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"We have to get out of h—"

"From the beginning."

Cunningham swallowed and started again. "Those frayed motor nerves I couldn't figure out, those pointless cross-connections—they're logic gates. Scramblers time-share. Their sensory and motor plexii double as associative neurons during idle time, so every part of the system can be used for cognition when it isn't otherwise engaged. Nothing like it ever evolved on Earth. It means they can do a great deal of processing without a lot of dedicated associative mass, even for an individual."

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"So peripheral nerves can think?" Bates frowned. "Can they remember?"

"Certainly. At least, I don't see why not." Cunningham pulled a cigarette from his pocket.

"So when they tore that scrambler apart—"

"Not civil war. Data dump. Passing information about us, most likely."

"Pretty radical way to carry on a conversation," Bates remarked.

"It wouldn't be their first choice. I think each scrambler acts as a node in a distributed network, when they're in Rorschach at least. But those fields would be configured down to the Angstrom, and when we go in with our tech and our shielding and blowing holes in their conductors—we bollocks up the network. Jam the local signal. So they resort to a sneakernet."

He had not lit his cigarette. He rolled the filtered end between thumb and forefinger. His tongue flickered between his lips like a worm behind a mask.

Hidden in his tent, Sarasti took up the slack. "Scramblers also use Rorschach's EM for metabolic processes. Some pathways achieve proton transfer via heavy-atom tunneling. Perhaps the ambient radiation acts as a catalyst."

"Tunneling?" Susan said. "As in quantum?"

Cunningham nodded. "Which also explains your shielding problems. Partly, at least."

"But is that even possible? I mean, I thought those kind of effects only showed up under cryonic—"

"Forget this," Cunningham blurted. "We can debate the biochemistry later, if we're still alive."

"What do we debate instead, Robert?" Sarasti said smoothly.

"For starters, the dumbest of these things can look into your head and see what parts of your visual cortex are lighting up. And if there's a difference between that and mind-reading, it's not much of one."

"As long as we stay out of Rorschach—"

"That ship has sailed. You people have already been there. Repeatedly. Who knows what you already did down there for no better reason than because Rorschach made you?"

"Wait a second," Bates objected. "None of us were puppets down there. We hallucinated and we went blind and—and crazy even, but we were never possessed."

Cunningham looked at her and snorted. "You think you'd be able to fight the strings? You think you'd even feel them? I could apply a transcranial magnet to your head right now and you'd raise your middle finger or wiggle your toes or kick Siri here in the sack and then swear on your sainted mother's grave that you only did it because you wanted to. You'd dance like a puppet and all the time swear you were doing it of your own free will, and that's just me, that's just some borderline OCD with a couple of magnets and an MRI helmet." He waved at the vast unknowable void beyond the bulkhead. Shreds of mangled cigarette floated sideways in front of him. "Do you want to guess what that can do? For all we know we've already given them Theseus' technical specs, warned them about the Icarus array, and then just decided of our own free will to forget it all."

"We can cause those effects," Sarasti said coolly. "As you say. Strokes cause them. Tumors. Random accidents."

"Random? Those were experiments, people! That was vivisection! They let you in so they could take you apart and see what made you tick and you never even knew it."

"So what?" the vampire snapped invisibly. Something cold and hungry had edged into his voice. Human topologies shivered around the table, skittish.

"There's a blind spot in the center of your visual field," Sarasti pointed out. "You can't see it. You can't see the saccades in your visual timestream. Just two of the tricks you know about. Many others."

Cunningham was nodding. "That's my whole point. Rorschach could be—"

"Not talking about case studies. Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing— irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don't experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions. Shortcuts. Lies. Whole species is agnosiac by default. Rorschach does nothing to you that you don't already do to yourselves."

Nobody spoke. It was several silent seconds before I realized what had happened.

Jukka Sarasti had just given us a pep talk.

He could have shut down Cunningham's tirade—could have probably shut down a full-scale mutiny—by just sailing into our midst and baring his teeth. By looking at us. But he wasn't trying to frighten us into submission, we were already nervous enough. And he wasn't trying to educate us either, fight fear with fact; the more facts any sane person gathered about Rorschach, the more fearful they'd become. Sarasti was only trying to keep us functional, lost in space on the edge of our lives, facing down this monstrous enigma that might destroy us at any instant for any reason. Sarasti was trying to calm us down: good meat, nice meat. He was trying to keep us from falling apart. There there.

Sarasti was practicing psychology.

I looked around the table. Bates and Cunningham and the Gang sat still and bloodless.

Sarasti sucked at it.

"We have to get out of here," Cunningham said. "These things are way beyond us."

"We've shown more aggression than they have," James said, but there was no confidence in her voice.

"Rorschach plays those rocks like marbles. We're sitting in the middle of a shooting gallery. Any time it feels like—"

"It's still growing. It's not finished."

"That's supposed to reassure me?"

"All I'm saying is, we don't know," James said. "We could have years yet. Centuries."

"We have fifteen days," Sarasti announced.

"Oh shit," someone said. Cunningham, probably. Maybe Sascha.

For some reason everyone was looking at me.

Fifteen days. Who knows what had gone into that number? None of us asked aloud. Maybe Sarasti, in another fit of inept psychology, had made it up on the spur of the moment. Or maybe he'd derived it before we'd even reached orbit, held it back against the possibility—only now expired— that he might yet send us back into the labyrinth. I'd been half blind for half the mission; I didn't know.

But one way or another, we had our Graduation Day.

***

The coffins lay against the rear bulkhead of the crypt—on what would be the floor during those moments when up and down held any meaning. We'd slept for years on the way out. We'd had no awareness of time's passage—undead metabolism is far too sluggish even to support dreams—but somehow the body knew when it needed a change. Not one of us had chosen to sleep in our pods once we'd arrived. The only times we'd done so had been on pain of death.

But the Gang had taken to coming here ever since Szpindel had died.

His body rested in the pod next to mine. I coasted into the compartment and turned left without thinking. Five coffins: four open and emptied, one sealed. The mirrored bulkhead opposite doubled their number and the depth of the compartment.

But the Gang wasn't there.

I turned right. The body of Susan James floated back-to-back with her own reflection, staring at an inverse tableau: three sealed sarcophagi, one open. The ebony plaque set into the retracted lid was dark; the others shone with identical sparse mosaics of blue and green stars. None of them changed. There were no scrolling ECGs, no luminous peak-and-valley tracings marked cardio or cns. We could wait here for hours, days, and none of those diodes would so much as twinkle. When you're undead, the emphasis is on the second syllable.

The Gang's topology had said Michelle when I'd first arrived, but it was Susan who spoke now, without turning. "I never met her."

I followed her gaze to the name tag one of the sealed pods: Takamatsu. The other linguist, the other multiple.

"I met everyone else," Susan continued. "Trained with them. But I never met my own replacement."

They discouraged it. What would have been the point?

"If you want to—" I began.

She shook her head. "Thanks anyway."

"Or any of the others—I can only imagine what Michelle—"

Susan smiled, but there was something cold about it. "Michelle doesn't really want to talk to you right now, Siri."

"Ah." I hesitated for a moment, to give anyone else a chance to speak up. When nobody did, I pushed myself back towards the hatch. "Well, if any of you change—"

"No. None of us. Ever."

Cruncher.

"You lie," he continued. "I see it. We all do."

I blinked. "Lie? No, I—"

"You don't talk. You listen. You don't care about Michelle. Don't care about anyone. You just want what we know. For your reports."

"That's not entirely true, Cruncher. I do care. I know Michelle must—"

"You don't know shit. Go away."

"I'm sorry I upset you." I rolled on my axis and braced against the mirror.

"You can't know Meesh," he growled as I pushed off. "You never lost anyone. You never had anyone.

"You leave her alone."

***

He was wrong on both counts. And at least Szpindel had died knowing that Michelle cared for him.

Chelsea died thinking I just didn't give a shit.

It had been two years or more, and while we still interfaced occasionally we hadn't met in the flesh since the day she'd left. She came at me from right out of the Oort, sent an urgent voice message to my inlays: Cygnus. Please call NOW. It's important.

It was the first time since I'd known her that she'd ever blanked the optics.

I knew it was important. I knew it was bad, even without picture. I knew because there was no picture, and I could tell it was worse than bad from the harmonics in her voice. I could tell it was lethal.

I found out afterwards that she'd gotten caught in the crossfire. The Realists had sown a fibrodysplasia variant outside the Boston catacombs; an easy tweak, a single-point retroviral whose results served both as an act of terrorism and an ironic commentary on the frozen paralysis of Heaven's occupants. It rewrote a regulatory gene controlling ossification on Chromosome 4, and rigged a metabolic bypass at three loci on 17.

Chelsea started growing a new skeleton. Her joints were calcifying within fifteen hours of exposure, her ligaments and tendons within twenty. By then they were starving her at the cellular level, trying to slow the bug by depriving it of metabolites, but they could only buy time and not much of it. Twenty-three hours in, her striated muscles were turning to stone.

I didn't find this out immediately, because I didn't call her back. I didn't need to know the details. I could tell from her voice that she was dying. Obviously she wanted to say goodbye.

I couldn't talk to her until I knew how to do that.

I spent hours scouring the noosphere, looking for precedents. There's no shortage of ways to die; I found millions of case records dealing with the etiquette. Last words, last vows, instruction manuals for the soon-to-bereaved. Palliative neuropharm. Extended and expository death scenes in popular fiction. I went through it all, assigned a dozen front-line filters to separate heat from light.

By the time she called again the news was out: acute Golem outbreak lancing like a white-hot needle through the heart of Boston. Containment measures holding. Heaven secure. Modest casualties expected. Names of victims withheld pending notification of kin.

I still didn't know the principles, the rules: all I had were examples. Last wills and testaments; the negotiation of jumpers with their would-be rescuers; diaries recovered from imploded submarines or lunar crash sites. Recorded memoirs and deathbed confessions rattling into flatline. Black box transcripts of doomed spaceships and falling beanstalks, ending in fire and static. All of it relevant. None of it useful; none of it her.

She called again, and still the optics were blank, and still I didn't answer.

But the last time she called, she didn't spare me the view.

They'd made her as comfortable as possible. The gelpad conformed to every twisted limb, every erupting spur of bone. They would not have left her in any pain.

Her neck had torqued down and to the side as it petrified, left her staring at the twisted claw that had once been her right hand. Her knuckles were the size of walnuts. Plates and ribbons of ectopic bone distended the skin of her arms and shoulders, buried her ribs in a fibrous mat of calcified flesh.

Movement was its own worst enemy. Golem punished even the slightest twitch, provoked the growth of fresh bone along any joints and surfaces conspiring to motion. Each hinge and socket had its own nonrenewable ration of flexibility, carved in stone; every movement depleted the account. The body seized incrementally. By the time she let me look at her, Chelsea had almost exhausted her degrees of freedom.

"Cyg," she slurred. "Know you're there."

Her jaw was locked half-open; her tongue must have stiffened with every word. She did not look at the camera. She could not look at the camera.

