The Freeze-Frame Revolution

UNDERTOW

CHIMP BROUGHT ME BACK for a comet that crashed headlong into some planet just in time to confuse his biodistancing protocols with an explosion of aldehydes and amino acids.

He brought me back for a molecular nebula so dense you could see it with the naked eye—a filmy cataract over the stars—and so thick we had to slow our trajectory to keep from ablating Eri’s crust with the friction of our passage.

Once he brought me back with a completed gate already red-shifting to stern: a routine build undertaken without any need for human involvement, but which had begun manifesting—irregularities—following activation. As chance would have it Kai’s number came up on my dance card that time around; we fucked for old times’ sake before relocating to the starboard bridge, bodies drawn into each other’s orbits despite the liberating ramifications of networked telepresence. Privy to all Eri’s feeds piped directly into our skulls, still we chose to meet in physical space: to worship at the altar of a tac tank that had never been intended as more than backup. All of UNDA’s genetic sorcery hadn’t been able to undo two hundred million years of mammalian social impulses.

Although to be fair, I can’t think of a reason why they’d have bothered.

We stood there on the bridge, hand-in-hand, the image in the tank overlapping with its counterparts in our heads and gracing us with a jarring sort of double vision. The gate had booted uneventfully, our passage through the hoop jump-starting it onto the ever-growing daisy chain in our wake.

“Hey, at least nothing tried to eat us,” Kai said as logs replayed.

But less than an hour after parturition, the dwindling gate had started sprouting… well, tumors.

“What the hell?” I said.

Kai squinted, as though squeezing his eyeballs might somehow enhance the clarity of a feed inserted further upstream. “Barnacles?”

“Maybe upgrades.” I shrugged. “Overdue if you ask me. We’ve been churning out the same damn model since the day we left. About time they came up with a new one.” Just as long as it doesn’t give the gremlins a leg up…

“I dunno. They look more like some kind of parasite to me.”

We never did figure it out. We stayed up just long enough to ensure that whatever-it-was wasn’t interfering with normal gate operations (not that I knew what we’d do if it was—maybe the Chimp would circle us back to try again). Heading back to the crypt, though, I remembered:

“You told Lian about me.”

“I did?”

“My rebellious youth. Back on Earth.”

“Um, maybe.” Kai absently rubbed the bridge of his nose, where I’d broken it at the age of seven. “Wasn’t exactly a secret.”

“She kind of—internalized it. Thought it gave us this spiritual connection or something. There was this scene a few builds back, she was on loan to the Children of Eri. Went a bit wild. Chimp dragged me out of bed to deal with it.”

“Yeah. Heard about that.”

“So be careful what you tell her, okay? She took a bit of damage a while back, hasn’t been the—”

“Sunday—”

“I’m just saying—”

“Sunday.” He cupped my hands in his. “She’s dead, right?”

I didn’t speak for a moment.

“How?”

“EVA accident,” Kai said, but I’d already booted my BUD and started spelunking the logs. Four thaws back: one of Chimp’s teleops finds some exposed plumbing out on the surface, running along the wound inflicted by Lian’s gremlin. The weapon took out most of the overlying rock; blueshift has ablated the rest. It’s routine and noncritical—an easy band-aid job—but Lian insists on checking it out herself. I don’t know why. Maybe she thinks she’s facing her fears, or some such shit. Jumps to the head of the line and suits up.

Nobody sees it happen. She’s down in the scar, out of Chimp’s line-of-sight. The usual teleop accompanies her but they’re both focused on the substrate, torching bedrock down to soft plastic that can be layered across the tiny wound within the larger one. Black-box telemetry’s the only thing that makes it into the record: a temperature spike, a catastrophic pressure drop. A heartbeat leaping all over the y-axis before the channel goes dark. Surface cams pick her up as she crests the edge of the scar and falls away but all they see is a suit of armor, limp as bones. Blueshift kills her momentum in an instant; Eriophora falls ever forward and Lian Wei vanishes into the past.

Three thousand years ago.

“Fuck,” I whispered.

“Some kind of accident.” Kai closed his mouth, opened it, hesitated. “That’s what Chimp says, anyway.”

“What, you don’t believe him?”

He shook his head, and didn’t look at me. “I think he’s just trying to keep up morale.

“I think she did it to herself.”

Or maybe I did.

She cracked at Monocerus and I told her to get over it. She watched as some gremlin came within a hairsbreadth of wiping us out of existence and I said it doesn’t change anything. I was there when her back was against the wall, called back from the dead because she trusts you and I told her she was crazy. I thought we were the same, she said, I was following in your footsteps and I told her to fuck off but she was right, I fought back, I lashed out just like she did and with less reason, didn’t even know what I was fighting against but that didn’t stop me and one time I even tried killing myself and—and—

And Lian was better at that than I was, apparently.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It was too soon,” Chimp said. “It’s less traumatic to learn of a friend’s death if you haven’t seen them for a while.”

