Where was I when the lights came down? It had been scarcely two months since Helen had disappeared under the cowl. Two months by our reckoning, at least.
From her perspective it could have been a day or a decade; the Virtually Omnipotent set their subjective clocks along with everything else. She wasn't coming back. She would only deign to see her husband under conditions that amounted to a slap in the face. He didn't complain. He visited as often as she would allow: twice a week, then once. Then every two. Their marriage decayed with the exponential determinism of a radioactive isotope and still he sought her out, and accepted her conditions.
On the day the lights came down, I had joined him at my mother's side. It was a special occasion, the last time we would ever see her in the flesh. For two months her body had lain in state along with five hundred other new ascendants on the ward, open for viewing by the next of kin.
The interface was no more real than it would ever be, of course; the body could not talk to us. But at least it was there , its flesh warm, the sheets clean and straight. Helen's lower face was still visible below the cowl, though eyes and ears were helmeted. We could touch her. My father often did. Perhaps some distant part of her still felt it. But eventually someone has to close the casket and dispose of the remains.
Jim took her hand one more time. She would still be available in her world, on her terms, but later this day the body would be packed into storage facilities crowded far too efficiently for flesh and blood visitors.
Everything was reversible, we were told. There were rumors of dismemberment, of nonessential body parts hewn away over time according to some optimum-packing algorithm. Perhaps Helen would be a torso this time next year, a disembodied head the year after.
Perhaps her chassis would be stripped down to the brain before we'd even left the building, awaiting only that final technological breakthrough that would herald the arrival of the Great Digital Upload. Rumors, as I say. I personally didn't know of anyone who'd come back after ascending, but then why would anyone want to?
Not even Lucifer left Heaven until he was pushed. Whatever he knew, he'd obviously decided its disclosure wouldn't have changed Helen's mind. That would have been enough for him.
We donned the hoods that served as day passes for the Unwired, and we met my mother in the spartan visiting room she imagined for these visits. She'd built no windows into the world she occupied, no hint of whatever utopian environment she'd constructed for herself. She hadn't even opted for one of the prefab visiting environments designed to minimize dissonance among visitors. We found ourselves in a featureless beige sphere five meters across.
There was nothing in there but her. Maybe not so far removed from her vision of utopia after all , I thought. My father smiled. You came! She always used my name. I don't think she ever called me son. I do wish you could join us. Jim smiled. I know she was special to you. A startling possibility stopped me in mid-sentence: maybe I hadn't actually told them. I would have given them a fucking lifetime. I unplugged myself back to the ward, looked from the corpse on the bed to my blind and catatonic father in his couch, murmuring sweet nothings into the datastream.
Let them perform for each other. Let them formalize and finalize their so-called relationship in whatever way they saw fit. Maybe, just once, they could even bring themselves to be honest, there in that other world where everything else was a lie. I felt no desire to bear witness either way.
But of course I had to go back in for my own formalities. I adopted my role in the familial set-piece one last time, partook of the usual lies. We all agreed that this wasn't going to change anything, and nobody deviated enough from the script to call anyone else a liar on that account. I even suppressed my gag reflex long enough to give her a hug.
Jim had his inhaler in hand as we emerged from the darkness. I hoped, without much hope, that he'd throw it into the garbage receptacle as we passed through the lobby. But he raised it to his mouth and took another hit of vassopressin, that he would never be tempted. Fidelity in an aerosol. You can't imprint on someone who isn't even there, no matter how many hormones you snort. Jim said nothing. We passed beneath the muzzles of sentries panning for infiltrating Realists.
She'd be happy if you did. It never did. He smiled a bit at that. I'm comfortable with it. Easy for him to say. Easy even to accept the hurt she'd inflicted on him all these years. Do you think it's easy when you disappear for months on end? Do you think it's easy always wondering who you're with and what you're doing and if you're even alive? Do you think it's easy raising a child like that on your own? She'd blamed him for everything, but he bore it gracefully because he knew it was all a lie.
He knew he was only the pretense. She wasn't leaving because he was AWOL, or unfaithful. Her departure had nothing to do with him at all. It was me. Helen had left the world because she couldn't stand to look at the thing who'd replaced her son. The stars were falling. The Zodiac had rearranged itself into a precise grid of bright points with luminous tails.
