Taransay set out to meet the landers, from Astro America on behalf of Carlos Inc., well before dawn. She had ten kilometres to go, back to the river bank and the shoal, and allowed herself twenty kiloseconds for the journey. That should be ample, even for walking in the dark. The dark held no terrors for her.
Well, no more than the day, to be honest.
And speaking of darkness—in the deep dark of the download slot, where she came to her senses after the usual bus journey and the usual irresistible sleep, the join between her original frame and grafted right arm shone like a glow-stick armband of blue neon.
Her first seconds of awareness were spent glowering at the glow. The fuzz that had been like mould was now compact and rigid. It still smelled faintly of the local life, but with other tangs in its spectrum, a whiff of buckyballs and fullerenes and steel that indicated corrupted nanotech. Zaretsky’s team had been on the case, but not even the improved processing power at their disposal had laid a finger on whatever was going on.
However, the engineers did have one success to show for their efforts.
Towards it, her feet now groped.
There it was, a fine line across the sole of her foot, with a disproportionate stiffness and resilience for its width. The first rung of the ladder from the download slot. She trusted her weight to it, and found that it held. A few rungs more and she could see it all. It looked like a section of a cobweb, with threads fanning down and sticking to the ground. In the wind, it sang. It didn’t look or feel like it could bear her weight. Taransay knew not to trust her intuition about such matters. She scrambled down, shouldered the rope-net with the comms kit, and set off.
She followed the same route as before. An insecure decision, but it was hardly as if she were beating a path. And she knew, just by plodding along in her own virtual footsteps, she’d get where she wanted to be. Assuming no landslides, unknown big fierce beasts, fallen trees, new eruptions and fresh lava flows.
The tree trunks swayed in the wind; the limp, page-shaped leaves rattled. Rain fell, intermittent but heavy. Overhead raced tattered clouds. She could see the stars through the gaps, seeming to speed in the opposite direction to the clouds, if she cared to indulge the illusion. Best not—it could confuse her balance system. Below the clouds, a few noctilucent flying jellyfish scudded, driven faster than the clouds by the wind, and not always in the same direction. The trailing ribbons were now spread out like spokes, stiff before the stiff wind. The gasbags could steer, almost tack.
Another useful thing to know.
Taransay pushed in between tree trunks, her gait automatically countering the slither of the small mats underfoot. In dark and rain, viewed by infrared and ultraviolet and sonar, the jungle already seemed familiar. More so than could be accounted for by this being the second time she’d walked this way. There was an aesthetic quality to the experience, as if she were beginning to appreciate its alien beauty. This puzzled her for a moment, but she figured that it was probably a feature of the frame’s software.
Mind you, she couldn’t remember anything like this feeling on the bare surface of SH-17, but then she’d had a lot more than landscape on her mind.
She pressed on. After a while, the concern faded. The false and real colours, the strange scents and sounds, became more vivid and at the same time more … reassuring, almost. More than that: when she looked at a plant, or saw a new sliding or creeping or drifting organism, she felt she understood more about it than she could account for, even with the spectroscopic sense of smell. Yes, that leaf would be a good source of sodium, but how did she know the stalks of this particular kind of tree would dry out to make strong, flexible struts? How was it that she could almost taste what that slithering mat would be like to chew? The path felt much easier than it had before. She had to slash at the stalks less often than the first time. Every so often she saw a cut stalk, one she had slashed earlier. The frame’s pulsar-based galactic positioning system was utterly reliable, but it was good to have that confirmed, almost to the step.
Then, kilometres deep in the forest, as she waded through a small fast stream in which tiny mats swarmed below the slow, gelid ripples of the surface, a voice in her head said <STOP!>
She stopped. Fright of her life. She stood still in the rushing water that pressed to her knees. Heavy drops plopped from runnels down limp leaf-sheets, making overlapping dimples in the stream as they hit.
<Locke?> she asked.
