Of course, Graser 172 was never supposed to fire by itself. The whole array would fire together, in perfect harmony: every high-energy photon balanced against every other, all forces converged and canceled in a moment of impossible creation. Kilometers of robust circuitry, atomic clocks accurate down to Planck, existed for no other reason but to keep everything precisely in sync.
Precise doesn’t do it justice, though. Precise is far too coarse a word. No single clock would be able to fire all those beams at the same instant; the most miniscule variation in latency would throw the whole array out of sync, and the cables extending to each graser were of different lengths. No, the only solution was to build identical clocks into each graser, stamped right into the trigger assembly, each circuit matched to the angstrom. Use a master clock to keep them calibrated, for sure—but when the countdown starts, let the locals handle the firing sequence.
What none of that arcane circuitry understood was that all signals the master clock sent to 172 now passed through the plug-in Lian had just installed. That plug-in was dormant now. It would stay that way until a magnetic key with a unique and specific signature passed within ten meters or so: then it would awaken and begin its assigned duties as 172’s receptionist. It would screen 172’s calls, schedule 172’s appointments, reply with 172’s voice after just enough of a delay to reassure callers that their signals had gone all the way up the line and been properly understood.
This was not entirely untrue. The receptionist really was a paragon of diligence when it came to clear and accurate communication. In terms of time-keeping, though, it had its own standards of punctuality.
Once the receptionist showed up for work, Graser 172 would be living three hundred corsecs in the future.
The Chimp brought me back for another of its moments of insecurity, born of infinitesimal but increasing discrepancies between where we were and where we should be.
It brought me back for a build that wasn’t, around a star whose location and metallicity shouted optimal even though the vons, once deployed, could barely scrape together enough material for a fueling station, much less a gate. It was almost as though someone else had been there before us and made off with all the best stuff. We even looked around for a gate someone else might have built, but came up empty.
It brought me back for a handful of builds I’ve almost forgotten, resurrected me for reasons so trivial that all I remember now is my irritation with Viktor’s end-of-time rhapsodies and my greater irritation at the Chimp’s slavish adherence to trigger thresholds.
Most of the time, though, I slept while the Chimp built an army of vons. I watched the replay, ages afterward.
I’d never seen anything like it before.
I was used to the usual dance: the harvesters shot from our hanger bays, a scavenger swarm sent ahead at meat-killing delta-vees to scoop up dust and rocks and tumbling mountains full of precious metal. Once they’d mined enough treasure they transformed, linked arms and fused together and turned into printers or refineries or assembly-lines: a factory floor, a piecemeal cloud five hundred kilometers across. The Hawking Hoop would coalesce in its heart; more harvesters and rock-wranglers would be birthed around its edges. They’d forage out, half a lightyear sometimes, bring back ores and alloys in an accelerating escalation of mass and complexity.
Eventually the build would reach some critical inflection point and turn inward: harvesters would stop eating comets and start on each other, cannibalizing the factory from the outside in, recycling deprecated components into last-minute coils or condensers. The uneaten survivors would weld everything tight, line up safely to one side and shut down, waiting for Eriophora to catch up and boot the gate. Perhaps offering up some rudimentary machine prayer that we wouldn’t miss the needle’s eye when—a few megasecs down the road—we blew through at sixty thousand kps.
It took anywhere from a hundred gigasecs to ten thousand, and it was damned impressive the first hundred times you watched the replay. But that was just the construction of a single gate, floating at some safe and benign distance from some safe and benign star. The biggest productions had a cast of less than ten thousand—maybe a hundred heavies holding court to a swirling retinue of harvesters.
The Nemesis build took half a million. We were ringside from the second act.
No cheating, this time. No counting on robots to go ahead and do all the work while we cruised by later to kickstart the fruits of their labor. Oh, the vons still launched while we were parsecs out. They still raced ahead and scoured the neighborhood for raw material. This time, though, they were eating for nine, and every one of those gates would be within kissing distance of the event horizon. The usual boot protocol was a complete nonstarter. Try threading Eri through one of those needles at twenty percent lightspeed and we’d be diving down Nemesis’ throat in the next nanosecond.
The plan was to build a whole brood of black holes from scratch—stunted, disposable, one for each portal—instead of using the larger one at the heart of Eri’s drive. We’d lay each in turn like a microscopic egg, nudge it into a precise orbit that would carry it through its assigned needle’s-eye. Each singularity would give its life in turn to boot its gate; we’d hide behind Nemesis each time it happened. Nemesis’ own lethal emissions would be as gentle sunlight on a spring day, next to the glare of those annihilations.
We would do this nine times.
The gates weren’t finished by the time we fell into orbit. Their exposed guts glinted in the starlight; fabbers clambered around encrusted scaffolding like monstrous crabs, like mechanical scavengers feasting on interstellar road kill. No hurry, though. It would take almost four gigasecs to scrape up the energy for a single boot, thirty-five more to finish the builds themselves: almost five years, meat on deck for at least half that time.
The Chimp could have probably done it on its own but it was a big build, an important build, and it wasn’t taking chances. We had complementary weaknesses, meat and machines. Metal had faster reflexes and a more delicate touch by far; but we weren’t as vulnerable to rads or EMPs.
Not that we’re invulnerable, mind you. It’s just that organic life has a kind of momentum that keeps you moving even after your cells have been shredded. If some unexpected blast of radiation didn’t turn us to ash outright, we’d still have hours or days to keep up the pace; metal would have sparked and died in an instant. We were the backups to the backups, awake but relegated to the bench as a hedge against the chance that some catastrophic failure might fratz the machinery but leave us standing.
They were long odds. But we were cheap insurance.
In theory we’d survive even if the claim came in; our coffins could put us down and patch us up before our insides turned to mush. We’d be benched for the rest of the build, but there’d be plenty of time for repairs before we were needed on deck again.
Thus did we spend five years, parked in the shadow of the behemoth.
It was such a small behemoth: twenty suns, contained in a horizon only one hundred twenty kilometers across. Not even a speck, on cosmological scales.
The reach it had, though. The terrible, terrible reach.
Tidal gradients extended far beyond the event horizon, ready to tear us apart if we strayed too close. Just offstage, Nemesis’ dwarf companion orbited at hazardous distance: far enough to avoid being swallowed whole but just as doomed in the long run, its atmosphere slurped away and spun across the void in a bottomless spiral, feeding an insatiable partner that would not stop until it had bled its captive absolutely fucking dry.