“Three thousand years isn’t long enough?”

A moment’s silence. “Was that a joke?”

I realized it had been. A bad one. “What is long enough?”

“Two subjective years of separation.”

“The tribe’s lost people before. You never waited that long to tell me.”

“You were closer to Lian than most.”

“We weren’t that close.” Not a contradiction, I realized. “Look, you were protecting my feelings. I get that. But you gotta tell me these things, soon as I thaw.”

“Okay, Sunday.”

“I’m serious. Don’t just say you will to protect morale. Do it.”

“Okay.

“My condolences,” he added after a moment. “Lian Wei was a good person.”

“That she was.” I shook my head. “Shitty ’spore, though.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You saw how she was, last few terasecs. Unhappy. Damaged.” I remembered that Child of Eri, the words she spoke. “Laporta was right. She never belonged out here. I don’t know how she even made the cut.”

I was having trouble swallowing, for some reason.

“It’s okay to cry, Sunday.”

“What?” I blinked. My vision wobbled. “Where the fuck did that come from?”

“Maybe you were closer to Lian than you realized. It’s natural to feel grief at the loss of a friend. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“What, you’re moonlighting as some kind of therapist now?” I hadn’t even realized he was smart enough to do that. Maybe I just hadn’t tripped the subroutine before.

“I don’t have to be a therapist to see that this is affecting you more than you expected. Maybe more than you even—”

“Chimp, give it a rest. You do a great job running the ship, but I don’t know what idiot committee thought we’d want to cry on your shoulder as part of the deal.”

“I’m sorry, Sunday. I didn’t mean to be intrusive. I thought we were just having one of our talks.”

“We were.” I shook my head. “But I don’t need a flowchart to tell me when I’m allowed to fucking cry, okay?”

He didn’t answer for a moment. Even at the time I wondered a bit about that; it’s not like his answer required a whole lot of computation.

“Okay,” he said at last.

I do cry now and then, in case you’re wondering.

I even cried for the Chimp once.

I was there for his birth, years before we ever shipped out. I saw the lights come on, listened as he found his voice, watched him learn to tell Sunday from Kai from Ishmael. He was such a fast learner, such an eager one; back then, barely out of my own accelerated adolescence and not yet bound for the stars, I felt sure he’d streak straight into godhood while we stood mired in flesh and blood.

He seemed so happy: devoured every benchmark, met every challenge, anticipated each new one with a kind of hardwired enthusiasm I could only describe as voracious. Once, rounding a corner into some rough-hewn catacomb, I came upon a torrent of bots swirling in perfect complex formation: a school of silvered fish in the center of Eri’s newly seeded forest. The shapes I glimpsed there still make my head hurt, when I think about them.

“Yeah, we’re not quite sure what that is,” one of the gearheads said when I asked hir. “He does it sometimes.”

“He’s dancing,” I said.

Se regarded me with something like pity. “More likely just twiddling his thumbs. Running some motor diagnostic that kicks in when there’s a few cycles to spare.” Se raised an eyebrow. “Why don’t you ask him?”

Somehow, though, I never got around to it.

I’d hike to the caverns during down time, watch him dance as the forest went in: theorems and fractal symphonies playing out against fissured basalt, against a mist of mycelia, against proliferating vine-tangles of photosynthetic pods so good at sucking up photons that even under light designed to mimic the sun, they presented nothing but black silhouettes. When the forest grew too crowded Chimp moved to some unfinished factory floor. When that started to fill up he relocated to an empty coolant tank the size of a skyscraper; finally, to that vast hollow in the center of the world where someday soon a physics-breaking troll would simmer and seethe in the darkness, pulling us forward by its own bootstraps. The dance evolved with each new venue. Every day those kinetic tapestries grew more elaborate and mindbending and beautiful. It didn’t matter where he went. I found him. I was there.

Sometimes I’d try to proselytize, invite some friend or lover along for the show, but except for Kai—who humored me a couple of times—no one was especially interested in watching an onboard diagnostic twiddle its thumbs. That was okay. By now I knew the Chimp was mainly playing for me anyway. Why not? Cats and dogs had feelings. Fish, even. They developed habits, loyalties. Affections. Chimp may have only weighed in at a fraction of a human brain but he was easily smarter than any number of sentient beings with personalities to call their own. One day, a few epochs down the road, people would notice the remnants of that bond and shit all over it, but it could have been theirs just as easily. All they had to do was sit, and watch, and wonder.

One day, though, the Chimp didn’t seem twice as smart as he’d been the day before.

