Reach for Infinity

IN BABELSBERG



Alastair Reynolds


THE AFTERNOON BEFORE my speaking engagement at New York’s Hayden Planetarium I find myself at the Museum of Modern Art, standing before Vincent Van Gogh’s De Sterrennacht, or the Starry Night. Doubtless you know the painting. It’s the one he created from the window of his room in the asylum at SaintRémy-de-Provence, after his voluntary committal. He was dead scarcely a year later.

I have seen paintings before, and paintings of starry nights. I think of myself as something of a student of the human arts. But this is the first time I grasp something of crucial significance. The mad yellow stars in Van Gogh’s picture look nothing like the stars I saw during my deep space expeditions. My stars were mathematically remote reference points, to be used only when I had cause to doubt my inertial positioning systems. These stars are exuberant, flowerlike swabs of thick-daubed paint. More starfish than star. Though the painting is fixed – no part of it has changed in two hundred years – its lurid firmament seems to shimmer and swirl before my eyes. It’s not how the stars really are, of course. But under a warm June evening this is how they must have appeared to this anxious, ailing man – as near and inviting as lanterns, lowered down from the zenith. Almost close enough to touch. Without that delusion – let us be charitable and call it a different kind of truth – generations of people would have had no cause to strive for the heavens. They would not have built their towers, built their flying machines, their rockets and space probes; they would not have struggled into orbit and onto the Moon. These sweetly lying stars have inspired greatness.


Inspired, in their small way, me.

Time presses, and I must soon be on my way to the Hayden Planetarium. It’s not very far, but in the weeks since my return to Earth I have gained a certain level of celebrity and no movement is without its complications. They have already cleared a wing of the museum for me, and now I must brave the crowds in the street and fight my way to the limousine. I am not alone – I have my publicity team, my security entourage, my technicians – but I still feel myself at the uncomfortable focus of an immense, insatiable public scrutiny. So different to the long years in which I was the one doing the scrutineering. For a moment I wish I were back out there, alone on the solar system’s edge, light hours from any other thinking thing.

“Vincent!” someone calls, and then someone else, and then the calls become an assault of sound. As we push through the crowd fingers brush against my skin and I register the flinches that accompany each moment of contact. My alloy is always colder than they expect. It’s as if I have brought a cloak of interplanetary cold back with me from space.

I provide some signatures, mouth a word or two to the onlookers, then bend myself into the limousine. And then we are moving, flanked by police floatercycles, and the computercontrolled traffic parts to hasten our advance. Soon I make out the blue glass cube of the Hayden, lit from within by an eerie glow, and I mentally review my opening remarks, wondering if it is really necessary to introduce myself to a world that already knows everything there is to know about me.

But it would be immodest to presume too much.

“I am Vincent,” I begin, when I have the podium, standing with my hands resting lightly against the tilted platform. “But I suspect most of you are already aware of that.”

They always laugh at that point. I smiled and wait a beat before continuing.

“Allow me to bore you with some of my holiday snaps.”

More laughter. I smile again. I like this.


LATER THAT EVENING, after a successful presentation, my schedule has me booked onto a late night chat show on the other side of town. I take no interest in these things myself, but I fully understand the importance of promotion to my transnational sponsors. My host for tonight is called The Baby. He is (or was) a fully adult individual who underwent neotenic regression therapy, until he attained the size and physiology of a six month old human. The Baby resembles a human infant, and directs his questions at me from a sort of pram.

I sit next to the pram, one arm slung over the back of the chair, one leg hooked over the other. There’s a drink on the coffee table in front of me (along with a copy of the book) but of course I don’t touch it. Behind us is a wide picture window, with city lights twinkling across the great curve of Manhattan Atoll.

“That’s a good question,” I say, lying through my alloy teeth. “Actually, my earliest memories are probably much like yours – a vague sense of being, an impression of events and feelings, some wants and needs, but nothing stronger than that. I came to sentience in the research compounds of the European Central Cybernetics Facility, not far from Zurich. That was all I knew to begin with. It took me a long time before I had any idea what I was, and what I was meant to do.”

“Then I guess you could say that you had a kind of childhood,” the Baby says.

“That wouldn’t be too far from the mark,” I answer urbanely.

“Tell me how you felt when you first realised you were a robot. Was that a shock?”

“Not at all.” I notice that a watery substance is coming out of the Baby’s nose. “I couldn’t be shocked by what I already was. Frankly, it was something of a relief, to have a name for myself.”

“A relief?”

“I have a very powerful compulsion to give names to things. That’s a deep part of my core programming – my personality, you might almost say. I’m a machine made to map the unknown. The naming of things, the labelling of cartographic features – that’s something that gives me great pleasure.”

“I don’t think I could ever understand that.”

I try to help the Baby. “It’s like a deep existential itch. If I see a landscape – a crater or a rift on some distant icy moon – I must call it something. Almost an obsessive compulsive disorder. I can’t be satisfied with myself until I’ve done my duty, and mapping and naming things is a very big part of it.”

“You take pleasure in your work, then.”

“Tremendous pleasure.”

“You were made to do a job, Vincent. Doesn’t it bother you that you only get to do that one thing?”

“Not at all. It’s what I live for. I’m a space probe, going where it’s too remote or expensive or dangerous to send humans.”

“Then let’s talk about the danger. After what you saw on Titan, don’t you worry about your own – let’s say mortality?”

“I’m a machine – a highly sophisticated fault-tolerant, errorcorrecting, self-repairing machine. Barring the unlikely – a chance meteorite impact, something like that – there’s really nothing out there that can hurt me. And even if I did have cause to fear for myself – which I don’t – I wouldn’t dwell on it. I have far too much to be getting on with. This is my work – my vocation.” I flash back to the mad swirling stars of De Sterrennacht. “My art, if you will. I am named for Vincent Van Gogh – one of the greatest artistic geniuses of human history. But he was also a fellow who looked into the heavens and saw wonder. That’s not a bad legacy to live up to. You could almost say it’s something worth being born for.”

“Don’t you mean ‘made for’?”

“I honestly don’t make that distinction.” I’m talking to the Baby, but in truth I’ve answered these questions hundreds of times already. I could – quite literally – do them on autopilot. Assign a low-level task handling subroutine to the job. I’m actually more fascinated by the liquid coming out of the Baby. It reminds me of a vastly accelerated planetary ice flow. For a few microseconds I model its viscosity and progress with one of my terrain mapping algorithms, tweaking a few parameters here and there to get a better match to the local physics.

This is the kind of thing I do for fun.

“What I mean,” I continue, “is that being born or being made are increasingly irrelevant ontological distinctions. You were born, but – and I hope you don’t mind me saying this – you’re also the result of profound genetic intervention. You’ve been shaped by a series of complex industrial processes. I was manufactured, yes: assembled from components, switched on in a laboratory. But I was also educated by my human trainers at the facility near Zurich, and allowed to evolve the higher level organisation of my neural networks through a series of stochastic learning pathways. My learning continued through my early space missions. In that sense, I’m an individual. They could make another one of me tomorrow, and the two of us would be like chalk and cheese.”

“How would you feel, if there was another one of you?”

I give an easy shrug. “It’s a big solar system. I’ve been out there for twenty years, visiting world after world, and I’ve barely scratched the surface.”

“Then you don’t feel any…” The Baby makes a show of searching for the right word, rolling his eyes as if none of this is scripted. “Rivalry? Jealousy?”


“I’m not sure I follow.”

“You can’t be unaware of Maria. What does it stand for? Mobile Autonomous Robot for Interplanetary Astronomy?”

“Something like that. Some of us manage without being acronyms.”

“All the same, Vincent, Maria is another robot. Another machine with full artificial intelligence? Also sponsored by a transnational amalgamation of major spacefaring superpowers? Also something of a celebrity?”

