Rifters 4 - Blindsight (30 page)

I couldn't. "How do you mean?"

He sighed. "Biochemistry is a tradeoff. The faster you synthesize ATP, the more expensive each molecule becomes. It turns out scramblers are a lot more energy-efficient at making it than we are. They're just extremely slow at it, which might not be a big drawback for something that spends most of its time inactive.
Rorschach—
whatever
Rorschach
started out as— could have drifted for millennia before it washed up here. That's a lot of time to build up an energy reserve for bouts of high activity, and once you've laid the groundwork glycolysis is
explosive
. Two-thousand-fold boost, and no oxygen demand."

"Scramblers
sprint
. Their whole lives."

"They may come preloaded with ATP and burn it off throughout their lifespan."

"How long would that be?"

"Good question," he admitted. "Live fast, die young. If they ration it out, stay dormant most of the time—who knows?"

"Huh." The free-floating scrambler had drifted away from the center of its pen. One extended arm held a wall at bay; the others continued their hypnotic swaying.

I remembered other arms, their motion not so gentle.

"Amanda and I chased one into a crowd. It—"

Cunningham was back at his samples. "I saw the record."

"They tore it to pieces."

"Uh huh."

"Any idea why?"

He shrugged. "Bates thought there might be some kind of civil war going on down there."

"What do you think?"

"I don't know. Maybe it's right, or maybe scramblers are ritual cannibals, or—they're
aliens
, Keeton. What do you want from me?"

"But they're not
really
aliens. At least not intelligent ones.
War
implies intelligence."

"Ants wage war all the time. Proves nothing except that they're alive."

"Are
scramblers
even alive?" I asked.

"What kind of question is that?"

"You think
Rorschach
grows them on some kind of assembly line. You can't find any genes. Maybe they're just biomechanical machines."

"That's what life
is
, Keeton. That's what
you
are." Another hit of nicotine, another storm of numbers, another sample. "Life isn't either/or. It's a matter of degree."

"What I'm asking is, are they
natural
? Could they be constructs?"

"Is a termite mound a construct? Beaver dam? Space ship? Of course. Were they built by naturally-evolved organisms, acting naturally? They were. So tell me how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything
but
natural?"

I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. "You know what I mean."

"It's a meaningless question. Get your head out of the Twentieth Century."

I gave up. After a few seconds Cunningham seemed to notice the silence. He withdrew his consciousness from the machinery and looked around with fleshly eyes, as if searching for some mosquito that had mysteriously stopped whining.

"What's your problem with me?" I asked. Stupid question, obvious question. Unworthy of any synthesist to be so, so
direct
.

His eyes glittered in that dead face. "Processing without comprehension. That's what you do, isn't it?"

"That's a colossal oversimplification."

"Mmm." Cunningham nodded. "Then why can't you seem to
comprehend
how pointless it is to keep peeking over our shoulders and writing home to our masters?"

"Someone has to keep Earth in the loop."

"Seven months each way. Long loop."

"Still."

"We're on our own out here, Keeton.
You're
on your own. The game's going to be long over before our masters even know it's started." He sucked smoke. "Or perhaps not. Perhaps you're talking to someone closer, hmm? That it? Is the Fourth Wave telling you what to do?"

"There is no Fourth Wave. Not that anyone's told me, anyway."

"Probably not. They'd never risk
their
lives out here, would they? Too dangerous even to hang back and watch from a distance. That's why they built
us
."

"We're all self-made. Nobody forced you to get the rewire."

"No, nobody
forced
me to get the rewire. I could have just let them cut out my brain and pack it into Heaven, couldn't I? That's the
choice
we have. We can be utterly useless, or we can try and compete against the vampires and the constructs and the AIs. And perhaps
you
could tell me how to do that without turning into a—an utter freak."

So much in the voice. Nothing at all on the face. I said nothing.

"See what I mean? No comprehension." He managed a tight smile. "So I'll answer your questions. I'll delay my own work and hold your hand because Sarasti's told us to. I guess that superior vampire mind sees some legitimate reason to indulge your constant ankle-nipping, and it's in charge so I'll play along. But I'm not nearly that smart, so you'll forgive me if it all seems a bit naff."

"I'm just—"

"You're just doing your job. I know. But I don't like being
played
, Keeton. And that's what your job
is
."

*

Even back on Earth, Robert Cunningham had barely disguised his opinion of the ship's
commissar
. It had been obvious even to the topologically blind.

I'd always had a hard time imagining the man. It wasn't just his expressionless face. Sometimes, not even the subtler things behind would show up in his topology. Perhaps he repressed them deliberately, resenting the presence of this mole among the crew.

It would hardly have been the first time I'd encountered such a reaction. Everyone resented me to some extent. Oh, they liked me well enough, or thought they did. They tolerated my intrusions, and cooperated, and gave away far more than they thought they did.

But beneath Szpindel's gruff camaraderie, beneath James's patient explanations—there was no real respect. How could there be? These people were the bleeding edge, the incandescent apex of hominid achievement. They were trusted with the fate of the world. I was just a tattletale for small minds back home. Not even that much, when home receded too deeply into the distance. Superfluous mass. Couldn't be helped. No use getting bothered over it.

Still, Szpindel had only coined
commissar
half-jokingly. Cunningham
believed
it, and didn't laugh. And while I'd encountered many others like him over the years, those had only
tried
to hide themselves from sight. Cunningham was the first who seemed to succeed.

I tried to build the relationship all the way through training, tried to find the missing pieces. I watched him working the simulator's teleops one day, exercising the shiny new interfaces that spread him through walls and wires. He was practicing his surgical skills on some hypothetical alien the computer had conjured up to test his technique. Sensors and jointed teleops sprouted like the legs of an enormous spider crab from an overhead mount. Spirit-possessed, they dipped and weaved around some semiplausible holographic creature. Cunningham's own body merely trembled slightly, a cigarette jiggling at the corner of its mouth.