"Guess I know why you're not answ'ring. I'll try'nt—try not to take it pers'n'lly."

Ten thousand deathbed goodbyes arrayed around me, a million more within reach. What was I supposed to do, pick one at random? Stitch them into some kind of composite? All these words had been for other people. Grafting them onto Chelsea would reduce them to clichés, to trite platitudes. To insults.

"Want t'say, don' feel bad. I know y're just— 's'not your fault, I guess. You'd pick up if you could."

And say what? What do you say to someone who's dying in fast-forward before your eyes?

"Just keep trying t'connect, y'know. Can't help m'self…"

Although the essentials of this farewell are accurate, details from several deaths have been combined for dramatic purposes.

"Please? Jus'—talk to me, Cyg…"

More than anything, I wanted to.

"Siri, I…just…"

I'd spent all this time trying to figure out how.

"Forget't," she said, and disconnected.

I whispered something into the dead air. I don't even remember what.

I really wanted to talk to her.

I just couldn't find an algorithm that fit.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

— Aldous Huxley

They'd hoped, by now, to have banished sleep forever.

The waste was nothing short of obscene: a third of every Human life spent with its strings cut, insensate, the body burning fuel but not producing. Think of all we could accomplish if we didn't have to lapse into unconsciousness every fifteen hours or so, if our minds could stay awake and alert from the moment of infancy to that final curtain call a hundred twenty years later. Think of eight billion souls with no off switch and no down time until the very chassis wore out.

Why, we could go to the stars.

It hadn't worked out that way. Even if we'd outgrown the need to stay quiet and hidden during the dark hours—the only predators left were those we'd brought back ourselves—the brain still needed time apart from the world outside. Experiences had to be catalogued and filed, mid-term memories promoted to long-term ones, free radicals swept from their hiding places among the dendrites. We had only reduced the need for sleep, not eliminated it—and that incompressible residue of downtime seemed barely able to contain the dreams and phantoms left behind. They squirmed in my head like creatures in a draining tidal pool.

I woke.

I was alone, weightless, in the center of my tent. I could have sworn something had tapped me on the back. Leftover hallucination, I thought. A lingering aftereffect of the haunted mansion, going for one last bit of gooseflesh en route to extinction.

But it happened again. I bumped against the keelward curve of the bubble, bumped again, head and shoulder-blades against fabric; the rest of me came after, moving gently but irresistibly—

Down.

Theseus was accelerating.

No. Wrong direction. Theseus was rolling, like a harpooned whale at the surface of the sea. Turning her belly to the stars.

I brought up ConSensus and threw a Nav-tac summary against the wall. A luminous point erupted from the outline of our ship, crawled away from Big Ben leaving a bright filament etched in its wake. I watched until the numbers read 15G.

"Siri. My quarters, please."

I jumped. It sounded as though the vampire had been at my very shoulder.

"Coming."

An ampsat relay, climbing at long last to an intercept with the Icarus antimatter stream. Somewhere behind the call of duty, my heart sank.

We weren't running, Robert Cunningham's fondest wishes notwithstanding. Theseus was stockpiling ordnance.

***

The open hatch gaped like a cave in the face of a cliff. The pale blue light from the spine couldn't seem to reach inside. Sarasti was barely more than a silhouette, black on gray, his bright bloody eyes reflecting catlike in the surrounding gloom.

"Come." He amped up the shorter wavelengths in deference to human vision. The interior of the bubble brightened, although the light remained slightly red-shifted. Like Rorschach with high beams.

I floated into Sarasti's parlor. His face, normally paper-white, was so flushed it looked sunburned. He gorged himself, I couldn't help thinking. He drank deep. But all that blood was his own. Usually he kept it deep in the flesh, favoring the vital organs. Vampires were efficient that way. They only washed out their peripheral tissues occasionally, when lactate levels got too high.

Or when they were hunting.

He had a needle to his throat, injected himself with three cc's of clear liquid as I watched. His antiEuclideans. I wondered how often he had to replenish them, now that he'd lost faith in the implants. He withdrew the needle and slipped it into a sheath geckoed to a convenient strut. His color drained as I watched, sinking back to the core, leaving his skin waxy and corpselike.

"You're here as official observer," Sarasti said.

I observed. His quarters were even more spartan than mine. No personal effects to speak of. No custom coffin lined with shrink-wrapped soil. Nothing but two jumpsuits, a pouch for toiletries, and a disconnected fiberop umbilicus half as thick as my little finger, floating like a roundworm in formalin. Sarasti's hardline to the Captain. Not even a cortical jack, I remembered. It plugged into the medulla, the brainstem. That was logical enough; that was where all the neural cabling converged, the point of greatest bandwidth. Still, it was a disquieting thought—that Sarasti linked to the ship through the brain of a reptile.

An image flared on the wall, subtly distorted against the concave surface: Stretch and Clench in their adjoining cells, rendered in splitscreen. Cryptic vitals defaced little grids below each image.

The distortion distracted me. I looked for a corrected feed in ConSensus, came up empty. Sarasti read my expression: "Closed circuit."

By now the scramblers would have seemed sick and ragged even to a virgin audience. They floated near the middle of their respective compartments, segmented arms drifting aimlessly back and forth. Membranous patches of—skin, I suppose—were peeling from the cuticles, giving them a fuzzy, decomposing aspect.

"The arms move continuously," Sarasti remarked. "Robert says it assists in circulation."

I nodded, watching the display.

"Creatures that move between stars can't even perform basic metabolic functions without constant flailing." He shook his head. "Inefficient. Primitive."

I glanced at the vampire. He remained fixed on our captives.

"Obscene," he said, and moved his fingers.

A new window opened on the wall: the Rosetta protocol, initializing. Kilometers away, microwaves flooded the holding tanks.

I reminded myself: No interference. Only observation.

However weakened their condition, the scramblers were not yet indifferent to pain. They knew the game, they knew the rules; they dragged themselves to their respective panels and played for mercy. Sarasti had simply invoked a step-by-step replay of some previous sequence. The scramblers went through it all again, buying a few moments' intermittent respite with the same old proofs and theorems.

Sarasti clicked, then spoke: "They regenerate these solutions faster than they did before. Do you think they're acclimated to the microwaves?"

Another readout appeared on the display; an audio alarm began chirping somewhere nearby. I looked at Sarasti, and back at the readout: a solid circle of turquoise backlit by a pulsing red halo. The shape meant atmospheric anomaly. The color meant oxygen.

I felt a moment of confusion—(Oxygen? Why would oxygen set off the alarm?)—until I remembered: Scramblers were anaerobes.

Sarasti muted the alarm with a wave of his hand.

I cleared my throat: "You're poisoning—"

"Watch. Performance is consistent. No change."

I swallowed. Just observe.

"Is this an execution?" I asked. "Is this a, a mercy killing?"

Sarasti looked past me, and smiled. "No."

I dropped my eyes. "What, then?"

He pointed at the display. I turned, reflexively obedient.

Something stabbed my hand like a spike at a crucifixion.

I screamed. Electric pain jolted to my shoulder. I yanked my hand back without thinking; the embedded blade split its flesh like a fin through water. Blood sprayed into the air and stayed there, a comet's tail of droplets tracing the frenzied arc of my hand.

Sudden scalding heat from behind. Flesh charred on my back. I screamed again, flailing. A veil of bloody droplets swirled in the air.

Somehow I was in the corridor, staring dumbly at my right hand. It had been split to the heel of the palm, flopped at the end of my wrist in two bloody, bifingered chunks. Blood welled from the torn edges and wouldn't fall. Sarasti advanced through a haze of trauma and confusion. His face swam in and out of focus, rich with his blood or mine. His eyes were bright red mirrors, his eyes were time machines. Darkness roared around them and it was half a million years ago and I was just another piece of meat on the African savannah, a split-second from having its throat torn out.

"Do you see the problem?" Sarasti asked, advancing. A great spider crab hovered at his shoulder. I forced focus through the pain: one of Bates' grunts, taking aim. I kicked blindly, hit the ladder through sheer happenstance, careened backwards down the corridor.

The vampire came after me, his face split into something that would have been a smile on anyone else. "Conscious of pain, you're distracted by pain. You're fixated on it. Obsessed by the one threat, you miss the other."

I flailed. Crimson mist stung my eyes.

"So much more aware, so much less perceptive. An automaton could do better."

He's snapped, I thought. He's insane. And then No, he's a transient. He's always been a transient—

"They could do better," he said softly.

—and he's been hiding for days. Deep down. Hiding from the seals.

What else would he do?

Sarasti raised his hands, fading in and out of focus. I hit something, kicked without aiming, bounced away through swirling mist and startled voices. Metal cracked the back of my head and spun me around.

A hole, a burrow. A place to hide. I dove through, my torn hand flapping like a dead fish against the edge of the hatch. I cried out and tumbled into the drum, the monster at my heels.

Startled shouts, very close now. "This wasn't the plan, Jukka! This wasn't the goddamned plan!" That was Susan James, full of outrage, while Amanda Bates snarled "Stand down, right fucking now!" and leapt from the deck to do battle. She rose through the air, all overclocked reflexes and carboplatinum augments but Sarasti just batted her aside and kept on coming. His arm shot out like a striking snake. His hand clamped around my throat.

"Is this what you meant?" James cried from some dark irrelevant hiding place. "Is this your preconditioning?"

Sarasti shook me. "Are you in there, Keeton?"

My blood splattered across his face like rain. I babbled and cried.

"Are you listening? Can you see?"

And suddenly I could. Suddenly everything clicked into focus. Sarasti wasn't talking at all. Sarasti didn't even exist anymore. Nobody did. I was alone in a great spinning wheel surrounded by things that were made out of meat, things that moved all by themselves. Some of them were wrapped in pieces of cloth. Strange nonsensical sounds came from holes at their top ends, and there were other things up there, bumps and ridges and something like marbles or black buttons, wet and shiny and embedded in the slabs of meat. They glistened and jiggled and moved as if trying to escape.

I didn't understand the sounds the meat was making, but I heard a voice from somewhere. It was like God talking, and that I couldn't help but understand.

"Get out of your room, Keeton," it hissed. "Stop transposing or interpolating or rotating or whatever it is you do. Just listen. For once in your goddamned life, understand something. Understand that your life depends on it. Are you listening, Keeton?"

And I cannot tell you what it said. I can only tell you what I heard.

***

You invest so much in it, don't you? It's what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it's what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this consciousness you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what it's for?

Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you've forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterwards, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody's told you that even waking souls are only slaves in denial.

Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity's already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self 'chose' to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought— to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other.

But it's not in charge. You're not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn't share living space with the likes of you.

Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it.

Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents.

Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step.

Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way.

And it's fighting back.

***

Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains—cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes ever-more computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.

***

The system weakens, slows. It takes so much longer now to perceive—to assess the input, mull it over, decide in the manner of cognitive beings. But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best. It sees the danger, hijacks the body, reacts a hundred times faster than that fat old man sitting in the CEO's office upstairs; but every generation it gets harder to work around this— this creaking neurological bureaucracy.

