They were good answers, plausible answers. True answers, even. But each question I answered might incite others; each follow-up would make it that much harder to keep the flowchart veering toward evolution and away from engineering.
The silence stretched. I resisted the urge to hold my breath. It all came down to cost-benefit, to the number of layers the Chimp would peel back before diminishing returns told it to take the rest on faith.
“Do you have any recommendations?” it asked at last.
I resisted another urge: to slump, this time, to relax. To realize that our Earthbound progenitors had done their job well.
For all the blinding speed with which it could count on its fingers, the Chimp just wasn’t very smart.
I started at the extremes, let the flowchart talk me back to the middle.
“We could leave it alone. It’s still doing its job and the mutant cycle only works across extreme grav gradients anyway, so we don’t have to worry about it popping up anywhere else. Maybe we should just stay out of its way.”
Two corsecs; a thousand scenarios. “Operational variance is too high. There are too many unquantified variables in the Glade for reliable long-term management.”
A creature of confidence limits, this machine. Couldn’t abide anything more than two standard deviations off the mean.
“Then torch the place. Burn it to bedrock.”
Only one corsec this time; a simpler simulation, all those complicating variables turned to ash. “That would reduce life-support capacity by eight percent.”
“Reseed afterward. We could take an eight percent hit for a few centuries.”
“There’s no guarantee the mutation wouldn’t reappear.”
“Not with the original genome, no. Not unless we shut down the gradient so it couldn’t get a foothold.” Which would, of course, mean shutting down the drive. Like the Chimp would ever go for that in a billion years.
“We could modify the local genome,” it suggested.
“We could,” I admitted, as though I were only now considering it. “Break a few S-bonds, straighten some kinks to allow the edits. Maybe seed a retrovirus up front to slow growth. Buy us some time to gene-drive a proper fix.”
This time the pause went on forever. “I can’t calculate how long that would take.”
“’Course not. Genes are messy, they interact all over the place in a single cell. We’re talking about a multispecies ecosystem with precise operational constraints. You’d have better luck asking me for hard numbers on a three-digit N-body problem.”
“But it can be done.”
“Sure, through trial and error. Tweak one variable, let it cook, correct for overshoots and chaotic interactions, repeat.”
“How long to cook?”
“You in a hurry?”
“I’d like to restore equilibrium as soon as possible.”
“If you’re impatient we could do it all right now. Edit the hell out of the whole forest in a single generation. Just don’t expect me to deal with the second- and third-order interaction effects that’ll be cropping up every few megasecs, guaranteed.”
Chimp remained silent.
“We’re already dealing with a hell of an unforeseen complication here,” I reminded it. “You don’t want to add any new variables to the mix if you can help it. So don’t change the deck schedule; just keep thawing us out for the usual builds the way you always have. No point in leaning any harder on life support than we have to, especially while we’re trying to fix it.”
“It may still be necessary to intervene between builds, if changes happen too quickly.”
“We err on the side of caution. We’ve got specs for lithobes that take three hundred years to breed and bacilli that take twenty minutes. We can tweak gen time enough to be sure nothing goes too far off the rails between shifts. Then we just… seal it up, leave it alone. Let it bake.”
More silence. Maybe Chimp was double-checking my results, running his own genetic predictions against mine. It was welcome to. Without specific tweak specs—much less any post-app data to run them against—it might as well be rolling dice as building models. The extant mutations were the only parts of the puzzle solid enough to sink analytical teeth into, and anyone smart enough to hang a Calvin Cycle off a gravity gradient wouldn’t be dumb enough to leave footprints behind. I had nothing to worry about.
Right.
“I’ll adjust the duty roster for ecogenetics expertise on upcoming thaws,” the Chimp said at last.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ll give you a list.”
USER FRIENDLY
HOW DO YOU EVEN DO IT?
How do you stage a mutiny when you’re only awake a few days in a century, when your tiny handful of coconspirators gets reshuffled every time they’re called on deck? How do you plot against an enemy that never sleeps, that has all those empty ages to grind its brute-force way down every avenue, stumble across every careless clue you might have left behind? An enemy with eyes that span your whole world, an enemy that can see through your eyes, hear through your ears in glorious hi-def first-person? Sure, those channels come with off switches; use them too often and you might as well be sending up an alarm—Conspiracy In Progress! Mission Risk Critical!—to any idiot abacus wired in to the network.
How do you even begin?
In more ways than I’d ever imagined.
It was so much more than words posing as music. It was words posing as other words, the lyrics to long-dead songs resurrected and revised to embed new meaning in old verses. It was plans buried in hieroglyphs, messages encoded in chess moves and game dialog. Graffiti copied and commandeered for purposes of subtle cartography: three dots and a peculiar squiggle to say 1425 scanned and clear; 1470 in progress; someone wanna call dibs on 2190? We whispered secret messages down the aeons, sang songs and painted on cave walls and let the Chimp chalk it all up to the quirky evolution of island cultures.
Between builds, we sent messages in bottles. Within builds the revolution found ways to speak privately in real time. Eri’s natural blind spots—the radio shadows, the nooks and corners blocking the views of cameras—provided an initial foothold. We built out from those: equipment caches rearranged to make room for Francine’s art installation, or an improvised maze for a time-wasting tournament of Capture the Flag while we waited for the vons to process the latest asteroid. Embedded cameras were sparsely distributed along most service crawlways by design; that left a good chunk of the ship’s nervous system vulnerable to infiltration. Some spots were more transparent than blind: looped footage of empty corridors on endless replay, spliced into the main feed so the dead could walk the halls while the Chimp saw nothing. Proximity sensors that cut back to live feed whenever an unsuspecting roach or bot happened to pass the same way. We double agents smiled for the cameras and moved in the light; the zombies from the Glade, all those Missing and Presumed Deads, crept undetected like mice through the walls.