She knew it wasn’t Locke. She was out of range of the module’s own feeble comms and anyway Locke had insisted on maintaining radio silence. But the imperative had sounded—not like Locke’s dry voice-in-her-head, but—like the sort of override command the AI sometimes had to shout.
Silence.
Then a rustle in the undergrowth, upriver and to her right. She turned from the waist, fist close, knife clutched and pointed outward. Something rushed past along the bank right in front of her. A gleam like black glass, a long body, fast-moving legs. One of the giant millipede things. If she’d taken another three steps and climbed on the bank, she’d have been right in its way.
<Go,> said the voice in her head. This time, she noticed the blue glow on her right upper arm give a brief pulse with the word.
She remained stock still. Holy fucking shit. The fuzz was talking to her.
<GO!> it said, with a stronger blue pulse.
She went, wading forward and scrambling up. She’d barely cleared the slippery, rounded rocks when she heard a splash in the stream behind her. A backward glance showed a broken tree trunk, easily big enough to knock her off her feet, swirl past. Deeply shaken, perplexed, Taransay shouldered her way in between the trees. Something strange had happened. It seemed inconceivable that the blue glow had spoken to her, in any conscious sense. But if the native life was interacting with the nanomachinery of her frame, it was not at all impossible that the glow’s awareness—and perhaps even appreciation—of her surroundings was being translated into impulses the frame could process, and transmit to her as feelings of familiarity, and a warning voice in her head.
Huge if true.
Unimaginably huge. Far too huge for her to deal with now. Above her pay grade. She’d have to take this discovery back to the experts, to Zaretsky and the AIs. And there was an urgent practical reason, too, for holding back.
This was no time to interrogate the glow. Even her interactions with this unknown entity could give away her position, if anyone was seriously looking. Carlos Inc. had assured them they were safe from the Direction and the freebots, not to mention the Rax, but Beauregard and Nicole and Locke had wondered how Carlos could be sure, and how long the accord would last.
She pressed on, into the breaking day.
Taransay stood on the river bank and watched the skies. The laser comms device, deployed on the shingle behind her, was now a beacon. The day was clear, the weather calm. The exosun, low on the horizon, would have dazzled human eyes and made them peer and squint. The frame’s visual system dimmed that glare to a glow. Three landers were due to enter the atmosphere any second now. Their rocket engines had already been left in orbit. She wouldn’t see the entries, far over the horizon to the west. All the dramatic fiery streak stuff would happen half a world away, and a large world at that. The only visible activity in the early-morning sky was that of a handful of flying jellyfish in the middle distance, ascending rapidly. Taransay zoomed on them, and was amused to see that for a while at least they didn’t seem to shrink with distance because they got larger with altitude. Their internal gasses must be expanding their membranes as the atmospheric pressure dropped. Then one by one they began to move faster to the west, no doubt whipped along by a faster air stream into which they’d ascended.
<Entry nominal,> reported the satellite downlink from Astro America’s mission control.
Seconds passed. Tens of seconds.
<Ablation shields detached. Drogues deployed.>
Wait for it, wait for it …
<Drogues detached. Gliding at ten thousand metres.>
<Yay!> cried Taransay.
<Please clarify,> replied the downlink.
<Roger that,> Taransay clarified, somewhat abashed.
Hundreds of seconds dragged by. The exosun crawled higher, its spectrum shifting from red as more wavelengths had fewer kilometres of atmosphere to fight through. High in the lowest layer of the planet’s complex, contraflow jet streams the flying jellyfish, now tiny in the far distance, glinted in its beams.
Above the skyline rose three black dots, at the limit of resolution, and climbed rapidly.
<Visual contact made,> Taransay reported.
They passed beside the sun, and still rose. A trick of perspective—they were descending as they approached. Now at five thousand metres. Four. They were visibly dropping now, and in an arrow formation, one ahead and two behind. The black dots jiggled as if viewed through shaky binoculars as they passed through a layer of fast-moving air, then stabilised. Another quiver followed, moments later. Taransay relaxed the zoom and took a wider view.