It was as though the whole planet had been caught in some great closing net, the knots of its mesh aglow with St. Elmo's fire. It was beautiful. It was terrifying. I looked away to recalibrate my distance vision, to give this ill-behaved hallucination a chance to vanish gracefully before I set my empirical gaze to high-beam.
I saw a vampire in that moment, a female, walking among us like the archetypal wolf in sheep's clothing. Vampires were uncommon creatures at street level. I'd never seen one in the flesh before.
She had just stepped onto the street from the building across the way. She stood a head taller than the rest of us, her eyes shining yellow and bright as a cat's in the deepening dark. She realized, as I watched, that something was amiss. Totally indifferent to the fact that the world had just turned inside-out. It was Greenwich Mean Time, February 13, They clenched around the world like a fist, each black as the inside of an event horizon until those last bright moments when they all burned together.
They screamed as they died. Every radio up to geostat groaned in unison, every infrared telescope went briefly snowblind. Ashes stained the sky for weeks afterwards; mesospheric clouds, high above the jet stream, turned to glowing rust with every sunrise. The objects, apparently, consisted largely of iron. Nobody ever knew what to make of that. For perhaps the first time in history, the world knew before being told : if you'd seen the sky, you had the scoop.
The usual arbiters of newsworthiness, stripped of their accustomed role in filtering reality, had to be content with merely labeling it. It took them ninety minutes to agree on Fireflies. A half hour after that, the first Fourier transforms appeared in the noosphere; to no one's great surprise, the Fireflies had not wasted their dying breaths on static. There was pattern embedded in that terminal chorus, some cryptic intelligence that resisted all earthly analysis.
The experts, rigorously empirical, refused to speculate: they only admitted that the Fireflies had said something. They didn't know what. Everyone else did. How else would you explain 65, probes evenly dispersed along a lat-long grid that barely left any square meter of planetary surface unexposed?
Obviously the Flies had taken our picture. The whole world had been caught with its pants down in panoramic composite freeze-frame. My father might have known someone who might have known. But by then he'd long since disappeared, as he always did during times of hemispheric crisis. Whatever he knew or didn't, he left me to find my own answers with everyone else. There was no shortage of perspectives.
The noosphere seethed with scenarios ranging from utopian to apocalyptic. The Fireflies had seeded lethal germs through the jet stream. The Fireflies had been on a nature safari. The Icarus Array was being retooled to power a doomsday weapon against the aliens. The Icarus Array had already been destroyed. We had decades to react; anything from another solar system would have to obey the lightspeed limit like everyone else. We had days to live; organic warships had just crossed the asteroid belt and would be fumigating the planet within a week.
Like everyone else, I bore witness to lurid speculations and talking heads. I visited blathernodes, soaked myself in other people's opinions. That was nothing new, as far as it went; I'd spent my whole life as a sort of alien ethologist in my own right, watching the world behave, gleaning patterns and protocols, learning the rules that allowed me to infiltrate human society. It had always worked before.
Somehow, though, the presence of real aliens had changed the dynamics of the equation. Mere observation didn't satisfy any more. It was as though the presence of this new outgroup had forced me back into the clade whether I liked it or not; the distance between myself and the world suddenly seemed forced and faintly ridiculous. Yet I couldn't, for my life, figure out how to let it go. Chelsea had always said that telepresence emptied the Humanity from Human interaction.
But it's not. It's just shadows on the cave wall. I mean, sure, the shadows come in three-dee color with force-feedback tactile interactivity. They're good enough to fool the civilized brain. But your gut knows those aren't people , even if it can't put its finger on how it knows. They just don't feel real. Know what I mean? I didn't. Back then I'd had no clue what she was talking about.
But now we were all cavemen again, huddling beneath some overhang while lightning split the heavens and vast formless monsters, barely glimpsed in bright strobe-frozen instants, roared and clashed in the darkness on all sides. There was no comfort in solitude.
You couldn't get it from interactive shadows. You needed someone real at your side, someone to hold on to, someone to share your airspace along with your fear and hope and uncertainty. I imagined the presence of companions who wouldn't vanish the moment I unplugged. But Chelsea was gone, and Pag in her wake.
