We slept away the gigasecs as we always had, summoned back to life when the variables got too messy or the Knowable proved Unprovable or the Chimp suffered an episode of insecurity from the noise we bled into its sensory nerves. We took cues from songs and orders from the Glade: Lian slept through as many builds as she woke up for, but she always left notes on the kitchen table.
The first order of business was finding Enemy HQ.
Eriophora first shipped out with maybe a hundred nodes, each big enough to run the Chimp on its own, each clearly mapped on the schematics. New ones were always being produced, though. Nothing escapes the Diaspora’s redundancy imperative. We didn’t know how many there were by now, didn’t know where most of them lived. Any one of them could be acting hypervisor at any time—the place where the Chimp actually lived, as it were—and they handed that duty off to one another without fanfare or warning. Sometimes a node developed a fault, or just wore out; sometimes the Chimp would relocate itself next to some subsystem especially vital to a particular mission, to minimize latency during the crunch. So we wandered the halls, quizzing our Artificial Stupidity on matters trivial or profound, noting the infinitesimal time lag preceding each response. We’d pass those notes between us, plot them on maps of latency vs. location, triangulate relentlessly on our oppressor.
Also fruitlessly, for the most part. We’d spend half a millennium getting a fix on the Ghost of Chimp Present, only to wake up and discover that it had relocated again while we’d slept. A few thousand lightyears away, a few thousand centuries ago, you would have called it shoveling sand against the tide.
Not that it would have done us much good even if we had tracked down the little fucker. Some other node would’ve picked up the baton the moment we pulled the plug. There were so very many Ghosts of Chimp Yet to Come, and no way to get to them all.
We were working on it, though.
“We’re wasting our time,” Jahaziel Cauthorn opined a few centuries later. “Latency cues? Depending on how spaghettied the circuits are we could get a signal to the core and back faster than we could ping the next room.”
He was a new recruit, freshly outraged and looking for fast fixes. I’d brought him down to the Glade—showing him around the bioremediation protocols, far as the Chimp was concerned—to introduce him to Lian Wei and her undead council before they disappeared under a blanket of murder vines for another few gigs.
He’d just about crapped his pants when the forest first came at him. He recovered quickly, though. The pheromones did their job, the weeds kept their distance, and ten minutes later he was spritzing them for the sheer childish glee of watching them recoil.
“It’s more of an averages thing,” Li told him now.
“Yeah, and by the time you’ve got all those averages he’s pulled up stakes and moved on.” Jahaziel looked around. “Why don’t we just ask him where he is?”
Li turned to me. “You wanna take this?”
I grabbed the baton. “You don’t think that might tip it off, Jaz?”
“Tell him we need it for, I dunno, diagnostic purposes. Why wouldn’t he buy it? He’s stupid.”
“Except the Chimp isn’t the enemy.”
“I can’t believe you’re still defending that thing,” he said.
I had another kind of pheromone in my arsenal, something I’d cooked up while studying the forest. An attractant. I imagined dousing Jahaziel with the stuff and just—standing back.
Instead, I said, “You want to go to war against a gun, you’re welcome to try. I’d rather go to war against the assholes who’re pointing it at me.” He opened his mouth. “Shut up and listen. If it was just us against the Chimp, we’d’ve won already. But it wasn’t the Chimp’s idea to hide Easter Island. He doesn’t even remember doing it.”
“If you believe that.”
“I do. Sure, Chimp’s stupid. We’re not fighting the Chimp. We’re fighting mission planners who’ve been dead for over sixty million years, and they were not stupid, and they had AGIs backing them up who were even more not-stupid.”
“Why even bother trying, then?”
“Because not even a cluster of superintelligent AGIs is infallible when it comes to predicting asymmetric social dynamics a few million years down the road. But they obviously didn’t trust us over the long haul, or they wouldn’t have programmed the Chimp to hide the archive. They wouldn’t have programmed it for this shell-game bullshit with the nodes. It’s a good bet they coded in a bunch of flags keyed to their best guess at what insurrection might look like across deep time.”
“Um.”
“Haven’t you noticed that it isn’t always as stupid as it should be? That’s because it was programmed by very smart people. We utter the wrong trigger phrase, who knows what nasty subroutines wake up? So to answer your question, the reason we do not just ask the Chimp is because the Chimp is fucking haunted, and we don’t know what those ghosts are liable to do if they notice us.”
Jahaziel said nothing. It was a welcome change.
Lian shook her head admiringly. “You get better every time you say that. I swear, even I’m believing it now.”
She was, too. It had been ages since she’d worried out loud about the Chimp’s occasional moments of unaccountable insight. All just preloaded subroutines after all. All just ghosts of Engineers past.
Of course, if you are who I think you are, you know what an idiotic mistake that was.
Unlike some of the others, I might still be able to fix that one.
Looking back, I wonder if Lian’s recruit-the-dead strategy might have actually made the Chimp feel better about itself, about the mission. All those early aeons when we didn’t die on schedule—maybe those were what bothered it all along. An anomaly. An inexplicable divergence from the mission profile. I’d feared this recent cluster of apparent fatalities might raise some kind of flag but maybe the Chimp saw it as the correction of ancient error, a return to some statistical comfort zone. Certainly the only time it ever mentioned the subject in my presence, it seemed to think of those deaths as a good thing.
That might have just been for my benefit, though.
It was the time the Chimp told me my per-capita value had increased. Those were its exact words. And I knew it was telling the truth, because Baird Stoller had just died in the line of duty.
In fact, Baird Stoller had died trying to warn the Chimp about us. It had been a clusterfuck from the word Go: his rep as a malcontent turned out to be all smoke and status, thin as words. When Viktor had tried to recruit him, the first thing he’d done was make a break for it.
Ghora tackled him just before he got out of the blind spot. They managed a cover-up with the materials at hand; freak electrical fire, Stoller dead, Ghora escaping with second-degree burns down his left side. The Chimp bought the story but ended up completely rejigging its acceptable-risk thresholds, upgraded onboard surveillance, eliminated a third of our safe zones.
I slept through the whole thing, but both sides brought me up to speed the next time I was on deck. Lintang passed on the details as we passed through one of our surviving blind spots. The Chimp expressed sorrow for my loss, ever-mindful of my admonition after Lian’s “accident.” I accepted the overture with thanks, tried to reinforce the impression that finally—after that unfortunate misunderstanding—things were on the mend.