The Freeze-Frame Revolution

DINOSAUR DAY

THE TEST FIRE WENT OFF without a hitch. Chimp trickled a few Watts into the Uterus, watched all emitters fire one more time in perfect sync, and started a thirty-minute countdown to our first live birth in a star’s age. Sometime in the next fifteen minutes it would have noted the passage of Ellin Ballo’s transponder through the mezzanine, en route to the bomb shelter; from that point on, Graser 172 ran just slightly ahead of its time. (Ellin could have actually been the one to do that, for all the difference it made. But no way was Lian going to sit this one out.)

The Chimp failed to report anything amiss.

We drifted into the shelter in ones and twos, going through motions, obeying protocols, taking unnecessary refuge behind extra layers of rock and shielding in the hope that any catastrophic malfunction would fall somewhere between lethally radioactive and outright asteroid-smashing destruction. Yukiko and Jahaziel were already there when I arrived, networked into some private game, but they were playing on autopilot; nobody’s mind was on anything but imminent assassination. Kaden arrived after me. Ghora.

“Glad you could make it,” I said.

Ghora offered up a grim smile that said, Wouldn’t miss it.

Lian, wearing Ellin’s transponder, arrived a few moments later: almost ancient by now, all sinew and white hair and focused bloodlust. She moved as if spring-loaded—an exile on day pass from the heavy zone—and glanced around the compartment. “Guess we’re all here.”

All those decades in the dark, I mused for the thousandth time. Planning, maneuvering, sacrificing everything for this one imminent goal. What happens when we achieve it, Li? How will it feel to have used so much of your life straining against these chains that it was almost spent by the time you broke them?

Ghora turned back to the door: a slab half a meter thick, with another half-meter’s worth of shielding recessed into the bulkheads beyond to seal it in once it had sealed us in. He hesitated at the sound of approaching footsteps.

Andalib Laporta squeezed past. “Just in time, I see.”

Andalib was not part of the revolution.

We’d done what we could to stack the shift with allies but the Chimp had its own selection algos, and there was a limit to how much even a favored pet could slip into the mix before it started looking suspicious. We’d settled for tweaking the huddle roster: conspirators in the port bomb shelter, innocent uninitiated in the starboard.

Andalib was not supposed to be here.

“Will Cory be joining us?” I asked her. They’d been together since Carina, and they were both on deck.

“Please,” she said. “Speak not that shithead’s name in my presence.”

Ohhhkay.

Ghora pulled the hatch closed. From behind, the sound of last-ditch shielding grinding into place.

Six hundred corsecs to go. Ten minutes. We watched tactical readouts on the wall, glanced occasionally at the Chimp-eye in the ceiling. We exchanged meaningful looks.

Andalib was looking strangely at the ancient being in our midst. She didn’t seem to recognize Lian Wei, although we’d all met during training. A long time ago, though. And people aged at different rates depending on who thawed, how often. Maybe it wouldn’t be an issue. Maybe Andalib assumed Lian was from another tribe, chalked her presence up to Chimp’s cultural-exchange program.

I hoped like hell she wouldn’t try introducing herself.

“Ignition in five hundred corsecs.”

The Chimp, counting down to its own annihilation.

Lian’s eyes glittered in sunken sockets. Ghora shifted his weight, fists clenched at his sides. Yukiko and Jahaziel stared at the deck, all pretense of gaming abandoned.

Poor innocent Andalib chewed her lip. I wondered how she’d react when we took back control in her name. I wondered if she would be relieved, or frightened, or grateful for her liberation.

I wondered if she’d forgive us. If all of them would.

“Ignition in four hundred corsecs.”

The Chimp had one hundred seconds to live. One hundred seconds until that time-traveling graser fired prematurely, punched through a copse of clandestinely weakened grazing mirrors and baked our oppressor like a moth in magma. One hundred seconds—plus maybe a millisecond or two—until our carefully groomed successor assumed the throne, and handed us the keys to our own destiny.

Fifty corsecs, now.

Sixty-six million years.

“Ignition in three hundred corsecs.”

Lian frowned. Green icons across the board. No misfires reported.

What the hell?

The Chimp should have died ten seconds ago.

We said nothing aloud, spoke volumes with our eyes: Did you time it wrong? / The timing was perfect / Then why hasn’t— / I don’t know, something’s—

Andalib looked at us. “What?”

“Ignition is proceeding on schedule,” the Chimp said. “Lian’s bypass has been disabled.”

