I’d been throwing myself into the role of Sunday Ahzmundin, wounded confidante, returning to the fold. I’d nailed the shock, the anguish, the rage in the wake of Easter Island; I’d been pretty convincing with the subsequent disdain and cold shoulder. These days I was working on detente, even reconciliation. It was easier than you might think. The Chimp wasn’t especially perceptive, for one thing; the right words would sometimes do the trick even if their tone carried no conviction.
The other thing, though, is that I wasn’t really acting.
You have to understand: even after Easter Island, I was a reluctant convert. I knew things had to change. I knew my stupid emotional attachment to a piece of software had blinded me to the fact that we were, in the end, tools to be used and discarded at the whim of some dead engineer’s utility function.
But I also knew that it wasn’t really the Chimp’s fault. He was a machine; he did what he was built to. We had to take him down but there was no pleasure in the thought, no feel-good vengeance on behalf of Elon Morales or the Three Thousand. Those circuits that had inspired him to dance—they were still in there somewhere. There would be no joy in shutting them down; just the tragic necessity of killing a rabid pet before it could hurt anyone else.
And then Baird Stoller died, and the Chimp—in pursuit of its own kind of reconciliation, I guess—revisited a metric of human worth I’d once found wanting: “It might interest you to know, Sunday, that as a result of these recent losses your per-capita value is trending upward.” Maybe it thought I’d see such things in a new light.
I threw up a little in my mouth.
I don’t know why I kept feeling—I don’t know. Disappointed. Betrayed. Surely it would have sunk in by then. Surely the evidence would have long-since convinced me that I’d been fooling myself all along, that all those conversations and bed-time stories and Sunset Moments had been shared not with a friend but a weapon: something lethal and unfeeling, something that would target-lock me the moment the right number changed in its brain. But I kept forgetting, somehow. I kept wondering if I hadn’t really seen something in that machine, back before it drowned in mission imperatives. Kept wondering if maybe I could bring it back.
Even now, there’s a part of me that mourns. Wonders if maybe, even now, I still can.
I did ask once, in case you were wondering. Came right out and said: “Hey Chimp, what’s our halting state?”
It was an innocent question at the time. It wouldn’t have raised any red flags. It was back in happier days, before Lian had mutated, long before any whiff of revolution hung in the air. Viktor was off on another one of his rhapsodies about the end of time, about dark-matter filigree holding galaxies together, about the faint magical hope that we might be able to outrun the expansion of space itself if we could somehow just wormhole our way one or two superclusters to the left: “Imagine the bonus if we extended the Ring Road out past Lanaikea!”
There were no bonuses. The only bonus had been getting the hell away from Earth, and it was more than enough; I wasn’t going to complain that we were still working it off. But Viktor’s scenarios glittered so very far downstream that our whole voyage to date might have lasted barely a week in comparison. And of course we’d never make it that far—Vik just liked fantasizing about the End Days—so I had to ask:
“Seriously. How do we know when the mission’s over?”
“Why would you want it to be over?” Vik wondered.
“When we receive the callback sequence,” Chimp said. Which had made perfect sense back when we were young and freshly minted and shiny new. The Diaspora reflected the most advanced tech the twenty-second century could offer—but there’d be a twenty-third century, and a twenty-fourth. Our descendants would have wands and amulets unimaginable on the day we launched. Everyone knew it was only a matter of time before Eri and her sisters fell into obsolescence, before we were called back to a better home and some new generation took over. And if that didn’t happen, it only meant that Home hadn’t got better after all—that Mission Control had died without issue, along with the rest of the species.
Either way, we were better off here.
Still.
“I dunno, Chimp. It’s been a while. What if there is no callback? Could we just, you know, call it off from this end?”
It took a moment for him to answer. “There’s no other definitive end state, Sunday. The closest I could come would be an extinction event.”
“Our extinction?”
“Humanity’s extinction.”
Nobody said anything for a bit.
“So, um. How would you establish that?” Viktor asked eventually.
“And how do you tell the difference between going extinct and just, you know, changing into something else?” I added.
“I’m not certain in either case. I’d have to assess the evidence on a case-by-case basis.”
I frowned. “You don’t have protocols for that kind of thing?”
“I do. But they’re only triggered in context.”
“Funny you don’t have access to them otherwise,” Viktor remarked.
“There’s no need for them otherwise.”
We weren’t fooled. It was Easter Island all over again: a mission set in motion by control freaks, terrified that the meat would eventually screw things up. Limiting our degrees of freedom was their sacred charge.
Looking past the prehistoric politics, though, the bottom line was clear enough: there was no finish line. Far as the Chimp was concerned, we could keep going forever.
Maybe that should’ve bothered me more. It’s not that I objected to a life sentence; we’d known from the age of seven what we were in for. But that sentence had been voluntary. Joyful, even. We were exiles by our own consent, collaborators in the ultimate adventure.
Maybe that was the point. Maybe getting my nose rubbed in the obvious—that our consent was a joke, that the Diaspora had no Off switch—should have burned more than it did. At the time I wondered if they’d deliberately engineered us to be indifferent to future consequences.
Until I realized they wouldn’t have had to.
Dhanyata Wali did the honors, installed the Pretender during a build deep in the bow shock over TriAnd. I wasn’t on deck, so I never got the details first-hand. (You can’t exactly throw a party to celebrate your tactical victories when the enemy has eyes on your rec room, although there may have been some rejoicing down in the Glade. Assuming Lian was still capable of rejoicing by then.)
The ironic thing was, it wasn’t even our idea. We stole it from the Chimp—and even the Chimp was just using the same old traffic-allocation strategies networks have been using since the dawn of the computer age. Ping your nodes, get them to ping each other, provoke a web of call-and-response so you always know which one is fastest on the draw. The winner becomes Ghost of Chimp Yet to Come: ready to jump in and take the reins when Chimp Present retires, when its current node gets old or breaks or just ends up too far from the action.
Which is where the Ghost of Chimp Past comes in.
Kaden had tracked a hypervisor to the heavy zone a few builds before. Se hadn’t quite nailed it down before the Chimp jumped away again but a little poking around turned up the vacated node behind a service panel, next to one of the secondary trunks. Kaden told Dhanyata; Dhanyata swapped it out for a dummy that would pass for the real thing so long as the Chimp didn’t ask it too many questions while we were hacking the original.
The first hack coaxed the node into subtracting some trifling amount from its latency scores; a little white lie to make it appear to be the fastest player in the game, guaranteed next in the line of succession.