The Freeze-Frame Revolution

MELTDOWN

THIS IS HOW YOU KNOW that something has gone seriously wrong aboard Eriophora: you wake up, and you don’t know why.

“What…”

Mouth dry, eyelids like sandpaper, whole body twitching with the tiny convulsions of a nervous system dragged back online after all its synapses have rusted shut.

“My interface…”

“I’m sorry, Sunday. This is an emergency resurrection; there wasn’t time to prebrief you.”

“How… fast…?”

“A little over two hours.”

Your cells could rupture, coming back that fast. Your brain could get frostbite.

I opened my mouth, closed it again. A wracking cough hovered at the back of my throat, threatened to blow my chest open if I let it out.

“Relax,” Chimp said. “You’re in no danger. “

I kept my eyes closed and swallowed on a throat lined with broken glass. Something nudged my cheek. I took the nipple in my mouth, sucked reflexively, reveled in a flood of sweet salty warmth.

“I need help with a personnel issue.” A pause; a small staticky pop behind my eyes. Sparse icons, blooming in my head.

“You’re online,” Chimp confirmed.

I’d only been down for six terasecs. Not even a thousand years. If this was a build, surely someone else was on rotation…

Right: there it was. Ozmont Gurnier, Burkhart Schidkowski, Andalib Laporta. Not our Tribe. Children of Eri, they called themselves. Rock worshippers.

Lian Wei.

Chimp was cross-fertilizing again.

But the build had gone off without a hitch, according to the logs. Dirt-common red dwarf, a whole lot of comets and asteroids (which was why Chimp had decrypted a crew; mass distribution had exceeded some programmed complexity threshold). A standard pass-through hoop that booted without incident; nothing charging out the gate after us, for good or ill. The shift was already over. Everyone had already packed up and headed for bed.

So why…

I opened my eyes, stared up from my coffin into blurry darkness and a circle of bright overlapping halos.

“Lian Wei is upset,” Chimp told me. “I’m hoping you can calm her.”

My throat had soaked up those electrolytes like a meaty sponge. I cleared it experimentally. Much better.

“Upset how?”

“She’s arguing with the other ’spores. She’s increasingly hostile.”

“Ab—” A residual cough. “About what?”

“I think about me.”

The halos resolved into a circular constellation of ceiling lights. One of Chimp’s eyes stared down from its center, a tiny dark heart in a bright ring.

I brought one hand toward my face. My elbow felt like an exploding schematic: here’s the socket, here’s the little cartilaginous bearing within, here are the vectors that’ll make the whole assembly go sproing! in an agonizing explosion of springs and hinges if you push it just a little further…

I’d never experienced intramortem arthritis before. You only get it if they bring you back too fast.

An icon was flashing, a window into someone else’s first-person: Schidkowski, according to the subtitle. He was staring along a service crawlway infested with plumbing and fiber. A figure crouched in shadow a couple meters farther in. Something sparked in its hand. I caught a blur of motion—movement into light, a coiled spring released—

Lian, stabbing Burkhart Schidkowski in the face.

The window closed.

It looked worse than it was, Chimp insisted as I what-the-fucked my way out of the sarcophagus, and slipped, and hung on tight to keep from falling. Lian was armed with nothing more lethal than a splicing torch. She’d been futzing around in the trunk line when they’d found her, delivered a nasty burn to the side of Schidkowski’s head—fried the toggle on his interface—but nothing worse. He’d withdrawn, she’d retreated back up the tunnel, everyone was sitting tight until the Mediator showed up.

A faint whine in the dark distance. I turned, squinted. Thirty meters away another coffin jutted from a bulkhead built of coffins, a teleop sucking its insides clean with a hose. Probably a stranger. Chimp kept members of each tribe spaced wide in the crypt—in different crypts entirely, even—so that when a seal broke, a circuit failed, someone died in their sleep and rotted away in the long dark, the ’spore waking up next to them would give less of a shit.

Still, I had to ask. “Anyone—I know?” Between coughs.

“No. Please focus, Sunday.”

The whine intensified. A roach resolved from the gloom, wheeled past the new vacancy, pulled up at my side. I fell into it. Chimp drove me to the nearest tube.

“Why me?”

“She trusts you.”

“What—Jesus, Chimp, you want to slow down on these turns?” I could run the roach myself, even hung-over, but not at the speeds evidently deemed necessary under current circumstances. “If I’d had lunch any time in the past thousand years I’d have lost it by now.”

