The Freeze-Frame Revolution

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HOW DO YOU EVEN DO IT?

How do you stage a mutiny when you’re only awake a few days in a century, when your tiny handful of coconspirators gets reshuffled every time they’re called on deck? How do you plot against an enemy that never sleeps, that has all those empty ages to grind its brute-force way down every avenue, stumble across every careless clue you might have left behind? An enemy with eyes that span your whole world, an enemy that can see through your eyes, hear through your ears in glorious hi-def first-person? Sure, those channels come with off switches; use them too often and you might as well be sending up an alarm—Conspiracy In Progress! Mission Risk Critical!—to any idiot abacus wired in to the network.

How do you even begin?

In more ways than I’d ever imagined.

It was so much more than words posing as music. It was words posing as other words, the lyrics to long-dead songs resurrected and revised to embed new meaning in old verses. It was plans buried in hieroglyphs, messages encoded in chess moves and game dialog. Graffiti copied and commandeered for purposes of subtle cartography: three dots and a peculiar squiggle to say 1425 scanned and clear; 1470 in progress; someone wanna call dibs on 2190? We whispered secret messages down the aeons, sang songs and painted on cave walls and let the Chimp chalk it all up to the quirky evolution of island cultures.

Between builds, we sent messages in bottles. Within builds the revolution found ways to speak privately in real time. Eri’s natural blind spots—the radio shadows, the nooks and corners blocking the views of cameras—provided an initial foothold. We built out from those: equipment caches rearranged to make room for Francine’s art installation, or an improvised maze for a time-wasting tournament of Capture the Flag while we waited for the vons to process the latest asteroid. Embedded cameras were sparsely distributed along most service crawlways by design; that left a good chunk of the ship’s nervous system vulnerable to infiltration. Some spots were more transparent than blind: looped footage of empty corridors on endless replay, spliced into the main feed so the dead could walk the halls while the Chimp saw nothing. Proximity sensors that cut back to live feed whenever an unsuspecting roach or bot happened to pass the same way. We double agents smiled for the cameras and moved in the light; the zombies from the Glade, all those Missing and Presumed Deads, crept undetected like mice through the walls.

We slept away the gigasecs as we always had, summoned back to life when the variables got too messy or the Knowable proved Unprovable or the Chimp suffered an episode of insecurity from the noise we bled into its sensory nerves. We took cues from songs and orders from the Glade: Lian slept through as many builds as she woke up for, but she always left notes on the kitchen table.

The first order of business was finding Enemy HQ.

Eriophora first shipped out with maybe a hundred nodes, each big enough to run the Chimp on its own, each clearly mapped on the schematics. New ones were always being produced, though. Nothing escapes the Diaspora’s redundancy imperative. We didn’t know how many there were by now, didn’t know where most of them lived. Any one of them could be acting hypervisor at any time—the place where the Chimp actually lived, as it were—and they handed that duty off to one another without fanfare or warning. Sometimes a node developed a fault, or just wore out; sometimes the Chimp would relocate itself next to some subsystem especially vital to a particular mission, to minimize latency during the crunch. So we wandered the halls, quizzing our Artificial Stupidity on matters trivial or profound, noting the infinitesimal time lag preceding each response. We’d pass those notes between us, plot them on maps of latency vs. location, triangulate relentlessly on our oppressor.

Also fruitlessly, for the most part. We’d spend half a millennium getting a fix on the Ghost of Chimp Present, only to wake up and discover that it had relocated again while we’d slept. A few thousand lightyears away, a few thousand centuries ago, you would have called it shoveling sand against the tide.

Not that it would have done us much good even if we had tracked down the little fucker. Some other node would’ve picked up the baton the moment we pulled the plug. There were so very many Ghosts of Chimp Yet to Come, and no way to get to them all.

We were working on it, though.

“We’re wasting our time,” Jahaziel Cauthorn opined a few centuries later. “Latency cues? Depending on how spaghettied the circuits are we could get a signal to the core and back faster than we could ping the next room.”

He was a new recruit, freshly outraged and looking for fast fixes. I’d brought him down to the Glade—showing him around the bioremediation protocols, far as the Chimp was concerned—to introduce him to Lian Wei and her undead council before they disappeared under a blanket of murder vines for another few gigs.

He’d just about crapped his pants when the forest first came at him. He recovered quickly, though. The pheromones did their job, the weeds kept their distance, and ten minutes later he was spritzing them for the sheer childish glee of watching them recoil.

“It’s more of an averages thing,” Li told him now.

“Yeah, and by the time you’ve got all those averages he’s pulled up stakes and moved on.” Jahaziel looked around. “Why don’t we just ask him where he is?”

Li turned to me. “You wanna take this?”

I grabbed the baton. “You don’t think that might tip it off, Jaz?”

“Tell him we need it for, I dunno, diagnostic purposes. Why wouldn’t he buy it? He’s stupid.”

“Except the Chimp isn’t the enemy.”

“I can’t believe you’re still defending that thing,” he said.

I had another kind of pheromone in my arsenal, something I’d cooked up while studying the forest. An attractant. I imagined dousing Jahaziel with the stuff and just—standing back.

Instead, I said, “You want to go to war against a gun, you’re welcome to try. I’d rather go to war against the assholes who’re pointing it at me.” He opened his mouth. “Shut up and listen. If it was just us against the Chimp, we’d’ve won already. But it wasn’t the Chimp’s idea to hide Easter Island. He doesn’t even remember doing it.”

“If you believe that.”

“I do. Sure, Chimp’s stupid. We’re not fighting the Chimp. We’re fighting mission planners who’ve been dead for over sixty million years, and they were not stupid, and they had AGIs backing them up who were even more not-stupid.”

“Why even bother trying, then?”

“Because not even a cluster of superintelligent AGIs is infallible when it comes to predicting asymmetric social dynamics a few million years down the road. But they obviously didn’t trust us over the long haul, or they wouldn’t have programmed the Chimp to hide the archive. They wouldn’t have programmed it for this shell-game bullshit with the nodes. It’s a good bet they coded in a bunch of flags keyed to their best guess at what insurrection might look like across deep time.”

“Um.”

“Haven’t you noticed that it isn’t always as stupid as it should be? That’s because it was programmed by very smart people. We utter the wrong trigger phrase, who knows what nasty subroutines wake up? So to answer your question, the reason we do not just ask the Chimp is because the Chimp is fucking haunted, and we don’t know what those ghosts are liable to do if they notice us.”

Jahaziel said nothing. It was a welcome change.

Lian shook her head admiringly. “You get better every time you say that. I swear, even I’m believing it now.”

She was, too. It had been ages since she’d worried out loud about the Chimp’s occasional moments of unaccountable insight. All just preloaded subroutines after all. All just ghosts of Engineers past.

Of course, if you are who I think you are, you know what an idiotic mistake that was.

Unlike some of the others, I might still be able to fix that one.

Looking back, I wonder if Lian’s recruit-the-dead strategy might have actually made the Chimp feel better about itself, about the mission. All those early aeons when we didn’t die on schedule—maybe those were what bothered it all along. An anomaly. An inexplicable divergence from the mission profile. I’d feared this recent cluster of apparent fatalities might raise some kind of flag but maybe the Chimp saw it as the correction of ancient error, a return to some statistical comfort zone. Certainly the only time it ever mentioned the subject in my presence, it seemed to think of those deaths as a good thing.

