BUD finally went down and stayed down: a victim of signal-squelching rocks and bioelectric static and drive circuitry that couldn’t possibly be expected to contain such vast energies without emitting some of its own. The dead air was our privacy alarm. As long as we were blind, we were alone.
“So what the hell were you doing, Li?”
She didn’t answer at first. She didn’t answer at all.
Instead: “You read books, right?”
“Sure. Sometimes.”
“You plug in. Tour. Watch ennies.”
“What’s your point?”
“You’ve seen the way people lived. Kids with cats, or hacking their tutors, or parasailing on their birthdays.”
“So?”
“So you don’t just see it, Sunday. You feed off it. You base your life on it. Our speech patterns, our turns of phrase—fuck, our swear words for chrissake—all lifted from a culture that hasn’t existed for petasecs.” She took a breath. “We’ve been out here so very long…”
I rolled my eyes. “Enough with the world-weary ancient immortal shtick, okay? The fact that we’ve been out here for sixty million years—”
“Sixty-five.”
“—doesn’t change the fact that you’ve only been awake for ten or twenty, tops.”
“My point is we’re living dead lives. Theirs, not ours. We never went hiking, or scuba diving, or—”
“Sure we have. We can. Any time we want. You just said so.”
“They cheated us. We wake up, we build their fucking gates, and we recycle their lives because they never gave us any of our own.”
I should have pitied her. Instead, surprisingly, I found myself getting angry. “Do you even remember the shape Earth was in when we left? I wouldn’t trade this life for centuries on that grubby shithole if God Itself came through the gate and offered me a ticket. I like this life.”
“You like it because they built you to. Because they’d never get any normal person to sign up for a one-way trip in a dead rock to the end of time, so they built this special model all small and twisted, like—like those plants they used to grow. In Japan or somewhere. Something so stunted it couldn’t even imagine spending its life outside a cage.”
Bonsai, I remembered. But I didn’t want to encourage her.
“You liked it here too,” I said instead. Until you broke.
“Yeah.” She nodded, and even in the dimness I got the sense of a sad smile. “But I got better.”
“Lian. What were you doing in the crawlway?”
She sighed. “I was running a bypass on one of the Chimp’s sensory trunks.”
“I saw that. What for?”
“Nothing critical. I was just going to—inject some noise into the channel.”
“Noise.”
“Static. To reduce signal fidelity.”
I spread my palms: So?
“I was trying to take back a little control, okay? For all of us!”
“How does compromising Chimp’s—”
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
“You were increasing the uncertainty threshold,” I murmured.
“Yeah.”
Because the only reason Eri shipped out with meat on board in the first place was for those times the Chimp didn’t feel up to managing a build on his own, when he needed some of that organic human insight to get him past the unknown variables and halting states. And the less reliable his data, the less certain he’d be that he could handle it on his own. Lian was trying to tilt the algos towards human input.
In principle, it was a pretty clever hack. In practice…
“Li. Even if you figured out some way to keep the Chimp from just—finding your monkey wrenches and fixing them while we’re all down for the count, do you have any idea how many of those cables you’d have to jam up before you even started to make a dent in the redundant systems?”
“Somewhere between two thousand and twenty-seven hundred.” Then added: “You don’t have to cut the inputs, you just have to—fog them a little. Widen the confidence limits.”
“Uh huh. And how many of those nerves you hacked so far?”
“Five.”
Maybe I thought she’d realize how insane the whole idea was if she said it aloud. Nothing in her voice suggested she had.
“Why do you even want this? It’s not like Chimp’s fucking up the builds when we’re not there to keep an eye on him.”
“It’s not about the builds, Sun. It’s about being human. It’s about getting back a little autonomy.”
“And what are you gonna do with that autonomy when you get it? Stop building gates?”
“At least then we wouldn’t have to worry about gremlins taking shots at us.”
“Shop around for a nice little Earthlike planet? Print some shuttles, settle down, live the rest of our lives in thatched huts? Or maybe circle back to the last build and wait for some magic silver ship to sail out and give us all first-class tickets to the retirement paradise of our choice?”
That had actually been part of the mission profile, back before those first few gates opened up and spat out nothing but automation and ancient binary. Before the next few just sat there empty. Before the gremlins started. But it must have been thirty million years since I’d heard anyone mention retirement as anything but a cheap punchline.
It fell flat this time too. “The first step is to gain our freedom,” Lian said. “Lots of time to figure out what to do with it afterward.”
“And if you can get the Chimp to wake us up often enough he’ll just roll over and give it to you. Jesus, Li. What’re you thinking?”
Something changed in her posture. “I suppose I’m thinking that maybe there’s more to life than living like a troglodyte for a few days every couple thousand years, knowing that I’m never gonna see an honest-to-God forest again that doesn’t look like, like”—She glanced around—“a nightmare someone shat out in lieu of therapy.”
“Honestly, I don’t understand. Any time you want a—a green forest, just plug in. Any time you want to hike the desert or dive Enceladus or fly into the sunset, just plug in. You can experience things nobody ever did back on Earth, any time you want.”
“It’s not real.”
“You can’t tell the difference.”
“I know the difference.” She looked back at me from a face full of blue-gray shadows. “And I don’t understand you either, okay? I thought we were the same, I thought I was following in your footsteps…”
Silence.
“Why would you think that?” I asked at last.
“Because you fought it too, didn’t you? Before we ever shipped out. You were always pushing back, you were always challenging everyone and everything about the mission. You were, like, six years old and you called bullshit on Mamoro Sawada. Nobody could believe it. I mean, there we all were, programmed for the mission before we were even born, everything preloaded and hardwired and you—threw it off, somehow. Resisted. Way I hear it they nearly kicked you out a few times.”
“Where did you hear that?” Because I was really damn sure that Lian Wei and I had not gone through training within ten thousand kliks of each other.
“Kai told me.”
That figured. “Kai talks too much.”