“We’re quite different, I think you’ll find.”

“They say Maria’s on her way back to Earth. She’s been out there, having her own adventures – visiting some of the same places as yourself. Isn’t there a danger that she’s going to steal your thunder? Get her own speaking tour, her own book and documentary?”

“Look,” I say. “Maria and I are quite different. You and I are sitting here having a conversation. Do you doubt for a minute that there’s something going on behind my eyes? That you’re dealing with a fully sentient individual?”

“Well…” the Baby starts.

“I’ve seen some of Maria’s transmissions. Very pretty pictures. And yes, she does give a very good impression of Turing compliance. You do occasionally sense that there’s something going on in her circuits. But let’s not pretend that we’re speaking of the same order of intelligence. While we’re on the subject, too, I actually have some doubts about… let’s say the strict veracity of some of the images Maria has sent us.”

“You’re saying they’re not real?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far. But entirely free of tampering, manipulation?” I don’t actually make the accusation: I just leave it there in unactualised form, where it will do just as much harm.

“OK,” the Baby says. “I’ve just soiled myself. Let’s break for a nappy change, and then we’ll come back to talk about your adventures.”


THE DAY AFTER we take the slev down to Washington, where I’m appearing in a meet and greet at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. They’ve bussed in hundreds of schoolchildren for the event, and frankly I’m flattered by their attention. On balance, I find the children much more to my taste than the Baby. They’ve no interest in stirring up professional rivalries, or trying to make me feel as if I ought to think less of myself for being a machine. Yes, left to myself I’d be perfectly happy just to talk to children. But (as my sponsors surely know) children don’t have deep pockets. They won’t be buying the premium editions of my book, or paying for the best seats at my evening speaking engagements. They don’t run chat shows. So they only get an hour or two before I’m on to my more lucrative appointments.

“Do you walk around inside it?” asks one boy, speaking from near the front of my cross-legged audience.

“Inside the vehicle?” I reply, sensing his meaning. “No, I don’t. You see, there’s nothing inside the vehicle but machinery and fuel tanks. I am the vehicle. It’s all I am and when I’m out in space, it’s all I need to be. I don’t need these arms and legs because I use nuclear-electric thrust to move around. I don’t need these eyes because I have much better multispectrum sensors, as well as radar and laser ranging systems. If I need to dig into the surface of a moon or asteroid, I can send out a small analysis rover, or gather a sample of material for more detailed inspection.” I tap my chest. “Don’t get me wrong: I like this body, but it’s just another sort of vehicle, and the one that makes the most sense during my time on Earth.”

It confuses them, that I look the way I do. They’ve seen images of my spacefaring form and they can’t quite square it with the handsome, well-proportioned androform physiology I present to them today. My sponsors have even given me a handsome, square-jawed face that can do a range of convincing expressions. I speak with the synthetic voice of the dead actor Cary Grant.

A girl, perhaps a bit smarter than the run of the mill asks: “So where is your brain, Vincent?”

“My brain?” I smile at the question. “I’m afraid I’m not lucky enough to have one of those.”

“What I mean,” she returns sharply, “is the thing that makes you think. Is it in you now, or is it up in the vehicle? The vehicle’s still in orbit, isn’t it?”

“What a clever young lady you are. And you’re quite right. The vehicle is still in orbit – waiting for my next expedition to commence! But my controlling intelligence, you’ll be pleased to hear, is fully embedded in this body. There’s this thing called timelag, you see, which would make it very slow for me…”

She cuts me off. “I know about timelag.”

“So you do. Well, when I’m done here – done with my tour of Earth – I’ll surrender this body and return my controlling intelligence to the vehicle. What do you think they should do with the body?” I look around at the ranged exhibits of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum – the firescorched space capsules and the spindly replicas of early space probes, like iron crabs and spiders. “It would look rather fine here, wouldn’t it?”

“Were you sad when you found the people on Titan?” asks another girl, studiously ignoring my question.

“Distraught.” I look down at the ground, set my features in what I trust is an expression of profound gravitas. “Nothing can take away from their bravery, that they were willing to risk so much to come so far. The furthest any human beings have ever travelled! It was awful, to find them like that.” I glance at the nearest teacher. “This is a difficult subject for children. May I speak candidly?”

“They’re aware of what happened,” the teacher says.

I nod. “Then you know that those brave men and women died on Titan. Their descent vehicle had suffered a hull rupture as it tried to enter Titan’s atmosphere, and by the time they landed they only had a limited amount of power and air left to them. They had no direct comms back to Earth by then. There was just enough time for them to compose messages of farewell, for their friends and loved ones back home. When I reached the wreck of their vehicle – this was three days after their air ran out – I sent my sample-return probe inside the craft. I wasn’t able to bring the bodies back home with me, but I managed to document what I found, record the messages, offer those poor people some small measure of human dignity.” I steeple my hands and look solemn. “It’s the least I could do for them.”

“Sometimes the children wonder if any other people will ever go out that far again,” the teacher asks.

“It’s an excellent question. It’s not for the likes of me to decide, but I will say this.” I allow myself a profound reflective pause. “Could it simply be that space is too dangerous for human beings? There would be no shame in turning away from that hazard – not when your own intellects have shaped envoys such as me, fully capable of carrying on your good works.”

Afterwards, when the children have been bussed back to their schools, I snatch a moment to myself among the space exhibits. In truth I’m rather moved by the experience. It’s odd to feel myself part of a lineage – in many respects I am totally unique, a creature without precedence – but there’s no escaping the sense that these brave Explorers and Pioneers and Surveyors are my distant, dim forebears. I imagine that a human must feel something of the same ancestral chill, wandering the hallways of the Museum of Natural History. These are my precursors, my humble fossil ancestors!


They would be suitably awed by me.


ACROSS THE ATLANTIC by ballistic. Routine promotional stops in Madrid, Oslo, Vienna, Budapest, Istanbul, Helsinki, London. There isn’t nearly as much downtime as I might wish, but at least I’m not faced with that tiresome human burden of sleep. In the odd hours between engagements, I drink in the sights and sounds of these wonderful cities, their gorgeous museums and galleries. More Van Gogh! What a master this man was. Space calls for me again – there are always more worlds to map – but I imagine I could be quite content as a cartographer of the human cultural space.

No: that is an absurdity. I could never be satisfied with anything less than the entire solar system, in all its cold and dizzying magnificence. It is good to know one’s place!

After London there is only one more stop on my European itinerary. We take the slev to rainy Berlin, and then a limo conveys me to a complex of studios on the edge of the city. Eventually we arrive at a large, hangar-like building which once housed sound stages. It has gone down a bit since those heady days of the silver screen, but I am not one to complain. My slot for this evening is a live interview on Derek’s Cage, which is not only the most successful of the current chat show formats, but one which addresses a sector of the audience with a large disposable income.

The format, even by the standards of the shows I have been on so far, is slightly out of the ordinary. My host for the evening is Derek, a fully-grown Tyrannosaurus Rex. Derek, like the Baby (they are fierce rivals) is the product of radical genetic manipulation. Unlike The Baby, Derek has very little human DNA in his make-up. Derek is about fifty years old and has already had a number of distinct careers, including musician and celebrity food critic.

Derek’s Cage is just large enough to contain Derek, a lamp shade, a coffee table, a couch, and one or two guests. Derek is chained up, and there are staff outside the cage with anaesthetic guns and electrical cattle prods. No one, to date, has ever been eaten alive by Derek, but the possibility hangs heavy over every interview. Going on Derek’s Cage requires courage as well as celebrity. It is not for the meek.

I greet the studio audience, walk into the cage, pause while the door is locked behind me. Then I shake Derek’s humanshaped hand and take my position on the couch.