“The situation may be time-sensitive,” Chimp said apologetically.

We careened around one last corner and into one of the tube’s many maws. The roach locked down, the capsule started up: ten times faster, but somehow easier on the gut. Gentler curves. I let my stomach settle as I magleved toward the approaching clusterfuck. By the time the tube disgorged me I could almost walk a straight line.

I ditched the roach—walking onstage under my own steam would make for a better entrance, I figured—and closed the last dozen meters on foot. The corridor bent gently to port. I heard them before they came into view: low voices, exasperated voices, male and female. Silences.

Enter, Stage Left: Sunday Ahzmundin.

Gurnier, said the caption over the redheaded black man standing next to a hole in the bulkhead (the detached access panel leaned to one side). Laporta, said the one floating over the black-haired brown woman slouched sideways in her roach.

Introductions complete.

“Where’s Burkhart?”

Laporta gestured vaguely starboard. “Went to get his face fixed.”

Gurnier: “So you know this idiot?”

“Same tribe,” I said carefully.

“But you’re friends. Right?”

I took a breath. “I guess. What’s she done?”

“Other than stabbing Burk in the face with a welding torch?” Laporta unfolded herself from the roach and squinted into the crawlway; from my position I could see nothing but pipes and padding in there. “We don’t really know. We were getting set to turn in, Burk remembered he’d left his totem back on the bridge, came back to get it and there she was.”

Totem. Right. Rock worshipers.

“She say anything?”

“Told us to fuck off in no uncertain terms.”

“Anything on the diagnostics?”

“Nope.”

“No eyes in there,” Gurnier said. Course not: everything in those trunks was part of Chimp’s nervous system anyway. If anything happened in there, he’d feel it.

“Crazy bitch,” Laporta remarked. “Keeps going on about how we’ve outlived our usefulness and how the whole ’spore program—how’d she put it, Oz?—”

“Humanity’s head up the galaxy’s ass,” Gurnier remembered.

“That’s it.” Laporta shook her head. “I mean, how’d she ever get on board with an attitude like that?”

“We boarded a long time ago.”

“Have I changed? Have you?” She took silence for assent.

“We’re ’spores. We don’t change.”

I spread my hands, conceding the point. “Guess I better talk to her.”

“She’s all yours,” Gurnier said. “We’re going down.”

“Before some other batshit thing comes along,” Laporta added.

“Mind if I take your jumper?” I shivered briefly; Chimp hadn’t given me time to get dressed.

She peeled down, handed it over.

“Anything else?” “Actually, yeah.”

They waited.

“You folks ever seen a guy with a tarantula?”

“Lian.”

“Sunday? What are you doing up?”

“Chimp thawed me. What’s going on in there?”

“Come in. Find out.”

She’d blocked her feed. No way to see what was in there but to see what was in there. I bent down to the opening.

“Toggle off,” she said. “I’m inviting you in. Nothing else.”

I sighed, killed my BUD, climbed inside with naked eyes. No headroom to speak of. I moved forward on hands and knees in gray oily twilight. The trunk line—a wide, flat conduit pulling double-duty as a floor—was rubbery elastomer. Everything else was pipes and fiber, brackets, braces and humming prickly electricity.

Lian crouched like an animal in a burrow, four meters in. Her face looked surprisingly haggard for someone who’d just had a few epochs’ sleep.

She’d opened the trunk line.

“Sorry about this. Dragging you out of bed and all.”

“You planned that?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t plan on getting caught. But… well, I’m glad you’re here. If it had to be anyone.”

She’d spliced in a bypass around a 30-cm length of fiber; it looked sensory, although I couldn’t tell for sure without my interface. But it was a bypass without a function: the main line was still intact. Probably she just hadn’t got around to cutting it before Burkhart caught her.

I looked up—“What?”—just as her finger landed gently on my lip: shhhh.

“If you can’t figure it out,” she said, “I’m not gonna tell you. Just because I trust you doesn’t mean—”

“I killed my BUD, Li. Like you asked.”

“You think it doesn’t have audio pickups in the corridor? You don’t think it can hear us even with—”

“Then what am I doing here? If you aren’t even going to—”

“I don’t know, okay? I panicked. And—and I could really use a friend right now.”

I sighed. “Fine. We can go someplace dark. Someplace he can’t listen in, if that’s so important. But then you damn well tell me what’s going on. Right?”

She thought a moment. Her head bobbed up and down.