Black dots and bright spots, in the same part of the sky.
<Hey!> Taransay yelled. <Evade! Evade!>
Too late. The leading lander vanished in a bright flash. The other two peeled off, wavered, dipped and swung back on course. Behind them now, the remaining jellyfish sailed on into the sunrise, as if oblivious of the damage the collision of one of their number with the lander had caused.
Debris plummeted, slowly at this distance, like a pinch of soot.
<Contact with Lander One lost,> said the downlink. <Request status from ground observation.>
<Complete destruction of the vehicle with probable loss of payload,> Taransay reported.
<Please identify cause if known.>
<Collision with a natural object,> said Taransay. <Gas-containing aerial invertebrate.>
It sounded a bit more scientific than “flying jellyfish.”
<Noted,> said the downlink. <Recorded as accident.>
Taransay, her mind already jumpy from the voice of the glow, was almost ready to wonder if the collision was no accident. Could it have been deliberate, if not on the part of the suicidal flying jellyfish then on that of some remote directing intelligence, or self-defence reflex of the entire ecosystem or some superorganism within it?
Wait and see, she thought. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.
The other two landers were now clearly visible even without zoom, a couple of kilometres out, above the treetops. Head on, they looked like black gulls, or a cartoon of two frowns.
Black circular shapes were suddenly suspended beneath the two flying wings, making them look like approaching hang-gliders.
<Cargo pods lowered,> said the downlink. <Prepare for landing in thirty-seven seconds.>
<Roger,> said Taransay.
There was no landing strip as such, just the clear shingle shoal at the side of the river. The landers would come in low and slow, drop their cargo pods and then simply stall. The wings, like the exhausted rocket engines, might or might not be recovered later.
Above the bend in the river now, the landers dipped, skimming the treetops. Taransay instinctively crouched. The two long black triangles shot above her head. Two cargo pods landed with two heavy thumps that she felt through her feet. Then the instrument packs dropped, with lesser thuds that she merely heard. A moment later the wing components sliced into the low growth behind her between the river and the trees. One of them upended on its nose, then toppled, coming to rest on its edge.
One cargo pod was close to the edge of the river. Taransay crunched across pebbles towards it. Bright yellow, half a metre in diameter and ten metres long, it lay like a log. A swirl of current lapped nearby, rasping the small stones. You could see them shift, and sand grains tumble. Erosion was fierce here. The only stable part of the river bank was probably where grass-equivalents and reeds grew, binding the stones. And even that, going by the height and lushness and uniformity of the plants, was likely often flooded.
<Zero altitude,> said the downlink.
<Landing successful,> Taransay reported.
She stood between the middle of the pod and the water, pressed her hands against the side of the pod and pushed. The thing didn’t budge. She turned around, put her back to the curved side, dug her heels into the silty pebbles, and pushed. Slowly the pod rolled. When it was a couple of metres out of immediate danger, Taransay stepped away.
She didn’t need to read the instructions printed on the ends to know what to do. The frame already had the knowledge. Taransay found a detachable panel at one end, prised it open with a thumb and pulled the handle behind it. The pod split open along its length, into two neat halves.
Packed in recesses in shock-proofing spongy stuff were four low-slung, stubby-legged robots with obvious load-carrying arrangements on their backs. As soon as the light hit them they stirred, then clambered out to stand on the shore.
Gee, thanks, Carlos and Astro. A lot of fucking use that is. She hadn’t expected transport robots. She could see the point, and appreciate the intent, but she had no intention of using the robots until it had been cleared with Locke. As things stood the robots, helpful though they’d be, were so many tracking devices. Of course the other supplies could be tracked as well, but that would be detectable if you knew where and how to scan for it, and she did.
Taransay dragged the now far lighter opened cylinder across the shingle to where plants grew, and let it drop. The four robots plodded after her. She went over to the other pod and opened it. Inside, in the same shock-proof packaging as with the first, was much more immediately useful stuff: metre-long portable tubes of nanotech machinery; a crate of fusion pods; a case of basic tools designed for the small hands of frames; a case of four likewise frame-ergonomic rifles with standard ammunition; coils of rope; a box of surveying instruments. Most immediately useful of all: rucksacks and carrying harnesses. All of them were folded so small she almost overlooked them in their two-centimetre-square recesses.
