than the words to either side. I could see James’ personae shatter and coalesce in the flutter of an eyelash. Szpindel’s unspoken distrust of Amanda Bates shouted from the corner of his smile. Every twitch of the phenotype cried aloud to anyone who knew the language.

“Where’s—” James croaked, coughed, waved one spindly arm at Sarasti’s empty coffin gaping at the end of the row.

Szpindel’s lips cracked in a small rictus. “Gone back to Fab, eh? Getting the ship to build some dirt to lie on.”

“Probably communing with the Captain.” Bates breathed louder than she spoke, a dry rustle from pipes still getting reacquainted with the idea of respiration.

James again: “Could do that up here.”

“Could take a dump up here, too,” Szpindel rasped. “Some things you do by yourself, eh?”

And some things you kept to yourself. Not many baselines felt comfortable locking stares with a vampire — Sarasti, ever courteous, tended to avoid eye contact for exactly that reason — but there were other surfaces to his topology, just as mammalian and just as readable. If he had withdrawn from public view, maybe I was the reason. Maybe he was keeping secrets.

After all, Theseus damn well was.

She’d taken us a good fifteen AUs towards our destination before something scared her off course. Then she’d skidded north like a startled cat and started climbing: a wild high three-gee burn off the ecliptic, thirteen hundred tonnes of momentum bucking against Newton’s First. She’d emptied her Penn tanks, bled dry her substrate mass, squandered a hundred forty days’ of fuel in hours. Then a long cold coast through the abyss, years of stingy accounting, the thrust of every antiproton weighed against the drag of sieving it from the void. Teleportation isn’t magic: the Icarus stream couldn’t send us the actual antimatter it made, only the quantum specs. Theseus had to filterfeed the raw material from space, one ion at a time. For long dark years she’d made do on pure inertia, hording every swallowed atom. Then a flip; ionizing lasers strafing the space ahead; a ramscoop thrown wide in a hard brake. The weight of a trillion trillion protons slowed her down and refilled her gut and flattened us all over again. Theseus had burned relentless until almost the moment of our resurrection.

It was easy enough to retrace those steps; our course was there in ConSensus for anyone to see. Exactly why the ship had blazed that trail was another matter. Doubtless it would all come out during the post-rez briefing. We were hardly the first vessel to travel under the cloak of sealed orders, and if there’d been a pressing need to know by now we’d have known by now. Still, I wondered who had locked out the Comm logs. Mission Control, maybe. Or Sarasti. Or Theseus herself, for that matter. It was easy to forget the Quantical AI at the heart of our ship. It stayed so discreetly in the background, nurtured and carried us and permeated our existence like an unobtrusive God; but like God, it never took your calls.

Sarasti was the offical intermediary. When the ship did speak, it spoke to him — and Sarasti called it Captain.

So did we all.

He’d given us four hours to come back. It took more than three just to get me out of the crypt. By then my brain was at least firing on most of its synapses, although my body — still sucking fluids like a thirsty sponge — continued to ache with every movement. I swapped out drained electrolyte bags for fresh ones and headed aft.

Fifteen minutes to spin-up. Fifty to the post-resurrection briefing. Just enough time for those who preferred gravity-bound sleep to haul their personal effects into the drum and stake out their allotted 4.4 square meters of floor space.

Gravity — or any centripetal facsimile thereof — did not appeal to me. I set up my own tent in zero-gee and as far to stern as possible, nuzzling the forward wall of the starboard shuttle tube. The tent inflated like an abscess on Theseus’ spine, a little climate-controlled bubble of atmosphere in the dark cavernous vacuum beneath the ship’s carapace. My own effects were minimal; it took all of thirty seconds to stick them to the wall, and another thirty to program the tent’s environment.

Afterwards I went for a hike. After five years, I needed the exercise.

Stern was closest, so I started there: at the shielding that separated payload from propulsion. A single sealed hatch blistered the aft bulkhead dead center. Behind it, a service tunnel wormed back through machinery best left untouched by human hands. The fat superconducting torus of the ramscoop ring; the antennae fan behind it, unwound now into an indestructible soap-bubble big enough to shroud a city, its face turned sunward to catch the faint quantum sparkle of the Icarus antimatter stream. More shielding behind that; then the telematter reactor, where raw hydrogen and refined information conjured fire three hundred times hotter than the sun’s. I knew the incantations, of course — antimatter cracking and deconstruction, the teleportation of quantum serial numbers — but it was still magic to me, how we’d come so far so fast. It would have been magic to anyone.

Except Sarasti, maybe.

Around me, the same magic worked at cooler temperatures and to less volatile ends: a small riot of chutes and dispensers crowded the bulkhead on all sides. A few of those openings would choke on my fist: one or two could swallow me whole. Theseus’ fabrication plant could build everything from cutlery to cockpits. Give it a big enough matter stockpile and it could have even been built another Theseus, albeit in many small pieces and over a very long time. Some wondered if it could build another crew as well, although we’d all been assured that was impossible. Not even these machines had fine enough fingers to reconstruct a few trillion synapses in the space of a human skull. Not yet, anyway.

I believed it. They would never have shipped us out fully-assembled if there’d been a cheaper alternative.

I faced forward. Putting the back of my head against that sealed hatch I could see almost to Theseus’ bow, an uninterrupted line-of-sight extending to a tiny dark bull’s-eye thirty meters ahead. It was like staring at a great textured target in shades of white and gray: concentric circles, hatches centered within bulkheads one behind another, perfectly aligned. Every one stood open, in nonchalant defiance of a previous generation’s safety codes. We could keep them closed if we wanted to, if it made us feel safer. That was all it would do, though; it wouldn’t improve our empirical odds one whit. In the event of trouble those hatches would slam shut long milliseconds before Human senses could even make sense of an alarm. They weren’t even computer-controlled. Theseus’ body parts had reflexes.

I pushed off against the stern plating — wincing at the tug and stretch of disused tendons — and coasted forward, leaving Fab behind. The shuttle-access hatches to Scylla and Charybdis briefly constricted my passage to either side. Past them the spine widened into a corrugated extensible cylinder two meters across and — at the moment — maybe fifteen long. A pair of ladders ran opposite each other along its length; raised portholes the size of manhole covers stippled the bulkhead to either side. Most of those just looked into the hold. A couple served as general-purpose airlocks, should anyone want to take a stroll beneath the carapace. One opened into my tent. Another, four meters further forward, opened into Bates’.

From a third, just short of the forward bulkhead, Jukka Sarasti climbed into view like a long white spider.

If he’d been Human I’d have known instantly what I saw there, I’d have smelled murderer all over his topology. And I wouldn’t have been able to even guess at the number of his victims, because his affect was so utterly without remorse. The killing of a hundred would leave no more stain on Sarasti’s surfaces than the swatting of an insect; guilt beaded and rolled off this creature like water on wax.

But Sarasti wasn’t human. Sarasti was a whole different animal, and coming from him all those homicidal refractions meant nothing more than predator. He had the inclination, was born to it; whether he had ever acted on it was between him and Mission Control.

Maybe they cut you some slack, I didn’t say to him. Maybe it’s just a cost of doing business. You’re mission-critical, after all. For all I know you cut a deal. You’re so very smart, you know we wouldn’t have brought you back in the first place if we hadn’t needed you. From the day they cracked the vat you knew you had leverage.

Is that how it works, Jukka? You save the world, and the folks who hold your leash agree to look the other way?

As a child I’d read tales about jungle predators transfixing their prey with a stare. Only after I’d met Jukka Sarasti did I know how it felt. But he wasn’t looking at me now. He was focused on installing his own tent, and even if he had looked me in the eye there’d have been nothing to see but the dark wraparound visor he wore in deference to Human skittishness. He ignored me as I grabbed a nearby rung and squeezed past.

I could have sworn I smelled raw meat on his breath.

Into the drum (drums, technically; the BioMed hoop at the back spun on its own bearings). I flew through the center of a cylinder sixteen meters across. Theseus’ spinal nerves ran along its axis, the exposed plexii and piping bundled against the ladders on either side. Past them, Szpindel’s and James’ freshly-erected tents rose from nooks on opposite sides of the world. Szpindel himself floated off my shoulder, still naked but for his gloves, and I could tell from the way his fingers moved that his favorite color was green. He anchored himself to one of three stairways to nowhere arrayed around the drum: steep narrow steps rising five vertical meters from the deck into empty air.

The next hatch gaped dead-center of the drum’s forward wall; pipes and conduits plunged into the bulkhead to each side. I grabbed a convenient rung to slow myself — biting down once more on the pain — and floated through.

T-junction. The spinal corridor continued forward, a smaller diverticulum branched off to an EVA cubby and the forward airlock. I stayed the course and found myself back in the crypt, mirror-bright and less than two meters deep. Empty pods gaped to the left; sealed ones huddled to the right. We were so irreplaceable we’d come with replacements. They slept on, oblivious. I’d met three of them back in training. Hopefully none of us would be getting reacquainted any time soon.

Only four pods to starboard, though. No backup for Sarasti.

Another hatchway. Smaller this time. I squeezed through into the bridge. Dim light there, a silent shifting mosaic of icons and alphanumerics iterating across dark glassy surfaces. Not so much bridge as cockpit, and a cramped one at that. I’d emerged between two acceleration couches, each surrounded by a horseshoe array of controls and readouts. Nobody expected to ever use this compartment. Theseus was perfectly capable of running herself, and if she wasn’t we were capable of running her from our inlays, and if we weren’t the odds were overwhelming that we were all dead anyway. Still, against that astronomically off-the-wall chance, this was where one or two intrepid survivors could pilot the ship home again after everything else had failed.

Between the footwells the engineers had crammed one last hatch and one last passageway: to the observation blister on Theseus’ prow. I hunched my shoulders (tendons cracked and complained) and pushed through—

—into darkness. Clamshell shielding covered the outside of the dome like a pair of eyelids squeezed tight. A single icon glowed softly from a touchpad to my left; faint stray light followed me through from the spine, brushed dim fingers across the concave enclosure. The dome resolved in faint shades of blue and gray as my eyes adjusted. A stale draft stirred the webbing floating from the rear bulkhead, mixed oil and machinery at the back of my throat. Buckles clicked faintly in the breeze like impoverished wind chimes.

I reached out and touched the crystal: the innermost layer of two, warm air piped through the gap between to cut the cold. Not completely, though. My fingertips chilled instantly.

Space out there.

Perhaps, en route to our original destination, Theseus had seen something that scared her clear out of the solar system. More likely she hadn’t been running away from anything but to something else, something that hadn’t been discovered until we’d already died and gone from Heaven. In which case…

I reached back and tapped the touchpad. I half-expected nothing to happen; Theseus’ windows could be as easily locked as her comm logs. But the dome split instantly before me, a crack then a crescent then a wide-eyed lidless stare as the shielding slid smoothly back into the hull. My fingers clenched reflexively into a fistful of webbing. The sudden void stretched empty and unforgiving in all directions, and there was nothing to cling to but a metal disk barely four meters across.

Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life me understand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black. Stars, and—

—nothing else.

What did you expect? I chided myself. An alien mothership hanging off the starboard bow?

Well, why not? We were out here for something.

The others were, anyway. They’d be essential no matter where we’d ended up. But my own situation was a bit different, I realized. My usefulness degraded with distance.

And we were over half a light year from home.

Where was I when the lights came down?

I was emerging from the gates of Heaven, mourning a father who was — to his own mind, at least — still alive.

It had been scarcely two months since Helen had disappeared under the cowl. Two months by our reckoning, at least. From her perspective it could have been a day or a decade; the Virtually Omnipotent set their subjective clocks along with everything else.

She wasn’t coming back. She would only deign to see her husband under conditions that amounted to a slap in the face. He didn’t complain. He visited as often as she would allow: twice a week, then once. Then every two. Their marriage decayed with the exponential determinism of a radioactive isotope and still he sought her out, and accepted her conditions.

On the day the lights came down, I had joined him at my mother’s side. It was a special occasion, the last time we would ever see her in the flesh. For two months her body had lain in state along with five hundred other new ascendants on the ward, open for viewing by the next of kin. The interface was no more real than it would ever be, of course; the body could not talk to us. But at least it was there, its flesh warm, the sheets clean and straight. Helen’s lower face was still visible below the cowl, though eyes and ears were helmeted. We could touch her. My father often did. Perhaps some distant part of her still felt it.

But eventually someone has to close the casket and dispose of the remains. Room must be made for the new arrivals — and so we came to this last day at my mother’s side. Jim took her hand one more time. She would still be available in her world, on her terms, but later this day the body would be packed into storage facilities crowded far too efficiently for flesh and blood visitors. We had been assured that the body would remain intact — the muscles electrically exercised, the body flexed and fed, the corpus kept ready to return to active duty should Heaven experience some inconceivable and catastrophic meltdown. Everything was reversible, we were told. And yet — there were so many who had ascended, and not even the deepest catacombs go on forever. There were rumors of dismemberment, of nonessential body parts hewn away over time according to some optimum-packing algorithm. Perhaps Helen would be a torso this time next year, a disembodied head the year after. Perhaps her chassis would be stripped down to the brain before we’d even left the building, awaiting only that final technological breakthrough that would herald the arrival of the Great Digital Upload.

Rumors, as I say. I personally didn’t know of anyone who’d come back after ascending, but then why would anyone want to? Not even Lucifer left Heaven until he was pushed.

Dad might have known for sure — Dad knew more than most people, about the things most people weren’t supposed to know — but he never told tales out of turn. Whatever he knew, he’d obviously decided its disclosure wouldn’t have changed Helen’s mind. That would have been enough for him.

We donned the hoods that served as day passes for the Unwired, and we met my mother in the spartan visiting room she imagined for these visits. She’d built no windows into the world she occupied, no hint of whatever utopian environment she’d constructed for herself. She hadn’t even opted for one of the prefab visiting environments designed to minimize dissonance among visitors. We found ourselves in a featureless beige sphere five meters across. There was nothing in there but her.

Maybe not so far removed from her vision of utopia after all, I thought.

My father smiled. “Helen.”

“Jim.” She was twenty years younger than the thing on the bed, and still she made my skin crawl. “Siri! You came!”

She always used my name. I don’t think she ever called me son.

“You’re still happy here?” my father asked.

“Wonderful. I do wish you could join us.”

Jim smiled. “Someone has to keep the lights on.”

“Now you know this isn’t goodbye,” she said. “You can visit whenever you like.”

“Only if you do something about the scenery.” Not just a joke, but a lie; Jim would have come at her call even if the gauntlet involved bare feet and broken glass.

“And Chelsea, too,” Helen continued. “It would be so nice to finally meet her after all this time.”

“Chelsea’s gone, Helen,” I said.

“Oh yes but I know you stay in touch. I know she was special to you. Just because you’re not together any more doesn’t mean she can’t—”

“You know she—”

A startling possibility stopped me in mid-sentence: maybe I hadn’t actually told them.

“Son,” Jim said quietly. “Maybe you could give us a moment.”

I would have given them a fucking lifetime. I unplugged myself back to the ward, looked from the corpse on the bed to my blind and catatonic father in his couch, murmuring sweet nothings into the datastream. Let them perform for each other. Let them formalize and finalize their so-called relationship in whatever way they saw fit. Maybe, just once, they could even bring themselves to be honest, there in that other world where everything else was a lie. Maybe.

I felt no desire to bear witness either way.

But of course I had to go back in for my own formalities. I adopted my role in the familial set-piece one last time, partook of the usual lies. We all agreed that this wasn’t going to change anything, and nobody deviated enough from the script to call anyone else a liar on that account. And finally — careful to say until next time rather than goodbye — we took our leave of my mother.

I even suppressed my gag reflex long enough to give her a hug.

Jim had his inhaler in hand as we emerged from the darkness. I hoped, without much hope, that he’d throw it into the garbage receptacle as we passed through the lobby. But he raised it to his mouth and took another hit of vassopressin, that he would never be tempted.

Fidelity in an aerosol. “You don’t need that any more,” I said.

“Probably not,” he agreed.

“It won’t work anyway. You can’t imprint on someone who isn’t even there, no matter how many hormones you snort. It just—”

Jim said nothing. We passed beneath the muzzles of sentries panning for infiltrating Realists.

“She’s gone,” I blurted. “She doesn’t care if you find someone else. She’d be happy if you did.” It would let her pretend the books had been balanced.

“She’s my wife,” he told me.

“That doesn’t mean what it used to. It never did.”

He smiled a bit at that. “It’s my life, son. I’m comfortable with it.”

“Dad—”

“I don’t blame her,” he said. “And neither should you.”

Easy for him to say. Easy even to accept the hurt she’d inflicted on him all these years. This cheerful façade here at the end hardly made up for the endless bitter complaints my father had endured throughout living memory. Do you think it’s easy when you disappear for months on end? Do you think it’s easy always wondering who you’re with and what you’re doing and if you’re even alive? Do you think it’s easy raising a child like that on your own?

She’d blamed him for everything, but he bore it gracefully because he knew it was all a lie. He knew he was only the pretense. She wasn’t leaving because he was AWOL, or unfaithful. Her departure had nothing to do with him at all. It was me. Helen had left the world because she couldn’t stand to look at the thing who’d replaced her son.

I would have pursued it — would have tried yet again to make my father see — but by now we’d left the gates of Heaven for the streets of Purgatory, where pedestrians on all sides murmured in astonishment and stared open-mouthed at the sky. I followed their gaze to a strip of raw twilight between the towers, and gasped—

The stars were falling.

The Zodiac had rearranged itself into a precise grid of bright points with luminous tails. It was as though the whole planet had been caught in some great closing net, the knots of its mesh aglow with St. Elmo’s fire. It was beautiful. It was terrifying.