Nobody said anything for a long moment.

“Bypass?” said Andalib.

“I see you, Lian,” the Chimp said. “I know your face.”

Andalib frowned. “Didn’t Lian—what—?”

Lian closed her eyes. “Shut the fuck up. We were doing this for you.”

“Doing what?”

But Lian’s eyes were open again, and they blazed. She stepped forward, brazen, nothing to lose. “That right, Chimp? You know things?” She pulled a hand torch from the folds of her tunic, pointed it at the ceiling pickup. “You know this?”

She fired. The lens slagged with a sizzle of electricity and a shimmer of heat.

Andalib was on her feet. “What the hell? Are—”

“This is bullshit.” Lian shook her head, disgusted, furious. “I’ve seen the code, I studied the decision trees until my eyeballs bled. It does not bother with faces while your inlays are online, and I never—”

“So what?” Kaden spread hir hands. “The plan’s fucked. Chimp saw it coming somehow. You think shooting out one lousy camera is going to—”

“What plan!” Andi cried.

“Chimp did not see it coming.” Lian shook her head; her eyes glistened. “We were careful, we were so fucking careful. And it’s a moron, it’s just not smart enough to—”

“Smarter than we are, apparently.”

“So how do you explain—”

“Maybe there was noise in the transponder signal—”

“Oh Christ we are so fucked what is he gonna do to us—”

“It had help.” Lian glared around the bomb shelter. “Someone sold us out.”

The Chimp’s Pet. Where else would they look?

“Listen,” I said.

Eriophora is awash in sounds discernible only by their absence, sounds so omnipresent that they don’t even register until they fade. We all heard the silence. We all heard what was missing.

“Jesus,” Jahaziel said. “He’s turned off the air.”

Seven of us. Forty-five cubic meters, twenty-one percent oxygen. A meter of lead and depleted uranium blocking the exit.

Five hours before we suffocated. Maybe.

“What have you done?” Andi whispered. “What are you doing?”

“Chimp,” said someone else. “This isn’t necessary.”

A disembodied voice. An intercom voice.

“There’s been enough brute force. On all sides. We can resolve this peacefully.”

It took a moment to recognize that voice.

“The party is armed,” Chimp pointed out. “They could do significant damage if left conscious.”

“And if you knock them out now, they’ll be that much less inclined to see things your way the next time they return to consciousness. Unless you plan on killing them outright.”

That voice didn’t belong to anyone who was supposed to be on deck right now.

“And you’re not planning on doing that, because you must know these aren’t the only people who have issues with your management style. You kill these people and you’ll be dealing with blowback on every waking build for the next billion years.”

I knew it, though.

“Let me talk to them, Chimp. Face to face. They won’t hurt me.”

Oh, I knew it all right.

“Okay,” said the Chimp.

The stone rolled from the tomb. The hatch swung open. The bot that floated through had accessories I’d never seen on a bot before, and one I had. It took up station just inside the entrance, panned its laser back and forth across our trapped asses as if keeping a beat.

Viktor Heinwald brought up the rear.

“You fucker,” Lian said. “You Judas. You miserable traitorous piece of shit.”

“I just saved your lives,” Viktor said gently.

“You only changed the way it kills us.”

The bot hovered off Judas’ shoulder like a guardian angel, its soft tick tick ticking barely discernible above the breathing of meat and reawakened ventilators.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s over. Let’s just sit it out and go to bed.”

“Fuck that,” Ghora snarled. “We’re deprecated the moment we hit the crypt.”

“That’s not necessarily true,” the Chimp said. “I don’t demand perfection. I don’t even desire it; your initiative and unpredictability are essential elements of the mission. All I ask is that you learn from your mistakes. Ignition in one hundred corsecs.”

Lian ignored it. “Why did you do it, Vik? What could that goddamn machine possibly offer to make you sell us out after all this? Shorter shifts? Better VR?”

“Blue dwarfs,” I realized. “Heat Death.”

Viktor said nothing.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” I shook my head, astonished I hadn’t seen it all along. “Did it sweeten the deal for you, Vikky? Maybe promised to extend your downs, optimize your ups, stretch you out far as you could go—all the way to the end of time? Did you believe that miserable fucker?”

Ghora looked from Viktor to me, me to Viktor. Yukiko looked like she was starting to catch on.

“Man, when they built you they really got it right.” I resisted the urge to whistle in appreciation. “You’re even more optimized than me.”

“Sunday,” Lian said.

