The Freeze-Frame Revolution

OCCASIONAL DEMONS

IT WAS THE MONOCERUS BUILD that broke her. The gremlin came out of the gate a split-second after we booted it up: as if the fucking thing had been waiting the whole time, hunger and hatred building with every second of every century we’d been crawling across the void to set it free. Maybe it was whatever Humanity turned into, after Eriophora shipped out. Maybe it was something that came along after, something that swallowed Humanity whole and raced along our conquered highways in search of loose ends to devour.

It doesn’t matter. It never matters. We birthed the gate; the gate birthed an abomination. This one stirred something in me, a faint familiar echo I couldn’t quite put my finger on. That happens more often than you might think. Rack up enough gigasecs on the road and you’re bound to start seeing the same models in your rear-view eventually.

The usual protocols saved us. Deceleration in the wake of a boot is just another word for suicide: the radiation erupting from a newborn wormhole would turn us to ash long seconds before the occasional demon had a chance to gulp us down. So we threaded that needle as we always did: rode our bareback singularity through a hoop barely twice as wide as we were, closed the circuit at sixty thousand kps, connected there to here without ever slowing down. We trusted the rules hadn’t changed, that math and physics and the ass-saving geometry of distance-squared would water down the wavefront before it caught up with us.

We outran the rads, and we outran the gremlin, and as two kinds of uncertain death redshifted to stern Chimp threw a little yellow icon onto the corner of my eye—

—and I didn’t know why, until I turned to Lian and saw that she was shaking.

I reached out. “Lian, are you—”

She waved me away. Her breathing was fast and shallow. Her pulse jumped in her throat.

“I’m okay. I’m just…”

I could see a fragile kind of control trying to assert itself. I saw it struggle, and weaken, and not entirely succeed. But her breathing slowed.

I killed the icon.

“Lian, what’s the problem? You know it can’t catch us.”

She gave me a look I’d never seen before. “You don’t know what they can do. You don’t even know what they are. You don’t know anything.”

“I know they’d have maybe ten kilosecs to get up to twenty percent lightspeed from a standing start to even try to catch up. I know anything that could pull that off would’ve been able to squash us like a bug long before now, if it wanted to. You know that too.”

She used to, anyway.

“Is that how you do it?” A small giggle, a sound too close to the edge of hysteria.

“Do?”

“Is that how you deal with it? If it never happened, it never will?”

Five of us on deck for the build, and I have to be the one at her side when she loses it. “Li, where’s this coming from? Ninety-five percent of the time the gate just sits there.”

“As if that’s any better.” She spread her hands, a paradoxical gesture of defeat and defiance. “How long have we been doing this?”

“You know as well as I do.”

“Furthering the Human Empire. Whatever it’s turned into by now.” As if this was any kind of news. “So we build another gate and nothing comes out. They’re extinct? They don’t care? They just forgot about us?”

I opened my mouth.

“Or—” she went on, “we build a gate and something tries to kill us. Or we—”

“Or we build a gate,” I said firmly, “and something wonderful happens. Remember the bubbles? Remember those gorgeous bubbles?” They’d boiled through the hoop like rainbows, iridescent and beautiful, dancing around each other as they grew to the size of cities and then just faded away.

Their invocation got me a small, broken smile. “Yeah. What were those things?”

“They didn’t eat us. That’s my point. Didn’t even try. We’re still alive, Lian. We’re doing fine—better than fine, we’ve overperformed on any axis you could name. And we’re exploring the galaxy. How can you have forgotten how amazing that is? Back on Earth—they never could’ve dreamed of the things we’ve seen.”

“Living the non-dream.” She giggled again. “That’s just fucking aces, Sunday.”

I watched some biomechanical monstrosity fade behind us. I watched a swarm of icons flicker and update in the tac tank. I watched deck plating glint in the dim bridgelight.

“Why can’t they just—talk to us? Say hello now and again? Just once, even?”

“I dunno. You ever hop over to Madagascar before we shipped out, look up any tree shrews, thank them for the helping hand?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Just—” I shrugged. “I think they’ve got other priorities by now.”

