Echopraxia

A SUN GROWN huge. A shadow on its face. A fleck, then a freckle: a dot, a disk, a hole. Smaller than a sunspot—darker, more symmetrical—and then larger. It grew like a perfect tumor, a black planetary disk where no planet could be, swelling across the photosphere like a ravenous singularity. A sun that covered half the void: a void that covered half the sun. Some critical, razor-thin instant passed and foreground and background had switched places, the sun no longer a disk but a brilliant golden iris receding around a great dilating pupil. Now it was less than that, a fiery hoop around a perfect starless hole; now a circular thread, writhing, incandescent, impossibly fine.

Gone.

A million stars winked back into the firmament, cold dimensionless pinpricks strewn in bands and random handfuls across half the sky. But the other half remained without form and void—and now the tumor that had swallowed the sun was gnawing outward at the stars as well. Brüks looked away from that great maw and saw a black finger lancing through the starfield directly to port: a dark spire, five hundred kilometers long, buried deep in the shade. Brüks downshifted his personal spectrum a few angstroms and it glowed red as an ember, an infrared blackbody rising from the exact center of the disk ahead. Heat radiator. A hairbreadth from the center of the solar system, it never saw the sun.

He tugged nervously at the webbing holding him to the mirrorball. Sengupta was strapped into her usual couch on his left, Lianna to his right, Moore to hers. The old warrior had barely said a word to him since Brüks had broached the subject of his son. Some lines were invisible until crossed, apparently.

Or maybe they were perfectly visible, to anyone who wasn’t an insensitive dolt. Empiricists always kept their minds open to alternative hypotheses.

He sought refuge in the view outside, dark to naked eyes but alive on tactical. Icons, momentum vectors, trajectories. A thin hoop of pale emerald shrank across the forward view, drawing tight around the Crown’s nose: the rim of her reflective parasol—erased from ConSensus in deference to an uninterrupted view—redundant now, spooling tight into stowage. The habs had already been folded back and tied down for docking. Beyond the overlays the Crown fell silently past massive structures visible only in their absence: shadows against the sky, the starless silhouettes of gantries and droplet-conveyors, endless invisible antennae belied by the intermittent winking of pilot lights strung along their lengths.

The Crown bucked. Thrusters flared like the sparks of arc welders in the darkness ahead. Down returned, dead forward. Brüks fell gently from the couch into the elastic embrace of his harness, hung there while the Crown’s incandescent brakes gave dim form to the face of a distant cliff: girders, the cold dead cones of dormant thrusters, great stratified slabs of polytungsten. Then the sparks died, and down with them. All that distant topography vanished again. The Crown of Thorns continued to fall, gently as thistledown.

“Looks normal so far,” Moore remarked to no one in particular.

“Wasn’t there supposed to be some kind of standing guard?” Brüks wondered. There’d been an announcement, anyway, in the weeks after Firefall. While we have seen no evidence of ill will on the part of blah blah blah prudent to be cautious yammer yammer cannot afford to leave such a vital source of energy undefended in the current climate of uncertainty yammer blah.

Moore said nothing. After a moment Lianna took up the slack: “The place is almost impossible to see in the glare unless you know where to look. And there’s nothing like a bunch of big obvious heatprints going back and forth for telling the other guys where to look.”

It was as much as she’d said—to Brüks, at least—since Valerie had flexed her claws in the Hub. He took it as a good sign.

More sparks, tweaking the night in split-second bursts. Wireframes crawled all over tactical now, highlighting structures the naked eye could barely discern even as shadows. Constellations ignited on the cliff ahead, lights triggered by the presence of approaching mass, dim and elegant as the photophores of deep-sea fish. Candles in the window to guide travelers home. They rippled and flowed and converged on a monstrous gray lamprey uncoiling from the landscape beneath. Its great round mouth pulsed and puckered and closed off the port bow.

One final burst of counterthrust. The lamprey flinched, recoiled a meter or two, resumed its approach. The Crown was barely moving now. The lamprey closed on the port flank and attached itself to the docking hatch.

“We are down to fumes felching Bicams better know what they’re doing because even our chemical just ran dry,” Sengupta reported. “You want this ship to go anywhere now you gotta get out and push.”

“Not a problem,” Moore said. “We’re sitting on the biggest charger in the solar system.”

Lianna looked at Brüks and tried to smile.

“Welcome to Icarus.”

Of course, no one was going to fuck on a first date.

The sky in the Hub began to fill with handshakes and head shots: Icarus and the Crown introducing each other, coming to terms, agreeing that this little rendezvous was an intimate affair that really didn’t warrant the involvement of Earthbound engineers. Sengupta whispered sweet nothings to the station’s onboard, coaxed it into turning on the lights, booting up life-support, maybe sharing a few pages from its diary.

Naked bodies floated up from the lower hemisphere. Eulali and one of the other Bicamerals (Haina, Brüks thought), purged of hostile microbes and decompressed at last, slumming it with the baselines. Nobody seemed to think it worthy of comment.

“No one since the last on-site op check.” Sengupta jabbed one finger at a window full of alphanumeric gibberish. “Nobody came or went any time in the last eighteen months. Boosters fired a hundred ninety-two days ago to stabilize the orbit but nothing else.”

Sudden swift movement from the corners of both eyes: the undead in formation, shooting single-file through the hatch like raptors diving for a kill. They bounced off the sky, swung around the forward ladder, disappeared through the ceiling fast and fluid as barracuda.

So much for the pack, Brüks thought nervously. What about the Alph—and didn’t finish the question, because the flesh crawling up his backbone had just given him the answer.

She was right behind him. For all he knew, she always had been.

The Bicamerals didn’t seem to notice. They hadn’t taken their eyes off tactical since they’d arrived. Brüks swallowed and forced his gaze left. He forced himself to turn. He resisted the urge to lower his gaze as Valerie came into view, forced himself to look her right in the eyes. They shone back at him. He gritted his teeth and thought very hard about leucophores and thin-film optics and finally realized: She’s not even looking at me.

She wasn’t. Those bright monster eyes burned a path right past him to the dome behind, shifted and jiggled in microscopic increments to this datum or that image, jittered fast as the eyes of zombies and with twice the intensity. Brüks could almost see the brain sparking behind those lenses, the sheets of electricity soaking up information faster than fiber. It had all of them now, monks and monsters and minions alike, all of them finally brought together under a tiny metal sky crowded with the machinery of thought: boot sequences, diagnostics, the sprawling multidimensional vistas of a thousand mechanical senses. It threatened to overflow the hemisphere entirely, a ceaseless flickering infostorm that breached the equator and started spilling aft as Brüks watched.

Crude as papyrus, he realized. All these dimensions, squashed flat and pasted across physical space: it was a medium for cavemen and cockroaches, not these cognitive giants looming on all sides. Why were they even here? Why come together in the land of the blind when ConSensus went on forever, arrayed endless intelligence throughout the infinite space within their own heads? Why settle for eyes of jelly when invisible signals could reach through bone and brain and doodle on the very synapses themsel—

Shit, he thought.

All that smart paint, so ubiquitous throughout the ship. He’d just assumed it was for ambient lighting, and a backup for backups should the implants fail in one of these overclocked brains. But now it seemed to be their preferred interface: crude, pointillist, extrinsic. Not completely unhackable, perhaps—but at least any intrusions would take place outside the head, would compromise the mech and not the meat. At least no alien, imagined or otherwise, would be rewriting the thoughts in the heads of the hive.

A few years to settle in, Moore had said. A few years for parties unknown to study new and unfamiliar technology, to infer the nature of the softer things behind it. Years to build whatever gears and interfaces an unlimited energy source could provide, and sit back, and wait for the owners to arrive. All that time for anything in there to figure out how to get in here.

They’re afraid, Brüks realized, and then:

Shit, they’re afraid?

Sengupta threw a row of camera feeds across the dome. Holds and service crawlways, mainly: tanks for the storage of programmable matter, warrens of tunnels where robots on rails slid along on endless missions of repair and resupply. Habs embedded here and there like lymph nodes, vacuoles to be grudgingly pumped full of warmth and atmosphere on those rare occasions when visitors came calling—but barren, uninviting, barely big enough to stand erect even if gravity had been an option. Icarus was an ungracious host, resentful of any parasites that sought to take up residence in her gut.

Something had done that anyway.

Sengupta grabbed that window and stretched it across a fifth of the dome: AUX/RECOMP according to the feed, a cylindrical compartment with another cylinder—segmented, ribbed, studded with conduits and access panels and eruptions of high-voltage cabling—running through its center like a metal trachea. The view brightened as they watched. Fitful sparks ignited along the walls, caught steady, dimmed to a soft lemon glow that spread across painted strips of bulkhead. Wisps of frozen vapor swirled in weightless arabesques before some reawakened ventilator sucked them away.

Brüks had educated himself on the way down. He knew what he’d find if he were to cut that massive windpipe down the middle. At one end a great black compound eye, a honeycomb cluster of gamma-ray lasers aimed along the lumen of the tube. Pumps and field coils encircled that space at regular intervals: superconductors, ultrarefrigeration pipes to bring some hypothetical vacuum down to a hairbreadth of absolute zero. Matter took on strange forms inside that chamber. Atoms would lie down, forget about Brown and entropy, take a message from the second law of thermodynamics and promise to get back to it later. They would line up head to toe and lock into place as a single uniform substrate. A trillion atoms would condense into one vast entity: a blank slate, waiting for energy and information to turn it into something new.

Theseus had fed from something a lot like this, part of the same circuit in fact. Maybe it was feeding still. And down at the far end of AUX/RECOMP, past the lasers and the magnets and the microchannel plate traps, Brüks could see something else, something—

Wrong.

That was all he could tell, at first: something just a little bit off about the far end of the compiler. It took a few moments to notice the service port just slightly ajar, the stain leaking from its edges. His brain shuffled through a thousand cue cards and tried spilled paint on for size, but that didn’t really fit. It looked too thick, too blobby for the smart stuff; and he’d seen no other surface painted that oily shade of gray on any of the other feeds.

Then someone zoomed the view and a whole new set of cues clicked into place.

Those branching, filigreed edges: like rootlets, like dendrites growing along the machinery.

“Is it still coming through?” Lianna’s voice, a little dazed.

“Don’t be stupid you don’t think I’d mention it if it was? Wouldn’t work anyway some idiot left the port open.”

But life support had been shut down until the Crown had docked, Brüks remembered. Vacuum throughout. “Maybe it was running until you pressurized the habs. Maybe we—interrupted it.”

Those little pimply lumps, like—like some kind of early-stage fruiting bodies…

“I told you I’d mention it Jesus the logs say no juice for weeks.”

“Assuming we can trust the logs,” Moore said softly.

“It looks almost like dumb paint of some kind,” Lianna remarked.

Brüks shook his head. “Looks like a slime mold.”

“Whatever it is,” Moore said, “it’s not something any of our people would have sent down. Which raises an obvious question.”

It did. But nobody asked it.

Of course, no slime mold could survive in hard vacuum at absolute zero.

“Name one thing that can,” Moore said.

“Deinococcus comes close. Some of the synthetics come closer.”

“But active?”

“No,” Brüks admitted. “They pretty much shut down until conditions improve.”

“So whatever that is”—Moore gestured at the image—“you’re saying it’s dormant.”

Stranger even than the thing in the window: the experience of being asked for an opinion by anyone on the Crown of Thorns. The mystery lasted long enough for Brüks to glance sideways and see monks and vampire clustered in a multimodal dialogue of clicks and phonemes and dancing fingers. The Bicamerals faced away from each other; they hovered in an impromptu knot, each set of eyes aimed out along a different bearing.

Jim may be Colonel Supersoldier to me, Brüks realized, but we’re all just capuchins next to those things…

“I said—”

“Sorry.” Brüks shook his head. “No, I’m not saying that. I mean, look at it: it’s outside the chamber, part of it anyway. You tell me if there’s some way for that machine to assemble matter off the condenser plate.”

“So it must have—grown.”

“That’s the logical conclusion.”

“In hard vacuum, near absolute zero.”

“Maybe not so logical. I don’t have another answer.” Brüks jerked his chin toward the giants. “Maybe they do.”