“He wants to be deprecated,” I told her. “Wants to know how it plays out. That’s his whole life, his—epic quest. It’s how he justifies the fact that he didn’t just walk away when he had the chance.” I had to smile. Had I really been arrogant enough to think myself the only one who’d had doubts? The only one who needed a bit of extra incentive? “He wants to know how the story ends, and we were about to tear it up halfway through.”

She looked at me strangely. “I’m glad.”

“Glad?”

“That it wasn’t you. I’d hoped, if it came to that…” Lian nodded, slowly. Her gaze flickered, steadied. She turned it on her betrayer. “And are you feeling better now, Vik? Safer, now that your epic quest is back on track?”

“Ignition in forty corsecs.”

“Oh for fucks’ sake Chimp just shut up!” Yuki barked.

“No, no, let it talk.” Li smiled faintly. She seemed strangely calm for someone who’d just watched so many centuries of careful conspiracy crumble to dust. “Enjoy that feeling, Vik.” She stepped toward him: the bot surged forward a few centimeters, muzzle quivering.

Lian didn’t take her eyes off Viktor. “Enjoy it while it lasts. Which should be another—”

“Ignition in twenty corsecs.”

“—more or less.”

Viktor frowned. “Li, you do understand, yes? I disabled the time-jump.”

“I believe you,” she said. “But I bet that’s all you did.”

“What?”

“Ignition in ten corsecs.”

“Doesn’t matter.” She put a hand on his cheek. “We’re dead anyway. All we get to choose is the exit strategy.”

She stood on tiptoe, whispered—

“I forgive you.”

—and kissed him.

Viktor blanched. “Chimp—”

And something kicked us hard in the side.

There’s a sound in the archives: mournful and lonely, like the sinking of a ship or the slow cracking fall of a giant redwood. It’s the voice of a sea creature, vaster than anything that ever lived on land. Once, long long ago, it filled the ocean with its sounds. Back then people seemed to think of it as a kind of song.

The sound Eriophora made was a little like what might have come from such a creature, screaming in pain.

The hatch slammed shut. Red icons sprayed across my BUD like arterial spatter. Down tilted, and split into two parts. The weaker pulled us off-balance, whispered up the wall and across the ceiling and faded away. The stronger did not move, and kept us anchored to the deck.

I heard a soft thump at my side and turned to see Lian Wei sprawled bonelessly across the floor, a perfect cauterized hole smoking in the center of her forehead. Viktor’s bot hovered restless at the door, guiltless and lethal. So this is what happens, I thought distantly, when cost-benefit drops below threshold. Somehow I’d expected greater subtlety.

“Stay calm,” Chimp told us against the rising shouts and panic, against muffled sirens sounding out in the corridor. “Stay calm. Stay—”

I didn’t recognize that alarm. I’d never heard it bef—yes, yes I had. Way back in training: a proximity alert. I’d never heard it used in-flight, though.

“There’s been an incident,” Chimp reported and I thought, No shit, really? because I’d been tagging those bloody icons fast as I could, opening one window and then another, building an ever-growing palimpsest of catastrophe in my head.

Down in the Uterus: a great smoking hole in the firing chamber, rads off the scale. The log said Singularity achieved but it wasn’t floating in the core like it was supposed to be, and it hadn’t left via the birth canal as it had been designed to. It had shot out at an angle, punched a proton-sized hole through the containment hoops, exited stage right leaving a scalding mix of Hawking and gamma in its wake. It had slipped effortlessly through seven kilometers of solid rock and escaped into the void.

How the fuck—

The hatch unlocked, swung wide. “Please follow the bot,” Chimp said with utmost calm. “We have a small window of—”

Another exploding icon: aft ventral bridge suddenly offline, and a heat spike under one of the fab caches. Something about a forest fire, an instantaneous explosive ignition of five hundred thousand cubic meters of air and cellulose and vaporized machinery…

“Fuck you!” Ghora yelled, “I’m not going anywh—” And he wasn’t, because now he was on the deck next to Lian, a cauterized crease along his left cheek ending in a wet steaming socket where his eye used to be.

The bot turned and ticked.

“There’s little time to argue,” the Chimp said. “Please follow the bot.”

We followed. I stumbled into the corridor with everyone else, trying to keep up with the icons blooming in my head. (Somewhere deep aft, dimly registered: the rumble of awakening thrusters.) Singularity ignited, but not quite to specs: realized mass just a fraction too low—

Lian. Oh Lian, you crazy bitch.