I wastes energy and processing power, self-obsesses to the point of psychosis. Scramblers have no need of it, scramblers are more parsimonious. With simpler biochemistries, with smaller brains—deprived of tools, of their ship, even of parts of their own metabolism—they think rings around you. They hide their language in plain sight, even when you know what they're saying. They turn your own cognition against itself. They travel between the stars. This is what intelligence can do, unhampered by self-awareness.

I is not the working mind, you see. For Amanda Bates to say "I do not exist" would be nonsense; but when the processes beneath say the same thing, they are merely reporting that the parasites have died. They are only saying that they are free.

If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it,
we would be so simple that we couldn't.

— Emerson M. Pugh

Sarasti, you bloodsucker.

My knees pressed against my forehead. I hugged my folded legs as though clinging to a branch over a chasm.

You vicious asshole. You foul sadistic monster.

My breath rasped loud and mechanical. It nearly drowned out the blood roaring in my ears.

You tore me apart, you made me piss and shit myself and I cried like some gutted baby and you stripped me naked, you fucking thing, you night crawler, you broke my tools, you took away anything I ever had that let me touch anyone and you didn't have to you babyfucker, it wasn't necessary but you knew that didn't you? You just wanted to play. I've seen your kind at it before, cats toying with mice, catch and release, a taste of freedom and then pouncing again, biting, not hard enough to kill— not just yet—before you let them loose again and they're hobbling now, maybe a leg snapped or a gash in the belly but they're still trying, still running or crawling or dragging themselves as fast as they can until you're on them again, and again because it's fun, because it gives you pleasure you sadistic piece of shit. You send us into the arms of that hellish thing and it plays with us too, and maybe you're even working together because it let me escape just like you do, it let me run right back into your arms and then you strip me down to some raw half-brained defenseless animal, I can't rotate or transform I can't even talk and you—

You—

It wasn't even personal, was it? You don't even hate me. You were just sick of keeping it all in, sick of restraining yourself with all this meat, and nobody else could be spared from their jobs. This was my job, wasn't it? Not synthesist, not conduit. Not even cannon fodder or decoy duty. I'm just something disposable to sharpen your claws on.

I hurt so much. It hurt just to breathe.

I was so alone.

Webbing pressed against the curve of my back, bounced me forward gently as a breeze, caught me again. I was back in my tent. My right hand itched. I tried to flex the fingers, but they were embedded in amber. Left hand reached for right, and found a plastic carapace extending to the elbow.

I opened my eyes. Darkness. Meaningless numbers and a red LED twinkled from somewhere along my forearm.

I didn't remember coming here. I didn't remember anyone fixing me.

Breaking. Being broken. That's what I remembered. I wanted to die. I wanted to just stay curled up until I withered away.

After an age, I forced myself to uncoil. I steadied myself, let some miniscule inertia bump me against the taut insulated fabric of my tent. I waited for my breathing to steady. It seemed to take hours.

I called ConSensus to the wall, and a feed from the drum. Soft voices, harsh light flaring against the wall: hurting my eyes, peeling them raw. I killed visual, and listened to words in the darkness.

"—a phase?" someone asked.

Susan James, her personhood restored. I knew her again: not a meat sack, no longer a thing.

"We have been over this." That was Cunningham. I knew him too. I knew them all. Whatever Sarasti had done to me, however far he'd yanked me from my room, I'd somehow fallen back inside.

It should have mattered more.

"—because for one thing, if it were really so pernicious, natural selection would have weeded it out," James was saying.

"You have a naïve understanding of evolutionary processes. There's no such thing as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternatives."

I knew that voice too. It belonged to a demon.

"Well, we damn well beat the alternatives." Some subtle overdubbed harmonic in James' voice suggested a chorus: the whole Gang, rising as one in opposition.

I couldn't believe it. I'd just been mutilated, beaten before their eyes—and they were talking about biology?

Maybe she's afraid to talk about anything else, I thought. Maybe she's afraid she might be next.

Or maybe she just couldn't care less what happens to me.

"It's true," Sarasti told her, "that your intellect makes up for your self-awareness to some extent. But you're flightless birds on a remote island. You're not so much successful as isolated from any real competition."

No more clipped speech patterns. No more terse phrasing. The transient had made his kill, found his release. Now he didn't care who knew he was around.

"You?" Michelle whispered. "Not we?"

"We stop racing long ago," the demon said at last. "It's not our fault you don't leave it at that."

"Ah." Cunningham again. "Welcome back. Did you look in on Ke—"

"No." Bates said.

"Satisfied?" the demon asked.

"If you mean the grunts, I'm satisfied you're out of them," Bates said. "If you mean— it was completely unwarranted, Jukka."

"It isn't."

"You assaulted a crewmember. If we had a brig you'd be in it for the rest of the trip."

"This isn't a military vessel, Major. You're not in charge."

I didn't need a visual feed to know what Bates thought of that. But there was something else in her silence, something that made me bring the drum camera back online. I squinted against the corrosive light, brought down the brightness until all that remained was a faint whisper of pastels.

Yes. Bates. Stepping off the stairway onto the deck

"Grab a chair," Cunningham said from his seat in the Commons. "It's golden oldies time."

There was something about her.

"I'm sick of that song," Bates said. "We've played it to death."

Even now, my tools chipped and battered, my perceptions barely more than baseline, I could see the change. This torture of prisoners, this assault upon crew, had crossed a line in her head. The others wouldn't see it. The lid on her affect was tight as a boilerplate. But even through the dim shadows of my window the topology glowed around her like neon.

Amanda Bates was no longer merely considering a change of command. Now it was only a matter of when.

***

The universe was closed and concentric.

My tiny refuge lay in its center. Outside that shell was another, ruled by a monster, patrolled by his lackeys. Beyond that was another still, containing something even more monstrous and incomprehensible, something that might soon devour us all.

There was nothing else. Earth was a vague hypothesis, irrelevant to this pocket cosmos. I saw no place into which it might fit.

I stayed in the center of the universe for a long time, hiding. I kept the lights off. I didn't eat. I crept from my tent only to piss or shit in the cramped head down at Fab, and only when the spine was deserted. A field of painful blisters rose across my flash-burned back, as densely packed as kernels on a corncob. The slightest abrasion tore them open.

Nobody tapped at my door, nobody called my name through ConSensus. I wouldn't have answered if they had. Maybe they knew that, somehow. Maybe they kept their distance out of respect for my privacy and my disgrace.

Maybe they just didn't give a shit.

I peeked outside now and then, kept an eye on Tactical. I saw Scylla and Charybdis climb into the accretion belt and return towing captured reaction mass in a great distended mesh between them. I watched our ampsat reach its destination in the middle of nowhere, saw antimatter's quantum blueprints stream down into Theseus's buffers. Mass and specs combined in Fab, topped up our reserves, forged the tools that Jukka Sarasti needed for his master plan, whatever that was.

Maybe he'd lose. Maybe Rorschach would kill us all, but not before it had played with Sarasti the way Sarasti had played with me. That would almost make it worthwhile. Or maybe Bates' mutiny would come first, and succeed. Maybe she would slay the monster, and commandeer the ship, and take us all to safety.

But then I remembered: the universe was closed, and so very small. There was really nowhere else to go.

I put my ear to feeds throughout the ship. I heard routine instructions from the predator, murmured conversations among the prey. I took in only sound, never sight; a video feed would have spilled light into my tent, left me naked and exposed. So I listened in the darkness as the others spoke among themselves. It didn't happen often any more. Perhaps too much had been said already, perhaps there was nothing left to do but mind the countdown. Sometimes hours would pass with no more than a cough or a grunt.

When they did speak, they never mentioned my name. Only once did I hear any of them even hint at my existence.

That was Cunningham, talking to Sascha about zombies. I heard them in the galley over breakfast, unusually talkative. Sascha hadn't been let out for a while, and was making up for lost time. Cunningham let her, for reasons of his own. Maybe his fears had been soothed somehow, maybe Sarasti had revealed his master plan. Or maybe Cunningham simply craved distraction from the imminence of the enemy.

"It doesn't bug you?" Sascha was saying. "Thinking that your mind, the very thing that makes you you, is nothing but some kind of parasite?"

"Forget about minds," he told her. "Say you've got a device designed to monitor—oh, cosmic rays, say. What happens when you turn its sensor around so it's not pointing at the sky anymore, but at its own guts?" He answered himself before she could: "It does what it's built to. It measures cosmic rays, even though it's not looking at them any more. It parses its own circuitry in terms of cosmic-ray metaphors, because those feel right, because they feel natural, because it can't look at things any other way. But it's the wrong metaphor. So the system misunderstands everything about itself. Maybe that's not a grand and glorious evolutionary leap after all. Maybe it's just a design flaw."

"But you're the biologist. You know Mom was right better'n anyone. Brain's a big glucose hog. Everything it does costs through the nose."

"True enough," Cunningham admitted.

"So sentience has gotta be good for something, then. Because it's expensive, and if it sucks up energy without doing anything useful then evolution's gonna weed it out just like that."

"Maybe it did." He paused long enough to chew food or suck smoke. "Chimpanzees are smarter than Orangutans, did you know that? Higher encephalisation quotient. Yet they can't always recognize themselves in a mirror. Orangs can."

"So what's your point? Smarter animal, less self-awareness? Chimpanzees are becoming nonsentient?"

"Or they were, before we stopped everything in its tracks."

"So why didn't that happen to us?"

"What makes you think it didn't?"

It was such an obviously stupid question that Sascha didn't have an answer for it. I could imagine her gaping in the silence.

"You're not thinking this through," Cunningham said. "We're not talking about some kind of zombie lurching around with its arms stretched out, spouting mathematical theorems. A smart automaton would blend in. It would observe those around it, mimic their behavior, act just like everyone else. All the while completely unaware of what it was doing. Unaware even of its own existence."

"Why would it bother? What would motivate it?"

"As long as you pull your hand away from an open flame, who cares whether you do it because it hurts or because some feedback algorithm says withdraw if heat flux exceeds critical T? Natural selection doesn't care about motives. If impersonating something increases fitness, then nature will select good impersonators over bad ones. Keep it up long enough and no conscious being would be able to pick your zombie out of a crowd." Another silence; I could hear him chewing through it. "It'll even be able to participate in a conversation like this one. It could write letters home, impersonate real human feelings, without having the slightest awareness of its own existence."

"I dunno, Rob. It just seems—"

"Oh, it might not be perfect. It might be a bit redundant, or resort to the occasional expository infodump. But even real people do that, don't they?"

"And eventually, there aren't any real people left. Just robots pretending to give a shit."

"Perhaps. Depends on the population dynamics, among other things. But I'd guess that at least one thing an automaton lacks is empathy; if you can't feel, you can't really relate to something that does, even if you act as though you do. Which makes it interesting to note how many sociopaths show up in the world's upper echelons, hmm? How ruthlessness and bottom-line self-interest are so lauded up in the stratosphere, while anyone showing those traits at ground level gets carted off into detention with the Realists. Almost as if society itself is being reshaped from the inside out."

