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Blindsight Peter Watts







For Lisa



If we're not in pain, we're not alive.







Prologue Theseus Rorschach Charybdis Acknowledgments Notes and References Creative Commons Licensing Information









"This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real."  Philip Gourevitch



"You will die like a dog for no good reason."  Ernest Hemingway





Prologue

"Try to touch the past. Try to deal with the past. It's not real. It's just a dream."  Ted Bundy

It didn't start out here. Not with the scramblers or Rorschach, not with Big Ben or Theseus or the vampires. Most people would say it started with the Fireflies, but they'd be wrong. It ended with all those things. For me, it began with Robert Paglino. At the age of eight, he was my best and only friend. We were fellow outcasts, bound by complementary misfortune. Mine was developmental. His was genetic: an uncontrolled genotype that left him predisposed to nearsightedness, acne, and (as it later turned out) a susceptibility to narcotics. His parents had never had him optimized. Those few TwenCen relics who still believed in God also held that one shouldn't try to improve upon His handiwork. So although both of us could have been repaired, only one of us had been. I arrived at the playground to find Pag the center of attention for some half-dozen kids, those lucky few in front punching him in the head, the others making do with taunts of mongrel and polly while waiting their turn. I watched him raise his arms, almost hesitantly, to ward off the worst of the blows. I could see into his head better than I could see into my own; he was scared that his attackers might think those hands were coming up to hit back, that they'd read it as an act of defiance and hurt him even more. Even then, at the tender age of eight and with half my mind gone, I was becoming a superlative observer. But I didn't know what to do. I hadn't seen much of Pag lately. I was pretty sure he'd been avoiding me. Still, when your best friend's in trouble you help out, right? Even if the odds are impossibleand how many eight-year-olds would go up against six bigger kids for a sandbox buddy?at least you call for backup. Flag a sentry. Something. I just stood there. I didn't even especially want to help him. That didn't make sense. Even if he hadn't been my best friend, I should at least have empathized. I'd suffered less than Pag in the way of overt violence; my seizures tended to keep the other kids at a distance, scared them even as they incapacitated me. Still. I was no stranger to the taunts and insults, or the foot that appears from nowhere to trip you up en route from A to B. I knew how that felt. Or I had, once. But that part of me had been cut out along with the bad wiring. I was still working up the algorithms to get it back, still learning by observation. Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their midst. Every child knows that much instinctively. Maybe I should just let that process unfold, maybe I shouldn't try to mess with nature. Then again, Pag's parents hadn't messed with nature, and look what it got them: a son curled up in the dirt while a bunch of engineered superboys kicked in his ribs. In the end, propaganda worked where empathy failed. Back then I didn't so much think as observe, didn't deduce so much as rememberand what I remembered was a thousand inspirational stories lauding anyone who ever stuck up for the underdog. So I picked up a rock the size of my fist and hit two of Pag's assailants across the backs of their heads before anyone even knew I was in the game. A third, turning to face the new threat, took a blow to the face that audibly crunched the bones of his cheek. I remember wondering why I didn't take any satisfaction from that sound, why it meant nothing beyond the fact I had one less opponent to worry about. The rest of them ran at the sight of blood. One of the braver promised me I was dead, shouted "Fucking zombie!" over his shoulder as he disappeared around the corner. Three decades it took, to see the irony in that remark. Two of the enemy twitched at my feet. I kicked one in the head until it stopped moving, turned to the other. Something grabbed my arm and I swung without thinking, without looking until Pag yelped and ducked out of reach. "Oh," I said. "Sorry." One thing lay motionless. The other moaned and held its head and curled up in a ball. "Oh shit," Pag panted. Blood coursed unheeded from his nose and splattered down his shirt. His cheek was turning blue and yellow. "Oh shit oh shit oh shit..." I thought of something to say. "You all right?" "Oh shit, youI mean, you never..." He wiped his mouth. Blood smeared the back of his hand. "Oh man are we in trouble." "They started it." "Yeah, but youI mean, look at them!" The moaning thing was crawling away on all fours. I wondered how long it would be before it found reinforcements. I wondered if I should kill it before then. "You'da never done that before," Pag said. Before the operation, he meant. I actually did feel something thenfaint, distant, but unmistakable. I felt angry. "They started" Pag backed away, eyes wide. "What are you doing? Put that down!" I'd raised my fists. I didn't remember doing that. I unclenched them. It took a while. I had to look at my hands very hard for a long, long time. The rock dropped to the ground, blood-slick and glistening. "I was trying to help." I didn't understand why he couldn't see that. "You're, you're not the same," Pag said from a safe distance. "You're not even Siri any more." "I am too. Don't be a fuckwad." "They cut out your brain!" "Only half. For the ep" "I know for the epilepsy! You think I don't know? But you were in that halfor, like, part of you was..." He struggled with the words, with the concept behind them. "And now you're different. It's like, your mom and dad murdered you" "My mom and dad," I said, suddenly quiet, "saved my life. I would have died." "I think you did die," said my best and only friend. "I think Siri died, they scooped him out and threw him away and you're some whole other kid that just, just grew back out of what was left. You're not the same. Ever since. You're not the same." I still don't know if Pag really knew what he was saying. Maybe his mother had just pulled the plug on whatever game he'd been wired into for the previous eighteen hours, forced him outside for some fresh air. Maybe, after fighting pod people in gamespace, he couldn't help but see them everywhere. Maybe. But you could make a case for what he said. I do remember Helen telling me (and telling me) how difficult it was to adjust. Like you had a whole new personality, she said, and why not? There's a reason they call it radical hemispherectomy: half the brain thrown out with yesterday's krill, the remaining half press-ganged into double duty. Think of all the rewiring that one lonely hemisphere must have struggled with as it tried to take up the slack. It turned out okay, obviously. The brain's a very flexible piece of meat; it took some doing, but it adapted. I adapted. Still. Think of all that must have been squeezed out, deformed, reshaped by the time the renovations were through. You could argue that I'm a different person than the one who used to occupy this body. The grownups showed up eventually, of course. Medicine was bestowed, ambulances called. Parents were outraged, diplomatic volleys exchanged, but it's tough to drum up neighborhood outrage on behalf of your injured baby when playground surveillance from three angles shows the little darlingand five of his buddies kicking in the ribs of a disabled boy. My mother, for her part, recycled the usual complaints about problem children and absentee fathersDad was off again in some other hemispherebut the dust settled pretty quickly. Pag and I even stayed friends, after a short hiatus that reminded us both of the limited social prospects open to schoolyard rejects who don't stick together. So I survived that and a million other childhood experiences. I grew up and I got along. I learned to fit in. I observed, recorded, derived the algorithms and mimicked appropriate behaviors. Not much of it washeartfelt, I guess the word is. I had friends and enemies, like everyone else. I chose them by running through checklists of behaviors and circumstances compiled from years of observation. I may have grown up distant but I grew up objective, and I have Robert Paglino to thank for that. His seminal observation set everything in motion. It led me into Synthesis, fated me to our disastrous encounter with the Scramblers, spared me the worse fate befalling Earth. Or the better one, I suppose, depending on your point of view. Point of view matters: I see that now, blind, talking to myself, trapped in a coffin falling past the edge of the solar system. I see it for the first time since some beaten bloody friend on a childhood battlefield convinced me to throw my own point of view away. He may have been wrong. I may have been. But that, that distancethat chronic sense of being an alien among your own kindit's not entirely a bad thing. It came in especially handy when the real aliens came calling.











Theseus





"Blood makes noise." Susanne Vega

Imagine you are Siri Keeton: You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate; flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You're a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae. You'd scream if you had the breath. Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn't done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They're back now, after all raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire. The pain begins, just slightly, to recede. You fire up your inlays and access your own vitals: it'll be long minutes before your body responds fully to motor commands, hours before it stops hurting. The pain's an unavoidable side effect. That's just what happens when you splice vampire subroutines into Human code. You asked about painkillers once, but nerve blocks of any kind compromise metabolic reactivation. Suck it up, soldier. You wonder if this was how it felt for Chelsea, before the end. But that evokes a whole other kind of pain, so you block it out and concentrate on the life pushing its way back into your extremities. Suffering in silence, you check the logs for fresh telemetry. You think: That can't be right. Because if it is, you're in the wrong part of the universe. You're not in the Kuiper Belt where you belong: you're high above the ecliptic and deep into the Oort, the realm of long-period comets that only grace the sun every million years or so. You've gone interstellar, which means (you bring up the system clock) you've been undead for eighteen hundred days. You've overslept by almost five years. The lid of your coffin slides away. Your own cadaverous body reflects from the mirrored bulkhead opposite, a desiccated lungfish waiting for the rains. Bladders of isotonic saline cling to its limbs like engorged antiparasites, like the opposite of leeches. You remember the needles going in just before you shut down, way back when your veins were more than dry twisted filaments of beef jerky. Szpindel's reflection stares back from his own pod to your immediate right. His face is as bloodless and skeletal as yours. His wide sunken eyes jiggle in their sockets as he reacquires his own links, sensory interfaces so massive that your own off-the-shelf inlays amount to shadow-puppetry in comparison. You hear coughing and the rustling of limbs just past line-of-sight, catch glimpses of reflected motion where the others stir at the edge of vision. "Wha" Your voice is barely more than a hoarse whisper. " happ ?" Szpindel works his jaw. Bone cracks audibly. " Sssuckered," he hisses. You haven't even met the aliens yet, and already they're running rings around you.