“It escaped.”

“If that’s what you want to call it. Not that it got very far.” The stain—or slime mold, or whatever it was—spread less than two meters from the open port before petering out in a bifurcation of rootlets. Of course, it shouldn’t have even been able to do that much.

The damn thing looked alive. As much as Brüks kept telling himself not to jump to conclusions, not to judge alien apparitions by earthly appearance, the biologist was too deeply rooted in him. He looked at that grainy overblown image and he didn’t see any random collection of molecules, didn’t even see an exotic crystal growing along some predestined lattice of alignment. He saw something organic—something that couldn’t have just coalesced from a diffuse cloud of atoms.

He turned to Moore. “You’re sure Icarus’s telematter technology isn’t just a wee bit more advanced than you let on? Maybe closer to actual fabbing? Because that looks a lot like complex macrostructure to me.”

Moore turned away and fixed Sengupta with a stare: “Did it—break out? Force open the port?”

She shook her head and kept her eyes on the ceiling. “No signs of stress or metal fatigue nothing popped nothing broken no bits floating around. Just looks like someone ran a standard diagnostic took out the sample forgot to close the door.”

“Pretty dumb mistake,” Brüks remarked.

“Cockroaches make dumb mistakes all the time.”

And one of the biggest, Brüks did not say, was building you lot.

“’Course there’s only so much you can see with a camera you gotta go in there and check to be sure.”

Up on the sky, the slime mold beckoned with a million filigreed fingers.

“So that’s the next step, right?” Brüks guessed. “We board?”

A grunted staccato from Eulali, with fingertip accompaniment. From any other primate it might have sounded like a laugh. The node spared him a look and returned her attention to the dome.

It wasn’t English. Brüks supposed it wasn’t even language, not the way he’d define it at least. But somehow he knew exactly what Eulali had meant.

You first.

Two hours later four of the Bicamerals and a couple of Valerie’s zombies were on the hull crawling forward along the Crown’s spine with a retinue of maintenance spiders, hauling torches and lasers and wrenches behind them. Two hours to start making half a ship whole again.

Three days to screw up the courage to go anywhere else.

Oh, they laid the groundwork. Sengupta did cam-by-cams of the whole frozen array, hijacked a couple of maintenance bots and sent them through every accessible corner and cranny. Brüks couldn’t make out any angels on the feeds. No asteroids either, for that matter. He was starting to wonder if that code-name hadn’t been a red herring—a phrase set loose across the ether so pursuers wouldn’t think twice when the Crown relit her engines halfway through the innersys and accelerated away to some farther destination.

Squinting as hard as she could, all Sengupta could see was a small dark suspicion that disappeared when you laid an error bar across it: “Station allometry’s off by a few millimeters but it’d be weirder if you didn’t get shrinkage and expansion with all the heat flux.” The hive huddled together and passed occasional instructions through Lianna: Bring the condenser up to twenty atmospheres. Freeze the chamber. Heat the chamber. Turn out the lights. Turn them on again. Vent the condenser back to vacuum. Here, fab this SEM and bot it over.

The elephant in the room refused to rise to any flavor of bait. After three days, Brüks was itching for action.

“They want you to stay here,” Lianna said apologetically. “For your own safety.”

They floated in the attic, the Crown’s viscera hissing and gurgling about them as a procession of Bicamerals climbed into spacesuits at the main airlock. A globe of water, held together by surface tension, wobbled in midair just off the beaten path. The soft light spilling from the lamprey’s mouth washed everything in robin’s egg.

“Now they’re interested in my safety.”

She sighed. “We’ve been over this, Dan.”

Valerie emerged from the Hub and bared her teeth as she sailed past. Her fingers trailed along a bundle of coolant pipes, lightly tapping an arrhythmic tattoo. Brüks glanced at Lianna; Lianna glanced away. Up the attic, Ofoegbu plunged his hands into the water; pulled them out; rubbed them together before donning his gauntlets.

“You’re going, though,” Brüks observed. To work side by side with the creature who had nearly killed her without so much as a glance in her direction. He’d edged around the subject in casual conversation, what little of that there’d been lately. She hadn’t seemed to want to talk about it.

“It’s my job,” she said now. “But you know, we’re even keeping Jim pretty much in the background.”

That surprised him. “Really?”

“We might bring him over once we’re a little more sure of our footing—he was ground control for the Theseus mission, after all—but even then he’ll mostly be remoting in from the Crown. The Bicams don’t want to expose anyone to unnecessary risk. Besides—” She shrugged. “What would you do over there anyway?”

Brüks shrugged. “Watch. Explore.” Farther up the hall, the blob shuddered afresh as the node called Jaingchu washed away her sins. Why do all the bodies do that, he wondered, if there’s only one mind behind them all?

“You’ll get better real-time intel back here.”

“I guess.” He shook his head. “You’re right, of course. They’re right. I’m just—going a bit stir-crazy in here.”

“I’d have thought you’d want less excitement in your life. The way things have been going lately, boredom’s something we should be aspiring to.” She managed a smile, laid a hand on his arm. “You’ll be good as there. Looking right over my shoulder.”

Sengupta grunted from her couch as he drifted back into the Hub. “So they won’t let you out to play.”

“They will not,” he admitted, and settled in beside her.

“Better view from here.” One foot tapped absently against the deck. “Wouldn’t wanna be over there anyway, not with that lot can’t even talk to them they got shitty manners in case you hadn’t noticed. Wouldn’t go over there if you paid me.”

“Thanks,” Brüks said.

“For what?”

For trying. For the comforting scritch between the ears.

Sengupta waved her hand as if spreading a deck of cards: a row of camera windows bloomed left to right across the dome. Gloved hands, visors, the backs of helmets; tactical overlays describing insides and outsides in luminous time-series.

The lamprey opened its mouth. The Bicameral entourage swam innocently down its throat.

Brüks pulled on his hood and booted up the motion sensors.

He wasn’t entirely useless. They set him to work reseeding the astroturf panels; scraping away the dead brittle stuff that had been sacrificed to cold and vacuum on the way down; spraying fresh nutrigel into the bulkhead planters; spraying, in turn, a mist of microscopic seeds into the gel. The treated surfaces began to green up within the hour, but rather than watch the grass grow he looked on from a distance while Bicams and zombies swarmed across Icarus like army ants, carving great cookie-cutter chunks of polytungsten from its flanks and hauling them back to that jagged gaping stump where the Crown had been torn in two. Eventually they let him outside; the array itself was still off-limits but they let him help out closer to home, tutored him in the use of heavy machinery and set him loose on the Crown’s hull. He torched pins and struts on command, helped shear the parasol free from its mooring at the bow and haul it aft; helped cut precise holes in its center for improvised thrusters that could stare down the heat of ten suns.

Other times he sat restlessly in the Hub while Sengupta ran numbers across the wall, this many tonnes and that many kiloNewtons and so much Isp thrust. He’d tap into AUX/RECOMP and watch Valerie and Ofoegbu and Amina at work, scientific and religious paraphernalia floating about their heads as they attempted communion with an impossible slime mold from the stars. He’d capture their movements and their incantations, feed them to a private database he’d been building since before the Crown had docked. Sometimes Jim Moore would be there; other times Brüks would catch him sequestered in some far-off corner of the Crown, adrift on a sea of old telemetry that had nothing to do with his son, nothing at all, just facts on the ground.

The Colonel was always civil, these days. Never more.

When the sight of people in more productive roles failed to satisfy, Brüks abandoned Icarus’s bustling tourist district and went off by himself, cam by cam: stepped through views of empty crawlspaces and frozen habs, an endless dark maze of tunnels connecting the uninhabited and the unexplored. Sometimes there was atmosphere, and frost sparkling on bulkheads. Sometimes there was only vacuum and girders and rails along which prehensile machinery scuttled like platelets in a mechanical bloodstream.

Once there were stars where no stars should have been: a great hole bitten out of Icarus’s carapace where it would do the least damage. Brüks could see incendiary Bicameral teeth through the gap, brilliant blue pinpoints taking another bite farther down the hull. Even filtered by the camera, they made him squint.

Next stop.

Ah. AUX/RECOMP again, more crowded than before: Moore had joined Valerie and the Bicamerals at play.

Just another roach, Brüks thought. Just like me.

But you get a seat at the table just the same.

He watched in silence for a few moments.

Fuck this.

Pale blue light spilled into the attic from the open airlock, limned the edges of pipes and lockers and empty alcoves. Brüks sailed through the hatch, grabbed a strut in passing, swung to port and into the glowing mouth of the lamprey itself.

Eyes hypersaccading in an ebony face, snapping instantly into focus. A body rooted to the airlock wall by one arm, fingers clenched around a convenient handhold. Spring-loaded prosthetics below the knees; they extended absurdly and braced against a bulkhead, blocking Brüks’s way.

He braked just in time.

“Restricted access, sir,” the zombie said, eyes dancing once more.

“Holy shit. You talk.”

The zombie said nothing.

“I didn’t think there’d be—anyone in there,” Brüks tried. Nothing. “Are you awake?”

“No, sir.”

“So you’re talking in your sleep.”

Silence. Eyes, jiggling in their sockets.

I wonder if it knows what happened to the other one. I wonder if it was there…

“I want to—”

“You can’t, sir.”

“Will you—”

“Yes, sir.”

—stop me?

“Yes but it won’t be necessary,” the zombie added.

Brüks had been wondering about lethal force. Maybe best not to push that angle.

On the other hand, the thing didn’t seem to mind answering questions…

“Why do your ey—”

“To maximize acquisition of high-res input across the visual field sir.”

“Huh.” Not a trick the conscious mind could use, with its limited bandwidth. A good chunk of so-called vision actually consisted of preconscious filters deciding what not to see, to spare the homunculus upstream from information overload.

“You’re black,” Brüks observed. “Most of you zombies are black.”

No response.

“Does Valerie have a melanin feti—”

“I’ve got this,” Moore said, rising into view through the docking tube. The zombie moved smoothly aside to let him pass.

“They talk,” Brüks said. “I didn’t—”

Moore spared a glance at Brüks’s face as he moved past. Then he was back on board, and heading aft. “Come with me, please.”

“Uh, where?”

“R&M. Freckle on your face I don’t like the look of.” Moore disappeared into the Hub.

Brüks looked back at the airlock. Valerie’s sentry had moved back into place, blocking the way to more exotic locales.

“Thanks for the chat,” Brüks said. “We’ll have to do it again sometime.”

“Close your eyes.”

Brüks obeyed; the insides of his lids glowed brief bloody red as Moore’s diagnostic laser scanned down his face.

“Word of advice,” the Colonel said from the other side. “Don’t tease the zombies.”

“I wasn’t teasing him, I was just chat—”

“Don’t chat with them, either.”

Brüks opened his eyes. Moore was running his eyes down some invisible midair diagnostic. “Remember who they answer to,” he added.

“I can’t imagine that Valerie forgot to swear her minions to secrecy.”

“And I can’t imagine her minions will forget to tell her any secrets you might have asked about. Whether they answered or not.”

Brüks considered that. “You think she might take offense at the melanin-fetish remark?”

“I have no idea,” Moore said quietly. “I sure as hell did.”

Brüks blinked. “I—”

“You look at them.” There was liquid nitrogen in the man’s voice. “You see—zombies. Fast on the draw, good in the field, less than human. Less than animals, maybe; not even conscious. Maybe you don’t even think it’s possible to disrespect something like that. Like disrespecting a lawn mower, right?”

“No, I—”

“Let me tell you what I see. The man you were chatting with was called Azagba. Aza to his buddies. But he gave that up—either for something he believed in, or because it was the best of a bad lot of options, or because it was the only option he had. You look at Valerie’s entourage and you see a cheap joke. I see the seventy-odd percent of military bioauts recruited from places where armed violence runs so rampant that nonexistence as a conscious being is actually something you aspire to. I see people who got mowed down on the battlefield and then rebooted, just long enough to make a choice between going back to the grave or paying off the jump-start with a decade of blackouts and indentured servitude. And that’s pretty close to the best-case scenario.”

“What would be worst case?”