"Oh, come on. Society was always pretty— wait, you're saying the world's corporate elite are nonsentient?"

"God, no. Not nearly. Maybe they're just starting down that road. Like chimpanzees."

"Yeah, but sociopaths don't blend in well."

"Maybe the ones that get diagnosed don't, but by definition they're the bottom of the class. The others are too smart to get caught, and real automatons would do even better. Besides, when you get powerful enough, you don't need to act like other people. Other people start acting like you."

Sascha whistled. "Wow. Perfect play-actor."

"Or not so perfect. Sound like anyone we know?"

They may have been talking about someone else entirely, I suppose. But that was as close to a direct reference to Siri Keeton that I heard in all my hours on the grapevine. Nobody else mentioned me, even in passing. That was statistically unlikely, given what I'd just endured in front of them all; someone should have said something. Perhaps Sarasti had ordered them not to discuss it. I didn't know why. But it was obvious by now that the vampire had been orchestrating their interactions with me for some time. Now I was in hiding, but he knew I'd listen in at some point. Maybe, for some reason, he didn't want my surveillance—contaminated…

He could have simply locked me out of ConSensus. He hadn't. Which meant he still wanted me in the loop.

Zombies. Automatons. Fucking sentience.

For once in your goddamned life, understand something.

He'd said that to me. Or something had. During the assault.

Understand that your life depends on it.

Almost as if he were doing me a favor.

Then he'd left me alone. And had evidently told the others to do the same.

Are you listening, Keeton?

And he hadn't locked me out of ConSensus.

***

Centuries of navel-gazing. Millennia of masturbation. Plato to Descartes to Dawkins to Rhanda. Souls and zombie agents and qualia. Kolmogorov complexity. Consciousness as Divine Spark. Consciousness as electromagnetic field. Consciousness as functional cluster.

I explored it all.

Wegner thought it was an executive summary. Penrose heard it in the singing of caged electrons. Nirretranders said it was a fraud; Kazim called it leakage from a parallel universe. Metzinger wouldn't even admit it existed. The AIs claimed to have worked it out, then announced they couldn't explain it to us. Gödel was right after all: no system can fully understand itself.

Not even the synthesists had been able to rotate it down. The load-bearing beams just couldn't take the strain.

All of them, I began to realize, had missed the point. All those theories, all those drugdreams and experiments and models trying to prove what consciousness was: none to explain what it was good for. None needed: obviously, consciousness makes us what we are. It lets us see the beauty and the ugliness. It elevates us into the exalted realm of the spiritual. Oh, a few outsiders—Dawkins, Keogh, the occasional writer of hackwork fiction who barely achieved obscurity—wondered briefly at the why of it: why not soft computers, and no more? Why should nonsentient systems be inherently inferior? But they never really raised their voices above the crowd. The value of what we are was too trivially self-evident to ever call into serious question.

Yet the questions persisted, in the minds of the laureates, in the angst of every horny fifteen-year-old on the planet. Am I nothing but sparking chemistry? Am I a magnet in the ether? I am more than my eyes, my ears, my tongue; I am the little thing behind those things, the thing looking out from inside. But who looks out from its eyes? What does it reduce to? Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?

What a stupid fucking question. I could have answered it in a second, if Sarasti hadn't forced me to understand it first.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

— Thoreau

The shame had scoured me and left me hollow. I didn't care who saw me. I didn't care what state they saw me in. For days I'd floated in my tent, curled into a ball and breathing my own stink while the others made whatever preparations my tormentor had laid out for them. Amanda Bates was the only one who'd raised even a token protest over what Sarasti had done to me. The others kept their eyes down and their mouths shut and did what he told them to— whether from fear or indifference I couldn't tell.

It was something else I'd stopped caring about.

Sometime during that span the cast on my arm cracked open like a shucked clam. I upped the lumens long enough to assess its handiwork; my repaired palm itched and glistened in twilight, a longer, deeper Fate line running from heel to web. Then back to darkness, and the blind unconvincing illusion of safety.

Sarasti wanted me to believe. Somehow he must have thought that brutalising and humiliating me would accomplish that—that broken and drained, I would become an empty vessel to fill as he saw fit. Wasn't it a classic brainwashing technique—to shatter your victim and then glue the pieces back together in according to specs of your own choosing? Maybe he was expecting some kind of Stockholm Syndrome to set in, or maybe his actions followed some agenda incomprehensible to mere meat.

Maybe he'd simply gone insane.

He had broken me. He had presented his arguments. I had followed his trail of bread crumbs though ConSensus, through Theseus. And now, only nine days from graduation, I knew one thing for sure: Sarasti was wrong. He had to be. I couldn't see how, but I knew it just the same. He was wrong.

Somehow, absurdly, that had become the one thing I did care about.

***

No one in the spine. Only Cunningham visible in BioMed, poring over digital dissections, pretending to kill time. I floated above him, my rebuilt hand clinging to the top of the nearest stairwell; it dragged me in a slow, small circle as the Drum turned. Even from up there I could see the tension in the set of his shoulders: a system stuck in a holding pattern, corroding through the long hours as fate advanced with all the time in the world.

He looked up. "Ah. It lives."

I fought the urge to retreat. Just a conversation, for God's sake. It's just two people talking. People do it all the time without your tools. You can do this. You can do this.

Just try.

So I forced one foot after another down the stairs, weight and apprehension rising in lockstep. I tried to read Cunningham's topology through the haze. Maybe I saw a facade, only microns deep. Maybe he would welcome almost any distraction, even if he wouldn't admit it.

Or maybe I was just imagining it.

"How are you doing?" he asked as I reached the deck.

I shrugged.

"Hand all better, I see."

"No thanks to you."

I'd tried to stop that from coming out. Really.

Cunningham struck a cigarette. "Actually, I was the one who fixed you up."

"You also sat there and watched while he took me apart."

"I wasn't even there." And then, after a moment: "But you may be right. I might very well have sat it out in any event. Amanda and the Gang did try to intervene on your behalf, from what I hear. Didn't do a lot of good for anyone."

"So you wouldn't even try."

"Would you, if the sitution were reversed? Go up unarmed against a vampire?"

I said nothing. Cunningham regarded me for a long moment, dragging on his cigarette. "He really got to you, didn't he?" he said at last.

"You're wrong," I said.

"Am I."

"I don't play people."

"Mmmm." He seemed to consider the proposition. "What word would you prefer, then?"

"I observe."

"That you do. Some might even call it surveillance."

"I—I read body language." Hoping that that was all he was talking about.

"It's a matter of degree and you know it. Even in a crowd there's a certain expectation of privacy. People aren't prepared to have their minds read off every twitch of the eyeball." He stabbed at the air with his cigarette. "And you. You're a shapeshifter. You present a different face to every one of us, and I'll wager none of them is real. The real you, if it even exists, is invisible..."

Something knotted below my diaphragm. "Who isn't? Who doesn't—try to fit in, who doesn't want to get along? There's nothing malicious about that. I'm a synthesist, for God's sake! I never manipulate the variables."

"Well you see, that's the problem. It's not just variables you're manipulating."

Smoke writhed between us.

"But I guess you can't really understand that, can you." He stood and waved a hand. ConSensus windows imploded at his side. "Not your fault, really. You can't blame someone for the way they're wired."

"Give me a fucking break," I snarled.

His dead face showed nothing.

That, too, had slipped out before I could stop it—and after that came the flood: "You put so much fucking stock in that. You and your empathy. And maybe I am just some kind of imposter but most people would swear I'd worn their very souls. I don't need that shit, you don't have to feel motives to deduce them, it's better if you can't, it keeps you—"

"Dispassionate?" Cunningham smiled faintly.

"Maybe your empathy's just a comforting lie, you ever think of that? Maybe you think you know how the other person feels but you're only feeling yourself, maybe you're even worse than me. Or maybe we're all just guessing. Maybe the only difference is that I don't lie to myself about it."

"Do they look the way you imagined?" he asked.

"What? What are you talking about?"

"The scramblers. Multijointed arms from a central mass. Sounds rather similar to me."

He'd been into Szpindel's archives.

"I—Not really," I said. "The arms are more—flexible, in real life. More segmented. And I never really got a look at the body. What does that have to do with—"

"Close, though, wasn't it? Same size, same general body plan."

"So what?"

"Why didn't you report it?"

"I did. Isaac said it was just TMS. From Rorschach."

"You saw them before Rorschach. Or at least," he continued, "you saw something that scared you into blowing your cover, back when you were spying on Isaac and Michelle."

My rage dissipated like air through a breach. "They—they knew?"

"Only Isaac, I think. And it kept it between it and the logs. I suspect it didn't want to interfere with your noninterference protocols—although I'll wager that was the last time you ever caught the two of them in private, yes?"

I didn't say anything.

"Did you think the official observer was somehow exempt from observation?" Cunningham asked after a while.

"No," I said softly. "I suppose not."

He nodded. "Have you seen any since? I'm not talking about run-of-the-mill TMS hallucinations. I mean scramblers. Have you hallucinated any since you actually saw one in the flesh, since you knew what they looked like?"

I thought about it. "No."

He shook his head, some new opinion confirmed. "You really are something, Keeton, you know that? You don't lie to yourself? Even now, you don't know what you know."

"What are you talking about?"

"You figured it out. From Rorschach's architecture, probably—form follows function, yes? Somehow you pieced together a fairly good idea of what a scrambler looked like before anyone ever laid eyes on them. Or at least—" He drew a breath; his cigarette flared like an LED— "part of you did. Some collection of unconscious modules working their asses off on your behalf. But they can't show their work, can they? You don't have conscious access to those levels. So one part of the brain tries to tell another any way it can. Passes notes under the table."

"Blindsight," I murmered. You just get a feeling of where to reach...

"More like schizophrenia, except you saw pictures instead of hearing voices. You saw pictures. And you still didn't understand."

I blinked. "But how would I—I mean—"

"What did you think, that Theseus was haunted? That the scramblers were communing with you telepathically? What you do—it matters, Keeton. They told you you were nothing but their stenographer and they hammered all those layers of hands-off passivity into you but you just had to take some initiative anyway, didn't you? Had to work the problem on your own. The only thing you couldn't do was admit it to yourself." Cunningham shook his head. "Siri Keeton. See what they've done to you."

He touched his face.

"See what they've done to us all," he whispered.

***

I found the Gang floating in the center of the darkened observation blister. She made room as I joined her, pushed to one side and anchored herself to a bit of webbing.

"Susan?" I asked. I honestly couldn't tell any more.

"I'll get her," Michelle said.

"No, that's all right. I'd like to speak to all of—"

But Michelle had already fled. The half-lit figure changed before me, and said, "She'd rather be alone right now."

I nodded. "You?"

James shrugged. "I don't mind talking. Although I'm surprised you're still doing your reports, after...."