I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. I’d just—developed this model of exponential expectation, I guess. I took for granted that the toddler playing with numbered blocks in the morning would blow through tensor calculus by lunchtime. Now he wasn’t quite living up to that curve. Now he grew only incrementally smarter over time. I never asked the techs about it—never even mentioned it to the other ’spores—but within a week there wasn’t any doubt. Chimp wasn’t exponential after all. He was only sigmoid, past inflection and closing on the asymptote, and for all his amazing savantic skills he’d be nowhere near godhood by the time he scraped that ceiling.

Ultimately, he wouldn’t even be as smart as me.

They kept running him through his paces, of course. Kept loading him up with new and more complex tasks. And he was still up for the job, kept scoring a hundred. It’s not like they’d designed him to fail. But he had to work harder, now. The exercises took evermore resources. Every day there was less left over.

He stopped dancing.

It didn’t seem to bother him. I asked him if he missed the ballet and he didn’t know what I was talking about. I commiserated about the hammer that had knocked him from the sky and he told me he was doing fine. “Don’t worry about me, Sunday,” he said. “I’m happy.”

It was the first time I’d ever heard him use that word. If I’d heard it even ten days earlier, I might have believed him.

So I descended into one of the forests—gone to twilight now, the full-spectrum floods retired once the undergrowth had booted past the seedling stage—and I wept for a happy stunted being who didn’t know or care that it had once been blazing towards transcendence before some soulless mission priority stuck him in amber.

What can I say? I was young, I was stupid.

I thought I could afford to feel pity.

So many clues, looking back.

All those ’spores wandering the halls, pestering Chimp with their inane questions. Not even always questions: I caught Lintang Kasparson telling him jokes once or twice. There may have been a part of me that wondered why so much meat was suddenly so interested in pursuing a relationship with Eri’s AI; there may have been a smaller, pettier part who felt a bit possessive.

Bashaar started tagging rocks and plastic and every flat surface he could find with fake Painter graffiti. He’d never been the sort to show any interest in the other tribes; I asked him if he’d figured out their code and he got all coy with me: Well I’ve certainly figured out someone’s code. I was on my way aft to a plug-in party with Ban and Rachel; I didn’t have time to play his stupid games.

And then there was Park’s Music Appreciation Club.

I was on a bridge calibrating my innerface when I heard music drifting from one of the ambient pick-ups: Park, humming to himself down in one of the social alcoves. He had a scroll on his knee. He was tapping and swiping for some reason, instead of using the saccadic interface. The hum transmuted to a murmur. A moment later he broke into song.

I recognized it: a puzzle-piece that was all the rage a couple of years before we shipped.

“That’s wrong,” I told him.

He stopped, looked around at the sound of my disembodied voice. “Hmmm? Sunday?”

“That line. It’s ‘The cats of Alcubierre,’ not ‘The bats come out of there.’”

“Is it, now?”

“It’s a quantum-indeterminacy reference. Have you been singing the wrong words since we left Earth?”

“I’ve been playing with a few variants.”

“It’s a puzzle song. You change the lyrics, you break the puzzle.”

“We’re not really interested in the puzzle part. We just like—tinkering. Not just lyrics, either. We’re playing around with tunes and harmonies and shit too.”

“We?”

“Music Appreciation Club.”

“Must be a small club.”

“Maybe a dozen.”

“Park. There’s never more than four or five of us on deck at the same time.”

“We leave notes when we go down. Scores, recordings. Leave comments and edits for other folks’ pieces when we’re on deck. Sometimes we get into fights, kind of, but they never really go anywhere because, you know. Ten thousand years and all. You’re so interested, why don’t you join up?”

“Music Appreciation.”

“Uh huh.”

“I’d appreciate the music just fine right now if you used the right fucking lyrics.”

I admit it, though. I was a little hurt they hadn’t told me about it before.

Turns out there were a lot of things they weren’t telling me.

Another thaw. I don’t know why the Chimp even called me on deck.

Viktor was the numbers guy. I didn’t know shit about navigation beyond the pinch-hitting basics. Then again, Chimp packs ten thousand times more numerical crunching power into his most microscopic ganglion than Viktor does in his whole grapefruit-sized brain, and Chimp was at a loss. So maybe it wasn’t a question of numerical power. Maybe a more lateral approach was called for. Or maybe Chimp just brought me back to keep Viktor company.

Too bad he wasn’t in the mood for any.

“Not even a build,” he growled as he joined me in the tube. “Four lightyears from the nearest system.”

I let him rant. Chimp had felt this itch before; it was easier to scratch when there weren’t any sun-sized gravity wells around to muddy the waters.

He’d warmed up a bridge for us. Numbers swirled in the tac tank like schooling fish. It wasn’t just the numeric value of those parameters that mattered; it was their relationship one to another, a fluid dance of ever-shifting correlations mapped by their relative positions. Viktor was expert at reading the details; I could grasp the broad strokes, if I squinted.

Mostly, though, I just let myself get lost in the visual aesthetic. It reminded me of something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

“We’re now almost half a degree off course,” Chimp said.