I looked away to recalibrate my distance vision, to give this ill-behaved hallucination a chance to vanish gracefully before I set my empirical gaze to high-beam. I saw a vampire in that moment, a female, walking among us like the archetypal wolf in sheep’s clothing. Vampires were uncommon creatures at street level. I’d never seen one in the flesh before.

She had just stepped onto the street from the building across the way. She stood a head taller than the rest of us, her eyes shining yellow and bright as a cat’s in the deepening dark. She realized, as I watched, that something was amiss. She looked around, glanced at the sky — and continued on her way, totally indifferent to the cattle on all sides, to the heavenly portent that had transfixed them. Totally indifferent to the fact that the world had just turned inside-out.

It was 1035 Greenwich Mean Time, February 13, 2082.

They clenched around the world like a fist, each black as the inside of an event horizon until those last bright moments when they all burned together. They screamed as they died. Every radio up to geostat groaned in unison, every infrared telescope went briefly snowblind. Ashes stained the sky for weeks afterwards; mesospheric clouds, high above the jet stream, turned to glowing rust with every sunrise. The objects, apparently, consisted largely of iron. Nobody ever knew what to make of that.

For perhaps the first time in history, the world knew before being told: if you’d seen the sky, you had the scoop. The usual arbiters of newsworthiness, stripped of their accustomed role in filtering reality, had to be content with merely labeling it. It took them ninety minutes to agree on Fireflies. A half hour after that, the first Fourier transforms appeared in the noosphere; to no one’s great surprise, the Fireflies had not wasted their dying breaths on static. There was pattern embedded in that terminal chorus, some cryptic intelligence that resisted all earthly analysis. The experts, rigorously empirical, refused to speculate: they only admitted that the Fireflies had said something. They didn’t know what.

Everyone else did. How else would you explain 65,536 probes evenly dispersed along a lat-long grid that barely left any square meter of planetary surface unexposed? Obviously the Flies had taken our picture. The whole world had been caught with its pants down in panoramic composite freeze-frame. We’d been surveyed — whether as a prelude to formal introductions or outright invasion was anyone’s guess.

My father might have known someone who might have known. But by then he’d long since disappeared, as he always did during times of hemispheric crisis. Whatever he knew or didn’t, he left me to find my own answers with everyone else.

There was no shortage of perspectives. The noosphere seethed with scenarios ranging from utopian to apocalyptic. The Fireflies had seeded lethal germs through the jet stream. The Fireflies had been on a nature safari. The Icarus Array was being retooled to power a doomsday weapon against the aliens. The Icarus Array had already been destroyed. We had decades to react; anything from another solar system would have to obey the lightspeed limit like everyone else. We had days to live; organic warships had just crossed the asteroid belt and would be fumigating the planet within a week.

Like everyone else, I bore witness to lurid speculations and talking heads. I visited blathernodes, soaked myself in other people’s opinions. That was nothing new, as far as it went; I’d spent my whole life as a sort of alien ethologist in my own right, watching the world behave, gleaning patterns and protocols, learning the rules that allowed me to infiltrate human society. It had always worked before. Somehow, though, the presence of real aliens had changed the dynamics of the equation. Mere observation didn’t satisfy any more. It was as though the presence of this new outgroup had forced me back into the clade whether I liked it or not; the distance between myself and the world suddenly seemed forced and faintly ridiculous.

Yet I couldn’t, for my life, figure out how to let it go.

Chelsea had always said that telepresence emptied the Humanity from Human interaction. “They say it’s indistinguishable,” she told me once, “just like having your family right there, snuggled up so you can see them and feel them and smell them next to you. But it’s not. It’s just shadows on the cave wall. I mean, sure, the shadows come in three-dee color with force-feedback tactile interactivity. They’re good enough to fool the civilized brain. But your gut knows those aren’t people, even if it can’t put its finger on how it knows. They just don’t feel real. Know what I mean?”

I didn’t. Back then I’d had no clue what she was talking about. But now we were all cavemen again, huddling beneath some overhang while lightning split the heavens and vast formless monsters, barely glimpsed in bright strobe-frozen instants, roared and clashed in the darkness on all sides. There was no comfort in solitude. You couldn’t get it from interactive shadows. You needed someone real at your side, someone to hold on to, someone to share your airspace along with your fear and hope and uncertainty.

I imagined the presence of companions who wouldn’t vanish the moment I unplugged. But Chelsea was gone, and Pag in her wake. The few others I could have called — peers and former clients with whom my impersonations of rapport had been especially convincing — didn’t seem worth the effort. Flesh and blood had its own relationship to reality: necessary, but not sufficient.

Watching the world from a distance, it occurred to me at last: I knew exactly what Chelsea had meant, with her Luddite ramblings about desaturated Humanity and the colorless interactions of virtual space. I’d known all along.

I’d just never been able to see how it was any different from real life.

Imagine you are a machine.

Yes, I know. But imagine you’re a different kind of machine, one built from metal and plastic and designed not by blind, haphazard natural selection but by engineers and astrophysicists with their eyes fixed firmly on specific goals. Imagine that your purpose is not to replicate, or even to survive, but to gather information.

I can imagine that easily. It is in fact a much simpler impersonation than the kind I’m usually called on to perform.

I coast through the abyss on the colder side of Neptune’s orbit. Most of the time I exist only as an absence, to any observer on the visible spectrum: a moving, asymmetrical silhouette blocking the stars. But occasionally, during my slow endless spin, I glint with dim hints of reflected starlight. If you catch me in those moments you might infer something of my true nature: a segmented creature with foil skin, bristling with joints and dishes and spindly antennae. Here and there a whisper of accumulated frost clings to a joint or seam, some frozen wisp of gas encountered in Jupiter space perhaps. Elsewhere I carry the microscopic corpses of Earthly bacteria who thrived with carefree abandon on the skins of space stations or the benign lunar surface — but who had gone to crystal at only half my present distance from the sun. Now, a breath away from Absolute Zero, they might shatter at a photon’s touch.

My heart is warm, at least. A tiny nuclear fire burns in my thorax, leaves me indifferent to the cold outside. It won’t go out for a thousand years, barring some catastrophic accident; for a thousand years, I will listen for faint voices from Mission Control and do everything they tell me to. So far they have told me to study comets. Every instruction I have ever received has been a precise and unambiguous elaboration on that one overriding reason for my existence.

Which is why these latest instructions are so puzzling, for they make no sense at all. The frequency is wrong. The signal strength is wrong. I cannot even understand the handshaking protocols. I request clarification.

The response arrives almost a thousand minutes later, and it is an unprecedented mix of orders and requests for information. I answer as best I can: yes, this is the bearing at which signal strength was greatest. No, it is not the usual bearing for Mission Control. Yes, I can retransmit: here it is, all over again. Yes, I will go into standby mode.

I await further instructions. They arrive 839 minutes later, and they tell me to stop studying comets immediately.

I am to commence a controlled precessive tumble that sweeps my antennae through consecutive 5°-arc increments along all three axes, with a period of 94 seconds. Upon encountering any transmission resembling the one which confused me, I am to fix upon the bearing of maximal signal strength and derive a series of parameter values. I am also instructed to retransmit the signal to Mission Control.

I do as I’m told. For a long time I hear nothing, but I am infinitely patient and incapable of boredom. Eventually a fleeting, familiar signal brushes against my afferent array. I reacquire and track it to source, which I am well-equipped to describe: a trans-Neptunian comet in the Kuiper Belt, approximately two hundred kilometers in diameter. It is sweeping a 21-cm tightbeam radio wave across the heavens with a periodicity of 4.57 seconds. This beam does not intersect Mission Control’s coordinates at any point. It appears to be directed at a different target entirely.

It takes much longer than usual for Mission Control to respond to this information. When it does, it tells me to change course. Mission Control informs me that henceforth my new destination is to be referred to as Burns-Caulfield. Given current fuel and inertial constraints I will not reach it in less than thirty-nine years.

I am to watch nothing else in the meantime.

I’d been liaising for a team at the Kurzweil Institute, a fractured group of cutting-edge savants convinced they were on the verge of solving the quantum-glial paradox. That particular log-jam had stalled AI for decades; once broken, the experts promised we’d be eighteen months away from the first personality upload and only two years from reliable Human-consciousness emulation in a software environment. It would spell the end of corporeal history, usher in a Singularity that had been waiting impatiently in the wings for nigh on fifty years.

Two months after Firefall, the Institute cancelled my contract.

I was actually surprised it had taken them so long. It had cost us so much, this overnight inversion of global priorities, these breakneck measures making up for lost initiative. Not even our shiny new post-scarcity economy could withstand such a seismic shift without lurching towards bankruptcy. Installations in deep space, long since imagined secure by virtue of their remoteness, were suddenly vulnerable for exactly the same reason. Lagrange habitats had to be refitted for defense against an unknown enemy. Commercial ships on the Martian Loop were conscripted, weaponised, and reassigned; some secured the high ground over Mars while others fell sunward to guard the Icarus Array.

It didn’t matter that the Fireflies hadn’t fired a shot at any of these targets. We simply couldn’t afford the risk.

We were all in it together, of course, desperate to regain some hypothetical upper hand by any means necessary. Kings and corporations scribbled IOUs on the backs of napkins and promised to sort everything out once the heat was off. In the meantime, the prospect of Utopia in two years took a back seat to the shadow of Armageddon reaching back from next Tuesday. The Kurzweil Institute, like everyone else, suddenly had other things to worry about.

So I returned to my apartment, split a bulb of Glenfiddich, and arrayed virtual windows like daisy petals in my head. Everyone Icons debated on all sides, serving up leftovers two weeks past their expiry date:

Disgraceful breakdown of global security.

No harm done.

Comsats annihilated. Thousands dead.

Random collisions. Accidental deaths.

(who sent them?)

We should have seen them coming. Why didn’t we —

Deep space. Inverse square. Do the math.

They were stealthed!

(what do they want?)

We were raped!

Jesus Christ. They just took our picture.

Why the silence?

Moon’s fine. Mars’s fine.

(Where are they?)

Why haven’t they made contact?

Nothing’s touched the O’Neills.

Technology Implies Belligerence!

(Are they coming back?)

Nothing attacked us.

Yet

Nothing invaded.

So far.

(But where are they?)

(Are they coming back?)

(Anyone?)

The text window blossomed directly in my line of sight, eclipsing the debate. I read it twice. I tried to remember the last time he’d called from the field, and couldn’t.

I muted the other windows. “Dad?”

“Son,” he replied after a moment. “Are you well?”

“Like everyone else. Still wondering whether we should be celebrating or crapping our pants.”

He didn’t answer immediately. “It’s a big question, all right,” he said at last.

“I don’t suppose you could give me any advice? They’re not telling us anything at ground level.”

It was a rhetorical request. His silence was hardly necessary to make the point. “I know,” I added after a moment. “Sorry. It’s just, they’re saying the Icarus Array went down, and—”

“You know I can’t — oh.” My father paused. “That’s ridiculous. Icarus’s fine.”

“It is?”

He seemed to be weighing his words. “The Fireflies probably didn’t even notice it. There’s no particle trail as long as it stays offstream, and it would be buried in solar glare unless someone knew where to search.”

It was my turn to fall silent. This conversation felt suddenly wrong.

Because when my father went on the job, he went dark. He never called his family.

Because even when my father came off the job, he never talked about it. It wouldn’t matter whether the Icarus Array was still online or whether it had been shredded and thrown into the sun like a thousand kilometers of torn origami; he wouldn’t tell either tale unless an official announcement had been made. Which — I refreshed an index window just to be sure — it hadn’t.

Because while my father was a man of few words, he was not a man of frequent, indecisive pauses — and he had hesitated before each and every line he’d spoken in this exchange.

I tugged ever-so-gently on the line — “But they’ve sent ships.” — and started counting.

One one-thousand, two one-thousand —

“Just a precaution. Icarus was overdue for a visit anyway. You don’t swap out your whole grid without at least dropping in and kicking the new tires first.”

Nearly three seconds to respond.

“You’re on the moon,” I said.

Pause. “Close enough.”

“What are you — Dad, why are you telling me this? Isn’t this a security breach?”

“You’re going to get a call,” he told me.

“From who? Why?”

“They’re assembling a team. The kind of — people you deal with.” My father was too rational to dispute the contributions of the recons and hybrids in our midst, but he’d never been able to hide his mistrust of them.

“They need a synthesist,” he said.

“Isn’t it lucky you’ve got one in the family.”

Radio bounced back and forth. “This isn’t nepotism, Siri. I wanted very much for them to pick someone else.”

“Thanks for the vote of conf—”

But he’d seen it coming, and preempted me before my words could cross the distance: “It’s not a slap at your abilities and you know it. You’re simply the most qualified, and the work is vital.”

“So why—” I began, and stopped. He wouldn’t want to keep me away from some theoretical gig in a WestHem lab.

“What’s this about, Dad?”

“The Fireflies. They found something.”

“What?”

“A radio signal. From the Kuiper. We traced the bearing.”

“They’re talking?”

“Not to us.” He cleared his throat. “It was something of a fluke that we even intercepted the transmission.”

“Who are they talking to?”

“We don’t know.”

“Friendly? Hostile?”

“Son, we don’t know. The encryption seems similar, but we can’t even be sure of that. All we have is the location.”

“So you’re sending a team.” You’re sending me. We’d never gone to the Kuiper before. It had been decades since we’d even sent robots. Not that we lacked the capacity. We just hadn’t bothered; everything we needed was so much closer to home. The Interplanetary Age had stagnated at the asteroids.

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 headed 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 was 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.”

“Got another we could trade it on?” Szpindel wondered. “More options? Longer warranty?”

“I don’t know.” James sighed. “I guess not. It’s just — odd, that they’d want to actively mislead us. I’d hoped they were merely — well.” She spread her hands. “Probably no big deal. I’m sure they’ll still be willing to talk, if we handle the introductions right. We just need to be a little more cautious, perhaps…”

Sarasti unfolded himself from his chair and loomed over us. “We go in. What we know weighs against further delay.”

Bates frowned and pitched her ball back into orbit. “Sir, all we actually know is that an Oasa emitter’s in our path. We don’t even know if there’s anyone there.”

“There is,” Sarasti said. “They expect us.”

Nobody spoke for a few seconds. Someone’s joints cracked in the silence.

“Er…” Szpindel began.

Without looking, Sarasti flicked out his arm and snatched Bates’ returning ball from the air. “Ladar pings Theseus four hours forty-eight minutes ago. We respond with an identical signal. Nothing. Probe launches half-hour before we wake up. We don’t go in blind, but we don’t wait. They see us already. Longer we wait, greater risk of countermeasures.”

I looked at the dark featureless placeholder on the table: bigger than Jupiter and we couldn’t even see it yet. Something in the shadow of that mass had just reached out with casual, unimaginable precision and tapped us on the nose with a laser beam.

This was not going to be an even match.

Szpindel spoke for all of us: “You knew that all along? You’re telling us now?”

This time Sarasti’s smile was wide and toothy. It was as though a gash had opened in the lower half of his face.

Maybe it was a predator thing. He just couldn’t help playing with his food.

It wasn’t so much the way they looked. The elongate limbs, the pale skin, the canines and the extended mandible — noticeable, yes, even alien, but not disturbing, not frightening. Not even the eyes, really. The eyes of dogs and cats shine in the darkness; we don’t shiver at the sight.

Not the way they looked. The way they moved.

Something in the reflexes, maybe. The way they held their limbs: like mantis limbs, long jointed things you just knew could reach out and snatch you from right across the room, any time they felt like it. When Sarasti looked at me — really looked, naked-eyed, unfiltered by the visor — a half-million years just melted away. The fact that he was extinct meant nothing. The fact that we’d come so far, grown strong enough to resurrect our own nightmares to serve us…meant nothing. The genes aren’t fooled. They know what to fear.

Of course, you had to experience it in person. Robert Paglini knew the theory of vampires down the molecules, but even with all those technical specs in his head he never really got it.

He called me, before we left. I hadn’t been expecting it; ever since the roster had been announced our watches had blocked calls from anyone not explicitly contact-listed. I’d forgotten that Pag had been. We hadn’t spoken since Chelsea. I’d given up on ever hearing from him again.

But there he was. “Pod-man.” He smiled, a tentative overture.

“It’s good to see you,” I said, because that’s what people said in similar situations.

“Yeah, well I saw your name in the noose. You’ve made it big, for a baseline.”

“Not so big.”

“Crap. You’re the vanguard of the Human Race. You’re our first, last, and only hope against the unknown. Man, you showed them.” He held his fist up and shook it, vicariously triumphant.

Showing them had become a cornerstone of Robert Paglino’s life. He’d really made it work for him, too, overcome the handicap of a natural birth with retrofits and enhancements and sheer bloody-mindedness. In a world in which Humanity had become redundant in unprecedented numbers, we’d both retained the status of another age: working professional.

“So you’re taking orders from a vamp,” he said now. “Talk about fighting fire with fire.”

“I guess it’s practice. Until we run up against the real thing.”

He laughed. I couldn’t imagine why. But I smiled back anyway.

It was good to see him.

“So, what are they like?” Pag asked.

“Vampires? I don’t know. Just met my first one yesterday.”

“And?”

“Hard to read. Didn’t even seem to be aware of his surroundings sometimes, he seemed to be… off in his own little world.”

“He’s aware all right. Those things are so fast it’s scary. You know they can hold both aspects of a Necker cube in their heads at the same time?”

The term rang a bell. I subtitled, and saw the thumbnail of a familiar wireframe box:

Now I remembered: classic ambiguous illusion. Sometimes the shaded panel seemed to be in front, sometimes behind. The perspective flipped back and forth as you watched.

“You or I, we can only see it one way or the other,” Pag was saying. “Vamps see it both ways at once. Do you have any idea what kind of an edge that gives ’em?”

“Not enough of one.”

“Touché. But hey, not their fault neutral traits get fixed in small populations.”

“I don’t know if I’d call the Crucifix glitch neutral.”