Someone—Carlos, most likely—had figured she might have trust issues with leading robots back to the module. Well done that man. She gladly stripped off and abandoned the rope sling.
<Cargo delivered intact,> Taransay reported.
<Roger,> said the downlink.
<Signing off for now,> said Taransay.
<Signing off.>
Taransay piled the supplies on the backs of the four robot mules and dragged the empty cargo pods to just underneath the trees. There, she put the supplies she wasn’t taking back in their shock-proof recesses and closed the pod. She walked over to where the instrument packs lay on flattened reeds and eyed them suspiciously. They were already rooting and flowering: tendrils digging in, dish aerials and sensors opening. Sending data about the planet up to the DisCorps was part of the deal, she understood, but she didn’t like it.
The wing components, a hundred metres further away, were curious triumphs of nanotech aviation engineering and AI design, flexible and fluted, with tiny ramjets scored through them and subtle warping along the trailing edges. She walked around them for a bit, marvelling.
Then she summoned the robots and set them to work dragging the wing components over, one by one. They were gigantic to her—long acute triangles, twenty metres by eight—but surprisingly light even under two gravities. When she’d got them on each side of the cargo pods, she lifted them on their sides and then, with some help from the robots, tipped them over to meet in the middle, forming a crude lean-to roof. She decided it would be safe enough to leave the laser comms device here with the supplies she couldn’t carry, and left it well inside the shelter. She filled the rucksacks and harnesses with nanotech tubes (which stuck up above her shoulders, like a pack of rolled-up posters in cardboard cylinders, except a lot heavier), shouldered a rifle, and side-slung a container of ammunition and the two fusion pods.
<Guard this,> she told the four robots.
<Please clarify,> they all said at once.
<Jesus fucking fuck,> she said.
<Please clarify.>
She thought about it. <You see the opening there?>
She pointed. They looked at her finger. She laser-pointed. That they understood.
<Yes.>
<Prevent any large organism or machine—except me, or one or more like me—from entering that. Keep the cargo pods at this location. Likewise the wing components. Do you understand?>
<Yes,> they chorused.
She wasn’t at all sure they did, but she didn’t press the matter. By now it was noon, and time she was heading back. This time, with her awkward load, she expected the journey to take longer.
She tramped off into the jungle, without a backward glance and without indulging the sentimentality of a goodbye.
Fucking stupid robots. She hoped Carlos was having a better time getting through to the smart ones. It occurred to her that she’d never actually interacted with a conscious robot except by exchanging fire.
Taransay was a couple of kilometres into the jungle, and the exosun about a quarter of the way down from its zenith, when she was stopped in her tracks by an unaccountable feeling that something wasn’t quite right. No rain, for the moment. The little buzzing spinning things flitted in the narrow slanted beams of light between the shadows cast by the efficient leaves. Somewhere, water gurgled and small stones shifted. Her nanotech stone-age knife glinted in her hand. Her feet slowly sank deeper in the squishy, slithery floor of living and dead mats.
Nothing was wrong. No voice in her head, no brightening of the blue glow around her upper right arm.
It took Taransay a moment to realise what was troubling her. Her walk had been too easy. She’d expected it to be difficult, what with the heavier and bulkier load, and the nanotech cylinders poking up high above her shoulders and more than doubling her effective height. Instead, she had made her way between trees and bushes and through and over streams, boulders, swathes of ash and sheets of cooled lava without so much as catching a cylinder against an overhanging branch. She was still following the same route, but she hadn’t had to hack at any vegetation, or found herself facing a branch or stalk she’d cut before.