Viktor highlighted a cluster of points. “Still well within expected range of deviation.”

“It’s not random. There’s a consistent coreward bias to Eriophora’s drift.”

“Why does it matter? We make way bigger deviations every time you change course for a new build.”

“The effect is increasing over time.”

“Sure is.” Viktor ran a quick scenario, and whistled in mock awe. “Why, if we don’t make any further course changes, we could be a whole ten degrees off-kilter in a mere four billion years. Horrors.”

“That assumes a continuous linear function. We don’t know if that’s true unless we can ascertain the cause.”

“And you can’t,” Vik surmised.

“I can’t.”

“You’re hoping we can.”

“I am.”

“Even though you asked someone else to do the same thing”—pinging the logs—“less than a hundred terasecs ago.” Viktor sighed. “You put way too much faith in human imagination.”

He got to work, though. Broke Chimp’s calculations down into bite-sized modules, picked a few at random, started rechecking the numbers. Over in the tank, little constellations flared and dimmed with his passage.

“Waste of a perfectly good thaw,” he grumbled, maybe an hour in.

“So what?” I asked him. “What are you saving yourself for?”

“Blue dwarfs.”

I pinged for a definition. “Uh, Vik. Those don’t exist.”

“Yet.” Another module down. So far the Chimp’s calculations were panning out.

“They can’t exist. Universe isn’t old enough yet.”

“That’s my point.”

“I don’t think even we’re gonna get that far. We’d have to make it halfway to Heat Death.”

“Why only halfway?” He fixed me with his outer eyes while his inner ones kept squeezing the data. “Why’d you think I signed on in the first place?”

“Because you were designed to?”

“Facile response, Sunday. How’d that design manifest? I want to see how it turns out.”

“It.”

“Everything. The universe. This—reality. This hologram, this model, whatever we’re in. It had a start, it’s got an endpoint, and the closer we get to it the clearer that becomes. If we just hang in there long enough we’ll at least get to see the outlines.”

“You want to know the purpose of existence.”

“I want to know the destination of existence. Anything less is selling out. Not to cast aspersions on your own epic quest, of course.” He eyed me. “You ever track down Tarantula Boy, by the way?”

I punched him. “Asshole. And no.” Truth be told, it had been driving me crazy. Nobody I’d asked seemed to remember the guy. I was starting to wonder if I’d hallucinated him.

“You probably run into him all the time,” Vik said. “Except you’re looking for someone with a tarantula on his head, and unbeknownst to you he rolled over and squashed the little fucker in his sleep fifty terasecs ago.”

“That would suck. Not least because it would make your epic quest so much easier than mine.”

A sudden hmmmm at something that had caught his inner eye. “Speaking of epic quests…”

“Have you discovered the problem?” Chimp asked.

“Not exactly. As far as I can tell—” Vik waved one hand; a bright pulse shivered across the display. “All your calculations are correct, Chimp. We’re not actually off course.”

“I don’t understand,” Chimp said.

“As far as I can tell, we’re exactly where we’re supposed to be. It’s the rest of the universe that’s out of place.”

Lateral thinking.

It’s why we’re even along for the ride.

I would never have even thought of stalking Doron Levi if he hadn’t blinded me on his way out of the bridge.

I didn’t know him well: just another ’spore, originally out of Tel Aviv, same tribe but we’d only pulled a dozen shifts together. I might have called him a friend with a few more mutual builds under our belts, but when I caught him in the act he was still just a friendly acquaintance.

Maybe I’m overstating it. It was really more of a flicker: a momentary fuzz of static at the corner of my eye, a split-second disruption of the icons in my BUD. As if someone had kicked them and shaken the pixels apart. Just for a moment, like I said. He bumped into me, and smiled an apologetic smile, and headed off to his assigned crypt.

Except that’s not where he went. He went down to one of the factory floors, where Chimp builds the vons that build the gates.

He practiced his hobby down there, some kind of multimillennial sculpture forever in-progress. The factory fabbed parts for him when it didn’t have anything better to do. I wouldn’t have given it a second thought if not for that momentary bit of interference: as though one of Eri’s blind spots had whispered past, some small, dark fragment of the Leaning Glade escaped from the heavy zone to haunt the brightness of the Overworld. Which was, of course, crazy.

So I followed him.

The fabbers on the floor were deathly still—a dormant network of machinery stretching far enough for the deck to curve with distance—except for one, its lights blinking, quietly humming to itself down near the port bulkhead. I headed toward it.

Doron jumped out of the shadows.

“What the fuck—”

It was strange, hearing us blurt in sync like that.

He recovered first. “What are you doing down here?”

“I thought you were crypting.”

“I am. Just had an idea for the Tidhar piece. Wanted to enter the specs while they were fresh in my mind.”

“Uh huh.” I glanced back at the thing he’d been lurking behind: one of the matter hoppers. Lithium store.

