Ambassador
Peter Watts
I’ve never sold a story to Analog. (Truth be told, I’ve never sold a story to any of the US magazines.) But this one, according to Analog editor Stanley Schmidt, “almost made it”. It had a “powerful narrative drive” and “compelling theme”. Sadly, ol’ Stan also found the ending “ugly” and “simplistic”; in other words, just too damn futile (which, to those familiar with my work, is kind of a familiar refrain). I toyed with the idea of bringing in some clowns at the end, but I just couldn’t get ’em to dance on cue.
“Ambassador” finally showed up in my “Ten Monkeys, Ten Minutes” anthology, albeit in a somewhat updated and up-tarted (but every bit as ugly and futile) form. It was my one true foray into spaceships-and-rayguns science fiction until Blindsight (still in progress). And in either a clever nod to continuity or a pathetic recycling of unoriginal ideas, the thematic tagline of this story shows up in Blindsight as well.
Ambassador
First Contact was supposed to solve everything.
That was the rumour, anyway: gentle wizards from Epsilon Eridani were going to save us from the fire and welcome us into a vast Galactic Siblinghood spanning the Milky Way. Whatever diseases we’d failed to conquer, they would cure. Whatever political squabbles we hadn’t outgrown, they would resolve. They were going to fix it all.
They were not supposed to turn me into a hunted animal.
I didn’t dwell much on the philosophical implications, at first; I was too busy running for my life. Zombie streaked headlong into the universe, slaved to a gibbering onboard infested with static. Navigation was a joke. Every blind jump I made reduced the chances of finding my way home by another order of magnitude. I did it anyway, and repeatedly; any jump I didn’t make would kill me.
Once more out of the breach. Long-range put me somewhere in the cometary halo of a modest binary. In better times the computer would have shown me the system’s planetary retinue in an instant; now it would take days to make the necessary measurements.
Not enough time. I could have fixed my position in a day or so using raw starlight even without the onboard, but whatever was after me had never given me the chance. Several times I’d made a start. The longest reprieve had lasted six hours; in that time I’d placed myself somewhere coreward of the Orion spur.
I’d stopped trying. Knowing my location at any moment would put me no further ahead at t+1. I’d be lost again as soon as I jumped.
And I always jumped. It always found me. I still don’t know how; theoretically it’s impossible to track anything through a singularity. But somehow space always opened its mouth and the monster dropped down on me, hungry and mysterious. It might have been easier to deal with if I’d known why.
What did I do, you ask. What did I do to get it so angry? Why, I tried to say hello.
What kind of intelligence could take offence at that?
Imagine a dead tree, three hundred fifty meters tall, with six gnarled branches worming their way from its trunk. Throw it into orbit around a guttering red dwarf that doesn’t even rate a proper name. This is what I’d come upon; there were no ports, no running lights, no symbols on the hull. It hung there like some forgotten chunk of cosmic driftwood. Embers of reflected sunlight glinted occasionally from the surface; they only emphasised the shadows drowning the rest of the structure. I thought it was derelict at first.
Of course I went through the motions anyway. I reached out on all the best wavelengths, tried to make contact a hundred different ways. For hours it ignored me. Then it sent the merest blip along the hydrogen band. I fed it into the onboard.
What else do you do with an alien broadcast?
The onboard had managed one startled hiccough before it crashed. All the stats on my panel had blinked once, in impossible unison, and gone dark.
And then doppler had registered the first incoming missile.
So I’d jumped, blind. There really hadn’t been a choice, then or the four times since. Sometime during that panicked flight, I had given my tormentor a name: Kali.
Unless Kali had gotten bored—hope springs eternal, even within puppets such as myself—I’d have to run again in a few hours. In the meantime I aimed Zombie at the binary and put her under thrust. Open space is impossible to hide in; a system, even a potential one, is marginally better.
Of course I’d have to jump long before I got there. It didn’t matter. My reflexes were engineered to perform under all circumstances. Zombie’s autopilot may have been disabled, but mine engaged smoothly.
It takes time to recharge between jumps. So far, it had taken longer for Kali to find me. At some point that was likely to change; the onboard had to be running again before it did.
I knew there wasn’t a hope in hell.
A little forensic hindsight, here: how exactly did Kali pull it off?
I’m not exactly sure. But some of Zombie’s diagnostic systems run at the scale of the merely electronic, with no reliance on quantum computation. The crash didn’t affect them; they were able to paint a few broad strokes in the aftermath.
The Trojan signal contained at least one set of spatial co-ordinates. The onboard would have read that as a pointer of some kind: it would have opened the navigation files to see what resided at x-y-z. A conspicuous astronomical feature, perhaps? Some common ground to compare respective visions of time and space?
Zap. Nav files gone.
Once nav was down—or maybe before, I can’t tell—the invading program told Zombie to update all her backups with copies of itself. Only then, with all avenues of recovery contaminated, had it crashed the onboard. Now the whole system was frozen, every probability wave collapsed, every qubit locked into P=1.00.
It was an astonishingly beautiful assault. In the time it had taken me to say hello, Kali had grown so intimate with my ship that she’d been able to seduce it into suicide. Such a feat was beyond my capabilities, far beyond those of the haphazard beasts that built me. I’d have given anything to meet the mind behind the act, if it hadn’t been trying so hard to kill me.
Early in the hunt I’d tried jumping several times in rapid succession, without giving Kali the chance to catch up. I’d nearly bled out the reserves. All for nothing; the alien found me just as quickly, and I’d had barely enough power to escape.
I was still paying for that gamble. It would take two days at sublight for Zombie to recharge fully, and ninety minutes before I could even jump again. Now I didn’t dare jump until the destroyer came for me; I lay in real space and hoarded whatever moments of peace the universe saw fit to grant.
This time the universe granted three and a half hours. Then short-range beeped at me; object ahead. I plugged into Zombie’s cameras and looked forward.
A patch of stars disappeared before my eyes.
The manual controls were still unfamiliar. It took precious seconds to call up the right numbers. Whatever eclipsed the stars was preceding Zombie on a sunwards course, decelerating fast. One figure refused to settle; the mass of the object was increasing as I watched. Which meant that it was coming through from somewhere else.
Kali was cutting her search time with each iteration.