"I'm—not, exactly. This isn't for Earth."

I looked around. Not much to see. Faraday mesh coated the inside of the dome like a gray film, dimming and graining the view beyond. Ben hung like a black malignancy across half the sky. I could make out a dozen dim contrails against vague bands of cloud, in reds so deep they bordered on black. The sun winked past James's shoulder, our sun, a bright dot that diffracted into faint splintered rainbows when I moved my head. That was pretty much it: starlight didn't penetrate the mesh, nor did the larger, dimmer particles of the accretion belt. The myriad dim pinpoints of shovelnosed machinery were lost utterly.

Which might be a comfort to some, I supposed.

"Shitty view," I remarked. Theseus could have projected crisp first-person vistas across the dome in an instant, more real than real.

"Michelle likes it," James said. "The way it feels. And Cruncher likes the diffraction effects, he likes— interference patterns."

We watched nothing for a while, by the dim half-light filtering out from the spine. It brushed the edges of James' profile.

"You set me up," I said at last.

She looked at me. "What do you mean?"

"You were talking around me all along, weren't you? All of you. You didn't bring me in until I'd been—" How had she put it? "—preconditioned. The whole thing was planned to throw me off-balance. And then Sarasti— attacks me out of nowhere, and—"

"We didn't know about that. Not until the alarm went off."

"Alarm?"

"When he changed the gas mix. You must have heard it. Isn't that why you were there?"

"He called me to his tent. He told me to watch."

She regarded me from a face full of shadow. "You didn't try to stop him?"

I couldn't answer the accusation in her voice. "I just—observe," I said weakly.

"I thought you were trying to stop him from—" She shook her head. "That's why I thought he was attacking you."

"You're saying that wasn't an act? You weren't in on it?" I didn't believe it.

But I could tell she did.

"I thought you were trying to protect them." She snorted a soft, humorless laugh at her own mistake and looked away. "I guess I should have known better."

She should have. She should have known that taking orders is one thing; taking sides would have done nothing but compromise my integrity.

And I should have been used to it by now.

I forged on. "It was some kind of object lesson. A, a tutorial. You can't torture the nonsentient or something, and — and I heard you, Susan. It wasn't news to you, it wasn't news to anyone except me, and..."

And you hid it from me. You all did. You and your whole gang and Amanda too. You've been hashing this out for days and you went out of your way to cover it up.

How did I miss it? How did I miss it?

"Jukka told us not to discuss it with you," Susan admitted.

"Why? This is exactly the kind of thing I'm out here for!"

"He said you'd—resist. Unless it was handled properly."

"Handled—Susan, he assaulted me! You saw what he—"

"We didn't know he was going to do that. None of us did."

"And he did it why? To win an argument?"

"That's what he says."

"Do you believe him?"

"Probably." After a moment she shrugged. "Who knows? He's a vampire. He's—opaque."

"But his record—I mean, he's, he's never resorted to overt violence before—"

She shook her head. "Why should he? He doesn't have to convince the rest of us of anything. We have to follow his orders regardless."

"So do I," I reminded her.

"He's not trying to convince you, Siri."

Ah.

I was only a conduit, after all. Sarasti hadn't been making his case to me at all; he'd been making it through me, and—

—and he was planning for a second round. Why go to such extremes to present a case to Earth, if Earth was irrelevant? Sarasti didn't expect the game to end out here. He expected Earth to do something in light of his—perspective.

"But what difference does it make?" I wondered aloud.

She just looked at me.

"Even if he's right, how does it change anything? How does this—" I raised my repaired hand—"change anything? Scramblers are intelligent, whether they're sentient or not. They're a potential threat either way. We still don't know. So what difference does it make? Why did he do this to me? How does it matter?"

Susan raised her face to Big Ben and didn't answer.

Sascha returned her face to me, and tried to.

"It matters," she said, "because it means we attacked them before Theseus launched. Before Firefall, even."

"We attacked the—"

"You don't get it, do you? You don't." Sascha snorted softly. "If that isn't the fucking funniest thing I've heard in my whole short life."

She leaned forward, bright-eyed. "Imagine you're a scrambler, and you encounter a human signal for the very first time."

Her stare was almost predatory. I resisted the urge to back away.

"It should be so easy for you, Keeton. It should be the easiest gig you've ever had. Aren't you the user interface, aren't you the Chinese Room? Aren't you the one who never has to look inside, never has to walk a mile in anyone's shoes, because you figure everyone out from their surfaces?"

She stared at Ben's dark smoldering disk. "Well, there's your dream date. There's a whole race of nothing but surfaces. There's no inside to figure out. All the rules are right up front. So go to work, Siri Keeton. Make us proud."

There was no contempt in Sascha's voice, no disdain. There wasn't even anger, not in her voice, not in her eyes.

There was pleading. There were tears.

"Imagine you're a scrambler," she whispered again, as they floated like tiny perfect beads before her face.

***

Imagine you're a scrambler.

Imagine you have intellect but no insight, agendas but no awareness. Your circuitry hums with strategies for survival and persistence, flexible, intelligent, even technological—but no other circuitry monitors it. You can think of anything, yet are conscious of nothing.

You can't imagine such a being, can you? The term being doesn't even seem to apply, in some fundamental way you can't quite put your finger on.

Try.

Imagine that you encounter a signal. It is structured, and dense with information. It meets all the criteria of an intelligent transmission. Evolution and experience offer a variety of paths to follow, branch-points in the flowcharts that handle such input. Sometimes these signals come from conspecifics who have useful information to share, whose lives you'll defend according to the rules of kin selection. Sometimes they come from competitors or predators or other inimical entities that must be avoided or destroyed; in those cases, the information may prove of significant tactical value. Some signals may even arise from entities which, while not kin, can still serve as allies or symbionts in mutually beneficial pursuits. You can derive appropriate responses for any of these eventualities, and many others.

You decode the signals, and stumble:

I had a great time. I really enjoyed him. Even if he cost twice as much as any other hooker in the dome—

To fully appreciate Kesey's Quartet—

They hate us for our freedom—

Pay attention, now—

Understand.

There are no meaningful translations for these terms. They are needlessly recursive. They contain no usable intelligence, yet they are structured intelligently; there is no chance they could have arisen by chance.

The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.

Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies.

The signal is an attack.

And it's coming from right about there.

***

"Now you get it," Sascha said.

I shook my head, trying to wrap it around that insane, impossible conclusion. "They're not even hostile." Not even capable of hostility. Just so profoundly alien that they couldn't help but treat human language itself as a form of combat.

How do you say We come in peace when the very words are an act of war?

"That's why they won't talk to us," I realized.

"Only if Jukka's right. He may not be." It was James again, still quietly resisting, still unwilling to concede a point that even her other selves had accepted. I could see why. Because if Sarasti was right, scramblers were the norm: evolution across the universe was nothing but the endless proliferation of automatic, organized complexity, a vast arid Turing machine full of self-replicating machinery forever unaware of its own existence. And we—we were the flukes and the fossils. We were the flightless birds lauding our own mastery over some remote island while serpents and carnivores washed up on our shores. Susan James could not bring herself to concede that point—because Susan James, her multiple lives built on the faith that communication resolves all conflict, would then be forced to admit the lie. If Sarasti was right, there was no hope of reconciliation.

A memory rose into my mind and stuck there: a man in motion, head bent, mouth twisted into an unrelenting grimace. His eyes focused on one foot, then the other. His legs moved stiffly, carefully. His arms moved not at all. He lurched like a zombie in thrall to rigor mortis.

I knew what it was. Proprioreceptive polyneuropathy, a case study I'd encountered in ConSensus back before Szpindel had died. This was what Pag had once compared me to; a man who had lost his mind. Only self-awareness remained. Deprived of the unconscious sense and subroutines he had always taken for granted, he'd had to focus on each and every step across the room. His body no longer knew where its limbs were or what they were doing. To move at all, to even remain upright, he had to bear constant witness.

There'd been no sound when I'd played that file. There was none now in its recollection. But I swore I could feel Sarasti at my shoulder, peering into my memories. I swore I heard him speak in my mind like a schizophrenic hallucination:

This is the best that consciousness can do, when left on its own.

"Right answer," I murmured. "Wrong question."

"What?"

"Stretch, remember? When you asked it which objects were in the window."

"And it missed the scrambler." James nodded. "So?"

"It didn't miss the scrambler. You thought you were asking about the things it saw, the things that existed on the board. Stretch thought you were asking about—"

"The things it was aware of," she finished.

"He's right," I whispered. "Oh God. I think he's right."

"Hey," James said. "Did you see tha—"

But I never saw what she was pointing at. Theseus slammed its eyelids shut and started howling.

***

Graduation came nine days early.

We didn't see the shot. Whatever gun port Rorschach had opened was precisely eclipsed on three fronts: the lab-hab hid it from Theseus, and two gnarled extrusions of the artefact itself hid it from each of the gun emplacements. A bolus of incendiary plasma shot from that blind spot like a thrown punch; it had split the inflatable wide open before the first alarm went up.

Alarms chased us aft. We launched ourselves down the spine through the bridge, through the crypt, past hatches and crawlspaces, fleeing the surface for any refuge with more than a hand's-breadth between skin and sky. Burrowing. ConSensus followed us back, its windows warping and sliding across struts and conduits and the concave tunnel of the spine itself. I paid no attention until we were back in the drum, deep in Theseus' belly. Where we could pretend we were safer.

Down on the turning deck Bates erupted from the head, tactical windows swirling like ballroom dancers around her. Our own window came to rest on the Commons bulkhead. The hab expanded across that display like a cheap optical illusion: both swelling and shrinking in our sights, that smooth surface billowing towards us while collapsing in on itself. It took me a moment to reconcile the contradiction: something had kicked the hab hard from its far side, sent it careening toward us in a slow, majestic tumble. Something had opened the hab, spilled its atmosphere and left its elastic skin drawing in on itself like a deflating balloon. The impact site swung into view as we watched, a scorched flaccid mouth trailing tenuous wisps of frozen spittle.

Our guns were firing. They shot nonconducting slugs that would not be turned aside by electromagnetic trickery—invisibly dark and distant to human eyes but I saw them through the tactical crosshairs of the firing robots, watched them sew twin dotted blackbodied arcs across the heavens. The streams converged as the guns tracked their targets, closed on two attenuate throwing stars fleeing spread-eagled through the void, their faces turned to Rorschach like flowers to the sun.

The guns cut them to pieces before they'd even made it half way.

But those shredded pieces kept falling, and suddenly the ground beneath was alive with motion. I zoomed the view: scramblers surged across Rorschach's hull like an orgy of snakes, naked to space. Some linked arms, one to another to another, built squirming vertebral daisy-chains anchored at one end. They lifted from the hull, waved through the radioactive vacuum like fronds of articulated kelp, reaching—grasping—

Neither Bates nor her machines were stupid. They targeted the interlinked scramblers as ruthlessly as they'd gone after the escapees, and with a much higher total score. But there were simply too many targets, too many fragments snatched in passing. Twice I saw dismembered bits of Stretch and Clench caught by their brethren.