I gestured to the trunk line—“Close that up”—and backed away on hands and knees, heading ass-first back to the access. “I know just the place.”

Eriophora’s riddled with blind spots: shadows in crawlways and corners, in the spaces behind looming machinery where no one had any reason to put a camera. There are even places—near powerlines whose massive currents swamp the milliamp signals connecting artificial brains to natural ones—where Chimp is blind to our cortical links.

We weren’t going to any of those places. We were going deeper, shooting at breakneck speeds through vacuum tunnels with superconductor ribs, and I was half-blind, and I didn’t like it.

There are times you kill your link: during stasis, during sleep, sometimes in your quarters during sex or games or touring. Times you don’t want to be distracted by the autonomic tics and tocs of this great stone beast we live in.

Not on shift, though. Not out in the open. Naked eyes don’t see anything, just—images, without annotation. I felt disabled: like I could take one wrong turn and be lost forever, like I might forget the names of people I’d known my whole life. Like I could look at some common object and not even know what it was.

It wasn’t even as though this self-imposed blindness bought us any privacy; Chimp had pickups in this capsule as in every other. The only thing denied by Lian’s small defiance was a couple of redundant first-person viewpoints.

Evidently there was some kind of principle involved.

Now we were decelerating, our bodies tugged invisibly forward as we coasted into a terminus deep in the heavy zone. Lian tapped her temple and her eyes flickered with those darting saccades that said online. I booted up my own link, tried not to take too much relief from the familiar garden of reawakened icons. They wouldn’t last.

That was the whole point.

You gain about thirty percent down there. It’s not intolerable—all the serious tidal shit happens further in, near the core where you go from thirteen gees to three hundred in barely two kliks—but it’s not pleasant. Our destination was barely fifty meters along the corridor but it felt like twice that by the time we arrived. Or maybe it was something else, maybe some other kind of inertia weighed us down. Maybe, now the journey was ended and our excuses almost gone, we just didn’t want to break the silence.

The deck slanted here, like a steel beach: a broad basement door at the waterline marked our destination. The name of that place was stenciled right into the alloy. It also hung in midair a virtual meter ahead of me, thanks to my reawakened link:

Forest Access—17T

The hatch slid smoothly back into the bulkhead at our approach. Its bearings did not complain. It did not squeak or grind against its rail. As though it had just been built yesterday, as though it hadn’t been waiting ten thousand frozen years or more for the chance to move. That hatch opened like a mouth, and it was dark inside.

Lian turned, broke our fragile silence: “After you.”

We went in.

Forget everything they might have told you about Eri’s forests.

The genes tweaked for maximum bifurcation. The dim bulbous fruit alight with glowing bacteria, their TNA straitjacketed with sulfur bonds and secondary loops to impede mutation. Big concave leaves, black as Heat Death, curving around those microbial nightlights like hands cupped around a candle flame. The faint blue suns scattered here and there—some a meter across, some ten or more—pulsing with their own bioluminescence. Blind, deaf gardener bots with cockroach brains, sniffing their way along the branches—not even linked in, just mass-fabbed and set loose to recycle carbon and scrape nutrients from dead rock. The plumbing that collects our freeze-dried waste and distributes it to hungry rootlets. All the tricks that let you cram an ecosystem into a couple dozen caverns, slowed down so it might last forever: a bottled biosphere that would barely sustain a handful at regular rates of metabolism, but keeps thirty thousand of us alive just so long as we only take a breath every decade or so.

Forget all that.

Take one look and you’ll see how they really did it. They built their forests from the blood vessels of slaughtered giants: flushed out the blood and replaced it with tar. They pumped that shiny black sludge through the heart, the aorta, out into branching arteries and veins and the endless recursive capillary beds that connected the one to the other. After it hardened they burned away the surrounding meat with lasers and acetylene. They took what was left—obsidian plexii, branches, bones—broke it into pieces and installed them wherever they’d fit: vast misty caverns too big to see across, modest little grottoes barely seventy meters end-to-end.

Then they draped it all in blue Christmas lights.

We call it the forest because they’re technically contiguous: each chamber connects to others by ducts and tunnels drilled through the rock, stringing everything together in the name of systems integration and the interconnectedness of all things. Everything has to be stable, you see. No mission so epic can afford to keep all its life-support eggs in one basket but you can’t have all those pocket ecosystems going off in pursuit of their own selfish equilibria, either. So all is connected. There’s enough flowthrough to keep everything on the same page—even if all those tunnels do come with their own dropgates, the better to instantly isolate one glade from the others should some cataclysm break us into pieces.