“It should be over. They were supposed to call us back millions of years ago. No”—she held up a shaky hand—“we were not supposed to go on forever. How many times have we tunneled through this fucking ring already?” She threw an arm wide: Chimp, misreading the gesture, sprinkled the local starfield across the backs of our brains. “We could be the only ones left. And we still could’ve gated the whole disk ourselves by now.”

I tried for a chuckle. “It’s a big galaxy. We’ll have to go a few more circuits before there’s much chance of that.”

“And we will. You can count on it. Until the drive evaporates and the Chimp runs out of juice and the last of us rots away in the crypt like a piece of moldy fruit.” She glanced back at the tac tank, though its vistas floated in our heads as well. “We’ve done the job, Sunday. We’re way past mission expiration. Eri was never supposed to last this long. We weren’t.” She took a breath, let it out. “Surely we’ve done enough.”

“Are you talking about killing yourself?” Because I honestly didn’t know.

“No.” She shook her head. “No, of course not.”

“Then what do you want? I mean, here we are; where else can we be?”

“Maybe Madagascar?” She smiled then, absurdly. “Maybe they left us a spot. Next to the tree shrews.”

“I’m sure they did. Judging by that last one we saw.”

“Oh Jesus, Sun.” Her face collapsed in on itself. “I just want to go home.”

I gave physical contact another shot. “Lian—this is—”

“Is it really.” But at least she didn’t shake me off this time.

“There’s nowhere else. Earth, if it even still exists—it’s not ours any more. We’re—”

“Tree shrews,” she whispered.

“Yeah. Kind of.”

“Well then, maybe there’s still a warm wet forest somewhere for us to hole up in.”

“That’s you. Ever the fucking optimist.” And when she didn’t respond: “Build’s over, Lian. Time to stand down.

“I promise: Things’ll look brighter in a couple thousand years.”

Park and Viktor, jaded by builds beyond number, had sat out the boot in favor of a little cubby time. We reconvened afterward in a cerulean sky, to unwind before heading back to the crypts.

Three of us did, anyway. Lian, as usual, preferred her own setting: a sun-dappled glade in an old-growth forest generated from some long-dead South American archive. The system was smart enough to reconcile incompatible realities, strategically placed each of us in the other’s scenario without any awkward overlaps. So we sat there—sprawled on pseudopods in the stratosphere or arrayed around some grassy forest floor—sipping drugs and toasting another successful build. Park and Viktor—still gripped by the post-coital fuzzies—lay with their legs draped over each other, Park absently finger-painting onto his scroll. Lian sat cross-legged on her own ’pod (in this world, anyway; for all I knew she was squatting on a lily pad in her own).

Kallie was nowhere to be seen: “Turned in early,” Viktor said when I asked.

I tipped my glass at Park’s scroll. “New piece?”

“Clockwork in D Minor.”

“It’s pretty good,” Viktor said.

“It’s crap,” Park grunted. “But it’s getting there.”

“It is not crap.” Viktor glanced over at Lian. “Lian, you’ve heard…”

She just sat there, folded into herself, staring at the flagstones.

“Li?”

“We, um, had a bit of a moment,” I explained. “After the boot.” I squirted footage of the gremlin.

Park looked up. “Huh.”

“Are those jaws?” Viktor wondered.

“Maybe some kind of waldo,” I suggested.

Viktor tapped his thumb and fingers together, claw-like. “Maybe that’s just how we say Hello these days.” And after a moment: “I don’t suppose it actually did say anything…?”

“Not on any wavelength we could hear.”

“Posthuman mating ritual,” Park suggested.

“No dumber than anything else I’ve heard.” I shrugged. “If they were trying to kick our asses you’d think they’d have figured out particle beams or missiles by now. Make more sense than running after us with their mouths hanging open.”

For Lian, of course. But still she said nothing, her eyes fixed on the ground. Or maybe some nightmare she could see beneath it.

Suddenly no one else was saying anything, either.

Half-memory clicked, solidified. “You know what that really looks like? That tarantula whatsisname snuck on board.”

Blank looks.

“The front end, I mean. With the, the—fangs. And those little globule things look like eyes.”

“There’s a tarantula on board?” Park asked, after just long enough to have pinged the archive for a definition of tarantula.

