He stares at me without speaking, so I add context: “Far as we can tell something big came through a few hundred thousand years back, knocked everything haywire. None of the planetary masses are even on the ecliptic any more. We can’t find anything orbiting with an eccentricity of less than point six, there’s a shitload of rogues zipping around in the halo—but by the time those numbers came back, we were already committed. So now we just buckle down through the heavy traffic, steal a gravity-assist, get back on the road.”
He shakes his head. “What are we doing here?”
Oh, that’s what he means. I tap an interface, timelapse the red giant. It jerks in the tank like a fibrillating heart. “Turns out it’s an irregular variable. One complication too many, right?” Not that we’ll be able thread the needle any better than the Chimp can (although of course Hakim’s going to try, in these few hours left to him). But the mission has parameters. The Chimp has his algorithms. Too many unexpected variables and he wakes up the meat. That’s what we’re here for, after all.
That’s all we’re here for.
One more time, Hakim asks: “What are we doing here?”
Oh.
“You’re the numbers guy,” I say after a moment. “One of ’em, anyway.” Out of how many thousand, stored down in the crypt?
Doesn’t matter. They probably all know about me by now.
“Guess it was just your rotation,” I add.
He nods. “And you? You a numbers guy too, now?”
“We come back in pairs,” I say softly. “You know that.”
“So it just happened to be your rotation as well.”
“Look—”
“Nothing to do with your Chimp wanting its own personal sock-puppet on hand to keep an eye on things.”
“Fuck, Hakim, what do you want me to say?” I spread my hands. “That he might want someone on deck who won’t try to pull the plug the first chance they get? You think that’s unreasonable, given what happened?” But he doesn’t even know what happened, not first-hand. Hakim wasn’t up when the mutiny went down; someone obviously told him, down through the epochs. Christ knows how much of what he heard is truth, lies, legend.
A few million years go by and suddenly I’m the bogeyman.
***
We fall towards ice. Ice falls towards fire. Both spill through the link and spread across the back of my skull in glorious terrifying first-person. Orders of magnitude aren’t empty abstractions in here: they’re life-size, you feel them in your gut. Surtr may be small to a textbook—at seven million kilometers across, it’s barely big enough to get into the giant’s club—but that doesn’t mean shit when you meet it face to face. That’s not a star out there: that’s the scorching edge of all creation, that’s heat-death incarnate. Its breath stinks of left-over lithium from the worlds it’s already devoured. And the dark blemish marching across its face isn’t just a planet. It’s a melting hellscape twice the size of Uranus, it’s frozen methane and liquid hydrogen and a core hot and heavy enough to bake diamonds. Already it’s coming apart before my eyes, any moons long since lost, the tattered remnants of a ring system shredding around it like a rotting halo. Storms boil across its face; aurorae flicker madly at both poles. A supercyclone pinwheels at the center of the dark side, fed by turbulent streamers fleeing from light into shadow. Its stares back at me like the eye of a blind god.
Meanwhile, Hakim pushes balls around inside an aquarium.
He’s been at it for hours: a bright blue marble here, a sullen red basketball over there, threads of tinsel looping through time and trajectory like the webbing of some crazed spacefaring spider. Maybe pull our center of mass to starboard, start gentle then ramp up to max? Break some rocks on the way, suffer some structural damage but nothing the drones won’t be able to patch up in time for the next build.
No?
Maybe cut smooth and fast into full reverse. Eri’s not built for it but if we keep the vectors dead along the centerline, no turn no torque just a straight linear one-eighty back out the way we came—
But no.
If only we hadn’t already fallen so far down the well. If only we hadn’t slowed down to open the trunk, all these N-bodies wouldn’t have been able to get such a grip on us. But now we’re only fast, not fast enough; we’re big but still too small.
Now, the only way out is through.
Hakim’s not an idiot. He knows the rules as well as I do. He keeps trying, though. He’d rather rewrite the laws of physics than trust himself to the enemy. We’ll be deaf and blind in there, after all; the convulsions of Thule’s disintegrating atmosphere will fog our sight at short range, the roar of Surtr’s magnetic field will deafen us in the long. There’ll be no way of telling where we are, nothing but the Chimp’s math to tell us where we should be.
Hakim doesn’t see the world like I do. He doesn’t like having to take things on faith.
Now he’s getting desperate, blasting chunks off his toy asteroid in an attempt to reduce its momentum. He hasn’t yet considered how that might impact our radiation shielding once we get back up to speed. He’s still stuck on whether we can scavenge enough in-system debris to patch the holes on our way out.
“It won’t work,” I tell him, though I’m wandering deep in the catacombs half a kilometer from his location. (I’m not spying because he knows I’m watching. Of course he knows.)
“Won’t it now.”
“Not enough mass along the escape trajectory, even if the vons could grab it all and get it back in time.”
“We don’t know how much mass is out there. Haven’t plotted it all yet.”
He’s being deliberately obtuse, but I go along with it; at least we’re talking. “Come on. You don’t need to plot every piece of gravel to get a mass distribution. It won’t work. Check with the Chimp if you don’t believe me. He’ll tell you.”
“It just has told me,” he says.
I stop walking. I force myself to take a slow breath.
“I’m linked, Hakim. Not possessed. It’s just an interface.”
“It’s a corpus callosum.”
“I’m just as autonomous as you are.”
“Define I.”
“I don’t—”
“Minds are holograms. Split one in half, you get two. Stitch two together, you get one. Maybe you were human back before your upgrade. Right now you’ve got about as much standalone soul as my parietal lobe.”
I look back along the vaulted corridor (I suppose the cathedral architecture might just be coincidence), where the dead sleep stacked on all sides.
They’re much better company like this.
“If that’s true,” I ask them all, “then how did you ever get free?”
Hakim doesn’t speak for a moment.
“The day you figure that out,” he says, “is the day we lose the war.”
***
It’s not a war. It’s a fucking tantrum. They tried to derail the mission and the Chimp stopped them. Simple as that, and perfectly predictable. That’s why the engineers made the Chimp so minimalist in the first place, why the mission isn’t run by some transcendent AI with an eight-dimensional IQ: so that things will stay predictable. If my fellow meat sacks couldn’t see it coming, they’re more stupid than the thing they’re fighting.