*

So we dragged ourselves back from the dead: five part-time cadavers, naked, emaciated, barely able to move even in zero gee. We emerged from our coffins like premature moths ripped from their cocoons, still half-grub. We were alone and off course and utterly helpless, and it took a conscious effort to remember: they would never have risked our lives if we hadn't been essential. "Morning, commissar." Isaac Szpindel reached one trembling, insensate hand for the feedback gloves at the base of his pod. Just past him, Susan James was curled into a loose fetal ball, murmuring to herselves. Only Amanda Bates, already dressed and cycling through a sequence of bone-cracking isometrics, possessed anything approaching mobility. Every now and then she tried bouncing a rubber ball off the bulkhead; but not even she was up to catching it on the rebound yet. The journey had melted us down to a common archetype. James' round cheeks and hips, Szpindel's high forehead and lumpy, lanky chassiseven the enhanced carboplatinum brick shit-house that Bates used for a body all had shriveled to the same desiccated collection of sticks and bones. Even our hair seemed to have become strangely discolored during the voyage, although I knew that was impossible. More likely it was just filtering the pallor of the skin beneath. Still. The pre-dead James had been dirty blond, Szpindel's hair had been almost dark enough to call black but the stuff floating from their scalps looked the same dull kelpy brown to me now. Bates kept her head shaved, but even her eyebrows weren't as rusty as I remembered them. We'd revert to our old selves soon enough. Just add water. For now, though, the old slur was freshly relevant: the Undead really did all look the same, if you didn't know how to look. If you did, of courseif you forgot appearance and watched for motion, ignored meat and studied topologyyou'd never mistake one for another. Every facial tic was a data point, every conversational pause spoke volumes more than the words to either side. I could see James' personae shatter and coalesce in the flutter of an eyelash. Szpindel's unspoken distrust of Amanda Bates shouted from the corner of his smile. Every twitch of the phenotype cried aloud to anyone who knew the language. "Where's" James croaked, coughed, waved one spindly arm at Sarasti's empty coffin gaping at the end of the row. Szpindel's lips cracked in a small rictus. "Gone back to Fab, eh? Getting the ship to build some dirt to lie on." "Probably communing with the Captain." Bates breathed louder than she spoke, a dry rustle from pipes still getting reacquainted with the idea of respiration. James again: "Could do that up here." "Could take a dump up here, too," Szpindel rasped. "Some things you do by yourself, eh?" And some things you kept to yourself. Not many baselines felt comfortable locking stares with a vampireSarasti, ever courteous, tended to avoid eye contact for exactly that reasonbut there were other surfaces to his topology, just as mammalian and just as readable. If he had withdrawn from public view, maybe I was the reason. Maybe he was keeping secrets. After all, Theseus damn well was.

*

She'd taken us a good fifteen AUs towards our destination before something scared her off course. Then she'd skidded north like a startled cat and started climbing: a wild high three-gee burn off the ecliptic, thirteen hundred tonnes of momentum bucking against Newton's First. She'd emptied her Penn tanks, bled dry her substrate mass, squandered a hundred forty days' of fuel in hours. Then a long cold coast through the abyss, years of stingy accounting, the thrust of every antiproton weighed against the drag of sieving it from the void. Teleportation isn't magic: the Icarus stream couldn't send us the actual antimatter it made, only the quantum specs. Theseus had to filterfeed the raw material from space, one ion at a time. For long dark years she'd made do on pure inertia, hoarding every swallowed atom. Then a flip; ionizing lasers strafing the space ahead; a ramscoop thrown wide in a hard brake. The weight of a trillion trillion protons slowed her down and refilled her gut and flattened us all over again. Theseus had burned relentless until almost the moment of our resurrection. It was easy enough to retrace those steps; our course was there in ConSensus for anyone to see. Exactly why the ship had blazed that trail was another matter. Doubtless it would all come out during the post-rez briefing. We were hardly the first vessel to travel under the cloak of sealed orders, and if there'd been a pressing need to know by now we'd have known by now. Still, I wondered who had locked out the Comm logs. Mission Control, maybe. Or Sarasti. Or Theseus herself, for that matter. It was easy to forget the Quantical AI at the heart of our ship. It stayed so discreetly in the background, nurtured and carried us and permeated our existence like an unobtrusive God; but like God, it never took your calls. Sarasti was the official intermediary. When the ship did speak, it spoke to him and Sarasti called it Captain. So did we all.

*

He'd given us four hours to come back. It took more than three just to get me out of the crypt. By then my brain was at least firing on most of its synapses, although my bodystill sucking fluids like a thirsty sponge continued to ache with every movement. I swapped out drained electrolyte bags for fresh ones and headed aft. Fifteen minutes to spin-up. Fifty to the post-resurrection briefing. Just enough time for those who preferred gravity-bound sleep to haul their personal effects into the drum and stake out their allotted 4.4 square meters of floor space. Gravityor any centripetal facsimile thereofdid not appeal to me. I set up my own tent in zero-gee and as far to stern as possible, nuzzling the forward wall of the starboard shuttle tube. The tent inflated like an abscess on Theseus' spine, a little climate-controlled bubble of atmosphere in the dark cavernous vacuum beneath the ship's carapace. My own effects were minimal; it took all of thirty seconds to stick them to the wall, and another thirty to program the tent's environment. Afterwards I went for a hike. After five years, I needed the exercise. Stern was closest, so I started there: at the shielding that separated payload from propulsion. A single sealed hatch blistered the aft bulkhead dead center. Behind it, a service tunnel wormed back through machinery best left untouched by human hands. The fat superconducting torus of the ramscoop ring; the antennae fan behind it, unwound now into an indestructible soap-bubble big enough to shroud a city, its face turned sunward to catch the faint quantum sparkle of the Icarus antimatter stream. More shielding behind that; then the telematter reactor, where raw hydrogen and refined information conjured fire three hundred times hotter than the sun's. I knew the incantations, of courseantimatter cracking and deconstruction, the teleportation of quantum serial numbersbut it was still magic to me, how we'd come so far so fast. It would have been magic to anyone. Except Sarasti, maybe. Around me, the same magic worked at cooler temperatures and to less volatile ends: a small riot of chutes and dispensers crowded the bulkhead on all sides. A few of those openings would choke on my fist: one or two could swallow me whole. Theseus' fabrication plant could build everything from cutlery to cockpits. Give it a big enough matter stockpile and it could have even been built another Theseus, albeit in many small pieces and over a very long time. Some wondered if it could build another crew as well, although we'd all been assured that was impossible. Not even these machines had fine enough fingers to reconstruct a few trillion synapses in the space of a human skull. Not yet, anyway. I believed it. They would never have shipped us out fully-assembled if there'd been a cheaper alternative. I faced forward. Putting the back of my head against that sealed hatch I could see almost to Theseus' bow, an uninterrupted line-of-sight extending to a tiny dark bull's-eye thirty meters ahead. It was like staring at a great textured target in shades of white and gray: concentric circles, hatches centered within bulkheads one behind another, perfectly aligned. Every one stood open, in nonchalant defiance of a previous generation's safety codes. We could keep them closed if we wanted to, if it made us feel safer. That was all it would do, though; it wouldn't improve our empirical odds one whit. In the event of trouble those hatches would slam shut long milliseconds before Human senses could even make sense of an alarm. They weren't even computer-controlled. Theseus' body parts had reflexes. I pushed off against the stern platingwincing at the tug and stretch of disused tendonsand coasted forward, leaving Fab behind. The shuttle-access hatches to Scylla and Charybdis briefly constricted my passage to either side. Past them the spine widened into a corrugated extensible cylinder two meters across andat the momentmaybe fifteen long. A pair of ladders ran opposite each other along its length; raised portholes the size of manhole covers stippled the bulkhead to either side. Most of those just looked into the hold. A couple served as general-purpose airlocks, should anyone want to take a stroll beneath the carapace. One opened into my tent. Another, four meters further forward, opened into Bates'. From a third, just short of the forward bulkhead, Jukka Sarasti climbed into view like a long white spider. If he'd been Human I'd have known instantly what I saw there, I'd have smelled murderer all over his topology. And I wouldn't have been able to even guess at the number of his victims, because his affect was so utterly without remorse. The killing of a hundred would leave no more stain on Sarasti's surfaces than the swatting of an insect; guilt beaded and rolled off this creature like water on wax. But Sarasti wasn't human. Sarasti was a whole different animal, and coming from him all those homicidal refractions meant nothing more than predator. He had the inclination, was born to it; whether he had ever acted on it was between him and Mission Control. Maybe they cut you some slack, I didn't say to him. Maybe it's just a cost of doing business. You're mission-critical, after all. For all I know you cut a deal. You're so very smart, you know we wouldn't have brought you back in the first place if we hadn't needed you. From the day they cracked the vat you knew you had leverage. Is that how it works, Jukka? You save the world, and the folks who hold your leash agree to look the other way? As a child I'd read tales about jungle predators transfixing their prey with a stare. Only after I'd met Jukka Sarasti did I know how it felt. But he wasn't looking at me now. He was focused on installing his own tent, and even if he had looked me in the eye there'd have been nothing to see but the dark wraparound visor he wore in deference to Human skittishness. He ignored me as I grabbed a nearby rung and squeezed past. I could have sworn I smelled raw meat on his breath. Into the drum (drums, technically; the BioMed hoop at the back spun on its own bearings). I flew through the center of a cylinder sixteen meters across. Theseus' spinal nerves ran along its axis, the exposed plexii and piping bundled against the ladders on either side. Past them, Szpindel's and James' freshly-erected tents rose from nooks on opposite sides of the world. Szpindel himself floated off my shoulder, still naked but for his gloves, and I could tell from the way his fingers moved that his favorite color was green. He anchored himself to one of three stairways to nowhere arrayed around the drum: steep narrow steps rising five vertical meters from the deck into empty air. The next hatch gaped dead-center of the drum's forward wall; pipes and conduits plunged into the bulkhead to each side. I grabbed a convenient rung to slow myselfbiting down once more on the painand floated through. T-junction. The spinal corridor continued forward, a smaller diverticulum branched off to an EVA cubby and the forward airlock. I stayed the course and found myself back in the crypt, mirror-bright and less than two meters deep. Empty pods gaped to the left; sealed ones huddled to the right. We were so irreplaceable we'd come with replacements. They slept on, oblivious. I'd met three of them back in training. Hopefully none of us would be getting reacquainted any time soon. Only four pods to starboard, though. No backup for Sarasti. Another hatchway. Smaller this time. I squeezed through into the bridge. Dim light there, a silent shifting mosaic of icons and alphanumerics iterating across dark glassy surfaces. Not so much bridge as cockpit, and a cramped one at that. I'd emerged between two acceleration couches, each surrounded by a horseshoe array of controls and readouts. Nobody expected to ever use this compartment. Theseus was perfectly capable of running herself, and if she wasn't we were capable of running her from our inlays, and if we weren't the odds were overwhelming that we were all dead anyway. Still, against that astronomically off-the-wall chance, this was where one or two intrepid survivors could pilot the ship home again after everything else had failed. Between the footwells the engineers had crammed one last hatch and one last passageway: to the observation blister on Theseus' prow. I hunched my shoulders (tendons cracked and complained) and pushed through into darkness. Clamshell shielding covered the outside of the dome like a pair of eyelids squeezed tight. A single icon glowed softly from a touchpad to my left; faint stray light followed me through from the spine, brushed dim fingers across the concave enclosure. The dome resolved in faint shades of blue and gray as my eyes adjusted. A stale draft stirred the webbing floating from the rear bulkhead, mixed oil and machinery at the back of my throat. Buckles clicked faintly in the breeze like impoverished wind chimes. I reached out and touched the crystal: the innermost layer of two, warm air piped through the gap between to cut the cold. Not completely, though. My fingertips chilled instantly. Space out there. Perhaps, en route to our original destination, Theseus had seen something that scared her clear out of the solar system. More likely she hadn't been running away from anything but to something else, something that hadn't been discovered until we'd already died and gone from Heaven. In which case... I reached back and tapped the touchpad. I half-expected nothing to happen; Theseus' windows could be as easily locked as her comm logs. But the dome split instantly before me, a crack then a crescent then a wide-eyed lidless stare as the shielding slid smoothly back into the hull. My fingers clenched reflexively into a fistful of webbing. The sudden void stretched empty and unforgiving in all directions, and there was nothing to cling to but a metal disk barely four meters across. Stars, everywhere. So many stars that I could not for the life me understand how the sky could contain them all yet be so black. Stars, and nothing else. What did you expect? I chided myself. An alien mothership hanging off the starboard bow? Well, why not? We were out here for something. The others were, anyway. They'd be essential no matter where we'd ended up. But my own situation was a bit different, I realized. My usefulness degraded with distance. And we were over half a light year from home. "When it is dark enough, you can see the stars."  Emerson