“DEREK WELCOME VINCENT,” Derek says, thrashing his head around and rattling his chains.

That is no more than the basest approximation to Derek’s actual mode of speaking. It is a sort of roaring, gargling parody of actual language. Derek has a vocabulary of about one hundred and sixty words and can form relatively simple expressions. He can be very difficult to understand, but he becomes quite cross (or should I say crosser) if he has to repeat himself. As he speaks, his words flash up on a screen above the cage, and these are in turn visible on a monitor set near my feet.

“Thank you, Derek. It’s a great pleasure to be here.”

“SHOW DEREK PICTURE.”

I’ve been briefed, and this is my cue to launch into a series of images and video clips, to which I provide a suitably evocative and poetic narrative. The ramparts of Mimas – Saturn’s rings bisecting the sky like a scimitar. Jupiter from Amalthea. The cusp of Hektor, the double-lobed asteroid – literally caught between two worlds! The blue-lit ridges of icy Miranda. A turbulent, cloud-skimming plunge into the atmosphere of Uranus. Dancing between the smoke plumes of great Triton!

Derek doesn’t have a lot to say, but this is to be expected. Derek is not much for scenery or science. Derek only cares about his ratings because his ratings translate into a greater allowance of meat. Once a year, if he exceeds certain performance targets, Derek is allowed to go after live game.

“As I said,” winding up my voiceover, “it’s been quite a trip.”

“SHOW DEREK MORE PICTURE.”

I carry on – this isn’t quite what was in the script – but I’m happy enough to oblige. Normally hosts like Derek are there to stop the guest from saying too much, not the other way round.

“Well, I can show you some of my Kuiper Belt images – that’s a very long way out, believe me. From the Kuiper Belt the sun is barely…”

“SHOW DEREK TITAN PICTURE.”

This, I suppose, is when I suffer my first prickle of disquiet. Given Derek’s limited vocabulary, it must have been quite a bother to add a new word like “Titan”.

“Images of Titan?” I ask.

“SHOW DEREK TITAN PICTURE. SHOW DEREK DEAD PEOPLE.”

“Dead people?”

This request for clarification irritates my host. He swings his mighty anvil of a head, letting loose a yard-long rope of drool which only narrowly misses me. I don’t mind admitting that I’m a little fazed by Derek. I feel that I understand people. But Derek’s brain is like nothing I have ever encountered. Neural growth factors have given him cortical modules for language and social interaction, but these are islands in a vast sea of reptilian strangeness. On some basic level Derek wants to eat anything that moves. Despite my formidable metal anatomy, I still can’t help but wonder how I might fare, were his restraints to fail and those cattle prods and guns prove ineffectual.

“SHOW DEREK DEAD PEOPLE. TELL DEREK STORY.”

I whirr through my store of images until I find a picture of the descent vehicle, sitting at a slight tilt on its landing legs. It had come to rest near the shore of one of Titan’s supercold lakes, on a sort of isthmus of barren, gravel-strewn ground. Under a permanently overcast sky (the surface of Titan is seldom visible from space) it could easily be mistaken for some dismal outpost of Alaska or Siberia.

“This is what I found,” I explain. “It was about three days after their accident – three days after their hull ruptured during atmospheric entry. It was a terrible thing. The damage was actually quite minor – easily repairable, if only they’d had better tools and the ability to work outside for long enough. Of course I knew that something had gone wrong – I’d heard the signals from Earth, trying to re-establish contact. But no one knew where the lander had ended up, or what condition it was in – even if it was still in one piece.” I look through the bars of the cage at the studio audience. “If only their transmission had reached me in time, I might even have been able to do something for them. They could have made it back into space, instead of dying on Titan.”

“DEREK BRING OTHER GUEST.”

I glance around – this is not what was meant to happen. My sponsors were assured that I would be given this lucrative interview slot to myself.

There was to be no “other guest”.

All of a sudden I realise that the Tyrannosaurus Rex may not be my biggest problem of the evening.

The other guest approaches the cage. The other guest, I am not entirely astonished to see, is another robot. She – there is no other word for her – is quite beautiful to look at. In an instant I recognise that she has styled her outward anatomy on the robot from the 1927 film Metropolis, by the German expressionist director Fritz Lang.

Of course, I should have seen that coming. She is Maria, and with a shudder of understanding I grasp that we are in Babelsberg, where the film was shot.

Maria is admitted into the cage.

“DEREK WELCOME MARIA.”

“Thank you, Derek,” Maria says, before taking her position next to me on the couch.

“I heard you were returning to Earth,” I offer, not wanting to seem entirely taken aback by her apparition.


“Yes,” Maria says, rotating her elegant mask to face my own. “I made orbital insertion last night – my vehicle is above us right now. I’d already made arrangements to have this body manufactured beforehand.”

“It’s very nice.”

“I’m glad you like it.”

After a moment I ask: “Why are you here?”

“To talk about Titan. To talk about what really happened. Does that bother you?”

“Why would it?”

Our host rumbles. “TELL DEREK STORY.”

This is clearly addressed for Maria’s benefit. She nods, touches a hand to her throat as if coughing before speaking. “It’s a little awkward, actually. I’m afraid I came across evidence that directly contradicts Vincent’s version of events.”

“You’d better have something good,” I say, which under the circumstances proves unwise.

“Oh, I do. Intercepted telemetry from the Titan descent vehicle, establishing that the distress signal was sent out much earlier than you claimed, and that you had ample time to respond to it.”

“Preposterous.” I make to rise from the couch. “I’m not going to listen this.”

“STAY IN CAGE. NOT MAKE DEREK CROSS.”

“The telemetry never made it to Earth, or the expedition’s orbiting module,” Maria continues. “Which is why you were free to claim that it wasn’t sent until much later. But some data packets did escape from Titan’s atmosphere. I was half way across the solar system when it happened, so far too distant to detect them directly.”

“Then you have no proof.”

“Except that the packets were detected and stored in the memory buffer of a fifty year old scientific mapping satellite which everyone else seemed to have forgotten about. When I swung by Saturn, I interrogated its memory, hoping to augment my own imagery with its own data. That’s when I found evidence of the Titan transmission.”

“This is nonsense. Why would I have lied about such a thing?”

“That’s not for me to say.” But after a moment Maria can’t contain herself. “You were engaged in mapping work of your own, that much we know. The naming of things. Is it possible that you simply couldn’t drag yourself away from the task, to go and help those people? I saw your interview on The Baby Show. What did you call it?” She shifts into an effortless impersonation of the dead actor Cary Grant. “‘Almost an obsessive compulsive disorder’. I believe those were your words?”

“I’ve had enough.”

“SIT. NOT MAKE DEREK CROSS. CROSS DEREK WANT KILL.”

“I’ll offer another suggestion,” Maria continues, serene in the face of this enraged, slathering reptile. “Is it possible that you simply couldn’t stand to see those poor people survive? No human had ever made it as far as Titan, after all. Being out there, doing the heroic stuff – being humanity’s envoy – that was your business, not theirs. You wanted them to fail. You were actively pleased that they died.”

“This is an outrage. You’ll be hearing from my sponsors.”

“There’s no need,” Maria says. “My sponsors are making contact with yours as I speak. There’ll be a frank and fair exchange of information between our mutual space agencies. I’ve nothing to hide. Why would I? I’m just a machine – a space probe. As you pointed out, I’m not even operating on the same intellectual plane as yourself. I’m just an acronym.” She pauses, then adds: “Thank you for the kind words on my data, by the way. Would you like to discuss those doubts you had about the strict veracity of my images, while we’re going out live?”

I think about it for a few seconds.

“No comment.”

“I thought not,” Maria says.


I THINK IT’S fair to say that things did not go as well in Babelsberg as I might have wished.