She was no longer crashing and hacking her way through the jungle, like an explorer. She was slipping through it like a native. Well, not that she knew about such contrasts directly, or even reliably, but she’d watched enough well-meant rain forest eco-romantic adventure serials as a child to have the notion embedded.
Now that she’d noticed, of course, she got tangled in one of the long vine things on her next three steps, and put a foot in a hole a few steps after that.
Zen, that was what she had to strive for. Zen and the art of hiking. But you couldn’t strive for it. Like the millipede in the legend that was asked how it moved its legs, and suddenly couldn’t take another step. Millipedes, ah yes. She concentrated hard on recalling the millipede-like animals she’d seen, and thinking about whether any of the images she could recollect of it would betray the affinity with the mats that Zaretsky’s team had detected by genetic analysis.
Then she got to thinking about thinking. When she wanted to recall what the two fierce, fast creatures she’d noticed had been like, she could see in her mind clear and distinct images of them. It was exactly as if they were photo files being retrieved from an album. And she could turn them over in her mind’s eye, almost literally: she could rotate the images this way and that, zoom in on detail.
This was not, she remembered very clearly, what remembering very clearly was like. Here in the frame, she was still herself, still Taransay Rizzi from one of Partick’s lower-rent zip codes. But she was far more remote from her original self than she was even in the sim, where she was physically a little cloud of electron states in a big crystal. She wasn’t thinking like a human being. She was thinking like a robot. The actual mechanisms of memory and thought and sense were quite different, in whatever chip she was running on, from in the biological brain or even its electronic copy, its emulation in the simulation.
In a sense, she was far more conscious, far more self-aware, than she could recall being in life, or in the sim. She wondered if the distinction was qualitative. There had always been something slippery, elusive and illusive, about subjectivity in the first place. Too much of it subtended biological mechanisms, too much of it was subjected to social relations, for it to be truly as autonomous as it fancied itself to be. What if people, herself included, had always already been p-zombies, at least most of the time, and only machines could be truly conscious?
If people were to stay in frames long enough, would they start to think as robots? Was this what was happening to Carlos and his mates? And was this possibility what the necessity of recuperating in the sims was designed to prevent?
She was still thinking about all that when she found herself back at the module.
She hailed Locke, on the weak local waveband that was all the module could raise, and just as well from the point of view of their equivalently feeble effort at concealing their location.
<Mission successful,> she said. <One lander lost to a flying jellyfish.>
<We’ve already received the reports,> said Locke. <Welcome back.>
Taransay unladed herself, and Locke showed her where to clamp the nanotech gear to the module, and where to place the two fusion pods. The damaged frames lay in the overhang of the module, slowly being rebuilt. Local life—fuzz, something else—was contending with the nanomachinery’s slow-motion 3-D printing. Or, for all she knew, it was cooperating, having been suborned. Tendrils reached out from the module to the nanotech tubes at once. It wasn’t clear whether they were the module’s own nanotech or among the hybrids Zaretsky’s team had made with the fuzz.
The fuzz. Oh yes. The fuzz. She’d have to tell Locke about that. In fact—
<Are Beauregard and Nicole up and about? Oh, and Zaretsky.>
The exosun was now low, the shadows of the surrounding forest deep and long, but the diurnal cycles of the module’s sim and the world outside were still out of synch.
<They’re all here,> said Locke.
<Good. Uh, put me on screen.>
<You are,> said Locke, dryly.
<Oh! Right. Uh, guys and gals, I’ve got something to tell you …>
She told them about the voice in her head and its warnings, about the glow, and about the less definable sense of being at home in the jungle and her unaccountable agility in it.