Where was I when the lights came down? I was emerging from the gates of Heaven, mourning a father who wasto his own mind, at leaststill alive. It had been scarcely two months since Helen had disappeared under the cowl. Two months by our reckoning, at least. From her perspective it could have been a day or a decade; the Virtually Omnipotent set their subjective clocks along with everything else. She wasn't coming back. She would only deign to see her husband under conditions that amounted to a slap in the face. He didn't complain. He visited as often as she would allow: twice a week, then once. Then every two. Their marriage decayed with the exponential determinism of a radioactive isotope and still he sought her out, and accepted her conditions. On the day the lights came down, I had joined him at my mother's side. It was a special occasion, the last time we would ever see her in the flesh. For two months her body had lain in state along with five hundred other new ascendants on the ward, open for viewing by the next of kin. The interface was no more real than it would ever be, of course; the body could not talk to us. But at least it was there, its flesh warm, the sheets clean and straight. Helen's lower face was still visible below the cowl, though eyes and ears were helmeted. We could touch her. My father often did. Perhaps some distant part of her still felt it. But eventually someone has to close the casket and dispose of the remains. Room must be made for the new arrivalsand so we came to this last day at my mother's side. Jim took her hand one more time. She would still be available in her world, on her terms, but later this day the body would be packed into storage facilities crowded far too efficiently for flesh and blood visitors. We had been assured that the body would remain intactthe muscles electrically exercised, the body flexed and fed, the corpus kept ready to return to active duty should Heaven experience some inconceivable and catastrophic meltdown. Everything was reversible, we were told. And yetthere were so many who had ascended, and not even the deepest catacombs go on forever. There were rumors of dismemberment, of nonessential body parts hewn away over time according to some optimum-packing algorithm. Perhaps Helen would be a torso this time next year, a disembodied head the year after. Perhaps her chassis would be stripped down to the brain before we'd even left the building, awaiting only that final technological breakthrough that would herald the arrival of the Great Digital Upload. Rumors, as I say. I personally didn't know of anyone who'd come back after ascending, but then why would anyone want to? Not even Lucifer left Heaven until he was pushed. Dad might have known for sureDad knew more than most people, about the things most people weren't supposed to knowbut he never told tales out of turn. Whatever he knew, he'd obviously decided its disclosure wouldn't have changed Helen's mind. That would have been enough for him. We donned the hoods that served as day passes for the Unwired, and we met my mother in the spartan visiting room she imagined for these visits. She'd built no windows into the world she occupied, no hint of whatever utopian environment she'd constructed for herself. She hadn't even opted for one of the prefab visiting environments designed to minimize dissonance among visitors. We found ourselves in a featureless beige sphere five meters across. There was nothing in there but her. Maybe not so far removed from her vision of utopia after all, I thought. My father smiled. "Helen." "Jim." She was twenty years younger than the thing on the bed, and still she made my skin crawl. "Siri! You came!" She always used my name. I don't think she ever called me son. "You're still happy here?" my father asked. "Wonderful. I do wish you could join us." Jim smiled. "Someone has to keep the lights on." "Now you know this isn't goodbye," she said. "You can visit whenever you like." "Only if you do something about the scenery." Not just a joke, but a lie; Jim would have come at her call even if the gauntlet involved bare feet and broken glass. "And Chelsea, too," Helen continued. "It would be so nice to finally meet her after all this time." "Chelsea's gone, Helen," I said. "Oh yes but I know you stay in touch. I know she was special to you. Just because you're not together any more doesn't mean she can't" "You know she" A startling possibility stopped me in mid-sentence: maybe I hadn't actually told them. "Son," Jim said quietly. "Maybe you could give us a moment." I would have given them a fucking lifetime. I unplugged myself back to the ward, looked from the corpse on the bed to my blind and catatonic father in his couch, murmuring sweet nothings into the datastream. Let them perform for each other. Let them formalize and finalize their so-called relationship in whatever way they saw fit. Maybe, just once, they could even bring themselves to be honest, there in that other world where everything else was a lie. Maybe. I felt no desire to bear witness either way. But of course I had to go back in for my own formalities. I adopted my role in the familial set-piece one last time, partook of the usual lies. We all agreed that this wasn't going to change anything, and nobody deviated enough from the script to call anyone else a liar on that account. And finallycareful to say until next time rather than goodbyewe took our leave of my mother. I even suppressed my gag reflex long enough to give her a hug.

*

Jim had his inhaler in hand as we emerged from the darkness. I hoped, without much hope, that he'd throw it into the garbage receptacle as we passed through the lobby. But he raised it to his mouth and took another hit of vassopressin, that he would never be tempted. Fidelity in an aerosol. "You don't need that any more," I said. "Probably not," he agreed. "It won't work anyway. You can't imprint on someone who isn't even there, no matter how many hormones you snort. It just" Jim said nothing. We passed beneath the muzzles of sentries panning for infiltrating Realists. "She's gone," I blurted. "She doesn't care if you find someone else. She'd be happy if you did." It would let her pretend the books had been balanced. "She's my wife," he told me. "That doesn't mean what it used to. It never did." He smiled a bit at that. "It's my life, son. I'm comfortable with it." "Dad" "I don't blame her," he said. "And neither should you." Easy for him to say. Easy even to accept the hurt she'd inflicted on him all these years. This cheerful façade here at the end hardly made up for the endless bitter complaints my father had endured throughout living memory. Do you think it's easy when you disappear for months on end? Do you think it's easy always wondering who you're with and what you're doing and if you're even alive? Do you think it's easy raising a child like that on your own? She'd blamed him for everything, but he bore it gracefully because he knew it was all a lie. He knew he was only the pretense. She wasn't leaving because he was AWOL, or unfaithful. Her departure had nothing to do with him at all. It was me. Helen had left the world because she couldn't stand to look at the thing who'd replaced her son. I would have pursued itwould have tried yet again to make my father seebut by now we'd left the gates of Heaven for the streets of Purgatory, where pedestrians on all sides murmured in astonishment and stared open-mouthed at the sky. I followed their gaze to a strip of raw twilight between the towers, and gasped The stars were falling. The Zodiac had rearranged itself into a precise grid of bright points with luminous tails. It was as though the whole planet had been caught in some great closing net, the knots of its mesh aglow with St. Elmo's fire. It was beautiful. It was terrifying. I looked away to recalibrate my distance vision, to give this ill-behaved hallucination a chance to vanish gracefully before I set my empirical gaze to high-beam. I saw a vampire in that moment, a female, walking among us like the archetypal wolf in sheep's clothing. Vampires were uncommon creatures at street level. I'd never seen one in the flesh before. She had just stepped onto the street from the building across the way. She stood a head taller than the rest of us, her eyes shining yellow and bright as a cat's in the deepening dark. She realized, as I watched, that something was amiss. She looked around, glanced at the skyand continued on her way, totally indifferent to the cattle on all sides, to the heavenly portent that had transfixed them. Totally indifferent to the fact that the world had just turned inside-out. It was 1035 Greenwich Mean Time, February 13, 2082.