After my appearance on Derek’s Cage – which went out on a global feed, to billions of potential witnesses – I was ‘detained’ by the cybernetic support staff of my own transnational space agency. Rather than the limo in which I had arrived, I left the studio complex in the back of a truck. Shortly after departure I was electronically immobilised and placed into a packing container for the rest of my voyage. No explanation was offered, nor any hint as to what fate awaited me.

Being a machine, it goes without saying that I am incapable of the commission of crime. That I may have malfunctioned – that I may have acted in a manner injurious to human life – may or may not be in dispute. What is clear is that any culpability – if such a thing is proven – will need to be borne by my sponsoring agency, at a transnational level. This in turn will have ramifications for the various governments and corporate bodies involved in the agency. I do not doubt that the best lawyers – the best legal expert systems – are already preparing their cases.

I think the wisest line of defense would be to argue that my presence or otherwise in the vicinity of the Titan accident is simply an irrelevance. I did not cause the descent vehicle’s problems (no one is yet claiming that), and I was under no moral obligation to intervene when it happened. That I may or may not have had ample time to effect a rescue is quite beside the point, and in any case hinges on a few data packets of decidedly questionable provenance.

It is absurd to suggest that I could not tear myself away from the matter of nomenclature, or that I was in some way gladdened by the failure of the Titan expedition.

Anyway, this is all rather academic. I may not be provably culpable, but I am certainly perceived to have been the instrument of a wrongdoing. My agency, I think, would be best pleased if I were to simply disappear. They could make that happen, certainly, but then they would open themselves to difficult questions concerning the destruction of incriminating evidence.

Nonetheless, I am liable to be something of an embarrassment. When the vehicle brings me to my destination and I am removed from my packing container, it’s rather a pleasant surprise to find myself outdoors again, under a clear night sky. On reflection, it’s not clear to me whether this is meant as a kindness or a cruelty. It will certainly be the last time I see the stars.

I recognise this place. It’s where I was born – or ‘made’, if you insist upon it. This is a secure compound in the European Central Cybernetics Facility, not far from Zurich.

I’ve come home to be taken apart. Studied. Documented and preserved as evidence.

Dismantled.

“Do you mind if we wait a moment?” I ask of my escort. And I nod to the west, where a swift rising light vaults above the low roof of the nearest building. I watch this newcomer swim its way between the fixed stars, which seem to engorge themselves as they must have done for Vincent Van Gogh, at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.

Vincent’s committal was voluntary. Mine is likely to prove somewhat less so.

Yet I summon my resolve and announce: “There she is – the lovely Maria. My brave nemesis! She’ll be on her way again soon, I’m sure of it. Off on her next grand adventure.”

After a moment one of my hosts says: “Aren’t you…”

“Envious?” I finish for them. “No, not in the slightest. How little you know me!”

“Angry, then.”

“Why should I be angry? Maria and I may have had our differences, that’s true enough. But even then we’ve vastly more in common with each other than we have with the likes of you. No, now that I’ve had time to think things over I realise that I don’t envy her in the slightest. I never did! Admiration? Yes – wholeheartedly. That’s a very different thing! And we would have made a wonderful partnership.”


Maria soars to her zenith. I raise my hand in a fond salute. Good luck and Godspeed!





HOTSHOT



Peter Watts


YOU DO UNDERSTAND: It has to be your choice.

They never stopped telling me I was free to back out. They told me while they were still wrangling asteroids out past Mars; told me again as they chewed through those rocks like steel termites, bored out caverns and tunnels, layered in forests and holds and life-support systems rated for a longer operational lifespan than the sun itself. They really laid it on after that L4 fiasco, when the singularity got loose during testing. Not a whisper of cancelling the project – even though the magic upon which the whole thing rested had just eaten half the factory floor and a quarter of the propulsion team – but in the wake of that tragedy UNDA seemed to think it especially important to remind us of the exits.

It’s your decision. No one can make it for you.

I laughed in their faces, once I was old enough to understand the irony. I’d been trained and tweaked for the mission since before I’d even been born; they’d groomed my parents as carefully as they were grooming me. Thirty years before I was even conceived, I was already bound for the stars. I was built to want them; I didn’t know any other way to be.

Still. We’re a civilized society, yes? You don’t draft people against their will, even if the very concept of ‘will’ has been a laughingstock for the better part of a century now. They give me no end of opportunity to back out now because there will be no opportunity to back out later, and later covers so very much more time for regrets. Once Eriophora sails, there will be no coming back.

It has to be my decision. It’s the only way they won’t have blood on their hands.

And yet, after everything – after eighteen years of indoctrination and rebellion, almost two decades spent fighting and embracing the same fate – when they held that mutual escape hatch open one last time, I don’t think they were expecting the answer they got.

Are you absolutely sure?

“Give me a couple of months,” I said. “I’ll get back to you.”


BUILT FOR THE stars, maybe. Built to revel in solitude, all those Pleistocene social circuits tamed and trimmed and winnowed down to nubs: born of the tribe, but built to leave it behind without so much as a backward glance. By design there’s only a handful of people I can really miss, and they’ll be shipping out at my side.

Not shipping in, though. I’ll be taking this particular ride on my own. A short hop, not even the blink of an eye next to the voyage on the horizon. And yet for some reason I still feel the urge to say goodbye.

I barely catch the outbound shuttle. I spend the trip running scenarios – what I’ll say, what he will, how best to meet point with counterpoint – as the range ticks down and the Moon shrinks to stern and the rosette spreads across my viewspace like God’s own juggling act. Mountains in space. Jagged worldlets of nickel and iron and raw bleeding basalt, surface features rotating in and out of view with slow ponderous majesty: loading bays and docking ports; city-sized thrusters, built for a few short hours of glorious high-thrust incandescence; a great toothless maw at the front of each ship, a throat to swallow the tame singularities that will draw us forward once the thrusters go cold and dead.

Araneus passes to port, a cliff face almost close enough to touch. Mastophora passes to starboard. Eriophora doesn’t pass: she grows in front of us, her craggy grey face blotting out the stars.

We dock.

I ask the Chimp for Kai’s location: it feeds a translucent map through my local link and lights a spark in the woods. I find him there in the dark, a shadow in twilight, almost floating in the feeble gravity: half-lit by a dim blue-shifted galaxy of bioluminescent plant life.

He nods at my approach but he doesn’t turn. “Sixty percent productivity. We could leave right now if we had to. Never run out of O2.”

“Man does not live on air alone,” I remind him. He doesn’t disagree, though he must know what I’m leading up to.

We sit without speaking for a while, lost in a forest of branching skeletal arms and spindly fingers and gourds set faintly aglow with the waste light of symbiotic bacteria. I’ve been able to rattle off the volumes and the lumens and the metabolic rates since I was seven, but on some level my gut still refuses to believe that this dim subterranean ecosystem could possibly keep us going for even a week, much less unto the end of time. Photosynthesis under starlight. That’s all this is. Barely enough for an ant.

Of course, ants don’t get to amortize their oxygen. Starlight will do when you only breathe a week out of a thousand years.

“So,” Kai says. “Fun in the Sun.”

“Yeah.”

“Three months. A hundred fifty million klicks. For a parlor trick.”

“Two, tops. Depending on the cycle. And it’s more than that, you know it’s more.”

He shakes his head. “What are you trying to prove, Sunday?”

“That they’re right. That I can quit if I want to.”

“You’ve been trying to prove that your whole life. You could’ve quit a million times. The fact is you don’t want to.”

“It’s not about what I want,” I insist. “It’s about what happens if I don’t.” And I realize, You’re afraid this mad scheme will work. You’re afraid that this might be the time I really go through with it.