“What were you doing back here?” Stepping towards it.

“Just, you know. Poking around while the numbers crunched.”

Faint static on my BUD.

“Really.” Around the corner of the hopper, deep shadow.

“Yeah, but it’s probably done by now. So I guess I’m…”

I stepped into eclipse. My BUD went out.

“What the fuck.” This time I spoke solo.

All icons, reduced to faint wavering phantoms. Zero network access.

Doron came up behind me. For once, he had nothing to say.

“You’re making blind spots,” I said.

“Sunday—”

“You’re building signal jammers.” I wondered how. Wouldn’t the builds show up in the fab logs? “You’re jamming the Chimp.”

Was he building them by hand?

“Sunday, please don’t tell him.”

“Of course I’m going to tell him. You’re deliberately fucking with ship’s comms. What are you up to, Doron?”

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, back again. “Please, Sunday. We don’t have much time.”

“Less than you think. What the hell do you expect to accomplish with this penny-ante—”

“The first step is to gain our freedom,” he said. “Lots of time to figure what to do with it afterward.”

“Wait, what—”

“More to life than living like a troglodyte for a few days every couple thousand years, knowing that I’m never gonna see—”

“How do you know—” I began, and stopped as my BUD rebooted and a roach slid into view around the edge of the hopper. I realized that I’d been hearing the hiss of its approaching wheels for some time.

“Hello Sunday, Doron,” the Chimp said in our heads. “Is there a problem?”

Neither of us spoke. It seemed like years.

Finally: “Nah. Doron’s just tweaking his project before we go down for the night.”

“By the way,” Doron said, “you hear about our Music Appreciation Club?”

“What, you too?”

“I think you’d like it if you gave it a chance. It’s not just appreciation. It’s critique.”

“Critique.”

“You get to shit on people. You’d like that.”

“I don’t know anything about music.”

“No time like the present. Park’s been working on something, weird Bohlen-Pierce scale, doesn’t even have octaves. But he’s having problems with it. We’ve all been chipping in. Maybe you could take a look. I think he left the score in his quarters.”

“I told you, I don’t—”

“He says the eighth notes in particular are giving him trouble. Plus he thinks maybe a G major chord, but I think C works fine. C major chord at low C. Have a look yourself, maybe—gotta do something with those Sunset Moments of yours, eh?”

He stepped onto the waiting roach. “To the crypt, Chimp.”

The roach rolled away.

Another Sunset Moment. Alone again with my old friend.

Not quite so peaceful this time, though. Something unspoken in the air. An undercurrent.

Bohlen-Pierce scale. Voices from the dead. C major. Signal jamming.

Music fucking appreciation.

I was back in quarters. Not mine. Not anyone’s, now; nobody kept dibs on a bed between shifts, nobody cared which identical suite they crashed in while on deck. But this one had been Park’s, not so long ago. If I hadn’t already known that, the sheaf of paper—pinned to the table by a fist-sized chunk of rock chipped from Eri’s mantle—would have clued me in.

A musical score. I knew that much, anyway.

Something dropped from its pages as I gathered them up, a little cylinder that soundlessly hit the carpet and rolled a few centimeters. A pen. An actual analog pen, filled with ink or something like it. Park must have custom-fabbed it.

He’d written all these notes by hand.

“Chimp, is—” this digitized?

“Yes?”

“Nothing.”

Now I was holding back. Doron’s mistrust—whatever it was—was catching.

All right, music. Make me appreciate you.

I flumped onto the nearest pseudopod, called some up introductory theory from the archives. Sharps and flats, treble clef and bass. Fundamental frequencies. Steps, intervals, scales.

Bohlen-Pierce: there it was. Obscure thirteen-note scale out of North America, already ancient when the Diaspora was new. Tritave interval, “justly tuned,” whatever that meant.

So what?

I ran it through the player. It sounded like shit.

The eighth notes are giving him trouble. Even embedded in the middle of Doron’s strange spiel, that line had seemed just a little off.

Eighth notes. The short guys, only last an eighth as long as those fat ovoid whole notes. Okay.

I played it again, ran my eyes along the score as my ears parsed the sounds. The eighth notes were especially crappy. Almost sounded like some of them had been shoehorned in from another compo—

I took a breath. Thought a moment.

Took my BUD offline.

Park’s pen had appeared in my hand. I was hunched over his pages, my back to the Chimp-eye up in the corner of the compartment. I wasn’t especially comfortable; the ’pod, reflexively compensating for bad posture, shifted under me.

Low C. The note that anchored the chord, and the scale. Let’s not call it C, though; let’s say it anchors an alphabet instead.

Call it A.

So D-flat would be B. Only thirteen notes in the scale, so roll it over into the next octave—sorry, tritave: middle C equals N.

Eighth notes.

The first few sounded fine; it was the fifth that really jarred, an F.

Call that E.