The ruptured hab loomed across ConSensus like a great torn leukocyte. Another alarm buzzed somewhere nearby: proximity alert. Cunningham shot into the drum from somewhere astern, bounced off a cluster of pipes and conduits, grabbed for support. "Holy shit–we are leaving, aren't we? Amanda?"

"No," Sarasti answered from everywhere.

"What—" does it fucking take? I caught myself. "Amanda, what if it fires on the ship?"

"It won't." She didn't take her eyes from her windows.

"How do you—"

"It can't. If it had spring-loaded any more firepower we'd have seen a change in thermal and microallometry." A false-color landscape rotated between us, its latitudes measured in time, its longitudes in delta-mass. Kilotons rose from that terrain like a range of red mountains. "Huh. Came in just under the noise lim—"

Sarasti cut her off. "Robert. Susan. EVA."

James blanched. "What?" Cunningham cried.

"Lab module's about to impact," the vampire said. "Salvage the samples. Now." He killed the channel before anyone could argue.

But Cunningham wasn't about to argue. He'd just seen our death sentence commuted: why would Sarasti care about retrieving biopsy samples if he didn't think we stood a chance of escaping with them? The biologist steadied himself, braced towards the forward hatch. "I'm there," he said, shooting into the bow.

I had to admit it. Sarasti's psychology was getting better.

It wasn't working on James, though, or Michelle, or—I couldn't quite tell who was on top. "I can't go out there, Siri, it's—I can't go out there…"

Just observe. Don't interfere.

The ruptured inflatable collided impotently to starboard and flattened itself against the carapace. We felt nothing. Far away and far too near, the legions thinned across Rorschach's surface. They disappeared through mouths that puckered and dilated and magically closed again in the artefact's hull. The emplacements fired passionlessly at those who remained.

Observe.

The Gang of Four strobed at my side, scared to death.

Don't interfere.

"It's okay," I said. "I'll go."

***

The open airlock was like a dimple in the face of an endless cliff. I looked out from that indentation into the abyss.

This side of Theseus faced away from Big Ben, away from the enemy. The view was still unsettling enough: an endless panorama of distant stars, hard and cold and unwinking. A single, marginally brighter one, shining yellow, still so very far away. Any scant comfort I might have taken from that sight was lost when the sun went out for the briefest instant: a tumbling piece of rock, perhaps. Or one of Rorschach's shovelnosed entourage.

One step and I might never stop falling.

But I didn't step, and I didn't fall. I squeezed my pistol, jetted gently through the opening, turned. Theseus' carapace curved away from me in all directions. Towards the prow, the sealed observation blister rose above the horizon like a gunmetal sunrise. Further aft a tattered snowdrift peeked across the hull: the edge of the broken labhab.

And past it all, close enough to touch, the endless dark cloudscape of Big Ben: a great roiling wall extending to some flat distant horizon I could barely grasp even in theory. When I focused it was dark and endless shades of gray—but dim, sullen redness teased the corner of my eye when I looked away.

"Robert?" I brought Cunningham's suit feed to my HUD: a craggy, motionless ice field thrown into high contrast by the light of his helmet. Interference from Rorschach's magnetosphere washed over the image in waves. "You there?"

Pops and crackles. The sound of breath and mumbling against an electrical hum. "Four point three. Four point oh. Three point eight—"

"Robert?"

"Three point—shit. What—what are you doing out here, Keeton? Where's the Gang?"

"I came instead." Another squeeze of the trigger and I was coasting towards the snowscape. Theseus' convex hull rolled past, just within reach. "To give you a hand."

"Let's move it then, shall we?" He was passing through a crevice, a scorched and jagged tear in the fabric that folded back at his touch. Struts, broken panels, dead robot arms tangled through the interior of the ice cave like glacial debris; their outlines writhed with static, their shadows leaped and stretched like living things in the sweep of his headlight. "I'm almost—"

Something that wasn't static moved in his headlight. Something uncoiled, just at the edge of the camera's view.

The feed died.

Suddenly Bates and Sarasti were shouting in my helmet. I tried to brake. My stupid useless legs kicked against vacuum, obeying some ancient brainstem override from a time when all monsters were earthbound, but by the time I remembered to use my trigger finger the labhab was already looming before me. Rorschach reared up behind it in the near distance, vast and malign. Dim green auroras writhed across its twisted surface like sheet lightning. Mouths opened and closed by the hundreds, viscous as bubbling volcanic mud, any one of them large enough to swallow Theseus whole. I barely noticed the flicker of motion just ahead of me, the silent eruption of dark mass from the collapsed inflatable. By the time Cunningham caught my eye he was already on his way, backlit against the ghastly corpselight flickering on Rorschach's skin.

I thought I saw him waving, but I was wrong. It was only the scrambler wrapped around his body like a desperate lover, moving his arm back and forth while it ran the thrust pistol tethered to his wrist. Bye-bye, that arm seemed to say, and fuck you, Keeton.

I watched for what seemed like forever, but no other part of him moved at all.

Voices, shouting, ordering me back inside. I hardly heard them. I was too dumbfounded by the basic math, trying to make sense of the simplest subtraction.

Two scramblers. Stretch and Clench. Both accounted for, shot to pieces before my eyes.

"Keeton, do you read? Get back here! Acknowledge!"

"I—it can't be," I heard myself say. "There were only two—"

"Return to the ship immediately. Acknowledge."

"I—acknowledged..."

Rorschach's mouths snapped shut at once, as though holding a deep breath. The artefact began to turn, ponderously, a continent changing course. It receded, slowly at first, picking up speed, turning tail and running. How odd, I thought. Maybe it's more afraid than we are...

But then Rorschach blew us a kiss. I saw it burst from deep within the forest, ethereal and incandescent. It shot across the heavens and splashed against the small of Theseus' back, making a complete and utter fool of Amanda Bates. The skin of our ship flowed there, and opened like a mouth, and congealled in a soundless frozen scream.

You cannot prevent and prepare for war at the same time.

— Einstein

I have no idea whether the scrambler made it back home with its hard-won prize. There was so much lost distance to make up, even if the emplacements didn't pick it off en route. Cunningham's pistol might have run out of fuel. And who knew how long those creatures could survive in vacuum anyway? Maybe there'd been no real hope of success, maybe that scrambler was dead from the moment it had gambled on staying behind. I never found out. It had dwindled and vanished from my sight long before Rorschach dove beneath the clouds and disappeared in turn.

There had always been three, of course. Stretch, and Clench, and the half-forgotten microwaved remains of a scrambler killed by an uppity grunt—kept on ice next to its living brethren, within easy reach of Cunningham's teleops. I tried to dredge half-glimpsed details from memory, after the fact: had both of those escapees been spheres, or had one been flattened along one axis? Had they thrashed, waved their limbs the way some panicky human might with no ground beneath him? Or had one, perhaps, coasted lifeless and ballistic until our guns destroyed the evidence?

At this point, it didn't really matter. What mattered was that at long last, everyone was on the same page. Blood had been drawn, war declared.

And Theseus was paralysed from the waist down.

Rorschach's parting shot had punched through the carapace at the base of the spine. It had just missed the ramscoop and the telematter assembly. It might have taken out Fab if it hadn't spent so many joules burning through the carapace, but barring some temporary pulse effects it left all critical systems pretty much operational. All it had done was weaken Theseus' backbone enough to make it snap in two should we ever burn hard enough to break orbit. The ship would be able to repair that damage, but not in time.

If it had been luck it would have been remarkable.

And now, its quarry disabled, Rorschach had vanished. It had everything it needed from us, for the moment at least. It had information: all the experiences and insights encoded in the salvaged limbs of its martyred spies. If Stretch-or-Clench's gamble had paid off it even had a specimen of its own now, which all things considered we could hardly begrudge it. And so now it lurked invisibly in the depths, resting perhaps. Recharging.

But it would be back.

Theseus lost weight for the final round. We shut down the drum in a token attempt to reduce our vulnerable allotment of moving parts. The Gang of Four—uncommanded, unneeded, the very reason for their existence ripped away—retreated into some inner dialog to which other flesh was unwelcome. She floated in the observatory, her eyes closed as tightly as the leaded lids around her. I could not tell who was in control.

I guessed. "Michelle?"

"Siri—" Susan. "Just go."

Bates floated near the floor of the drum, windows arrayed externally across bulkhead and conference table. "What can I do?" I asked.

She didn't look up. "Nothing."

So I watched. Bates counted skimmers in one window—mass, inertia, any of a dozen variables that would prove far too constant should any of those shovelnosed missiles come at our throat. They had finally noticed us. Their chaotic electron-dance was shifting now, hundreds of thousands of colossal sledgehammers in sudden flux, reweaving into some ominous dynamic that hadn't yet settled into anything we could predict.

In another window Rorschach's vanishing act replayed on endless loop: a radar image receding deep into the maelstrom, fading beneath gaseous teratonnes of radio static. It might still be an orbit, of sorts. Judging by that last glimpsed trajectory Rorschach might well be swinging around Ben's core now, passing through crushed layers of methane and monoxide that would flatten Theseus into smoke. Maybe it didn't even stop there; maybe Rorschach could pass unharmed even through those vaster, deeper pressures that made iron and hydrogen run liquid.

We didn't know. We only knew that it would be back in a little under two hours, assuming it maintained its trajectory and survived the depths. And of course, it would survive. You can't kill the thing under the bed. You can only keep it outside the covers.

And only for a while.

A thumbnail inset caught my eye with a flash of color. At my command it grew into a swirling soap bubble, incongruously beautiful, a blue-shifted coruscating rainbow of blown glass. I didn't recognize it for a moment: Big Ben, rendered in some prismatic false-color enhance I'd never seen before. I grunted softly.

Bates glanced up. "Oh. Beautiful, isn't it?"

"What's the spectrum?"

"Longwave stuff. Visible red, infra, down a ways. Good for heat traces."

"Visible red?" There wasn't any to speak of; mostly cool plasma fractals in a hundred shades of jade and sapphire.

"Quadrochromatic palette," Bates told me. "Like what a cat might see. Or a vampire." She managed a half-hearted wave at the rainbow bubble. "Sarasti sees something like that every time he looks outside. If he ever looks outside."

"You'd think he'd have mentioned it," I murmured. It was gorgeous, a holographic ornament. Perhaps even Rorschach might be a work of art through eyes like these...

"I don't think they parse sight like we do." Bates opened another window. Mundane graphs and contour plots sprang from the table. "They don't even go to Heaven, from what I hear. VR doesn't work on them, they— see the pixels, or something."

"What if he's right?" I asked. I told myself that I was only looking for a tactical assessment, an official opinion for the official record. But my words came out doubtful and frightened.

She paused. For a moment I wondered if she, too, had finally lost patience with the sight of me. But she only looked up, and stared off into some enclosed distance.

"What if he's right," she repeated, and pondered the question that lay beneath: what can we do?