Flesh and blood had its own relationship to reality: necessary, but not sufficient. Watching the world from a distance, it occurred to me at last: I knew exactly what Chelsea had meant, with her Luddite ramblings about desaturated Humanity and the colorless interactions of virtual space. I'd known all along. I'd just never been able to see how it was any different from real life. Imagine you are a machine.
Yes, I know. But imagine you're a different kind of machine, one built from metal and plastic and designed not by blind, haphazard natural selection but by engineers and astrophysicists with their eyes fixed firmly on specific goals. Imagine that your purpose is not to replicate, or even to survive, but to gather information. I can imagine that easily. It is in fact a much simpler impersonation than the kind I'm usually called on to perform.
I coast through the abyss on the colder side of Neptune's orbit. Most of the time I exist only as an absence, to any observer on the visible spectrum: a moving, asymmetrical silhouette blocking the stars.
But occasionally, during my slow endless spin, I glint with dim hints of reflected starlight. If you catch me in those moments you might infer something of my true nature: a segmented creature with foil skin, bristling with joints and dishes and spindly antennae. Here and there a whisper of accumulated frost clings to a joint or seam, some frozen wisp of gas encountered in Jupiter space perhaps. Now, a breath away from Absolute Zero, they might shatter at a photon's touch. My heart is warm, at least.
A tiny nuclear fire burns in my thorax, leaves me indifferent to the cold outside. It won't go out for a thousand years, barring some catastrophic accident; for a thousand years, I will listen for faint voices from Mission Control and do everything they tell me to.
So far they have told me to study comets. Every instruction I have ever received has been a precise and unambiguous elaboration on that one overriding reason for my existence. Which is why these latest instructions are so puzzling, for they make no sense at all. The frequency is wrong. The signal strength is wrong. I cannot even understand the handshaking protocols. I request clarification.
The response arrives almost a thousand minutes later, and it is an unprecedented mix of orders and requests for information. I answer as best I can: yes, this is the bearing at which signal strength was greatest. No, it is not the usual bearing for Mission Control. Yes, I can retransmit: here it is, all over again. Yes, I will go into standby mode. I await further instructions. They arrive minutes later, and they tell me to stop studying comets immediately.
Upon encountering any transmission resembling the one which confused me, I am to fix upon the bearing of maximal signal strength and derive a series of parameter values. I am also instructed to retransmit the signal to Mission Control. I do as I'm told. For a long time I hear nothing, but I am infinitely patient and incapable of boredom.
Eventually a fleeting, familiar signal brushes against my afferent array. I reacquire and track it to source, which I am well-equipped to describe: a trans-Neptunian comet in the Kuiper Belt, approximately two hundred kilometers in diameter. It is sweeping a cm tightbeam radio wave across the heavens with a periodicity of 4. This beam does not intersect Mission Control's coordinates at any point. It appears to be directed at a different target entirely. It takes much longer than usual for Mission Control to respond to this information.
When it does, it tells me to change course. Mission Control informs me that henceforth my new destination is to be referred to as Burns-Caulfield. Given current fuel and inertial constraints I will not reach it in less than thirty-nine years. I am to watch nothing else in the meantime. I'd been liaising for a team at the Kurzweil Institute, a fractured group of cutting-edge savants convinced they were on the verge of solving the quantum-glial paradox.
That particular log-jam had stalled AI for decades; once broken, the experts promised we'd be eighteen months away from the first personality upload and only two years from reliable Human-consciousness emulation in a software environment.
It would spell the end of corporeal history, usher in a Singularity that had been waiting impatiently in the wings for nigh on fifty years. Two months after Firefall, the Institute cancelled my contract. I was actually surprised it had taken them so long. It had cost us so much, this overnight inversion of global priorities, these breakneck measures making up for lost initiative.
Not even our shiny new post-scarcity economy could withstand such a seismic shift without lurching towards bankruptcy. Installations in deep space, long since imagined secure by virtue of their remoteness, were suddenly vulnerable for exactly the same reason. Lagrange habitats had to be refitted for defense against an unknown enemy. Commercial ships on the Martian Loop were conscripted, weaponised, and reassigned; some secured the high ground over Mars while others fell sunward to guard the Icarus Array.