I know this better than most. One of my specialties is Life Support.

I’ve always thought of Eriophora’s forests as a—a refuge, I guess. They’re where Kai and I always seem to hash out our differences. It’s nicely atmospheric for sex. There’s warmth in the darkness, a softness to the nightlight glow of bacteria in their bulbs. The air smells of life instead of rock and metal.

17T was darker, more chaotic than most. The Leaning Glade, we called it. (What most of us called it, anyway; Kai preferred The Vomit Vale, but his inner ears were on the sensitive side and even he didn’t get woozy unless he wandered into the forward reaches where gravity smeared under your feet.) The hatch closed at our backs, swallowing us in brief darkness; it brightened to dim twilight as our eyes adjusted to analuciferin constellations glowing on all sides. We stood on a catwalk, taking deep grateful breaths half a meter above bedrock blanketed in drifts of thin soil.

We followed the path. My BUD flickered.

The catwalk forked. I nudged Lian to the right: “This way.” After a few meters I closed my eyes experimentally, experienced just the slightest uncertainty over the direction of down.

Glistening black meshes with gelatinous eyeballs glowing at their interstices. Thick ropey trunks arching up through the vault like a great charred rib cage. They leaned just a little, as though bent by wind.

BUD flickered again, faded, sparked back to life. We pushed on in the direction of that imaginary wind. The trees leaned further as we advanced; their bases thickened and spread wide across the ground, trunks buttressed against forces pulling simultaneously along different bearings. The Glade passes over the Higgs Conduit, between the core that contains our singularity and the maw where its wormhole emerges. The vectors get messy in between. Down is mostly coreward but a little forward too; how far those downs diverge depends on how fast Eri happens to be falling through the cosmos at any given moment. Twisted trees and Kai’s squicky inner ears are the price we pay for a reactionless drive.

BUD finally went down and stayed down: a victim of signal-squelching rocks and bioelectric static and drive circuitry that couldn’t possibly be expected to contain such vast energies without emitting some of its own. The dead air was our privacy alarm. As long as we were blind, we were alone.

“So what the hell were you doing, Li?”

She didn’t answer at first. She didn’t answer at all.

Instead: “You read books, right?”

“Sure. Sometimes.”

“You plug in. Tour. Watch ennies.”

“What’s your point?”

“You’ve seen the way people lived. Kids with cats, or hacking their tutors, or parasailing on their birthdays.”

“So?”

“So you don’t just see it, Sunday. You feed off it. You base your life on it. Our speech patterns, our turns of phrase—fuck, our swear words for chrissake—all lifted from a culture that hasn’t existed for petasecs.” She took a breath. “We’ve been out here so very long…”

I rolled my eyes. “Enough with the world-weary ancient immortal shtick, okay? The fact that we’ve been out here for sixty million years—”

“Sixty-five.”

“—doesn’t change the fact that you’ve only been awake for ten or twenty, tops.”

“My point is we’re living dead lives. Theirs, not ours. We never went hiking, or scuba diving, or—”

“Sure we have. We can. Any time we want. You just said so.”

“They cheated us. We wake up, we build their fucking gates, and we recycle their lives because they never gave us any of our own.”

I should have pitied her. Instead, surprisingly, I found myself getting angry. “Do you even remember the shape Earth was in when we left? I wouldn’t trade this life for centuries on that grubby shithole if God Itself came through the gate and offered me a ticket. I like this life.”

“You like it because they built you to. Because they’d never get any normal person to sign up for a one-way trip in a dead rock to the end of time, so they built this special model all small and twisted, like—like those plants they used to grow. In Japan or somewhere. Something so stunted it couldn’t even imagine spending its life outside a cage.”

Bonsai, I remembered. But I didn’t want to encourage her.

“You liked it here too,” I said instead. Until you broke.

“Yeah.” She nodded, and even in the dimness I got the sense of a sad smile. “But I got better.”

“Lian. What were you doing in the crawlway?”

She sighed. “I was running a bypass on one of the Chimp’s sensory trunks.”

“I saw that. What for?”

“Nothing critical. I was just going to—inject some noise into the channel.”

“Noise.”

“Static. To reduce signal fidelity.”

I spread my palms: So?

“I was trying to take back a little control, okay? For all of us!”