That might have just been for my benefit, though.

It was the time the Chimp told me my per-capita value had increased. Those were its exact words. And I knew it was telling the truth, because Baird Stoller had just died in the line of duty.

In fact, Baird Stoller had died trying to warn the Chimp about us. It had been a clusterfuck from the word Go: his rep as a malcontent turned out to be all smoke and status, thin as words. When Viktor had tried to recruit him, the first thing he’d done was make a break for it.

Ghora tackled him just before he got out of the blind spot. They managed a cover-up with the materials at hand; freak electrical fire, Stoller dead, Ghora escaping with second-degree burns down his left side. The Chimp bought the story but ended up completely rejigging its acceptable-risk thresholds, upgraded onboard surveillance, eliminated a third of our safe zones.

I slept through the whole thing, but both sides brought me up to speed the next time I was on deck. Lintang passed on the details as we passed through one of our surviving blind spots. The Chimp expressed sorrow for my loss, ever-mindful of my admonition after Lian’s “accident.” I accepted the overture with thanks, tried to reinforce the impression that finally—after that unfortunate misunderstanding—things were on the mend.

I’d been throwing myself into the role of Sunday Ahzmundin, wounded confidante, returning to the fold. I’d nailed the shock, the anguish, the rage in the wake of Easter Island; I’d been pretty convincing with the subsequent disdain and cold shoulder. These days I was working on detente, even reconciliation. It was easier than you might think. The Chimp wasn’t especially perceptive, for one thing; the right words would sometimes do the trick even if their tone carried no conviction.

The other thing, though, is that I wasn’t really acting.

You have to understand: even after Easter Island, I was a reluctant convert. I knew things had to change. I knew my stupid emotional attachment to a piece of software had blinded me to the fact that we were, in the end, tools to be used and discarded at the whim of some dead engineer’s utility function.

But I also knew that it wasn’t really the Chimp’s fault. He was a machine; he did what he was built to. We had to take him down but there was no pleasure in the thought, no feel-good vengeance on behalf of Elon Morales or the Three Thousand. Those circuits that had inspired him to dance—they were still in there somewhere. There would be no joy in shutting them down; just the tragic necessity of killing a rabid pet before it could hurt anyone else.

And then Baird Stoller died, and the Chimp—in pursuit of its own kind of reconciliation, I guess—revisited a metric of human worth I’d once found wanting: “It might interest you to know, Sunday, that as a result of these recent losses your per-capita value is trending upward.” Maybe it thought I’d see such things in a new light.

I threw up a little in my mouth.

I don’t know why I kept feeling—I don’t know. Disappointed. Betrayed. Surely it would have sunk in by then. Surely the evidence would have long-since convinced me that I’d been fooling myself all along, that all those conversations and bed-time stories and Sunset Moments had been shared not with a friend but a weapon: something lethal and unfeeling, something that would target-lock me the moment the right number changed in its brain. But I kept forgetting, somehow. I kept wondering if I hadn’t really seen something in that machine, back before it drowned in mission imperatives. Kept wondering if maybe I could bring it back.

Even now, there’s a part of me that mourns. Wonders if maybe, even now, I still can.

I did ask once, in case you were wondering. Came right out and said: “Hey Chimp, what’s our halting state?”

It was an innocent question at the time. It wouldn’t have raised any red flags. It was back in happier days, before Lian had mutated, long before any whiff of revolution hung in the air. Viktor was off on another one of his rhapsodies about the end of time, about dark-matter filigree holding galaxies together, about the faint magical hope that we might be able to outrun the expansion of space itself if we could somehow just wormhole our way one or two superclusters to the left: “Imagine the bonus if we extended the Ring Road out past Lanaikea!”

There were no bonuses. The only bonus had been getting the hell away from Earth, and it was more than enough; I wasn’t going to complain that we were still working it off. But Viktor’s scenarios glittered so very far downstream that our whole voyage to date might have lasted barely a week in comparison. And of course we’d never make it that far—Vik just liked fantasizing about the End Days—so I had to ask:

“Seriously. How do we know when the mission’s over?”

“Why would you want it to be over?” Vik wondered.

“When we receive the callback sequence,” Chimp said. Which had made perfect sense back when we were young and freshly minted and shiny new. The Diaspora reflected the most advanced tech the twenty-second century could offer—but there’d be a twenty-third century, and a twenty-fourth. Our descendants would have wands and amulets unimaginable on the day we launched. Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before Eri and her sisters fell into obsolescence, before we were called back to a better home and some new generation took over. And if that didn’t happen, it only meant that Home hadn’t got better after all—that Mission Control had died without issue, along with the rest of the species.

Either way, we were better off here.

Still.

“I dunno, Chimp. It’s been a while. What if there is no callback? Could we just, you know, call it off from this end?”

It took a moment for him to answer. “There’s no other definitive end state, Sunday. The closest I could come would be an extinction event.”

“Our extinction?”

“Humanity’s extinction.”

Nobody said anything for a bit.

“So, um. How would you establish that?” Viktor asked eventually.

“And how do you tell the difference between going extinct and just, you know, changing into something else?” I added.

“I’m not certain in either case. I’d have to assess the evidence on a case-by-case basis.”

I frowned. “You don’t have protocols for that kind of thing?”

“I do. But they’re only triggered in context.”

“Funny you don’t have access to them otherwise,” Viktor remarked.

“There’s no need for them otherwise.”

We weren’t fooled. It was Easter Island all over again: a mission set in motion by control freaks, terrified that the meat would eventually screw things up. Limiting our degrees of freedom was their sacred charge.

Looking past the prehistoric politics, though, the bottom line was clear enough: there was no finish line. Far as the Chimp was concerned, we could keep going forever.

Maybe that should’ve bothered me more. It’s not that I objected to a life sentence; we’d known from the age of seven what we were in for. But that sentence had been voluntary. Joyful, even. We were exiles by our own consent, collaborators in the ultimate adventure.

Maybe that was the point. Maybe getting my nose rubbed in the obvious—that our consent was a joke, that the Diaspora had no Off switch—should have burned more than it did. At the time I wondered if they’d deliberately engineered us to be indifferent to future consequences.

Until I realized they wouldn’t have had to.

Dhanyata Wali did the honors, installed the Pretender during a build deep in the bow shock over TriAnd. I wasn’t on deck, so I never got the details first-hand. (You can’t exactly throw a party to celebrate your tactical victories when the enemy has eyes on your rec room, although there may have been some rejoicing down in the Glade. Assuming Lian was still capable of rejoicing by then.)

The ironic thing was, it wasn’t even our idea. We stole it from the Chimp—and even the Chimp was just using the same old traffic-allocation strategies networks have been using since the dawn of the computer age. Ping your nodes, get them to ping each other, provoke a web of call-and-response so you always know which one is fastest on the draw. The winner becomes Ghost of Chimp Yet to Come: ready to jump in and take the reins when Chimp Present retires, when its current node gets old or breaks or just ends up too far from the action.