“Some jurisdictions still hold that life ends at death,” Moore told him. “Anything else is an animated corpse. In which case Azagba has exactly as many rights as a cadaver in an anatomy class.” He stabbed the air and nodded: “I was right: it’s precancerous.”

Malawi, Brüks remembered.

“That’s why you took her on,” he realized. “Not for me, not for Sengupta. Not even for the mission. Because she killed one of your own.”

Moore looked right through him. “I would have thought that by now you’d have learned to keep your attempts at psychoanalysis to yourself.” He extracted a tumor pencil from the first-aid kit. “Any nausea? Headaches, dizziness? Loose stools?”

Brüks brought his hand to his face. “Not yet.”

“Probably nothing to worry about, but we’ll run a complete body scan just to be safe. Could be internal lesions as well.” He leaned in, pressed the pencil against Brüks’s face. Something electrical snapped in Brüks’s ear; a sudden tingling warmth spread out across his cheek.

“I’d recommend daily scans from here on in,” Moore said. “Our shielding on approach wasn’t all it could have been.” He gestured for Brüks to move to the right, unfolded the medbed from the wall. “I have to admit I’m a bit surprised this started so soon, though. Maybe you had a preexisting condition.” He stood aside. “Lie back.”

Brüks maneuvered himself over the pallet; Moore strapped him into place against the free fall. A biomedical collage bloomed across the bulkhead.

“Uh, Jim…”

The soldier kept his eyes on the scan.

“Sorry.”

Moore grunted. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have expected you to be so fast on the uptake.” He paused. “It’s not as though you’re some kind of zombie.”

“Roaches, you know—we fuck up,” Brüks admitted.

“Yes. I forget that sometimes.” The Colonel took a breath, let it out softly through clenched teeth. “Before you showed up, I—well…”

Brüks waited in silence, fearful of tipping some scale.

“It’s been a while,” Moore said, “since I’ve had much call to deal with my own kind.”

“GOT SOMETHING FOR you.”

It was a white plastic clamshell, about the size and shape to hold a set of antique eyeglasses. Lianna had fabbed a bright green bow and stuck it to the top.

Brüks eyed it suspiciously. “What is it?”

“The Face of God,” she declared, and then—deflated by the look he shot at her, “That’s kind of what the hive’s calling it, anyway. Piece of your slime mold.” She held it out with a flourish. “If Muhammad can’t come to the sample…”

“Thanks.” He took the offering (try as he might, he couldn’t keep from smiling), and set it on the table next to dessert.

“They thought you’d like to take a shot at, you know. Seeing what makes it tick.”

Brüks glanced at a bulkhead window where three Bicamerals floated at the compiler, their gazes divergent as was their wont. (Not any Senguptoid aversion to eye contact, he’d come to realize; just the default preference for a 360-degree visual field, adopted by a collective with eyes to share.) “Are they throwing me a bone, or do they just want someone expendable doing the dissections?”

“A bone, maybe. But you know, this thing does have certain biological properties. And you are the only biologist on board.”

“Roach biologist. And that slime mold’s got to be postbiological if it’s anything at all. And you know as well as I do that I’ve got better odds of getting a blow job from Valerie than—”

He caught himself, too late. Idiot. Stupid, insensitive—

“Maybe not,” Leona said after a pause so brief it might have been imaginary. “But you’re the only one in the neighborhood with a biologist’s perspective.”

“You—you think that makes a difference?”

“Sure. More to the point, I think they do, too.”

Brüks thought about that. “I’ll try not to let them down, then.” And then: “Lee—”

“So what you doing here, anyway?” She leaned in for a closer look at his display. “You’re running mo-cap.”

He nodded, wary of speech.

“What for? Slimey hasn’t moved since we got here.”

“I’m, uh…” He shrugged and confessed. “I’m watching the Bicams.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“I’ve been trying to figure out their methodology,” he confessed. “Everyone’s got to have one, right? Scientific or superstitious or just some weird gut instinct, there’s at least got to be some kind of pattern…”

“You’re not finding one?”

“Sure I am. They’re rituals. Eulali and Ofoegbu raise their hands just so, Chodorowska howls at the moon for precisely three-point-five seconds, the whole lot of them throw their heads back and gargle, for fucksake. The behaviors are so stereotyped you’d call them neurotic if you saw them in one of those old labs with the real animals in cages. But I can’t correlate them to anything else that happens. You’d think there’d be some kind of sequence, right? Try something, if that doesn’t work try something else. Or just follow some prescribed set of steps to chase away the evil spirits.”

Lianna nodded and said nothing.

“I don’t even know why they bother to make sounds,” he grumbled. “That quantum callosum or whatever they have has got to be faster than any kind of acoustic—”

“Don’t spend too much effort on that,” Lianna told him. “Half those phonemes are just a side effect of booting up the hyperparietals.”

Brüks nodded. “Plus I think the hive—fragments sometimes, you know? Sometimes I think I’m looking at one network, sometimes two or three. They drop in and out of sync all the time. I’m correcting for that—trying to, anyway—but I still can’t get any correlations that make sense.” He sighed. “At least with the Catholics, you know that when someone hands you a cracker there’s gonna be wine in the mix at some point.”

Lianna shrugged, unconcerned. “You gotta have faith. You’ll figure it out, if it’s God’s will.”

He couldn’t help himself. “Jesus Christ, Lee, how can you keep saying that? You know there’s not the slightest shred of evidence—”

“Really.” In an instant her body language had changed; suddenly there was fire in her eyes. “And what kind of evidence would be good enough for you, Dan?”

“I—”

“Voices in the clouds? Fiery letters in the sky proclaiming I Am the Lord thy God, you insignificant weasel? Then would you believe?”

He held up his hands, reeling in the face of her anger. “Lee, I didn’t mean—”

“Oh, don’t back down now. You’ve been shitting on my beliefs since the day we met. The least you can do is answer the goddamn question.”

“I—well…” Probably not, he had to admit. The first thought that fiery skywriting would bring to his mind would be hoax, or hallucination. God was such an absurd proposition at its heart that Brüks couldn’t think of any physical evidence for which it would be the most parsimonious explanation.

“Hey, you’re the one who keeps talking about the unreliability of human senses.” It sounded feeble even to himself.

“So no evidence could ever change your mind. Tell me how that doesn’t make you a fundamentalist.”

“The difference,” he said slowly, feeling his way, “is that brain hack is an alternate hypothesis entirely consistent with the observed data. And Occam likes it a lot more than omnipotent sky wizard.”

“Yeah. Well, the people you’re putting under your nanoscope know a thing or two about observed data too, and I’m pretty sure their publication record kicks yours all over the innersys. Maybe you don’t know everything. I gotta go.”

She turned to the ladder, gripped the rails so hard her knuckles whitened.

Stopped. Unclenched, a little.

Turned back.

“Sorry. I just…”

“S’okay,” he told her. “I didn’t mean to, well…” Except he had, of course. They both had. They’d been doing this dance the whole trip downhill.

It just hadn’t seemed so personal before.

“I don’t know what got into me,” Lianna said.

He didn’t call her on it. “It’s okay. I can be kind of a brain stem sometimes.”

She tried on a smile.

“Anyhow, I do have to go. We’re good?”

“We’re good.”

She climbed away, smile still fastened to her face, bent just slightly to the left. Favoring ribs that medical technology had long since completely healed.

He wasn’t a scientist, not to these creatures. He was a baby in a playpen, an unwelcome distraction to be kept busy with beads and rattles while the grown-ups convened on more adult matters. This gift Lianna had brought him wasn’t a sample; it was a pacifier.

But by all the laws of thermodynamics, it did its job. Brüks was hooked at first sight.

He pulled the gimp hood over his head, linked into the lab’s ConSensus channel, and time just—stopped. It stopped, then shot ahead in an instant. He threw himself down through orders of magnitude, watched molecules in motion, built stick-figure caricatures and tried to coax them into moving the same way. He felt distant surprise at his own proficiency, marveled at how much he’d accomplished in just a few minutes; wondered vaguely why his throat felt so dry and somehow eighteen hours had passed.

What are you? he thought in amazement.

Not computronium, anyway. Not organic. More like a Tystovitch plasma helix than anything built out of protein. Things that looked like synaptic gates were ticking away in there to the beat of ions; some carried pigment as well as electricity, like chromatophores moonlighting as associative neurons. Trace amounts of magnetite, too; this thing could change color if it ran the right kind of computations.

Not much more computational density than your garden-variety mammalian brain, though. That was surprising.

And yet… the way it was arranged…

He resented his own body for needing water, ignored the increasing need to take a piss until his bladder threatened to burst. He built tabletop vistas of alien technology and shrank himself down into their centers, wandered thunderstruck through streets and cityscapes and endlessly shifting lattices of intelligent crystal. He stood humbled by the sheer impossibility held in that little fleck of alien matter, and by the sheer mind-boggling simplicity of its execution.

It was as though someone had taught an abacus to play chess. It was as though someone had taught a spider to argue philosophy.

“You’re thinking,” he murmured, and couldn’t keep an amazed smile off his face.

It actually did remind him of a spider, in fact. One particular genus that had become legendary among invertebrate zoologists and computational physicists alike: a problem-solver that improvised and drew up plans far beyond anything that should have been able to fit into such a pinheaded pair of ganglia. Portia. The eight-legged cat, some had called it. The spider that thought like a mammal.

It took its time, mind you. Sat on its leaf for hours, figuring out the angles without ever making a move, and then zap: closed on its prey along some roundabout route that broke line-of-sight for minutes at a time. Somehow it hit every waypoint, never lost track of the target. Somehow it just remembered all those three-dimensional puzzle pieces with a brain barely big enough to register light and motion.

As far as anyone could tell, Portia had learned to partition its cognitive processes: almost as if it were emulating a larger brain piece by piece, saving the results of one module to feed into the next. Slices of intellect, built and demolished one after another. No one would ever know for sure—a rogue synthophage had taken out the world’s Salticids before anyone had gotten around to taking a closer look—but the Icarus slime mold seemed to have taken the same basic idea and run with it. There’d be some upper limit, of course—some point at which scratchpads and global variables took up so much room there’d be none left over for actual cognition—but this was just a fleck, this was barely the size of a ladybug. The condenser chamber was awash in the stuff.

What had Lianna called it? God. The Face of God.

Maybe, Brüks thought. Give it time.

“Scale-invariant shit it timeshares!”

He’d almost gotten used to it by now. Barely even jumped at the sound of Rakshi Sengupta exclaiming unexpectedly at his side. He peeled the hood back and there she was, a meter to his left: eavesdropping on his models through an ancillary bulkhead feed.

He sighed and nodded. “Emulates larger networks a piece at a time. That one little piece of Portia could—”

“Portia.” Sengupta stabbed the air, stabbed ConSensus. “After the spider right?”

“Yeah. That one little piece could probably model a human brain if it had to.” He pursed his lips. “I wonder if it’s conscious.”

“No chance it’d take days just to chug through a half-second brain slice and networks only wake up—”

“Right.” He nodded. “Of course.”

Her eyes jiggled and another window sprouted off to one side: AUX/RECOMP, and the postbiological wonder painted on its guts. “Bet that could be though. What else you got?”

“I think it was designed specifically for this kind of environment,” Brüks said after a moment.

“What space stations?”

“Empty space stations. Smart mass isn’t anything special. But something this small, running cognition-level computations—there’s a reason you don’t run into that a lot on Earth.”

Sengupta frowned. “’Cause being a thousand times smarter than the thing that’s trying to eat you isn’t much help if it takes you a month to be a thousand times smarter.”

“Pretty much. Glacial smarts only pay off if your environment doesn’t change for a long time. ’Course it’s not such a bottleneck at higher masses, but—well, I think this was designed to work no matter how much or how little managed to sneak through. Which implies that it’s optimized for telematter dispersal—although if it isn’t using our native protocols, how it hijacks the stream in the first place is beyond me.”

“Oh they figured that out couple days ago,” Sengupta told him.

“Really?” Fuckers.

“Know how when you pack a layer of ball bearings into the bottom of a crate and the second layer fits into the bumps and valleys laid down by the first and the third fits onto the second so it all comes down to the first layer, first layer determines all the turtles all the way up, right?”