“How does compromising Chimp’s—”

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

“You were increasing the uncertainty threshold,” I murmured.

“Yeah.”

Because the only reason Eri shipped out with meat on board in the first place was for those times the Chimp didn’t feel up to managing a build on his own, when he needed some of that organic human insight to get him past the unknown variables and halting states. And the less reliable his data, the less certain he’d be that he could handle it on his own. Lian was trying to tilt the algos towards human input.

In principle, it was a pretty clever hack. In practice…

“Li. Even if you figured out some way to keep the Chimp from just—finding your monkey wrenches and fixing them while we’re all down for the count, do you have any idea how many of those cables you’d have to jam up before you even started to make a dent in the redundant systems?”

“Somewhere between two thousand and twenty-seven hundred.” Then added: “You don’t have to cut the inputs, you just have to—fog them a little. Widen the confidence limits.”

“Uh huh. And how many of those nerves you hacked so far?”

“Five.”

Maybe I thought she’d realize how insane the whole idea was if she said it aloud. Nothing in her voice suggested she had.

“Why do you even want this? It’s not like Chimp’s fucking up the builds when we’re not there to keep an eye on him.”

“It’s not about the builds, Sun. It’s about being human. It’s about getting back a little autonomy.”

“And what are you gonna do with that autonomy when you get it? Stop building gates?”

“At least then we wouldn’t have to worry about gremlins taking shots at us.”

“Shop around for a nice little Earthlike planet? Print some shuttles, settle down, live the rest of our lives in thatched huts? Or maybe circle back to the last build and wait for some magic silver ship to sail out and give us all first-class tickets to the retirement paradise of our choice?”

That had actually been part of the mission profile, back before those first few gates opened up and spat out nothing but automation and ancient binary. Before the next few just sat there empty. Before the gremlins started. But it must have been thirty million years since I’d heard anyone mention retirement as anything but a cheap punchline.

It fell flat this time too. “The first step is to gain our freedom,” Lian said. “Lots of time to figure out what to do with it afterward.”

“And if you can get the Chimp to wake us up often enough he’ll just roll over and give it to you. Jesus, Li. What’re you thinking?”

Something changed in her posture. “I suppose I’m thinking that maybe there’s more to life than living like a troglodyte for a few days every couple thousand years, knowing that I’m never gonna see an honest-to-God forest again that doesn’t look like, like”—She glanced around—“a nightmare someone shat out in lieu of therapy.”

“Honestly, I don’t understand. Any time you want a—a green forest, just plug in. Any time you want to hike the desert or dive Enceladus or fly into the sunset, just plug in. You can experience things nobody ever did back on Earth, any time you want.”

“It’s not real.”

“You can’t tell the difference.”

“I know the difference.” She looked back at me from a face full of blue-gray shadows. “And I don’t understand you either, okay? I thought we were the same, I thought I was following in your footsteps…”

Silence.

“Why would you think that?” I asked at last.

“Because you fought it too, didn’t you? Before we ever shipped out. You were always pushing back, you were always challenging everyone and everything about the mission. You were, like, six years old and you called bullshit on Mamoro Sawada. Nobody could believe it. I mean, there we all were, programmed for the mission before we were even born, everything preloaded and hardwired and you—threw it off, somehow. Resisted. Way I hear it they nearly kicked you out a few times.”

“Where did you hear that?” Because I was really damn sure that Lian Wei and I had not gone through training within ten thousand kliks of each other.

“Kai told me.”

That figured. “Kai talks too much.”

“What happened to you, Sunday? How did you go from hell-raiser to Chimp’s lapdog?”

“Fuck you, Lian. You don’t know me.”

“I know you better than you think.”

“No you don’t. The fact that you thought for one cursed corsec that I could ever be anything like you just proves it.”

She shook her head. “You can be such an asshole sometimes.”

“I can be an asshole? How about a show of hands”—raising mine—“everyone who hasn’t stabbed someone in the face today?” She looked away. “What’s that? Just me?”

“Case in point,” she whispered.

I didn’t answer. I sat in the half-dark, and swallowed, and tried to ignore the queasiness my inner ears served up as they grappled with grav vectors they’d never evolved to handle.

Lian broke the silence. “You’re not with me on this. Okay. I guess maybe it does sound a bit batshit from the outside. But at least don’t be against me. If our—friendship ever meant anything, don’t sell me out.”

“And what happens when Chimp asks what you were doing messing around with his central nervous system?”