*

They clenched around the world like a fist, each black as the inside of an event horizon until those last bright moments when they all burned together. They screamed as they died. Every radio up to geostat groaned in unison, every infrared telescope went briefly snowblind. Ashes stained the sky for weeks afterwards; mesospheric clouds, high above the jet stream, turned to glowing rust with every sunrise. The objects, apparently, consisted largely of iron. Nobody ever knew what to make of that. For perhaps the first time in history, the world knew before being told: if you'd seen the sky, you had the scoop. The usual arbiters of newsworthiness, stripped of their accustomed role in filtering reality, had to be content with merely labeling it. It took them ninety minutes to agree on Fireflies. A half hour after that, the first Fourier transforms appeared in the noosphere; to no one's great surprise, the Fireflies had not wasted their dying breaths on static. There was pattern embedded in that terminal chorus, some cryptic intelligence that resisted all earthly analysis. The experts, rigorously empirical, refused to speculate: they only admitted that the Fireflies had said something. They didn't know what. Everyone else did. How else would you explain 65,536 probes evenly dispersed along a lat-long grid that barely left any square meter of planetary surface unexposed? Obviously the Flies had taken our picture. The whole world had been caught with its pants down in panoramic composite freeze-frame. We'd been surveyedwhether as a prelude to formal introductions or outright invasion was anyone's guess. My father might have known someone who might have known. But by then he'd long since disappeared, as he always did during times of hemispheric crisis. Whatever he knew or didn't, he left me to find my own answers with everyone else. There was no shortage of perspectives. The noosphere seethed with scenarios ranging from utopian to apocalyptic. The Fireflies had seeded lethal germs through the jet stream. The Fireflies had been on a nature safari. The Icarus Array was being retooled to power a doomsday weapon against the aliens. The Icarus Array had already been destroyed. We had decades to react; anything from another solar system would have to obey the lightspeed limit like everyone else. We had days to live; organic warships had just crossed the asteroid belt and would be fumigating the planet within a week. Like everyone else, I bore witness to lurid speculations and talking heads. I visited blathernodes, soaked myself in other people's opinions. That was nothing new, as far as it went; I'd spent my whole life as a sort of alien ethologist in my own right, watching the world behave, gleaning patterns and protocols, learning the rules that allowed me to infiltrate human society. It had always worked before. Somehow, though, the presence of real aliens had changed the dynamics of the equation. Mere observation didn't satisfy any more. It was as though the presence of this new outgroup had forced me back into the clade whether I liked it or not; the distance between myself and the world suddenly seemed forced and faintly ridiculous. Yet I couldn't, for my life, figure out how to let it go. Chelsea had always said that telepresence emptied the Humanity from Human interaction. "They say it's indistinguishable," she told me once, "just like having your family right there, snuggled up so you can see them and feel them and smell them next to you. But it's not. It's just shadows on the cave wall. I mean, sure, the shadows come in three-dee color with force-feedback tactile interactivity. They're good enough to fool the civilized brain. But your gut knows those aren't people, even if it can't put its finger on how it knows. They just don't feel real. Know what I mean?" I didn't. Back then I'd had no clue what she was talking about. But now we were all cavemen again, huddling beneath some overhang while lightning split the heavens and vast formless monsters, barely glimpsed in bright strobe-frozen instants, roared and clashed in the darkness on all sides. There was no comfort in solitude. You couldn't get it from interactive shadows. You needed someone real at your side, someone to hold on to, someone to share your airspace along with your fear and hope and uncertainty. I imagined the presence of companions who wouldn't vanish the moment I unplugged. But Chelsea was gone, and Pag in her wake. The few others I could have called peers and former clients with whom my impersonations of rapport had been especially convincingdidn't seem worth the effort. Flesh and blood had its own relationship to reality: necessary, but not sufficient. Watching the world from a distance, it occurred to me at last: I knew exactly what Chelsea had meant, with her Luddite ramblings about desaturated Humanity and the colorless interactions of virtual space. I'd known all along. I'd just never been able to see how it was any different from real life.

*

Imagine you are a machine. Yes, I know. But imagine you're a different kind of machine, one built from metal and plastic and designed not by blind, haphazard natural selection but by engineers and astrophysicists with their eyes fixed firmly on specific goals. Imagine that your purpose is not to replicate, or even to survive, but to gather information. I can imagine that easily. It is in fact a much simpler impersonation than the kind I'm usually called on to perform. I coast through the abyss on the colder side of Neptune's orbit. Most of the time I exist only as an absence, to any observer on the visible spectrum: a moving, asymmetrical silhouette blocking the stars. But occasionally, during my slow endless spin, I glint with dim hints of reflected starlight. If you catch me in those moments you might infer something of my true nature: a segmented creature with foil skin, bristling with joints and dishes and spindly antennae. Here and there a whisper of accumulated frost clings to a joint or seam, some frozen wisp of gas encountered in Jupiter space perhaps. Elsewhere I carry the microscopic corpses of Earthly bacteria who thrived with carefree abandon on the skins of space stations or the benign lunar surfacebut who had gone to crystal at only half my present distance from the sun. Now, a breath away from Absolute Zero, they might shatter at a photon's touch. My heart is warm, at least. A tiny nuclear fire burns in my thorax, leaves me indifferent to the cold outside. It won't go out for a thousand years, barring some catastrophic accident; for a thousand years, I will listen for faint voices from Mission Control and do everything they tell me to. So far they have told me to study comets. Every instruction I have ever received has been a precise and unambiguous elaboration on that one overriding reason for my existence. Which is why these latest instructions are so puzzling, for they make no sense at all. The frequency is wrong. The signal strength is wrong. I cannot even understand the handshaking protocols. I request clarification. The response arrives almost a thousand minutes later, and it is an unprecedented mix of orders and requests for information. I answer as best I can: yes, this is the bearing at which signal strength was greatest. No, it is not the usual bearing for Mission Control. Yes, I can retransmit: here it is, all over again. Yes, I will go into standby mode. I await further instructions. They arrive 839 minutes later, and they tell me to stop studying comets immediately. I am to commence a controlled precessive tumble that sweeps my antennae through consecutive 5  -arc increments along all three axes, with a period of 94 seconds. Upon encountering any transmission resembling the one which confused me, I am to fix upon the bearing of maximal signal strength and derive a series of parameter values. I am also instructed to retransmit the signal to Mission Control. I do as I'm told. For a long time I hear nothing, but I am infinitely patient and incapable of boredom. Eventually a fleeting, familiar signal brushes against my afferent array. I reacquire and track it to source, which I am well-equipped to describe: a trans-Neptunian comet in the Kuiper Belt, approximately two hundred kilometers in diameter. It is sweeping a 21-cm tightbeam radio wave across the heavens with a periodicity of 4.57 seconds. This beam does not intersect Mission Control's coordinates at any point. It appears to be directed at a different target entirely. It takes much longer than usual for Mission Control to respond to this information. When it does, it tells me to change course. Mission Control informs me that henceforth my new destination is to be referred to as Burns-Caulfield. Given current fuel and inertial constraints I will not reach it in less than thirty-nine years. I am to watch nothing else in the meantime.

*

I'd been liaising for a team at the Kurzweil Institute, a fractured group of cutting-edge savants convinced they were on the verge of solving the quantum-glial paradox. That particular log-jam had stalled AI for decades; once broken, the experts promised we'd be eighteen months away from the first personality upload and only two years from reliable Human-consciousness emulation in a software environment. It would spell the end of corporeal history, usher in a Singularity that had been waiting impatiently in the wings for nigh on fifty years. Two months after Firefall, the Institute cancelled my contract. I was actually surprised it had taken them so long. It had cost us so much, this overnight inversion of global priorities, these breakneck measures making up for lost initiative. Not even our shiny new post-scarcity economy could withstand such a seismic shift without lurching towards bankruptcy. Installations in deep space, long since imagined secure by virtue of their remoteness, were suddenly vulnerable for exactly the same reason. Lagrange habitats had to be refitted for defense against an unknown enemy. Commercial ships on the Martian Loop were conscripted, weaponised, and reassigned; some secured the high ground over Mars while others fell sunward to guard the Icarus Array. It didn't matter that the Fireflies hadn't fired a shot at any of these targets. We simply couldn't afford the risk. We were all in it together, of course, desperate to regain some hypothetical upper hand by any means necessary. Kings and corporations scribbled IOUs on the backs of napkins and promised to sort everything out once the heat was off. In the meantime, the prospect of Utopia in two years took a back seat to the shadow of Armageddon reaching back from next Tuesday. The Kurzweil Institute, like everyone else, suddenly had other things to worry about. So I returned to my apartment, split a bulb of Glenfiddich, and arrayed virtual windows like daisy petals in my head. Everyone Icons debated on all sides, serving up leftovers two weeks past their expiry date:



Disgraceful breakdown of global security. No harm done.







Comsats annihilated. Thousands dead. Random collisions. Accidental deaths.





(who sent them?)





We should have seen them coming. Why didn't we Deep space. Inverse square. Do the math.







They were stealthed!

(what do they want?)





We were raped! Jesus Christ. They just took our picture.







Why the silence? Moon's fine. Mars's fine.





(Where are they?)





Why haven't they made contact? Nothing's touched the O'Neills.







Technology Implies Belligerence!

(Are they coming back?)

Nothing attacked us.

Yet Nothing invaded.

So far.

(But where are they?) (Are they coming back?) (Anyone?)





Jim Moore Voice Only encrypted Accept?