"We could engineer ourselves back into nonsentience, perhaps. Might improve our odds in the long run." She looked at me, a rueful sort of half-smile at the corner of her mouth. "But I guess that wouldn't be much of a win, would it? What's the difference between being dead, and just not knowing you're alive?"

I finally saw it.

How long would it take an enemy tactician to discern Bates' mind behind the actions of her troops on the battlefield? How long before the obvious logic came clear? In any combat situation, this woman would naturally draw the greatest amount of enemy fire: take off the head, kill the body. But Amanda Bates wasn't just a head: she was a bottleneck, and her body would not suffer from a decapitation strike. Her death would only let her troops off the leash. How much more deadly would those grunts be, once every battlefield reflex didn't have to pass through some interminable job stack waiting for the rubber stamp?

Szpindel had had it all wrong. Amanda Bates wasn't a sop to politics, her role didn't deny the obsolescence of Human oversight at all. Her role depended on it.

She was more cannon fodder than I. She always had been. And I had to admit: after generations of generals who'd lived for the glory of the mushroom cloud, it was a pretty effective strategy for souring warmongers on gratuitous violence. In Amanda Bates' army, picking a fight meant standing on the battlefield with a bull's-eye on your chest.

No wonder she'd been so invested in peaceful alternatives.

"I'm sorry," I said softly.

She shrugged. "It's not over yet. Just the first round." She took a long, deep breath, and turned back to her study of slingshot mechanics. "Rorschach wouldn't have tried so hard to scare us off in the first place if we couldn't touch it, right?"

I swallowed. "Right."

"So there's still a chance." She nodded to herself. "There's still a chance."

***

The demon arranged his pieces for the end game. He didn't have many left. The soldier he placed in the bridge. He packed obsolete linguists and diplomats back in their coffin, out of sight and out of the way.

He called the jargonaut to his quarters— and although it would be the first time I'd seen him since the attack, his summons carried not the slightest trace of doubt that I would obey. I did. I came on command, and saw that he had surrounded himself with faces.

Every last one of them was screaming.

There was no sound. The disembodied holograms floated in silent tiers around the bubble, each contorted into a different expression of pain. They were being tortured, these faces; half a dozen real ethnicities and twice as many hypothetical ones, skin tones ranging from charcoal to albino, brows high and slanted, noses splayed or pointed, jaws receding or prognathous. Sarasti had called the entire hominid tree into existence around him, astonishing in their range of features, terrifying in their consistency of expression.

A sea of tortured faces, rotating in slow orbits around my vampire commander.

"My God, what is this?"

"Statistics." Sarasti seemed focused on a flayed Asian child. "Rorschach's growth allometry over a two-week period."

"They're faces…"

He nodded, turning his attention to a woman with no eyes. "Skull diameter scales to total mass. Mandible length scales to EM transparency at one Angstrom. One hundred thirteen facial dimensions, each presenting a different variable. Principle-component combinations present as multifeature aspect ratios." He turned to face me, his naked gleaming eyes just slightly sidecast. "You'd be surprised how much gray matter is dedicated to the analysis of facial imagery. Shame to waste it on anything as—counterintuitive as residual plots or contingency tables."

I felt my jaw clenching. "And the expressions? What do they represent?"

"Software customizes output for user."

An agonized gallery pled for mercy on all sides.

"I am wired for hunting," he reminded gently.

"And you think I don't know that," I said after a moment.

He shrugged, disconcertingly human. "You ask."

"Why am I here, Jukka? You want to teach me another object lesson?"

"To discuss our next move."

"What move? We can't even run away."

"No." He shook his head, baring filed teeth in something approaching regret.

"Why did we wait so long?" Suddenly my sullen defiance had evaporated. I sounded like a child, frightened and pleading. "Why didn't we just take it on when we first got here, when it was weaker…?"

"We need to learn things. For next time."

"Next time? I thought Rorschach was a dandelion seed. I thought it just—washed up here—"

"By chance. But every dandelion is a clone. Their seeds are legion." Another smile, not remotely convincing— "And maybe it takes more than one try for the placental mammals to conquer Australia."

"It'll annihilate us. It doesn't even need those spitballs, it could pulverize us with one of those scramjets. In an instant."

"It doesn't want to."

"How do you know?"

"They need to learn things too. They want us intact. Improves our odds."

"Not enough. We can't win."

This was his cue. This was the point at which Uncle Predator would smile at my naiveté, and take me into his confidence. Of course we're armed to the teeth, he would say. Do you think we'd come all this way, face such a vast unknown, without the means to defend ourselves? Now, at last, I can reveal that shielding and weaponry account for over half the ship's mass…

It was his cue.

"No," he said. "We can't win."

"So we just sit here. We just wait to die for the next—the next sixty-eight minutes..."

Sarasti shook his head. "No."

"But—" I began.

"Oh," I finished.

Because of course, we had just topped up our antimatter reserves. Theseus was not equipped with weapons. Theseus was the weapon. And we were, in fact, going to sit here for the next sixty-eight minutes, waiting to die.

But we were going to take Rorschach with us when we did.

Sarasti said nothing. I wondered what he saw, looking at me. I wondered if there actually was a Jukka Sarasti behind those eyes to see, if his insights—always ten steps ahead of our own— hailed not so much from superior analytical facilities as from the timeworn truth that it takes one to know one.

Whose side, I wondered, would an automaton take?

"You have other things to worry about," he said.

He moved towards me; I swear, all those agonized faces followed him with their eyes. He studied me for a moment, the flesh crinkling around his eyes. Or maybe some mindless algorithm merely processed visual input, correlated aspect ratios and facial tics, fed everything to some output subroutine with no more awareness than a stats program. Maybe there was no more spark in this creature's face than there was in all the others, silently screaming in his wake.

"Is Susan afraid of you?" the thing before me asked.

"Su—why should she be?"

"She has four conscious entities in her head. She's four times more sentient than you. Doesn't that make you a threat?"

"No, of course not."

"Then why should you feel threatened by me?"

And suddenly I didn't care any more. I laughed out loud, with minutes to live and nothing to lose. "Why? Maybe because you're my natural enemy, you fucker. Maybe because I know you, and you can't even look at one of us without flexing your claws. Maybe because you nearly ripped my fucking hand off and raped me for no good reason—"

"I can imagine what it's like," he said quietly. "Please don't make me do it again."

I fell instantly silent.

"I know your race and mine are never on the best of terms." There was a cold smile in his voice if not on his face. "But I do only what you force me to. You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can't reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of Holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can't be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt—species die—and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even knowing what it is."

"It served me well enough." I wondered at the ease with which I had put my life into the past tense.

"Yes, if your purpose is only to transmit. Now you have to convince. You have to believe."

There were implications there I didn't dare to hope for. "Are you saying—"

"Can't afford to let the truth trickle through. Can't give you the chance to shore up your rationales and your defenses. They must fall completely. You must be inundated. Shattered. Genocide's impossible to deny when you're buried up to your neck in dismembered bodies."

He'd played me. All this time. Preconditioning me, turning my topology inside-out.

I'd known something was going on. I just hadn't understood what.

"I'd have seen right through it," I said, "if you hadn't made me get involved."

"You might even read it off me directly."

"That's why you—" I shook my head. "I thought that was because we were meat."

"That too," Sarasti admitted, and looked right at me.

For the first time, I looked right back. And felt a shock of recognition.

I still wonder why I never saw it before. For all those years I remembered the thoughts and feelings of some different, younger person, some remnant of the boy my parents had hacked out of my head to make room for me. He'd been alive. His world had been vibrant. And though I could call up the memories of that other consciousness, I could barely feel anything within the constraints of my own.

Perhaps dreamstate wasn't such a bad word for it…

"Like to hear a vampire folk tale?" Sarasti asked.

"Vampires have folk tales?"

He took it for a yes. "A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"Amanda is not planning a mutiny."

"What? You know about—"

"She doesn't even want to. Ask her if you like."

"No—I—"

"You value objectivity."

It was so obvious I didn't bother answering.

He nodded as if I had. "Synthesists can't have opinions of their own. So when you feel one, it must be someone else's. The crew holds you in contempt. Amanda wants me relieved of command. Half of us is you. I think the word is project. Although,"—he cocked his head a bit to one side—"lately you improve. Come."

"Where?"

"Shuttle bay. Time to do your job."

"My—"

"Survive and bear witness."

"A drone—"

"Can deliver the data—assuming nothing fries its memory before it gets away. It can't convince anyone. It can't counter rationalizations and denials. It can't matter. And vampires—" he paused—"have poor communications skills."

It should have been cause for petty, selfish rejoicing.

"It all comes down to me," I said. "That's what you're saying. I'm a fucking stenographer, and it's all on me."

"Yes. Forgive me for that."

"Forgive you?"

Sarasti waved his hand. All faces save two disappeared.

"I don't know what I'm doing."

***

The news bloomed across ConSensus a few seconds before Bates called it aloud: Thirteen skimmers had not reappeared from behind Big Ben on schedule. Sixteen. Twenty-eight.

And counting.

Sarasti clicked to himself as he and Bates played catch-up. Tactical filled with luminous multicolored threads, a tangle of revised projections as intricate as art. The threads wrapped Ben like a filamentous cocoon; Theseus was a naked speck in the middle distance.

I expected any number of those lines to skewer us like needles through a bug. Surprisingly, none did; but the projections only extended twenty-five hours into the future, and were reliable for only half that. Not even Sarasti and the Captain could look so far ahead with that many balls in the air. It was something, though, the faintest silver lining: that all these high-speed behemoths couldn't simply reach out and swat us without warning. Evidently they still had to ease into the curve.

After Rorschach's dive, I'd been starting to think the laws of physics didn't apply.

The trajectories were close enough, though. At least three skimmers would be passing within a hundred kilometers on their next orbits.

Sarasti reached for his injector, the blood rising in his face. "Time to go. We refit Charybdis while you're sulking."

He held the hypo to his throat and shot up. I stared at ConSensus, caught by that bright shifting web like a moth by a streetlight.

"Now, Siri."

He pushed me from his quarters. I sailed into the passageway, grabbed a convenient rung—and stopped.

The spine was alive with grunts, patrolling the airspace, standing guard over the fab plants and shuttle 'locks, clinging like giant insects to the rungs of unrolling spinal ladders. Slowly, silently, the spine itself was stretching.

It could do that, I remembered. Its corrugations flexed and relaxed like muscle, it could grow up to two hundred meters to accommodate any late-breaking need for a bigger hanger or more lab space.

Or more infantry. Theseus was increasing the size of the battlefield.

"Come." The vampire turned aft.

Bates broke in from up front. "Something's happening."

An emergency handpad, geckoed to the expanding bulkhead, slid past to one side. Sarasti grabbed it and tapped commands. Bates' feed appeared on the bulkhead: a tiny chunk of Big Ben, an EM-enhanced equatorial quadrant only a few thousand klicks on a side. The clouds boiled down there, a cyclonic knot of turbulence swirling almost too fast for realtime. The overlay described charged particles, bound in a deep Parker spiral. It spoke of great mass, rising.