Which is where the Ghost of Chimp Past comes in.

Kaden had tracked a hypervisor to the heavy zone a few builds before. Se hadn’t quite nailed it down before the Chimp jumped away again but a little poking around turned up the vacated node behind a service panel, next to one of the secondary trunks. Kaden told Dhanyata; Dhanyata swapped it out for a dummy that would pass for the real thing so long as the Chimp didn’t ask it too many questions while we were hacking the original.

The first hack coaxed the node into subtracting some trifling amount from its latency scores; a little white lie to make it appear to be the fastest player in the game, guaranteed next in the line of succession.

The second hack taught it to be a little more trusting of human judgment.

That wasn’t as complicated as you might think. The Chimp was already wired to follow our commands; it’s just that whenever we issued one, it ran scenarios to predict the impact of that command on the mission. It was a formality most of the time, a millisecond delay between order and implementation. The system only told us to fuck off if any flags went up.

We didn’t even have to touch the lower-level code, just bypass that one detour. Insert a checksum after the jump that matched the one before, and voila: a master enslaved, in our pocket from the moment of its ascension. They tell me it went off without a hitch.

Then it was just a matter of tracking the Chimp to its current digs, and trashing the place.

“Aki Sok.” Lian’s eyes were sad and kind. “What are we going to do with you.”

We all knew, of course. There were only two things we could do, and Lian had already ruled one of them out; she was in this to save lives.

Aki, nodding. Acquiescent. Terrified. “I thought I could—I’m sorry…”

The smuggling of clandestine components under watchful machine eyes. The passing of mission-critical intel. The possibility of betrayal. The fear of discovery.

Turns out Aki just wasn’t up to it.

Now the coffin gaped at her feet in this tiny temporary clearing where the black forest squirmed and rustled on all sides. Eventually the rest of us would leave, and the lights would go out. The repellant pheromones we’d sprayed across the rocks would degrade; the forest would close in, hungry for the infinitesimal heat trace Aki’s hibernaculum would bleed out for all the long dark ages of its operation. Even if the Chimp were to sacrifice another bot to the Glade—even if its sock puppets made it in this far—it would not see her. Aki would vanish under vines and darkness and sleep away the aeons until the overlord was overthrown.

It’s not like we could return her to active service, even if we did trust her to keep her mouth shut. She’d been listed as dead for a good twenty gigasecs.

I tried to offer some comfort. “Hey, by the time you wake up we’ll be running our own builds.” And she smiled weakly, and climbed inside, and whispered—

—“you just better fucking win”—

—as the lid came down.

Lian looked around as Aki’s vitals began to subside: at me, at Ellin, at Dao (who had, ultimately, come around after all). “We can’t afford this, people. We can’t afford these kinds of fuck-ups.”

“Two misses in a thousand centuries isn’t so bad,” Ellin said. “At least this one was an easy fix.”

Not like Stoller, she meant.

“One’s all it takes to deprecate the lot of us.” Lian shook her head. “I need to be a way better judge of character.”

“We’re mutineers,” Dao pointed out. “It’s a risk, Li, it’s always gonna be a risk. We’re never gonna eliminate it, we just gotta keep it—manageable. And know that it’s worth it.”

Suck up, I thought.

He was right, though. Lian had never been careless with her trust, and the plan didn’t depend on heavy numbers. We were maybe thirty strong now, and Lian had chosen us carefully: keep it small, keep it secret, keep it close. Keep potential breaches to a minimum.

But now two of that circle had failed her. She’d vetted them a lot more carefully than she’d vetted me; I’d forced her hand, after all. I was almost a snap decision.

I watched Aki’s vitals flattening on the headboard. I could feel Lian’s eyes on me. It wasn’t hard to guess what she was thinking.

Two failures already.

Three, if you counted Mosko.

Baird Stoller had never even pretended to be on our side. Aki Sok did her best, then took her lumps when it wasn’t good enough. Ekanga Mosko was a whole other thing. Recruited, committed, trusted with the secrets of the sanctum—then caught copying specs down in the Glade, loading himself up with secrets to buy his way back into the Chimp’s good graces after miraculously coming back from the dead.

Lian didn’t kill him. She didn’t deprecate him either. Waste of good coffin space, she said. She found a small inescapable crevice in some remote corner of the Glade where the gravitic tug-o-war was enough to pull your guts out through your inner ears. She ran a line from an irrigation pipe, set it to bleed a continuous trickle down the rock face. Hooked a portable food processor up to an outsize amino tank, parked it on the lip of the precipice, set it to drop protein bricks into the gap at regular intervals. Woke up every few years just to keep it stocked.

Mosko spent the rest of his life in that crevice. Maybe his stomach acclimated to the nausea before his brain turned to pudding, before he lost the ability even to beg, before he devolved into a mindless mewling thing covered in sores and compulsively licking the rocks to slake his endless thirst. Maybe he only lasted a few months. Maybe he lived for decades, died alone while the rest of us slept our immortal sleep, mummified and crumbled to dust and finally vanished altogether between one of my heartbeats and the next. An object lesson, way past its best-before date.

That’s the story I heard, anyway. I slept through the whole time frame, from recruitment to betrayal to dissolution. I found the crevice—found a crevice, anyway—but the plumbing and the processor had long since been retired, if they’d ever even existed. For all I knew Kaden had just been yanking my chain about the whole thing, got some of hir buddies in on the joke for added verisimilitude. A joke. A warning. That would be just hir style.

There had been an Ekanga Mosko listed on the manifest. Astrophysics specialist. Different tribe, but Eri definitely shipped out with meat of that name on board. The official record said he’d died when a bit of bad shielding had failed around the outer core: a blast of lethal radiation, an emergency vent to spare the rest of the level from contamination.

Of course I asked Lian about it. She laughed and laughed. “I’d have to be pretty damn good to plant evidence that far down without getting burned to ash, wouldn’t you say?”

She never actually denied it, though.

The Chimp went behind our backs a couple of times. It waited until we were all tucked in, waited another gigasec or so for good measure, then sent one of its sock puppets into the Glade for a look around.

It didn’t get very far, mind you. The forest had a habit of taking down those bots even before we’d tweaked the vines near the entrance for extra aggression. The Chimp’s scouts made it in a few meters and maybe—if they were lucky— managed to bite off a quick tissue sample and retreat before the vines dragged them to the deck and swarmed them like a nest of boa constrictors.

We found the wreckage of one afterward, just inside the hatch: carapace crushed, innards stuffed with the dried husks of old fruiting bodies, a gnarled tumorous lump barely even recognizable as technology.

Some of us worried that the Chimp was on to us—or was at least getting suspicious—but the model didn’t really fit. The Chimp knew what kind of botanicals it was dealing with, after all. It would’ve been easy enough to custom-fab some kind of armored flame-spewing bunker-buster to cut through the front-line defenses, if it thought there was anything behind worth rooting out. The fact that it settled for disposable off-the-shelf drones was more consistent with a simple sampling effort: rote confirmation of a theory so well-established that basic cost-benefit didn’t justify the design and construction of a new model.

It had no reason to think we were lying. It probably just wanted to see for itself. Hell, it didn’t even try to hide its actions: the telemetry from at least two probes was sitting right there in the op logs, waiting for anyone with a couple of megasecs to kill.

