“We are down to fumes felching Bicams better know what they’re doing because even our chemical just ran dry,” Sengupta reported. “You want this ship to go anywhere now you gotta get out and push.”
“Not a problem,” Moore said. “We’re sitting on the biggest charger in the solar system.”
Lianna looked at Brüks and tried to smile.
“Welcome to Icarus.”
Of course, no one was going to fuck on a first date.
The sky in the Hub began to fill with handshakes and head shots: Icarus and the Crown introducing each other, coming to terms, agreeing that this little rendezvous was an intimate affair that really didn’t warrant the involvement of Earthbound engineers. Sengupta whispered sweet nothings to the station’s onboard, coaxed it into turning on the lights, booting up life-support, maybe sharing a few pages from its diary.
Naked bodies floated up from the lower hemisphere. Eulali and one of the other Bicamerals (Haina, Brüks thought), purged of hostile microbes and decompressed at last, slumming it with the baselines. Nobody seemed to think it worthy of comment.
“No one since the last on-site op check.” Sengupta jabbed one finger at a window full of alphanumeric gibberish. “Nobody came or went any time in the last eighteen months. Boosters fired a hundred ninety-two days ago to stabilize the orbit but nothing else.”
Sudden swift movement from the corners of both eyes: the undead in formation, shooting single-file through the hatch like raptors diving for a kill. They bounced off the sky, swung around the forward ladder, disappeared through the ceiling fast and fluid as barracuda.
So much for the pack, Brüks thought nervously. What about the Alph—and didn’t finish the question, because the flesh crawling up his backbone had just given him the answer.
She was right behind him. For all he knew, she always had been.
The Bicamerals didn’t seem to notice. They hadn’t taken their eyes off tactical since they’d arrived. Brüks swallowed and forced his gaze left. He forced himself to turn. He resisted the urge to lower his gaze as Valerie came into view, forced himself to look her right in the eyes. They shone back at him. He gritted his teeth and thought very hard about leucophores and thin-film optics and finally realized: She’s not even looking at me.
She wasn’t. Those bright monster eyes burned a path right past him to the dome behind, shifted and jiggled in microscopic increments to this datum or that image, jittered fast as the eyes of zombies and with twice the intensity. Brüks could almost see the brain sparking behind those lenses, the sheets of electricity soaking up information faster than fiber. It had all of them now, monks and monsters and minions alike, all of them finally brought together under a tiny metal sky crowded with the machinery of thought: boot sequences, diagnostics, the sprawling multidimensional vistas of a thousand mechanical senses. It threatened to overflow the hemisphere entirely, a ceaseless flickering infostorm that breached the equator and started spilling aft as Brüks watched.
Crude as papyrus, he realized. All these dimensions, squashed flat and pasted across physical space: it was a medium for cavemen and cockroaches, not these cognitive giants looming on all sides. Why were they even here? Why come together in the land of the blind when ConSensus went on forever, arrayed endless intelligence throughout the infinite space within their own heads? Why settle for eyes of jelly when invisible signals could reach through bone and brain and doodle on the very synapses themsel—
Shit, he thought.
All that smart paint, so ubiquitous throughout the ship. He’d just assumed it was for ambient lighting, and a backup for backups should the implants fail in one of these overclocked brains. But now it seemed to be their preferred interface: crude, pointillist, extrinsic. Not completely unhackable, perhaps—but at least any intrusions would take place outside the head, would compromise the mech and not the meat. At least no alien, imagined or otherwise, would be rewriting the thoughts in the heads of the hive.
A few years to settle in, Moore had said. A few years for parties unknown to study new and unfamiliar technology, to infer the nature of the softer things behind it. Years to build whatever gears and interfaces an unlimited energy source could provide, and sit back, and wait for the owners to arrive. All that time for anything in there to figure out how to get in here.
They’re afraid, Brüks realized, and then:
Shit, they’re afraid?
Sengupta threw a row of camera feeds across the dome. Holds and service crawlways, mainly: tanks for the storage of programmable matter, warrens of tunnels where robots on rails slid along on endless missions of repair and resupply. Habs embedded here and there like lymph nodes, vacuoles to be grudgingly pumped full of warmth and atmosphere on those rare occasions when visitors came calling—but barren, uninviting, barely big enough to stand erect even if gravity had been an option. Icarus was an ungracious host, resentful of any parasites that sought to take up residence in her gut.
Something had done that anyway.
Sengupta grabbed that window and stretched it across a fifth of the dome: AUX/RECOMP according to the feed, a cylindrical compartment with another cylinder—segmented, ribbed, studded with conduits and access panels and eruptions of high-voltage cabling—running through its center like a metal trachea. The view brightened as they watched. Fitful sparks ignited along the walls, caught steady, dimmed to a soft lemon glow that spread across painted strips of bulkhead. Wisps of frozen vapor swirled in weightless arabesques before some reawakened ventilator sucked them away.
Brüks had educated himself on the way down. He knew what he’d find if he were to cut that massive windpipe down the middle. At one end a great black compound eye, a honeycomb cluster of gamma-ray lasers aimed along the lumen of the tube. Pumps and field coils encircled that space at regular intervals: superconductors, ultrarefrigeration pipes to bring some hypothetical vacuum down to a hairbreadth of absolute zero. Matter took on strange forms inside that chamber. Atoms would lie down, forget about Brown and entropy, take a message from the second law of thermodynamics and promise to get back to it later. They would line up head to toe and lock into place as a single uniform substrate. A trillion atoms would condense into one vast entity: a blank slate, waiting for energy and information to turn it into something new.
Theseus had fed from something a lot like this, part of the same circuit in fact. Maybe it was feeding still. And down at the far end of AUX/RECOMP, past the lasers and the magnets and the microchannel plate traps, Brüks could see something else, something—
Wrong.
That was all he could tell, at first: something just a little bit off about the far end of the compiler. It took a few moments to notice the service port just slightly ajar, the stain leaking from its edges. His brain shuffled through a thousand cue cards and tried spilled paint on for size, but that didn’t really fit. It looked too thick, too blobby for the smart stuff; and he’d seen no other surface painted that oily shade of gray on any of the other feeds.
Then someone zoomed the view and a whole new set of cues clicked into place.
Those branching, filigreed edges: like rootlets, like dendrites growing along the machinery.