And Lian was better at that than I was, apparently.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was too soon,” Chimp said. “It’s less traumatic to learn of a friend’s death if you haven’t seen them for a while.”
“Three thousand years isn’t long enough?”
A moment’s silence. “Was that a joke?”
I realized it had been. A bad one. “What is long enough?”
“Two subjective years of separation.”
“The tribe’s lost people before. You never waited that long to tell me.”
“You were closer to Lian than most.”
“We weren’t that close.” Not a contradiction, I realized. “Look, you were protecting my feelings. I get that. But you gotta tell me these things, soon as I thaw.”
“Okay, Sunday.”
“I’m serious. Don’t just say you will to protect morale. Do it.”
“Okay.
“My condolences,” he added after a moment. “Lian Wei was a good person.”
“That she was.” I shook my head. “Shitty ’spore, though.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You saw how she was, last few terasecs. Unhappy. Damaged.” I remembered that Child of Eri, the words she spoke. “Laporta was right. She never belonged out here. I don’t know how she even made the cut.”
I was having trouble swallowing, for some reason.
“It’s okay to cry, Sunday.”
“What?” I blinked. My vision wobbled. “Where the fuck did that come from?”
“Maybe you were closer to Lian than you realized. It’s natural to feel grief at the loss of a friend. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“What, you’re moonlighting as some kind of therapist now?” I hadn’t even realized he was smart enough to do that. Maybe I just hadn’t tripped the subroutine before.
“I don’t have to be a therapist to see that this is affecting you more than you expected. Maybe more than you even—”
“Chimp, give it a rest. You do a great job running the ship, but I don’t know what idiot committee thought we’d want to cry on your shoulder as part of the deal.”
“I’m sorry, Sunday. I didn’t mean to be intrusive. I thought we were just having one of our talks.”
“We were.” I shook my head. “But I don’t need a flowchart to tell me when I’m allowed to fucking cry, okay?”
He didn’t answer for a moment. Even at the time I wondered a bit about that; it’s not like his answer required a whole lot of computation.
“Okay,” he said at last.
I do cry now and then, in case you’re wondering.
I even cried for the Chimp once.
I was there for his birth, years before we ever shipped out. I saw the lights come on, listened as he found his voice, watched him learn to tell Sunday from Kai from Ishmael. He was such a fast learner, such an eager one; back then, barely out of my own accelerated adolescence and not yet bound for the stars, I felt sure he’d streak straight into godhood while we stood mired in flesh and blood.
He seemed so happy: devoured every benchmark, met every challenge, anticipated each new one with a kind of hardwired enthusiasm I could only describe as voracious. Once, rounding a corner into some rough-hewn catacomb, I came upon a torrent of bots swirling in perfect complex formation: a school of silvered fish in the center of Eri’s newly seeded forest. The shapes I glimpsed there still make my head hurt, when I think about them.
“Yeah, we’re not quite sure what that is,” one of the gearheads said when I asked hir. “He does it sometimes.”
“He’s dancing,” I said.
Se regarded me with something like pity. “More likely just twiddling his thumbs. Running some motor diagnostic that kicks in when there’s a few cycles to spare.” Se raised an eyebrow. “Why don’t you ask him?”
Somehow, though, I never got around to it.
I’d hike to the caverns during down time, watch him dance as the forest went in: theorems and fractal symphonies playing out against fissured basalt, against a mist of mycelia, against proliferating vine-tangles of photosynthetic pods so good at sucking up photons that even under light designed to mimic the sun, they presented nothing but black silhouettes. When the forest grew too crowded Chimp moved to some unfinished factory floor. When that started to fill up he relocated to an empty coolant tank the size of a skyscraper; finally, to that vast hollow in the center of the world where someday soon a physics-breaking troll would simmer and seethe in the darkness, pulling us forward by its own bootstraps. The dance evolved with each new venue. Every day those kinetic tapestries grew more elaborate and mindbending and beautiful. It didn’t matter where he went. I found him. I was there.
Sometimes I’d try to proselytize, invite some friend or lover along for the show, but except for Kai—who humored me a couple of times—no one was especially interested in watching an onboard diagnostic twiddle its thumbs. That was okay. By now I knew the Chimp was mainly playing for me anyway. Why not? Cats and dogs had feelings. Fish, even. They developed habits, loyalties. Affections. Chimp may have only weighed in at a fraction of a human brain but he was easily smarter than any number of sentient beings with personalities to call their own. One day, a few epochs down the road, people would notice the remnants of that bond and shit all over it, but it could have been theirs just as easily. All they had to do was sit, and watch, and wonder.
One day, though, the Chimp didn’t seem twice as smart as he’d been the day before.
I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. I’d just—developed this model of exponential expectation, I guess. I took for granted that the toddler playing with numbered blocks in the morning would blow through tensor calculus by lunchtime. Now he wasn’t quite living up to that curve. Now he grew only incrementally smarter over time. I never asked the techs about it—never even mentioned it to the other ’spores—but within a week there wasn’t any doubt. Chimp wasn’t exponential after all. He was only sigmoid, past inflection and closing on the asymptote, and for all his amazing savantic skills he’d be nowhere near godhood by the time he scraped that ceiling.
Ultimately, he wouldn’t even be as smart as me.
They kept running him through his paces, of course. Kept loading him up with new and more complex tasks. And he was still up for the job, kept scoring a hundred. It’s not like they’d designed him to fail. But he had to work harder, now. The exercises took evermore resources. Every day there was less left over.
He stopped dancing.
It didn’t seem to bother him. I asked him if he missed the ballet and he didn’t know what I was talking about. I commiserated about the hammer that had knocked him from the sky and he told me he was doing fine. “Don’t worry about me, Sunday,” he said. “I’m happy.”
It was the first time I’d ever heard him use that word. If I’d heard it even ten days earlier, I might have believed him.
So I descended into one of the forests—gone to twilight now, the full-spectrum floods retired once the undergrowth had booted past the seedling stage—and I wept for a happy stunted being who didn’t know or care that it had once been blazing towards transcendence before some soulless mission priority stuck him in amber.
What can I say? I was young, I was stupid.
I thought I could afford to feel pity.
So many clues, looking back.
All those ’spores wandering the halls, pestering Chimp with their inane questions. Not even always questions: I caught Lintang Kasparson telling him jokes once or twice. There may have been a part of me that wondered why so much meat was suddenly so interested in pursuing a relationship with Eri’s AI; there may have been a smaller, pettier part who felt a bit possessive.