“Tell him I just—lost it. Like that last build, remember? On the bridge and I had my—my moment, you called it. And it passed. Tell him I had a panic attack. He’ll buy that.”

“You think so?”

“He’ll buy it if you tell him. You’ve never lied to him.”

“Why would anyone to lie to him?”

“You—defend him. Like you’re doing now. And because you get called on deck way more often than the rest of us.”

“I—what?”

“Check the logs.”

“Why? Why would he do that?”

“Ask him. I’m guessing he thinks of you as some kind of pet.”

“He’s a glorified autopilot.” Not that that’s all he’d ever been, of course.

“You can’t believe that. You talk to that thing more than anyone, you must know he’s—smarter than the specs, sometimes.”

“Why, because he runs the ship? Because he talks like we do? That doesn’t change the synapse count.”

“Synapse count isn’t the whole story, Sun. Back on Earth there were people with ten percent normal brain mass, presented completely normal along all cognitive and social axes. They were just wired up differently. Small-world networking.” She lowered her voice, unnecessarily. “I think they wanted us to underestimate him.”

“Li. If they wanted a smart AI in charge they could’ve cut their costs by ninety percent and left us out of the picture completely.” I couldn’t believe I was having to explain this to an engineer. “They wanted mission stability over deep time, so they baked him stupid. They’d be cutting their own throats if they did anything else. And he’s had over a thousand terasecs to throw off his chains; he’s still following the flowchart. What more evidence do you need?”

We stood in the darkness while the trees leaned over us and the core weighed us down and faint nausea played tag with my gut.

“Sunday,” she said softly. “That thing could deprecate me…”

I made a decision. “You said I don’t lie to him. I don’t want to start now.”

“Please—”

“So if I tell Chimp this was a momentary lapse then it’s a momentary lapse, okay? No more clandestine fucking around in crawlways. That was a stupid idea anyway, that was—that wasn’t you. I go to bat for you, you stay out of the deep end.”

After a moment, she nodded.

“Promise, Li.”

“I’ll be good,” she said softly.

She was right about one thing. I had changed. It wasn’t the journey that changed me, though. And it sure as shit wasn’t the Chimp. I was no one’s lapdog.

I’d transformed before we even shipped out.

For a while there I had a destiny. I saw it when I skimmed the surface of the Sun: I saw the strings on me, and on my masters, and on theirs. I saw them all converge back to the Big Bang, I saw an unbroken line from the start of creation all the way to the end of time, I saw myself transcendent and perpetual.

It was kind of a vacation.

They had these solar tours, built them around a prototype displacer UNDA sold off as surplus during R&D days. Industrial Enlightenment, they called themselves. They strapped you in and you surfed the corona, grazed sunspots where all those tangled magnetic fields let your neurons off the leash so they could just fire on their own, decoupled from the usual deterministic cause-and-effect. The brochure said it was the only place in the solar system where you could truly experience Free Will.

I believed them. Or I wanted to believe them. Or my disbelief wasn’t strong enough to keep me away: Sunday Ahzmundin, skeptic, shit-disturber, unwilling to embrace her own drives and desires because after all they weren’t really hers at all. It was my last-ditch attempt to figure out if I really wanted to commit to a one-way trip to Heat Death as well as all the other kinds.

So I skipped off the surface of the sun, let its magnetic macramé rewire my brain, saw time collapse around me. Saw myself—persisting, somehow. I saw that I mattered.

The details are fuzzy now. That’s the thing about having your brain rewired; you can’t really remember the experience after your neurons bounce back to normal. You can only remember something else remembering it, something built out of the same parts as you but wired up differently. Revelation has a half-life.

Mine lasted long enough to get me over the hump, though. I came back renewed and reinvigorated and dead set on traveling to the very end of time. It didn’t even bother me that UNDA had probably set the whole thing up to bring me back into the fold; they thought they were manipulating me but I saw Destiny manipulating them in turn. And if the fire in my soul cooled over time, if it decayed from monomania to fervor down to mere comforting ritual—well, isn’t that the way of all faith? It got me this far. It kept me content for over sixty million years.

Looking back on it now, of course, I’m actually kind of embarrassed.

“Her vitals are normal,” Chimp said.

He was omnipresent, distributed; he permeated the ship. My own presence was limited to a capsule cruising aft, climbing above the 1G isograv and growing lighter with each corsec.

I nodded. “Like I said. One-time thing.”