The text window blossomed directly in my line of sight, eclipsing the debate. I read it twice. I tried to remember the last time he'd called from the field, and couldn't. I muted the other windows. "Dad?" "Son," he replied after a moment. "Are you well?" "Like everyone else. Still wondering whether we should be celebrating or crapping our pants." He didn't answer immediately. "It's a big question, all right," he said at last. "I don't suppose you could give me any advice? They're not telling us anything at ground level." It was a rhetorical request. His silence was hardly necessary to make the point. "I know," I added after a moment. "Sorry. It's just, they're saying the Icarus Array went down, and" "You know I can'toh." My father paused. "That's ridiculous. Icarus's fine." "It is?" He seemed to be weighing his words. "The Fireflies probably didn't even notice it. There's no particle trail as long as it stays offstream, and it would be buried in solar glare unless someone knew where to search." It was my turn to fall silent. This conversation felt suddenly wrong. Because when my father went on the job, he went dark. He never called his family. Because even when my father came off the job, he never talked about it. It wouldn't matter whether the Icarus Array was still online or whether it had been shredded and thrown into the sun like a thousand kilometers of torn origami; he wouldn't tell either tale unless an official announcement had been made. WhichI refreshed an index window just to be sure it hadn't. Because while my father was a man of few words, he was not a man of frequent, indecisive pausesand he had hesitated before each and every line he'd spoken in this exchange. I tugged ever-so-gently on the line"But they've sent ships."and started counting. One one-thousand, two one-thousand "Just a precaution. Icarus was overdue for a visit anyway. You don't swap out your whole grid without at least dropping in and kicking the new tires first." Nearly three seconds to respond. "You're on the moon," I said. Pause. "Close enough." "What are youDad, why are you telling me this? Isn't this a security breach?" "You're going to get a call," he told me. "From who? Why?" "They're assembling a team. The kind ofpeople you deal with." My father was too rational to dispute the contributions of the recons and hybrids in our midst, but he'd never been able to hide his mistrust of them. "They need a synthesist," he said. "Isn't it lucky you've got one in the family." Radio bounced back and forth. "This isn't nepotism, Siri. I wanted very much for them to pick someone else." "Thanks for the vote of conf" But he'd seen it coming, and preempted me before my words could cross the distance: "It's not a slap at your abilities and you know it. You're simply the most qualified, and the work is vital." "So why" I began, and stopped. He wouldn't want to keep me away from some theoretical gig in a WestHem lab. "What's this about, Dad?" "The Fireflies. They found something." "What?" "A radio signal. From the Kuiper. We traced the bearing." "They're talking?" "Not to us." He cleared his throat. "It was something of a fluke that we even intercepted the transmission." "Who are they talking to?" "We don't know." "Friendly? Hostile?" "Son, we don't know. The encryption seems similar, but we can't even be sure of that. All we have is the location." "So you're sending a team." You're sending me. We'd never gone to the Kuiper before. It had been decades since we'd even sent robots. Not that we lacked the capacity. We just hadn't bothered; everything we needed was so much closer to home. The Interplanetary Age had stagnated at the asteroids. But now something lurked at the furthest edge of our backyard, calling into the void. Maybe it was talking to some other solar system. Maybe it was talking to something closer, something en route. "It's not the kind of situation we can safely ignore," my father said. "What about probes?" "Of course. But we can't wait for them to report back. The follow-up's been fast-tracked; updates can be sent en route." He gave me a few extra seconds to digest that. When I still didn't speak, he said, "You have to understand. Our only edge is that as far as we know, Burns-Caulfield doesn't know we're on to it. We have to get as much as we can in whatever window of opportunity that grants us." But Burns-Caulfield had hidden itself. Burns-Caulfield might not welcome a forced introduction. "What if I refuse?" The timelag seemed to say Mars. "I know you, son. You won't." "But if I did. If I'm the best qualified, if the job's so vital " He didn't have to answer. I didn't have to ask. At these kind of stakes, mission-critical elements didn't get the luxury of choice. I wouldn't even have the childish satisfaction of holding my breath and refusing to playthe will to resist is no less mechanical than the urge to breathe. Both can be subverted with the right neurochemical keys. "You killed my Kurzweill contract," I realized. "That's the least of what we did." We let the vacuum between us speak for a while. "If I could go back and undo thethe thing that made you what you are," Dad said after a while, "I would. In a second." "Yeah." "I have to go. I just wanted to give you the heads-up." "Yeah. Thanks." "I love you, son." Where are you? Are you coming back? "Thanks," I said again. "That's good to know."

*

This is what my father could not unmake. This is what I am: I am the bridge between the bleeding edge and the dead center. I stand between the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain. I am the curtain. I am not an entirely new breed. My roots reach back to the dawn of civilization but those precursors served a different function, a less honorable one. They only greased the wheels of social stability; they would sugarcoat unpleasant truths, or inflate imaginary bogeymen for political expedience. They were vital enough in their way. Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force on all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives. There have always been those tasked with the rotation of informational topologies, but throughout most of history they had little to do with increasing its clarity. The new Millennium changed all that. We've surpassed ourselves now, we're exploring terrain beyond the limits of merely human understanding. Sometimes its contours, even in conventional space, are just too intricate for our brains to track; other times its very axes extend into dimensions inconceivable to minds built to fuck and fight on some prehistoric grassland. So many things constrain us, from so many directions. The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain-stem imperative of self-interest. Subtle and elegant equations predict the behavior of the quantum world, but none can explain it. After four thousand years we can't even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer. We have such need of intellects greater than our own. But we're not very good at building them. The forced matings of minds and electrons succeed and fail with equal spectacle. Our hybrids become as brilliant as savants, and as autistic. We graft people to prosthetics, make their overloaded motor strips juggle meat and machinery, and shake our heads when their fingers twitch and their tongues stutter. Computers bootstrap their own offspring, grow so wise and incomprehensible that their communiqués assume the hallmarks of dementia: unfocused and irrelevant to the barely-intelligent creatures left behind. And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You have to take their word on faith Or you use information theory to flatten it for you, to squash the tesseract into two dimensions and the Klein bottle into three, to simplify reality and pray to whatever Gods survived the millennium that your honorable twisting of the truth hasn't ruptured any of its load-bearing pylons. You hire people like me; the crossbred progeny of profilers and proof assistants and information theorists. In formal settings you'd call me Synthesist. On the street you call me jargonaut or poppy. If you're one of those savants whose hard-won truths are being bastardized and lobotomized for powerful know-nothings interested only in market share, you might call me a mole or a chaperone. If you're Isaac Szpindel you'd call me commissar, and while the jibe would be a friendly one, it would also be more than that. I've never convinced myself that we made the right choice. I can cite the usual justifications in my sleep, talk endlessly about the rotational topology of information and the irrelevance of semantic comprehension. But after all the words, I'm still not sure. I don't know if anyone else is, either. Maybe it's just some grand consensual con, marks and players all in league. We won't admit that our creations are beyond us; they may speak in tongues, but our priests can read those signs. Gods leave their algorithms carved into the mountainside but it's just li'l ol' me bringing the tablets down to the masses, and I don't threaten anyone. Maybe the Singularity happened years ago. We just don't want to admit we were left behind.



"All kinds of animals living here. Occasional demons too."  Ian Anderson, Catfish Rising

The Third Wave, they called us. All in the same boat, driving into the long dark courtesy of a bleeding-edge prototype crash-graduated from the simulators a full eighteen months ahead of schedule. In a less fearful economy, such violence to the timetable would have bankrupted four countries and fifteen multicorps. The first two waves came out of the gate in even more of a hurry. I didn't find out what had happened to them until thirty minutes before the briefing, when Sarasti released the telemetry into ConSensus. Then I opened wide; experience flooded up my inlays and spilled across my parietal cortex in glorious high-density fast forward. Even now I can bring those data back, fresh as the day they were recorded. I'm there. I'm them. I am unmanned. I am disposable. I am souped-up and stripped-down, a telematter drive with a couple of cameras bolted to the front end, pushing gees that would turn meat to jelly. I sprint joyously toward the darkness, my twin brother a stereoscopic hundred klicks to starboard, dual streams of backspat pions boosting us to relativity before poor old Theseus had even crawled past Mars. But now, six billion kilometers to stern, Mission Control turns off the tap and leaves us coasting. The comet swells in our sights, a frozen enigma sweeping its signal across the sky like a lighthouse beam. We bring rudimentary senses to bear and stare it down on a thousand wavelengths. We've lived for this moment. We see an erratic wobble that speaks of recent collisions. We see scarssmooth icy expanses where once-acned skin has liquefied and refrozen, far too recently for the insignificant sun at our backs to be any kind of suspect. We see an astronomical impossibility: a comet with a heart of refined iron. Burns-Caufield sings as we glide past. Not to us; it ignores our passage as it ignored our approach. It sings to someone else entirely. Perhaps we'll meet that audience some day. Perhaps they're waiting in the desolate wastelands ahead of us. Mission Control flips us onto our backs, keeps us fixed on target past any realistic hope of acquisition. They send last-ditch instructions, squeeze our fading signals for every last bit among the static. I can sense their frustration, their reluctance to let us go; once or twice, we're even asked if some judicious mix of thrust and gravity might let us linger here a bit longer. But deceleration is for pansies. We're headed for the stars. Bye, Burnsie. Bye, Mission Control. Bye, Sol. See you at heat death.

*

Warily, we close on target. There are three of us in the second waveslower than our predecessors, yes, but still so much faster than anything flesh-constrained. We are weighed down by payloads which make us virtually omniscient. We see on every wavelength, from radio to string. Our autonomous microprobes measure everything our masters anticipated; tiny onboard assembly lines can build tools from the atoms up, to assess the things they did not. Atoms, scavenged from where we are, join with ions beamed from where we were: thrust and materiel accumulate in our bellies. This extra mass has slowed us, but midpoint braking maneuvers have slowed us even more. The last half of this journey has been a constant fight against momentum from the first. It is not an efficient way to travel. In less-hurried times we would have built early to some optimal speed, perhaps slung around a convenient planet for a little extra oomph, coasted most of the way. But time is pressing, so we burn at both ends. We must reach our destination; we cannot afford to pass it by, cannot afford the kamikaze exuberance of the first wave. They merely glimpsed the lay of the land. We must map it down to the motes. We must be more responsible. Now, slowing towards orbit, we see everything they saw and more. We see the scabs, and the impossible iron core. We hear the singing. And there, just beneath the comet's frozen surface, we see structure: an infiltration of architecture into geology. We are not yet close enough to squint, and radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail. But we are smart, and there are three of us, widely separated in space. The wavelengths of three radar sources can be calibrated to interfere at some predetermined point of convergenceand those tripartite echoes, hologramatically remixed, will increase resolution by a factor of twenty-seven. Burns-Caulfield stops singing the moment we put our plan into action. In the next instant I go blind. It's a temporary aberration, a reflexive amping of filters to compensate for the overload. My arrays are back online in seconds, diagnostics green within and without. I reach out to the others, confirm identical experiences, identical recoveries. We are all still fully functional, unless the sudden increase in ambient ion density is some kind of sensory artefact. We are ready to continue our investigation of Burns-Caulfield. The only real problem is that Burns-Caulfield seems to have disappeared...

