But I set my alarm to wake up alone.
I linger in the coffin for a while, grateful for small and ancient victories. The chimp’s dead, blackened eye gazes down from the ceiling; in all these millions of years, nobody’s scrubbed off the carbon scoring. It’s a trophy of sorts, a memento from the early incendiary days of our Great Struggle.
There’s still something—comforting, I guess—about that blind, endless stare. I’m reluctant to venture out where the chimp’s nerves have not been so thoroughly cauterized. Childish, I know. The damn thing already knows I’m up; it may be blind, deaf, and impotent in here, but there’s no way to mask the power the crypt sucks in during a thaw. And it’s not as though a bunch of club-wielding teleops are waiting to pounce on me the moment I step outside. These are the days of détente, after all. The struggle continues but the war has gone cold; we just go through the motions now, rattling our chains like an old married multiplet resigned to hating each other to the end of time.
After all the moves and countermoves, the truth is we need each other.
So I wash the rotten-egg stench from my hair and step into Eri’s silent cathedral hallways. Sure enough, the enemy waits in the darkness, turns the lights on as I approach, shuts them off behind me—but it does not break the silence.
Dix.
A strange one, that. Not that you’d expect anyone born and raised on Eriophora to be an archetype of mental health, but Dix doesn’t even know what side he’s on. He doesn’t even seem to know he has to choose a side. It’s almost as though he read the original mission statements and took them seriously, believed in the literal truth of the ancient scrolls: Mammals and Machinery, working together across the ages to explore the Universe! United! Strong! Forward the Frontier!
Rah.
Whoever raised him didn’t do a great job. Not that I blame them; it can’t have been much fun having a child underfoot during a build, and none of us were selected for our parenting skills. Even if bots changed the diapers and VR handled the infodumps, socializing a toddler couldn’t have been anyone’s idea of a good time. I’d have probably just chucked the little bastard out an airlock.
But even I would’ve brought him up to speed.
Something changed while I was away. Maybe the war’s heated up again, entered some new phase. That twitchy kid is out of the loop for a reason. I wonder what it is.
I wonder if I care.
I arrive at my suite, treat myself to a gratuitous meal, jill off. Three hours after coming back to life, I’m relaxing in the starbow commons. “Chimp.”
“You’re up early,” it says at last.
I am. Our answering shout hasn’t even arrived at its destination yet. No real chance of new data for another two months, at least.
“Show me the forward feeds,” I command.
DHF428 blinks at me from the center of the lounge: Stop. Stop. Stop.
Maybe. Or maybe the chimp’s right, maybe it’s pure physiology. Maybe this endless cycle carries no more intelligence than the beating of a heart.
But there’s a pattern inside the pattern, some kind of flicker in the blink. It makes my brain itch.
“Slow the time-series,” I command. “By a hundred.”
It is a blink. DHF428’s disk isn’t darkening uniformly, it’s eclipsing. As though a great eyelid were being drawn across the surface of the sun, from right to left.
“By a thousand.”
Chromatophores, the chimp called them. But they’re not all opening and closing at once. The darkness moves across the membrane in waves.
A word pops into my head: latency.
“Chimp. Those waves of pigment. How fast are they moving?”
“About fifty-nine thousand kilometers per second.”
The speed of a passing thought.
And if this thing does think, it’ll have logic gates, synapses—it’s going to be a net of some kind. And if the net’s big enough, there’s an I in the middle of it. Just like me, just like Dix. Just like the chimp. (Which is why I educated myself on the subject, back in the early tumultuous days of our relationship. Know your enemy and all that.)
The thing about I is, it only exists within a tenth-of-a-second of all its parts. When we get spread too thin—when someone splits your brain down the middle, say, chops the fat pipe so the halves have to talk the long way around; when the neural architecture diffuses past some critical point and signals take just that much longer to pass from A to B—the system, well, decoheres. The two sides of your brain become different people with different tastes, different agendas, different senses of themselves.
I shatters into we.
It’s not just a human rule, or a mammal rule, or even an Earthly one. It’s a rule for any circuit that processes information, and it applies as much to the things we’ve yet to meet as it did to those we left behind.
Fifty-nine thousand kilometers per second, the chimp says. How far can the signal move through that membrane in a tenth of a corsec? How thinly does I spread itself across the heavens?
The flesh is huge, the flesh is inconceivable. But the spirit, the spirit is—
Shit.
“Chimp. Assuming the mean neuron density of a human brain, what’s the synapse count on a circular sheet of neurons one millimeter thick with a diameter of five thousand eight hundred ninety-two kilometers?”
“Two times ten to the twenty-seventh.”
I saccade the database for some perspective on a mind stretched across thirty million square kilometers: the equivalent of two quadrillion human brains.
Of course, whatever this thing uses for neurons have to be packed a lot less tightly than ours; we can see right through them, after all. Let’s be superconservative, say it’s only got a thousandth the computational density of a human brain. That’s—
Okay, let’s say it’s only got a ten-thousandth the synaptic density, that’s still—
A hundred thousandth. The merest mist of thinking meat. Any more conservative and I’d hypothesize it right out of existence.
Still twenty billion human brains.
Twenty billion.
I don’t know how to feel about that. This is no mere alien.
But I’m not quite ready to believe in gods.
I round the corner and run smack into Dix, standing like a golem in the middle of my living room. I jump about a meter straight up.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
He seems surprised by my reaction. “Wanted to—talk,” he says after a moment.
“You never come into someone’s home uninvited!”
He retreats a step, stammers: “Wanted, wanted—”
“To talk. And you do that in public. On the bridge, or in the commons, or—for that matter, you could just comm me.”
He hesitates. “Said you—wanted face to face. You said, cultural tradition.”
I did, at that. But not here. This is my place, these are my private quarters. The lack of locks on these doors is a safety protocol, not an invitation to walk into my home and lie in wait, and stand there like part of the fucking furniture…