“She was a cloud-killer,” Brüks said at last.
“Huh,” Moore grunted. Then, helping Brüks’s arms into their sleeves: “Not a very good one, I hope.”
“Why?”
“Let’s just say that not every distributed AI’s emergent, and not every emergent AI’s rogue.” Moore handed over his gauntlets. “We don’t publicize it, but every now and then some of the better CKs have been known to pick targets we’d really rather they didn’t.”
Brüks swallowed on a throat gone suddenly dry. “The fucked-up thing is, she agreed with them. The AI Rights idiots, I mean. She quit because she got sick of killing conscious beings whose only crime was—” How had she put it? “Growing up too fast.”
Suit zipped up. Gauntlets clicked into place. A solid yank on the boa-cord and the suit squirmed around him, cinching from flaccid to skintight in a few disquieting seconds. Moore handed him the helmet: “Seat it facing your three, turn counterclockwise until it clicks. Keep the visor up until I say.”
“Really?” Brüks was starting to feel light-headed. “The air seems a little—thin…”
“Plenty of time.” Moore grabbed another suit off the wall. “I don’t want your hearing compromised.” He bounced off the deck, brought knees to chest and spread his suit open with both hands. With one fluid motion he kicked his legs straight back onto the deck, suited to the waist. He bounced lightly.
“So she wasn’t afraid of the conscious AIs.” Moore shrugged arms into sleeves. “How about the smart ones?”
“W-What?”
“Smart AIs.” He clicked his own helmet into place. “Was she afraid of them?”
Brüks gulped oily alpine air and tried to concentrate. The smart ones. Past that minimum complexity threshold where networks wake up: past the Sapience Limit where they go to sleep again, where self-awareness dissolves in the vaster reaches of networks grown too large, in the signal lags that reduce synchrony to static. Up where intelligence continues to grow even though the self has been left behind.
“Those, she—was a little worried about,” he admitted, trying to ignore the faint roaring in his ears.
“Smart woman.” The Colonel’s voice was strangely tinny. He leaned over and checked Brüks’s seals and sockets with precise mechanical efficiency, nodded. “Okay, drop your visor,” he said, dropping his.
A louder hiss replaced the fainter one: a blessed wash of fresh air caressed Brüks’s face the moment his visor sealed. Relief flooded in a moment later. An arcane mosaic of icons and acronyms flickered to life across the crystal.
Moore’s helmet bumped against his own, his voice buzzing distantly across the makeshift connection: “It’s a saccadal interface. Comm tree’s upper left.” Sure enough an amber star blinked there: a knock at the door. Brüks focused his gaze just so and accepted the call.
“That’s better.” Suddenly, it was as though Moore was speaking from right inside Brüks’s helmet.
“Let’s get out of here,” Brüks said.
Moore held his arm out, watched it drop. “Not quite yet. Another minute or two.”
Out beyond Brüks’s helmet, the air—the lack of it, maybe—grew somehow hard. Through that impoverished atmosphere and two layers of convex crystal, Jim Moore’s face was calm and cryptic.
“What about yours?” he asked after a moment.
“My what?”
“Your wife. What was she—in for?”
“Yes. Helen.” A frown may have flickered across Moore’s face then, but it was gone in an instant and he was answering before Brüks had a chance to regret the question. “She just got—tired, I suppose. Or maybe scared.” His gaze dropped for a moment. “Twenty-first century’s not for everyone.”
“When did she ascend?”
“Almost fourteen years ago now.”
“Firefall.” A lot of people had fled into Heaven after that. A lot of the Ascended had even come back.
But Moore was shaking his head. “Just before, actually. Literally minutes before. We all said good-bye, and then we went outside and I looked up…”
“Maybe she knew something.”
Moore smiled faintly, held out his arm. Brüks watched it drift back to his side, slow as a feather. “Almost—”
The hab lurched. Cubes and cartons teetered and wobbled against their mutual attraction; rogue containers lifted from the deck and bumped against the walls in a ponderous ballet. Brüks and Moore, tethered to their cargo straps, drifted like seaweed.
“—time to go.” Moore dialed open the inner hatch. Brüks pulled himself along in the other man’s wake.
“Jim.”
“Right here.” Moore pulled a spring-loaded clasp from a little disk at his waist. A bright thread unspooled behind it.
“Why were you here? When things went south?”
“I was on patrol.” Fastening the clasp to a cleat on Brüks own suit. “Walking the perimeter.”
“What?”
“You heard me.” The inner hatch squeezed down behind them.
Brüks tugged on the thread while Moore went through the motions of depressurizing the ’lock: impossibly fine, impossibly strong. A leash of engineered spider silk.
“You’ve got a ConSensus feed in your head,” Brüks pointed out. “You can see any place on the network without getting off the toilet and you walk the perimeter?”
“Twice a day. Going on thirty years. You should be thankful I’ve never seen any reason to stop.” One gauntleted hand made a small flourish toward the outer hatch. “Shall we go?”
Moore, you old warhorse.
I’m alive thanks to you. I pass out inside a tornado, I wake up with a smashed ankle on a space station with a broken back. You get me into this suit. You get me to natter on about my wife so I barely even notice the air bleeding away around us.
I bet you’ll never tell me how close we came, will you? Not your style. You were too busy distracting me from making a complete panicking ass of myself while you saved my life.
“Thank you,” he said softly, but if Moore—tapping out some incantation on the bulkhead interface—even heard him, he gave no sign.
The outer airlock irised open. The great wide universe waited beyond.
And the magnitude of all Jim Moore’s well-intentioned lies spread naked across the heavens for anyone to see.
“Welcome to the Crown of Thorns,” Moore said from the other end of the universe.
The sun was too large, too blinding: Brüks saw that as soon as the outer hatch opened, in the instant before a polarizing disk bloomed on his faceplate—perfectly line of sight—to cut the glare. Of course, he thought at first, no atmosphere. Things were bound to be brighter in orbit.
And then he stumbled out in Moore’s wake, and toppled weightlessly around some lopsided center of mass while stars and vast structures spun around him.
The Earth was gone.
That wasn’t true, he knew in some distant hypothetical place that made absolutely no difference. It couldn’t be true. Earth was still out there somewhere; one of those billion bright shards lacerating the heavens on all sides. Unwinking pixels, all of them. Not a single one close enough to rise above zero dimensions, to actually assume a shape.