It didn't matter that the Fireflies hadn't fired a shot at any of these targets. We simply couldn't afford the risk. We were all in it together, of course, desperate to regain some hypothetical upper hand by any means necessary. Kings and corporations scribbled IOUs on the backs of napkins and promised to sort everything out once the heat was off. In the meantime, the prospect of Utopia in two years took a back seat to the shadow of Armageddon reaching back from next Tuesday.
The Kurzweil Institute, like everyone else, suddenly had other things to worry about. So I returned to my apartment, split a bulb of Glenfiddich, and arrayed virtual windows like daisy petals in my head. Everyone Icons debated on all sides, serving up leftovers two weeks past their expiry date:. Disgraceful breakdown of global security. No harm done. Comsats annihilated. Thousands dead. Random collisions. Accidental deaths. We should have seen them coming.
Deep space. Inverse square. Do the math. They were stealthed! We were raped! Jesus Christ. They just took our picture. Why the silence? Moon's fine. Mars's fine. Where are they?
Why haven't they made contact? Nothing's touched the O'Neills. Technology Implies Belligerence! Are they coming back? Nothing attacked us. Nothing invaded. So far. But where are they? Jim Moore Voice Only. The text window blossomed directly in my line of sight, eclipsing the debate.
I read it twice. I tried to remember the last time he'd called from the field, and couldn't. I muted the other windows. Still wondering whether we should be celebrating or crapping our pants. He didn't answer immediately. They're not telling us anything at ground level. It was a rhetorical request. His silence was hardly necessary to make the point. Icarus's fine. He seemed to be weighing his words. There's no particle trail as long as it stays offstream, and it would be buried in solar glare unless someone knew where to search.
It was my turn to fall silent. This conversation felt suddenly wrong. Because when my father went on the job, he went dark. He never called his family.
Because even when my father came off the job, he never talked about it. It wouldn't matter whether the Icarus Array was still online or whether it had been shredded and thrown into the sun like a thousand kilometers of torn origami; he wouldn't tell either tale unless an official announcement had been made. Icarus was overdue for a visit anyway. You don't swap out your whole grid without at least dropping in and kicking the new tires first. Nearly three seconds to respond.
Isn't this a security breach? Radio bounced back and forth. I wanted very much for them to pick someone else. But he'd seen it coming, and preempted me before my words could cross the distance: "It's not a slap at your abilities and you know it.
You're simply the most qualified, and the work is vital. He wouldn't want to keep me away from some theoretical gig in a WestHem lab. They found something.
From the Kuiper. We traced the bearing. The encryption seems similar, but we can't even be sure of that. All we have is the location. We'd never gone to the Kuiper before. It had been decades since we'd even sent robots. Not that we lacked the capacity. We just hadn't bothered; everything we needed was so much closer to home. The Interplanetary Age had stagnated at the asteroids. But now something lurked at the furthest edge of our backyard, calling into the void.
Maybe it was talking to some other solar system. Maybe it was talking to something closer, something en route. But we can't wait for them to report back. The follow-up's been fast-tracked; updates can be sent en route. He gave me a few extra seconds to digest that. When I still didn't speak, he said, "You have to understand. Our only edge is that as far as we know, Burns-Caulfield doesn't know we're on to it. We have to get as much as we can in whatever window of opportunity that grants us.
But Burns-Caulfield had hidden itself. Burns-Caulfield might not welcome a forced introduction. The timelag seemed to say Mars. You won't. He didn't have to answer. I didn't have to ask. At these kind of stakes, mission-critical elements didn't get the luxury of choice.
Both can be subverted with the right neurochemical keys. We let the vacuum between us speak for a while. In a second. I just wanted to give you the heads-up. Where are you? Are you coming back? This is what my father could not unmake. This is what I am:. I am the bridge between the bleeding edge and the dead center.
I stand between the Wizard of Oz and the man behind the curtain. I am the curtain. I am not an entirely new breed. My roots reach back to the dawn of civilization but those precursors served a different function, a less honorable one. They only greased the wheels of social stability; they would sugarcoat unpleasant truths, or inflate imaginary bogeymen for political expedience. They were vital enough in their way.
Not even the most heavily-armed police state can exert brute force on all of its citizens all of the time. Meme management is so much subtler; the rose-tinted refraction of perceived reality, the contagious fear of threatening alternatives. There have always been those tasked with the rotation of informational topologies, but throughout most of history they had little to do with increasing its clarity.
