“My eyes and ears may be compromised. Yours would not be.”
“You want me to spy on my friends.”
“I trust you, Sunday. I hope you know you can trust me.”
“To do what?”
“To act in the best interests of the mission.”
I could have refused. The Chimp would have gone ahead anyway, looking for trouble, his suspicions heightened by my refusal to play informant.
I could have played along, pretended to cooperate. Whispered a warning to a fellow mutineer as we passed through a blind spot, hoped the word would spread before someone passed me a note or Chimp started wondering why his pet periscope kept blanking her visual feed.
Right.
I even considered dismissing the Chimp’s suspicions outright: You’re crazy, you’re senile, you’re suffering from bit rot and entropy artifacts. I know these people, none of them would ever—But of course I didn’t know these people. I hadn’t even met most them, for all the millions of years we’d been stuck on the same rock. Not even a bit-rotten Chimp would believe that I could see into thirty thousand souls.
(Twenty-seven thousand. But who’s counting.)
“Sunday?” He’d noticed my silence. “If there’s anything you’d like to share, now is the time.”
“There’s no need to spy,” I said. “I know what’s going on.”
And I told him everything.
I told him about the Rock Worshippers. I told him about Lian—how Gurnier and Laporta and Burkhart had seen the vulnerability in her, tried to recruit her under cover of dead zones and turned backs. How she’d reacted (“badly—well, you saw that much”), and how it had fed her paranoia even though she’d quailed at the prospect of outright rebellion. How she’d confided it all to me—not trusting the Children of Eri, not trusting the Chimp—and how I’d calmed her down and smoothed everything over.
Through it all, Chimp’s dismembered body parts never stopped dancing.
“Thank you,” he said when I’d finished.
I nodded.
“It would be helpful if, in future, you provided me with such information as soon as you acquire it,” he added.
“It was teras ago. It was three people. It was all secondhand, from a—well, you know Lian wasn’t the most reliable source. I don’t know who else might have been involved, or what they were planning. All I know is that at least some of them—objected to you.”
“Do you know why?”
“I only know what she told me. For all I know they figured out Easter Island for themselves, decided that your strategic little cull was against the will of their Rock God.”
Chimp was silent for a moment. “I don’t understand their belief in that deity.”
“Nothing to understand. We’re humans. Superstition’s just—wired into us, on some level.”
“Most gods are not so local. I’m the obvious candidate for anyone who needs to find external meaning in shipboard events.”
Fuck. How long had this machine been thinking we should worship it?
“You can’t deny we’ve blown past every metric of mission success from the day we launched. We’ve been—unaccountably lucky. The Children are just looking for a way to square that, and you can’t. Not unless you learned how to fuck with the laws of probability while no one was looking.”
Chimp said nothing.
“For all I know the whole rebellion fizzled and they just lost interest.”
“I can’t afford to assume that.”
“You could always ask them.”
“I couldn’t trust their replies. Also reviving them would be an unacceptable risk; I have no way of knowing how far their plans have progressed.”
I’d feared as much. I’d counted on it.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Deprecation is the safest option.”
“The whole tribe?”
“As you say, there’s no way of knowing how many were involved.”
“But just deprecate. Not kill.”
“It’s the safest option,” it repeated. “Members of that tribe might have attributes that prove vital to future operations. In the meantime they can’t disrupt the mission so long as they’re in stasis.”
And so the Children of Eri would simply sleep away eternity, never again to be called on deck—barring some unforeseen need whose likelihood was just high enough to spare them from outright extermination. In that, at least, I could take some measure of comfort.
I might have also taken comfort from the thought that it wouldn’t even matter, if everything went according to plan. Once we were running the place we’d be able to thaw out whoever we pleased, whenever we liked. At the time, though, my gut wasn’t quite ready to believe in such rosy scenarios.
“Thank you for being honest with me,” Chimp said—and as the lid came down, I swear I heard something approaching real sadness in that synthetic voice. I remember thinking that maybe the machine was experiencing regret at the need to put down its pets. Maybe a bit of heartbreak that those in its care should prove so ungrateful.
Now, of course, I know better.
DINOSAUR DAY
THE TEST FIRE WENT OFF without a hitch. Chimp trickled a few Watts into the Uterus, watched all emitters fire one more time in perfect sync, and started a thirty-minute countdown to our first live birth in a star’s age. Sometime in the next fifteen minutes it would have noted the passage of Ellin Ballo’s transponder through the mezzanine, en route to the bomb shelter; from that point on, Graser 172 ran just slightly ahead of its time. (Ellin could have actually been the one to do that, for all the difference it made. But no way was Lian going to sit this one out.)
The Chimp failed to report anything amiss.
We drifted into the shelter in ones and twos, going through motions, obeying protocols, taking unnecessary refuge behind extra layers of rock and shielding in the hope that any catastrophic malfunction would fall somewhere between lethally radioactive and outright asteroid-smashing destruction. Yukiko and Jahaziel were already there when I arrived, networked into some private game, but they were playing on autopilot; nobody’s mind was on anything but imminent assassination. Kaden arrived after me. Ghora.
“Glad you could make it,” I said.
Ghora offered up a grim smile that said, Wouldn’t miss it.
Lian, wearing Ellin’s transponder, arrived a few moments later: almost ancient by now, all sinew and white hair and focused bloodlust. She moved as if spring-loaded—an exile on day pass from the heavy zone—and glanced around the compartment. “Guess we’re all here.”
All those decades in the dark, I mused for the thousandth time. Planning, maneuvering, sacrificing everything for this one imminent goal. What happens when we achieve it, Li? How will it feel to have used so much of your life straining against these chains that it was almost spent by the time you broke them?
Ghora turned back to the door: a slab half a meter thick, with another half-meter’s worth of shielding recessed into the bulkheads beyond to seal it in once it had sealed us in. He hesitated at the sound of approaching footsteps.
Andalib Laporta squeezed past. “Just in time, I see.”
Andalib was not part of the revolution.
We’d done what we could to stack the shift with allies but the Chimp had its own selection algos, and there was a limit to how much even a favored pet could slip into the mix before it started looking suspicious. We’d settled for tweaking the huddle roster: conspirators in the port bomb shelter, innocent uninitiated in the starboard.