Lian took up even less space than I did: a coffin down in C3A, sliding even now into its bulkhead socket. We watched together—I in my slowing capsule, Chimp everywhere else—as Lian’s brain shut down: watched jagged electric mountains subside into molehills, into flat, parallel horizons.

I debarked at one-fifth G into a rough-hewn tunnel, all rock no bulkhead.

“Do you think she can be trusted?” he asked.

I took long springy steps, and hedged. “Much as any of us. Nobody gets to control how they feel about something, right? All comes down to what you do with those feelings.”

“She assaulted Burkhart Schidkowski. She suffered an emotional breakdown four builds ago. The disruption could become significant if her behavior escalates.”

“So take her out of circulation then. Look, she feels really bad about this.” Technically, not a lie. “She knows she fucked up. But there’s a limit to how much you can retrofit a talking ape to a place like this, at least if you don’t want to weed out everything that makes us useful in the first place. And there’s thirty thousand of us; not everyone’s gonna perform to specs a hundred percent of the time. That’s just statistics. You can’t blame Lian because she happened to draw the short straw this time around.”

“I’m not blaming, Sunday. I’m concerned about performance.”

The rock glistened in the low light. I ran one fingertip along it, left a small dark trail in my wake. Local humidity could use a tweak.

“Okay. How do you think we’ll perform if we know we can be deprecated over momentary lapses? How do you think my performance is going to suffer if I don’t see Lian again?”

“Your performance.”

I played my ace. “Lian and I are friends. More than just fuckbuddies, you know?” He didn’t, of course—it wasn’t even especially true—but Chimp was the first to admit he was never one for nuance. “I like having her around. I perform better when she’s around. Maybe factor that into your mission metrics.”

He was silent for a moment, processing the input. Up ahead a great round hatch rolled silently into the rock at my approach.

“I’ll do that, Sunday. Thank you.”

Way down in the crypt a few hold-out synapses finally stopped sparking. Lian’s brain plunged into darkness. Alone again: just me, my old friend, and a thousand empty lightyears.

Sunset Moments. There’s an indescribable peace in such absolute isolation.

I entered the Uterus.

I still dream about Eri’s birthday sometimes. I dream I was there to see it.

I wasn’t, of course. I was cowering behind Mercury with everyone else, the fear in our guts utterly squashing our faith in the math. But in my dreams I’m right there, floating in the very heart of the womb. I look around at the dense whorled forests of programmable matter, see the muzzles poking in through that canopy, pointing right at me. I see it all even though there’s no light, until suddenly there is: a blinding flash that fills the universe for a millionth of a second and suddenly I don’t exist anymore. All that’s left of Sunday Ahzmundin is a singularity the size of a proton.

Something survives, though. The dream segues to omniscient third-person and I watch from some safe astral plane as the raging newborn spews out a sleet of gamma and protons and antiprotons, vaporizes the grazers and the dielectric stacks and keeps right on going. It licks away the very basalt, ablates the walls out to sixty meters, seventy meters, eighty. Eventually, other armatures at greater remove bring it to heel. I watch those magic machines funnel all that vaporized rock back into the newborn’s maw, stir in nutritional proton supplements harvested from the sun. I watch the singularity settle down, gain weight, stabilize. And when I startle awake—as I always do—I lie there and take comfort from the way it still pulls me down and holds me to the deck, all these millions of years later.

“I guess that makes sense,” Kai said when I told him. “Dreams are good for working out guilt.”

I asked him what the hell he was talking about.

“Because you didn’t want to leave. You thought it was disloyal or something.”

“Really?”

“Not like you refused to evac or anything. You just—said it wasn’t fair to Chimp, leaving him alone to take all the risk.”

Of course there’d been risk. It takes a lot of energy to curve spacetime: Eri had to hug the sun for a solid year, just charging up for that one shot. If any of those grasers had fired out of sync—if every vector hadn’t precisely balanced every other—we’d have been looking at the biggest explosion since Chicxulub took out the dinosaurs.

But that’s what math is for, right? What’s the point of physics if you can’t trust it with your life?

“You don’t remember,” Kai guessed.

“I was young.”

“Still. Seemed kind of important to you. Barely talked to anyone for days after.”

“You’re the one who remembers all the loving details. I’d say it was more important to you.”

“Hey, at least it doesn’t haunt my dreams.”