I waited for him to take a break. Eventually the tension ebbed from his shoulders. His vicarious limbs relaxed.

"So." I tapped my temple. "Why'd
you
do it?"

He didn't turn. Above the dissection, sensors swiveled and stared back like dismembered eyestalks.
That
was the center of Cunningham's awareness right now, not this nicotine-stained body in front of me.
Those
were his eyes, or his tongue, or whatever unimaginable bastard-senses he used to parse what the machines sent him. Those clusters aimed back at me, at
us
—and if Robert Cunningham still possessed anything that might be called vision, he was watching himself from eyes two meters outside his own skull.

"Do what, exactly?" he said at last. "The enhancements?"

Enhancements
. As though he'd upgraded his wardrobe instead of ripping out his senses and grafting new ones into the wounds.

I nodded.

"It's vital to keep current," he said. "If you don't reconfigure you can't retrain. If you don’t retrain you're obsolete inside a month, and then you're not much good for anything except Heaven or dictation."

I ignored the jibe. "Pretty radical transformation, though."

"Not these days."

"Didn't it
change
you?"

His body dragged on the cigarette. Targeted ventilation sucked away the smoke before it reached me. "That's the whole point."

"Surely you were affected personally, though. Surely—"

"Ah." He nodded; at the far end of shared motor nerves, teleops jiggled in sympathy. "Change the eyes that look at the world, change the
me
does the looking?"

"Something like that."

Now he was watching me with fleshly eyes. Across the membrane those snakes and eyestalks returned to their work on the virtual carcass, as if deciding they'd wasted enough time on pointless distractions. I wondered which body he was in now.

"I'm surprised you'd have to ask," the meat one said. "Doesn't my body language tell you everything? Aren't jargonauts supposed to read minds?"

He was right, of course. I wasn't interested in Cunningham's
words
; those were just the carrier wave. He couldn't hear the
real
conversation we were having. All his angles and surfaces spoke volumes, and although their voices were strangely fuzzed with feedback and distortion I knew I'd be able to understand them eventually. I only had to keep him talking.

But Jukka Sarasti chose that moment to wander past and surgically trash my best-laid plans.

"Siri's best in his field," he remarked. "But not when it gets too close to home."

Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above him when he shows no mercy to what is under him?

—
Pierre Troubetzkoy

"The thing is," Chelsea said, "this whole first-person thing takes
effort
. You have to care enough to
try
, you know? I've been working my ass off on this relationship, I've been working so hard, but you just don't seem to
care
..."

She thought she was breaking the news. She thought I hadn't seen it coming, because I hadn't said anything. I'd probably seen it before she had. I hadn't said anything because I'd been scared of giving her an opening.

I felt sick to my stomach.

"I care about you," I said.

"As much as you could care about anything," she admitted. "But you—I mean, sometimes you're fine, Cygnus, sometimes you're wonderful to be around but whenever anything gets the least bit intense you just go away and leave this, this
battle computer
running your body and I just can't
deal
with it any more..."

I stared at the butterfly on the back of her hand. Its wings flexed and folded, lazy and iridescent. I wondered how many of those tattoos she had; I'd seen five of them on different body parts, albeit only one at a time. I thought about asking her, but this didn't seem like the right moment.

"You can be so—so brutal sometimes," she was saying. "I know you don't mean to be, but... I don't know. Maybe I'm your pressure-release valve, or something. Maybe you have to submerge yourself so much on the job that everything just, just builds up and you need some kind of punching bag. Maybe that's why you say the things you do."

She was waiting for me to say something now. "I've been honest," I said.

"Yeah. Pathologically. Have you ever had a negative thought that you
haven't
said out loud?" Her voice trembled but her eyes—for once— stayed dry. "I guess it's as much my fault as yours. Maybe more. I could tell you were—disconnected, from the day we met. I guess on some level I always saw it coming."

"Why even try, then? If you knew we were just going to crash and burn like this?"

"Oh, Cygnus. Aren't you the one who says that
everyone
crashes and burns eventually? Aren't you the one who says it
never
lasts?"

Mom and Dad lasted
.
Longer than this, anyway
.

I frowned, astonished that I'd even let the thought form in my head. Chelse read the silence as a wounded one. "I guess—maybe I thought I could help, you know? Help fix whatever made you so—so
angry
all the time."

The butterfly was starting to fade. I'd never seen that happen before.

"Do you understand what I'm saying?" she asked.

"Sure. I'm a fixer-upper."

"Siri, you wouldn't even get a tweak when I offered. You were so scared of being
manipulated
you wouldn't even try a basic cascade. You're the one guy I've met who might be truly, eternally unfixable. I dunno. Maybe that's even something to be proud of."

I opened my mouth, and closed it.

She gave me a sad smile. "Nothing, Siri? Nothing at all? There was a time you always knew exactly what to say." She looked back at some earlier version of me. "Now I wonder if you ever actually meant any of it."

"That's not fair."

"No." She pursed her lips. "No, it isn't. That's not really what I'm trying to say. I guess...it's not so much that you don't
mean
any of it. It's more like you don't know what any of it
means
."

The color was gone from the wings. The butterfly was a delicate charcoal dusting, almost motionless.

"I'll do it now," I said. "I'll get the tweaks. If it's that important to you. I'll do it now."

"It's too late, Siri. I'm used up."

Maybe she wanted me to call her back. All these words ending in question marks, all these significant silences. Maybe she was giving me the opportunity to plead my case, to beg for another chance. Maybe she wanted a reason to change her mind.