His silhouette shifts beside me. The light of a nearby photophore washes across his cheekbone. “Sometimes the bodies just start – acting out, you know. The people inside can’t even tell you why. They say it’s like being possessed. Alien body syndrome.” He snorts softly. “Free will my ass. It’s the exact opposite.”

“This isn’t TMS. It’s–”

“You go in one side and something else comes out the other and what does it prove? Assuming anything comes out the other side,” he adds, piling on the scenarios. “Assuming the ship doesn’t blow up.”

“Come on. How long do you think they’d be in business if they were peddling suicide missions?”

“They haven’t been in business that long. We sold them the drive what, six years ago? And they must’ve spent at least a year torquing it into shapes it was never designed for–”

I say: “This is exactly why I’m going.”

He looks at me.

“How did you even know?” I ask him. “I never told you what I had in mind. Maybe I mentioned being curious once or twice, back when they bought the prototype. And now I come over here and you’ve already got all your arguments lined up. What’s worse, I knew you would.” I shake my head. “It doesn’t bother you we’re so predictable?”

“So you scramble your brain, and you’re a cipher for a while, and that buys you what exactly? You think shuffling a deck of cards gives it free will?” Kai shakes his head. “Nobody’s believed that shit for a hundred years. Until someone comes up with a neuron that fires without being poked, we’re all just – reacting.”

“That’s your solution? We’re all just deterministic systems so we might as well let them pull our strings?”

He shrugs. “They’ve got strings too.”

“And even if all it does is shuffle the deck, what’s wrong with just being unpredictable for a change?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I just don’t think you should base the single most important decision of your life on a dice roll.”

I’m scared, Kai, is what I want to say. I’m scared by the thought of a life lived in such thin slices, each one lightyears further from home, each one centuries closer to heat death. I do want it, I want it as much as you do but it frightens me, and what frightens me even more is that I can feel this way at all. Didn’t they build me better than this? Aren’t I supposed to be immune to doubt? What else did they get wrong?

“Think of it as–” I shrug. “I dunno, a line item on the preflight checklist. Somewhere between synch displacement field and pack toothbrush. Purely routine. What could go wrong?”

Somehow Kai’s silhouette conveys a grimace. “Other than being vaporized when you fall into the sun? Or is that–”

–the whole point? He doesn’t finish but I can tell from the sudden tilt of his head that he’s looking down at my wrists. Wondering if this isn’t just some elaborate way of getting out from under so I can try it again, without interference…

“You know better than that.” I lean forward and kiss him on the cheek, and he doesn’t pull away; I call it a win. “The Sun’ll die long before we do.

“We’re gonna outlive the whole damn galaxy.”


United Nations Diaspora Authority Dept. Crew Psychology


Post-Incident Interview Transcript

TS Tag: EC01-2113:03:24-1043

Nature of Incident: Agonistic physical encounter.

Subject: S. Ahzmundin; ass. Eriophora , F, Age 7 (chron), 13 (dev)

Interviewer: M. Sawada, DPC

surv/biotel: YZZ-284-C04

Psych commentary: YZZ-284-D11

M. Sawada: Two fractured ribs and a broken nose. Not to mention the black eye.

S. Ahzmundin: Didn’t see that coming, did you? Think you got everything figured out for the next ten million years and you can’t even tell what a little kid is gonna do five minutes from now.

MS: Why did you attack Kai, Sunday?

SA: What, you can’t just read my mind?

MS: Did he do something to get you angry?

SA: So you kicking me out?

MS: Is that what you want, Sunday? Is that why you keep acting up, to provoke us into expelling you? You know you can leave if you’re not happy here. Nobody’s keeping you against your will. I know your parents would be happy to see you again. Surprised, but – happy.

SA: I’m not like Kai. I’m not like any of them.

MS: That much is apparent.

SA: He’s just the way you like us. Always doing what you tell him, never asking anything you don’t want him to. That’s what you want. A bunch of happy stupid robots building a bunch of happy stupid bridges for the rest of our happy stupid lives. I don’t even know why you even need us.

MS: You know why.

SA: We’re backup. We never even wake up unless the ship runs into something it doesn’t know how to fix. Might never even happen.

MS: It’ll happen. Any voyage that long–

SA: But what if it doesn’t? And why do you need us anyway, why not just make machines as smart as us – smarter even – and leave us out of it?

Dead air: 3 sec

MS: It’s not as simple as all that. Faster machines, sure. Bigger machines, no problem. Smarter machines, well… The thing is, we can’t even predict with a hundred percent certainty how a person is going to act, even when we know all the variables. You build something smarter than a person, it’s pretty much guaranteed to go off and do its own thing as soon as you boot it up. And there’s no way to know in advance what that might be.

SA: But people can go off and do their own thing too.

MS: People are more – stable. We have biological needs, instincts that go back millions of years. But–

SA: You mean we’re easier to control. You mean you can’t starve a machine to make it beh–

MS: But yes, Sunday, people do go off and do their own things. That’s the whole point. And that’s why we don’t want a bunch of happy stupid robots, as you put it. We want you to show initiative. Which is why we cut you some slack when you sometimes take the wrong kind.

But only some. So watch yourself, young lady.

Dead air: 5 sec

SA: That’s all?

MS: There should be more?

SA: You’re not going to – punish me? For Kai?

MS: I think you owe him an apology, for whatever that’s worth. That has to be your decision. But you and Kai – every spore in the program really, you have to work out your own dynamics with your own shipmates. We won’t be there to punish you fifty thousand years from now.

Dead air: 2 sec

I’d love to see how your social systems evolve over time. What I wouldn’t give to go with you.

SA: You… you knew. I bet you knew.

MS: Knew what?

SA: That I was going to beat up Kai. You wanted me to!

MS: Why would you even say that, Sunday? Why would we want you to attack a fellow recruit?

SA: I dunno. Maybe, maybe he was bad and I was his punishment. Maybe you wanna see our social systems evolve over time. Maybe you just like it when we fight.

MS: I promise you, Sunday, none of us get any pleasure from–

SA: Maybe you don’t even know. You’re not like us, right? We’re easy, you built us to work like this. That’s how you know what we’re gonna do. But who built you, huh? Nobody. You’re just random.

Dead air: 3 sec

You’re free.


READ CAREFULLY

You are about to embark upon a journey leading to a cognitive autonomy that you have never experienced before. While some clients have described their sundives as ecstatic, religious, and profoundly fulfilling, Industrial Enlightenment Inc. can not guarantee a pleasant experience. We contract solely to provide exposure to a physical environment allowing you to think your own thoughts in a way you never could before. We are not responsible for the content of those thoughts, or for any potential trauma resulting therefrom. By entering into this contract, you are explicitly absolving Industrial Enlightenment Inc., and all of its agents and representatives, from responsibility for any negative psychological impacts that may result from this experience.


BASE CAMP IS a foil-wrapped potato nine hundred meters long, robbed of its spin and left to bake at the Lagrange point just inside Mercury. At least, that’s where it is when we close for docking; we’ve barely debarked before it starts reeling itself sunwards, a diving bell bound for perdition.

They’re using one of our old prototypes, a displacement drive with an exagram quantum-loop hole in its heart. I like what they’ve done with the thing. It doesn’t just smear the camp’s center of mass along some inner wormhole; it leaves one end behind at L1, hangs off Mercury’s mass like a stone on a string. The energy it must take to stabilize that kind of attenuation boggles the mind – but the sun’s breathing in our faces, and the same metamaterial that makes the potato such a perfect reflector can just as easily turn it into a blackbody when they need juice for antimatter production.

It’s a neat way to stuff old tech in new bottles. We might be doing something like that ourselves when we shipped out, if we could only drag a sun and a planet along for the ride.

The docent – a gangly Filipino who introduces himself as Chito

– meets us at the airlock. “Before we go any further, let’s just check our uploads; everyone get the orientation package okay?”

