“Why are you even up?” I snarl. “We’re not even supposed to come online for another two months.”
“Asked Chimp to get me up when you did.”
That fucking machine.
“Why are you up?” he asks, not leaving.
I sigh, defeated, and fall into a convenient pseudopod. “I just wanted to go over the preliminary data.” The implicit alone should be obvious.
“Anything?”
Evidently it isn’t. I decide to play along for a while. “Looks like we’re talking to an, an island. Almost six thousand klicks across. That’s the thinking part, anyway. The surrounding membrane’s pretty much empty. I mean, it’s all alive. It all photosynthesizes, or something like that. It eats, I guess. Not sure what.”
“Molecular cloud,” Dix says. “Organic compounds everywhere. Plus it’s concentrating stuff inside the envelope.”
I shrug. “Point is, there’s a size limit for the brain, but it’s huge, it’s…”
“Unlikely,” he murmurs, almost to himself.
I turn to look at him; the pseudopod reshapes itself around me. “What do you mean?”
“Island’s twenty-eight million square kilometers? Whole sphere’s seven quintillion. Island just happens to be between us and 428, that’s—one in fifty billion odds.”
“Go on.”
He can’t. “Uh, just… just unlikely.”
I close my eyes. “How can you be smart enough to run those numbers in your head without missing a beat and stupid enough to miss the obvious conclusion?”
That panicked, slaughterhouse look again. “Don’t—I’m not—”
“It is unlikely. It’s astronomically unlikely that we just happen to be aiming at the one intelligent spot on a sphere one and a half AU’s across. Which means…”
He says nothing. The perplexity in his face mocks me. I want to punch it.
But finally, the lights flicker on: “There’s, uh, more than one island? Oh! A lot of islands!”
This creature is part of the crew. My life will almost certainly depend on him some day.
That is a very scary thought.
I try to set it aside for the moment. “There’s probably a whole population of the things, sprinkled through the membrane like, like cysts I guess. The chimp doesn’t know how many, but we’re only picking up this one so far, so they might be pretty sparse.”
There’s a different kind of frown on his face now. “Why Chimp?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why call him Chimp?”
“We call it the chimp.” Because the first step to humanizing something is to give it a name.
“Looked it up. Short for chimpanzee. Stupid animal.”
“Actually, I think chimps were supposed to be pretty smart,” I remember.
“Not like us. Couldn’t even talk. Chimp can talk. Way smarter than those things. That name—it’s an insult.”
“What do you care?”
He just looks at me.
I spread my hands. “Okay, it’s not a chimp. We just call it that because it’s got roughly the same synapse count.”
“So gave him a small brain, then complain that he’s stupid all the time.”
My patience is just about drained. “Do you have a point or are you just blowing CO2 in—”
“Why not make him smarter?”
“Because you can never predict the behavior of a system more complex than you. And if you want a project to stay on track after you’re gone, you don’t hand the reins to anything that’s guaranteed to develop its own agenda.” Sweet smoking Jesus, you’d think someone would have told him about Ashby’s Law.
“So they lobotomized him,” Dix says after a moment.
“No. They didn’t turn it stupid, they built it stupid.”
“Maybe smarter than you think. You’re so much smarter, got your agenda, how come he’s still in control?”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” I say.
“What?”
I let a grim smile peek through. “You’re only following orders from a bunch of other systems way more complex than you are.” You’ve got to hand it to them, too; dead for stellar lifetimes and those damn project admins are still pulling the strings.
“I don’t—I’m following?—”
“I’m sorry, dear.” I smile sweetly at my idiot offspring. “I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to the thing that’s making all those sounds come out of your mouth.”
Dix turns whiter than my panties.
I drop all pretense. “What were you thinking, chimp? That you could send this sock-puppet to invade my home and I wouldn’t notice?”
“Not—I’m not—it’s me,” Dix stammers. “Me talking.”
“It’s coaching you. Do you even know what ‘lobotomized’ means?” I shake my head, disgusted. “You think I’ve forgotten how the interface works just because we all burned ours out?” A caricature of surprise begins to form on his face. “Oh, don’t even fucking try. You’ve been up for other builds, there’s no way you couldn’t have known. And you know we shut down our domestic links too, or you wouldn’t even be sneaking in here. And there’s nothing your lord and master can do about that because it needs us, and so we have reached what you might call an accommodation.”
I am not shouting. My tone is icy, but my voice is dead level. And yet Dix almost cringes before me.
There is an opportunity here, I realize.
I thaw my voice a little. I speak gently: “You can do that too, you know. Burn out your link. I’ll even let you come back here afterward, if you still want to. Just to—talk. But not with that thing in your head.”
There is panic in his face, and, against all expectation, it almost breaks my heart. “Can’t,” he pleads. “How I learn things, how I train.The mission…”
I honestly don’t know which of them is speaking, so I answer them both: “There is more than one way to carry out the mission. We have more than enough time to try them all. Dix is welcome to come back when he’s alone.”
They take a step toward me. Another. One hand, twitching, rises from their side as if to reach out, and there’s something on that lopsided face that I can’t quite recognize.
“But I’m your son,” they say.
I don’t even dignify it with a denial.
“Get out of my home.”
A human periscope. The Trojan Dix. That’s a new one.
The chimp’s never tried such overt infiltration while we were up and about before. Usually, it waits until we’re all undead before invading our territories. I imagine custom-made drones never seen by human eyes, cobbled together during the long dark eons between builds; I see them sniffing through drawers and peeking behind mirrors, strafing the bulkheads with X-rays and ultrasound, patiently searching Eriophora’s catacombs millimeter by endless millimeter for whatever secret messages we might be sending one another down through time.
There’s no proof to speak of. We’ve left trip wires and telltales to alert us to intrusion after the fact, but there’s never been any evidence they’ve been disturbed. Means nothing, of course. The chimp may be stupid, but it’s also cunning, and a million years is more than enough time to iterate through every possibility using simpleminded brute force. Document every dust mote; commit your unspeakable acts; put everything back the way it was, afterward.