*

Theseus carried no regular crewno navigators or engineers, no one to swab the decks, no meat wasted on tasks that machinery orders of mag smaller could perform orders of mag better. Let superfluous deckhands weigh down other ships, if the nonAscendent hordes needed to attach some pretense of usefulness to their lives. Let them infest vessels driven only by commercial priorities. The only reason we were here was because nobody had yet optimized software for First Contact. Bound past the edge of the solar system, already freighted with the fate of the world, Theseus wasted no mass on self-esteem. So here we were, rehydrated and squeaky-clean: Isaac Szpindel, to study the aliens. The Gang of FourSusan James and her secondary personae to talk to them. Major Amanda Bates was here to fight, if necessary. And Jukka Sarasti to command us all, to move us like chess pieces on some multidimensional game board that only vampires could see. He'd arrayed us around a conference table that warped gently through the Commons, keeping a discreet and constant distance from the curved deck beneath. The whole drum was furnished in Early Concave, tricked unwary and hung-over brains into thinking they were looking at the world through fisheye lenses. In deference to the creakiness of the nouveaux undead it spun at a mere fifth of a gee, but it was just warming up. We'd be at half-grav in six hours, stuck there for eighteen out of every twenty-four until the ship decided we were fully recovered. For the next few days, free-fall would be a rare and blesséd thing. Light sculptures appeared on the tabletop. Sarasti could have fed the information directly to our inlays the whole briefing could have gone through ConSensus, without the need to assemble physically in the same place but if you want to be sure everyone's paying attention, you bring them together. Szpindel leaned in conspiratorially at my side. "Or maybe the bloodsucker just gets off seeing all this meat in close quarters, eh?" If Sarasti heard he didn't show it, not even to me. He pointed to a dark heart at the center of the display, his eyes lost behind black glass. "Oasa object. Infrared emitter, methane class." On the display it wasnothing. Our apparent destination was a black disk, a round absence of stars. In real life it weighed in at over ten Jupiters and measured twenty percent wider at the belly. It was directly in our path: too small to burn, too remote for the reflection of distant sunlight, too heavy for a gas giant, too light for a brown dwarf. "When did that show up?" Bates squeezed her rubber ball in one hand, the knuckles whitening. "X-ray spike appears during the '76 microwave survey." Six years before Firefall. "Never confirmed, never reacquired. Like a torsion flare from an L-class dwarf, but we should see anything big enough to generate that kind of effect and the sky's dark on that bearing. IAU calls it a statistical artefact." Szpindel's eyebrows drew together like courting caterpillers. "What changed?" Sarasti smiled faintly, keeping his mouth closed. "The metabase getscrowded, after Firefall. Everyone skittish, looking for clues. After Burns-Caulfield explodes" He clicked at the back of his throat. "Turns out the spike might arise from a subdwarf object after all, if the magnetosphere's torqued enough." Bates: "Torqued by what?" "Don't know." Layers of statistical inference piled up on the table while Sarasti sketched background: even with a solid bearing and half the world's attention, the object had hidden from all but the most intensive search. A thousand telescopic snapshots had been stacked one on another and squeezed through a dozen filters before something emerged from the static, just below the three-meter band and the threshold of certainty. For the longest time it hadn't even been real: just a probabilistic ghost until Theseus got close enough to collapse the waveform. A quantum particle, heavy as ten Jupiters. Earthbound cartographers were calling it Big Ben. Theseus had barely passed Saturn's orbit when it showed up in the residuals. That discovery would have been moot for anyone else; no other ship caught en route could have packed enough fuel for anything but the long dejected loop back home. But Theseus' thin, infinitely attenuate fuel line reached all the way back to the sun; she could turn on the proverbial dime. We'd changed course in our sleep and the Icarus stream tracked our moves like a cat after prey, feeding us at lightspeed. And here we were. "Talk about long shots," Szpindel grumbled. Across the table, Bates flicked her wrist. Her ball sailed over my head; I heard it bounce off the deck (not the deck, something in me amended: handrail). "We're assuming the comet was a deliberate decoy, then." Sarasti nodded. The ball riccocheted back into my line of sight high overhead and disappeared briefly behind the spinal bundle, looping through some eccentric, counterintuitive parabola in the drum's feeble grav. "So they want to be left alone." Sarasti steepled his fingers and turned his face in her direction. "That your recommendation?" She wished it was. "No, sir. I'm just saying that Burns-Caulfield took a lot of resources and effort to set up. Whoever built it obviously values their anonymity and has the technology to protect it." The ball bounced one last time and wobbled back towards the Commons. Bates half-hopped from her seat (she floated briefly), barely catching it on its way past. There remained a new-born-animal awkwardness to her movements, half Coriolis, half residual rigor. Still: a big improvement in four hours. The rest of the Humans were barely past the walking stage. "Maybe it wasn't much trouble for them at all, eh?" Szpindel was musing. "Maybe it was dead easy." "In which case they might or might not be as xenophobic, but they're even more advanced. We don't want to rush into this." Sarasti turned back to the simmering graphics. "So?" Bates kneaded the recovered ball with her fingertips. "The second mouse gets the cheese. We may have blown our top-of-the-line recon in the Kuiper, but we don't have to go in blind. Send in our own drones along separate vectors. Hold off on a close approach until we at least know whether we're dealing with friendlies or hostiles." James shook her head. "If they were hostile, they could have packed the Fireflies with antimatter. Or sent one big object instead of sixty thousand little ones, let the impact take us out." "The Fireflies only imply an initial curiosity," Bates said. "Who knows if they liked what they saw?" "What if this whole diversion theory's just so much shit?" I turned, briefly startled. James's mouth had made the words; Sascha had spoken them. "You wanna stay hidden, you don't light up the sky with fucking fireworks," she continued. "You don't need a diversion if nobody's looking for you, and nobody's looking for you if you lie low. If they were so curious, they could've just snuck in a spycam." "Risks detection," the vampire said mildly. "Hate to break it, Jukka, but the Fireflies didn't exactly slip under the rad" Sarasti opened his mouth, closed it again. Filed teeth, briefly visible, clicked audibly behind his face. Tabletop graphics reflected off his visor, a band of writhing polychrome distortions where eyes should be. Sascha shut up. Sarasti continued. "They trade stealth for speed. By the time you react, they already have what they want." He spoke quietly, patiently, a well-fed predator explaining the rules of the game to prey that really should know better: the longer it takes me to track you down, the more hope you have of escaping. But Sascha had already fled. Her surfaces had scattered like a flock of panicked starlings, and the next time Susan James' mouth opened, it was Susan James who spoke through it. "Sascha's aware of the current paradigm, Jukka. She's simply worried that it might be wrong." "Got another we could trade it on?" Szpindel wondered. "More options? Longer warranty?" "I don't know." James sighed. "I guess not. It's justodd, that they'd want to actively mislead us. I'd hoped they were merely well." She spread her hands. "Probably no big deal. I'm sure they'll still be willing to talk, if we handle the introductions right. We just need to be a little more cautious, perhaps..." Sarasti unfolded himself from his chair and loomed over us. "We go in. What we know weighs against further delay." Bates frowned and pitched her ball back into orbit. "Sir, all we actually know is that an Oasa emitter's in our path. We don't even know if there's anyone there." "There is," Sarasti said. "They expect us." Nobody spoke for a few seconds. Someone's joints cracked in the silence. "Er..." Szpindel began. Without looking, Sarasti flicked out his arm and snatched Bates' returning ball from the air. "Ladar pings Theseus four hours forty-eight minutes ago. We respond with an identical signal. Nothing. Probe launches half-hour before we wake up. We don't go in blind, but we don't wait. They see us already. Longer we wait, greater risk of countermeasures." I looked at the dark featureless placeholder on the table: bigger than Jupiter and we couldn't even see it yet. Something in the shadow of that mass had just reached out with casual, unimaginable precision and tapped us on the nose with a laser beam. This was not going to be an even match. Szpindel spoke for all of us: "You knew that all along? You're telling us now?" This time Sarasti's smile was wide and toothy. It was as though a gash had opened in the lower half of his face. Maybe it was a predator thing. He just couldn't help playing with his food.

*

It wasn't so much the way they looked. The elongate limbs, the pale skin, the canines and the extended mandiblenoticeable, yes, even alien, but not disturbing, not frightening. Not even the eyes, really. The eyes of dogs and cats shine in the darkness; we don't shiver at the sight. Not the way they looked. The way they moved. Something in the reflexes, maybe. The way they held their limbs: like mantis limbs, long jointed things you just knew could reach out and snatch you from right across the room, any time they felt like it. When Sarasti looked at mereally looked, naked-eyed, unfiltered by the visor a half-million years just melted away. The fact that he was extinct meant nothing. The fact that we'd come so far, grown strong enough to resurrect our own nightmares to serve us...meant nothing. The genes aren't fooled. They know what to fear. Of course, you had to experience it in person. Robert Paglini knew the theory of vampires down the molecules, but even with all those technical specs in his head he never really got it. He called me, before we left. I hadn't been expecting it; ever since the roster had been announced our watches had blocked calls from anyone not explicitly contact-listed. I'd forgotten that Pag had been. We hadn't spoken since Chelsea. I'd given up on ever hearing from him again. But there he was. "Pod-man." He smiled, a tentative overture. "It's good to see you," I said, because that's what people said in similar situations. "Yeah, well I saw your name in the noose. You've made it big, for a baseline." "Not so big." "Crap. You're the vanguard of the Human Race. You're our first, last, and only hope against the unknown. Man, you showed them." He held his fist up and shook it, vicariously triumphant. Showing them had become a cornerstone of Robert Paglino's life. He'd really made it work for him, too, overcome the handicap of a natural birth with retrofits and enhancements and sheer bloody-mindedness. In a world in which Humanity had become redundant in unprecedented numbers, we'd both retained the status of another age: working professional. "So you're taking orders from a vamp," he said now. "Talk about fighting fire with fire." "I guess it's practice. Until we run up against the real thing." He laughed. I couldn't imagine why. But I smiled back anyway. It was good to see him. "So, what are they like?" Pag asked. "Vampires? I don't know. Just met my first one yesterday." "And?" "Hard to read. Didn't even seem to be aware of his surroundings sometimes, he seemed to be... off in his own little world." "He's aware all right. Those things are so fast it's scary. You know they can hold both aspects of a Necker cube in their heads at the same time?" The term rang a bell. I subtitled, and saw the thumbnail of a familiar wireframe box:



Now I remembered: classic ambiguous illusion. Sometimes the shaded panel seemed to be in front, sometimes behind. The perspective flipped back and forth as you watched. "You or I, we can only see it one way or the other," Pag was saying. "Vamps see it both ways at once. Do you have any idea what kind of an edge that gives 'em?" "Not enough of one." "Touché. But hey, not their fault neutral traits get fixed in small populations." "I don't know if I'd call the Crucifix glitch neutral." "It was at first. How many intersecting right angles do you see in nature?" He waved one dismissive hand. "Anyway, that's not the point. The point is they can do something that's neurologically impossible for us Humans. They can hold simultaneous multiple worldviews, Pod-man. They just see things we have to work out step-by-step, they don't have to think about it. You know, there isn't a single baseline human who could just tell you, just off the top of their heads, every prime number between one and a billion? In the old days, only a few autistics could do shit like that." "He never uses the past tense," I murmered. "Huh? Oh, that." Pag nodded. "They never experience the past tense. It's just another thread to them. They don't remember stuff, they relive it." "What, like a post-traumatic flashback?" "Not so traumatic." He grimaced. "Not for them, at least." "So this is obviously your current hot spot? Vampires?" "Pod, vampires are the capital-Hot spot for anyone with a 'neuro' in their c.v. I'm just doing a couple of histology papers. Pattern-matching receptors, Mexican-hat arrays, reward/irrelevance filters. The eyes, basically." "Right." I hesitated. "Those kind of throw you." "No shit." Pag nodded knowingly. "That tap lucidum of theirs, that shine. Scary." He shook his head, impressed all over again at the recollection. "You've never met one," I surmised. "What, in the flesh? I'd give my left ball. Why?" "It's not the shine. It's the" I groped for a word that fit "The attitude, maybe." "Yeah," he said after a bit. "I guess sometimes you've just gotta be there, huh? Which is why I envy you, Pod-man." "You shouldn't." "I should. Even if you never meet whoever sent the 'Flies, you're in for one Christly research opportunity with thatSarasti, is it?" "Wasted on me. The only neuro in my file's under medical history." He laughed. "Anyway, like I said, I just saw your name in the headlines and I figured, hey, the man's leaving in a couple of months, I should probably stop waiting around for him to call." It had been over two years. "I didn't think I'd get through. I thought you'd shitlisted me." "Nah. Never." He looked down, though, and fell silent. "But you should have called her," he said at last. "I know." "She was dying. You should've" "There wasn't time." He let the lie sit there for a while. "Anyway," he said at last. "I just wanted to wish you luck." Which wasn't exactly true either. "Thanks. I appreciate that." "Kick their alien asses. If aliens have asses." "There's five of us, Pag. Nine if you count the backups. We're not exactly an army." "Just an expression, fellow mammal. Bury the hatchet. Damn the torpedoes. Soothe the serpent." Raise the white flag, I thought. "I guess you're busy," he said, "I'll" "Look, you want to get together? In airspace? I haven't been to QuBit's in a while." "Love to, Pod. Unfortunately I'm in Mankoya. Splice'n'dice workshop." "What, you mean physically?" "Cutting-edge research. Old-school habits." "Too bad." "Anyway, I'll let you go. Just wanted, you know" "Thanks," I said again. "So, you know. Bye," Robert Paglino told me. Which was, when you got down to it, the reason he'd called. He wasn't expecting another chance.

*

Pag blamed me for the way it had ended with Chelsea. Fair enough. I blamed him for the way it began. He'd gone into neuroeconomics at least partly because his childhood buddy had turned into a pod person before his eyes. I'd ended up in Synthesis for roughly the same reason. Our paths had diverged, and we didn't see each other in the flesh all that often; but two decades after I'd brutalized a handful of children on his behalf, Robert Paglino was still my best and only friend. "You need to seriously thaw out," he told me, "And I know just the lady to handle the oven mitts." "That is perhaps the worst use of metaphor in the history of human language," I said. "Seriously, Pod. She'll be good for you. A, a counterbalanceease you a bit closer to the comfy mean, you know?" "No, Pag, I don't. What is she, another neuroeconomist?" "Neuroaestheticist," he said. "There's still a market for those?" I couldn't imagine how; why pay to tweak your compatibility with some significant other, when significant others themselves were so out of fashion? "Not much of one," Pag admitted. "Fact is, she's pretty much retired. But she's still got the tools, my man. Very thigmotactic. Likes all her relationships face-to-face and in the flesh." "I dunno, Pag. Sounds like work." "Not like your work. She's got to be easier than the bleeding composites you front for. She's smart, she's sexy, and she's nicely inside the standard deev except for the personal contact thing. Which is not so much outright perversion as charming fetish. In your case it could even be therapeutic." "If I wanted therapy I'd see a therapist." "She does a bit of that too, actually." "Yeah?" And then, despite myself, "Any good?" He looked me up and down. "No one's that good. That's not what this is. I just figured you two would click. Chelse is one of the few who might not be completely put off by your intimacy issues." "Everyone's got intimacy issues these days, in case you hadn't noticed." He must have; the population had been dropping for decades. "I was being euphemistic. I meant your aversion to general Human contact." "Making it euphemistic to call you Human?" He grinned. "Different deal. We got history." "No thanks." "Too late. She's already en route to the appointed place." "Appoinyou're an asshole, Pag." "The tightest." Which was how I found myself intrusively face-to-face in an airspace lounge south of Beth and Bear. The lighting was low and indirect, creeping from under seats and the edges of tables; the chromatics, this afternoon at least, were defiantly longwave. It was a place where baselines could pretend to see in infrared. So I pretended for a moment, assessing the woman in the corner booth: gangly and glorious, half-a-dozen ethnicities coexisting peacefully with no single voice dominant. Something glowed on her cheek, a faint emerald staccato against the ambient red shift. Her hair floated in a diffuse ebony cloud about her head; as I neared I caught occasional glints of metal within that nimbus, the threads of a static generator purveying the illusion of weightlessness. In normal light her blood-red skin would doubtless shift down to the fashionable butterscotch of the unrepentant mongrel. She was attractive, but so was everyone in this kind of light; the longer the wavelength, the softer the focus. There's a reason fuckcubbies don't come with fluorescent lights. You will not fall for this, I told myself. "Chelsea," she said. Her little finger rested on one of the table's inset trickle-chargers. "Former neuroaestheticist, presently a parasite on the Body Economic thanks to genes and machines on the cutting edge." The glow on her cheek flapped bright lazy wings: a tattoo, a bioluminescent butterfly. "Siri," I said. "Freelance synthesist, indentured servant to the genes and machines that turned you into a parasite." She waved at the empty seat. I took it, assessing the system before me, sizing up the best approach for a fast yet diplomatic disconnect. The set of her shoulders told me she enjoyed lightscapes, and was embarrassed to admit it. Monahan was her favorite artist. She thought herself a natural girl because she'd stayed on chemical libidinals all these years, even though a synaptic edit would have been simpler. She revelled in her own inconsistency: a woman whose professional machinery edited thought itself, yet mistrustful of the dehumanising impact of telephones. Innately affectionate, and innately afraid of unreturned affection, and indomitably unwilling to let any of that stop her. She liked what she saw when looked at me. She was a little afraid of that, too. Chelsea gestured at my side of the table. The touchpads there glowed soft, dissonant sapphire in the bloody light, like a set of splayed fingerprints. "Good dope here. Extra hydroxyl on the ring, or something." Assembly-line neuropharm doesn't do much for me; it's optimized for people with more meat in their heads. I fingered one of the pads for appearances, and barely felt the tingle. "So. A Synthesist. Explaining the Incomprehensible to the Indifferent." I smiled on cue. "More like bridging the gap between the people who make the breakthroughs and the people who take the credit for them." She smiled back. "So how do you do it? All those optimized frontal lobes and refitsI mean, if they're incomprehensible, how do you comprehend them?" "It helps to find pretty much everyone else incomprehensible too. Provides experience." There. That should force a bit of distance. It didn't. She thought I was joking. I could see her lining up to push for more details, to ask questions about what I did, which would lead to questions about me, which would lead "Tell me what it's like," I said smoothly, "rewiring people's heads for a living." Chelsea grimaced; the butterfly on her cheek fluttered nervously at the motion, wings brightening. "God, you make it sound like we turn them into zombies or something. They're just tweaks, mainly. Changing taste in music or cuisine, you know, optimizing mate compatibility. It's all completely reversible." "There aren't drugs for that?" "Nah. Too much developmental variation between brains; our targeting is really fine-scale. But it's not all microsurgery and fried synapses, you know. You'd be surprised how much rewiring can be done noninvasively. You can start all sorts of cascades just by playing certain sounds in the right order, or showing images with the right balance of geometry and emotion." "I assume those are new techniques." "Not really. Rhythm and music hang their hats on the same basic principle. We just turned art into science." "Yeah, but when?" The recent past, certainly. Sometime within the past twenty years or so Her voice grew suddenly quiet. "Robert told me about your operation. Some kind of viral epilepsy, right? Back when you were just a tyke." I'd never explicitly asked him to keep it a secret. What was the difference anyway? I'd made a full recovery. Besides, Pag still thought that had happened to someone else. "I don't know your specifics," Chelsea continued gently. "But from the sound of it, noninvasive techniques wouldn't have helped. I'm sure they only did what they had to." I tried to suppress the thought, and couldn't: I like this woman. I felt something then, a strange, unfamiliar sensation that somehow loosened my vertebrae. The chair felt subtly, indefinably more comfortable at my back. "Anyway." My silence had thrown her off-stride. "Haven't done it much since the bottom dropped out of the market. But it did leave me with a fondness for face-to-face encounters, if you know what I mean." "Yeah. Pag said you took your sex in the first-person." She nodded. "I'm very old-school. You okay with that?" I wasn't certain. I was a virgin in the real world, one of the few things I still had in common with the rest of civilized society. "In principle, I guess. It just seemsa lot of effort for not as much payoff, you know?" "Don't I." She smiled. "Real fuckbuddies aren't airbrushed. Got all these needs and demands that you can't edit out. How can you blame anyone for saying no thanks to all that, now there's a choice? You gotta wonder how our parents ever stayed together sometimes." You gotta wonder why they did. I felt myself sinking deeper into the chair, wondered again at this strange new sensation. Chelsea had said the dopamine was tweaked. That was probably it. She leaned forward, not coy, not coquettish, not breaking eye contact for an instant in the longwave gloom. I could smell the lemony tang of pheromones and synthetics mingling on her skin. "But there are advantages too, once you learn the moves," she said. "The body's got a long memory. And you do realize that there's no trickler under your left finger there, don't you, Siri?" I looked. My left arm was slightly extended, index finger touching one of the trickle pads; and my right had mirrored the motion while I wasn't watching, its own finger tapping uselessly on blank tabletop. I pulled it back. "Bit of a bilateral twitch," I admitted. "The body creeps into symmetrical poses when I'm not looking." I waited for a joke, or at least a raised eyebrow. Chelsea just nodded and resumed her thread. "So if you're game for this, so am I. I've never been entangled with a synthesist before." "Jargonaut's fine. I'm not proud." "Don't you just always know just exactly what to say." She cocked her head at me. "So, your name. What's it mean?" Relaxed. That was it. I felt relaxed. "I don't know. It's just a name." "Well, it's not good enough. If we're gonna to be swapping spit for any length of time you've gotta get a name that means something." And we were, I realized. Chelsea had decided while I wasn't looking. I could have stopped her right there, told her what a bad idea this was, apologized for any misunderstanding. But then there'd be wounded looks and hurt feelings and guilt because after all, if I wasn't interested why the hell had I even shown up? She seemed nice. I didn't want to hurt her. Just for a while, I told myself. It'll be an experience. "I think I'll call you Cygnus," Chelsea said. "The swan?" I said. A bit precious, but it could have been worse. She shook her head. "Black hole. Cygnus X-1." I furrowed my brow at her, but I knew exactly what she meant: a dark, dense object that sucks up the light and destroys everything in its path. "Thanks a whole fucking lot. Why?" "I'm not sure. Something dark about you." She shrugged, and gave me a great toothy grin. "But it's not unattractive. And let me give you a tweak or two, I bet you'd grow right out of it." Pag admitted afterward, a bit sheepishly, that maybe I should have read that as a warning sign. Live and learn.