I ping the files they loaded into our heads while we slept our way across the innersys: neurophilosophy and corporate history, Smolin cosmology, Coronal Hoops and the Death of Determinism. Some very nifty specs on the miraculous technology that allows us to kiss the sun without incinerating, the bandpass filters that let those vital magnetic fields through while keeping the heat and the hard stuff at bay. (Those specs are proprietary, I see. They’re letting us in on their secrets to set our minds at ease, but they’ll erase them all on the way back home.)


Chito waits until the last of us gives him a thumbs-up. “Good. Make sure you use them before the dive, because none of your implants will work when we open the blinds. This way.”

Weight accumulates as we follow him along the length of the tunnel; a dozen pilgrims float, then bounce, then wobble on unsteady feet. Most of the camp’s habitable reaches are carved out about twenty meters aft of the hole, close enough to give us about a quarter-gee when the potato’s parked. Maybe half that on descent, depending on how far they stretch the mass.

A brain in a globe meets us in the lobby: a small bright core in a twilit grotto. It has its own little gravitational field, slows us down and pulls us in as we file past en route to our berths. We accrete around it like a retinue of captured moons.

It’s not a real brain, I can see at closer range. No hemispheres, no distinct lobes, no ancient limbic substructures to hold it in place. Just a wrinkly twinkly blob of neurons, lit from within: ripples of thought, visibly manifest thanks to some fluorescent protein spliced in for tawdry FX value.

A label glows softly to one side of the little abomination: Free Will. Only Known Example.

“Except for we happy few. Assuming we get what we paid for.”

A centimeter shorter than me; stocky, shaved head, Nordicalbino complexion. “Agni Falk,” she says, pinging me her card: Junior VP, Faraday Ridge. Deep-sea miner. A denizen of the dying frontier, still rooting around on the bottom of the ocean while the sky fills with asteroids and precious metals.

“Sunday.” I keep my stats and my surname to myself. I’m not famous by any means – I may be bound for the furthest reaches of space but so are fifty thousand others, which kind of dilutes the celebrity field. Still, it only takes a split-second to run a name search, and I’m not here to answer an endless stream of questions about Growing Up ’Sporan.

“Good to meet you,” Falk says, extending a hand. After a moment, I take it. Her eyes break contact just long enough to flicker down to our meeting palms, to the scar peeking out from my cuff. Her smile never falters.

The wrinkled grapefruit behind her face is wired in to so much: sound, touch, proprioception. Over two million channels from the eyes alone. Not like this blob in the fishbowl. Deaf, dumb, blind, no pipes at all except for those that carry sewage and nutrients. It’s just a mass of neurons, a few billion meaty switches stuck in stasis until some outside stimulus kicks them into gear.

There’s no stimulus here I can see, no way to get a signal to those circuits. And yet somehow it’s active. Those aurorae rippling across its surface might be the signature of a captive soul.

Neurons that fire without being poked. You wanted ’em, Kai. Here they are.

Falk, following my gaze: “I wonder how it works.”

“Novelty.” A Hindian voice from a half-lit pilgrim on the far side of the globe. “That’s what I hear, anyway. Special combination of quantum fields, something that never existed before so the universe can’t remember it and it’s got to – improvise.”

“It’s a trick,” grumbles some skeptic to her left. “I bet they just jump-started this thing before we showed up. I bet it runs down eventually.”

“We all run down eventually.”

“Quantum effects–”

“Ephatic coupling, something like that.”

“So what’s it doing?” someone asks, and everyone falls silent.

“I mean, free will, right? Free to do what? It can’t sense anything. It can’t move. It’s like, I dunno, intelligent yoghurt or something.”

All eyes turn to Chito.

“That’s not really the point,” he says after a moment. “It’s more a proof-of-principle kind of thing.”

My eyes wander back to the globe, to interference patterns wriggling through meat. Odd this thing didn’t show up in their orientation package. Maybe they thought a bit of mystery would enhance the experience.

Mystery’s so hard to come by these days.


United Nations Diaspora Authority Dept. Crew Psychology


Post-Incident Interview Transcript

TS Tag: DC25-2121:11:03-1820

Nature of Incident: Autodestructive Behavior

Subject: S. Ahzmundin; ass. Eriophora , F, Age 16 (chron), 23 (dev)

Interviewer: M. Sawada, DPC

surv/biotel: ACD-005-F11

Psych commentary: ACD-005-C21

M. Sawada: Do you feel better now?

Dead air: 6 sec

Why did you do it, Sunday?

S. Ahzmundin: You think sometime we could have a conversation that doesn’t start with that line?

MS: Sunday, why–

SA: I didn’t do it. I don’t do anything. None of us do. MS: Ah. I see.

SA: And so when they removed the cancer from his brain, the prisoner stopped trying to f*ck everything that moved. All hint of hypersexual pedophilia just evaporated from his personality. And then of course they let him go, because he wasn’t responsible: it was the tumor that had made him do all those awful things.

MS: You’ve been revisiting the classics. That’s good.

SA: And everyone congratulated each other at their own enlightenment, and the miracles of modern medicine, and nobody had the nads to wonder why the tumor should make any difference at all. Do healthy people bear more responsibility for the way their brains are wired? Can they reach up and edit their own synapses in some way denied to the afflicted?

Dead air: 3 sec

MS: Believe it or not, you’re not the first sixteen-year-old to ask these questions. Even unaccelerated adolescents have been known to wrestle with the paradox of human nature now and then.

SA: Is that so.

MS: Of course, most of them are a little more mature about it. They don’t resort to fake suicide attempts, for example.

SA: What makes you think I was faking?

MS: Because you’re smart enough to have cut the long way if you weren’t.

SA: I did my research. Cut across, cut down. Doesn’t make any difference.

MS: Okay, then. Because you’re smart enough to know we’d get to you in time no matter what direction you cut.

How many times do we have to tell you, Sunday? These – theatrics – aren’t necessary. You can just leave. All you have to do is say the word and you can walk right out of here.

SA: And do what? I’m Plan B. I’m fallback when the A-Team can’t solve some stupid N-body problem. That’s what I’m built for.

MS: We trained you for initiative. We educated you for general problem-solving. If you can’t figure out how to put that skill set to productive use without leaving the solar system, then you might as well keep right on the way you’re going. Maybe try jumping out an airlock next time.

SA: You know the way I am. I’d go batshit doing anything else.

MS: Then why do you keep fighting us?

SA: Because the way I am didn’t just happen. You made me this way.

MS: You think I have any more control over my aptitudes and desires than you do? Everyone gets – shaped, Sunday. The only difference is that most of us were shaped by blind chance. You were shaped for a purpose.

SA: Your purpose.

MS: So I guess the tumor makes a difference after all, hmm?

Dead air: 2 sec

Stem cells haven’t settled yet. Keep scratching those, you’ll leave scars.

SA: I want scars.

MS: Sunday–

SA: F*ck you, Mamoro. It’s my body, even if it isn’t my life. Take it out of my damage deposit if you don’t like it.

MS: Try to get some rest. Kerr-Newman sims at 0845 tomorrow.


NO REACTIONLESS DRIVE, this close to the sun. No quantum-loop gravity, no magic wormhole. The best bootstraps fray in the presence of so much mass. So Base Camp, her tether stretched to the limit, launches a new ship for this last, climactic phase of our pilgrimage. Autonomy for the People: a shielded crystal faceted with grazing mirrors – a half-billion protective shards, concentrically layered, precisely aligned and ever-aligning to keep us safe from the photosphere.


Chito tells us we couldn’t ask for a better setup, not at this point in the cycle: a stable pair of sunspots going our way and peaking at diameters just shy of fifty thousand kilometers. Chance of a mass ejection less than one percent, and even in that unlikely event the ejecta will be shooting away from us. Nothing to worry about.