Brüks nodded.

“Like that. ’Cept the ball bearings are atoms.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Yah because I got nothing better to do than play tricks on roaches.”

“But—that’s like laying down a set of wheels and expecting it to act as a template for a car.”

“More like laying down a set of tread marks and expecting it to act as a template for a car.”

“Come on. Something has to tell the nozzles where to squirt that first layer. Something has to tell the second layer of atoms when to come though so that they can line up with the first. Might as well call it magic and be done with it.”

“You call it magic. Hive calls it the Face of God.”

“Yeah. Well, the tech may be way beyond us, but superstitious labels aren’t bringing it any closer.”

“Oh that’s rich you think God’s a thing God’s not a thing.”

“I’ve never thought God was a thing,” Brüks said.

“Good ’cause it’s not. It’s water into wine it’s life from clay it’s waking meat.”

Sweet smoking Jesus. Not you, too.

He summed it up to move it along. “So God’s a chemical reaction.”

Sengupta shook her head. “God’s a process.”

Fine. Whatever.

But she wasn’t letting it go. “Everything’s numbers you go down far enough don’t you know?” She poked him, pinched his arm. “You think this is continuous? You think there’s anything but math?”

He knew there wasn’t. Digital physics had reigned supreme since before he’d been born, and its dictums were as incontrovertible as they were absurd. Numbers didn’t just describe reality; numbers were reality, discrete step functions smoothing up across the Planck length into an illusion of substance. Roaches still quibbled over details, doubtless long since resolved by precocious children who never bothered to write home: was the universe a hologram or a simulation? Was its boundary a program or merely an interface—and if the latter, what sat on the other side, watching it run? (A few latter-day religions had predictably answered that question with the names of their favorite deities, although Brüks had never been entirely clear on what an omniscient being would need a computer for. Computation, after all, implied a problem not yet solved, insights not yet achieved. There was really only one sort of program for which foreknowledge of the outcome didn’t diminish the point of the exercise, and Brüks had never been able to find any religious orders that described God as a porn addict.)

So. The laws of physics were the OS of some inconceivable supercomputer called reality. At least that explained why reality had a resolution limit; Planck length and Planck time had always looked a bit too much like pixel dimensions for comfort. Past that, though, it had always seemed like angels dancing on the head of a pin. None of it changed anything way up here where life happened, and besides, positing universe as program didn’t seem to answer the Big Questions so much as kick them down the road another order of magnitude. Might as well just say that God did it after all, head off the infinite regress before it drove you crazy.

Still…

“A process,” Brüks mused. That sounded more—modest, at least. He wondered why Lianna had never spelled it out during their debates.

Sengupta’s head bobbed. “What kind of process though that’s the question. Master algorithm defining the laws of physics or some daemon reaching up to break ’em?” Her eyes flickered briefly toward his, flickered away at the last instant. “That’s how we know it exists in the first place. Miracles.”

“Miracles.”

“Impossible events. Physics violations.”

“Such as?”

“Star formation way below the z-limit. Photons doing things they’re not supposed to the metarules changing over by the Cloverleaf Nebula. They vindicated the Smolin model or something I dunno it’s beyond me so you’d never get it in a million years. But they found something impossible. Way down deep.”

“A miracle.”

“I think more than one but that’s what I said.”

“Wait a second.” Brüks frowned. “If the laws of physics are part of some universal operating system and God, by definition, breaks them… you’re basically saying…”

“Don’t stop now roach you’re almost there.”

“You’re basically saying God’s a virus.”

“Well that’s the question isn’t it?”

Portia iterated before them.

What was it Lianna had said? We’ve always thought c and friends ruled supreme, out to the quasars and beyond. What if they’re just some kind of local ordinance?

“What if they’re a bug?” he murmured.

Sengupta grinned and stared at his wrist. “Change the whole mission wouldn’t it?”

“This mission?”

“Bicameral mission the mission of the whole Order. Reality’s iterating everywhere but there’re these inconsistencies. Maybe not the right reality, mmm? Change alpha a just bit and the universe stops supporting life. Maybe alpha’s wrong. Maybe life’s just a parasitic offshoot of a corrupted OS.”

Somewhere in Brüks’s head, a penny dropped.

For fifteen billion years, the universe had been shooting for maximum entropy. Life didn’t throw entropy into reverse—nothing did—but it put on the brakes, even as it spewed chaos out the other end. The gradient of Life was the first scale any aspiring biologist learned to sing: the further you kept yourself from thermodynamic equilibrium, the more alive you were.

It’s the Anthropic Principle’s evil twin, he thought.

“What—what is this mission, exactly?” Brüks asked softly.

“Mmmm.” Sengupta rocked gently back and forth. “They know God exists already that’s old. I think now they’re trying to figure what to do with It.”

“What to do with God.”

“Maybe worship. Maybe disinfect.”

The word hung there, reeking of blasphemy.

“How do you disinfect God?” Brüks said after a very long time.

“Don’t ask me I just fly the ship.” Her gaze slid back to the bulkhead, to the church of AUX/RECOMP and the alien emissary there.

“I think that puppy’s giving them some ideas though,” she said.

Lianna Lutterodt was lost in inner space when he sailed through the Commons ceiling. She blinked as he bounced off the deck, shook her head: her eyes came back to the here and now as a courtesy window opened on the bulkhead. A flatscreen concession to the neurologically disabled.

Icarus. The confessional. A rosette of spacesuited monks, outward facing, visors raised to bare their souls before the face of God.

“Hi,” Brüks said carefully.

She nodded around a mouthful of couscous. “Rakshi says you made some serious headway. Even gave it name.”

He nodded. “Portia. It’s pretty amazing, it…”

Her gaze drifted back to the window. She can’t take her eyes off them, he thought, just as she did and caught him looking: “What?”

“It’s not just amazing,” he told her. “It’s actually kind of scary.” He dipped his chin at the feed. “And they cut pieces out of it.”

“They take samples,” Lianna said. “Almost like real scientists.”

“Something that reaches down across half a light-year and makes our own machines do backflips around the laws of physics.”

“Not like they can get all the answers by just staring at it all day.”

“I thought that was exactly how they got their answers.”

“They know what they’re doing, Dan.”

“That’s one hypothesis. Want to hear another?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Ever hear of induced thanoparorasis?” he asked.

“Uh-huh.” Lianna shrugged. “Common procedure among the augmented. Keeps ’em from collapsing into existential angst.”

“It’s a bit more fundamental than that,” Brüks said. “Have you got it?”

“Thanoparoasis? ’Course not.”

“Are you going to die?”

“Eventually. Hopefully not for a while.”

“Good to know,” Brüks told her. “Because if you were a victim of ITP, you wouldn’t be able to answer that question. You might not even have heard it.”

“Dan, I don’t—”

“You and I”—raising his voice over hers—“we’re blessed with a certain amount of denial. You admit you’re going to die, you even know it intellectually on some level, but you don’t really believe it. You can’t. The thought of dying is just too damn scary. So we invent some Fairyland Heaven to take us in after we pass on, or we look to your friends and their friends to give us immortality on a chip or—if we’re hardcore realists—we just pay lip service to death and decay and keep right on feeling immortal anyway.

“But some folks”—he nodded at the feed—“just get too damn smart. They put their heads together and develop insights way too deep to paper over with a few million years’ worth of whistling past the graveyard. People like that would know they were going to die, they’d feel it in the gut. They’d know what death means in a way you or I never could. And the only way they can keep from collapsing into whimpering puddles is to give denial a hand, cut a cognitive hole into the middle of their heads. We may live in denial most of the time but those people—they didn’t even show a fright response when it looked like their whole damn hive was an hour from the morgue. Like those agnosiacs who’d die of thirst in their own homes after some tumor’s destroyed their ability to recognize water.”

“I don’t think they’re like that,” Lianna said softly.

“Sure you do. You told me as much, remember? Reset the sensory biases, randomize the errors.”

They watched in silence as the hive poked a stick at something dangerous.

“A lot of them died, not so long ago,” Brüks said after a while.

“I remember.”

“Me, too. And you know what I remember the most, you know what I can’t forget? Luckett rolling around in his own shit while his spinal cord shorted out, smiling and insisting that everything was going according to plan.”

Lianna turned away, eyes bright. “I liked him. He was a good man.”

“I wouldn’t know. All I know is, he sounded just like every hapless Yahweh junkie who ever looked around at all the horror and injustice in the world and mumbled some shit about how It’s not the place of the clay to question the potter. The only difference is that everyone else lays it all on God’s master plan and your Bicamerals talk about their own.”

“You’re wrong. They don’t think of themselves that way at all.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t, either. Maybe you shouldn’t have quite so much faith—”

“Dan, shut the fuck up. You don’t know anything about it, you can’t know—”

“I was there, Lee. I saw you. They’ve got you so convinced they’re infallible, they’ve got everything so factored five ways to Sunday that you didn’t even need a hole cut into your brain. You went straight into the lion’s den without missing a beat, you got right up in Valerie’s face and it didn’t occur to you for a microsecond that she’s your goddamn predator, she could rip your throat out without even thinking about it—”

“Do not put that on them.” Lianna’s voice was flinty. “That was my mistake. Chinedum was—I will not let you blame anyone else for my stupidity.”

“Isn’t that the way, though? Isn’t that how it’s always been? Just obey the guys in the funny hats and if it’s a win it’s all praise be to Allah but if your ass gets kicked it’s your fault. You read scripture the wrong way. You weren’t worthy. You didn’t have enough faith.”

Some of the fight seemed to bleed out of her then; some of the old Lianna Lutterodt peeked through. She sighed, and shook her head, and ghosted a smiled. “Hey, remember when this used to be fun?”

He spread his hands, feeling helpless. “I just…”

“You mean well. I know. But after all you’ve seen, you can’t deny how far ahead of us they are.”

“Oh they’re scary smart, I’ll give them that. They run circles around the best we roaches can throw at them, they snap this ship like a twig and pitch it all the way to the sun, drop us dead center onto Icarus’s dark side from a hundred million kilometers with barely a thruster tweak. But they glitch, just like we do. They still wash away their sins, because after all that rewiring their brains still mix up sensation and metaphor. They’re more glitchy than we are, because half their upgrades are barely out of beta—and while we’re on the subject, has anyone factored in the neuropsychologic impairment that a few weeks of hyperbaric exposure must be inflicting on all that extra brain tissue?”

Lianna shook her head. “We’re not on the steppes anymore, Dan. We don’t measure success by how far you can throw a spear in a crosswind. They think rings around us in every way that matters.”

“Uh-huh. And Masaso and Luckett are still dead. And all that poor bastard could cling to while his lights went out was that it was all according to plan.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “Lee, it’s not just that these people can’t wrap their heads around mortality. They can’t even entertain the possibility they could be wrong. If that doesn’t scare the shit out of you—”

She shook him off. “The plan was to get us to Icarus. Here we are.”

“Here we are.” Brüks pointed to a hole in the wall, where a hived demigod communed with something that could change the laws of physics. “And how does it feel to know our lives depend on the judgment of something that can’t even imagine it could die?”

“WHAT’S RAKSHI GOT against you guys?”

The lights were dimmed, the mutants and monsters were off pursuing their alien agendas, and the Glenmorangie was back on the table. Moore grimaced at Brüks, refriended, over the lip of his glass. “Who’s us guys?”

“Military,” Brüks said. “Why’s she got such a hate-on for you?”

“Not sure. Self-loathing, maybe.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Sengupta’s as much of a soldier as I am. She just doesn’t know it. Not consciously, at least.”

“Metaphorically, you mean.”

Moore shook his head, took another sip; his cheeks puckered as he swirled the single malt around in his mouth. He swallowed. “WestHem Alliance. Same as me.”

“And she doesn’t know.”

“Nope.”

“What’s her rank?”

“Doesn’t work like that.”

“Some kind of sleeper agent?”

“It’s not like that, either.”

“Then what—”

Moore raised a hand. Brüks fell silent.