The new Millennium changed all that. We've surpassed ourselves now, we're exploring terrain beyond the limits of merely human understanding. Sometimes its contours, even in conventional space, are just too intricate for our brains to track; other times its very axes extend into dimensions inconceivable to minds built to fuck and fight on some prehistoric grassland. So many things constrain us, from so many directions. The most altruistic and sustainable philosophies fail before the brute brain-stem imperative of self-interest.
Subtle and elegant equations predict the behavior of the quantum world, but none can explain it. After four thousand years we can't even prove that reality exists beyond the mind of the first-person dreamer. We have such need of intellects greater than our own. But we're not very good at building them. The forced matings of minds and electrons succeed and fail with equal spectacle.
Our hybrids become as brilliant as savants, and as autistic. We graft people to prosthetics, make their overloaded motor strips juggle meat and machinery, and shake our heads when their fingers twitch and their tongues stutter. And when your surpassing creations find the answers you asked for, you can't understand their analysis and you can't verify their answers. You hire people like me; the crossbred progeny of profilers and proof assistants and information theorists.
In formal settings you'd call me Synthesist. On the street you call me jargonaut or poppy. If you're one of those savants whose hard-won truths are being bastardized and lobotomized for powerful know-nothings interested only in market share, you might call me a mole or a chaperone.
If you're Isaac Szpindel you'd call me commissar , and while the jibe would be a friendly one, it would also be more than that. I've never convinced myself that we made the right choice. I can cite the usual justifications in my sleep, talk endlessly about the rotational topology of information and the irrelevance of semantic comprehension. But after all the words, I'm still not sure. I don't know if anyone else is, either. Maybe it's just some grand consensual con, marks and players all in league.
We won't admit that our creations are beyond us; they may speak in tongues, but our priests can read those signs. Gods leave their algorithms carved into the mountainside but it's just li'l ol' me bringing the tablets down to the masses, and I don't threaten anyone. Maybe the Singularity happened years ago. We just don't want to admit we were left behind. Occasional demons too. The Third Wave, they called us. All in the same boat, driving into the long dark courtesy of a bleeding-edge prototype crash-graduated from the simulators a full eighteen months ahead of schedule.
In a less fearful economy, such violence to the timetable would have bankrupted four countries and fifteen multicorps. The first two waves came out of the gate in even more of a hurry. I didn't find out what had happened to them until thirty minutes before the briefing, when Sarasti released the telemetry into ConSensus.
Then I opened wide; experience flooded up my inlays and spilled across my parietal cortex in glorious high-density fast forward. Even now I can bring those data back, fresh as the day they were recorded.
I'm there. I'm them. I am unmanned. I am disposable. I am souped-up and stripped-down, a telematter drive with a couple of cameras bolted to the front end, pushing gees that would turn meat to jelly. I sprint joyously toward the darkness, my twin brother a stereoscopic hundred klicks to starboard, dual streams of backspat pions boosting us to relativity before poor old Theseus had even crawled past Mars.
But now, six billion kilometers to stern, Mission Control turns off the tap and leaves us coasting. The comet swells in our sights, a frozen enigma sweeping its signal across the sky like a lighthouse beam. We bring rudimentary senses to bear and stare it down on a thousand wavelengths.
We've lived for this moment. We see an erratic wobble that speaks of recent collisions. We see an astronomical impossibility: a comet with a heart of refined iron. Burns-Caufield sings as we glide past.
Not to us; it ignores our passage as it ignored our approach. It sings to someone else entirely. Perhaps we'll meet that audience some day. Perhaps they're waiting in the desolate wastelands ahead of us.
Mission Control flips us onto our backs, keeps us fixed on target past any realistic hope of acquisition. They send last-ditch instructions, squeeze our fading signals for every last bit among the static.
I can sense their frustration, their reluctance to let us go; once or twice, we're even asked if some judicious mix of thrust and gravity might let us linger here a bit longer. But deceleration is for pansies. We're headed for the stars. Bye, Burnsie. Bye, Mission Control. Bye, Sol. See you at heat death. Warily, we close on target. We are weighed down by payloads which make us virtually omniscient. We see on every wavelength, from radio to string. Our autonomous microprobes measure everything our masters anticipated; tiny onboard assembly lines can build tools from the atoms up, to assess the things they did not.