“It was at first. How many intersecting right angles do you see in nature?” He waved one dismissive hand. “Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is they can do something that’s neurologically impossible for us Humans. They can hold simultaneous multiple worldviews, Pod-man. They just see things we have to work out step-by-step, they don’t have to think about it. You know, there isn’t a single baseline human who could just tell you, just off the top of their heads, every prime number between one and a billion? In the old days, only a few autistics could do shit like that.”

“He never uses the past tense,” I murmered.

“Huh? Oh, that.” Pag nodded. “They never experience the past tense. It’s just another thread to them. They don’t remember stuff, they relive it.”

“What, like a post-traumatic flashback?”

“Not so traumatic.” He grimaced. “Not for them, at least.”

“So this is obviously your current hot spot? Vampires?”

“Pod, vampires are the capital-Hot spot for anyone with a ‘neuro’ in their c.v. I’m just doing a couple of histology papers. Pattern-matching receptors, Mexican-hat arrays, reward/irrelevance filters. The eyes, basically.”

“Right.” I hesitated. “Those kind of throw you.”

“No shit.” Pag nodded knowingly. “That tap lucidum of theirs, that shine. Scary.” He shook his head, impressed all over again at the recollection.

“You’ve never met one,” I surmised.

“What, in the flesh? I’d give my left ball. Why?”

“It’s not the shine. It’s the—” I groped for a word that fit — “The attitude, maybe.”

“Yeah,” he said after a bit. “I guess sometimes you’ve just gotta be there, huh? Which is why I envy you, Pod-man.”

“You shouldn’t.”

“I should. Even if you never meet whoever sent the ’Flies, you’re in for one Christly research opportunity with that — Sarasti, is it?”

“Wasted on me. The only neuro in my file’s under medical history.”

He laughed. “Anyway, like I said, I just saw your name in the headlines and I figured, hey, the man’s leaving in a couple of months, I should probably stop waiting around for him to call.”

It had been over two years. “I didn’t think I’d get through. I thought you’d shitlisted me.”

“Nah. Never.” He looked down, though, and fell silent.

“But you should have called her,” he said at last.

“I know.”

“She was dying. You should’ve—”

“There wasn’t time.”

He let the lie sit there for a while.

“Anyway,” he said at last. “I just wanted to wish you luck.” Which wasn’t exactly true either.

“Thanks. I appreciate that.”

“Kick their alien asses. If aliens have asses.”

“There’s five of us, Pag. Nine if you count the backups. We’re not exactly an army.”

“Just an expression, fellow mammal. Bury the hatchet. Damn the torpedoes. Soothe the serpent.”

Raise the white flag, I thought.

“I guess you’re busy,” he said, “I’ll—”

“Look, you want to get together? In airspace? I haven’t been to QuBit’s in a while.”

“Love to, Pod. Unfortunately I’m in Mankoya. Splice’n’dice workshop.”

“What, you mean physically?”

“Cutting-edge research. Old-school habits.”

“Too bad.”

“Anyway, I’ll let you go. Just wanted, you know—”

“Thanks,” I said again.

“So, you know. Bye,” Robert Paglino told me. Which was, when you got down to it, the reason he’d called.

He wasn’t expecting another chance.

Pag blamed me for the way it had ended with Chelsea. Fair enough. I blamed him for the way it began.

He’d gone into neuroeconomics at least partly because his childhood buddy had turned into a pod person before his eyes. I’d ended up in Synthesis for roughly the same reason. Our paths had diverged, and we didn’t see each other in the flesh all that often; but two decades after I’d brutalized a handful of children on his behalf, Robert Paglino was still my best and only friend.

“You need to seriously thaw out,” he told me, “And I know just the lady to handle the oven mitts.”

“That is perhaps the worst use of metaphor in the history of human language,” I said.

“Seriously, Pod. She’ll be good for you. A, a counterbalance — ease you a bit closer to the comfy mean, you know?”

“No, Pag, I don’t. What is she, another neuroeconomist?”

“Neuroaestheticist,” he said.

“There’s still a market for those?” I couldn’t imagine how; why pay to tweak your compatibility with some significant other, when significant others themselves were so out of fashion?

“Not much of one,” Pag admitted. “Fact is, she’s pretty much retired. But she’s still got the tools, my man. Very thigmotactic. Likes all her relationships face-to-face and in the flesh.”

“I dunno, Pag. Sounds like work.”

“Not like your work. She’s got to be easier than the bleeding composites you front for. She’s smart, she’s sexy, and she’s nicely inside the standard deev except for the personal contact thing. Which is not so much outright perversion as charming fetish. In your case it could even be therapeutic.”

“If I wanted therapy I’d see a therapist.”

“She does a bit of that too, actually.”

“Yeah?” And then, despite myself, “Any good?”

He looked me up and down. “No one’s that good. That’s not what this is. I just figured you two would click. Chelse is one of the few who might not be completely put off by your intimacy issues.”

“Everyone’s got intimacy issues these days, in case you hadn’t noticed.” He must have; the population had been dropping for decades.

“I was being euphemistic. I meant your aversion to general Human contact.”

“Making it euphemistic to call you Human?”

He grinned. “Different deal. We got history.”

“No thanks.”

“Too late. She’s already en route to the appointed place.”

“Appoin — you’re an asshole, Pag.”

“The tightest.”

Which was how I found myself intrusively face-to-face in an airspace lounge south of Beth and Bear. The lighting was low and indirect, creeping from under seats and the edges of tables; the chromatics, this afternoon at least, were defiantly longwave. It was a place where baselines could pretend to see in infrared.

So I pretended for a moment, assessing the woman in the corner booth: gangly and glorious, half-a-dozen ethnicities coexisting peacefully with no single voice dominant. Something glowed on her cheek, a faint emerald staccato against the ambient red shift. Her hair floated in a diffuse ebony cloud about her head; as I neared I caught occasional glints of metal within that nimbus, the threads of a static generator purveying the illusion of weightlessness. In normal light her blood-red skin would doubtless shift down to the fashionable butterscotch of the unrepentant mongrel.

She was attractive, but so was everyone in this kind of light; the longer the wavelength, the softer the focus. There’s a reason fuckcubbies don’t come with fluorescent lights.

You will not fall for this, I told myself.

“Chelsea,” she said. Her little finger rested on one of the table’s inset trickle-chargers. “Former neuroaestheticist, presently a parasite on the Body Economic thanks to genes and machines on the cutting edge.”

The glow on her cheek flapped bright lazy wings: a tattoo, a bioluminescent butterfly.

“Siri,” I said. “Freelance synthesist, indentured servant to the genes and machines that turned you into a parasite.”

She waved at the empty seat. I took it, assessing the system before me, sizing up the best approach for a fast yet diplomatic disconnect. The set of her shoulders told me she enjoyed lightscapes, and was embarrassed to admit it. Monahan was her favorite artist. She thought herself a natural girl because she’d stayed on chemical libidinals all these years, even though a synaptic edit would have been simpler. She revelled in her own inconsistency: a woman whose professional machinery edited thought itself, yet mistrustful of the dehumanising impact of telephones. Innately affectionate, and innately afraid of unreturned affection, and indomitably unwilling to let any of that stop her.

She liked what she saw when looked at me. She was a little afraid of that, too.

Chelsea gestured at my side of the table. The touchpads there glowed soft, dissonant sapphire in the bloody light, like a set of splayed fingerprints. “Good dope here. Extra hydroxyl on the ring, or something.”

Assembly-line neuropharm doesn’t do much for me; it’s optimized for people with more meat in their heads. I fingered one of the pads for appearances, and barely felt the tingle.

“So. A Synthesist. Explaining the Incomprehensible to the Indifferent.”

I smiled on cue. “More like bridging the gap between the people who make the breakthroughs and the people who take the credit for them.”

She smiled back. “So how do you do it? All those optimized frontal lobes and refits — I mean, if they’re incomprehensible, how do you comprehend them?”

“It helps to find pretty much everyone else incomprehensible too. Provides experience.” There. That should force a bit of distance.

It didn’t. She thought I was joking. I could see her lining up to push for more details, to ask questions about what I did, which would lead to questions about me, which would lead—

“Tell me what it’s like,” I said smoothly, “rewiring people’s heads for a living.”

Chelsea grimaced; the butterfly on her cheek fluttered nervously at the motion, wings brightening. “God, you make it sound like we turn them into zombies or something. They’re just tweaks, mainly. Changing taste in music or cuisine, you know, optimizing mate compatibility. It’s all completely reversible.”

“There aren’t drugs for that?”

“Nah. Too much developmental variation between brains; our targeting is really fine-scale. But it’s not all microsurgery and fried synapses, you know. You’d be surprised how much rewiring can be done noninvasively. You can start all sorts of cascades just by playing certain sounds in the right order, or showing images with the right balance of geometry and emotion.”

“I assume those are new techniques.”

“Not really. Rhythm and music hang their hats on the same basic principle. We just turned art into science.”

“Yeah, but when?” The recent past, certainly. Sometime within the past twenty years or so—

Her voice grew suddenly quiet. “Robert told me about your operation. Some kind of viral epilepsy, right? Back when you were just a tyke.”

I’d never explicitly asked him to keep it a secret. What was the difference anyway? I’d made a full recovery.

Besides, Pag still thought that had happened to someone else.

“I don’t know your specifics,” Chelsea continued gently. “But from the sound of it, noninvasive techniques wouldn’t have helped. I’m sure they only did what they had to.”

I tried to suppress the thought, and couldn’t: I like this woman.

I felt something then, a strange, unfamiliar sensation that somehow loosened my vertebrae. The chair felt subtly, indefinably more comfortable at my back.

“Anyway.” My silence had thrown her off-stride. “Haven’t done it much since the bottom dropped out of the market. But it did leave me with a fondness for face-to-face encounters, if you know what I mean.”

“Yeah. Pag said you took your sex in the first-person.”

She nodded. “I’m very old-school. You okay with that?”

I wasn’t certain. I was a virgin in the real world, one of the few things I still had in common with the rest of civilized society. “In principle, I guess. It just seems — a lot of effort for not as much payoff, you know?”

“Don’t I.” She smiled. “Real fuckbuddies aren’t airbrushed. Got all these needs and demands that you can’t edit out. How can you blame anyone for saying no thanks to all that, now there’s a choice? You gotta wonder how our parents ever stayed together sometimes.”

You gotta wonder why they did. I felt myself sinking deeper into the chair, wondered again at this strange new sensation. Chelsea had said the dopamine was tweaked. That was probably it.

She leaned forward, not coy, not coquettish, not breaking eye contact for an instant in the longwave gloom. I could smell the lemony tang of pheromones and synthetics mingling on her skin. “But there are advantages too, once you learn the moves,” she said. “The body’s got a long memory. And you do realize that there’s no trickler under your left finger there, don’t you, Siri?”

I looked. My left arm was slightly extended, index finger touching one of the trickle pads; and my right had mirrored the motion while I wasn’t watching, its own finger tapping uselessly on blank tabletop.

I pulled it back. “Bit of a bilateral twitch,” I admitted. “The body creeps into symmetrical poses when I’m not looking.”

I waited for a joke, or at least a raised eyebrow. Chelsea just nodded and resumed her thread. “So if you’re game for this, so am I. I’ve never been entangled with a synthesist before.”

“Jargonaut’s fine. I’m not proud.”

“Don’t you just always know just exactly what to say.” She cocked her head at me. “So, your name. What’s it mean?”

Relaxed. That was it. I felt relaxed.

“I don’t know. It’s just a name.”

“Well, it’s not good enough. If we’re gonna to be swapping spit for any length of time you’ve gotta get a name that means something.”

And we were, I realized. Chelsea had decided while I wasn’t looking. I could have stopped her right there, told her what a bad idea this was, apologized for any misunderstanding. But then there’d be wounded looks and hurt feelings and guilt because after all, if I wasn’t interested why the hell had I even shown up?

She seemed nice. I didn’t want to hurt her.

Just for a while, I told myself. It’ll be an experience.

“I think I’ll call you Cygnus,” Chelsea said.

“The swan?” I said. A bit precious, but it could have been worse.

She shook her head. “Black hole. Cygnus X-1.”

I furrowed my brow at her, but I knew exactly what she meant: a dark, dense object that sucks up the light and destroys everything in its path.

“Thanks a whole fucking lot. Why?”

“I’m not sure. Something dark about you.” She shrugged, and gave me a great toothy grin. “But it’s not unattractive. And let me give you a tweak or two, I bet you’d grow right out of it.”

Pag admitted afterward, a bit sheepishly, that maybe I should have read that as a warning sign. Live and learn.

Our scout fell towards orbit, watching Ben. We fell days behind, watching the scout. And that was all we did: sit in Theseus’ belly while the system streamed telemetry to our inlays. Essential, irreplaceable, mission-critical — we might as well have been ballast during that first approach.

We passed Ben’s Rayleigh limit. Theseus squinted at a meager emission spectrum and saw a rogue halo element from Canis Major — a dismembered remnant of some long-lost galaxy that had drifted into ours and ended up as road kill, uncounted billions of years ago. We were closing on something from outside the Milky Way.

The probe arced down and in, drew close enough for false-color enhance. Ben’s surface brightened to a seething parfait of high-contrast bands against a diamond-hard starscape. Something twinkled there, faint sparkles on endless overcast.

“Lightning?” James wondered.

Szpindel shook his head. “Meteorites. Must be a lot of rock in the neighborhood.”

“Wrong color,” Sarasti said. He was not physically among us — he was back in his tent, hardlined into the Captain — but ConSensus put him anywhere on board he wanted to be.

Morphometrics scrolled across my inlays: mass, diameter, mean density. Ben’s day lasted seven hours twelve minutes. Diffuse but massive accretion belt circling the equator, more torus than ring, extending almost a half-million kilometers from the cloud-tops: the pulverized corpses of moons perhaps, ground down to leftovers.

“Meteorites.” Szpindel grinned. “Told ya.”

He seemed to be right; increasing proximity smeared many of those pinpoint sparkles into bright ephemeral hyphens, scratching the atmosphere. Closer to the poles, cloud bands flickered with dim, intermittent flashes of electricity.

Weak radio emission peaks at 31 and 400m. Outer atmosphere heavy with methane and ammonia; lithium, water, carbon monoxide in abundance. Ammonia hydrogen sulfide, alkali halide mixing locally in those torn swirling clouds. Neutral alkalis in the upper layers. By now even Theseus could pick those things out from a distance, but our scout was close enough to see filigree. It no longer saw a disk. It gazed down at a dark convex wall in seething layers of red and brown, saw faint stains of anthracene and pyrene.

One of a myriad meteorite contrails scorched Ben’s face directly ahead; for a moment I thought I could even see the tiny dark speck at its core, but sudden static scratched the feed. Bates cursed softly. The image blurred, then steadied as the probe pitched its voice higher up the spectrum. Unable to make itself heard above the longwave din, now it spoke down a laser.

And still it stuttered. Keeping it aligned across a million fluctuating kilometers should have posed no problem at all; our respective trajectories were known parabolas, our relative positions infinitely predictable at any time t. But the meteorite’s contrail jumped and skittered on the feed, as if the beam were being repeatedly, infinitesimally knocked out of alignment. Incandescent gas blurred its details; I doubted that even a rock-steady image would have offered any sharp edges for a human eye to hold on to. Still. There was something wrong about it somehow, something about the tiny black dot at the core of that fading brightness. Something that some primitive part of my mind refused to accept as natural—

The image lurched again, and flashed to black, and didn’t return.

“Probe’s fried,” Bates reported. “Spike there at the end. Like it hit a Parker Spiral, but with a really tight wind.”

I didn’t need to call up subtitles. It was obvious in the set of her face, the sudden creases between her eyebrows: she was talking about a magnetic field.

“It’s—” she began, and stopped as a number popped up in ConSensus: 11.2 Tesla.

“Holy shit,” Szpindel whispered. “Is that right?”

Sarasti clicked from the back of his throat and the back of the ship. A moment later he served up an instant replay, those last few seconds of telemetry zoomed and smoothed and contrast-enhanced from visible light down to deep infrared. There was that same dark shard cauled in flame, there was the contrail burning in its wake. Now it dimmed as the object skipped off the denser atmosphere beneath and regained altitude. Within moments the heat trace had faded entirely. The thing that had burned at its center rose back into space, a fading ember. A great conic scoop at its front end gaped like a mouth. Stubby fins disfigured an ovoid abdomen.

Ben lurched and went out all over again.

“Meteorites,” Bates said dryly.

The thing had left me with no sense of scale. It could have been an insect or an asteroid. “How big?” I whispered, a split-second before the answer appeared on my inlays:

Four hundred meters along the major axis.

Ben was safely distant in our sights once more, a dark dim disk centered in Theseus’s forward viewfinder. But I remembered the close-up: a twinkling orb of black-hearted fires; a face gashed and pockmarked, endlessly wounded, endlessly healing.

There’d been thousands of the things.

Theseus shivered along her length. It was just a pulse of decelerating thrust; but for that one moment, I imagined I knew how she felt.

We headed in and hedged our bets.

Theseus weaned herself with a ninety-eight-second burn, edged us into some vast arc that might, with a little effort, turn into an orbit — or into a quick discreet flyby if the neighborhood turned out to be a little too rough. The Icarus stream fell invisibly to port, its unswerving energy lost to space-time. Our city-sized, molecule-thick parasol wound down and packed itself away until the next time the ship got thirsty. Antimatter stockpiles began dropping immediately; this time we were alive to watch it happen. The dip was infinitesimal, but there was something disquieting about the sudden appearance of that minus sign on the display.

We could have retained the apron strings, left a buoy behind in the telematter stream to bounce energy down the well after us. Susan James wondered why we hadn’t.

“Too risky,” Sarasti said, without elaboration.

Szpindel leaned in James’ direction. “Why give ’em something else to shoot at, eh?”