“Not a regular one. Engineered. Takes it into his coffin with him between shifts. Says it’ll live a good two hundred active years if no one steps on it.”

Viktor: “Who says?”

“The guy. Tarantula Boy.” I looked around the patio. “Nobody?”

“Different tribe?” Viktor suggested. Chimp did that sometimes, dropped a member from one tribe into rotation with another as a hedge against any disaster that might decimate a social group. Easier to integrate into a group you already know, or something.

I raised my eyes to the heavens. “Chimp? You know who I’m talking about?”

“No one named Tarantula Boy was assigned to Eriophora,” Chimp reported.

“That’s not his name, that’s just what he was.”

“Can you describe him?”

“Dark hair? Average height? Whitish?” I strained for details. “Really nice guy?”

Viktor rolled his eyes.

“He kept a tarantula on his shoulder! That doesn’t narrow the field a bit?”

“Sorry,” Chimp said. “I’m not getting any hits.”

“It would have been contraband,” Viktor pointed out. “He’d’ve cranked his personal privacy settings at the very least.”

He had a point. Eri’s biosphere was fine-tuned for ecological balance and perpetual motion. Mission Control, clinically obsessive, would have taken a very dim view of anything it considered even remotely invasive.

Lian stood, flickered.

“Li? Turning in?”

She shook her head. “Think I might just—go for a walk, first. Take in something real for a change.”

“Caves and tunnels,” Viktor remarked. “You’re welcome to ’em.”

“Who knows.” She managed a smile. “Maybe I’ll find Easter Island.”

“Good luck with that.”

She vanished.

“Another nomad,” Park said.

“Another?”

“You do realize she’s following in your footsteps.” Which I hadn’t. Although I did tend to wander the corridors after a build, shoot the shit with Chimp before bedding down.

“Anyone notice anything off about her?” I asked.

Viktor stretched, yawned. “Like?”

I wondered how I’d feel if someone spread news of my private breakdown all over the tribe, and opted for discretion. “She didn’t seem kind of—subdued?”

“Maybe. After you made that crack about getting shot at by gremlins.”

“Then again,” Park added, “you’d expect that sort of reaction from someone who’s been shot at by gremlins.”

“I—what?”

“She was on deck when—” Park saw it in my face. “You don’t know.”

“Know what?”

“Something took a shot at us,” Viktor explained. “Few builds back.”

“What!”

“Hit us, too,” Park added. “Big divot on the starboard side. Twenty meters deep. Half a degree to the left and we’d be out of the finals.”

“Fuck.” It came out a whisper. “I had no idea.”

Park frowned. “Don’t you check the mission logs?”

“I would have, if I’d known.” I shook my head. “Also someone could’ve told me, you know?”

“We just did,” Viktor pointed out.

“It was five hundred years ago.” Park shrugged. “Hundred lightyears away.”

“Five hundred years is nothing,” Viktor said. “Call me in a few billion. Then we’ll talk.”

“Yeah, but—” Obvious, suddenly, why all my reassuring words had fallen so flat. “Jeez. Maybe we should build some guns or something.”

Park snorted. “Right. Chimp would really smile on that.”

We had a legend, we denizens of Eriophora, of a cavern—deep aft, almost as far back as the launch thrusters themselves—filled with diamonds. Not just ordinary diamonds, either: the uncut, hexagonal shit. Lonsdaleite. The toughest solid in the whole damn solar system—back when we shipped out, at least—and laser-readable to boot.

Build your backups out of anything less and you might as well be carving them from butter.

Nothing’s immortal on a road trip of a billion years. The universe runs down in stop-motion around you, your backups’ backups’ backups need backups. Not even the error-correcting replication strategies cadged from biology can keep the mutations at bay forever. It was true for us meatsicles cycling through mayfly moments every thousand years; it was just as true for the hardware. It was so obvious I never even thought about it. By the time I did, the Chimp was on his eighty-third reincarnation.

Not enough that his nodes bred like flies and distributed themselves to every far corner of the asteroid. Not enough that the circuits themselves were almost paleolithically crude; when your AI packs less than half the synapse count of a human brain, fiddling around at nano scales is just grandstanding. Things still fall apart. Conduits decay. Circuits a dozen molecules thick would just evaporate over time, even if entropy and quantum tunneling didn’t degrade them down to sponge first.

