Peter Watts. Hotshots
You do understand: It has to be your choice.
They never stopped telling me I was free to back out. They told me while they were still wrangling asteroids out past Mars; told me again as they chewed through those rocks like steel termites, bored out caverns and tunnels, layered in forests and holds and life- support systems rated for a longer operational lifespan than the sun itself. They really laid it on after that L4 fiasco, when the singularity got loose during testing. Not a whisper of cancelling the project—even though the magic upon which the hole thing rested had just eaten half the factory floor and a quarter of the propulsion team—but in the wake of that tragedy UNDA seemed to think it especially important to remind us of the exits.
It's your decision. No one can make it for you.
I laughed in their faces, once I was old enough to understand the irony. I'd been trained and tweaked for the mission since before I'd even been born, they'd groomed my parents as carefully as they were grooming me. Thirty years before I was even conceived, I was already bound for the stars. I was built to want them; I didn't know any other way to be.
Still. We're a civilized society, yes? You don't draft people against their will, even if the very concept of "will" has been a laughingstock for the better part of a century now. They give me no end of opportunity to back out now because there will be no opportunity to back out later, and later covers so very much more time for regrets. Once Eriophora sails, there will be no coming back.
It has to be my decision. It's the only way they won't have blood on their hands.
And yet, after everything—after eighteen years of indoctrination and rebellion, almost two decades spent fighting and embracing the same fate—when they held that mutual escape hatch open one last time, I don't think they were expecting the answer they got.
Are you absolutely sure?
"Give me a couple of months," I said. "I'll get back to you."
***
Built for the stars, maybe. Built to revel in solitude, all those Pleistocene social circuits tamed and trimmed and winnowed down to nubs: born of the tribe, but built to leave it behind without so much as a backward glance. By design there's only a handful of people I can really miss, and they'll be shipping out at my side.
Not shipping in, though. I'll be taking this particular ride on my own. A short hop, not even the blink of an eye next to the voyage on the horizon. And yet for some reason I still feel the urge to say goodbye.
I barely catch the outbound shuttle. I spend the trip running scenarios—what I'll say, what he will, how best to meet point with counterpoint—as the range ticks down and the Moon shrinks to stern and the rosette spreads across my viewspace like God's own juggling act. Mountains in space. Jagged worldlets of nickel and iron and raw bleeding basalt, surface features rotating in and out of view with slow ponderous majesty: loading bays and docking ports; city-sized thrusters, built for a few short hours of glorious high-thrust incandescence; a great toothless maw at the front of each ship, a throat to swallow the tame singularities that will draw us forward once the thrusters go cold and dead.
Araneus passes to port, a cliff face almost close enough to touch. Mastophora passes to starboard. Eriophora doesn't pass: she grows in front of us, her craggy grey face blotting out the stars.
We dock.
I ask the Chimp for Kai's location: still voiceless, it feeds a translucent map through my local link and lights a spark in the woods. I find him there in the dark, a shadow in twilight, almost floating in the feeble gravity: half-lit by a dim blue-shifted galaxy of bioluminescent plant life.
He nods at my approach but he doesn't turn. "Sixty percent productivity. We could leave right now if we had to. Never run out of O2."
"Man does not live on air alone," I remind him. He doesn't disagree, though he must know what I'm leading up to.
We sit without speaking for a while, lost in a forest of branching skeletal arms and spindly fingers and gourds set faintly aglow with the waste light of symbiotic bacteria. I've been able to rattle off the volumes and the lumens and the metabolic rates since I was seven, but on some level my gut still refuses to believe that this dim subterranean ecosystem could possibly keep us going for even a week, much less unto the end of time. Photosynthesis under starlight. That's all this is. Barely enough for an ant.
Of course, ants don't get to amortize their oxygen. Starlight will do when you only breathe a week out of a thousand years.
"So," Kai says. "Fun in the Sun."
"Yeah."
"Three months. A hundred fifty million klicks. For a parlor trick."
"Two, tops. Depending on the cycle. And it's more than that, you know it's more."
He shakes his head. "What are you trying to prove, Sunday?"
"That they're right. That I can quit if I want to."
"You've been trying to prove that your whole life. You could've quit a million times. The fact is you don't want to."
"It's not about what I want," I insist. "It's about what happens if I don't." And realize You're afraid this mad scheme will work. You're afraid that this might be the time I really go through with it.
His silhouette shifts beside me. The light of a nearby photophore washes across his cheekbone. "Sometimes the bodies just start—acting out, you know. The people inside can't even tell you why. They say it's like being possessed. Alien body syndrome." He snorts softly. "Free will my ass. It's the exact opposite."
"This isn't TMS. It's—"
"You go in one side and something else comes out the other and what does it prove? Assuming anything comes out the other side," he adds, piling on the scenarios. "Assuming the ship doesn't blow up."
"Come on. How long do you think they'd be in business if they were peddling suicide missions?"
"They haven't been in business that long. We sold them the drive what, six years ago? And they must've spent at least a year torquing it into shapes it was never designed for—"
I say: "This is exactly why I'm going."
He looks at me.
"How did you even know?" I ask him. "I never told you what I had in mind. Maybe I mentioned being curious once or twice, back when they bought the prototype. And now I come over here and you've already got all your arguments lined up. What's worse, I knew you would." I shake my head. "It doesn't bother you we're so predictable?"
"So you scramble your brain, and you're a cipher for a while, and that buys you what exactly? You think shuffling a deck of cards gives it free will?" Kai shakes his head. "Nobody's believed that shit for a hundred years. Until someone comes up with a neuron that fires without being poked, we're all just—reacting."
"That's your solution? We're all just deterministic systems so we might as well let them pull our strings?"
He shrugs. "They've got strings too."
"And even if all it does is shuffle the deck, what's wrong with just being unpredictable for a change?"
"Nothing's wrong. I just don't think you should base the single most important decision of your life on a dice roll."
I'm scared, Kai, is what I want to say. I'm scared by the thought of a life lived in such thin slices, each one lightyears further from home, each one centuries closer to heat death. I do want it, I want it as much as you do but it frightens me, and what frightens me even more is that I can feel this way at all. Didn't they build me better than this? Aren't I supposed to be immune to doubt?