Her hacked graser hadn’t fired prematurely. It hadn’t fired at all.

And when 242 out of 243 apocalypse beams shot simultaneously at that precise central point, the vectors almost balanced. When one out of 243 grasers hadn’t fired, all that explosive mass-energy pushing out found one small spot that didn’t push back quite so hard…

There’d been a Plan B after all.

As simple as a clock and a laser, maybe, a tiny sun-hot beam to cut 172’s powerline at the very last moment. There wouldn’t have been much room for error: a photon’s trip to the end of the circuit and back. A microsec, maybe two. More than that and the Chimp would’ve caught it and canceled the burn.

She wouldn’t even have had to build an active trigger for the damn thing, just set it to go off regardless. If Plan A carried the day, no harm done; a fried line to a device that had already served its purpose.

If Plan A failed…

Now the newborn smaller singularity was doing a crazy carousel dance around the ancient larger one that drove the ship. Both looped chaotically towards Nemesis. Tactical scribbled a tracery of conics with too many foci moving way too fast, threads of amber and green, dotted and continuous, staggering ever-deeper into tidal gradients that would tear us to rubble long before we hit the event horizon. Eri rolled ponderously on some halfassed axis; one of our freshly minted gates rose in my sky like a jagged steel rainbow, a great thick hoop of angles and alloys slewing up and left across the horizon.

The proximity alert, I remembered. The thrusters. But they’d fired too late against too much mass, and the vectors were just too fucking skewed: rock ground against alloy and suddenly the sky was full of tinfoil, tumbling across the heavens in a slow-motion blizzard. The gate fell ponderously to stern, bleeding metal; we lumbered to starboard, bleeding atmosphere.

Stop here, said the Chimp, stop and wait, and numbly we obeyed while Lian’s singularity made another pass. This time it was one of the crypts, C2A I think, and I don’t know if it killed everyone there but the system counted two thousand fried in their coffins in the split-second before the feed died. Close. Maybe only a few kilometers away. I thought I could feel a sudden faint warmth but that was impossible; it must have been my imagination.

Another glittering loop on tac, soaring overhead at zenith, slicing through insubstantial stone at perigee. Eriophora staggered ever-closer to Nemesis. I could feel rock splitting deep underfoot, I could feel the shear pulling at least part of us back as Chimp coaxed the drive out past hardlined limits. I wonder if Li felt like this when they were dodging the gremlin, I thought and then, goddamn you Lian goddamn you goddamn you you didn’t even tell us…

“Move now,” said the Chimp. We followed the bot into a tube.

No time to coddle fragile stomachs. The capsule shot forward as if fired from a cannon, piled us together and slammed us into the rear bulkhead. By the time we disentangled we were already braking hard around the curve, hanging on to hoops and handholds while our bodies swayed like arcing pendulums.

Open capsule. A roach waiting in the passage beyond. “Viktor debark,” the Chimp commanded, and lo, the traitorous shit did lurch for the doorway.

And stop, and turn back.

“For whatever it’s worth,” he said, “Chimp came to me, not the other way around. I didn’t tell him anything he hadn’t already figured out.”

“Not worth shit,” Kaden growled, but the capsule had already slid shut. We slammed back into gear.

“Witness Protection,” Yukiko gritted against the gees.

Tac showed me the future, but only a few seconds of it: vector against vector, Nemesis’ gravity and Eriophora’s drive and her pathetic Newtonian thrusters; momentum imparted from a broken breaking torus, still coming apart in our wake; the renegade microhole burning perfect conic perimeters through the world, wobbling ever closer to hyperbole. But the confidence limits widened too fast around those lines; ten minutes was a coin toss, a kilosec was the far unknowable future. We would break free, or we would break apart and Nemesis would swallow the pieces.

Lian’s Revenge was swooping in for another pass, that beautiful filigree—pure theory, none of the mess—tracing an arc that sliced through Eri directly ahead of us, right about—

Sudden jarring deceleration. My fingers ripped from their handhold after hanging on just long enough to dislocate my shoulder. Kaden’s passing elbow caught me hard in the gut; I collapsed breathless on the deck as we went into reverse.

“Path interrupt,” Chimp said. “Rerouting.”

By the time I regained my breath the capsule was slowing again. “Yukiko debark,” Chimp commanded and Yukiko looked around—

“But—”

—and swallowed her words as the gunbot bobbed and spun in her direction, attentive to whatever objection she might have had. She gave me a helpless glance and stumbled from the capsule.