Every now and then, you have to renovate.

And so was born The Archive: a library of backups, cubist slabs of diamond statuary larger than life, commemorations of some unsullied ancestral state. Someone back at the dawn of time named it Easter Island: curious, I pinged the archives and dredged up an entry about some scabby rock back on Earth in the middle of nowhere, known primarily for the fact that its pretech inhabitants destroyed their environment for no better reason than to build a bunch of butt-ugly statues in commemoration of long-dead ancestors.

What else would we call it?

So when the inventory of backup Chimps ran too low—or of grav lenses, or air conditioners, or any other vital artifact more short-lived than a proton—Eri would send lumbering copy-editors back to its own secret Easter Island where they would read mineral blueprints so vast, so stable, they might outlast the Milky Way.

The place wasn’t always so secret, mind you. We’d trooped through it a dozen times during construction, a dozen more in training. But one day, maybe our third or fourth pass through the Sagittarius Arm, Ghora went spelunking at the end of a shift while the rest of us lay dead in the crypt; just killing time, he told me later, staving off the inevitable shut-down with a little recreational reconnaissance. He hiked down into the hi-gee zone, wormed through crawlways and crevices to where X marked the Spot, and found Easter Island scoured clean: just a dark gaping cavity in the rock, studded with the stubs of bolts and anchors sheared off a few centimeters above the substrate.

The Chimp had relocated the whole damn archive while we’d slept between the stars.

He wouldn’t tell us where. He couldn’t tell us, he insisted. Said he’d just been following prerecorded instructions from Mission Control, hadn’t been aware of them himself until some timer ticked over and injected new instructions into his job stack. He couldn’t even tell us why.

I believed him. When was the last time programmers explained themselves to the code?

“They don’t trust us,” Kai said, rolling his eyes. “Eight million years down the road and they’re afraid we might—what? Trash our own life support? Write Sawada sucks farts on their scale models?”

We’d still go searching now and then, when there was time to kill and itches to scratch. We’d plant tiny charges in the rock, read the echoes vibrating through our worldlet in search of some undiscovered grotto. The Chimp didn’t stop us. He never had to; in all the terasecs since Ghora’s discovery, we’d never found anything.

Maybe Lian thought she’d get lucky this time. Maybe she was just looking for an excuse to get away from us.

Either way, I wished her luck.

“Find it?”

She was in the middle of the usual funeral rites, clearing out her suite for whoever got it next time around. It took me maybe two minutes to do that: a couple of favorite jumpers I’d grown inexplicably fond of over the aeons, a little standalone sculpture rig that was mine and mine alone (no matter that the rigs in Eri’s rec facilities ran at ten times the rez and twenty times the speed). A couple of books— real antiques, couldn’t even map your eye movements so you had to scroll the text manually—that Mom and Dad gave me at graduation, which I treasured beyond all reason even though I’d never read them. Crappy charcoal sketches of Kai and Ishmael, legacy of an incompetent portraiture phase I went through on our third pass through Carina. That was pretty much it.

Lian, though. Lian might have been packing for half the tribe: wall hangings, wardrobes, a local VRchive that would have been more efficiently entrusted to Eri’s own library. Matching threadbare covers festooned with Penrose tiles, for sleeping and pseudopods. Something that looked like a rock collection, for fucks’ sake. She even packed her own sex toys, although the ones that came standard in each suite could’ve kept her occupied halfway to Heat Death.

For all I knew she’d been stuffing that junk into storage since the moment she’d left the party.

She looked up, eyes glazed; they took a moment to find me. “Huh?”

“Easter Island. Any luck?”

“Oh. Nah. Maybe next time.” She jammed a final balled-up pair of socks into the trunk, brought the lid down with a definitive click. “Thought you’d all be crypted by now.”

“On my way. Just wanted to check in, see how you were doing.”

“Just had—you know, like you said. A moment. I’m fine.”

“You’re sure?”

She nodded, straightened, pointed at the suitcase: it rolled to attention. “In a way, prey are lucky. Running for your life instead of running for your dinner.” A weak smile. “Better motivation, right?”