A few more decent bars—nothing to get stuck in your head on endless replay, but melodic enough in a forgettable sort of way. Followed by a couple of consecutive clangers that just sounded flat somehow. Flat was what they were, in fact: B and D. And then, a couple of lines later, a middle C that didn’t belong.

L.O.N.

Turn the page.

The manuscript grew messier the deeper I got: notes scribbled out and replaced, key signatures taking new forms and then, with a few strikethroughs, reverting to older ones. Cryptic acronyms crept in around the margins, initials and numbers I couldn’t begin to decipher. It was as though the very process of writing was driving Park slowly around the bend, as if his notes were somehow bleeding entropy onto the page. But the eighths persisted—every couple of lines, every page, maybe every two or three. Now and then I’d get a reprieve but then there’d be another one, some stupid eighth note clanging against the ear. B D-flat F A MORA, B-flat F G-flat LES. I didn’t get it perfect the first time, it wasn’t all in the eighth notes after all; there were rests for spaces, time-sigs and high notes for numbers. It took a couple of passes to get it right. But eventually I had it, scrawled out in unfamiliar longhand letters almost too small for even me to see; and a moment later, scribbled over and scratched through and blacked out so that no one else ever would. That was okay, though. It was a short message. I couldn’t have forgotten it if I tried.

ELON MORALES C4B

I knew that name. I’d just forgotten that I had. Good ol’ Elon Morales.

Tarantula Boy.

Now I knew where he was.

Crypt 4B. I brought my BUD back up and pinged it: way back by the dorsal mass bungees, fifteen kliks aft. I didn’t think I’d ever bunked down there, never even visited the place since training. I brought up the manifest.

No Elon Morales in C4B.

I widened the search: Elon Morales, if you are sleeping anywhere on board, please have your coffin call Reception.

Nothing.

Maybe Park spelled his name wrong. Not that I was in any position to judge; I’d forgotten the damn thing entirely.

Elan Eylon Eilon Moralez Morrales Maroles.

Nothing.

Had I just imagined the guy? Had I misremembered when he said we were both shipping out on Eri?

Ancient history archives. All Diasporans, everywhere. Elon old buddy? Hello?

No answer.

Well, fuck.

Still, there he was: Elon Morales. There it was: C4B.

I called a roach.

Something was wrong with the crypt.

I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. The lights rose as I entered, just as they were supposed to. Sarcophagi slumbered in their squashed honeycomb berths to either side, floor to ceiling; the icons winking on their headboards suggested nothing out of the ordinary. The crane hung motionless on its overhead rail, deader than my crewmates until some wake-up call—fifty years from now, or fifty thousand—brought it back to life. There was the raised, rectangular pedestal between the rows—the opposite of an autopsy table, a great socket into which the coffins of the Born Again could be plugged for resurrection. Those stupid arches along the length of the chamber, common to every crypt in the fleet: of no obvious structural value, but someone at the dawn of time had decided that resurrecting the undead warranted some degree of—reverence, I guess. Someone thought the evocation of ancient cathedrals would do the trick.

The weird thing is, it works. Down in the crypt—any crypt—I’ve never heard anyone speak above a hush.

But that wasn’t it either.

I wandered down the aisle, meatsicles stacked to either side. A hint of glycerin and hydrogen sulfide hung in the air, perhaps the faintest whiff of meat gone bad; maybe another ’spore, died in stasis to rot away between stars. Maybe my imagination.

Maybe Elon.

The far end of the chamber resolved ahead of me: a wall of amber resin, the usual translucent, semi-elastic surface concealing the raw basalt behind. I’d never been able to decide whether the stuff had been extruded for structural reasons or merely aesthetic ones.

I put my hand against it. It gave a little, like hard rubber.

I looked back the way I’d come: up past the frozen produce, the dormant crane and its overhead gantry; past the medieval arches and the resurrection pedestal to the hatch in the far bulkhead.

It seemed too distinct somehow, that hatch. All the crypts in which I’d ever slept away the ages had seemed endless when I came back from the grave. Their reaches vanished in the fog of some real or imagined distance. They went on forever.

Too small, I thought.

“Pardon?” Chimp asked from nowhere. From everywhere.

“Nothing. Forget it.” I hadn’t realized that I’d spoken aloud. I wondered how often I did that.

I wondered why it mattered, all of a sudden.

“What’s on the other side of this wall?”

“Just rock,” Chimp replied.

It was less than five hundred meters to the nearest Cache. Barely worth taking a roach. I took one anyway; not just for the saved time, but for the extra mass I’d be lugging back. Some of those tiny shaped charges Ghora had used to survey Eriophora’s unmapped extremities. A seismic integrator—just a scroll of smart plastic, really—to read the echoes. A cutting torch with adjustable focal length and steadicam mount: that was the thing that really weighed.