“I say army,” Moore told him, “you think boots on the ground. Drones, zombies, battlefield robots. Things you can see. Fact is, if you’ve reached the point where you need that kind of brute force, you’ve already lost.”

Visions of the Oregon desert sprang into Brüks’ head. “Brute force seemed to work just fine for those fuckers who attacked the monastery.”

“They were trying to stop us. Here we are.”

Human bodies, turned to stone. The screams of dying Bicamerals.

Not bodies, he reminded himself. Body parts. Here in the dusk of the twenty-first century it was so easy to confuse murder with the amputation of a fingertip. None of the usual definitions made sense when a single supersoul stretched across so many bodies.

“Suppose you’re a political heavyweight,” Moore was saying. “A mover and shaker, a titan. And down around your ankles are all those folks you never used to worry about. The moved and the shaken. They don’t like you much. They never have, but historically that never mattered. Little people. Back in the day you just ignored them. The business of titans is other titans.

“But now they get into the nodes, they decrypt your communiqués, they hack your best-laid plans. They hate your guts, Daniel, because you are big and they are small, because you turn their lives upside down with a wave of your hand and they don’t care about realpolitik or the big picture. They only care about monkey-wrenching and whistleblowing.

“And you find out about them. You find out about Rakshi Sengupta and Caitlin deFranco and Parvad Gamji and a million others. You give them what they want. You leave the back door open just a crack, so they can see your files on the African Hegemony. You let them sniff out a weakness in your firewall. Maybe one day they find out how to provoke a firestorm in one of your subsidiary accounts, bankrupt some puppet government you kept under your thumb for tax purposes.”

“Except that’s not what they’re doing,” Brüks surmised.

“No it’s not.” There was a hint of sadness in Moore’s smile. “It’s all window dressing. They think they’re really sticking it to you, but they’re being—herded. Into the service of agendas they’d never support in a thousand years, if they only knew. And they’re dedicated, Daniel. They’re ferocious. They fight your wars with a passion you could never buy and never coerce, because they’re doing it out of pure ideology.”

“Should you be telling me this?” Brüks wondered.

“You mean, state secrets? What’s a state, these days?”

“I mean, what if I tell her?”

“Go ahead. She won’t believe you.”

“Why not? She already hates you guys.”

“She can’t believe you.” Moore tapped his temple. “Recruits get—tweaked.”

Brüks stared.

“Or at least,” Moore elaborated, “she can’t believe she believes you.” He eyed his scotch. “On some level, I think she already knows.”

Brüks shook his head. “You don’t even have to pay them.”

“Sure we do. Sometimes. We make sure they have enough to make ends meet. Let them skim some cream from an offshore account, drop a legitimate contract into their in-box before the rent comes due. Mostly, though, we inspire them. Oh, they get bored sometimes. Kids, you know. But all it takes is a little judicious injustice, some new atrocity visited on the little people. Get them all fired up again, and off they go.”

“That seems a bit—”

Moore raised an eyebrow. “Immoral?”

“Complicated. Why herd them into hating you? Why not just leave a trail of bread crumbs pointing back at the other guy?”

“Ah. Demonize your enemy.” Moore nodded sagely. “I wonder why we never thought of that.”

Brüks grimaced.

“Rakshi and her kind, they’re wise to the old school. You leak footage showing the slants skewering babies and it’ll take them maybe thirty seconds to find a pixel that doesn’t belong. Discredit the whole campaign. People put a lot less effort into picking apart evidence that confirms what they already believe. The great thing about making yourself the villain is, nobody’s likely to contradict you.

“Besides.” He spread his hands. “These days, half the time we don’t even know who the real enemy is.”

“And that’s easier than just tweaking them so they flat-out want to work for you.”

“Not easier. Marginally more legal.” The Colonel sipped his drink. “A small agnosia to protect state secrets is one thing. Changing someone’s basic personality without consent—that’s in a whole other league.”

Neither spoke for a while.

“That is really fucked up,” Brüks said at last.

“Uh-huh.”

“So why’s she here?”

“Driving the ship.”

“Crown’s perfectly capable of driving itself, unless it’s even more old school than I am.”

“Better to have meat and electronics backing each other up in low-intel scenarios. Complementary vulnerabilities.”

“But why her? Why would she agree to work under someone she hated—”

“This mission’s under Bicameral command,” the Colonel reminded him. “And anyone in Sengupta’s position would jump at an opportunity like this. Most of those people spend their time babysitting low-orbit crap-zappers from their bedrooms, praying that one of them glitches enough to warrant human intervention. Actual deep-space missions—anything with enough of a time lag to need onboard real-time piloting—those’ve been scarcer than snowstorms ever since Firefall. The Bicamerals had their pick of the field.”

“Rakshi must be very good at her job.”

Moore drained his glass, set it down. “I think in her case it was more a function of motivation. She has a wife on class-four life support.”

“And no way to pay the bills,” Brüks guessed.

“She does now.”

“So they didn’t want the best and the brightest,” Brüks said slowly. “They wanted someone who’d do anything to save her wife.”

“Motivation,” Moore repeated.

“They wanted a hostage.”

The soldier looked at him with something that might almost have been pity. “You disapprove.”

“You don’t.”

“You’d rather they picked someone who just wanted to get out of the house? Someone who was in it for the thrills or the bank balance? This was the humane choice, Daniel. Celu would have been dead. Now she’s got a chance.”

“Celu,” Brüks said, and swallowed on a throat gone suddenly dry.

Moore nodded. “Rakshi’s wife.”

“What was, um… what was wrong with her?” Thinking: There’s no chance. It would be one in a million.

Moore shrugged. “Bio attack, about a year ago. New England. Some kind of encephalitis variant, I think.”

Then you’re wrong. She doesn’t have a chance. She doesn’t. I don’t care how much they spend keeping her heart beating, there’s no coming back from something like that.

Oh my God. I killed her.

I killed Rakshi’s wife.

It hadn’t been anything radical. It hadn’t even been anything new.

The methodology was decades old, a proven tent pole for a thousand peer-reviewed studies or more. Everyone knew you couldn’t simulate a pandemic without simulating its victims; everyone knew that human behavior was too complex to thumbnail with a few statistical curves. Populations weren’t clouds, and people weren’t points; people were agents, autonomous and multifaceted. There was always the outlier who ran into the hot zone after a loved one, the frontline medic whose unsuspected fear of centipedes might cause him to freeze at some critical juncture. And since pandemics, by definition, involved millions of people, your simulation had better be running millions of human-level AIs if you wanted to get realistic results.

Or you could piggyback on a preexisting model where each of a million data points was already being run by a human-level intelligence.

Game worlds weren’t nearly as popular as they’d once been—Heaven had stolen away those myriad souls who preferred to play with themselves, free of community standards—but their virtual sandboxes were still more than large enough to keep them way out front as the CDC’s favorite platform for epidemiological research. For decades now, the plagues and sniffles that afflicted wizards and trolls alike had been tweaked and nudged toward specs that made them ideal analogs for the more pedestrian outbreaks afflicting what some still called the real world. Corrupted Blood bore more than a passing similarity to ectopic fibrodysplasia. The transmission dynamics of Beowulf’s Bane, an exotic glowing fungus that ate the flesh of elves, bore an uncanny resemblance to those of necrotizing fasciitis. Flying carpets and magic portals mapped onto airlines and customs bottlenecks; Mages to jet-setting upper-echelon elites with unlimited carbon ceilings. For a generation now, public health policies the world over had been informed by the lurid fantasy afflictions of clerics and wights.

It was just bad timing that a Realist faction out of Peru figured how to hack that system when Dan Brüks and his merry band were running a sim on emerging infectious diseases in Latin America.

Nobody caught it at the time. The Realists had been subtle. They’d left the actual disease parameters strictly alone: any sudden changes to mutation rate or infectivity would’ve shown up in the dailies. They’d tweaked the superficial appearance of infected players instead, according to location and demographic. Certain victims looked a bit sicklier than they should have, while others—wealthier PCs with gold and flying mounts at their command—looked a little healthier. It didn’t change the biology one whit, but it edged Human responses just a hair to the left. Subsequent outbreaks edged them a bit farther. The ripples spread out of gamespace and into the reports, out of the reports and into policy. Nobody noticed the tiny back door that had opened in the resulting contingency plans until six months later, when someone discovered a suspicious empty vial in the garbage behind the Happy Humpback Daycare Center. By then, a shiny new encephalitis mod had already slipped past Daniel Brüks’s first-response algorithms and was carving a bloody swathe from Bridgeport to Philadelphia.

Celu MacDonald had survived unscathed. She’d hadn’t even been in the kill zone; she’d been on the other side of the world, growing freelance code next to the girl of her dreams. Those weren’t as rare as they’d once been. In fact they’d grown pretty common ever since Humanity had learned to edit the dream as well as the girl. Soul mates could be made to order now: monogamous, devoted, fiercely passionate. The kind of love that prior generations had barely tasted before their hollow sacraments withered into miserable life sentences, or shattered outright as the bloom faded, the eye wandered, the genes reasserted themselves.

Not for Macdonald and her kind, that empty hypocrisy. They’d ripped the lie right out of their heads, rewired and redeemed it, turned it into joyful truth with a lifetime warranty. First-person sex had even made a modest comeback in the shelter of that subculture, or so Brüks had heard.

He didn’t know any of that at the time, of course. Celu MacDonald was just a name on a list of subcontractors, a monkey hired to grow code the academics couldn’t be bothered with. Brüks only learned of her after the fact: a bloody little coda at the end of the massacre.

There’d been no conspiracy. No one had thrown her to the wolves. But the academics had had deans and CEOs and PR hotshots keeping their identities confidential, keeping their connections from staining the good names of venerable institutions. Nobody had given any cover to Celu MacDonald. When the dust had finally settled, when the inquiries and ass-covering and alibis had all run their course, there’d she’d been: standing alone in the crosshairs with hacked code dribbling from her hands.

Maybe it had been Rakshi who’d found her, staring slack-jawed at the ceiling after some bereaved next of kin decided to make the punishment fit the crime. She would still have been breathing. The variant didn’t kill its victims. It burned them out and moved on; you could tell when it had finished because the convulsions stopped, at long last, and left nothing behind but vegetation.

They’d found the guy that did it, eventually: dead for days, at the center of a micro-outbreak that had imploded under quarantine. Evidently he’d slipped up. But Rakshi Sengupta was still hunting. That was the word she’d used. Denied her revenge on the hand that had pulled the trigger, she was looking for the gunsmith. All that seething anger. All those hours spent trawling the cache. All that implanted idealized love, transmuted into grief: all that grief, transmuted into rage. The growled threats and mutterings about hunting dead men and debts owed and Some fucker going to be eating his own guts when I get hold of him.

Rakshi Sengupta didn’t know it yet, but she was gunning for Backdoor Brüks.

She was waiting at the mouth of his tent.

“Roach. Got something for you.”

He tried to read her eyes, but they were averted. He tried to read her body language, but it had always been a cipher to him.

He tried to keep the wariness out of his voice. “What you got?”

“Just watch.” She called a window to the adjacent bulkhead.

She doesn’t know. She couldn’t know.

She’d have to look into my eyes for that…

“What are you looking at?”

“No—nothing. Just—”

“Look at the window,” Sengupta said.

I am so sorry, he thought. Oh God, I am so very sorry.

He forced his eyes to the bulkhead: an over-the-shoulder view of a diagnostic chair, facing a flatscreen. A tropical savanna glowed there, lit by the grimy yellow light of a fading afternoon (Africa, Brüks guessed, although there were no telltale animals in frame). Telemetry framed the tableaux on every side: ribbons of heart rate, respiration, skin galvanics. A translucent brain scan glowed to the left, writhing with the iridescence of neurons firing in real time.

Someone sat in that chair, almost totally eclipsed by its back. The top of their skull crested above a padded headrest, wrapped in the superconducting spiderweb of a tomo matrix. The tip of one armrest peeked into view; a hand rested there. The rest of the person existed only by inference. Fragments of a body, almost lost among the bright flayed images of its own electricity.

Sengupta wiggled a finger: the still life began to move. A chrono readout ticked out the time at one second per second: 03/05/2090—0915:25.