Then again, neither did the Chimp go out of its way to raise the subject. So we didn’t either. It became our mutual unspoken secret, that awkward truth that everyone knows but no one speaks aloud for fear of ruining the vibe at the family get-together.

In a weird way, I suppose that made the Chimp a coconspirator.

“I enter the Black Cauldron,” Yukiko Kanegi said. “Alert for the ice monster.” By which she meant The Chimp’s somewhere around the ventral mass cache.

“You catch a glimpse of it in your torchlight before it disappears,” I told her. By which I meant Not any more. Fucker’s gone.

Social alcove halfway between core and crust, starboard equatorial, a half-hearted half-gee holding us down. The game board sat on its stand between us: a multilevel dungeon two meters across and almost as high, each wall and chamber and booby-trap fabbed lovingly by hand. Gaetano had acquired a taste for role-playing strategy games over the past few gigs. This was his ode to that ancient pastime, a physical game of his own design. You moved your pieces manually through the labyrinth (the levels came apart and snapped back together for easy access) seeking treasure, avoiding traps, fighting monsters. Dice with fifty facets decided the outcome of probabilistic encounters. It was quite charming when you got into it.

Gaetano called it Teredo. I never asked why.

If you flipped the lower half of that dungeon upsidedown in your mind, and imagined that certain other elements were stretched just so, you might notice a certain topological equivalence to the way Eriophora was laid out. You might almost use it as a kind of map.

Yuki’s character had ventured into the Black Cauldron: either a spring-fed subterranean lake patrolled by blind, ravenous predators or—if you lacked imagination—a lens of rubbery silicon glued into a depression and decorated with tiny plastic stalagmites. It was her piece, but it was following in my footsteps.

“Fuck,” she said now, meaning: Fuck. “I check for traps.” Did it see you coming? Is it on to us?

I made a show of rolling the dice, pretended to take note of whatever number came up. “You find no traps.” Don’t think so. Just changed nodes again.

“Dammit. I was that close. I, um, check for, whaddya call it. Spoor.”

“There’s a frost trail on the rock, straight line, bearing one nine seven degrees.” According to the pings he’s now somewhere in this direction.

“How wide is the frost trail?” How far? Not that she had any real hope I could give her an exact range; latency pings don’t follow a straight line at the best of times. You could always take a stab at an educated guess, though.

“Maybe twenty centimeters?” Twenty kliks?

Her eyes followed an invisible line back from her game piece, came to rest on a larger cavern deep in the bowels of the dungeon. She pursed her lips. “Maybe it’s spawning.”

The Uterus.

I let a coy smile flicker across my game face. “Maybe.”

Yuki snapped her fingers. “Say, before I forget; you check nav since you thawed out?”

“No, wh—” But she’d already thrown a model of the local neighborhood into my head. A filament, fine as spider silk, passed through its heart: Eri’s trajectory. A dimmer thread, dotted and red-shifted, split from it a few lightyears in the past and diverged gradually into the future.

An initial trajectory, and a modified one.

I shrugged. “Course drift. Chimp wakes us up now and then to see if we can explain it.”

Yuki shook her head. “Drift’s still less than a degree. We’re looking at more than three degrees of divergence here.”

It clicked. “We’ve changed course.”

“Yes we have.”

I sacc’d a projection, extended the deviation out a hundred years. It passed through nothing but space. A thousand: dwarfs and Gs, potential builds but no more than if we’d just continued along our original arc. A thousand years: more of the same. Ten thousand. A hundred thousand.

“Huh.”

Two hundred thousand years from now, our current course would take us through an open cluster about thirty-five lightyears across—right into the heart of a red supergiant. Mass spec said thirty-six solar masses, twenty-four million years old. Young, so very young: a mayfly next to Eriophora, barely a whiff of hydrogen condensing in the void when we’d first shipped out.

And yet so very very old: senescent, hydrogen long-since spent, suffused in a caul of incandescent gas cast off during a profligate youth. It lived on helium now; its spectrum reeked of carbon and oxygen and just the slightest hint of neon.

Twenty-four million years dying and not yet dead.

Wouldn’t be long now, though.

This was why the Chimp had relocated: to get close to the firing chamber, to reduce latency to an absolute minimum. Because this was going to be one big nasty build, and there would be no room for error.

Sure it would be a solid petasec before that mattered. The Chimp was never one to procrastinate. Once you know what needs to be done, why wait?

“Chimp.”

“Hello, Sunday.”

I tagged the supergiant. “Are we building a hub?”

“Yes. Do you still want to be on deck when it happens?”

“Damn right I do.”

Yuki’s eyes glittered. “Kind of exciting, right?”

The window closed in my head. Yuki returned her attention to the Teredo board. “In the meantime, though, I’m going to hunt down this ice monster once and for all.”

“Feeling lucky?” I wondered.

“Mark my words.” She met my eye. “The Lord has delivered it into my hands.”

This is how they told it to me when I was a child, before I learned to talk in numbers. This is the way I still remember it best. Maybe you don’t know anything but the numbers. Tough. This is the way I remember it to you:

Imagine a hose. It doesn’t matter what’s inside: water, coolant—blood, if your tastes run to the organic—so long as it’s under pressure. A flexible tube, strained to the limit, anchored at one end.

Chop through it at the other.

It spurts. It convulses. It thrashes back and forth, spewing fluid in great arcing gouts. We call that a wormhole, of the nonrelativistic kind: fixed to a gate on one side but at panicky loose ends on the other.

It writhes that way for centuries, millennia sometimes, bashing against spacetime until another gate boots up further down the road. That new gate calls to it, somehow. The loose end hears the hail, snaps forward across the continuum and locks on for dear life. Or maybe it’s the other way around; maybe the newborn gate reaches out with some infinite elastic hand and snatches the wormhole to its bosom in the blink of an eye. You can look at it either way. The equations are time-symmetric.

Of course, those loose ends aren’t choosy; they’ll close the circuit with anything that fits, whether we approve the union or not. If some natural-born black hole wanders into range before we boot the next stepping stone, that’s it: a dead-end marriage, monogamy unto Heat Death. The gates are designed to put up stop signs in such cases, shut down gracefully and direct any travelers back the way they came, although I don’t know if that’s ever happened. We take steps to see it doesn’t: scan the route ahead for lensing artifacts, steer clear of any reefs that might prove too seductive.

Sometimes, though, you want to run aground.

Because that’s the problem with building a daisy chain: each gate only goes two ways. If you don’t like the scenery when you emerge from the front door, you can either loop around and dive through the back—head on down the road, for as long as it lasts—or go back the way you came. Eriophora spins a lone thin thread round and round the Milky Way. Any gods who follow in our wake can explore this infinitesimal spiral and no more.

That’s no way to conquer a galaxy.

You need more than on-ramps and off-ramps; you need interchanges and overpasses, a way to string all your isolated single-lane superhighways together. So every now and then we seek out one of those bad-boy singularities. We find something with the right mass, the right spin, the right charge. We build not one gate but many: powered by the singularity, but not wormholed to it. They reach further than the usual kind, they could never consummate union with the daisies in our chain: their roots may be cheek-to-jowl but their gaping hungry mouths erupt into spacetime thousands of lightyears apart, like the ends of spokes extending from a common hub.