Atoms, scavenged from where we are, join with ions beamed from where we were: thrust and materiel accumulate in our bellies. This extra mass has slowed us, but midpoint braking maneuvers have slowed us even more. The last half of this journey has been a constant fight against momentum from the first.
It is not an efficient way to travel. In less-hurried times we would have built early to some optimal speed, perhaps slung around a convenient planet for a little extra oomph , coasted most of the way. But time is pressing, so we burn at both ends. We must reach our destination; we cannot afford to pass it by, cannot afford the kamikaze exuberance of the first wave.
They merely glimpsed the lay of the land. We must map it down to the motes. We must be more responsible. Now, slowing towards orbit, we see everything they saw and more. We see the scabs, and the impossible iron core. We hear the singing. And there, just beneath the comet's frozen surface, we see structure : an infiltration of architecture into geology. We are not yet close enough to squint, and radar is too long in the tooth for fine detail.
But we are smart, and there are three of us, widely separated in space. Burns-Caulfield stops singing the moment we put our plan into action. In the next instant I go blind. It's a temporary aberration, a reflexive amping of filters to compensate for the overload.
My arrays are back online in seconds, diagnostics green within and without. I reach out to the others, confirm identical experiences, identical recoveries. We are all still fully functional, unless the sudden increase in ambient ion density is some kind of sensory artefact. We are ready to continue our investigation of Burns-Caulfield. The only real problem is that Burns-Caulfield seems to have disappeared Let superfluous deckhands weigh down other ships, if the nonAscendent hordes needed to attach some pretense of usefulness to their lives.
Let them infest vessels driven only by commercial priorities. The only reason we were here was because nobody had yet optimized software for First Contact. Bound past the edge of the solar system, already freighted with the fate of the world, Theseus wasted no mass on self-esteem.
So here we were, rehydrated and squeaky-clean: Isaac Szpindel, to study the aliens. Major Amanda Bates was here to fight, if necessary. And Jukka Sarasti to command us all, to move us like chess pieces on some multidimensional game board that only vampires could see. He'd arrayed us around a conference table that warped gently through the Commons, keeping a discreet and constant distance from the curved deck beneath. The whole drum was furnished in Early Concave, tricked unwary and hung-over brains into thinking they were looking at the world through fisheye lenses.
In deference to the creakiness of the nouveaux undead it spun at a mere fifth of a gee, but it was just warming up. We'd be at half-grav in six hours, stuck there for eighteen out of every twenty-four until the ship decided we were fully recovered. Light sculptures appeared on the tabletop. Szpindel leaned in conspiratorially at my side. If Sarasti heard he didn't show it, not even to me. He pointed to a dark heart at the center of the display, his eyes lost behind black glass.
Infrared emitter, methane class. Our apparent destination was a black disk, a round absence of stars. In real life it weighed in at over ten Jupiters and measured twenty percent wider at the belly. It was directly in our path: too small to burn, too remote for the reflection of distant sunlight, too heavy for a gas giant, too light for a brown dwarf.
Like a torsion flare from an L-class dwarf, but we should see anything big enough to generate that kind of effect and the sky's dark on that bearing. IAU calls it a statistical artefact. Szpindel's eyebrows drew together like courting caterpillers. Sarasti smiled faintly, keeping his mouth closed. Everyone skittish , looking for clues. Bates: "Torqued by what? Layers of statistical inference piled up on the table while Sarasti sketched background: even with a solid bearing and half the world's attention, the object had hidden from all but the most intensive search.
A thousand telescopic snapshots had been stacked one on another and squeezed through a dozen filters before something emerged from the static, just below the three-meter band and the threshold of certainty. For the longest time it hadn't even been real: just a probabilistic ghost until Theseus got close enough to collapse the waveform.
A quantum particle, heavy as ten Jupiters. Earthbound cartographers were calling it Big Ben. Theseus had barely passed Saturn's orbit when it showed up in the residuals. That discovery would have been moot for anyone else; no other ship caught en route could have packed enough fuel for anything but the long dejected loop back home.
