If only Ghora could see this, I thought, because I knew he’d be so proud.
I’d rediscovered Easter Island.
“Well,” I said.
The lights had come on when I’d breached the wall, presumably some autonomic reflex beyond Chimp’s conscious control. The backups squatted in orderly rows, chunky effigies of plumbing and circuitry receding beneath a dim vault of columns and arches. Some were smaller than the palm of my hand; others towered beyond reach of the light, vanished into mist and darkness like crystal mountains. Here and there I saw something familiar—the corrugated sheet of a countercurrent exchanger, a roach’s drive train grown twice life-sized—but most of those sculptures were abstract shapes to me.
“Been wondering where these got off to.”
The Chimp said nothing.
“Is this the lot?” Because a walled-off piece of crypt didn’t seem big enough to hold them all.
“I don’t know,” the Chimp said.
“You don’t know. You put them here.”
“I don’t know that either.”
“You’re saying one of us did it? Maybe Kai or Ellin set the alarm to wake them up a terasec early so they could lug everything over here for, what—a scavenger hunt?”
“It was most likely me,” he admitted. “I don’t remember doing it.”
“You don’t remember.”
“Sunday, my memory is easier to edit than yours.”
“Or you could be lying.” Although probably not. This was probably just another of Mission Control’s time-lapsed tricks, to minimize the odds that the Chimp might accidentally betray mission-critical secrets to his betters. For all I knew, he’d been obediently forgetting his own actions since Day One.
“So where’s Elon?” I asked after a moment.
“I don’t know who that is.”
“Elon Morales. Tarantula Boy.” I paused. “Where’s everyone, for that matter? Where did you move them to?”
“Sunday,” the Chimp reminded me gently, “I don’t know that I did.”
“Because unless you’ve drilled out a whole new crypt somewhere—”
“I didn’t.”
I brought up the map. No new features. Of course, the map hadn’t shown this archive either, not until five minutes ago when the Chimp updated the schematics.
“Maybe you just forgot,” I suggested.
“That’s unlikely. It would make more sense to decommission the coffins.”
“Maybe you—what did you say?”
“That’s unlikely. It would make more sense to—”
“What do you mean, decommission the coffins?”
“Recycle them into the matter reservoirs.”
“Yeah, but what happens to the people?”
“Recycling human remains follows a different track.”
“You’re not saying they’re dead.” Of course he wasn’t saying that. He wouldn’t do that.
“I was speaking hypothetically,” Chimp said. “In answer to your question.”
“I’m not asking hypothetically. I want to know what happened to the specific people in the decommissioned coffins.”
“That’s a hypothetical question. I don’t know that the coffins were decommissioned.”
“Chimp. What happened to the people?”
He said nothing. Almost as though he’d realized too late that he’d crossed a line, and was running quick quiet scenarios to find his way back.
“You killed them.” I marveled a little at how quiet my voice had become. “Tell me you didn’t fucking kill them.”
“I don’t know.”
“But it would”—I couldn’t believe I was saying this—“it would make sense to kill them, right?”
“I don’t—”
“Hypothetically, Chimp. What’s the value of human life at this point in the mission?”
“That’s a very complex utility function, Sunday. It would be difficult to describe verbally.”
“It’s ratios, right? Crew vs. expected mission time. Maintenance costs vs. added value. Meat per megasec. Stop me if I’m wrong.”
He didn’t.
“The longer we’re out here, the less mission time remains. Meat-to-mission ratio keeps climbing, unless we die off on schedule. And we’ve had the bad grace to not do that. Every corsec that goes by without someone falling out an airlock or getting squashed by the drive, the less per-capita value we have. So by now I’m guessing we’re worth less than a backup library, right? Because this mission isn’t about people at all. It never has been. The only utility we have is how useful we are to building your fucking gates.”
Not quite so quiet, there at the end.
“You haven’t stopped me,” I noted.
The crystal sculptures gleamed smugly down their endless rows.
“How many, Chimp? How many did you flush out the airlock, or incinerate, or—or just turn off until they rotted to dust?”
“I don’t have any memory of—”
“Hypothesize, for fucks’ sake! You’re great at that! How many people fit into this space before you decommissioned them all and brainwiped the guilt away?”
“I can’t tell precisely,” he said after a moment. “Approximately three thousand.”
“You fucker. You evil goddamned machine.”
“Sunday, I don’t understand why this changes anything.”
“Then you’re an idiot.”
“Everyone who dies on the mission expects to die on the mission. You all knew you’d most likely spend your lives here. You knew you’d most likely die here. You knew the expected mortality rates going in; the fact that they were too high means that on average you’ve lived longer than you expected to. Even after the relocation of the archive we’re still outperforming the median scenario.”
You mean there’s still a meat surplus.
“Decommissioning would have occurred in stasis. There would be no suffering. It would be the best-case scenario for anyone on a mission of this sort.”
“No suffering? You killed our friends! People I’ve known my whole life, maybe! You don’t think that matters to us?”
“Most likely, entire tribes would have been decommissioned. They would not have been on deck with any survivors at any point in the mission. There would be no bereavement, no severed emotional connections.”
“Elon Morales,” I said through gritted teeth.
“You couldn’t even remember his name.” I swore I heard reproach in the fucker’s voice.
I buried my head in my hands.
How long had it taken me? How many million years had
I not seen him for what he was? He hadn’t even hidden it, for chrissake.
I’d been blind since the day we shipped out.
“Sunday—”
“Shut up! Just shut the fuck up and leave me alone!”