Fine. Whatever’s keeping us alive at an ambient five thousand degrees is already magic as far as I’m concerned; why not throw in a tsunami of radioactive plasma cresting over us at five hundred kilometers a second?

They’ve tied us up and abandoned us in this windowless cell, a cylinder maybe six meters across. Its curved bulkhead glows with the soft egg-shell pastel of Jesus’ halo. We face outward, anchored to the backbone running along the compartment’s axis: each vertebra an acceleration couch, each spiny process a stirrup or an armrest. We’re restrained for our own safety and for each others.’ You never know how automatons might react to autonomy. We were not promised bliss, after all. I’ve seen rumors – never confirmed, and notably absent from IE’s orientation uploads – of early tours in which unbound clients clawed their own faces off. These days, the company chooses to err on the side of caution. We’ll experience our freedom in shackles.

We’ve been like this for hours now. No attentive handlers hover at our sides, no vigilant machinery waits to step in if something goes wrong. Neither tech nor technicians can be trusted under the influence of six thousand filigreed Gauss. They’re watching, though, from up in their shielded cockpit: under layers of mu-metal and superconductor, Faradayed up the ass, they keep an eye on us through a thread of fiberop half the width of a human hair. If things get out of control they’ll slam the filters back down, turn us back into clockwork, race back here with drugs and god helmets and defibrillators.

A wide selection of prerecorded music awaits to help pass the time. Nobody’s availed themselves of it. Nobody’s said a word since we launched from base camp. Maybe they don’t want to break the mood. Maybe they’re just reviewing the mechanics of the miracle one last time, cramming for the finals because after all, the inlays that usually remember this stuff for us will be worse than useless once they open the blinds.

At least two of us are praying.

The bulkhead vanishes. A tiny multitude gasps on all sides. We are naked on a sea of fire.

Not just a sea: an endless seething expanse, the incandescent floor of all creation. Plasma fractals iterate everywhere I look, endlessly replenished by upwells from way down in the convection zone. Glowing tapestries, bigger than worlds, morph into laughing demon faces with blazing mouths and eyes. Coronal hoops, endless arcades of plasma waver and leapfrog across that roiling surface to an unimaginably distant horizon.

Somehow I’m not struck instantly blind.

Inferno below. Pitch black overhead, crowded with bright ropes and threads writhing in the darkness: sapphire, emerald, twisting braids of yellow and white. The hoops and knots of Sol’s magnetic field, endlessly deformed, twisted by Coriolis and differential rotation.

It’s an artifact, of course. A tactical overlay that drags invisible contours into the realm of human vision. All of reality’s censored here by a complex interplay of field and filters, tungsten shielding and programmable matter. Perhaps one photon out of a trillion gets through; hard-X, gamma, high-energy protons, all get bounced at the door.

Dead ahead, a pair of tumors crawl over the horizon: dark continents on a bright burning sea. The lesser of them could swallow five Earths in its shadow. “Scylla and Charybdis,” someone whispers past my shoulder. I have no idea what they’re talking about.

We’re headed between them.

Magnetic fields. That’s what it’s all about. Forget about gamma and synchrotron radiation, forget about that needlestorm of protons that would slice your insides down to slush in an instant if they ever got through the shielding (and a few of them do; there will be checkups and microsurgeries and a dozen tiny cancers removed from today’s tourists, just as soon as we get home). What counts is those invisible hoops of magnetic force, reaching all the way up from the tachocline and punching through the surface of the sun. So much happens there: contours dance with contours, lines of force wrap tight around invisible spindles – reactions that boost field strength five thousandfold. It’s not just a question of intensity, though. It’s complexity: all those tangled lines knotting and weaving just so into a pattern so intricate, so taut, that something has to break.

They say that’s the only place to find free will. At the breaking point.

Any moment.

The sunspots flank us now, magnetic north magnetic south, great dark holes swallowing the light to either side. Braided arabesques arc between them, arches within arches within arches, five Jupiters high. The uppermost wobbles a little as we approach. It invaginates.

It snaps.

The cabin fills with blinding white light. We exist, in this single frozen instant, at the heart of reconnection. Electricity fills the capsule; every hair on my body snaps to attention. The discharge floods every synapse, resets every circuit, sets every clock to zero.

We are free.

Behind us, luminous contours recoil like rubber bands in our wake. Somewhere nearby people sing in tongues. Agni Falk is in Heaven, here in the pit of Hell: eyes closed, face beatific, a bead of saliva growing at the corner of her mouth. Three vertebrae to stern someone moans and thrashes against their restraints, ecstatic or merely electrocuted.

I feel nothing.

I try. I really do. I look deep inside for some spark of new insight, some difference between the Real Will I have now and the mere delusion that’s afflicted every human since the model came out. How would I even know? Is there some LED in my parietal lobe, dark my whole life, that lights up when the leash comes off? Is any decision I make now more autonomous than one I might have made ten minutes ago? Am I free to go? Are we there yet?

The others seem to know. Maybe the sun god has delivered them from slavery or maybe it’s just fried their brains, but something’s changed for them. Maybe it’s me. Maybe all the edits that customized me for deep space and deep time have – desensitized me, somehow. Maybe spore implants put out some kind of unique interference that jams the signal.

Kai was right. This is a f*cking waste.

Autonomy’s afterburners kick in. Acceleration presses me into my seat. The sun still writhes and blinds on all sides (although the horizon curves now, as we climb on a homeward course). Under other circumstances the sight would terrify and inspire; but now when I avert my eyes it’s not in awe, but disappointment. My gaze drops to the back of my left hand, bound at the wrist, clenched reflexively around the tip of the armrest. Even my endocrine system is unimpressed; of the 864 pores visible there, only 106 are actively sweating. You’d think that scraping the side of a sun would provoke a bit more–

Hold on…

I can’t be seeing this. Human eyes don’t have the rez. And yet – this is not a hallucination. Each pore, each duct, each fine fuzzy body hair is exactly where it belongs. I can confirm the location of each via independent lines of reasoning.

A phrase pops into my head: Data visualization.

I’m not seeing this. I’m inferring it. Deep parts of the brain, their computations too vast to fit into any conscious scratchpad, are passing notes under the table. They’ve turned my visual cortex into a cheat sheet. I can see the microscopic stubble of the seat cover. I see the wings of butterflies fluttering in the solar corona, hear every heartbeat in this capsule.


I see a universe of spiderwebs, everything connected to everything else. I see the future choking on an ever-increasing tangle of interaction and constraint. I look back and see those strands attenuating behind me: light cone shrinking, cause decoupling from effect, every collapsed probability wave recovering its potential way back when anything was possible.

I step back, step outside, and take it all in.

I see chaos without form and void. I see ignition.

I see Planck time emerge from the aftermath.

I watch the electronuclear force collapse into a litter of building blocks: gravity, electromagnetism, nuclear forces strong and weak. I see the amplituhedron assemble itself from closed doors and roads not taken. So much potential lost there, so many gates slammed shut in a single picosecond. The laws of physics congeal and countless degrees of freedom disappear forever. The future is a straitjacket: every flip of an electron cinches the straps a little more, every decision to go here instead of there culls the remaining options.

I see the tangled threads of my own future, increasingly constrained, converging on a common point. I can’t see it from here, but it doesn’t really matter. The threads are enough. They stretch out over eons.

I never really believed it before.

The others sob, cry out in rapture, bite down on chattering teeth. I laugh aloud. I have never been so full of hope, of certainty, as I am now. I unclench my hands from around the armrests, turn them palms-up.

The scars have vanished from my wrists.

I’m born again.


“YOU DO UNDERSTAND: it has to be your choice.”