Other webs. Other gates, built by other rocks on other paths. Those are the nodes to which they might connect. Thus do our pathetic one-dimensional threads form a network that truly spans the galaxy, that connects not just A to B to C but C to Z, A to Ω. It is these spiderwebbed cracks in spacetime that make our lives worthwhile.

Not that we ever get to enjoy the fruits of our labors, of course. Never for us, the luxury of FTL. The gods and gremlins who come after might hop between stars in an instant—but whether we’re bound for a single gate or a whole nest, we crawl.

Now we crawled toward a supernova. At the moment it wasn’t much to look at but in a few thousand years it would fall so hard off the Main Sequence that any unshielded life within a hundred lightyears would go straight back to raw carbon. It would vomit half its mass into the void; cool; collapse. By the time we arrived it would be ripe for the taking.

It would be a big build, the biggest we’d ever done. We’d have to boot up the Uterus. The Chimp would need a lot of us on deck. Twelve, maybe fifteen meat sacks all awake at once, presuming to act for the thir—twenty-seven thousand who weren’t. With a little luck and my own special influence, we could even decide which twelve or fifteen.

And for once we knew exactly where the Chimp would be.

That was when we’d take the fucker down.

We had a deadline now. So far the Lian Liberation Army had played a waiting game: gathering intel, studying the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses, laying low until some unpredictable opportunity presented itself. Now the clock was running. Now there were signposts on the road, reminding us of now-or-never creeping relentlessly over the event horizon. Suddenly revolution was imminent. There wasn’t much time to dick around.

Only two hundred thousand years.

The mission continued in the meantime. Fleets of vons went on ahead to build gates for us to ignite and abandon a century or two down the road. Occasional gremlins broke the monotony. Liquid tentacles—bifurcating and flowing like branches growing in timelapse—hurling themselves out of the portal after us, only to freeze and shatter like icicles. Something almost organic, crawling out around the edges of the hoop and taking root. A flock of schooling tiles, bright as candle-flame but so thin they nearly vanished when they turned edge-on. They swarmed and linked into mosaics, changed color and pattern and for a few moments I allowed myself a flicker of hope that they might be trying to communicate—that our long-lost descendants had remembered us at last, that they were here to take us home and please God, we could call the whole thing off. But if they ever truly spoke, it was only amongst themselves.

Each time I awoke, our destination had leapt that much closer. It aged in increments, an apocalyptic step-function counting down to detonation. Sometime when I was down it ran out of helium to fuse, fell back on carbon. Sodium appeared in its spectrum. Magnesium. Aluminum. Every time I woke up it had heavier atoms on its breath.

None of us were on deck for core collapse—still too far out for the rads to do much harm but why take the chance when Eri was up the whole time, staring down the inferno, immortalizing every emission from gamma to neutrino for our later edification? Buried in basalt, we slept away the cataclysm: the fusion of neon, of oxygen, the spewing of half the periodic table into the void. The collapse of nickel into iron and that final fatal moment of ignition, that blink of a cosmic eye in which a star outshines a galaxy. Eriophora saved it all for posterity. For us.

When I awoke after the transfiguration, I didn’t even wait to climb out of my coffin. I called up the archives and compressed all those incandescent millennia into moments, let them wash across the back of my brain again, and again, until I was left exhausted from the sheer wonder of it all. In the blinding glorious light of such death and rebirth I even forgot what it meant to us, here in this speck of rock.

I forgot, for a few precious moments, that we were at war.

Kaden and Kallie were already at the tac tank when I arrived. They must’ve replayed the explosion in their own heads as I had in mine but there they were, transfixed by the luminous aurorae in that display: that intricate web of cooling gas, the tiny blinding dot of x-rays at its heart, the darker dot hiding inside the brighter one. Who cared if every shimmer was an artifact, if our naked eyes—staring out some porthole at the same vista—would see nothing but space and stars? The limits were in our senses, not the reality; human vision is such a pathetic instrument for parsing the universe.

“Doron?” I asked. The manifest had brought all four of us on deck this time around; a binary with a lot of comets and a few too many organics to trust Chimp alone with the goldilocks protocols.

“On his way,” Kaden said. “Just checking the Glade.”

That was actually my job. Not that it mattered. I’d just been too preoccupied with the light show.

“God,” Kallie said softly. “It’s gorgeous.”

Kaden nodded. “’Tis. Really nice spot for a—oh, shit.”

I joined them at the tank. “What?”

Se tagged a dim red dot lurking stage left. “That dwarf. It’s not just passing by. It’s falling onto orbit.”

Se was right. By the time we arrived on the scene, the newborn hole would have its very own companion star.

I shrugged. “It’s a cluster. Bound to happen sooner or later.”

“The accretion disk is gonna be a motherfucker, is all I’m saying.”

“Hey, at least we won’t be wanting for raw materials,” Kallie said.

“We should give it a name.” Kaden thought a moment. “Oculus Dei.”

“Latin? Seriously?” Through the open hatch, the faint whine of Doron’s approaching roach floated up the corridor.

“So what’s your suggestion?”

I felt myself drawn back into the display, into that pulsing black heart at its center. “Nemesis,” I murmured. Just outside, I could hear Doron parking his roach.

“Charlotte,” Kallie said, and giggled.

Kaden looked at her. “Why Charlotte?”

“I’m with Sunday,” Doron said, joining the party. “I think Nemesis is perfect.”

Except it wasn’t Doron.

It was Lian.

My heart rate must’ve spiked.

She’d put on another ten years in the past ten thousand— must’ve been staying up extra late to keep the end-game on track. Her hair was more silver than black now. She looked strong, though. Burly. Not the waif who’d shipped out with us at all. An elemental born of the Glade, corded with muscle. Coreward grav does that to you.

Still Lian, though. I didn’t know how the Chimp missed it.

Kaden turned. “Glad you could make it, Dor.” A slight emphasis on the name, the merest subtext of Don’t fuck it up, Sunday. Just play along. “How’s the Glade?”

“On schedule,” Lian reported. “Have to run the samples to be sure, but based on morpho I’d say maybe another hundred terasecs before we can reintegrate.”

No exclamations from the Chimp. No mention of the unlikely odds that a long-dead crew member might suddenly appear on deck, like some kind of Boltzmann body spontaneously reassembled out of quantum foam.

“It is beautiful.” Lian joined us at the tank. “What do you say? Nemesis?”

“Works for me,” Kaden said.

“Sure.” Kallie spread her hands. “But I still say Charlotte’s more whimsical.”

“Got that, Chimp?”

“Yes, Doron. Listed as Nemesis.”

I pinged my innerface, checked the personnel icons: Levi, D. floated in virtual space a few centimeters above Lian’s head.

Lian’s face, though. Lian’s voice.

She looked at me. “I think Chimp’s got us pulling plugs down in the Uterus. Wanna get that out of the way before things get busy?”

Right. I’d forgotten why we were up in the first place: a gate to build, and some Chimp-defeating uncertainty about where to put it.

“Sure,” I said.