" Leaders are visionaries with a poorly developed sense of fear and no concept of the odds against them."  Robert Jarvik

Our scout fell towards orbit, watching Ben. We fell days behind, watching the scout. And that was all we did: sit in Theseus' belly while the system streamed telemetry to our inlays. Essential, irreplaceable, mission-criticalwe might as well have been ballast during that first approach. We passed Ben's Rayleigh limit. Theseus squinted at a meager emission spectrum and saw a rogue halo element from Canis Majora dismembered remnant of some long-lost galaxy that had drifted into ours and ended up as road kill, uncounted billions of years ago. We were closing on something from outside the Milky Way. The probe arced down and in, drew close enough for false-color enhance. Ben's surface brightened to a seething parfait of high-contrast bands against a diamond-hard starscape. Something twinkled there, faint sparkles on endless overcast. "Lightning?" James wondered. Szpindel shook his head. "Meteorites. Must be a lot of rock in the neighborhood." "Wrong color," Sarasti said. He was not physically among ushe was back in his tent, hardlined into the Captainbut ConSensus put him anywhere on board he wanted to be. Morphometrics scrolled across my inlays: mass, diameter, mean density. Ben's day lasted seven hours twelve minutes. Diffuse but massive accretion belt circling the equator, more torus than ring, extending almost a half-million kilometers from the cloud-tops: the pulverized corpses of moons perhaps, ground down to leftovers. "Meteorites." Szpindel grinned. "Told ya." He seemed to be right; increasing proximity smeared many of those pinpoint sparkles into bright ephemeral hyphens, scratching the atmosphere. Closer to the poles, cloud bands flickered with dim, intermittent flashes of electricity. Weak radio emission peaks at 31 and 400m. Outer atmosphere heavy with methane and ammonia; lithium, water, carbon monoxide in abundance. Ammonia hydrogen sulfide, alkali halide mixing locally in those torn swirling clouds. Neutral alkalis in the upper layers. By now even Theseus could pick those things out from a distance, but our scout was close enough to see filigree. It no longer saw a disk. It gazed down at a dark convex wall in seething layers of red and brown, saw faint stains of anthracene and pyrene. One of a myriad meteorite contrails scorched Ben's face directly ahead; for a moment I thought I could even see the tiny dark speck at its core, but sudden static scratched the feed. Bates cursed softly. The image blurred, then steadied as the probe pitched its voice higher up the spectrum. Unable to make itself heard above the longwave din, now it spoke down a laser. And still it stuttered. Keeping it aligned across a million fluctuating kilometers should have posed no problem at all; our respective trajectories were known parabolas, our relative positions infinitely predictable at any time t. But the meteorite's contrail jumped and skittered on the feed, as if the beam were being repeatedly, infinitesimally knocked out of alignment. Incandescent gas blurred its details; I doubted that even a rock-steady image would have offered any sharp edges for a human eye to hold on to. Still. There was something wrong about it somehow, something about the tiny black dot at the core of that fading brightness. Something that some primitive part of my mind refused to accept as natural The image lurched again, and flashed to black, and didn't return. "Probe's fried," Bates reported. "Spike there at the end. Like it hit a Parker Spiral, but with a really tight wind." I didn't need to call up subtitles. It was obvious in the set of her face, the sudden creases between her eyebrows: she was talking about a magnetic field. "It's" she began, and stopped as a number popped up in ConSensus: 11.2 Tesla. "Holy shit," Szpindel whispered. "Is that right?" Sarasti clicked from the back of his throat and the back of the ship. A moment later he served up an instant replay, those last few seconds of telemetry zoomed and smoothed and contrast-enhanced from visible light down to deep infrared. There was that same dark shard cauled in flame, there was the contrail burning in its wake. Now it dimmed as the object skipped off the denser atmosphere beneath and regained altitude. Within moments the heat trace had faded entirely. The thing that had burned at its center rose back into space, a fading ember. A great conic scoop at its front end gaped like a mouth. Stubby fins disfigured an ovoid abdomen. Ben lurched and went out all over again. "Meteorites," Bates said dryly. The thing had left me with no sense of scale. It could have been an insect or an asteroid. "How big?" I whispered, a split-second before the answer appeared on my inlays: Four hundred meters along the major axis. Ben was safely distant in our sights once more, a dark dim disk centered in Theseus's forward viewfinder. But I remembered the close-up: a twinkling orb of black-hearted fires; a face gashed and pockmarked, endlessly wounded, endlessly healing. There'd been thousands of the things. Theseus shivered along her length. It was just a pulse of decelerating thrust; but for that one moment, I imagined I knew how she felt.

*

We headed in and hedged our bets. Theseus weaned herself with a ninety-eight-second burn, edged us into some vast arc that might, with a little effort, turn into an orbitor into a quick discreet flyby if the neighborhood turned out to be a little too rough. The Icarus stream fell invisibly to port, its unswerving energy lost to space-time. Our city-sized, molecule-thick parasol wound down and packed itself away until the next time the ship got thirsty. Antimatter stockpiles began dropping immediately; this time we were alive to watch it happen. The dip was infinitesimal, but there was something disquieting about the sudden appearance of that minus sign on the display. We could have retained the apron strings, left a buoy behind in the telematter stream to bounce energy down the well after us. Susan James wondered why we hadn't. "Too risky," Sarasti said, without elaboration. Szpindel leaned in James' direction. "Why give 'em something else to shoot at, eh?" We sent more probes ahead, though, spat them out hard and fast and too fuel-constrained for anything but flyby and self-destruct. They couldn't take their eyes off the machines swinging around Big Ben. Theseus stared her own unblinking stare, more distant though more acute. But if those high divers even knew we were out there, they ignored us completely. We tracked them across the closing distance, watched them swoop and loop though a million parabolas at a million angles. We never saw them collidenot with each other, not with the cauldron of rock tumbling around Ben's equator. Every perigee dipped briefly into atmosphere; there they burned, and slowed, and accelerated back into space, their anterior scoops glowing with residual heat. Bates grabbed a ConSensus image, drew highlights and a conclusion around the front end: "Scramjet." We tracked nearly four hundred thousand in less than two days. That appeared to be most of them; new sightings leveled off afterwards, the cumulative curve flattening towards some theoretical asymptote. Most of the orbits were close and fast, but Sarasti projected a frequency distribution extending almost back to Pluto. We might stay out here for years, and still catch the occasional new shovelnose returning from its extended foray into the void. "The faster ones are pulling over fifty gees on the hairpin turn," Szpindel pointed out. "Meat couldn't handle that. I say they're unmanned." "Meat's reinforceable," Sarasti said. "If it's got that much scaffolding you might as well stop splitting hairs and call it a machine anyway." Surface morphometrics were absolutely uniform. Four hundred thousand divers, every one identical. If there was an alpha male calling the shots among the herd, it couldn't be distinguished on sight. One nightas such things were measured on board I followed a soft squeal of tortured electronics up to the observation blister. Szpindel floated there, watching the skimmers. He'd closed the clamshells, blocked off the stars and built a little analytical nest in their place. Graphs and windows spilled across the inside of the dome as though the virtual space in Szpindel's head was insufficient to contain them. Tactical graphics lit him from all sides, turned his body into a bright patchwork of flickering tattoos. The Illustrated Man. "Mind if I come in?" I asked. He grunted: Yeah, but not enough to push it. Inside the dome, the sound of heavy rainfall hissed and spat behind the screeching that had led me here. "What is that?" "Ben's magnetosphere." He didn't look back. "Nice, eh?" Synthesists don't have opinions on the job; it keeps observer effects to a minimum. This time I permitted myself a small breach. "The static's nice. I could do without the screeching." "Are you kidding? That's the music of the spheres, commissar. It's beautiful. Like old jazz." "I never got the hang of that either." He shrugged and squelched the upper register, left the rain pattering around us. His jiggling eyes fixed on some arcane graphic. "Want a scoop for your notes?" "Sure." "There you go." Light reflected off his feedback glove, iridescing like the wing of a dragonfly as he pointed: an absorption spectrum, a looped ti