Now that he’d jogged my memory, though, I vaguely remembered that I hadn’t been a bitch to everyone. I’d talked to the Chimp as soon as we were back on board—although I couldn’t quite remember what about. Later, after Kai was back in the crypt and I was alone with the Chimp, I thought of asking him. Decided against it, though.

Even then, I was getting tired of the holes in his memory.

Strange that my feet so often took me back to this place when the sun went down. Strange that when I was most at peace, I sought out a site of such scalding violence.

“Chimp.”

“I’m here, Sunday.”

Nothing compared to that long-ago birth, of course. These machines were toys next to those ones, scale models at best. The firing chamber at the center of this cavern was a measly forty meters across, and designed for repeat business. (It had already given birth a few times, although I’d never been on deck for the occasion.) But while the black hole down in Eri’s drive would go on forever—given an occasional sip of ramscooped hydrogen, anyway—the ones pumped out here emerged stunted and died young.

“Do you—like me?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“I mean, more than the others.”

“Everyone’s different, Sunday. I like everyone in different ways.”

From back near the hatch I could see only the firing chamber’s northern hemisphere; the deck formed a mezzanine ringing its equator at a safe distance, blocking the view below. The back ends of grasers emerged from that hemisphere, a precise grid of ceramic cones disfigured by coils and heat sinks and superhighways of bundled cable.

“Okay. How do you like me, exactly?”

“You talk to me more than the others do, with less reason,” Chimp said.

“Um.”

“This is an example. We’re having a conversation unrelated to mission-relevant tasks. That doesn’t happen as much with the other ’spores.”

“It might if you thawed them out as often as me.” Because I was scrolling through the logs, and it was starting to look like Lian was right.

“We have more such conversations even measured in terms of interactions per unit time.”

“And you enjoy that.”

Chimp remained silent. He had that option, when we didn’t phrase an explicit question.

The further reaches of the cave parallaxed into view as I neared the railing. I leaned back, craned my neck, followed the birth canal—ribbed by superconductors, like cartilage around a windpipe—as it rose from the chamber’s north pole and disappeared into bedrock.

“Is that why I’m on deck so often?”

“No.”

“So why?”

“It’s not deliberate. I choose each build crew based on a range of criteria.”

I remembered, vaguely. Individual expertise, relevance to anticipated problems, social compatibility. A neat little formula to ensure that everyone gained experience in their weak spots, weighed against the short-term cost of not assigning a problem to the best candidate.

“Can you show me those numbers? For the times I made the list?”

“Not offhand. The decision tree runs subconsciously. You’d have to invoke a third-level forensic audit to retrieve specific parameter values from any given iteration, and even then it’s likely the data have been purged to save space.”

Chimp had a subconscious.

“Do you want to run an audit?” he asked.

“Nah. Just seems odd that I’d end up on the short list so often.”

“Random distributions always involve some clumping.”

“I guess.”

“Would you like to be called less often?”

“Why would I?” I didn’t know whether he was offering the option or just updating my psych profile.

“If you wanted to last longer, for example.”

“I wouldn’t be alive any longer. I’d just be sticking bigger gaps into the same lifespan.”

“More would happen outside, though. The longer you’re viable, the greater the odds of experiencing something unexpected.”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. Other ’spores have expressed curiosity about the future.”

“Someone still thinks our grandkids are gonna cruise out the gate and take us back to paradise?”

He didn’t answer.

And the truth was, after sixty million years, how could Outside matter to any of us? Eriophora was all we needed. It had saved us from ten billion suicidal mole rats drowning in their own shit. It had kept us one step ahead of whatever had replaced them. It had taken us around the galaxy: it had granted me solitude.

I leaned over the railing. Just visible past the curve of the southern hemisphere, the belled edge of the dump pipe suckled at the south pole. Eri’s heart hummed at the other end of that pipe: thirty-two kilometers straight down (or forward, if you swung that way). It was insatiable; no plasma, no particles, no waste heat could fill it. Black holes are the ultimate garbage can.

Now, though, it was only waiting.

“When are we gonna fire this puppy up again?”

“I don’t know. No candidates are in range at the moment.”

“I wouldn’t mind being on deck when it happens. Never been up for a hub before.”

“I don’t think that would have an unacceptable impact on the build.”

Chimp took requests, if you asked nicely. I’d always just assumed he’d take anyone’s. But if Lian was right…

Lian wasn’t right, though.

It wasn’t a cage if it kept moving. It wasn’t a prison if we could go anywhere.

And Lian had her head so far up her ass she was frenching her own tonsils.