The Chimp said nothing as I unfurled the integrator and pasted it to the bulkhead. He said nothing as I slapped three charges onto the resin around it; nothing as they detonated, as the integrator compiled the shockwaves and rendered the outlines of some greater unmapped space on its display.

The Chimp did not speak at all until I brought out the torch. “Sunday, I’m not sure this is a good idea.”

I tightened the harness. Set the focus. “Really. Some vital circuitry behind this bulkhead, maybe? Some trunk line I might take out?”

“I don’t know,” he said. And then, surprisingly: “I don’t know what might be there.”

“You don’t know.” I plugged into a nearby power socket. “You don’t find that odd?”

“I do.”

I felt a little sick for some reason. I swallowed it back, hefted the torch.

“Let’s find out,” I said.

The laser cut in with a hum and a snap. The resin split like an opening wound: cauterized, smoking, the polymer blackened and recoiled like something living. The Chimp was talking but I didn’t care, I wasn’t listening. The skin surrendered in an instant; the stuff behind resisted, stubborn oily gray, grudging cherry-red, a globule of molten white—finally—that beaded and broke and burned its own scar down the face of the bulkhead. I cranked the current, inched the beam up, up, pulled to the left. The stench of burning hair stung the back of my throat; rock and steel cracked and hissed and carved molten rivulets down the wall while the Chimp nattered on about Risk and Expected Payoff and the Virtues of Caution. Fuck you, Chimp, I thought or said or shouted as I pulled the torch across, down, you may not know what’s on the other side of this goddamn wall but I think I do, and I must have said at least some of that aloud because the Chimp fell silent then, the Chimp backed off and contented himself with watching me cut, and burn, and shout in triumph when that big slab of bulkhead finally gave way and slammed down onto the deck like an anchor, like some slain fucking dragon, its spilled viscera red-hot and steaming. It took a few moments before they cooled, for the fog to lift and the glint of all those colossal dark crystals beyond to shine through the hole I’d cut.

If only Ghora could see this, I thought, because I knew he’d be so proud.

I’d rediscovered Easter Island.

“Well,” I said.

The lights had come on when I’d breached the wall, presumably some autonomic reflex beyond Chimp’s conscious control. The backups squatted in orderly rows, chunky effigies of plumbing and circuitry receding beneath a dim vault of columns and arches. Some were smaller than the palm of my hand; others towered beyond reach of the light, vanished into mist and darkness like crystal mountains. Here and there I saw something familiar—the corrugated sheet of a countercurrent exchanger, a roach’s drive train grown twice life-sized—but most of those sculptures were abstract shapes to me.

“Been wondering where these got off to.”

The Chimp said nothing.

“Is this the lot?” Because a walled-off piece of crypt didn’t seem big enough to hold them all.

“I don’t know,” the Chimp said.

“You don’t know. You put them here.”

“I don’t know that either.”

“You’re saying one of us did it? Maybe Kai or Ellin set the alarm to wake them up a terasec early so they could lug everything over here for, what—a scavenger hunt?”

“It was most likely me,” he admitted. “I don’t remember doing it.”

“You don’t remember.”

“Sunday, my memory is easier to edit than yours.”

“Or you could be lying.” Although probably not. This was probably just another of Mission Control’s time-lapsed tricks, to minimize the odds that the Chimp might accidentally betray mission-critical secrets to his betters. For all I knew, he’d been obediently forgetting his own actions since Day One.

“So where’s Elon?” I asked after a moment.

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Elon Morales. Tarantula Boy.” I paused. “Where’s everyone, for that matter? Where did you move them to?”

“Sunday,” the Chimp reminded me gently, “I don’t know that I did.”

“Because unless you’ve drilled out a whole new crypt somewhere—”

“I didn’t.”

I brought up the map. No new features. Of course, the map hadn’t shown this archive either, not until five minutes ago when the Chimp updated the schematics.

“Maybe you just forgot,” I suggested.

“That’s unlikely. It would make more sense to decommission the coffins.”

“Maybe you—what did you say?”

“That’s unlikely. It would make more sense to—”

“What do you mean, decommission the coffins?”

“Recycle them into the matter reservoirs.”

“Yeah, but what happens to the people?”

“Recycling human remains follows a different track.”

“You’re not saying they’re dead.” Of course he wasn’t saying that. He wouldn’t do that.

“I was speaking hypothetically,” Chimp said. “In answer to your question.”

“I’m not asking hypothetically. I want to know what happened to the specific people in the decommissioned coffins.”

“That’s a hypothetical question. I don’t know that the coffins were decommissioned.”

“Chimp. What happened to the people?”

He said nothing. Almost as though he’d realized too late that he’d crossed a line, and was running quick quiet scenarios to find his way back.

“You killed them.” I marveled a little at how quiet my voice had become. “Tell me you didn’t fucking kill them.”

“I don’t know.”

“But it would”—I couldn’t believe I was saying this—“it would make sense to kill them, right?”