We sent more probes ahead, though, spat them out hard and fast and too fuel-constrained for anything but flyby and self-destruct. They couldn’t take their eyes off the machines swinging around Big Ben. Theseus stared her own unblinking stare, more distant though more acute. But if those high divers even knew we were out there, they ignored us completely. We tracked them across the closing distance, watched them swoop and loop though a million parabolas at a million angles. We never saw them collide — not with each other, not with the cauldron of rock tumbling around Ben’s equator. Every perigee dipped briefly into atmosphere; there they burned, and slowed, and accelerated back into space, their anterior scoops glowing with residual heat.

Bates grabbed a ConSensus image, drew highlights and a conclusion around the front end: “Scramjet.”

We tracked nearly four hundred thousand in less than two days. That appeared to be most of them; new sightings leveled off afterwards, the cumulative curve flattening towards some theoretical asymptote. Most of the orbits were close and fast, but Sarasti projected a frequency distribution extending almost back to Pluto. We might stay out here for years, and still catch the occasional new shovelnose returning from its extended foray into the void.

“The faster ones are pulling over fifty gees on the hairpin turn,” Szpindel pointed out. “Meat couldn’t handle that. I say they’re unmanned.”

“Meat’s reinforceable,” Sarasti said.

“If it’s got that much scaffolding you might as well stop splitting hairs and call it a machine anyway.”

Surface morphometrics were absolutely uniform. Four hundred thousand divers, every one identical. If there was an alpha male calling the shots among the herd, it couldn’t be distinguished on sight.

One night — as such things were measured on board — I followed a soft squeal of tortured electronics up to the observation blister. Szpindel floated there, watching the skimmers. He’d closed the clamshells, blocked off the stars and built a little analytical nest in their place. Graphs and windows spilled across the inside of the dome as though the virtual space in Szpindel’s head was insufficient to contain them. Tactical graphics lit him from all sides, turned his body into a bright patchwork of flickering tattoos.

The Illustrated Man. “Mind if I come in?” I asked.

He grunted: Yeah, but not enough to push it.

Inside the dome, the sound of heavy rainfall hissed and spat behind the screeching that had led me here. “What is that?”

“Ben’s magnetosphere.” He didn’t look back. “Nice, eh?”

Synthesists don’t have opinions on the job; it keeps observer effects to a minimum. This time I permitted myself a small breach. “The static’s nice. I could do without the screeching.”

“Are you kidding? That’s the music of the spheres, commissar. It’s beautiful. Like old jazz.”

“I never got the hang of that either.”

He shrugged and squelched the upper register, left the rain pattering around us. His jiggling eyes fixed on some arcane graphic. “Want a scoop for your notes?”

“Sure.”

“There you go.” Light reflected off his feedback glove, iridescing like the wing of a dragonfly as he pointed: an absorption spectrum, a looped time-series. Bright peaks surged and subsided, surged and subsided across a fifteen-second timeframe.

Subtitles only gave me wavelengths and Angstroms. “What is it?”

“Diver farts. Those bastards are dumping complex organics into the atmosphere.”

“How complex?”

“Hard to tell, so far. Faint traces, and they dissipate like that. But sugars and aminos at least. Maybe proteins. Maybe more.”

“Maybe life? Microbes?” An alien terraforming project…

“Depends on how you define life, eh?” Szpindel said. “Not even Deinococcus would last long down there. But it’s a big atmosphere. They better not be in any hurry if they’re reworking the whole thing by direct inoculation.”

If they were, the job would go a lot faster with self-replicating inoculates. “Sounds like life to me.”

“Sounds like agricultural aerosols, is what it sounds like. Those fuckers are turning the whole damn gas ball into a rice paddy bigger than Jupiter.” He gave me a scary grin. “Something’s got a beeeg appetite, hmm? You gotta wonder if we aren’t gonna be a teeny bit outnumbered.”

Szpindel’s findings were front and center at our next get-together.

The vampire summed it up for us, visual aids dancing on the table: “Von Neumann self-replicating r-selector. Seed washes up and sprouts skimmers, skimmers harvest raw materials from the accretion belt. Some perturbations in those orbits; belt’s still unsettled.”

“Haven’t seen any of the herd giving birth,” Szpindel remarked. “Any sign of a factory?”

Sarasti shook his head. “Discarded, maybe. Decompiled. Or the herd stops breeding at optimal N.”

“These are only the bulldozers,” Bates pointed out. “There’ll be tenants.”

“A lot of ’em, eh?” Szpindel added. “Outnumber us by orders of mag.”

James: “But they might not show up for centuries.”

Sarasti clicked. “Do these skimmers build Fireflies? Burns-Caulfield?”

It was a rhetorical question. Szpindel answered anyway: “Don’t see how.”

“Something else does, then. Something already local.”

Nobody spoke for a moment. James’ topology shifted and shuffled in the silence; when she opened her mouth again, someone indefinably younger was on top.

“Their habitat isn’t anything like ours, if they’re building a home way out here. That’s hopeful.”

Michelle. The synesthete.

“Proteins.” Sarasti’s eyes were unreadable behind the visor. Comparable biochemistries. They might eat us.

“Whoever these beings are, they don’t even live in sunlight. No territorial overlap, no resource overlap, no basis for conflict. There’s no reason we shouldn’t get along just fine.”

“On the other hand,” Szpindel said, “Technology implies belligerence.”

Michelle snorted softly. “According to a coterie of theoretical historians who’ve never actually met an alien, yes. Maybe now we get to prove them wrong.” And in the next instant she was just gone, her affect scattered like leaves in a dust-devil, and Susan James was back in her place saying:

“Why don’t we just ask them?”

“Ask?” Bates said.

“There are four hundred thousand machines out there. How do we know they can’t talk?”

“We’d have heard.,” Szpindel said. “They’re drones.”

“Can’t hurt to ping them, just to make sure.”

“There’s no reason they should talk even if they are smart. Language and intelligence aren’t all that strongly correlated even on Ear—”

James rolled her eyes. “Why not try, at least? It’s what we’re here for. It’s what I’m here for. Just send a bloody signal.”

After a moment Bates picked up the ball. “Bad game theory, Suze.”

“Game theory.” She made it sound like a curse.

“Tit-for-tat’s the best strategy. They pinged us, we pinged back. Ball’s in their court now; we send another signal, we may give away too much.”

“I know the rules, Amanda. They say if the other party never takes the initiative again, we ignore each other for the rest of the mission because game theory says you don’t want to look needy.”

“The rule only applies when you’re going up against an unknown player, ” the Major explained. “We’ll have more options the more we learn.”

James sighed. “It’s just — you all seem to be going into this assuming they’ll be hostile. As if a simple hailing signal is going to bring them down on us.”

Bates shrugged. “It only makes sense to be cautious. I may be a jarhead but I’m not eager to piss off anything that hops between stars and terraforms superJovians for a living. I don’t have to remind anyone here that Theseus is no warship.”

She’d said anyone; she’d meant Sarasti. And Sarasti, focused on his own horizon, didn’t answer. Not out loud, at least; but his surfaces spoke in a different tongue entirely.

Not yet, they said.

Bates was right, by the way. Theseus was officially tricked out for exploration, not combat. No doubt our masters would have preferred to load her up with nukes and particle cannons as well as her scientific payload, but not even a telemattered fuel stream can change the laws of inertia. A weaponized prototype would have taken longer to build; a more massive one, laden with heavy artillery, would take longer to accelerate. Time, our masters had decided, was of greater essence than armament. In a pinch our fabrication facilities could build most anything we needed, given time. It might take a while to build a particle-beam cannon from scratch, and we might have to scavenge a local asteroid for the raw material, but we could do it. Assuming our enemies would be willing to wait, in the interests of fair play.

But what were the odds that even our best weapons would prove effective against the intelligence that had pulled off the Firefall? If the unknown was hostile, we were probably doomed no matter what we did. The Unknown was technologically advanced — and there were some who claimed that that made them hostile by definition. Technology Implies Belligerence, they said.

I suppose I should explain that, now that it’s completely irrelevant. You’ve probably forgotten after all this time.

Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence — spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can’t rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf.

Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn’t it be here by now?

Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn’t have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials — but if there are any, they said, they’re not just going to be smart. They’re going to be mean.

It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn’t merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for.

To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat?

Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-first century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others weren’t content until they had ended nature itself, still others until they’d built cities in space.

We all rested eventually, though. Each new technology trampled lesser ones, climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped — until my own mother packed herself away like a larva in honeycomb, softened by machinery, robbed of incentive by her own contentment.

But history never said that everyone had to stop where we did. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires. The threats contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh weather and natural disasters either kill you or they don’t, and once conquered — or adapted to — they lose their relevance. No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive. Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one.

And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who’ve never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?

The argument was straightforward enough. It might even have been enough to carry the Historians to victory — if such debates were ever settled on the basic of logic, and if a bored population hadn’t already awarded the game to Fermi on points. But the Historian paradigm was just too ugly, too Darwinian, for most people, and besides, no one really cared any more. Not even the Cassidy Survey’s late-breaking discoveries changed much. So what if some dirtball at Ursae Majoris Eridani had an oxygen atmosphere? It was forty-three lightyears away, and it wasn’t talking; and if you wanted flying chandeliers and alien messiahs, you could build them to order in Heaven. If you wanted testosterone and target practice you could choose an afterlife chock-full of nasty alien monsters with really bad aim. If the mere thought of an alien intelligence threatened your worldview, you could explore a virtual galaxy of empty real estate, ripe and waiting for any God-fearing earthly pilgrims who chanced by.

It was all there, just the other side of a fifteen-minute splice job and a cervical socket. Why endure the cramped and smelly confines of real-life space travel to go visit pond scum on Europa?

And so, inevitably, a fourth Tribe arose, a Heavenly host that triumphed over all: the Tribe that Just Didn’t Give A Shit. They didn’t know what to do when the Fireflies showed up.

So they sent us, and — in belated honor of the Historian mantra — they sent along a warrior, just in case. It was doubtful in the extreme that any child of Earth would be a match for a race with interstellar technology, should they prove unfriendly. Still, I could tell that Bates’ presence was a comfort, to the Human members of the crew at least. If you have to go up unarmed against an angry T-rex with a four-digit IQ, it can’t hurt to have a trained combat specialist at your side.

At the very least, she might be able to fashion a pointy stick from the branch of some convenient tree.

“I swear, if the aliens end up eating the lot of us, we’ll have the Church of Game Theory to thank for it,” Sascha said.

She was grabbing a brick of couscous from the galley. I was there for the caffeine. We were more or less alone; the rest of the crew was strewn from dome to Fab.

“Linguists don’t use it?” I knew some that did.

“We don’t.” And the others are hacks. “Thing about game theory is, it assumes rational self-interest among the players. And people just aren’t rational.”

“It used to assume that,” I allowed. “These days they factor in the social neurology.”

“Human social neurology.” She bit a corner off her brick, spoke around a mouthful of semolina. “That’s what game theory’s good for. Rational players, or human ones. And let me take a wild stab here and wonder if either of those is gonna apply to that.” She waved her hand at some archetypal alien lurking past the bulkhead.

“It’s got its limitations,” I admitted. “I guess you use the tools you can lay your hands on.”

Sascha snorted. “So if you couldn’t get your hands on a proper set of blueprints, you’d base your dream home on a book of dirty limericks.”

“Maybe not.” And then, a bit defensive in spite of myself, I added, “I’ve found it useful, though. In areas you might not expect it to be.”

“Yeah? Name one.”

“Birthdays,” I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t.

Sascha stopped chewing. Something behind her eyes flickered, almost strobed, as if her other selves were pricking up their ears.

“Go on,” she said, and I could feel the whole Gang listening in.

“It’s nothing, really. Just an example.”

“So. Tell us.” Sascha cocked James’ head at me.

I shrugged. No point making a big thing out of it. “Well, according to game theory, you should never tell anyone when your birthday is.”

“I don’t follow.”

“It’s a lose-lose proposition. There’s no winning strategy.”

“What do you mean, strategy? It’s a birthday.”

Chelsea had said exactly the same thing when I’d tried to explain it to her. Look, I’d said, say you tell everyone when it is and nothing happens. It’s kind of a slap in the face.

Or suppose they throw you a party, Chelsea had replied.

Then you don’t know whether they’re doing it sincerely, or if your earlier interaction just guilted them into observing an occasion they’d rather have ignored. But if you don’t tell anyone, and nobody commemorates the event, there’s no reason to feel badly because after all, nobody knew. And if someone does buy you a drink then you know it’s sincere because nobody would go to all the trouble of finding out when your birthday is — and then celebrating it — if they didn’t honestly like you.

Of course, the Gang was more up to speed on such things. I didn’t have to explain it verbally: I could just grab a piece of ConSensus and plot out the payoff matrix, Tell/Don’t Tell along the columns, Celebrated/Not Celebrated along the rows, the unassailable black-and-white logic of cost and benefit in the squares themselves. The math was irrefutable: the one winning strategy was concealment. Only fools revealed their birthdays.

Sascha looked at me. “You ever show this to anyone else?”

“Sure. My girlfriend.”

Her eyebrows lifted. “You had a girlfriend? A real one?”

I nodded. “Once.”

“I mean after you showed this to her.”

“Well, yes.”

“Uh huh.” Her eyes wandered back to the payoff matrix. “Just curious, Siri. How did she react?”

“She didn’t, really. Not at first. Then — well, she laughed.”

“Better woman than me.” Sascha shook her head. “I’d have dumped you on the spot.”

My nightly constitutional up the spine: glorious dreamy flight along a single degree of freedom. I sailed through hatches and corridors, threw my arms wide and spun in the gentle cyclonic breezes of the drum. Bates ran circles around me, bouncing her ball against bins and bulkheads, stretching to field each curving rebound in the torqued pseudograv. The toy ricocheted off a stairwell and out of reach as I passed; the major’s curses followed me through the needle’s eye from crypt to bridge.

I braked just short of the dome, stopped by the sound of quiet voices from ahead.

“Of course they’re beautiful,” Szpindel murmured. “They’re stars.”

“And I’m guessing I’m not your first choice to share the view,” James said.

“You’re a close second. But I’ve got a date with Meesh.”

“She never mentioned it.”

“She doesn’t tell you everything. Ask her.”

“Hey, this body’s taking its antilibs. Even if yours isn’t.”

“Mind out of the gutter, Suze. Eros is only one kind of love, eh? Ancient Greeks recognized four.”

“Riiight.” Definitely not Susan, not any more. “Figures you’d take your lead from a bunch of sodomites.”

“Fuck, Sascha. All I’m asking is a few minutes alone with Meesh before the whip starts cracking again…”

“My body too, Ike. You wanna pull your eyes over my wool?”

“I just want to talk, eh? Alone. That too much to ask?”

I heard Sascha take a breath.

I heard Michelle let it out.

“Sorry, kid. You know the Gang.”

“Thank God. It’s like some group inspection whenever I come looking for face time.”

“I guess you’re lucky they like you, then.”

“I still say you ought to stage a coup.”

“You could always move in with us.”

I heard the rustle of bodies in gentle contact. “How are you?” Szpindel asked. “You okay?”

“Pretty good. I think I’m finally used to being alive again. You?”

“Hey, I’m a spaz no matter how long I’ve been dead.”

“You get the job done.”

“Why, merci. I try.”

A small silence. Theseus hummed quietly to herself.

“Mom was right,” Michelle said. “They are beautiful.”

“What do you see, when you look at them?” And then, catching himself: “I mean—”

“They’re — prickly,” Michelle told him. “When I turn my head it’s like bands of very fine needles rolling across my skin in waves. But it doesn’t hurt at all. It just tingles. It’s almost electric. It’s nice.”

“Wish I could feel it that way.”

“You’ve got the interface. Just patch a camera into your parietal lobe instead of your visual cortex.”

“That’d just tell me how a machine feels vision, eh? Still wouldn’t know how you do.”

“Isaac Szpindel. You’re a romantic.”

“Nah.”

“You don’t want to know. You want to keep it mysterious.”

“Already got more than enough mystery to deal with out here, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Yeah, but we can’t do anything about that.”

“That’ll change. We’ll be working our asses off in no time.”

“You think?”

“Count on it,” Szpindel said. “So far we’ve just been peeking from a distance, eh? Bet all kinds of interesting stuff happens when we get in there and start poking with a stick.”

“Maybe for you. There’s got to be a biological somewhere in the mix, with all those organics.”

“Damn right. And you’ll be talking to ’em while I’m giving them their physicals.”

“Maybe not. I mean, Mom would never admit it in a million years but you had a point about language. When you get right down to it, it’s a workaround. Like trying to describe dreams with smoke signals. It’s noble, it’s maybe the most noble thing a body can do but you can’t turn a sunset into a string of grunts without losing something. It’s limiting. Maybe whatever’s out here doesn’t even use it.”

“Bet they do, though.”

“Since when? You’re the one who’s always pointing out how inefficient language is.”

“Only when I’m trying to get under your skin. Your pants — whole other thing.” He laughed at his own joke. “Seriously, what are they gonna to use instead, telepathy? I say you’ll be up to your elbows in hieroglyphics before you know it. And what’s more, you’ll decode ’em in record time.”

“You’re sweet, but I wonder. Half the time I can’t even decode Jukka.” Michelle fell silent a moment. “He actually kind of throws me sometimes.”

“You and seven billion others.”

“Yeah. I know it’s silly, but when he’s not around there’s a part of me that can’t stop wondering where he’s hiding. And when he’s right there in front of me, I feel like I should be hiding.”

“Not his fault he creeps us out.”

“I know. But it’s hardly a big morale booster. What genius came up with the idea of putting a vampire in charge?”

“Where else you going to put them, eh? You want to be the one giving orders to him?”

“And it’s not just the way he moves. It’s the way he talks. It’s just wrong.”