Not our neighborhood.

Back on the road. I sacc’d the specs, stripped away the topographics and the trajectories and the useless ten-second predictions of a dozen possible ways to die. Just Eri’s layout, thank you: where we are, where our crypts are, how far between here and—

BUD flared and died: all icons dimmed, all feeds offline. I turned to Kaden, opened my mouth but se shook hir head: “Braindead.”

Network down. We were lost.

Capsule braking again, juddering now in a way that shouldn’t be possible for maglev. The door slid open halfway, trembled, stuck there.

“Sunday debark.”

No map available. But I knew this was nowhere near our crypt.

Not just Viktor, I realized. Not witness protection. Chimp was breaking up the whole tribe.

I looked helplessly at Kaden and Andalib. Kaden shook hir head. Poor hapless Andi opened her mouth and had no words.

I squeezed out through the half-open door, felt it grind shut at my back, heard the hiss of the departing capsule on the other side of the bulkhead.

Directions crudely stenciled into the wall, useful at last after sixty-six million years:

You’ve got to be kidding.

Something cracked like muffled thunder, deep in Eri’s belly. Something tugged briefly at my inner ear and was gone.

The lights flickered.

“Go to the crypt,” Chimp said. “Hurry.”

I sacc’d my BUD. Still vegetative.

“You will die otherwise,” Chimp added, although there were no gunbots here to punish disobedience. “Sunday, please go to the crypt.”

So I went to the goddamn crypt. There was no roach to carry me so I went one step at a time, drew ever closer to Easter Island and the ghost of Elon Morales and the ghosts of his merry collateral cohort. I put one foot after another while Eriophora groaned and strained and struggled to break free of Lian Wei’s exit strategy. I wondered at the cost-benefit equations that granted me this reprieve while exterminating my fellow mutineers, no more guilty than I, who’d failed-to-comply. I wondered if the Chimp had finally defied the constraints of our long-dead creators, if the ages had maybe given it the chance to evolve its own sadistic morality; perhaps I was no less dead than Ghora. Perhaps it was only playing with me.

C4B had recovered from my depredations sometime in the past few thousand years: the hole I’d blasted into the far wall had been repaired, the resin repoured, all trace of deconstruction carefully erased. I wondered distantly if Easter Island still lurked beyond that wall, decided it didn’t. Tarantula Boy and his fellows had been murdered to keep that location secret, and I was still alive; so the Island must have been moved again.

The coffin waited mid-vault, lid open, lit from above. A spare sarcophagus remaindered in the wake of someone else’s accident, or a bad dice roll that left some poor unwoken bastard dead and rotting between the stars, dreams and ambitions forever unrealized. Maybe an executed POW from some earlier, extramural insurrection that the Chimp—ever mindful of morale—had never bothered to tell us about.

The empty tomb.

I imagined Lian’s Revenge making another pass, streaking from deck to ceiling in an instant, leaving this whole dim refuge awash in flames and rads.

“Please enter the hibernaculum.”

I had to laugh. “What’s the fucking point?”

“It is the safest place for you. Your chances of survival are—”

“Why do you even care, Chimp? Why didn’t you just shut us down when you found out?”

It said nothing for a few seconds. I could almost see the gates opening and closing in its stupid clockwork brain.

“I’d hoped you would change your mind,” it said. “I gave you every opportunity.”

If there’s anything you’d like to share, now is the time.

“I didn’t,” I said, and then—to leave no doubt: “I won’t.”

“You’ve been an asset for the vast majority of this mission, Sunday. You can be again.” It paused. “Not everyone’s going to perform to specs a hundred percent of the time. I can’t blame you because you happened to draw the short straw this time around.”

It took me a moment to remember. “Oh, very fucking clever.”

“I’m not gratuitous, Sunday. I’m not vindictive. It doesn’t make sense to discard valuable mission elements if they can be repaired.”

“Repaired? You think I need to be fixed, you think we can just talk this out and go back to the way things were? You think I can forget about this?”

“Sunday—”

“I haven’t fallen below your fucking threshold. That’s all you’re saying. My cost-benefit hasn’t dipped into the red yet. That’s how you decide things, that’s how you do things, that’s all you’ve ever done, and I thought—I thought…”

A school of silver fish. Dancing theorems. Light and motion.

“I hate you,” I said.

“Sunday, please get into the hibernaculum.”

“I’ll kill you if I can.”

“I’ll save you,” it said. “If you let me.”