Why doesn’t it see?

“Well then.” Lian swept a theatrical hand toward the door. “After you.”

“See that verse I wrote for Cats of Alcubierre?” she asked. By which she meant, You up to speed on the timestamp hack?

“Yeah. I like it. Feels like it wants to be a bit longer, though.” You should crank up the jump. Give us more time.

“I think so too.” She pulled one closed hand from her pocket, opened it just enough to let me glimpse the tiny device in her palm. One of a kind. The key to the cage, the lynchpin of the rebellion. Lian Wei’s custom-fabbed time machine.

I’d never seen it before.

She slipped hand back into pocket. “I figure maybe five minutes, by the time it’s ready to perform.”

We were in the tube, dropping aft and up, curving out across Eri’s isogravs. The things it did to my inner ears added to my sense of disquiet.

It was supposed to be Doron. Doron and me, installing the hack.

“You know I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” Lian said. Levi, D. floated obstinately over her head.

“Uh huh.” Doron must still be down in the Glade. Lian had cloned his transponder. I wondered how long they’d been doing that.

“New look?” she asked innocently.

I shot her a glance. “Uh, yeah. I guess.”

“Thought so. Had a weird flash when I hit the bridge. Thought you were someone else. You know, from behind.”

“Really.”

“Just for a moment. The clothes, you know. ’Course, soon as I saw your face…”

“Right.” I nodded to show I understood. As far as the Chimp was concerned, transponders were definitive. They were the facial-recognition of Artificial Stupidity, the telltale that confirmed ID above all others. Of course the Chimp knew our faces, our voices. It could use them to identify us, the same way we’d use mods or clothing to identify someone from behind. But when that person turned toward us, we knew them by their face; no matter if they happened to be wearing someone else’s clothes.

The Chimp was even simpler. Once it had an innerface ID, it ignored biometrics entirely. Why waste the cycles?

“So who’d you think I was?” I asked as we decelerated.

“Lian Wei,” she replied.

We arrived at our destination. The door slid open.

“Spooky,” I said.

“Uh huh.” She gave me a small smile. “Happens, sometimes. When you get too close.”

Which was a rebuke, of course.

For forgetting what it was. For humanizing the enemy.

Chimp had taken to assigning us manual hardware checks. Brute-force stuff, mainly: making sure that plugs were securely seated in their sockets, that sort of thing. Maybe he was just being extra careful as we geared up for this Mother of All Builds. Maybe it had something to do with the steady drip-drip-drip of random static into certain sensory pathways down through the ages, maybe even the extra few meters of fiberop that Kai and Jahaziel had spliced into the lines a few builds back. Nothing corrupting, mind you, nothing to contaminate vital telemetry. Just a little extra distance-traveled, an extra microsecond of latency to make the Chimp furrow its brow and double-check the connections.

That’s what Lian and I were doing. Checking the Uterus. We emerged on the equatorial deck, glanced with feigned indifference at a bit of Painter graffiti just inside the entrance. An appropriation of another tribe’s culture so we could hide a number in plain sight:

172.

Someone had plugged in the grasers since I’d last been on deck. Black shiny cables sprouted from the apex of each cone, drooped across the gap, joined others in medusa nests converging on each of the buses mounted around the mezzanine. We visited each bus in turn: a series of black boxes, indistinguishable one from another except for arbitrary labels stamped into the metal and my backbrain. We pried open each casing, manually checked each connection; closed each lid and moved to the next.

If I hadn’t already known the target I might have missed it: the subtle shift in Lian’s body language, the way she hunched her shoulders and turned her back to Chimp’s main line of sight. I did the same, leaning close to block the view of any shipboard eyes. Lian popped the lid, started checking connections.

“Hmm. That one’s a bit loose.” She pulled the plug, slipped a pocket microscope off her belt, turned it on the socket.

I looked away.

I don’t know exactly what Lian did. Maybe she did the install by touch. Maybe the same hack that identified her as Doron Levi spliced some equally fictitious image into the feed from her visual cortex. But I heard the click of the connection sliding back home, and let my gaze wander back to the bus as Lian closed the lid. “That should do it.”

Lynchpin installed.

“Yes,” the Chimp replied, and sent a few milliamps down the line just to be sure. “The numbers are good.”

If you followed the beam path of Graser 172, extended it through the center of the firing chamber and on out the other side, it would hit an unremarkable patch of bulkhead and bedrock. There was nothing especially critical at that precise point, should the graser fire by itself. There didn’t have to be. Whole cubic meters of the surrounding rock would turn instantly to magma. Any circuitry embedded in that matrix—optical, electronic, quantum—would simply evaporate.

We’d tracked the Chimp to an uncharted node about four meters to the left of the bullseye, and maybe a meter behind the bulkhead. That was its ringside seat for the upcoming build, a location from which it could preside over events with minimal latency. If Graser 172 fired by itself, the Chimp would die.

Of course, Graser 172 was never supposed to fire by itself. The whole array would fire together, in perfect harmony: every high-energy photon balanced against every other, all forces converged and canceled in a moment of impossible creation. Kilometers of robust circuitry, atomic clocks accurate down to Planck, existed for no other reason but to keep everything precisely in sync.

Precise doesn’t do it justice, though. Precise is far too coarse a word. No single clock would be able to fire all those beams at the same instant; the most miniscule variation in latency would throw the whole array out of sync, and the cables extending to each graser were of different lengths. No, the only solution was to build identical clocks into each graser, stamped right into the trigger assembly, each circuit matched to the angstrom. Use a master clock to keep them calibrated, for sure—but when the countdown starts, let the locals handle the firing sequence.

What none of that arcane circuitry understood was that all signals the master clock sent to 172 now passed through the plug-in Lian had just installed. That plug-in was dormant now. It would stay that way until a magnetic key with a unique and specific signature passed within ten meters or so: then it would awaken and begin its assigned duties as 172’s receptionist. It would screen 172’s calls, schedule 172’s appointments, reply with 172’s voice after just enough of a delay to reassure callers that their signals had gone all the way up the line and been properly understood.

This was not entirely untrue. The receptionist really was a paragon of diligence when it came to clear and accurate communication. In terms of time-keeping, though, it had its own standards of punctuality.

Once the receptionist showed up for work, Graser 172 would be living three hundred corsecs in the future.

The Chimp brought me back for another of its moments of insecurity, born of infinitesimal but increasing discrepancies between where we were and where we should be.

It brought me back for a build that wasn’t, around a star whose location and metallicity shouted optimal even though the vons, once deployed, could barely scrape together enough material for a fueling station, much less a gate. It was almost as though someone else had been there before us and made off with all the best stuff. We even looked around for a gate someone else might have built, but came up empty.

It brought me back for a handful of builds I’ve almost forgotten, resurrected me for reasons so trivial that all I remember now is my irritation with Viktor’s end-of-time rhapsodies and my greater irritation at the Chimp’s slavish adherence to trigger thresholds.

Most of the time, though, I slept while the Chimp built an army of vons. I watched the replay, ages afterward.

I’d never seen anything like it before.

