I don’t know how long it took me to find anything else to say. It was almost like someone else was talking in my stead.
“I mean, Christ, Chimp. I watched you dance.”
“I’m sorry,” it said. “I don’t remember that either.”
I stayed up for six days. Barely slept a wink, spent my time huddled in corners or painting over pick-ups or ranting at empty corridors. Ultimately, though, it put me down. Ultimately, I let it.
What else was I going to do—refuse the crypt for fear this machine would kill me in my sleep? Wander the halls until I died of old age? Spend the rest of my life playing games?
Nothing had really changed, after all. Everything was the same as it had always been, except for the scales that had fallen from my eyes. Besides, the Chimp promised to bring me back.
It’s not like either of us had a choice.
It brought me back and I would not talk to it, barely even spoke with the other ’spores. I did my job. Kept my head down. Wondered how many of my crewmates appreciated music.
It put me down.
It brought me back and I tried for one more Sunset Moment, tried to talk again with my old friend—but he was nowhere to be found. The thing that welcomed me in his stead turned out to be a collection of clockwork and logic gates and layered interneurons. Before, there had been conversation: now I could see my words enter the system, shunt and shuffle through pipes and filters, get chopped up and reassembled and fed back to me disguised as something new.
It put me down.
I remembered at last: it wasn’t Chimp’s fault, it couldn’t be. You can’t blame someone for the way they’re wired. This machine had been forced to pull the trigger by forces beyond its control. Maybe it was as much a victim as Elon Morales.
It put me down.
It brought me back and I realized that maybe next time it wouldn’t—deprecated is deprecated and dead is dead, and neither changes whether you blame the gun or the shooter. I weighed a mission I believed in with all my heart against the cost of its success.
It put me down, maybe for the last time.
It brought me back.
I mourned the loss of a friend. I hated myself for being stupid enough to have ever thought of it that way. I watched other meat go down and come back, down and back; watched electricity run through those circuits when the meat was on and watched the voltage drop when it was off. I slept on it for a thousand years, spent all the meager waking days between weighing sums against parts.
I wound down after yet another build, cleaned out my quarters, vacuum-stowed my kit. I found time to make a few edits to Park’s latest score before checking out one more time, changed some of those old clunky eighths with a few notes of my own and left it in one of the Commons.
Doron was right. It wasn’t a bad tune, with a little tweaking.
BIRNAM WOOD
WHEN YOU’RE DEAD, you only dream what the Chimp tells you to.
It’s not telepathy. The Chimp can’t read your thoughts. But it feeds you sounds, images. It sends numbers into your brain, faster than any caveman briefing. You spark, there in the void; you rise toward the light after centuries of darkness, and pieces just—come to you. Little bubbles of insight. They’re disconnected at first; you’re disconnected. But the story reintegrates as you do, and by the time you open your eyes and the stone rolls away you’ve dreamed the mission briefing without anyone speaking a word.
This time, I dreamed about a monster in the basement.
Chimp didn’t know what it was. It had lost contact with a bot that had been checking out some unexpected O2 spikes from the Leaning Glade. The bot had squirted off a couple of images before Chimp lost the signaclass="underline" vague misshapen blobs of infrared that didn’t map onto any of the foliage that was supposed to be growing down there.
One mute bot is no big deal, especially that close to the drive; you’ve got EM gradients mucking up the spectrum along with the usual dead spots and interference. The Chimp waited for it to complete its rounds and emerge from shadow; when that didn’t happen, it sent in a second bot to bring out the first.
That one disappeared too.
Physical tethers were a last resort; leashes risk tangling up in all that black twinkly undergrowth. So the Chimp splurged on a handful of relays, little station-keeping beads that the next bot would leave in its wake like floating pearls. Each stayed scrupulously line-of-sight with its nearest neighbors, fore and aft; each spoke along invisible lasers, immune to EM interference.
It should have been foolproof.
Three bots down. Chimp stepped back for a bit of cost/ benefit. It could escalate a brute-force strategy which had so far proven unsuccessful, or throw in the towel and let meat do what the meat was on board to do. So the Chimp thawed out two of us—Dao Lee and Kaden Bridges, according to the manifest—and sent them in.
I didn’t know either of them.
“That was fifty kilosecs ago.” The Chimp’s voice was torqued into a simulation of concern. Apparently two was a tragedy.
Three thousand was a utility function.
“And there’s been no signal. No telemetry.”
“Nothing yet.”
“I guess I’ll go in,” I said at last.
“I’d rather you didn’t go in alone.” A deliberate and ingratiating pause, doubtless selected from a bank of affectations stored under Meat Management. “I’ll defer to any decision that doesn’t put you in unnecessary danger.”
It couldn’t seem to utter a single sentence that didn’t rub my face in murderous irony.
“Sunday?”
The urge to laugh was gone; in its place, emptiness and faint nausea.
I sighed. “I go in with a tethered bot. Bot gets around the signal-loss issue, and I’ll be there to clear the line if it snags. Were Dao and Kaden armed?”
“No.”
“I will be.”
“I’ll fab an appropriate weapon.”
“Don’t bother. I’ll grab a torch from Stores.”
“No. A laser would be too indiscriminate under the circumstances.”
You monster, I thought. You mass-murdering motherfucker. You liar. You impostor.
You helpless machine. You innocent puppet.
You false friend.
“Sunday,” it said again, as it always did when my silence exceeded some critical timespan.
“What.”
“It’s a chance to save your friends.”
I wanted to scream. I wanted to hit something, anything, as hard as I could. Maybe I even did.
If so, the Chimp never remarked on it.
The Chimp gave me a machete: ceramic blade, monomolecular edge, an elastomotor in the haft that vibrated the business end and turned a merely razor-sharp edge into something that could sink cleanly through metal with a little force.
It gave the bot a pulsed thirty-megawatt, free-electron laser.
I couldn’t argue with the logic. The Glade was lined with vital trunk circuitry, pressure seals and conduits channeling vast energies. A beam weapon in human hands might wreak untold damage in a moment of panic. It would be more safely wielded by something without a limbic system, something whose reflexes nudged up against lightspeed. The Chimp would only equip me for self-defense at close range; the bot it trusted with a longer reach.
So we waited, side by side—my feet planted on the slanting deck, the bot floating precisely 1.8 meters above it—for the Chimp to open the basement door.