But Theseus ' thin, infinitely attenuate fuel line reached all the way back to the sun; she could turn on the proverbial dime. We'd changed course in our sleep and the Icarus stream tracked our moves like a cat after prey, feeding us at lightspeed.
And here we were. Across the table, Bates flicked her wrist. Her ball sailed over my head; I heard it bounce off the deck not the deck , something in me amended: handrail. Sarasti nodded. The ball riccocheted back into my line of sight high overhead and disappeared briefly behind the spinal bundle, looping through some eccentric, counterintuitive parabola in the drum's feeble grav.
Sarasti steepled his fingers and turned his face in her direction. She wished it was. I'm just saying that Burns-Caulfield took a lot of resources and effort to set up. Whoever built it obviously values their anonymity and has the technology to protect it. The ball bounced one last time and wobbled back towards the Commons. Bates half-hopped from her seat she floated briefly , barely catching it on its way past. There remained a new-born-animal awkwardness to her movements, half Coriolis, half residual rigor.
Still: a big improvement in four hours. The rest of the Humans were barely past the walking stage. We don't want to rush into this. Sarasti turned back to the simmering graphics. Bates kneaded the recovered ball with her fingertips. We may have blown our top-of-the-line recon in the Kuiper, but we don't have to go in blind.
Send in our own drones along separate vectors. Hold off on a close approach until we at least know whether we're dealing with friendlies or hostiles. James shook her head. Or sent one big object instead of sixty thousand little ones, let the impact take us out. I turned, briefly startled. James's mouth had made the words; Sascha had spoken them. If they were so curious , they could've just snuck in a spycam.
Sarasti opened his mouth, closed it again. Filed teeth, briefly visible, clicked audibly behind his face. Tabletop graphics reflected off his visor, a band of writhing polychrome distortions where eyes should be. Sascha shut up. Sarasti continued. By the time you react, they already have what they want. But Sascha had already fled. Her surfaces had scattered like a flock of panicked starlings, and the next time Susan James' mouth opened, it was Susan James who spoke through it. She's simply worried that it might be wrong.
Longer warranty? I'm sure they'll still be willing to talk, if we handle the introductions right. We just need to be a little more cautious, perhaps Sarasti unfolded himself from his chair and loomed over us. What we know weighs against further delay. Bates frowned and pitched her ball back into orbit. We don't even know if there's anyone there. Nobody spoke for a few seconds. Someone's joints cracked in the silence. Without looking, Sarasti flicked out his arm and snatched Bates' returning ball from the air.
We respond with an identical signal. Probe launches half-hour before we wake up. We don't go in blind, but we don't wait. They see us already. Longer we wait, greater risk of countermeasures. I looked at the dark featureless placeholder on the table: bigger than Jupiter and we couldn't even see it yet.
Something in the shadow of that mass had just reached out with casual, unimaginable precision and tapped us on the nose with a laser beam. This was not going to be an even match. Szpindel spoke for all of us: "You knew that all along? You're telling us now? This time Sarasti's smile was wide and toothy. It was as though a gash had opened in the lower half of his face.
Maybe it was a predator thing. He just couldn't help playing with his food. It wasn't so much the way they looked. Not even the eyes, really. The eyes of dogs and cats shine in the darkness; we don't shiver at the sight.
Not the way they looked. The way they moved. Something in the reflexes, maybe. The way they held their limbs: like mantis limbs, long jointed things you just knew could reach out and snatch you from right across the room, any time they felt like it. The fact that he was extinct meant nothing. The fact that we'd come so far, grown strong enough to resurrect our own nightmares to serve us The genes aren't fooled. They know what to fear.
Of course, you had to experience it in person. Novia Ranti Unforgettable. Edmund Halley. Agrifina Helga. Anonymous vFaknH. Iyaz Meindra. Skripsi Ptk. Irna Wahyuni. Nik Pisclovephy. David Arndt. More From Evan Husada Sidrap. Popular in Technology. Science and Tech. Rajesh Yenugula. Hari Ram. Winnie Cai. Mehar Asif Ibrahim. Sumardi Fnu. Archit Lohokare. Rahul Sharma. Pugal Vendan. Saravanan Kannan. Aadeesh Jain. Alan Khor. Ruben Castillo Financial Disclosure Report for Judicial Watch, Inc.
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