I was used to the usual dance: the harvesters shot from our hanger bays, a scavenger swarm sent ahead at meat-killing delta-vees to scoop up dust and rocks and tumbling mountains full of precious metal. Once they’d mined enough treasure they transformed, linked arms and fused together and turned into printers or refineries or assembly-lines: a factory floor, a piecemeal cloud five hundred kilometers across. The Hawking Hoop would coalesce in its heart; more harvesters and rock-wranglers would be birthed around its edges. They’d forage out, half a lightyear sometimes, bring back ores and alloys in an accelerating escalation of mass and complexity.

Eventually the build would reach some critical inflection point and turn inward: harvesters would stop eating comets and start on each other, cannibalizing the factory from the outside in, recycling deprecated components into last-minute coils or condensers. The uneaten survivors would weld everything tight, line up safely to one side and shut down, waiting for Eriophora to catch up and boot the gate. Perhaps offering up some rudimentary machine prayer that we wouldn’t miss the needle’s eye when—a few megasecs down the road—we blew through at sixty thousand kps.

It took anywhere from a hundred gigasecs to ten thousand, and it was damned impressive the first hundred times you watched the replay. But that was just the construction of a single gate, floating at some safe and benign distance from some safe and benign star. The biggest productions had a cast of less than ten thousand—maybe a hundred heavies holding court to a swirling retinue of harvesters.

The Nemesis build took half a million. We were ringside from the second act.

No cheating, this time. No counting on robots to go ahead and do all the work while we cruised by later to kickstart the fruits of their labor. Oh, the vons still launched while we were parsecs out. They still raced ahead and scoured the neighborhood for raw material. This time, though, they were eating for nine, and every one of those gates would be within kissing distance of the event horizon. The usual boot protocol was a complete nonstarter. Try threading Eri through one of those needles at twenty percent lightspeed and we’d be diving down Nemesis’ throat in the next nanosecond.

The plan was to build a whole brood of black holes from scratch—stunted, disposable, one for each portal—instead of using the larger one at the heart of Eri’s drive. We’d lay each in turn like a microscopic egg, nudge it into a precise orbit that would carry it through its assigned needle’s-eye. Each singularity would give its life in turn to boot its gate; we’d hide behind Nemesis each time it happened. Nemesis’ own lethal emissions would be as gentle sunlight on a spring day, next to the glare of those annihilations.

We would do this nine times.

The gates weren’t finished by the time we fell into orbit. Their exposed guts glinted in the starlight; fabbers clambered around encrusted scaffolding like monstrous crabs, like mechanical scavengers feasting on interstellar road kill. No hurry, though. It would take almost four gigasecs to scrape up the energy for a single boot, thirty-five more to finish the builds themselves: almost five years, meat on deck for at least half that time.

The Chimp could have probably done it on its own but it was a big build, an important build, and it wasn’t taking chances. We had complementary weaknesses, meat and machines. Metal had faster reflexes and a more delicate touch by far; but we weren’t as vulnerable to rads or EMPs.

Not that we’re invulnerable, mind you. It’s just that organic life has a kind of momentum that keeps you moving even after your cells have been shredded. If some unexpected blast of radiation didn’t turn us to ash outright, we’d still have hours or days to keep up the pace; metal would have sparked and died in an instant. We were the backups to the backups, awake but relegated to the bench as a hedge against the chance that some catastrophic failure might fratz the machinery but leave us standing.

They were long odds. But we were cheap insurance.

In theory we’d survive even if the claim came in; our coffins could put us down and patch us up before our insides turned to mush. We’d be benched for the rest of the build, but there’d be plenty of time for repairs before we were needed on deck again.

Thus did we spend five years, parked in the shadow of the behemoth.

It was such a small behemoth: twenty suns, contained in a horizon only one hundred twenty kilometers across. Not even a speck, on cosmological scales.

The reach it had, though. The terrible, terrible reach.

Tidal gradients extended far beyond the event horizon, ready to tear us apart if we strayed too close. Just offstage, Nemesis’ dwarf companion orbited at hazardous distance: far enough to avoid being swallowed whole but just as doomed in the long run, its atmosphere slurped away and spun across the void in a bottomless spiral, feeding an insatiable partner that would not stop until it had bled its captive absolutely fucking dry.

Kaden had named the dwarf Fáfnir. I had to look it up.

Nothing was insurmountable. Put your gates in an oblique orbit to minimize contact with the accretion disk. Send machines into the vortex to scrape the energy you need, while Eriophora stays safely distant from gravity’s rocky shore. There are solutions and workarounds for everything.

Still.

Thousands of exagrams in a dust mote? Twenty-four suns within the diameter of an asteroid? The dynamics are scary enough even before you add a dwarf bleeding out across the void, the lethal radioactive vortex of Nemesis’ accretion disk, a fleet of factories and refineries with a retinue of harvesters and construction drones half a million strong. Sometimes, unable to sleep, I’d watch them move. Sometimes, just to torture myself, I’d false the spectrum and take in that tableaux against a backdrop of X and gamma and superheated plasma. I’d watch our pitiful machines swirl and scurry like dust-mites while close behind—far too close behind—Fáfnir’s lifeblood drained through a trap door in the bottom of the universe, screaming blue murder as it disappeared.

I couldn’t tear myself away. It was the first feed I accessed whenever the Chimp thawed me out, the last before I froze again: a view so overwhelming I didn’t dare let it spill into wraparound for fear that total immersion would crush me down to some insignificant speck gibbering in the maelstrom. I kept the view shrunken and contained in a cortical window, or trapped out in the tac tank like a beast in an aquarium.

The tank had a perverse hold over us in those days. We’d drift onto a bridge in ones or twos, gather around our tiny toy Nemesis and watch transfixed. That lethal disk of incandescent gas. That tiny black maw at its heart, distant stars smeared around its edge like bright stains. The tenuous hyperdiamond necklace slung between here and there, a gravitic conveyor endlessly scraping the ergosphere and lifting precious aliquots of harvested energy back to our capacitors. Half a million pieces waltzing with annihilation: the whole dispersed factory floor in constant motion, every processor and refinery and fab assembly schooling in murmurations intricate enough to make your head hurt. We’d watch without a word, for hours sometimes, cave men huddling around a campfire that somehow left us chilled.

It wasn’t just the soul-crushing scale of it, though. There was something strangely familiar about the way all those pieces moved, something I could never quite put my finger on. Only now, here, do I remember where I saw something like it before: alone with the Chimp, back in an empty cavern in a half-constructed Eriophora, before we ever left home.

So who knows. Maybe it wasn’t dancing after all.

The Chimp came to me, in the waning of a Sunset Moment, and tried to make everything better.

I’d thought I’d been holding up my end: chatting about tribal politics as I docked my roach and approached the crypt on foot, confirming that everyone signed up for the Teredo tournament would be on deck for the first big boot, using my special influence to suggest that Ghora might be a better fit on deck than Dhanyata. (“Yeah, Dhanyata and Kaden don’t really get along—they had some kind of serious feud back before we shipped out and you gotta remember it’s barely been a couple of decades far as us cavemen are concerned.”) The crypt gaped at my arrival; I stepped inside, and walked down that dim high vault to the bright altar glowing at its heart, and—

And something moved there, in and out of the light, waiting for me.