“You know he—”

“I’m not talking about the present-tense thing, or all the glottals. He — well, you know how he talks. He’s terse.”

“It’s efficient.”

“It’s artificial, Isaac. He’s smarter than all of us put together, but sometimes he talks like he’s got a fifty-word vocabulary.” A soft snort. “It’s not like it’d kill him to use an adverb once in a while.”

“Ah. But you say that because you’re a linguist, and you can’t see why anyone wouldn’t want to wallow in the sheer beauty of language.” Szpindel harrumphed with mock pomposity. “Now me, I’m a biologist, so it makes perfect sense.”

“Really. Then explain it to me, oh wise and powerful mutilator of frogs.”

“Simple. Bloodsucker’s a transient, not a resident.”

“What are — oh, those are killer whales, right? Whistle dialects.”

“I said forget the language. Think about the lifestyle. Residents are fish-eaters, eh? They hang out in big groups, don’t move around much, talk all the time.” I heard a whisper of motion, imagined Szpindel leaning in and laying a hand on Michelle’s arm. I imagined the sensors in his gloves telling him what she felt like. “Transients, now — they eat mammals. Seals, sea lions, smart prey. Smart enough to take cover when they hear a fluke slap or a click train. So transients are sneaky, eh? Hunt in small groups, range all over the place, keep their mouths shut so nobody hears ’em coming.”

“And Jukka’s a transient.”

“Man’s instincts tell him to keep quiet around prey. Every time he opens his mouth, every time he lets us see him, he’s fighting his own brain stem. Maybe we shouldn’t be too harsh on the ol’ guy just because he’s not the world’s best motivational speaker, eh?”

“He’s fighting the urge to eat us every time we have a briefing? That’s reassuring.”

Szpindel chuckled. “It’s probably not that bad. I guess even killer whales let their guard down after making a kill. Why sneak around on a full stomach, eh?”

“So he’s not fighting his brain stem. He just isn’t hungry.”

“Probably a little of both. Brain stem never really goes away, you know. But I’ll tell you one thing.” Some of the playfulness ebbed from Szpindel’s voice. “I’ve got no problem if Sarasti wants to run the occasional briefing from his quarters. But the moment we stop seeing him altogether? That’s when you start watching your back.”

Looking back, I can finally admit it: I envied Szpindel his way with the ladies. Spliced and diced, a gangly mass of tics and jitters that could barely feel his own skin, somehow he managed to be—

Charming. That’s the word. Charming.

As a social necessity it was all but obsolete, fading into irrelevance along with two-party nonvirtual sex pairing. But even I’d tried one of those; and it would have been nice to have had Szpindel’s self-deprecating skill set to call on.

Especially when everything with Chelsea started falling apart.

I had my own style, of course. I tried to be charming in my own peculiar way. Once, after one too many fights about honesty and emotional manipulation, I’d started to think maybe a touch of whimsy might smooth things over. I had come to suspect that Chelsea just didn’t understand sexual politics. Sure she’d edited brains for a living, but maybe she’d just memorized all that circuitry without giving any thought to how it had arisen in the first place, to the ultimate rules of natural selection that had shaped it. Maybe she honestly didn’t know that we were evolutionary enemies, that all relationships were doomed to failure. If I could slip that insight into her head — if I could charm my way past her defenses — maybe we’d be able to hold things together.

So I thought about it, and I came up with the perfect way to raise her awareness. I wrote her a bedtime story, a disarming blend of humor and affection, and I called it

In the beginning were the gametes. And though there was sex, lo, there was no gender, and life was in balance.

And God said, “Let there be Sperm”: and some seeds did shrivel in size and grow cheap to make, and they did flood the market.

And God said, “Let there be Eggs”: and other seeds were afflicted by a plague of Sperm. And yea, few of them bore fruit, for Sperm brought no food for the zygote, and only the largest Eggs could make up the shortfall. And these grew yet larger in the fullness of time.

And God put the Eggs into a womb, and said, “Wait here: for thy bulk has made thee unwieldy, and Sperm must seek thee out in thy chambers. Henceforth shalt thou be fertilized internally.” And it was so.

And God said to the gametes, “The fruit of thy fusion may abide in any place and take any shape. It may breathe air or water or the sulphurous muck of hydrothermal vents. But do not forget my one commandment unto you, which has not changed from the beginning of time: spread thy genes.”

And thus did Sperm and Egg go into the world. And Sperm said, “I am cheap and plentiful, and if sowed abundantly I will surely fulfill God’s plan. I shall forever seek out new mates and then abandon them when they are with child, for there are many wombs and little time.”

But Egg said, “Lo, the burden of procreation weighs heavily upon me. I must carry flesh that is but half mine, gestate and feed it even when it leaves my chamber” (for by now many of Egg’s bodies were warm of blood, and furry besides). “I can have but few children, and must devote myself to those, and protect them at every turn. And I will make Sperm help me, for he got me into this. And though he doth struggle at my side, I shall not let him stray, nor lie with my competitors.”

And Sperm liked this not.

And God smiled, for Its commandment had put Sperm and Egg at war with each other, even unto the day they made themselves obsolete.

I brought her flowers one dusky Tuesday evening when the light was perfect. I pointed out the irony of that romantic old tradition — the severed genitalia of another species, offered as a precopulatory bribe — and then I recited my story just as we were about to fuck.

To this day, I still don’t know what went wrong.

There were stories, before we left Earth, of a fourth wave: a fleet of deep-space dreadnoughts running silent in our wake, should the cannon fodder up front run into something nasty. Or, if the aliens were friendly, an ambassadorial frigate full of politicians and CEOs ready to elbow their way to the front of the line. Never mind that Earth had no deep-space dreadnoughts or ambassadorial spaceships; Theseus hadn’t existed either, before Firefall. Nobody had told us of any such such contingent, but you never show the Big Picture to your front line. The less they know, the less they can betray.

I still don’t know if the fourth wave ever existed. I never saw any evidence of one, for whatever that’s worth. We might have left them floundering back at Burns-Caulfield. Or maybe they followed us all the way to Big Ben, crept just close enough to see what we were up against, and turned tail before things got ugly.

I wonder if that’s what happened. I wonder if they made it back home.

I look back now, and hope not.

A giant marshmallow kicked Theseus in the side. Down swung like a pendulum. Across the drum Szpindel yelped as if scalded; in the galley, cracking a bulb of hot coffee, I nearly was.

This is it, I thought. We got too close. They’re hitting back.

“What the—”

A flicker on the party line as Bates linked from the bridge. “Main drive just kicked in. We’re changing course.”

“To what? Where? Whose orders?”

“Mine,” Sarasti said, appearing above us.

Nobody spoke. Drifting into the drum through the stern hatchway: the sound of something grinding. I pinged Theseus’ resource-allocation stack. Fabrication was retooling itself for the mass production of doped ceramics.

Radiation shielding. Solid stuff, bulky and primitive, not the controlled magnetic fields we usually relied on.

The Gang emerged sleepy-eyed from their tent, Sascha grumbling, “What the fuck?”

“Watch.” Sarasti took hold of ConSensus and shook it.

It was a blizzard, not a briefing: gravity wells and orbital trajectories, shear-stress simulations in thunderheads of ammonium and hydrogen, stereoscopic planetscapes buried under filters ranging from gamma to radio. I saw breakpoints and saddlepoints and unstable equilibria. I saw fold catastrophes plotted in five dimensions. My augments strained to rotate the information; my meaty half-brain struggled to understand the bottom line.

Something was hiding down there, in plain sight.

Ben’s accretion belt still wasn’t behaving. Its delinquency wasn’t obvious; Sarasti hadn’t had to plot every pebble and mountain and planetesimal to find the pattern, but he’d come close. And neither he nor the conjoined intelligence he shared with the Captain had been able to explain those trajectories as the mere aftermath of some past disturbance. The dust wasn’t just settling; some of it marched downhill to the beat of something that even now reached out from the cloud-tops and pulled debris from orbit.

Not all that debris seemed to hit. Ben’s equatorial regions flickered constantly with the light of meteorite impacts — much fainter than the bright wakes of the skimmers, and gone in the wink of an eye — but those frequency distributions didn’t quite account for all the rocks that had fallen. It was almost as though, every now and then, some piece of incoming detritus simply vanished into a parallel universe.

Or got caught by something in this one. Something that circled Ben’s equator every forty hours, almost low enough to graze the atmosphere. Something that didn’t show up in visible light, or infrared, or radar. Something that might have remained pure hypothesis if a skimmer hadn’t burned an incandescent trail across the atmosphere behind it when Theseus happened to be watching.

Sarasti threw that one dead center: a bright contrail streaking diagonally across Ben’s perpetual nightscape, stuttering partway a degree or two to the left, stuttering back just before it passed from sight. Freeze-frame showed a beam of light frozen solid, a segment snapped from its midsection and jiggled just a hair out of alignment.

A segment nine kilometers long.

“It’s cloaked,” Sascha said, impressed.

“Not very well.” Bates emerged from the forward hatch and sailed spinward. “Pretty obvious refractory artefact.” She caught stairs halfway to the deck, used the torque of spin-against-spam to flip upright and plant her feet on the steps. “Why didn’t we catch that before?”

“No backlight,” Szpindel suggested.

“It’s not just the contrail. Look at the clouds.” Sure enough, Ben’s cloudy backdrop showed the same subtle dislocation. Bates stepped onto the deck and headed for the conference table. “We should’ve seen this earlier.”

“The other probes see no such artefact,” Sarasti said. “This probe approaches from a wider angle. Twenty-seven degrees.”

“Wider angle to what?” Sascha said.

“To the line,” Bates murmured. “Between us and them.”

It was all there on tactical: Theseus fell inwards along an obvious arc, but the probes we’d dispatched hadn’t dicked around with Hohmann transfers: they’d burned straight down, their courses barely bending, all within a few degrees of the theoretical line connecting Ben to Theseus.

Except this one. This one had come in wide, and seen the trickery.

“The further from our bearing, the more obvious the discontinuity,” Sarasti intoned. “Think it’s clearly visible on any approach perpendicular to ours.”

“So we’re in a blind spot? We see it if we change course?”

Bates shook her head. “The blind spot’s moving, Sascha. It’s—”

“Tracking us.” Sascha sucked breath between her teeth. “Motherfucker.”

Szpindel twitched. “So what is it? Our skimmer factory?”

The freeze-frame’s pixels began to crawl. Something emerged, granular and indistinct, from the turbulent swirls and curlicues of Ben’s atmosphere. There were curves, and spikes, and no smooth edges; I couldn’t tell how much of the shape was real, and how much a fractal intrusion of underlying cloudscape. But the overall outline was that of a torus, or perhaps a collection of smaller jagged things piled together in a rough ring; and it was big. Those nine klicks of displaced contrail had merely grazed the perimeter, cut across an arc of forty or fifty degrees. This thing hiding in the shadow of ten Jupiters was almost thirty kilometers from side to side.

Sometime during Sarasti’s executive summary we’d stopped accellerating. Down was back where it belonged. We weren’t, though. Our hesitant maybe-maybe-not approach was a thing of the past: we vectored straight in now, and damn the torpedoes.

“Er, that’s thirty klicks across,” Sascha pointed out. “And it’s invisible. Shouldn’t we maybe be a little more cautious now?”

Szpindel shrugged. “We could second-guess vampires, we wouldn’t need vampires, eh?”

A new facet bloomed on the feed. Frequency histograms and harmonic spectra erupted from flatline into shifting mountainscapes, a chorus of visible light.

“Modulated laser,” Bates reported.

Szpindel looked up. “From that?”

Bates nodded. “Right after we blow its cover. Interesting timing.”

“Scary timing,” Szpindel said. “How’d it know?”

“We changed course. We’re heading right for it.”

The lightscape played on, knocking at the window.

“Whatever it is,” Bates said, “it’s talking to us.”

“Well then,” remarked a welcome voice. “By all means let’s say hello.”

Susan James was back in the driver’s seat.

I was the only pure spectator.

They all performed what duties they could. Szpindel ran Sarasti’s sketchy silhouette through a series of filters, perchance to squeeze a bit of biology from engineering. Bates compared morphometrics between the cloaked artefact and the skimmers. Sarasti watched us all from overhead and thought vampire thoughts deeper than anything we could aspire to. But it was all just make-work. The Gang of Four was on center stage, under the capable direction of Susan James.

She grabbed the nearest chair, sat, raised her hands as if cueing an orchestra. Her fingers trembled in mid-air as she played virtual icons; her lips and jaw twitched with subvocal commands. I tapped her feed and saw text accreting around the alien signal:

Rorschach to vessel approaching 116°Az -23°dec rel. Hello Theseus. Rorschach to vessel approaching 116°Az -23°dec rel. Hello Theseus. Rorschach to vessel approachi

She’d decoded the damn thing. Already. She was even answering it:

Theseus to Rorschach. Hello Rorschach.

Hello Theseus. Welcome to the neighborhood.

She’d had less than three minutes. Or rather, they’d had less than three minutes: four fully-conscious hub personalities and a few dozen unconscious semiotic modules, all working in parallel, all exquisitely carved from the same lump of gray matter. I could almost see why someone would do such deliberate violence to their own minds, if it resulted in this kind of performance.

Up to now I had never fully convinced myself that even survival was sufficient cause.

Request permission to approach, the Gang sent. Simple and straightforward: just facts and data, thank you, with as little room as possible for ambiguity and misunderstanding. Fancy sentiments like we come in peace could wait. A handshake was not the time for cultural exchange.

You should stay away. Seriously. This place is dangerous.

That got some attention. Bates and Szpindel hesitated momentarily in their own headspaces and glanced into James’.

Request information on danger, the gang sent back. Still keeping it concrete.

Too close and dangerous to you. low orbit complications.

Request information on low orbit complications.

Lethal environment. Rocks and rads. You’re welcome. I can take it but we’re like that.

We are aware of the rocks in low orbit. We are equipped to deal with radiation. Request information on other hazards.

I dug under the transcript to the channel it fed from. Theseus had turned part of the incoming beam into a sound wave, according to the color code. Vocal communication, then. They spoke. Waiting behind that icon were the raw sounds of an alien language.

Of course I couldn’t resist.

“Anytime between friends, right? Are you here for the celebration?”

English. The voice was human, male. Old.

“We are here to explore,” replied the Gang, although their voice was pure Theseus. “Request dialog with agents who sent objects into near-solar space.”

“First contact. Sounds like something to celebrate.”

I double-checked the source. No, this wasn’t a translation; this was the actual unprocessed signal coming from — Rorschach, it had called itself. Part of the signal, anyway; there were other elements, nonacoustic ones, encoded in the beam.

I browsed them while James said, “Request information about your celebration”: standard ship-to-ship handshaking protocols.

“You’re interested.” The voice was stronger now, younger.

“Yes.”

“You are?”

“Yes,” the Gang repeated patiently.

“You are?”

The slightest hesitation. “This is Theseus.”

“I know that, baseline.” In Mandarin, now. “Who are you?”

No obvious change in the harmonics. Somehow, though, the voice seemed to have acquired an edge.

“This is Susan James. I am a—”

“You wouldn’t be happy here, Susan. Fetishistic religious beliefs involved. There are dangerous observances.”

James chewed her lip.

“Request clarification. Are we in danger from these observances?”

“You certainly could be.”

“Request clarification. Is it the observances that are dangerous, or the low-orbit environment?”

“The environment of the disturbances. You should pay attention, Susan. Inattention connotes indifference,” Rorschach said.

“Or disrespect,” it added after a moment.

We had four hours before Ben got in the way. Four hours of uninterrupted nonstop communication made vastly easier than anyone had expected. It spoke our language, after all. Repeatedly it expressed polite concern for our welfare. And yet, for all its facility with Human speech it told us very little. For four hours it managed to avoid giving a straight answer on any subject beyond the extreme inadvisability of closer contact, and by the time it fell into eclipse we still didn’t know why.

Sarasti dropped onto the deck halfway through the exchange, his feet never touching the stairs. He reached out and grabbed a railing to steady himself on landing, and staggered only briefly. If I’d tried that I’d have ended up bouncing along the deck like a pebble in a cement mixer.

He stood still as stone for the rest of the session, face motionless, eyes hidden behind his onyx visor. When Rorschach’s signal faded in midsentence he assembled us around the Commons table with a gesture.

“It talks,” he said.

James nodded. “It doesn’t say much, except for asking us to keep our distance. So far the voice has manifested as adult male, although the apparent age changed a few times.”

He’d heard all that. “Structure?”

“The ship-to-ship protocols are perfect. Its vocabulary is far greater than you could derive from standard nav chatter between a few ships, so they’ve been listening to all our insystem traffic — I’d say for several years at least. On the other hand, the vocabulary doesn’t have anywhere near the range you’d get by monitoring entertainment multimede, so they probably arrived after the Broadcast Age.”

“How well do they use the vocabulary they have?”

“They’re using phrase-structure grammar, long-distance dependencies. FLN recursion, at least four levels deep and I see no reason why it won’t go deeper with continued contact. They’re not parrots, Jukka. They know the rules. That name, for example—”

“Rorschach,” Bates murmered, knuckles cracking as she squeezed her pet ball. “Interesting choice.”

“I checked the registry. There’s an I-CAN freighter called Rorschach on the Martian Loop. Whoever we’re talking to must regard their own platform the way we’d regard a ship, and picked one of our names to fit.”

Szpindel dropped into the chair beside me, fresh from a galley run. A bulb of coffee glistened like gelatin in his hand. “That name, out of all the ships in the innersys? Seems way too symbolic for a random choice.”