I’d checked the logs, of course. The gremlin had charged through the gate like some monstrous mutant phage. It had wobbled—perfectly reflective, like shuddering mercury—extruding and resorbing a thousand needle-like projections as if trying them on for size: twenty-centimeter stilettos to pin your hand to the bulkhead, thousand-meter javelins that could puncture a moon.

It had sent two of them after us.

We’d been almost thirty lightsecs away by then. We should have been untouchable. One missile went wide and fell astern; but the other flew straight for our tailpipe, closing at a crawl but closing. Chimp crunched numbers and bent our wormhole a smidge to the left—just a fraction of a fraction of a degree but enough to push those stress contours out past the hardlined channels. Rock had cracked, split under the torque. Once you’ve gone relativistic the most infinitesimal change in bearing can break you apart; Eri was bleeding from self-inflicted wounds before that javelin even caught up with us. Even then it wasn’t quite enough; it grazed us in passing, boiled away and left a five-kilometer scar along our starboard flank.

I’d been blissfully undead for centuries to either side. Lian Wei had been right there, watching it all happen.

“So, that thing that took a shot at us—you know it doesn’t really change anything, right?”

She looked at me. “How’s that?”

“I mean we’ve still got the edge. Even Angryblob couldn’t get to us until we booted the gate from this end. By the time they charge up and charge through we’re ten million kliks away.”

The suitcase followed her into the corridor. I followed them both. Behind us, the hatch sealed with a soft hiss; behind that, Lian’s abandoned quarters began shutting down for the long sleep.

“And yeah, that thing really put the fear of God into us, and something could come through with beamed weapons or faster missiles. Anything’s possible. But think about this: over a hundred thousand builds and we’ve only been hit once, and even then we got away pretty much unscathed. You gotta admit those are pretty good odds.”

“How do you know it was just once?”

“The logs, of course.”

“And you trust them.”

“Li. They’re the logs.”

“And they can’t be corroborated because Chimp handles most builds on his own.”

“You’re saying he—why would he doctor the record?”

“Because he’s programmed for the good of the mission, and the mission might suffer if we spent every waking hour wondering if something was going to kill us. Maybe we’ve almost died in our sleep a thousand times and he’s rewriting history to protect morale.”

“Li, he saved our lives. You know that better than anyone. And even if you’re right—even if we’ve been under the gun more than the logs show—that’s just that many more times he saved us.”

A bank of lockers rounded into view, a gunmetal honeycomb stretching deck-to-ceiling along the curve of the corridor.

“So you trust him,” Lian said. “Now there’s a surprise.”

“Of course I do.”

“Even though he could be lying to us.” She hefted her luggage from the floor with a soft grunt and slotted it into an empty locker at waist height. Sealed it, locked it with her thumb.

“You said it yourself. He’s programmed for the good of the mission.” From behind the locker door, the faintest hiss of air being sucked away. “You know he’d die for us.”

“Probably.” She turned back down the corridor.

“Hey, we’re still alive.” I fell in beside her again. “He’s obviously doing something right.”

We walked in silence for a bit, passed strange graffiti splashed across the bulkhead.

“Painters are at it again, I see,” Lian said.

I nodded. “Still don’t know who those fuckers are.” Other than some tribe who’d taken to tagging the walls with weird-ass hieroglyphs. Chimp wouldn’t tell us who. Maybe they’d told him to keep their identity hush-hush. No Painter had ever passed through the tribe during any of Chimp’s cultural exchanges—or at least, no one who admitted to being one—which I’d always found a bit suspicious.

“I’m probably overthinking it,” Lian said, and it took me a second to remember: Chimp. Gremlins. Prey.

I took the concession, gave a little back: “I’d say you’ve got cause. I’d have been crapping my pants if I’d been on

deck when all that went down.”

“Sunday…” She stopped.

“Yeah?”

“Just—thanks.”

“For?”

“For checking in. No one else would’ve even thought about it.”

“’Spores. You know.” I shrugged. “We’re designed for solitude.”

“Yeah.” She laid a hand on my shoulder. “That’s kind of my point.”