“What do you see?” Not Sengupta talking. Someone in the video, speaking off stage.

“Grassland,” said the person in the chair, face still hidden, voice instantly recognizable.

Valerie.

The grasses dissolved into storm-tossed waves; the yellowish sky hardened down to wintry blue. The horizon didn’t change position, though; it still bisected the scene halfway up the frame.

Something tapped faintly on the soundtrack, like fingernails on plastic.

“What do you see?”

“Ocean. Subarctic Pacific, Oyashio Current, early Feb—”

“Ocean’s fine. Basic landscape, that’s all we want. One word.”

A hint of motion, center right: Valerie’s fingers, just visible, drumming against the armrest.

A salt flat, shimmering in summer heat. The edge of a mesa rose in the hazy distance, a dark terrace that split-leveled the horizon.

“What now?”

“Desert.” Tick… tick tick tick… tap…

Brüks glanced at Sengupta. “What is—”

“Shhhh.”

Same salt flat: the mesa had magically disappeared. Now a skeletal tree rose from the cracked earth, halfway to the horizon: leafless, yellow as old bone, a crown of naked branches atop a stripped featureless trunk almost too straight for nature. The trunk’s shadow reached directly toward the camera, like an unbroken phantom extension of the object itself.

“Now?”

“Desert.”

“Good, good.”

Down in the glass brain, a smattering of crimson pinpoints swept briefly across the visual cortex and disappeared.

“Now?”

Same picture, higher magnification: the tree was front and center now, its trunk straight as a flagpole, close enough to vertically split the horizon and a good chunk of the sky above. The speckles reappeared, a faint red rash staining the soap-bubble rainbows swirling across the back of Valerie’s brain. Her fingers had stopped moving.

“Same. Desert.” There wasn’t a trace of expression in her voice.

Right angles, Brüks realized. They’re turning the landscape into a natural cross…

“Now.”

“Same.”

It wasn’t. Now the branches were out of frame: all that remained was the white of the land, the hard crystalline blue of the sky and the hypothetical razor-edged line between, splitting the world side to side. And that impossibly straight vertical trunk, splitting it top to bottom.

They’re trying to trigger a glitch…

No longer a mere rash, glowing across the back of the vampire’s skull: a pulsing tumor. And yet her voice remained empty and untroubled; her body rested unmoving in the chair.

Her face still unseen. Brüks wondered why the archivists had been so afraid to record it.

Now the world on the screen began to come apart. The salt flat behind the tree came unstuck just a little at the bottom (the tree stayed in place, like a decal on glass), shrank up from the lower edge of the display like old curling parchment and revealed a strip of azure beneath: as if more sky had been hiding under the sand.

“Now?”

The desert pixels compressed a little further, squeezed tighter against the skyline—

“Same.”

—compressed from landscape to landstrip, the undersky pushing it up from below, the horizon holding it down from above—

“Now?”

“S-same. I…”

Scarlet auroras squirmed across Valerie’s brain. SKIN GALV and RESP shuddered along their time series.

CARDIAC beat strong and steady and did not change at all.

“And now?”

The ground was almost all sky, now. The desert had been reduced to a bright squashed band running across the screen like a flatlined EEG, like a crossbeam at Calvary. The tree trunk cut it vertically at right angles.

“I—sky, I think, I—”

“Now?”

“—know what you’re doing.”

“Now?”

The flattened desert shrank some critical fraction further; horizontal and vertical axes split quadrants of sky with borders of nearly equal thickness.

Valerie began to convulse. She tried to arch her back; something stopped her. Her fingers fluttered, her arms shook against the padded arms of the chair; for the first time Brüks realized that she was strapped into the thing.

Fireworks exploded across her brain. Her heart, so immutably stable until now, threw jagged spikes onto the time series and shut down completely. The body paused for a moment in midconvulsion, frozen in bone-breaking tetany for an endless moment; then the chair’s defibrillators kicked in and it resumed dancing to the rhythm of new voltage.

“Thirty-five total degrees of arc,” the invisible voice reported calmly. “Three-point-five degrees axial. Rep twenty-three, oh-nine-nineteen.” The recording ended.

Brüks let out his breath.

“Has to be real,” Sengupta grunted.

“What?”

“Horizon’s not real. It’s, it’s between. They don’t glitch on hypotheticals.”

He thought he understood: vampires were immune to horizons. No matter how flat, no matter how perfect, they were zero thickness. You couldn’t build a cross with a horizon, not one that stopped Valerie and her buddies at least: for that, you’d need something with depth.

“Really hard to get this,” Sengupta remarked. “The explosion scrambled the records.”

“Explosion?”

“Simon Fraser.”

Realist attack, he remembered. A couple of months before he’d gone on sabbatical; the bomb had taken out a lab working on spindle emulation. He hadn’t heard anything about the vamp program being targeted, though.

“There would’ve been backups,” he guessed.

“For the footage sure. But how do you know it’s her, huh? You never see her face. The embeds just give a subject code. Gait recognition not so great when your target’s tied down.”

“The voice,” Brüks said.

“That’s what I used. Now try trawling the cloud with a random voice sample, no stress data, no contextuals.” Sengupta jerked her chin. “Like I said. Hard. But I got it now it’s getting easier all the time.”

“They tortured her,” Brüks said softly. We tortured her. “Does—does Jim know about this?”

Sengupta barked out a humorless laugh. “I wouldn’t tell that asshole what time zone he was in.”

You don’t have to do this, Brüks thought. You don’t have to work so hard turning all that pain into anger. You could be free, Rakshi. Fifteen-minute tweak and they’d cut the grief right out of you, the same way they wired in the love. Twenty-five minutes and you’d forget you’d ever been in pain.

But you don’t want to forget, do you? You want the grief. You need it. Your wife’s dead, she’ll be dead forever but you can’t accept that, you’re clinging to Moore’s Law like a life jacket in a hurricane. Maybe they can’t bring her back now but maybe in five years, maybe ten, and in the meantime you’ll make do on hope and hate even if you haven’t figured out where they belong.

He closed his eyes while she smoldered at his side.

God help me when you do.

Back in the Hub, she’d stripped the sun naked. It seethed and roiled overhead, close enough to touch (which he did, just for the surrealistic hell of it: a gentle push off the grille, a weightless drift, and Daniel Brüks could kiss the sky). But the curve of its edge was as clean and sharp as if razored: no flares, no prominences, no great gouts of plasma to dwarf a dozen Jupiters and fuck with Earthly broadcasts.

“Where’s the corona?” he asked, thinking: Filters.

“Ha that’s not the sun that’s the sun side.”

Of Icarus, she meant: the sun and Icarus face-to-face, the light of one bouncing off the disk of the other into the eye of some remote camera, massively shielded, floating out front on the breath of a trillion hydrogen bombs.

“Perfect reflector if you crank it up high enough,” Sengupta said. “Won’t do much for the rads but if you’re talking about thermal and visible spectrum I could turn this place into the coldest spot from here to the Oort.”

“Wow,” Brüks said.

“That’s nothing look at this.”

The sun—the sun’s reflection—darkened by degrees. Those brilliant writhing coruscations began to dim: the sunspots, the weather systems, the looping cyclones of magnetic force began to fade from sight, sink into some colder cosmic background. Within moments the sun was a pale phantom on a dark mirror.

Something else was there, though: other currents, convecting like a pot of molten glass brought to a rolling boil. Liquid mass upwelled near the center of the disk, swirled outward in an endless bloom of turbulent curlicues, cooled and slowed and stagnated near the darker perimeter. It was as though the solar photosphere had been stripped away to reveal some other, completely separate weather system churning beneath.

Except, Brüks realized after a moment, he wasn’t looking at the sun at all, not even in reflection. This was—

“That’s Icarus,” he murmured. A great convex solar cell a hundred kilometers across: transparent or opaque, solid or liquid, its optical properties slaved to the whims of a glorified thermostat and Rakshi Sengupta’s little finger. Darker now, just a few degrees closer to blackbody status, the convection currents swirled ever faster as it worked to dump the excess heat.

Off in some distant corner, an alarm woke with a soft beeping.

“Um…,” Brüks began.

“Don’t worry roach just throttling up a bit to build some extra ergs don’t want Earth to fall below quota do you?”

The beeping continued, increasingly urgent. Insistent little tags began flashing near the bottom of the display, albedo falling, absorbance and ΔT on the rise.

“I thought we’d already tanked up.” It had been the final phase of the reconstruction: the last of the Bicams had stowed their tools and abandoned the Crown’s refitted hull for a group hug around Portia, twelve hours before. (Apparently their brains fell out of contact beyond some limited range.)

“Got some need more that’s a lot of mass we gotta get out from under.”

Brüks couldn’t take his eyes off the sunside view: like looking down at a blooming mushroom cloud in the wake of an airburst. He knew it was only imagination but the Hub felt—warmer…

He bit his lip. “Aren’t we overheating? Those tags—”

“More product takes more power right? Basic physics.”

“Not that much more.” Surely she hadn’t dialed down the reflectivity this far the last time, surely this was just—

“Want to double-check my numbers roach? Don’t trust my math think you can do better?”

—showing off…

The sunside sparked and vanished from the dome: NO SIGNAL pulsed above the warning icons left behind.

“Shit,” Sengupta spat. “Stupid cambot melted.”

“I’m impressed,” Brüks said quietly. “Now will you please just dial it back a—”

“Quit fucking around, Rak.” Lianna ricocheted up from the southern hemisphere, bounced off the Tropic of Cancer and arced toward the forward hatchway. “We’ve got more important things to do right now.”

“Yeah right more important than putting charge in the tank.” But her fingers twitched in the air, and the alarms dimmed a little. “Like what?”

Lianna spun around a handhold and planted herself on the arctic circle. “Like Oldschool’s slime mold. It’s talking to us.” And disappeared through magnetic north.

TALKING WAS GENEROUS: the images that had begun crawling across Portia’s skin were crude, chunky things, primitive mosaics build from pixels a centimeter on a side. There was no window per se, no distinct bounded area within which relevant information was neatly displayed. The mosaics simply faded into existence and out again, the oily gray of default epidermis stippling gradually into a roughly circular area of increasing contrast, a black-and-white scratchpad reminiscent of a crossword puzzle. Brüks’s secular circuitry couldn’t discern any pattern there.

Chromatophores, he remembered. This thing could change color if you ran the right current through it. “What started it up?”

“Dunno don’t bug me.” Sengupta had demoted the helmet-cam feeds to a line of thumbnails; her attention was fixed on Icarus’s own stereocams, zoomed and focused on Portia’s—what? Graphics interface? The same picture respawned in several iterations across the dome: sonar, infrared, ultrasound. The mosaic only showed up along visible wavelengths: infrared and ultraviolet filters showed nothing but plain old Portia, a monochrome porridge devoid of surface detail.

Smack dab in the middle of the human visual range, Brüks thought. Wouldn’t that be a coincidence…

“Ha!” Sengupta barked. “Z-contours the thing’s talking in terraces…” She zoomed the view. Sure enough the white pixels were elevated, little square mesas raised a millimeter above their darker counterparts. Brüks spawned his own window and zoomed even closer: the surfaces of all that topography were fracturing, folding, each pixel splitting and resplitting into a mesh of ever finer pigeonholes.

“It’s building diffraction gratings!” Sengupta brayed.

“And it’s increasing pixel-res—”

“I said shut up!”

Brüks bit back a response and cycled through MonkCam. The Bicamerals had fallen silent around the object of their veneration, played with their instruments, passed bands of radiation invisible and otherwise over Portia’s skin. Lianna was staying out of the way; her camera panned across the backs of helmets from the compartment hatch.

The resolution on that patchy window was improving by the second now; pixels the size of thumbnails shattered into spots the size of lentils, dissolved again into swirling clusters of pinheads that collapsed into shards below the resolving power of the camera. Steps became sawtooth lines became smooth, swirling curves that swept across the display and faded into flat gray oblivion. Now Brüks could almost recognize the patterns moving there—each new geometry seemed more familiar than the last, tugged a little harder at some half-forgotten memory before giving up and giving way to the next iteration. But nothing stuck. Nothing lasted long enough to sink his teeth into—until the patterns slowed, and Rakshi and Lianna spoke a single word, a shout and a whisper uttered in the same instant:

“Theseus.”