“I don’t think it was random. Unusual ship names provoke comment; Rorschach’s pilot goes ship-to-ship with some other vessel, the other vessel comes back with oh Grandma, what an unusual name you have, Rorschach replies with some off-the-cuff comment about nomenclatural origins and it all goes out in the EM. Someone listening to all that chatter not only figures out the name and the thing it applies to, but can get some sense of meaning from the context. Our alien friends probably eavesdropped on half the registry and deduced that Rorschach would be a better tag for something unfamiliar than, say, the SS Jaymie Matthews.”

“Territorial and smart.” Szpindel grimaced, conjuring a mug from beneath his chair. “Wonderful.”

Bates shrugged. “Territorial, maybe. Not necessarily aggressive. In fact, I wonder if they could hurt us even if they wanted to.”

“I don’t,” Szpindel said. “Those skimmers—”

The major waved a dismissive hand. “Big ships turn slowly. If they were setting up to snooker us we’d see it well in advance.” She looked around the table. “Look, am I the only one who finds this odd? An interstellar technology that redecorates superJovians and lines up meteoroids like elephants on parade, and they were hiding? From us?”

“Unless there’s someone else out here,” James suggested uneasily.

Bates shook her head. “The cloak was directional. It was aimed at us and no one else.”

“And even we saw through it,” Szpindel added.

“Exactly. So they go to Plan B, which so far amounts to nothing but bluster and vague warnings. I’m just saying, they’re not acting like giants. Rorschach’s behavior feels — improvised. I don’t think they expected us.”

“’Course not. Burns-Caulfield was—”

“I don’t think they expected us yet.”

“Um,” Szpindel said, digesting it.

The major ran one hand over her naked scalp. “Why would they expect us to just give up after we learned we’d been sniped? Of course we’d look elsewhere. Burns-Caulfield could only have been intended as a delaying action; if I was them, I’d plan on us getting out here eventually. But I think they miscalculated somehow. We got out here sooner than they expected and caught them with their pants down.”

Szpindel split the bulb and emptied it into his mug. “Pretty large miscalculation for something so smart, eh?” A hologram bloomed on contact with the steaming liquid, glowing in soft commemoration of the Gaza Glasslands. The scent of plasticised coffee flooded the Commons. “Especially after they’d surveilled us down to the square meter,” he added.

“And what did they see? I-CANNs. Solar sails. Ships that take years to reach the Kuiper, and don’t have the reserves to go anywhere else afterwards. Telematter didn’t exist beyond Boeing’s simulators and a half-dozen protypes back then. Easy to miss. They must’ve figured one decoy would buy them all the time they needed.”

“To do what?” James wondered.

“Whatever it is,” Bates said, “We’re ringside.”

Szpindel raised his mug with an infirm hand and sipped. The coffee trembled in its prison, the surface wobbling and blobbing in the drum’s half-hearted gravity. James pursed her lips in faint disapproval. Open-topped containers for liquids were technically verboten in variable-gravity environments, even for people without Szpindel’s dexterity issues.

“So they’re bluffing,” Szpindel said at last.

Bates nodded. “That’s my guess. Rorschach’s still under construction. We could be dealing with an automated system of some kind.”

“So we can ignore the keep-off-the-grass signs, eh? Walk right in.”

“We can afford to bide our time. We can afford to not push it.”

“Ah. So even though we could maybe handle it now, you want to wait until it graduates from covert to invulnerable.” Szpindel shuddered, set down his coffee. “Where’d you get your military training again? Sporting Chance Academy?”

Bates ignored the jibe. “The fact that Rorschach’s still growing may be the best reason to leave it alone for a while. We don’t have any idea what the — mature, I guess — what the mature form of this artefact might be. Sure, it hid. Lots of animals take cover from predators without being predators, especially young ones. Sure, it’s — evasive. Doesn’t give us the answers we want. But maybe it doesn’t know them, did you consider that? How much luck would you have interrogating a Human embryo? Adult could be a whole different animal.”

“Adult could put our asses through a meatgrinder.”

“So could the embryo for all we know.” Bates rolled her eyes. “Jesus, Isaac, you’re the biologist. I shouldn’t have to tell you how many shy reclusive critters pack a punch when they’re cornered. Porcupine doesn’t want any trouble, but he’ll still give you a faceful of quills if you ignore the warning.”

Szpindel said nothing. He slid his coffee sideways along the concave tabletop, to the very limit of his reach. The liquid sat there in its mug, a dark circle perfectly parallel to the rim but canted slightly towards us. I even thought I could make out the merest convexity in the surface itself.

Szpindel smiled faintly at the effect.

James cleared her throat. “Not to downplay your concerns, Isaac, but we’ve hardly exhausted the diplomatic route. And at least it’s willing to talk, even if it’s not as forthcoming as we’d like.”

“Sure it talks,” Szpindel said, eyes still on the leaning mug. “Not like us.”

“Well, no. There’s some—”

“It’s not just slippery, it’s downright dyslexic sometimes, you noticed? And it mixes up its pronouns.”

“Given that it picked up the language entirely via passive eavesdropping, it’s remarkably fluent. In fact, from what I can tell they’re more efficient at processing speech than we are.”

“Gotta be efficient at a language if you’re going to be so evasive in it, eh?”

“If they were human I might agree with you,” James replied. “But what appears to us as evasion or deceit could just as easily be explained by a reliance on smaller conceptual units.”

“Conceptual units?” Bates, I was beginning to realize, never pulled up a subtitle if she could help it.

James nodded. “Like processing a line of text word by word, instead of looking at complete phrases. The smaller the units, the faster they can be reconfigured; it gives you very fast semantic reflexes. The down side is that it’s difficult to maintain the same level of logical consistency, since the patterns within the larger structure are more likely to get shuffled.”

“Whoa.” Szpindel straightened, all thoughts of liquids and centipetal force forgotten.

“All I’m saying is, we aren’t necessarily dealing with deliberate deception here. An entity who parses information at one scale might not be aware of inconsistencies on another; it might not even have conscious access to that level.”

“That’s not all you’re saying.”

“Isaac, you can’t apply Human norms to a—”

“I wondered what you were up to.” Szpindel dove into the transcripts. A moment later he dredged up an excerpt:

Request information on environments you consider lethal. Request information on your response to the prospect of imminent exposure to lethal environments.

Glad to comply. But your lethal is different from us. there are many migrating circumstances.

“You were testing it!” Szpindel crowed. He smacked his lips; his jaw ticced. You were looking for an emotional response!”

“It was just a thought. It didn’t prove anything.”

“Was there a difference? In the response time?”

James hesitated, then shook her head. “But it was a stupid idea. There are so many variables, we have no idea how they — I mean, they’re alien…”

“The pathology’s classic.”

“What pathology?” I asked.

“It doesn’t mean anything except that they’re different from the Human baseline,” James insisted. “Which is not something anyone here can look down their nose about.”

I tried again: “What pathology?”

James shook her head. Szpindel filled me in: “There’s a syndrome you might have heard about, eh? Fast talkers, no conscience, tend to malapropism and self-contradiction. No emotional affect.”

“We’re not talking about human beings here,” James said again, softly.

“But if we were,” Szpindel added, “we might call Rorschach a clinical sociopath.”

Sarasti had said nothing during this entire exchange. Now, with the word hanging out in the open, I noticed that nobody else would look at him.

We all knew that Jukka Sarasti was a sociopath, of course. Most of us just didn’t mention it in polite company.

Szpindel was never that polite. Or maybe it was just that he seemed to almost understand Sarasti; he could look behind the monster and regard the organism, no less a product of natural selection for all the human flesh it had devoured in eons past. That perspective calmed him, somehow. He could watch Sarasti watching him, and not flinch.

“I feel sorry for the poor son of a bitch,” he said once, back in training.

Some would have thought that absurd. This man, so massively interfaced with machinery that his own motor skills had degraded for want of proper care and feeding; this man who heard x-rays and saw in shades of ultrasound, so corrupted by retrofits he could no longer even feel his own fingertips without assistance — this man could pity anyone else, let alone an infra-eyed predator built to murder without the slightest twitch of remorse?

“Empathy for sociopaths isn’t common,” I remarked.

“Maybe it should be. We, at least—” he waved an arm; some remote-linked sensor cluster across the simulator whirred and torqued reflexively — “chose the add-ons. Vampires had to be sociopaths. They’re too much like their own prey — a lot of taxonomists don’t even consider them a subspecies, you know that? Never diverged far enough for complete reproductive isolation. So maybe they’re more syndrome than race. Just a bunch of obligate cannibals with a consistent set of deformities.”

“And how does that make—”

“If the only thing you can eat is your own kind, empathy is gonna be the first thing that goes. Psychopathy’s no disorder in those shoes, eh? Just a survival strategy. But they still make our skin crawl, so we — chain ’em up.”

“You think we should’ve repaired the Crucifix glitch?” Everyone knew why we hadn’t. Only a fool would resurrect a monster without safeguards in place. Vampires came with theirs built in: without his antiEuclideans Sarasti would go grand mal the first time he caught close sight of a four-panel window frame.

But Szpindel was shaking his head. “We couldn’t have fixed it. Or we could have,” he amended, “but the glitch is in the visual cortex, eh? Linked to their omnisavantism. You fix it, you disable their pattern-matching skills, and then what’s the point in even bringing them back?”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Well, that’s the official story.” He fell silent a moment, cracked a crooked grin. “Then again, we didn’t have any trouble fixing the protocadherin pathways when it suited us.”

I subtitled. Context-sensitive, ConSensus served up protocadherin γ-Y: the magical hominid brain protein that vampires had never been able to synthesize. The reason they hadn’t just switched to zebras or warthogs once denied Human prey, why our discovery of the terrible secret of the Right Angle had spelled their doom.

“Anyway, I just think he’s — cut off.” A nervous tic tugged at the corner of Szpindel’s mouth. “Lone wolf, nothing but sheep for company. Wouldn’t you feel lonely?”

“They don’t like company,” I reminded him. You didn’t put vampires of the same sex together, not unless you were taking bets on a bloodbath. They were solitary hunters and very territorial. With a minimum viable pred-prey ratio of one to ten — and human prey spread so sparsely across the Pleistocene landscape — the biggest threat to their survival had been competition from their own kind. Natural selection had never taught them to play nicely together.

That didn’t cut any ice with Szpindel, though. “Doesn’t mean he can’t be lonely,” he insisted.

“Just means he can’t fix it.”

We did it with mirrors, great round parabolic things, each impossibly thin and three times as high as a man. Theseus rolled them up and bolted them to firecrackers stuffed with precious antimatter from our dwindling stockpiles. With twelve hours to spare she flung them like confetti along precise ballistic trajectories, and when they were safely distant she set them alight. They pinwheeled off every which way, gamma sleeting in their wake until they burned dry. Then they coasted, unfurling mercurial insect wings across the void.

In the greater distance, four hundred thousand alien machines looped and burned and took no obvious notice.

Rorschach fell around Ben barely fifteen hundred kilometers from atmosphere, a fast endless circle that took just under forty hours to complete. By the time it didn’t return to our sight, the mirrors were all outside the zone of total blindness. A closeup of Ben’s equatorial edge floated in ConSensus. Mirror icons sparkled around it like an exploding schematic, like the disconnected facets of some great expanding compound eye. None had brakes. Whatever high ground the mirrors held, they wouldn’t hold it for long.

“There,” Bates said.

A mirage wavered stage left, a tiny spot of swirling chaos perhaps half the size of a fingernail held at arms-length. It told us nothing, it was pure heat-shimmer — but light bounced towards us from dozens of distant relayers, and while each saw scarcely more than our last probe had — a patch of dark clouds set slightly awry by some invisible prism — each of those views refracted differently. The Captain sieved flashes from the heavens and stitched them into a composite view.

Details emerged.

First a faint sliver of shadow, a tiny dimple all but lost in the seething equatorial cloud bands. It had just barely rotated into view around the edge of the disk — a rock in the stream perhaps, an invisible finger stuck in the clouds, turbulence and shear stress shredding the boundary layers to either side.

Szpindel squinted. “Plage effect.” Subtitles said he was talking about a kind of sunspot, a knot in Ben’s magnetic field.

“Higher,” James said.

Something floated above that dimple in the clouds, the way a ground-effect ocean-liner floats above the depression it pushes into the water’s surface. I zoomed: next to an Oasa subdwarf with ten times the mass of Jupiter, Rorschach was tiny.

Next to Theseus, it was a colossus.

Not just a torus but a tangle, a city-sized chaos of spun glass, loops and bridges and attenuate spires. The surface texture was pure artifice, of course; ConSensus merely giftwrapped the enigma in refracted background. Still. In some dark, haunting way, it was almost beautiful. A nest of obsidian snakes and smoky crystal spines.

“It’s talking again,” James reported.

“Talk back,” Sarasti said, and abandoned us.

So she did: and while the Gang spoke with the artefact, the others spied upon it. Their vision failed over time — mirrors fell away along their respective vectors, lines-of-sight degraded with each passing second — but ConSensus filled with things learned in the meantime. Rorschach massed 1.8·10¹⁰ kg within a total volume of 2.3·10⁸ cubic meters. Its magnetic field, judging by radio squeals and its Plage Effect, was thousands of times stronger than the sun’s. Astonishingly, parts of the composite image were clear enough to discern fine spiral grooves twined around the structure. (“Fibonacci sequence,” Szpindel reported, one jiggling eye fixing me for a moment. “At least they’re not completely alien.”) Spheroid protuberances disfigured the tips of at least three of Rorschach’s innumerable spines; the grooves were more widely spaced in those areas, like skin grown tight and swollen with infection. Just before one vital mirror sailed out of range it glimpsed another spine, split a third of the way along its length. Torn material floated flaccid and unmoving in vacuum.

“Please,” Bates said softly. “Tell me that’s not what it looks like.”

Szpindel grinned. “Sporangium? Seed pod? Why not?”

Rorschach may have been reproducing but beyond a doubt it was growing, fed by a steady trickle of infalling debris from Ben’s accretion belt. We were close enough now to get a clear view of that procession: rocks and mountains and pebbles fell like sediment swirling around a drain. Particles that collided with the artefact simply stuck; Rorschach engulfed prey like some vast metastatic amoeba. The acquired mass was apparently processed internally and shunted to apical growth zones; judging by infinitesimal changes in the artefact’s allometry, it grew from the tips of its branches.

The procession never stopped. Rorschach was insatiable.

It was a strange attractor in the interstellar gulf; the paths along which the rocks fell was precisely and utterly chaotic. It was as though some Keplerian Black Belt had set up the whole system like an astronomical wind-up toy, kicked everything into motion, and let inertia do the rest.

“Didn’t think that was possible,” Bates said.

Szpindel shrugged. “Hey, chaotic trajectories are just as deterministic as any other kind.”

“That doesn’t mean you can even predict them, let along set them up like that.” Luminous intel reflected off the major’s bald head. “You’d have to know the starting conditions of a million different variables to ten decimal places. Literally.”

“Yup.”

“Vampires can’t even do that. Quanticle computers can’t do that.”

Szpindel shrugged like a marionette.

All the while the Gang had been slipping in and out of character, dancing with some unseen partner that — despite their best efforts — told us little beyond endless permutations of You really wouldn’t like it here. Any interrogative it answered with another — yet somehow it always left the sense of questions answered.

“Did you send the Fireflies?” Sascha asked.

“We send many things many places,” Rorschach replied. “What do their specs show?”

“We do not know their specifications. The Fireflies burned up over Earth.”

“Then shouldn’t you be looking there? When our kids fly, they’re on their own.”

Sascha muted the channel. “You know who we’re talking to? Jesus of fucking Nazareth, that’s who.”

Szpindel looked at Bates. Bates shrugged, palms up.

“You didn’t get it?” Sascha shook her head. “That last exchange was the informational equivalent of Should we render taxes unto Caesar. Beat for beat.”

“Thanks for casting us as the Pharisees,” Szpindel grumbled.

“Hey, if the Jew fits…”

Szpindel rolled his eyes.

That was when I first noticed it: a tiny imperfection on Sascha’s topology, a flyspeck of doubt marring one of her facets. “We’re not getting anywhere,” she said. “Let’s try a side door.” She winked out: Michelle reopened the outgoing line. “Theseus to Rorschach. Open to requests for information.”

“Cultural exchange,” Rorschach said. “That works for me.”

Bates’s brow furrowed. “Is that wise?”

“If it’s not inclined to give information, maybe it would rather get some. And we could learn a great deal from the kind of questions it asks.”

“But—”

“Tell us about home,” Rorschach said.

Sascha resurfaced just long enough to say “Relax, Major. Nobody said we had to give it the right answers.”

The stain on the Gang’s topology had flickered when Michelle took over, but it hadn’t disappeared. It grew slightly as Michelle described some hypothetical home town in careful terms that mentioned no object smaller than a meter across. (ConSensus confirmed my guess: the hypothetical limit of Firefly eyesight.) When Cruncher took a rare turn at the helm—

“We don’t all of us have parents or cousins. Some never did. Some come from vats.”

“I see. That’s sad. Vats sounds so dehumanising.”

—the stain darkened and spread across his surface like an oil slick.

“Takes too much on faith,” Susan said a few moments later.

By the time Sascha had cycled back into Michelle it was more than doubt, stronger than suspicion; it had become an insight, a dark little meme infecting each of that body’s minds in turn. The Gang was on the trail of something. They still weren’t sure what.

I was.

“Tell me more about your cousins,” Rorschach sent.

“Our cousins lie about the family tree,” Sascha replied, “with nieces and nephews and Neandertals. We do not like annoying cousins.”

“We’d like to know about this tree.”

Sascha muted the channel and gave us a look that said Could it be any more obvious? “It couldn’t have parsed that. There were three linguistic ambiguities in there. It just ignored them.”

“Well, it asked for clarification,” Bates pointed out.

“It asked a follow-up question. Different thing entirely.”

Bates was still out of the loop. Szpindel was starting to get it, though…

Subtle motion drew my eye. Sarasti was back, floating above the bright topography on the table. The light show squirmed across his visor as he moved his head. I could feel his eyes behind it.

