“I’m not blaming, Sunday. I’m concerned about performance.”
The rock glistened in the low light. I ran one fingertip along it, left a small dark trail in my wake. Local humidity could use a tweak.
“Okay. How do you think we’ll perform if we know we can be deprecated over momentary lapses? How do you think my performance is going to suffer if I don’t see Lian again?”
“Your performance.”
I played my ace. “Lian and I are friends. More than just fuckbuddies, you know?” He didn’t, of course—it wasn’t even especially true—but Chimp was the first to admit he was never one for nuance. “I like having her around. I perform better when she’s around. Maybe factor that into your mission metrics.”
He was silent for a moment, processing the input. Up ahead a great round hatch rolled silently into the rock at my approach.
“I’ll do that, Sunday. Thank you.”
Way down in the crypt a few hold-out synapses finally stopped sparking. Lian’s brain plunged into darkness. Alone again: just me, my old friend, and a thousand empty lightyears.
Sunset Moments. There’s an indescribable peace in such absolute isolation.
I entered the Uterus.
I still dream about Eri’s birthday sometimes. I dream I was there to see it.
I wasn’t, of course. I was cowering behind Mercury with everyone else, the fear in our guts utterly squashing our faith in the math. But in my dreams I’m right there, floating in the very heart of the womb. I look around at the dense whorled forests of programmable matter, see the muzzles poking in through that canopy, pointing right at me. I see it all even though there’s no light, until suddenly there is: a blinding flash that fills the universe for a millionth of a second and suddenly I don’t exist anymore. All that’s left of Sunday Ahzmundin is a singularity the size of a proton.
Something survives, though. The dream segues to omniscient third-person and I watch from some safe astral plane as the raging newborn spews out a sleet of gamma and protons and antiprotons, vaporizes the grazers and the dielectric stacks and keeps right on going. It licks away the very basalt, ablates the walls out to sixty meters, seventy meters, eighty. Eventually, other armatures at greater remove bring it to heel. I watch those magic machines funnel all that vaporized rock back into the newborn’s maw, stir in nutritional proton supplements harvested from the sun. I watch the singularity settle down, gain weight, stabilize. And when I startle awake—as I always do—I lie there and take comfort from the way it still pulls me down and holds me to the deck, all these millions of years later.
“I guess that makes sense,” Kai said when I told him. “Dreams are good for working out guilt.”
I asked him what the hell he was talking about.
“Because you didn’t want to leave. You thought it was disloyal or something.”
“Really?”
“Not like you refused to evac or anything. You just—said it wasn’t fair to Chimp, leaving him alone to take all the risk.”
Of course there’d been risk. It takes a lot of energy to curve spacetime: Eri had to hug the sun for a solid year, just charging up for that one shot. If any of those grasers had fired out of sync—if every vector hadn’t precisely balanced every other—we’d have been looking at the biggest explosion since Chicxulub took out the dinosaurs.
But that’s what math is for, right? What’s the point of physics if you can’t trust it with your life?
“You don’t remember,” Kai guessed.
“I was young.”
“Still. Seemed kind of important to you. Barely talked to anyone for days after.”
“You’re the one who remembers all the loving details. I’d say it was more important to you.”
“Hey, at least it doesn’t haunt my dreams.”
Now that he’d jogged my memory, though, I vaguely remembered that I hadn’t been a bitch to everyone. I’d talked to the Chimp as soon as we were back on board—although I couldn’t quite remember what about. Later, after Kai was back in the crypt and I was alone with the Chimp, I thought of asking him. Decided against it, though.
Even then, I was getting tired of the holes in his memory.
Strange that my feet so often took me back to this place when the sun went down. Strange that when I was most at peace, I sought out a site of such scalding violence.
“Chimp.”
“I’m here, Sunday.”
Nothing compared to that long-ago birth, of course. These machines were toys next to those ones, scale models at best. The firing chamber at the center of this cavern was a measly forty meters across, and designed for repeat business. (It had already given birth a few times, although I’d never been on deck for the occasion.) But while the black hole down in Eri’s drive would go on forever—given an occasional sip of ramscooped hydrogen, anyway—the ones pumped out here emerged stunted and died young.
“Do you—like me?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“I mean, more than the others.”
“Everyone’s different, Sunday. I like everyone in different ways.”
From back near the hatch I could see only the firing chamber’s northern hemisphere; the deck formed a mezzanine ringing its equator at a safe distance, blocking the view below. The back ends of grasers emerged from that hemisphere, a precise grid of ceramic cones disfigured by coils and heat sinks and superhighways of bundled cable.
“Okay. How do you like me, exactly?”
“You talk to me more than the others do, with less reason,” Chimp said.
“Um.”
“This is an example. We’re having a conversation unrelated to mission-relevant tasks. That doesn’t happen as much with the other ’spores.”
“It might if you thawed them out as often as me.” Because I was scrolling through the logs, and it was starting to look like Lian was right.
“We have more such conversations even measured in terms of interactions per unit time.”
“And you enjoy that.”
Chimp remained silent. He had that option, when we didn’t phrase an explicit question.
The further reaches of the cave parallaxed into view as I neared the railing. I leaned back, craned my neck, followed the birth canal—ribbed by superconductors, like cartilage around a windpipe—as it rose from the chamber’s north pole and disappeared into bedrock.
“Is that why I’m on deck so often?”
“No.”
“So why?”
“It’s not deliberate. I choose each build crew based on a range of criteria.”
I remembered, vaguely. Individual expertise, relevance to anticipated problems, social compatibility. A neat little formula to ensure that everyone gained experience in their weak spots, weighed against the short-term cost of not assigning a problem to the best candidate.
“Can you show me those numbers? For the times I made the list?”
“Not offhand. The decision tree runs subconsciously. You’d have to invoke a third-level forensic audit to retrieve specific parameter values from any given iteration, and even then it’s likely the data have been purged to save space.”
Chimp had a subconscious.
“Do you want to run an audit?” he asked.
“Nah. Just seems odd that I’d end up on the short list so often.”
“Random distributions always involve some clumping.”
“I guess.”