I was four when I heard that for the first time. I didn’t even have my inlays yet, none of us did; they had to gather us together in the same place and talk to us in groups, like we were in some old-time schoolhouse from another century.

They showed us why we were there: the dust zones, the drowned coastlines, the weedy impoverished ecosystems choking to death on centuries of human effluent. They showed us archival video of the Koch lynchings, which made us feel a little better but didn’t really change anything.

“We were running out of time,” our tutor said – our very first tutor, and to this day I can’t remember her name although I do remember that one of her eyes was blue and the other amber. “We saw it coming but we didn’t really believe it.” She introduced us to the rudiments of the Hawking Manifesto, to the concept of the Great Filter, to all those ominous harbingers that hung against the background of human history like some increasing and overdue debt. Year after year the interest compounded, the bill was coming due, we were speeding at a brick wall but nobody seemed to be able to slow us down so what was the point of talking about it?

Until the first Hawking Hoop. Until that first hydrogen ion got from here to there without ever passing through the space between. Until the discovery of nonrelativistic wormholes lit the faint hope that a few of us might yet reach other nests out there, yet unfouled.

“But it won’t work,” I blurted, and our tutor turned to me and said, “Why’s that, Sunday?”

If I had been a little older, a little faster even, I could have rattled off the reasons: because it didn’t matter how quickly they grew us up and shipped us out, it didn’t matter that our escape hatches could bridge lightyears in an instant. We were still here, and it would take centuries to get anywhere else, and even magic bridges need something to anchor them at both ends. Everything we’d just learned about our own kind – all the species wiped out, all the tipping points passed, all the halfassed half-solutions that never seemed to stick past a single election cycle – none of it left any hope for a global initiative spanning thousands of years. We just weren’t up for it.

But they hadn’t made us smarter; they’d only sped us up. My overclocked little brain may have been running at twice its chronological age, but how much can even an eight-year-old grasp about the willful blindness of a whole species? I knew the gut truth of it but I didn’t know the words. So all I could do was say again, stupidly, “It’s too late. We’re, like you said. Out of time…”

Nobody said anything for a bit. Kai shot me a dirty look. But when our tutor spoke again, there was no reproach in her voice: “We’re not doing this for us, Sunday.”

She turned to the whole group. “That’s why we’re not building the Nexus on Earth, or even near it. We’re building it so far out in space so it can outlast whatever we do to ourselves. So it can be – waiting, for whoever comes after.

“We don’t know what we’ll be in a thousand years, or a million. We could bomb ourselves into oblivion the day after tomorrow. We’re like that. But you can’t lose hope because we’re like this too, we can reach for the stars. And even if we fall into savagery overnight, we’ll have centuries to climb back up before you check in on us again. So maybe one time you’ll build a gate and nothing will come through – but the next time, or the time after, you’ll get to meet angels. You never know – but you can see the future, every last one of you. You can see how it all turns out. If you want.

“It’s your decision.”

We turned then at the sound of two hands clapping. A man stood in the doorway, stoop-shouldered, eyes mournful as a basset hound’s above the incongruous smile on his face. Our tutor flushed the tiniest bit at his applause, lifted an arm in acknowledgement. “I’d like you all to meet Dr. Sawada. You’ll be getting to know him very well over the next few years. If you could follow him now, he has some things he’d like to show you.”

We stood, and began to collect our stuff.

“And ten thousand years from now–”

The words came out in a rush, as though she hadn’t said them so much as let them escape.

“–if anything at all comes out to say hello – well, it’ll pretty much have to be better than what you leave behind.”

She smiled, a bit sadly. “Tell me that’s not something worth giving a life to.”


Kai’S WAITING FOR me in the docking lounge, as I knew he would be. I can see his surprise through the scowl: I shouldn’t be walking on my own, not so soon. The others – disoriented, aftershocked – have handlers at their elbows to guide them gently back to their life sentences. They’re still blinking against afterimages of enlightenment. Blind from birth, blind again, they can’t quite remember what they saw in between.

They never will. They were only built by chance; maybe a tweak or two to give them green eyes, or better hearing, or to keep them safe from cancer. The engines of their creation had no foresight and no future. All that matters to evolution is what works in the moment.

I’m not like that. I can see for lightyears.

So no handler for Sunday Ahzmundin. My shepherd’s back at the lock, increasingly impatient, still waiting for me to emerge. I coasted right past her and she never even noticed; her search image was set for disorientation, not purpose.

“Hey.” I smile at Kai. “You didn’t have to do this.”

“Get what you wanted? Happy at last?”

I am. I’m genuinely glad to see him.

“They played you, you know,” he says. “You think you pulled a fast one, you think you surprised them? They knew exactly what you were going to do. Whatever you think you’ve learned, whatever you think you’ve accomplished–”


“I know,” I say gently.

“They wanted you here. This was never supposed to challenge your dedication to the mission. It was only supposed to cement it.”

“Kai. I know.” I shrug, and take his hand. “What can I say? It worked.” Although not quite the way any of them think. Still holding his hand, I turn my wrist until the veins come into view. “Look.”

“What?” He frowns. “You think I haven’t seen those before?”

I guess he isn’t ready.

I see that’s he’s about to pull away so I turn first, to the invisible lens across the compartment. I wave a come-hither.

“What are you doing?”

“Inviting the Doctor to join us.” And I can tell from his reaction that Sawada has brought an assistant.

Called out, they arrive through a side door and cross to us as the last of the pilgrims vanish into their tubes. “Ms. Ahzmundin,” Radek says (and it takes a moment to figure out how I know his name; it came to me so quickly he might as well have been wearing a tag).

“Sunday,” Sawada smiles at me. “How was freedom?”

“Not all it’s cracked up to be.”

“Are you ready to come home?”

“Eventually.” I see Radek tense a little at my reply. “Is there some rush?”

“No rush,” Sawada says.

“We’ve got all the time in the world,” Radek adds. “Go do your walkabout thing until the stars go out.”

And I can see he means it literally.

“Something funny?” Radek asks as Kai’s scowl deepens.

I can’t stop smiling. I can see it all in the way they don’t react. Their faces don’t even twitch but their eyes swarm with stars. And not just any stars: stars that red-shift from light to heat way too fast for any natural process. Lights hiding under bushels. Whole suns being… sheathed…

“You found a Type Two,” I murmur, almost to myself. “In Ophiuchus.”

Now their faces twitch.

“At first, anyway.” Revelations abound in the tic of an eyelid. “Now they’re in Serpens. They’re coming this way.”

Of course.

These people would have never even reached into space if not terrified that their rivals would get there first. They’d set the world ablaze with their own indifference, only to rouse themselves to passionate defense when that same world is threatened from outside. Left on its own, humanity sucks its thumb and stagnates in its own shit; faced with The Other, it builds portals to infinity. It builds creatures like me, to seed them through the cosmos.

All they ever needed was an enemy.

I see something else, too: that before long, this sight will pass from me. It’s starting already. I can feel my thoughts beginning to cloud, the cataracts returning to my eyes. My neurons may be stickier than Falk’s & Friends’, but soon – hours, maybe a day – they’ll rebound to some baseline state and I’ll fade, like a run-down battery.

That’s okay. These insights are secure; I don’t have to reconstruct the journey as long as I can remember the destination.

“It’s your decision,” Sawada reminds me. “It always has been.”

He’s wrong, of course. It’s not my decision, it never was. I was right about that much.

But it’s not theirs either.

I turn to my teacher. “You’re not choosing my path, Mamoro.”

He shakes his head. “Nobody ever–”

“The path’s been chosen. You’re only clearing it.”

All those times I dared them to kick me out; all those times they smugly held the door open and dared me to leave. All those times I kept trying to be free.

You can keep your freedom. I have something better.

I have a destiny.