<I hope you don’t think I’m going crazy,> she concluded. <Or hallucinating or something.>
<Impossible,> said Nicole, in a tone of brisk reassurance. <The software of the frame does not permit it.>
<I thought you said the sims were to preserve our sanity?> Taransay retorted. <And I’ve been a long time out of the sim.>
<Not long enough,> said Nicole. <Not by far. And the symptoms would be different. They are … a drifting of thought from the human baseline, feelings of dissociation, a loss of the sense of self-preservation. Their onset is preceded by something like a craving for normality. You would know it if you felt it. Auditory and visual hallucinations and delusions of competence are not diagnostic and not expected.>
<Thanks,> said Taransay. <I guess.>
<Well, let’s assume this is really happening,> said Beauregard. <The fuzz that got on your stump has turned into something else, and adapted to the frame. Whether it’s consciously communicating with you, I doubt. I suspect it’s sensitive to its environment, and giving you cues through inner voice and through fine motor control at the subconscious level, maybe at the frame’s equivalent of reflex.>
<That’s more or less what I thought myself,> said Taransay. <But—>
<Have you tried talking back to it?> Zaretsky interrupted. Fucking nerd.
<No,> replied Taransay, testily. <I maintained comms discipline, for whatever good that would do.>
<Glad to hear it,> said Zaretsky. <OK, so talk to it now.>
Taransay held up her right arm and turned her head as far as she could, to face the glowing band.
<This is going to look very silly,> said Taransay.
<Never mind that,> said Nicole.
<We’ll all just point and laugh,> added Zaretsky, helpful as usual.
<Knock yourselves out,> said Taransay. <Fall off your stools.>
It was hard to find the words.
<Uh, hello?> she ventured. <Blue glow? Fuzz? Thing on my arm? Anyone home?>
<Yes.>
<Holy fucking shit!> Taransay yelped.
<I take it you got a reply,> said Nicole.
<It said yes! In my head.>
<Talk some more!> said Zaretsky.
<What are you?> Taransay asked the glow, still feeling very silly.
<No.>
<What do you mean?>
<No.>
She tried a few more queries, with the same result.
<Are you there?> she said at last.
<Yes.>
She reported this.
<Still sounds like what we thought,> said Beauregard.
<No alien intelligence, then?> said Taransay. <Colour me surprised.>
<Don’t jump to conclusions,> said Zaretsky. <Like, define “alien,” define “intelligence.”>
<Oh, fuck off,> said Taransay.
<Time to bring you in,> said Zaretsky.
<Yeah, tell me about it,> said Taransay. That thing Nicole had said about a craving for normality being the first symptom of having been out of the sim too long was preying on her mind a bit.
She climbed the cobweb ladder and hauled herself into the slot. The blue glow lit the dimness inside.
<OK, I’m ready,> she said.
Nothing happened.
<There is a problem,> said Locke. <A software incompatibility.>
Taransay felt the analogue of a cold shock, an instant alertness thrumming through her connectors and processors.
<Is this the fuzz? The glow?>
<That seems to be the case,> Locke admitted.
<I thought you had this thing under control!>
<We’re working on it,> said Zaretsky.
<How long will it take?> Taransay asked.
Zaretsky glyphed her a shrug. <I don’t know. Days, probably.>
<Shit!>
<Well, yes.>
<In that case,> said Taransay, <I might as well go back and pick up more of the stuff.>
<Are you sure?> said Nicole. <It’s dark.>
Taransay laughed. <You sent me out in the dark this morning.>
<True, but—>
<How long will it take me to recharge?> Taransay said.
<Several kiloseconds,> said Nicole. <But Locke can show you how to do it a lot faster with a fusion pod.>
<Now there’s an idea.>
She clambered down. Locke directed her to place a fusion pod against the join between her torso and her pelvis. The sensation was odd, not quite pleasant, but satisfying. Or perhaps that was an artefact of watching her charge indicator creep from red to green in ten seconds.
<Right,> she said. She shouldered the rifle, slung on the empty rucksack and harnesses and clutched her knife. <See you in a bit, guys.>
<Wait!> said Zaretsky. <Why not use the robots provided?>
<Fine by me, if that’s OK with Locke,> said Taransay.
<It is not,> said Locke.
<I concur,> said Nicole. <We cannot yet be sure of Carlos’s intentions. Or the Direction’s.>
<Trust issues,> said Taransay. <With you there, folks.>
She turned and slogged off into the night.