Eleven minutes was all it had taken. Eleven minutes for an anaerobic time-sharing slime mold to refine its pixels from the size of sugar cubes down to units that exceeded the resolving power of the human eye. Eleven minutes from coma to conversation.

First-contact protocols. Fibonacci sequences, golden ratios, periodic tables. The Bicamerals scribbled cryptic responses onto tacpads and held them up in turn; Brüks was not especially surprised to note that Portia’s swirling communiqués were a lot more comprehensible than the Bicamerals’ responses.

A shadow intruded subtly from the direction of the hatch, a hint of some presence beyond the lines of sight offered up by helmet feeds and onboard eyes. Icarus was full of blind spots; its cameras had not been installed with an eye to comprehensive surveillance. Brüks noticed, and tried not to.

Sudden surprised murmurs from the Bicamerals; a soft oooh from Lianna. Brüks scanned the feeds, where geometric primitives acted out some arcane theorem across Portia’s skin. “Lianna. Talk to me.”

“The GUI,” she told him. “It’s gone three-D.” Her feed circled the compartment, fixing Portia from every angle. “Some kind of lenticular diffraction effect. I’m seeing that whole display in three-D, we’re all seeing it in three-D. Wherever we move. The thing’s tracking us, it’s tracking five—uh, six pairs of eyes and pointing a customized diffraction grid at each one of us simultaneously. A single display surface.”

“Doesn’t look three-D to me,” Sengupta grumbled. “Too dumb to track the stereocam.”

Eleven minutes to derive the precise architecture of human eyesight. It seemed an impossibly short time to intuit a whole new sensory system from scratch, without invasion, without dissection. Except Portia hadn’t done that at all, most likely. It had probably taken the tutorials long before it ever made the in-system jaunt. Wherever the place it called home, it had at the very least made a pit stop at Theseus. These probably weren’t the first Humans it had encountered.

Maybe there’d been some dissection after all.

“Where’s Jim?” Lianna said.

“Right here,” Moore said from the depths of the Crown. He’d been off-shift but he was back in the game. “I’m on my way.”

“Uh, that’s a negative, Jim. We’d rather you stay back for now. Give us your insights from there.”

“Why’s that?”

“You know why. This thing’s using Theseus’s contact protocols. Your stock just went up.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Moore said mildly. “I’ve been over there many times.”

“It was never active before.” The slightest hint of exasperation tinged Lianna’s voice. “Come on, Jim, you know the rules about high-value assets better than anyone.”

“I do,” Moore agreed. “Which means my expert opinion should prevail. I’m coming over.”

No sound over comm. On the great surveilling compound eye, points of view shifted and bobbed.

“Fine,” Lianna said at last. “Don’t forget to suit up.”

Brüks and Sengupta, the last of the daycare buddies. They watched through one camera eye as Moore, fore in the attic, slid into his suit. They watched through a half dozen others as Ofoegbu et al returned to their rituals at the altar of First Contact, as Portia continued to iterate through stolen protocols; Sengupta grunted something about building a pidgin but all Brüks could see was plasma plots and dancing stick figures.

“Little warm in there,” Sengupta remarked. Brüks barely heard her.

Up in one corner of the compound eye, one of the Bicamerals—AMINA, according to the feed—panned away from the shrine and floated out of the sanctum; EULALI followed a moment later. The two began to trace a path back to the docking hatch. (Brüks felt a twinge of resentment on Moore’s behalf—as though the poor dumb caveman might get lost without a couple of grown-ups to show him the way.)

Metal guts sailed past Moore’s feed: grilles, bulkheads, conduits and plumbing turning around his axis in constant lazy rotation. Landmarks passed in faster succession than Brüks had ever seen through Bicameral feeds: the radiator bus, the T-junction leading off to the LEAR hoop, that row of fluorescent pink high-pressure tanks he’d never been able to find on any schematic. Moore moved as if he’d been born to this place; he rounded one last corner like a dolphin twisting onto a new heading and he was there. Lianna and Ofoegbu moved aside to let him enter.

Somehow he’d missed Amina and Eulali. Probably took a short cut, Brüks thought, glancing up at the nondescript passageway floating past in their feeds. That’ll teach ’em.

Soft ululations from the sanctum. On Lianna’s feed Moore frowned stage left, evidently squeezing some kind of intelligence from those sounds.

“I think I see the problem,” he said after a moment.

Somewhere—else—Eulali and Amina had stopped moving. They hesitated for a moment, looming in each other’s feeds; then Janused back-to-back, turning slowly. Signage and hazard striping adorned a hatch in the background: VPR H2 storage, thruster assembly. Hard vacuum beyond.

“It’s as you said,” Moore was saying back in the sanctum. “These are standard protocols.” His helmet cam held a tight focus on Portia’s paintings. Lianna’s feed showed him from the side, visor raised, cheek eclipsed by his helmet, his profile visible past the forward edge of the seal. Just past him, the node called Ofoegbu wasn’t looking at Moore or Portia: he was looking back through the open hatchway, into the corridor beyond—

Wait a second, Brüks thought. Shouldn’t there be—

That shadow, hinting at an unseen presence by the hatch. Gone now.

Moore: “It’s using the same protocols we are.”

Valerie had been there, just a few minutes ago. Now she was gone.

“It’s reflecting our own protocols back at us. It’s completely rote.”

Amina and Eulali. They weren’t going to meet Jim at all, Brüks realized. I bet they’re tracking Valerie…

He foregrounded their feeds. They still faced in opposite directions, each presumably sharing in the wraparound vista of a conjoined visual field. Icarus drifted about them like a sharp-edged dream.

“We’re not talking to an alien intelligence,” Moore continued. “We’re talking to a mirror.”

Something caught Brüks’s eye, a tiny bright sparkle in the upper-left corner of Amina’s feed. A faint star drifting on the recycled breeze. He skimmed the stereocam menu, selected 27E—VAPOR CORE REACTOR—EXT. CORRIDOR. Same corridor, dorsal view. Now he stared down at the tops of two open helmets; that floating star twinkled in the foreground. He zoomed the feed onto a sliver of glass—something like that, anyway—barely the size of a hangnail. A shard of something broken.

A big place, Icarus. It went on forever, breathed through more than a thousand kilometers of ductwork. This glass speck could have come from anywhere.

“You want to make any progress at all—” Moore said.

No signs of stress or metal fatigue nothing popped nothing broken no bits floating around.

…’Course you gotta go in there and check to be sure…

“—you’ve got to break it.”

In the sanctum, Jim Moore extended his arm. Too late, Ofoegbu rushed to intervene. A bright little figurine sprang into existence on the palm of Moore’s hand, a hologram, an offering in the shape of a man.

“This is my son.” Moore’s voice carried soft and clear along the channel. “Do you know him?”

Portia’s interface imploded and disappeared.

Holy shit holy shit— “Holy shit holy shit holy—” That was Sengupta beside him, locked in a loop, synced with another voice in Brüks’s own head. “Shut up,” Brüks said; amazingly, both obeyed.

Moore’s hand didn’t move. The offering on its palm glowed steadily. Portia lay silent on its shrine while every sapient being within a hundred million kilometers held its breath.

After an endless moment, a single bright eye opened in the middle of that surface. Light spilled from its pupil, fountained swirling across some canvas of melanin and magnetite, settled finally into an image with arms and legs. Siri Keeton looked back at himself, arms spread just slightly at his sides, palms out.

Brüks leaned forward. “Another mirror image.”

Sengupta clicked and ticked and shook her head. “Not a mirror look at the hand the right hand.” She zoomed the feed to make it easy: a ragged line there, from the heel of the palm right up to the webbing between the index and ring fingers. As if something had torn Keeton’s hand apart, right down to the wrist, and glued it back together.

Brüks glanced at Sengupta, trying to remember: “That’s not on Jim’s—”

“Of course not that’s the whole fucking point isn’t—”

A sudden strangled sound from somewhere in the network: Bicameral sounds, a host of complex harmonics that probably held volumes. All Brüks could decipher there was surprise: over at 27E—EXT. CORRIDOR. Eulali was charging up the passageway at full speed. Amina floated transfixed, staring straight at the camera—no, not at the camera. At that telltale shard floating in front of it.

Everywhere, suddenly: pandemonium.

The helmet feeds at the shrine were all in frantic motion, swinging like drunken pendulums and sweeping the scenery too fast to make out whatever had scared them. Off down 27E Eulali bounced off a bulkhead (Wait a second; had there even been a bulkhead there a moment ago?) and retreated back toward Amina; another instant and both were gone from third-person view, lost but for the frantic blurry sweep of their suit cams. Sengupta grabbed AUX/RECOMP and spread it front and center across the dome, a top-down view of the shrine and its resident deity and its misbegotten acolytes caroming off solid metal where an open hatchway had gaped only a few moments before. Portia lay quiet as clay along condenser, its subtle mutilation of Siri Keeton glowing soft and steady as a child’s nightlight: the oily gray tentacle that lashed out toward Chinedum Ofoegbu sprouted from the far bulkhead, and Moore barely had time to push the monk out of the way.

All in those final furious moments before the feeds went dark.

Sengupta gibbered faintly to port. Brüks barely heard her. I know what that is, he thought as those last seconds played over in his head. I’ve seen these before, I’ve used these before, I know exactly what this is…

Magnetite and chromatophores and crypsis. Cages broken and painstakingly rebuilt. Footprints wiped clean, disturbing alien smells erased, sensors and samplers carefully planted and natural habitat reconstructed along all axes.

This is a sampling transect.

He yanked the quick-release buckle on his harness, floated free. “We’ve got to get them out.”

Sengupta shook her head so hard Brüks thought it might come off. “No fucking way no fucking way we gotta get outta here—”

He spun above the mirrorball, grabbed her by the shoulders—

—“Don’t fucking touch me!”—

—let her go but kept close, face-to-face, mere centimeters between them though she squirmed and turned her face away: “It doesn’t know we’re here do you understand? You said it yourself, too dumb to track the camera too dumb to know we’re here, they never let us onto Icarus so it’s never seen us. We can take it by surprise—”

“Roach logic that’s stupid that doesn’t mean anything man we gotta leave—”

“Don’t leave. Do you hear me? Stay here if you want but don’t you fucking leave until I get back. Boot up the engines if the damn things even work yet, but stay put.”

She shook her head. An arc of spittle spread from her lips and fanned through the air. “What are you gonna do huh they’re ten times smarter than you and they never even saw it coming—”

Good question. “In some ways, Rakshi. They’re ten times dumber in others. They know all about quarks and amplituhedrons but they didn’t get nailed by a piece of quantum foam, do you understand? They got nailed by a goddamned field biologist. And that’s a game I know inside out.”

He cupped her head in his hands and kissed her on the crown—

—“Don’t leave.”—

—and leapt into the attic.

He shot through the rafters like a pinball, bouncing from strut to handhold, knocking aside straps and buckles and glistening blobs of oily water that splattered on contact. Brüks the baseline. Brüks the roach. Give it up, Danny-boy: don’t even try to think, you’ll only embarrass yourself in front of the grown-ups. Just nod and swallow what they feed you. Keep your mouth shut when Sengupta brushes off a discrepancy of a few millimeters as insignificant thermal expansion. Play it safe when Moore points out that Portia, wonder of wonders, grows; point to a puddle of candle wax on the machinery and dismiss it with a shrug. Don’t bother wondering whether the infiltration really stopped at such an obvious border. Forget that Portia computes and pattern-matches, forget its capacity to build mosaics of such intricate resolution that no meatball eye could tell the difference between a naked bulkhead and one sheathed in the thinnest layer of thinking plastic. Don’t let the results of your own half-assed research point you to the obvious: that Portia might coat everything like an invisible intelligent skin, that it’s there between whenever anyone boots up an interface or turns on the goddamn lights: watching everything we do, feeling every sequence our fingers tap against the panels. Just sit back and smile as the adults blunder innocently into an alien cage painted inside the man-made one.