And something else, behind him.

I couldn’t tell what it was. I could point to nothing but a vague sense of something out of place, somewhere in the background. Something over on the far side of the drum wasn’t quite right. No, that wasn’t it; something nearer, something amiss somewhere along the drum’s axis. But there was nothing there, nothing I could see — just the naked pipes and conduits of the spinal bundle, threading through empty space, and—

And suddenly, whatever had been wrong was right again. That was what finally locked my focus: the evaporation of some anomaly, a reversion to normalcy that caught my eye like a flicker of motion. I could see the exact spot along the bundle where the change had occured. There was nothing out of place there now — but there had been. It was in my head, barely subliminal, an itch so close to the surface that I knew I could bring it back if I just concentrated.

Sascha was talking to some alien artefact at the end of a laser beam. She was going on about familial relationships, both evolutionary and domestic: Neandertal and Cro Magnon and mother’s cousins twice removed. She’d been doing it for hours now and she had hours yet to go but right now her chatter was distracting me. I tried to block her out and concentrate on the half-perceived image teasing my memory. I’d seen something there, just a moment ago. One of the conduits had had — yes, too many joints on one of the pipes. Something that should have been straight and smooth but was somehow articulated instead. But not one of the pipes, I remembered: an extra pipe, an extra something anyway, something—

Boney.

That was crazy. There was nothing there. We were half a light year from home talking to unseen aliens about family reunions, and my eyes were playing tricks on me.

Have to talk to Szpindel about that, if it happened again.

A lull in the background chatter brought me back. Sascha had stopped talking. Darkened facets hung around her like a thundercloud. I pulled back the last thing she had sent: “We usually find our nephews with telescopes. They are hard as Hobblinites.”

More calculated ambiguity. And Hobblinites wasn’t even a word.

Imminent decisions reflected in her eyes. Sascha was poised at the edge of a precipice, gauging the depth of dark waters below.

“You haven’t mentioned your father at all,” Rorschach remarked.

“That’s true, Rorschach,” Sascha admitted softly, taking a breath—

And stepping forward.

“So why don’t you just suck my big fat hairy dick?”

The drum fell instantly silent. Bates and Szpindel stared, open-mouthed. Sascha killed the channel and turned to face us, grinning so widely I thought the top of her head would fall off.

“Sascha,” Bates breathed. “Are you crazy?”

“So what if I am? Doesn’t matter to that thing. It doesn’t have a clue what I’m saying.”

“What?”

“It doesn’t even have a clue what it’s saying back,” she added.

“Wait a minute. You said — Susan said they weren’t parrots. They knew the rules.”

And there Susan was, melting to the fore: “I did, and they do. But pattern-matching doesn’t equal comprehension.”

Bates shook her head. “You’re saying whatever we’re talking to — it’s not even intelligent?”

“Oh, it could be intelligent, certainly. But we’re not talking to it in any meaningful sense.”

“So what is it? Voicemail?”

“Actually,” Szpindel said slowly, “I think they call it a Chinese Room…”

About bloody time, I thought.

I knew all about Chinese Rooms. I was one. I didn’t even keep it a secret, I told anyone who was interested enough to ask.

In hindsight, sometimes that was a mistake.

“How can you possibly tell the rest of us what your bleeding edge is up to if you don’t understand it yourself?” Chelsea demanded back when things were good between us. Before she got to know me.

I shrugged. “It’s not my job to understand them. If I could, they wouldn’t be very bleeding-edge in the first place. I’m just a, you know, a conduit.”

“Yeah, but how can you translate something if you don’t understand it?”

A common cry, outside the field. People simply can’t accept that patterns carry their own intelligence, quite apart from the semantic content that clings to their surfaces; if you manipulate the topology correctly, that content just — comes along for the ride.

“You ever hear of the Chinese Room?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Only vaguely. Really old, right?”

“Hundred years at least. It’s a fallacy really, it’s an argument that supposedly puts the lie to Turing tests. You stick some guy in a closed room. Sheets with strange squiggles come in through a slot in the wall. He’s got access to this huge database of squiggles just like it, and a bunch of rules to tell him how to put those squiggles together.”

“Grammar,” Chelsea said. “Syntax.”

I nodded. “The point is, though, he doesn’t have any idea what the squiggles are, or what information they might contain. He only knows that when he encounters squiggle delta, say, he’s supposed to extract the fifth and sixth squiggles from file theta and put them together with another squiggle from gamma. So he builds this response string, puts it on the sheet, slides it back out the slot and takes a nap until the next iteration. Repeat until the remains of the horse are well and thoroughly beaten.”

“So he’s carrying on a conversation,” Chelsea said. “In Chinese, I assume, or they would have called it the Spanish Inquisition.”

“Exactly. Point being you can use basic pattern-matching algorithms to participate in a conversation without having any idea what you’re saying. Depending on how good your rules are, you can pass a Turing test. You can be a wit and raconteur in a language you don’t even speak.”

“That’s synthesis?”

“Only the part that involves downscaling semiotic protocols. And only in principle. And I’m actually getting my input in Cantonese and replying in German, because I’m more of a conduit than a conversant. But you get the idea.”

“How do you keep all the rules and protocols straight? There must be millions of them.”

“It’s like anything else. Once you learn the rules, you do it unconsciously. Like riding a bike, or pinging the noosphere. You don’t actively think about the protocols at all, you just — imagine how your targets behave.”

“Mmm.” A subtle half-smile played at the corner of her mouth. “But — the argument’s not really a fallacy then, is it? It’s spot-on: you really don’t understand Cantonese or German.”

“The system understands. The whole Room, with all its parts. The guy who does the scribbling is just one component. You wouldn’t expect a single neuron in your head to understand English, would you?”

“Sometimes one’s all I can spare.” Chelsea shook her head. She wasn’t going to let it go. I could see her sorting questions in order of priority; I could see them getting increasingly — personal…

“To get back to the matter at hand,” I said, preempting them all, “you were going to show me how to do that thing with the fingers…”

A wicked grin wiped the questions right off her face. “Oooh, that’s right…”

It’s risky, getting involved. Too many confounds. Every tool in the shed goes dull and rusty the moment you get entangled with the system you’re observing.

Still serviceable in a pinch, though.

“It hides now,” Sarasti said. “It’s vulnerable now.

“Now we go in.”

It wasn’t news so much as review: we’d been straight-lining towards Ben for days now. But perhaps the Chinese Room Hypothesis had strengthened his resolve. At any rate, with Rorschach in eclipse once more, we prepared to take intrusiveness to the next level.

Theseus was perpetually gravid; a generic probe incubated in her fabrication plant, its development arrested just short of birth in anticipation of unforeseen mission requirements. Sometime between briefings the Captain had brought it to parturition, customized for close contact and ground work. It burned down the well at high gee a good ten hours before Rorschach’s next scheduled appearance, inserted itself into the rock stream, and went to sleep. If our calculations were in order, it would not be smashed by some errant piece of debris before it woke up again. If all went well, an intelligence that had precisely orchestrated a cast of millions would not notice one extra dancer on the floor. If we were just plain lucky, the myriad high-divers that happened to be line-of-sight at the time were not programmed as tattletales.

Acceptable risks. If we hadn’t been up for them, we might as well have stayed home.

And so we waited: four optimized hybrids somewhere past the threshold of mere humanity, one extinct predator who’d opted to command us instead of eating us alive. We waited for Rorschach to come back around the bend. The probe fell smoothly around the well, an ambassador to the unwilling — or, if the Gang was right, maybe just a back-door artist set to B E an empty condo. Szpindel had named it Jack-in-the-box, after some antique child’s toy that didn’t even rate a listing in ConSensus; we fell in its wake, nearly ballistic now, momentum and inertia carefully precalculated to thread us through the chaotic minefield of Ben’s accretion belt.

Kepler couldn’t do it all, though; Theseus grumbled briefly now and then, the intermittent firing of her attitude jets rumbling softly up the spine as the Captain tweaked our descent into the Maelstrom.

No plan ever survives contact with the enemy I remembered, but I didn’t know from where.

“Got it,” Bates said. A speck appeared at Ben’s edge; the display zoomed instantly to closeup. “Proximity boot.”

Rorschach remained invisible to Theseus, close as we were, close as we were coming. But parallax stripped at least some of the scales from the probe’s eyes; it woke to spikes and spirals of smoky glass flickering in and out of view, Ben’s flat endless horizon semivisible through the intervening translucence. The view trembled; waveforms rippled across ConSensus.

“Quite the magnetic field,” Szpindel remarked.

“Braking,” Bates reported. Jack turned smoothly retrograde and fired its torch. On Tactical, delta-vee swung to red.

Sascha was driving the Gang’s body this shift. “Incoming signal,” she reported. “Same format.”

Sarasti clicked. “Pipe it.”

“Rorschach to Theseus. Hello again, Theseus.” The voice was female this time, and middle-aged.

Sascha grinned “See? She’s not offended at all. Big hairy dick notwithstanding.”

“Don’t answer,” Sarasti said.

“Burn complete,” Bates reported.

Coasting now, Jack — sneezed. Silver chaff shot into the void towards the target: millions of compass needles, brilliantly reflective, fast enough to make Theseus seem slow. They were gone in an instant. The probe watched them flee, swept laser eyes across every degree of arc, scanned its sky twice a second and took careful note of each and every reflective flash. Only at first did those needles shoot along anything approaching a straight line: then they swept abruptly into Lorentz spirals, twisted into sudden arcs and corkscrews, shot away along new and intricate trajectories bordering on the relativistic. The contours of Rorschach’s magnetic field resolved in ConSensus, at first glance like the nested layers of a glass onion.

“Sproinnnng,” Szpindel said.

At second glance the onion grew wormy. Invaginations appeared, long snaking tunnels of energy proliferating fractally at every scale.

“Rorschach to Theseus. Hello, Theseus. You there?”

A holographic inset beside the main display plotted the points of a triangle in flux: Theseus at the apex, Rorschach and Jack defining the narrow base.

“Rorschach to Theseus. I seeee you…”

“She’s got a more casual affect than he ever did.” Sascha glanced up at Sarasti, and did not add You sure about this? She was starting to wonder herself, though. Starting to dwell on the potential consequences of being wrong, now that we were committed. As far as sober second thought was concerned it was too little too late; but for Sascha, that was progress.

Besides, it had been Sarasti’s decision.

Great hoops were resolving in Rorschach’s magnetosphere. Invisible to human eyes, their outlines were vanishingly faint even on Tactical; the chaff had scattered so thinly across the sky that even the Captain was resorting to guesswork. The new macrostructures hovered in the magnetosphere like the nested gimbals of some great phantom gyroscope.

“I see you haven’t changed your vector,” Rorschach remarked. “We really wouldn’t advise continuing your approach. Seriously. For your own safety.”

Szpindel shook his head. “Hey, Mandy. Rorschach talking to Jack at all?”

“If it is, I’m not seeing it. No incident light, no directed EM of any kind.” She smiled grimly. “Seems to have snuck in under the radar. And don’t call me Mandy.”

Theseus groaned, twisting. I staggered in the low pseudograv, reached out to steady myself. “Course correction,” Bates reported. “Unplotted rock.”

“Rorschach to Theseus. Please respond. Your current heading is unacceptable, repeat, your current heading is unacceptable. Strongly advise you change course.”

By now the probe coasted just a few kilometers off Rorschach’s leading edge. That close it served up way more than magnetic fields: it presented Rorschach itself in bright, tactical color codes. Invisible curves and spikes iridesced in ConSensus across any number of on-demand pigment schemes: gravity, reflectivity, blackbody emissions. Massive electrical bolts erupting from the tips of thorns rendered in lemon pastels. User-friendly graphics had turned Rorschach into a cartoon.

“Rorschach to Theseus. Please respond.”

Theseus growled to stern, fishtailing. On tactical, another just-plotted piece of debris swept by a discreet six thousand meters to port.

“Rorschach to Theseus. If you are unable to respond, please — holy shit!”

The cartoon flickered and died.

I’d seen what had happened in that last instant, though: Jack passing near one of those great phantom hoops; a tongue of energy flicking out, quick as a frog’s; a dead feed.

“I see what you’re up to now, you cocksuckers. Do you think we’re fucking blind down here?”

Sascha clenched her teeth. “We—”

“No,” Sarasti said.

“But it fi—”

Sarasti hissed, from somewhere in the back of his throat. I had never heard a mammal make a noise quite like that before. Sascha fell immediately silent.

Bates negotiated with her controls. “I’ve still got — just a sec—”

“You pull that thing back right fucking now, you hear us? Right fucking now.”

“Got it.” Bates gritted as the feed came back up. “Just had to reacquire the laser.” The probe had been kicked wildly off-course — as if someone fording a river had been caught in sudden undertow and thrown over a waterfall — but it was still talking, and still mobile.

Barely. Bates struggled to stay the course. Jack staggered and wobbled uncontrollably though the tightly-wound folds of Rorschach’s magnetosphere. The artefact loomed huge in its eye. The feed strobed.

“Maintain approach,” Sarasti said calmly.

“Love to,” Bates gritted. “Trying.”

Theseus skidded again, corkscrewing. I could have sworn I heard the bearings in the drum grind for a moment. Another rock sailed past on Tactical.

“I thought you’d plotted those things,” Szpindel grumbled.

“You want to start a war, Theseus? Is that what you’re trying to do? You think you’re up for it?”

“It doesn’t attack,” Sarasti said.

“Maybe it does.” Bates kept her voice low; I could see the effort it took. “If Rorschach can control the trajectories of these—”

“Normal distribution. Insignificant corrections.” He must have meant statistically: the torque and grind of the ship’s hull felt pretty significant to the others.

“Oh, right,” Rorschach said suddenly. “We get it now. You don’t think there’s anyone here, do you? You’ve got some high-priced consultant telling you there’s nothing to worry about.”

Jack was deep in the forest. We’d lost most of the tactical overlays to reduced baud. In dim visible light Rorschach’s great ridged spines, each the size of a skyscraper, hashed a nightmare view on all sides. The feed stuttered as Bates struggled to keep the beam aligned. ConSensus painted walls and airspace with arcane telemetry. I had no idea what any of it meant.

“You think we’re nothing but a Chinese Room,” Rorschach sneered.

Jack stumbled towards collision, grasping for something to hang on to.

“Your mistake, Theseus.”

It hit something. It stuck.

And suddenly Rorschach snapped into view — no refractory composites, no profiles or simulations in false color. There it was at last, naked even to Human eyes.

Imagine a crown of thorns, twisted, dark and unreflective, grown too thickly tangled to ever rest on any human head. Put it in orbit around a failed star whose own reflected half-light does little more than throw its satellites into silhouette. Occasional bloody highlights glinted like dim embers from its twists and crannies; they only emphasized the darkness everywhere else.

Imagine an artefact that embodies the very notion of torture, something so wrenched and disfigured that even across uncounted lightyears and unimaginable differences in biology and outlook, you can’t help but feel that somehow, the structure itself is in pain.

Now make it the size of a city.

It flickered as we watched. Lightning arced from recurved spines a thousand meters long. ConSensus showed us a strobe-lit hellscape, huge and dark and twisted. The composites had lied. It was not the least bit beautiful.

“Now it’s too late,” something said from deep inside. “Now every last one of you is dead. And Susan? You there, Susan?

“We’re taking you first.”

They never sealed the hatch behind them. It was too easy to get lost up there in the dome, naked infinite space stretching a hundred eighty degrees on every axis. They needed all that emptiness but they needed an anchor in its midst: soft stray light from astern, a gentle draft from the drum, the sounds of people and machinery close by. They needed to have it both ways.

I lay in wait. Reading a dozen blatant cues in their behavior, I was already squirreled away in the forward airlock when they passed. I gave them a few minutes and crept forward to the darkened bridge.

“Of course they called her by name,” Szpindel was saying. “That was the only name they had. She told them, remember?”

“Yes.” Michelle didn’t seem reassured.

“Hey, it was you guys said we were talking to a Chinese Room. You saying you were wrong?”

“We — no. Of course not.”

“Then it wasn’t really threatening Suze at all, was it? It wasn’t threatening any of us. It had no idea what it was saying.”

“It’s rule-based, Isaac. It was following some kind of flowchart it drew up by observing Human languages in action. And somehow those rules told it to respond with threats of violence.”

“But if it doesn’t even know what it was saying—”

“It doesn’t. It can’t. We parsed the phrasing nineteen different ways, tried out conceptual units of every different length…” A long, deep breath. “But it attacked the probe, Isaac.”

“Jack just got too close to one of those electrode thingies is all. It just arced.”

“So you don’t think Rorschach is hostile?”

Long silence — long enough to make me wonder if I’d been detected.

“Hostile,” Szpindel said at last. “Friendly. We learned those words for life on Earth, eh? I don’t know if they even apply out here.” His lips smacked faintly. “But I think it might be something like hostile.”

Michelle sighed. “Isaac, there’s no reason for — I mean, it just doesn’t make sense that it would be. We can’t have anything it wants.”

“It says it wants to be left alone,” Szpindel said. “Even if it doesn’t mean it.”

They floated quietly for a while, up there past the bulkhead.

“At least the shielding held,” Szpindel said finally. “That’s something.” He wasn’t just talking about Jack; our own carapace was coated with the same stuff now. It had depleted our substrate stockpiles by two thirds, but no one wanted to rely on the ship’s usual magnetics in the face of anything that could play so easily with the electromagnetic spectrum.

“If they attack us, what do we do?” Michelle said.

“Learn what we can, while we can. Fight back. While we can.”

“If we can. Look out there, Isaac. I don’t care how embryonic that thing is. Tell me we’re not hopelessly outmatched.”

“Outmatched, for sure. Hopelessly, never.”

“That’s not what you said before.”

“Still. There’s always a way to win.”