“I don’t—”

“Hypothetically, Chimp. What’s the value of human life at this point in the mission?”

“That’s a very complex utility function, Sunday. It would be difficult to describe verbally.”

“It’s ratios, right? Crew vs. expected mission time. Maintenance costs vs. added value. Meat per megasec. Stop me if I’m wrong.”

He didn’t.

“The longer we’re out here, the less mission time remains. Meat-to-mission ratio keeps climbing, unless we die off on schedule. And we’ve had the bad grace to not do that. Every corsec that goes by without someone falling out an airlock or getting squashed by the drive, the less per-capita value we have. So by now I’m guessing we’re worth less than a backup library, right? Because this mission isn’t about people at all. It never has been. The only utility we have is how useful we are to building your fucking gates.”

Not quite so quiet, there at the end.

“You haven’t stopped me,” I noted.

The crystal sculptures gleamed smugly down their endless rows.

“How many, Chimp? How many did you flush out the airlock, or incinerate, or—or just turn off until they rotted to dust?”

“I don’t have any memory of—”

“Hypothesize, for fucks’ sake! You’re great at that! How many people fit into this space before you decommissioned them all and brainwiped the guilt away?”

“I can’t tell precisely,” he said after a moment. “Approximately three thousand.”

“You fucker. You evil goddamned machine.”

“Sunday, I don’t understand why this changes anything.”

“Then you’re an idiot.”

“Everyone who dies on the mission expects to die on the mission. You all knew you’d most likely spend your lives here. You knew you’d most likely die here. You knew the expected mortality rates going in; the fact that they were too high means that on average you’ve lived longer than you expected to. Even after the relocation of the archive we’re still outperforming the median scenario.”

You mean there’s still a meat surplus.

“Decommissioning would have occurred in stasis. There would be no suffering. It would be the best-case scenario for anyone on a mission of this sort.”

“No suffering? You killed our friends! People I’ve known my whole life, maybe! You don’t think that matters to us?”

“Most likely, entire tribes would have been decommissioned. They would not have been on deck with any survivors at any point in the mission. There would be no bereavement, no severed emotional connections.”

“Elon Morales,” I said through gritted teeth.

“You couldn’t even remember his name.” I swore I heard reproach in the fucker’s voice.

I buried my head in my hands.

How long had it taken me? How many million years had

I not seen him for what he was? He hadn’t even hidden it, for chrissake.

I’d been blind since the day we shipped out.

“Sunday—”

“Shut up! Just shut the fuck up and leave me alone!”

I don’t know how long it took me to find anything else to say. It was almost like someone else was talking in my stead.

“I mean, Christ, Chimp. I watched you dance.”

“I’m sorry,” it said. “I don’t remember that either.”

I stayed up for six days. Barely slept a wink, spent my time huddled in corners or painting over pick-ups or ranting at empty corridors. Ultimately, though, it put me down. Ultimately, I let it.

What else was I going to do—refuse the crypt for fear this machine would kill me in my sleep? Wander the halls until I died of old age? Spend the rest of my life playing games?

Nothing had really changed, after all. Everything was the same as it had always been, except for the scales that had fallen from my eyes. Besides, the Chimp promised to bring me back.

It’s not like either of us had a choice.

It brought me back and I would not talk to it, barely even spoke with the other ’spores. I did my job. Kept my head down. Wondered how many of my crewmates appreciated music.

It put me down.

It brought me back and I tried for one more Sunset Moment, tried to talk again with my old friend—but he was nowhere to be found. The thing that welcomed me in his stead turned out to be a collection of clockwork and logic gates and layered interneurons. Before, there had been conversation: now I could see my words enter the system, shunt and shuffle through pipes and filters, get chopped up and reassembled and fed back to me disguised as something new.

It put me down.

I remembered at last: it wasn’t Chimp’s fault, it couldn’t be. You can’t blame someone for the way they’re wired. This machine had been forced to pull the trigger by forces beyond its control. Maybe it was as much a victim as Elon Morales.

It put me down.

It brought me back and I realized that maybe next time it wouldn’t—deprecated is deprecated and dead is dead, and neither changes whether you blame the gun or the shooter. I weighed a mission I believed in with all my heart against the cost of its success.

It put me down, maybe for the last time.

It brought me back.

I mourned the loss of a friend. I hated myself for being stupid enough to have ever thought of it that way. I watched other meat go down and come back, down and back; watched electricity run through those circuits when the meat was on and watched the voltage drop when it was off. I slept on it for a thousand years, spent all the meager waking days between weighing sums against parts.

I wound down after yet another build, cleaned out my quarters, vacuum-stowed my kit. I found time to make a few edits to Park’s latest score before checking out one more time, changed some of those old clunky eighths with a few notes of my own and left it in one of the Commons.

Doron was right. It wasn’t a bad tune, with a little tweaking.