And when the traps snaps shut and all those pieces come together you can comfort yourself that the grown-ups didn’t see it either, that these brain-damaged groupthink Bicamerals aren’t so smart after all. You can die smug and vindicated with the best of them in a mass grave swinging around the sun.

The lamprey gaped ahead and to port, highlighting edges and angles in blue pastel. Three empty spacesuits floated in their alcoves. Brüks considered and dismissed them in an instant: by the time he wriggled into one of those things, everyone on Icarus might be pickled in whatever Portia used for formalin. Up past the ’lock, though, encircling the forward reaches of the docking bay: an array of tools sufficient to cut a ship in two and build it back again.

Portia could obviously lock its molecules into something like armor: Ofoegbu was not a small man and yet the slime mold—stretched thin across the hatch, drawn tight in seconds—had bounced him back into the compartment without even bending. But Brüks had seen this fucker from the inside, close up. He’d seen the pieces that let Portia talk, and think, and blend in; he had a least a rough idea of how those parts were structured and what they were made of.

He was pretty sure they couldn’t all be fireproof.

He yanked a welding laser from its mount and pulled himself aft, flipping off the safety and wrapping the tether around his wrist as he moved. An electric insect whined faintly up toward the ultrasonic as the capacitors charged.

Down the lamprey’s throat: a glowing semiflexible trachea, reinforced by skeletal hoops at three-meter intervals. Soft padded striations extending the length of the passageway, the ligaments and muscles that moved the tunnel during docking. A biosteel frame hove into view around the curve, a massive square hatch embedded within: Icarus’s main airlock, sealed and solid as a mountain, reassuringly industrial after all this squishy biotecture.

Pressed into the alloy off to the side, a handle nested within a crimson dimple. Brüks grabbed it, braced himself with one foot to either side; turned; pulled. The dimple turned green around his fist. The airlock sighed open. He grabbed its edge, swung it back, ignored the yellow flashing of nervous smart paint warning against DUAL HATCH DISCONNECT: stared through an open inner hatch into the labyrinth beyond.

Enemy territory. He had no way of knowing how far it extended. Maybe Portia was looking back at him now.

He hefted the welder and pushed off.

No animatics to guide him. No convenient schematics rotating in his head, no bright icon to pinpoint his location. He remembered the way from a dozen suit feeds, from his own solitary voyeurism. He didn’t know how useful those memories might be. Maybe they were as reliable as any roach’s. Maybe the very architecture had changed.

Gross anatomy would get him to the sanctum: down the longitudinal notochord, right fork past the LEAR hoop, turn right again under the coolant nexus. If he was lucky, someone would be making sounds to guide him the rest of the way.

Should’ve grabbed a helmet, he thought, looking backward with perfect clarity. Should’ve brought something with a comm link. An extra laser or two for Jim and the boys.

Shit shit shit.

Sounds ahead, sounds to starboard, sounds behind: a glimpse of motion from the corner of his eye as he sailed past some side tunnel that had never made it onto his mental map. He grabbed at a passing rib; the laser sailed on, yanked him forward by the wrist, pulled him off balance and sent him tumbling into the bulkhead. His head cracked painfully against a strut; the laser, jerking at the end of its strap, recoiled through weightless space and punched him in the chest.

Shouts from behind. A small chorus of wordless, panicky voices. An almost electrical slithering sound.

Brüks cursed and launched himself back the way he’d come. The forgotten passageway slid toward him; he braked, grabbed, swung around the corner—

—and nearly ran headlong into a wall congealing before him like a membrane of living clay.

In the time it took him to stop and gibber to himself—

—I almost touched it I almost touched it It almost got me—

—the membrane had transmuted to biosteel, rigid and impenetrable and almost thick enough to muffle the sounds of carnage on the other side.

Not biosteel, Brüks reminded himself. Not impenetrable.

Not fireproof.

He brought up the welder.

No. Not fireproof at all.

Portia squirmed where the beam hit, curled and blackened and iridesced like an oil slick. Brüks kept the focus tight, the beam as steady as free fall and nerves could keep it. It burned through, opened a hole that dilated like an eye: stretched elastic tissue split apart, recoiling from the hit. The beam weaved briefly, scoring inert metal on the other side, barely missing one of the figures beyond before Brüks’s killed the circuit.

And stopped, blinking.

Taken in during that endless, frozen moment: a tunnel with no deck and no ceiling, its walls buried behind an infestation of pipes and conduits, capped by a T-junction ten meters in. Five spacesuited figures, helmets open, halfway down that length. At least one shattered visor: a cloud of coppery crystal shards following their own small trajectories, some polished as new mirrors, others stained and splattered by a band of crimson mist that arced from a small silvered body turning in midair. Brüks knew who it was even before the face came into view, even before he saw those sightless eyes staring bone-white from a black mask.

Lianna.

The others moved under their own power. Amina, making desperately for the faint hope Brüks had just opened before her. Evans, flailing through the carnage in search of a handhold or a brace point, finding only the rag-doll embrace of a corpse entangled in passing. Azagba, the legless zombie: lashing out quick as a striking snake, spinning Amina around by the shoulder, driving the straightened fingers of one bladed hand pistonlike into her open helmet and turning her off in an instant. Another of Valerie’s zombies bounding forward like something arboreal, reaching out after Evans to do the same.

Brüks fired the torch. The zombie saw it coming and twisted like an eel but she was trapped in midair, purely ballistic, wed to inertia for just that instant too long. The beam bounced briefly off her silver abdomen, flash-burned a slash of cauterized charcoal across her exposed face. Amazingly she stayed on target: burned and half blind, one eye boiled and burst in its socket she lashed out and crushed Evan’s throat in passing, bounced off metal viscera, grabbed the nearest handhold without even looking.

Portia was there, too. It felt the clasp and returned it, wrapped glistening waxy pseudopods around that hand faster than even zombie reflexes could respond. Wisps of white vapor swirled at the seams where suit and slime fused together. The trapped zombie looked down with one dead dancing eye; but when she raised her head again there was something else in that face.

“Jesus,” she breathed. She doubled over in a great wracking cough, hand embedded in the wall; blood and spittle swirled around her face. “What am I—oh God, what’s—”

The light faded in her eye; the tics and stutters that reasserted themselves seemed dead even by zombie standards, the twitch of dying cells released on their own recognizance.

Jim would know your name, Brüks thought.

Something moved past her shoulder, past the drifting bodies, way down at the T-junction: behind the crack in the closet door, down in the space beneath the bed. Another glint of silver, moving with silent purpose: another figure, rounding the corner.

Valerie.

For a moment they stared at each other across a litter of corpses: predator with a look of distracted curiosity, prey because he simply couldn’t look away. Brüks didn’t know how long the moment lasted; it might have gone on forever if Valerie hadn’t lowered her faceplate. Maybe that was an act of mercy, the breaking of a headlight paralysis that would have kept him frozen right up until she tore him limb from limb. Maybe she just wanted to give him a sporting chance.

Brüks turned and fled.

Coolant clusters. Service tunnels. Sealed hatches leading to far-off places he’d never explored or long-since forgotten. He passed them unseeing, let instinct steer the meat while his global workspace filled with predator models and pants-pissing terror. He was passing a tertiary heat sink and he could see Valerie closing through the back of his head; he was at the Cache Hatch and he could see her lips drawn back in that gleaming predatory grin; he was fleeing up the notochord and he could feel her muscles bunching for the final killing blow.

In the lamprey now: No time to stop, no chance to bar the way, you even think about dogging that hatch and she’ll be on you before you even turn around. Don’t look back. Just keep running. Don’t think about where, don’t think about when: thirty seconds is a lifetime, two minutes is the far future, it’s the moment that matters, it’s now that’s trying to kill you. A voice ahead, as panicky as the one inside, echoing down the throat and getting louder: all shit shit shit and docking clamps and numbers going backward—but Don’t worry about that either, that’s for later, that’s for ten seconds from now if you’re still alive and—

The Crown.

End of line. Nowhere else to go, no more time to buy. All the future you have, right now.

Nothing left to lose.

Brüks turned and stared back down the throat; Valerie stood there, casually braced against the lip of Icarus’s inner hatch, looking up through the mirrored cyclops eye of her helmet. She might have been standing there for hours, just waiting for him to turn around and notice her.

Now that he had, she leapt.

He brought up the laser and snarled. Valerie sailed toward him; Brüks could have sworn she was laughing. He fired. The beam scattered off the reflective thermacele of the vampire’s spacesuit, shattered into a myriad emerald splinters bright as the sun. They scorched split-second tracks on random surfaces before Valerie darted out of the way.

Brüks lunged for the hatch controls, grabbed the lever, fumbled. The Crown clenched her front door a fraction, relaxed it again. Valerie closed for the kill, arms outspread. Somehow he could hear her: a mere whisper, impossibly audible even over Sengupta’s panicked chanting on comm. A voice as clear as if she were murmuring at his shoulder, as if she were right inside his head:

I want you to imagine something: Christ on the cross…

Electricity sang, deep down in his bones. Synapses snapped like blown circuits. Brüks’s flesh hummed like a tuning fork, every muscle thrown instantly into tetanus. Wet warmth bloomed at his crotch. He couldn’t move, couldn’t blink, could barely even breathe. Some distant part of him worried briefly about that last fact, then realized that it probably didn’t matter. Valerie was bound to kill him long before he had a chance to suffocate.

In fact here she came now, reaching out—

—and careening away, struck from behind. Jim Moore loomed up in her stead, his face utterly reptilian, eyes dancing frantic little jigs in the dark cavern of his open helmet. He pushed Brüks into the bay, slammed the airlock shut behind them both; his fist came down on Brüks’s chest not quite hard enough to crack the sternum through the suit. Something broke in there, though; something unlocked, and Brüks was sucking back great tidal washes of recycled air. By the time he stopped gasping Moore had webbed him into an empty alcove for safekeeping, an occupied suit next to empty ones.

There were plenty of those.

The Crown was a symphony orchestra, warming up: the creak and groan of stressed metal, the distant cough of awakening engines, the random percussion of buckles clanking against bulkheads pushed into grudging motion. Sengupta’s vocals, crackling out panicked numbers. A rogue droplet of oil floated in place while the ship shifted around it, splashed against Brüks’s cheek with a whiff of benzene.

From somewhere very far away, the roar of an ocean.

Moore’s hands brought up an interface on the bulkhead. His fingers played those controls with inhuman precision. A window opened to one side, an exterior feed rendered in smart paint: a smear of ragged blue light lashing back and forth, the lamprey torn free and recoiling into some distant burrow. A play of stars and shadow and knife-edged geometries blocking out the heavens. Dim red constellations flashed along wire-frame gantries: cliffs of black alloy stretched far and wide to their own horizons.

Valerie’s helmet, blocking the view. Fists pounding against the hull, any possible sound drowned out by the vibration of the engines. Sunrise, sudden and scalding: the whole universe burst into flame as the Crown of Thorns lumbered out of eclipse. Somewhere Sengupta was cursing; somewhere else, thrusters fired. For one brief instant Valerie was a black writhing shadow against a blinding sky: then burst into flame an instant before the pickup fried.

Moore’s fingers never stopped dancing.

It took endless seconds for the backup camera to kick in. By the time it did they were back in hiding, huddled in Icarus’s shadow, the starless black silhouette of the radiator spire sliding past to port. A gentle hand began to nudge Brüks down against the bottom of the alcove, mass-times-acceleration pulling him out against the webbing. The dim zodiac of the array’s streetlights receded slowly to stern—but other lights ignited back there as he watched, a pentagon of hot blue novae flaring silently in the darkness. It was only then that another silence registered: Moore had stopped talking to the wall, stilled the machine-gun staccato of his fingers against metal. Brüks could barely make out a fuzzy shape at the edge of vision; it took a Herculean effort to move his eyes even a fraction of a degree, to bring the Colonel into focus. He never did succeed completely. But he squeezed enough from his peripheral vision to see the old warrior standing still as stone against the deck, one hand half-raised to his face. He thought he heard a soft intake of breath caught halfway, and decided to call it the sound of a returning soul.

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

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

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

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

Probably that everything was going according to plan.