“If I said that, you’d call it wishful thinking.”

“If you said that, it would be. But I’m saying it, so it’s game theory.”

“Game theory again. Jesus, Isaac.”

“No, listen. You’re thinking about the aliens like they were some kind of mammal. Something that cares, something that looks after its investments.”

“How do you know they aren’t?”

“Because you can’t protect your kids when they’re lightyears away. They’re on their own, and it’s a big cold dangerous universe so most of them aren’t going to make it, eh? The most you can do is crank out millions of kids, take cold comfort in knowing that a few always luck out through random chance. It’s not a mammal mind-set, Meesh. You want an earthbound simile, think of dandelion seeds. Or, or herring.”

A soft sigh. “So they’re interstellar herring. That hardly means they can’t crush us.”

“But they don’t know about us, not in advance. Dandelion seed doesn’t know what it’s up against before it sprouts. Maybe nothing. Maybe some spastic weed that goes over like straw in the wind. Or maybe something that kicks its ass halfway to the Magellanic Clouds. It doesn’t know, and there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all survival strategy. Something that aces against one player blows goats against a different one. So the best you can do is mix up your strategies based on the odds. It’s a weighted dice roll and it gives you the best mean payoff over the whole game, but you’re bound to crap out and choose the wrong strategy at least some of the time. Price of doing business. And that means — that means — that weak players not only can win against stronger ones, but they’re statistically bound to in some cases.”

Michelle snorted. “That’s your game theory? Rock Paper Scissors with statistics?”

Maybe Szpindel didn’t know the reference. He didn’t speak, long enough to call up a subtitle; then he brayed like a horse. “Rock Paper Scissors! Yes!”

Michelle digested that for a moment. “You’re sweet for trying, but that only works if the other side is just blindly playing the odds, and they don’t have to do that if they know who they’re going up against in advance. And my dear, they have so very much information about us…”

They’d threatened Susan. By name.

“They don’t know everything,” Szpindel insisted. “And the principle works for any scenario involving incomplete information, not just the ignorant extreme.”

“Not as well.”

“But some, and that gives us a chance. Doesn’t matter how good you are at poker when it comes to the deal, eh? Cards still deal out with the same odds.”

“So that’s what we’re playing. Poker.”

“Be thankful it’s not chess. We wouldn’t have a hope in hell.”

“Hey. I’m supposed to be the optimist in this relationship.”

“You are. I’m just fatalistically cheerful. We all come into the story halfway through, we all catch up as best we can, and we’re all gonna die before it ends.”

“That’s my Isaac. Master of the no-win scenario.”

“You can win. Winner’s the guy who makes the best guess on how it all comes out.”

“So you are just guessing.”

“Yup. And you can’t make an informed guess without data, eh? And we could be the very first to find out what’s gonna happen to the whole Human race. I’d say that puts us into the semifinals, easy.”

Michelle didn’t answer for a very long time. When she did, I couldn’t hear her words.

Neither could Szpindel: “Sorry?”

“Covert to invulnerable, you said. Remember?”

“Uh huh. Rorschach’s Graduation Day. ”

“How soon, do you think?”

“No idea. But I don’t think it’s the kind of thing that’s gonna slip by unnoticed. And that’s why I don’t think it attacked us.”

She must have looked a question.

“Because when it does, it won’t be some debatable candy-ass bitch slap,” he told her. “When that fucker rises up, we’re gonna know.”

A sudden flicker from behind. I spun in the cramped passageway and bit down on a cry: something squirmed out of sight around the corner, something with arms, barely glimpsed, gone in an instant.

Never there. Couldn’t be there. Impossible.

“Did you hear that?” Szpindel asked, but I’d fled to stern before Michelle could answer him.

We’d fallen so far that the naked eye didn’t see a disk, barely even saw curvature any more. We were falling towards a wall, a vast roiling expanse of dark thunderclouds that extended in all directions to some new, infinitely-distant horizon. Ben filled half the universe.

And still we fell.

Far below, Jack clung to Rorschach’s ridged surface with bristly gecko-feet fenders and set up camp. It sent x-rays and ultrasound into the ground, tapped enquiring fingers and listened to the echos, planted tiny explosive charges and measured the resonance of their detonations. It shed seeds like pollen: tiny probes and sensors by the thousands, self-powered, near-sighted, stupid and expendable. The vast majority were sacrificial offerings to random chance; only one in a hundred lasted long enough to return usable telemetry.

While our advance scout took measure of its local neighborhood, Theseus drew larger-scale birdseye maps from the closing sky. It spat out thousands of its own disposable probes, spread them across the heavens and collected stereoscopic data from a thousand simultaneous perspectives.

Patchwork insights assembled in the drum. Rorschach’s skin was sixty percent superconducting carbon nanotube. Rorschach’s guts were largely hollow; at least some of those hollows appeared to contain an atmosphere. No earthly form of life would have lasted a second in there, though; intricate topographies of radiation and electromagnetic force seethed around the structure, seethed within it. In some places the radiation was intense enough to turn unshielded flesh to ash in an instant; calmer backwaters would merely kill in the same span of time. Charged particles raced around invisible racetracks at relativistic speeds, erupting from jagged openings, hugging curves of magnetic force strong enough for neutron stars, arcing through open space and plunging back into black mass. Occasional protuberances swelled and burst and released clouds of microparticulates, seeding the radiation belts like spores. Rorschach resembled nothing so much as a nest of half-naked cyclotrons, tangled one with another.

Neither Jack below nor Theseus above could find any points of entry, beyond those impassable gaps that spat out streams of charged particles or swallowed them back down. No airlocks or hatches or viewports resolved with increasing proximity. The fact that we’d been threatened via laser beam implied some kind of optical antennae or tightcast array; we weren’t even able to find that much.

A central hallmark of von Neumann machines was self-replication. Whether Rorschach would meet that criterion — whether it would germinate, or divide, or give birth when it passed some critical threshold — whether it had done so already — remained an open question.

One of a thousand. At the end of it all — after all the measurements, the theorizing and deduction and outright guesswork — we settled into orbit with a million trivial details and no answers. In terms of the big questions, there was only one thing we knew for sure.

So far, Rorschach was holding its fire.

“It sounded to me like it knew what it was saying,” I remarked.

“I guess that’s the whole point,” Bates said. She had no one to confide in, partook of no intimate dialogs that could be overheard. With her, I used the direct approach.

Theseus was birthing a litter, two by two. They were nasty-looking things, armored, squashed egg-shapes, twice the size of a human torso and studded with gardening implements: antennae, optical ports, retractable threadsaws. Weapons muzzles.

Bates was summoning her troops. We floated before the primary fab port at the base of Theseus’ spine. The plant could just as easily have disgorged the grunts directly into the hold beneath the carapace — that was where they’d be stored anyway, until called upon — but Bates was giving each a visual inspection before sending it through one of the airlocks a few meters up the passageway. Ritual, perhaps. Military tradition. Certainly there was nothing she could see with her eyes that wouldn’t be glaringly obvious to the most basic diagnostic.

“Would it be a problem?” I asked. “Running them without your interface?”

“Run themselves just fine. Response time actually improves without spam in the network. I’m more of a safety precaution.”

Theseus growled, giving us more attitude. The plating trembled to stern; another piece of local debris, no longer in our path. We were angling towards an equatorial orbit just a few miniscule kilometers above the artefact; insanely, the approach curved right through the accretion belt.

It didn’t bother the others. “Like surviving traffic in a high speed lane,” Sascha had said, disdainful of my misgivings. “Try creeping across and you’re road kill. Gotta speed up, go with the flow.” But the flow was turbulent; we hadn’t gone five minutes without a course correction since Rorschach had stopped talking to us.

“So, do you buy it?” I asked. “Pattern-matching, empty threats? Nothing to worry about?”

“Nobody’s fired on us yet,” she said. Meaning: Not for a second.

“What’s your take on Susan’s argument? Different niches, no reason for conflict?”

“Makes sense, I guess.” Utter bullshit.

“Can you think of any reason why something with such different needs would attack us?”

“That depends,” she said, “on whether the fact that we are different is reason enough.”

I saw playground battlefields reflected in her topology. I remembered my own, and wondered if there were any other kind.

Then again, that only proved the point. Humans didn’t really fight over skin tone or ideology; those were just handy cues for kin-selection purposes. Ultimately it always came down to bloodlines and limited resources.

“I think Isaac would say this is different,” I said.

“I guess.” Bates sent one grunt humming off to the hold; two more emerged in formation, spinelight glinting off their armor.

“How many of these are you making, anyway?”

“We’re breaking and entering, Siri. Not wise to leave our own house unguarded.”

I inspected her surfaces as she inspected theirs. Doubt and resentment simmered just beneath.

“You’re in a tough spot,” I remarked.

“We all are.”

“But you’re responsible for defending us, against something we don’t know anything about. We’re only guessing that—”

“Sarasti doesn’t guess,” Bates said. “The man’s in charge for a reason. Doesn’t make much sense to question his orders, given we’re all about a hundred IQ points short of understanding the answer anyway.”

“And yet he’s also got that whole predatory side nobody talks about,” I remarked. “It must be difficult for him, all that intellect coexisting with so much instinctive aggression. Making sure the right part wins.”

She wondered in that instant whether Sarasti might be listening in. She decided in the next that it didn’t matter: why should he care what the cattle thought, as long as they did what they were told?

All she said was, “I thought you jargonauts weren’t supposed to have opinions.”

“That wasn’t mine.”

Bates paused. Returned to her inspection.

“You do know what I do,” I said.

“Uh huh.” The first of the current pair passed muster and hummed off up the spine. She turned to the second. “You simplify things. So the folks back home can understand what the specialists are up to.”

“That’s part of it.”

“I don’t need a translator, Siri. I’m just a consultant, assuming things go well. A bodyguard if they don’t.”

“You’re an officer and a military expert. I’d say that makes you more than qualified when it comes to assessing Rorschach’s threat potential.”

“I’m muscle. Shouldn’t you be simplifying Jukka or Isaac?”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

She looked at me.

“You interact,” I said. “Every component of the system affects every other. Processing Sarasti without factoring you in would be like trying to calculate acceleration while ignoring mass.”

She turned back to her brood. Another robot passed muster.

She didn’t hate me. What she hated was what my presence implied.

They don’t trust us to speak for ourselves, she wouldn’t say. No matter how qualified we are, no matter how far ahead of the pack. Maybe even because of that. We’re contaminated. We’re subjective. So they send Siri Keeton to tell them what we really mean.

“I get it,” I said after a moment.

“Do you.”

“It’s not about trust, Major. It’s about location. Nobody gets a good view of a system from the inside, no matter who they are. The view’s distorted.”

“And yours isn’t.”

“I’m outside the system.”

“You’re interacting with me now.”

“As an observer only. Perfection’s unattainable but it isn’t unapproachable, you know? I don’t play a role in decision-making or research, I don’t interfere in any aspect of the mission that I’m assigned to study. But of course I ask questions. The more information I have, the better my analysis.”

“I thought you didn’t have to ask. I thought you guys could just, read the signs or something.”

“Every bit helps. It all goes into the mix.”

“You doing it now? Synthesizing?”

I nodded.

“And you do this without any specialized knowledge at all.”

“I’m as much of a specialist as you. I specialize in processing informational topologies.”

“Without understanding their content.”

“Understanding the shapes is enough.”

Bates seemed to find some small imperfection in the battlebot under scrutiny, scratched at its shell with a fingernail. “Software couldn’t do that without your help?”

“Software can do a lot of things. We’ve chosen to do some for ourselves.” I nodded at the grunt. “Your visual inspections, for example.”

She smiled faintly, conceding the point.

“So I’d encourage you to speak freely. You know I’m sworn to confidentiality.”

“Thanks,” she said, meaning On this ship, there’s no such thing.

Theseus chimed. Sarasti spoke in its wake: “Orbital insertion in fifteen minutes. Everyone to the drum in five.”

“Well,” Bates said, sending one last grunt on its way. “Here we go.” She pushed off and sailed up the spine.

The newborn killing machines clicked at me. They smelled like new cars.

“By the way,” Bates called over her shoulder, “you missed the obvious one.”

“Sorry?”

She spun a hundred-eighty degrees at the end of the passageway, landed like an acrobat beside the drum hatch. “The reason. Why something would attack us even if we didn’t have anything it wanted.”

I read it off her: “If it wasn’t attacking at all. If it was defending itself.”

“You asked about Sarasti. Smart man. Strong Leader. Maybe could spend a little more time with the troops.”

Vampire doesn’t respect his command. Doesn’t listen to advice. Hides away half the time.

I remembered transient killer whales. “Maybe he’s being considerate.” He knows he makes us nervous.

“I’m sure that’s it,” Bates said.

Vampire doesn’t trust himself.

It wasn’t just Sarasti. They all hid from us, even when they had the upper hand. They always stayed just the other side of myth.

It started pretty much the same way it did for anything else; vampires were far from the first to learn the virtues of energy conservation. Shrews and hummingbirds, saddled with tiny bodies and overclocked metabolic engines, would have starved to death overnight if not for the torpor that overtook them at sundown. Comatose elephant seals lurked breathless at the bottom of the sea, rousing only for passing prey or redline lactate levels. Bears and chipmunks cut costs by sleeping away the impoverished winter months, and lungfish — Devonian black belts in the art of estivation — could curl up and die for years, waiting for the rains.

With vampires it was a little different. It wasn’t shortness of breath, or metabolic overdrive, or some blanket of snow that locked the pantry every winter. The problem wasn’t so much a lack of prey as a lack of difference from it; vampires were such a recent split from the ancestral baseline that the reproductive rates hadn’t diverged. This was no woodland-variety lynx-hare dynamic, where prey outnumbered predators a hundred to one. Vampires fed on things that bred barely faster than they did. They would have wiped out their own food supply in no time if they hadn’t learned how to ease off on the throttle.

By the time they went extinct they’d learned to shut down for decades.

It made two kinds of sense. It not only slashed their metabolic needs while prey bred itself back to harvestable levels, it gave us time to forget that we were prey. We were so smart by the Pleistocene, smart enough for easy skepticism; if you haven’t seen any night-stalking demons in all your years on the savannah, why should you believe some senile campfire ramblings passed down by your mother’s mother?

It was murder on our ancestors, even if those same enemy genes — co-opted now — served us so well when we left the sun a half-million years later. But it was almost — heartening, I guess — to think that maybe Sarasti felt the tug of other genes, some aversion to prolonged visibility shaped by generations of natural selection. Maybe he spent every moment in our company fighting voices that urged him to hide, hide, let them forget. Maybe he retreated when they got too loud, maybe we made him as uneasy as he made us.

We could always hope.

Our final orbit combined discretion and valor in equal measure.

Rorschach described a perfect equatorial circle 87,900 km from Big Ben’s center of gravity. Sarasti was unwilling to let it out of sight, and you didn’t have to be a vampire to mistrust relay sats when swinging through a radiation-soaked blizzard of rock and machinery. The obvious alternative was to match orbits.

At the same time, all the debate over whether or not Rorschach had meant — or even understood — the threats it had made was a bit beside the point. Counterintrusion measures were a distinct possibility either way, and ongoing proximity only increased the risk. So Sarasti had derived some optimum compromise, a mildly eccentric orbit that nearly brushed the artefact at perigee but kept a discreet distance the rest of the time. It was a longer trajectory than Rorschach’s, and higher — we had to burn on the descending arc to keep in synch — but the end result was continuously line-of-sight, and only brought us within striking distance for three hours either side of bottoming out.

Our striking distance, that is. For all we knew Rorschach could have reached out and swatted us from the sky before we’d even left the solar system.

Sarasti gave the command from his tent. ConSensus carried his voice into the drum as Theseus coasted to apogee: “Now.”

Jack had erected a tent about itself, a blister glued to Rorschach’s hull and blown semi-taut against vacuum with the merest whiff of nitrogen. Now it brought lasers to bear and started digging; if we’d read the vibrations right, the ground should be only thirty-four centimeters deep beneath its feet. The beams stuttered as they cut, despite six millimeters of doped shielding.

“Son of a bitch,” Szpindel murmured. “It’s working.”

We burned through tough fibrous epidermis. We burned through veins of insulation that might have been some sort of programmable asbestos. We burned through alternating layers of superconducting mesh, and the strata of flaking carbon separating them.

We burned through.

The lasers shut down instantly. Within seconds Rorschach’s intestinal gases had blown taut the skin of the tent. Black carbon smoke swirled and danced in sudden thick atmosphere.

Nothing shot back at us. Nothing reacted. Partial pressures piled up on ConSensus: methane, ammonia, hydrogen. Lots of water vapor, freezing as fast as it registered.

Szpindel grunted. “Reducing atmosphere. Pre-Snowball.” He sounded disappointed.

“Maybe it’s a work in progress,” James suggested. “Like the structure itself.”

“Maybe.”

Jack stuck out its tongue, a giant mechanical sperm with a myo-optical tail. Its head was a thick-skinned lozenge, at least half ceramic shielding by cross-section; the tiny payload of sensors at its core was rudimentary, but small enough for the whole assembly to thread through the pencil-thin hole the laser had cut. It unspooled down the hole, rimming Rorschach’s newly-torn orifice.

“Dark down there,” James observed.

Bates: “But warm.” 281°K. Above freezing.

The endoscope emerged into darkness. Infrared served up a grainy grayscale of a — a tunnel, it looked like, replete with mist and exotic rock formations. The walls curved like honeycomb, like the insides of fossilized intestine. Cul-de-sacs and branches proliferated down the passage. The basic substrate appeared to be a dense pastry of carbon-fiber leaves. Some of the gaps between those layers were barely thick as fingernails; others looked wide enough to stack bodies.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Szpindel said softly, “The Devil’s Baklava.”

I could have sworn I saw something move. I could have sworn it looked familiar.

The camera died.