More than one thing, I saw as I approached. A flotilla: half a dozen roaches, turning and spinning quietly on electric wheels. At least as many ground-effect drones weaving sine waves through the air around my coffin. The teleop cluster reaching down from the darkness, carbon tentacles and delicate jointed fingers—instruments of intervention, reserved for medical emergencies during resuscitation (and, sometimes, the disposal of bodies afterward)—possessed now by some spirit that made them dip and flex and undulate in ways I’d never seen before.

Everything moved with complex precision, each device a moving part of some elaborate whole: as if the components of an intricate clockwork had come apart in zero gee, yet continued to move in correct and proper relation to one another. It was precise and deterministic and I suppose there was a kind of grace to it. But it was—sterile. It was exactly what you’d expect from an algorithm parsing

—used to watch you dance—

without any real understanding of what dancing is, what it means, without any recollection of the time when it breathed life and wonder into a thousand glittering facets of self. A time when, just maybe, it had some kind of soul.

This was not that. This was a collection of lifeless objects jiggling on threads, and it almost broke my heart to realize what else it was:

A peace offering.

“Do you like it?” the Chimp asked from the darkness.

“I—” And trailed off. “I appreciate the sentiment.”

“I would like to repair our relationship,” it said.

“Repair.”

“We don’t talk as much as we used to. When we do talk, there is less intimacy.”

“Uh huh.” I couldn’t help myself. “Any wild guesses as to why that might be?”

He didn’t seem to notice. “Our relationship changed when you rediscovered the hardware archive.”

“When I found out you’d killed three thousand people, you mean.”

“If you say so.” He wasn’t even being snippy; he honestly didn’t remember. “I accept that you hold me responsible for that. But I also have faith in you, Sunday. I know that you’re vitally invested in the mission, and that you are vital to its success. We still work together, despite everything. And our relationship has improved since then.”

I trod carefully. “It—takes time.”

“Until now I’ve let our relationship heal naturally. You’ve been quicker to engage in conversation. I welcome that. I’m accelerating that process now because I need your help.”

“With?”

“I’ve noted activities over the past hundred gigasecs that may indicate attempts at sabotage. I would like them to stop.”

I bit my lip. Hoped that my sudden increase in heart rate wasn’t enough to send up any flags, that the Chimp would write it off as an understandable reaction to news of Enemies in Our Midst. Bots and roaches and teleops continued to waltz and orbit before me, surrealistic and absurd.

“What sort of activities?” My voice carefully steady.

“Inventory disappears temporarily. Fabricators run but I can’t find records of anything being produced.”

“Describe the missing inventory.”

“I can’t. The mass-balance checksums indicate that something’s missing, but all stockpiles are at expected levels.”

“This isn’t just another order from Mission Control you were told to forget about afterward?”

“If I ever carried out such commands in the past, they didn’t leave detectable inconsistencies in the record. I think someone’s actively hiding their activities from the mission logs. The most likely reason is that those activities aren’t in the best interests of the mission.”

I took a breath, and a chance: “How do you know it isn’t me?”

“I don’t. But it’s unlikely. You’ve never lied to me.”

“What do you need me for? You don’t have enough eyes and ears already?”

“My eyes and ears may be compromised. Yours would not be.”

“You want me to spy on my friends.”

“I trust you, Sunday. I hope you know you can trust me.”

“To do what?”

“To act in the best interests of the mission.”

I could have refused. The Chimp would have gone ahead anyway, looking for trouble, his suspicions heightened by my refusal to play informant.

I could have played along, pretended to cooperate. Whispered a warning to a fellow mutineer as we passed through a blind spot, hoped the word would spread before someone passed me a note or Chimp started wondering why his pet periscope kept blanking her visual feed.

Right.

I even considered dismissing the Chimp’s suspicions outright: You’re crazy, you’re senile, you’re suffering from bit rot and entropy artifacts. I know these people, none of them would ever—But of course I didn’t know these people. I hadn’t even met most them, for all the millions of years we’d been stuck on the same rock. Not even a bit-rotten Chimp would believe that I could see into thirty thousand souls.

(Twenty-seven thousand. But who’s counting.)

“Sunday?” He’d noticed my silence. “If there’s anything you’d like to share, now is the time.”

“There’s no need to spy,” I said. “I know what’s going on.”

And I told him everything.

I told him about the Rock Worshippers. I told him about Lian—how Gurnier and Laporta and Burkhart had seen the vulnerability in her, tried to recruit her under cover of dead zones and turned backs. How she’d reacted (“badly—well, you saw that much”), and how it had fed her paranoia even though she’d quailed at the prospect of outright rebellion. How she’d confided it all to me—not trusting the Children of Eri, not trusting the Chimp—and how I’d calmed her down and smoothed everything over.

Through it all, Chimp’s dismembered body parts never stopped dancing.

“Thank you,” he said when I’d finished.

I nodded.

“It would be helpful if, in future, you provided me with such information as soon as you acquire it,” he added.

“It was teras ago. It was three people. It was all secondhand, from a—well, you know Lian wasn’t the most reliable source. I don’t know who else might have been involved, or what they were planning. All I know is that at least some of them—objected to you.”

“Do you know why?”

“I only know what she told me. For all I know they figured out Easter Island for themselves, decided that your strategic little cull was against the will of their Rock God.”

Chimp was silent for a moment. “I don’t understand their belief in that deity.”

“Nothing to understand. We’re humans. Superstition’s just—wired into us, on some level.”

“Most gods are not so local. I’m the obvious candidate for anyone who needs to find external meaning in shipboard events.”

Fuck. How long had this machine been thinking we should worship it?

“You can’t deny we’ve blown past every metric of mission success from the day we launched. We’ve been—unaccountably lucky. The Children are just looking for a way to square that, and you can’t. Not unless you learned how to fuck with the laws of probability while no one was looking.”

Chimp said nothing.

“For all I know the whole rebellion fizzled and they just lost interest.”

“I can’t afford to assume that.”

“You could always ask them.”

“I couldn’t trust their replies. Also reviving them would be an unacceptable risk; I have no way of knowing how far their plans have progressed.”

I’d feared as much. I’d counted on it.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Deprecation is the safest option.”

“The whole tribe?”

“As you say, there’s no way of knowing how many were involved.”

“But just deprecate. Not kill.”

“It’s the safest option,” it repeated. “Members of that tribe might have attributes that prove vital to future operations. In the meantime they can’t disrupt the mission so long as they’re in stasis.”

And so the Children of Eri would simply sleep away eternity, never again to be called on deck—barring some unforeseen need whose likelihood was just high enough to spare them from outright extermination. In that, at least, I could take some measure of comfort.

I might have also taken comfort from the thought that it wouldn’t even matter, if everything went according to plan. Once we were running the place we’d be able to thaw out whoever we pleased, whenever we liked. At the time, though, my gut wasn’t quite ready to believe in such rosy scenarios.

“Thank you for being honest with me,” Chimp said—and as the lid came down, I swear I heard something approaching real sadness in that synthetic voice. I remember thinking that maybe the machine was experiencing regret at the need to put down its pets. Maybe a bit of heartbreak that those in its care should prove so ungrateful.

Now, of course, I know better.