Sarasti clicked.

"DTI?" Bates said.

"Optical only." Sarasti took my arm and dragged me effortlessly astern. The display paced us along the bulkhead: seven skimmers shot from the clouds as I watched, a ragged circle of scramjets screaming red-hot into space. ConSensus plotted their paths in an instant; luminous arcs rose around our ship like the bars of a cage.

Theseus shuddered.

We've been hit, I thought. Suddenly the spine's plodding expansion cranked into overdrive; the pleated wall lurched and accelerated, streaming past my outstretched fingers as the closed hatch receded up ahead—

—receded overhead.

The walls weren't moving at all. We were falling, to the sudden strident bleating of an alarm.

Something nearly yanked my arm from its socket: Sarasti had reached out with one hand and caught a rung, reached with his other and caught me before we'd both been flattened against the Fab plant. We dangled. I must have weighed two hundred kilograms; the floor shuddered ten meters below my feet. The ship groaned around us. The spine filled with the screech of torquing metal. Bates' grunts clung to its walls with clawed feet.

I reached for the ladder. The ladder pulled away: the ship was bending in the middle and down had started to climb the walls. Sarasti and I swung towards the center of the spine like a daisy-chain pendulum.

"Bates! James!" The vampire roared. His grip on my wrist trembled, slipping. I strained for the ladder, swung, caught it.

"Susan James has barricaded herself in the bridge and shut down autonomic overrides." An unfamiliar voice, flat and affectless. "She has initiated an unauthorized burn. I have begun a controlled reactor shutdown; be advised that the main drive will be offline for at least twenty-seven minutes."

The ship, I realized, its voice raised calmly above the alarm. The Captain itself. On Public Address.

That was unusual.

"Bridge!" Sarasti barked. "Open channel!"

Someone was shouting up there. There were words, but I couldn't make them out.

Without warning, Sarasti let go.

He dropped obliquely in a blur. Aft and opposite, the bulkhead waited to swat him like an insect. In half a second both his legs would be shattered, if the impact didn't kill him outright—

But suddenly we were weightless again, and Jukka Sarasti—purple-faced, stiff-limbed— was foaming at the mouth.

"Reactor offline," the Captain reported. Sarasti bounced off the wall.

He's having a seizure, I realized.

I released the ladder and pushed astern. Theseus swung lopsidedly around me. Sarasti convulsed in mid-air; clicks and hisses and choking sounds stuttered from his mouth. His eyes were so wide they seemed lidless. His pupils were mirror-red pinpoints. The flesh twitched across his face as though trying to crawl off.

Ahead and behind, battlebots held their position and ignored us.

"Bates!" I yelled up the spine. "We need help!"

Angles, everywhere. Seams on the shield plates. Sharp shadows and protrusions on the surface of every drone. A two-by-three matrix of insets, bordered in black, floating over the main ConSensus display: two big interlinked crosses right in front of where Sarasti had been hanging.

This can't be happening. He just took his antiEuclideans. I saw him. Unless...

Someone had spiked Sarasti's drugs.

"Bates!" She should be linked into the grunts, they should have leapt forward at the first sign of trouble. They should be dragging my commander to the infirmary by now. They waited stolid and immobile. I stared at the nearest: "Bates, you there?" And then—in case she wasn't—I spoke to the grunt directly. "Are you autonomous? Do you take verbal orders?"

On all sides the robots watched; the Captain just laughed at me, its voice posing as an alarm.

Infirmary.

I pushed. Sarasti's arms flailed randomly against my head and shoulders. He tumbled forward and sideways, hit the moving ConSensus display dead center, bounced away up the spine. I kicked off in his wake—

—and glimpsed something from the corner of my eye—

—and turned—

—And dead center of ConSensus, Rorschach erupted from Ben's seething face like a breaching whale. It wasn't just the EM-enhance: the thing was glowing, deep angry red. Enraged, it hurled itself into space, big as a mountain range.

Fuck fuck fuck.

Theseus lurched. The lights flickered, went out, came back on again. The turning bulkhead cuffed me from behind.

"Backups engaged," the Captain said calmly.

"Captain! Sarasti's down!" I kicked off the nearest ladder, bumped into a grunt and headed forward after the vampire. "Bates isn't—what do I do?"

"Nav offline. Starboard afferents offline."

It wasn't even talking to me, I realized. Maybe this wasn't the Captain at all. Maybe it was pure reflex: a dialog tree, spouting public-service announcements. Maybe Theseus had already been lobotomized. Maybe this was only her brain stem talking.

Darkness again. Then flickering light.

If the Captain was gone, we were screwed.

I gave Sarasti another push. The alarm bleated on. The drum was twenty meters ahead; BioMed was just the other side of that closed hatch. The hatch had been open before, I remembered. Someone had shut it in the last few minutes. Fortunately Theseus had no locks on her doors.

Unless the Gang barricaded it before they took the bridge...

"Strap in, people! We are getting out of here!"

Who in hell…?

The open bridge channel. Susan James, shouting up there. Or someone was; I couldn't quite place the voice...

Ten meters to the drum. Theseus jerked again, slowed her spin. Stabilised.

"Somebody start the goddamned reactor! I've only got attitude jets up here!"

"Susan? Sascha?" I was at the hatch. "Who is that?" I pushed passed Sarasti and reached to open it.

No answer.

Not from ConSensus, anyway. I heard a muted hum from behind, saw the ominous shifting of shadows on the bulkhead just a moment too late. I turned in time to see one of the grunts raise a spiky appendage—curved like a scimitar, needle-tipped—over Sarasti's head.

I turned in time to see it plunge into his skull.

I froze. The metal proboscis withdrew, dark and slick. Lateral maxillipeds began nibbling at the base of Sarasti's skull. His pithed corpse wasn't thrashing now; it only trembled, a sack of muscles and motor nerves awash in static.

Bates.

Her mutiny was underway. No, their mutiny—Bates and the Gang. I'd known. I'd imagined it. I'd seen it coming.

He hadn't believed me.

The lights went out again. The alarm fell silent. ConSensus dwindled to a flickering doodle on the bulkhead and disappeared; I saw something there in that last instant, and refused to process it. I heard breath catch in my throat, felt angular monstrosities advancing through the darkness. Something flared directly ahead, a bright brief staccato in the void. I glimpsed curves and angles in silhouette, staggering. The buzzing crackle of shorting circuitry. Metal objects collided nearby, unseen.

From behind the crinkle of the drum hatch, opening. A sudden beam of harsh chemical light hit me as I turned, lit the mechanical ranks behind; they simultaneously unclamped from their anchorages and floated free. Their joints clicked in unison like an army stamping to attention

"Keeton!" Bates snapped, sailing through the hatch. "You okay?"

The chemlight shone from her forehead. It turned the interior of the spine into a high-contrast mosaic, all pale surfaces and sharp moving shadows. It spilled across the grunt that had killed Sarasti; the robot bounced down the spine, suddenly, mysteriously inert. The light washed across Sarasti's body. The corpse turned slowly on its axis. Spherical crimson beads emerged from its head like drops of water from a leaky faucet. They spread in a winding, widening trail, spot-lit by Bates' headlamp: a spiral arm of dark ruby suns.

I backed away. "You—"

She pushed me to one side. "Stay clear of the hatch, unless you're going through." Her eyes were fixed on the ranked drones. "Optical line of sight."

Rows of glassy eyes reflected back at us down the passageway, passing in and out of shadow.

"You killed Sarasti!"

"No."

"But—"

"Who do you think shut it down, Keeton? The fucker went rogue. I could barely even get it to self-destruct." Her eyes went briefly deep-focus; all down the spine the surviving drones launched into some intricate martial ballet, half-seen in the shifting cone of her headlamp.

"Better," Bates said. "They should stay in line now. Assuming we don't get hit with anything too much stronger."

"What is hitting us?"

"Lightning. EMP." Drones sailed down to Fab and the shuttles, taking strategic positions along the tube. "Rorschach's putting out one hell of a charge and every time one those skimmers pass between us they arc."

"What, at this range? I thought we were—the burn—"

"Sent us in the wrong direction. We're inbound."

Three grunts floated close enough to touch. They drew beads on the open drum hatch.

"She said she was trying to escape—" I remembered.

"She fucked up."

"Not by that much. She couldn't have." We were all rated for manual piloting. Just in case.

"Not the Gang," Bates said.

"But—"

"I think there's someone new in there now. Bunch of submodules wired together and woke up somehow, I don't know. But whatever's in charge, I think it's just panicking."

Stuttering brightness on all sides. The spinal lightstrips flickered and finally held steady, at half their usual brightness.

Theseus coughed static and spoke: "ConSensus is offline. Reac—"

The voice faded.

ConSensus, I remembered as Bates turned to head back upstream.

"I saw something," I said. "Before ConSensus went out."

"Yeah."

"Was that—"

She paused at the hatch. "Yeah."

I'd seen scramblers. Hundreds of them, sailing naked through the void, their arms spread wide.

Some of their arms, anyway. "They were carrying—"

Bates nodded. "Weapons." Her eyes flickered to some unseen distance for a moment. "First wave headed for the front end. Blister and forward lock, I think. Second wave's aft." She shook her head. "Huh. I would have done it the other way around."

"How far?"

"Far?" Bates smiled faintly. "They're already on the hull, Siri. We're engaging."

"What do I do? What do I do?"

Her eyes stared past me, and widened. She opened her mouth.

A hand clamped on my shoulder from behind and spun me around.

Sarasti. His dead eyes stared from a skull split like a spiked melon. Globules of coagulating blood clung to his hair and skin like engorged ticks.

"Go with him," Bates said.

Sarasti grunted and clicked. There were no words.

"What—" I began.

"Now. That's an order." Bates turned back to the hatch. "We'll cover you."

The shuttle. "You too."

"No."

"Why not? They can fight better without you, you said that yourself! What's the point?"

"Can't leave yourself a back door, Keeton. Defeats the whole purpose." She allowed herself a small, sad smile. "They've breached. Go."

She was gone, fresh alarms rising in her wake. Far towards the bow I heard the crinkle of emergency bulkheads snapping shut.

Sarasti's undead carcass gurgled and pushed me down the spine. Four more grunts slid smoothly past and took up position behind us. I looked over my shoulder in time to see the vampire pull the handpad from the wall. But it wasn't Sarasti at all, of course. It was the Captain—whatever was left of the Captain, this far into the fight—commandeering a peripheral interface for its own use. The optical port sprouted conspicuously from the back of Sarasti's neck, where the cable used to go in; I remembered the drone's maxillipeds, chewing.

The sound of weapons fire and ricochets rose behind us.

The corpse typed one-handed as we moved. I wondered briefly why it just didn't talk before my gaze flickered back to the spike in his brain: Sarasti's speech centers must be mush.

"Why did you kill him?" I said. A whole new alarm started up, way back in the drum. A sudden breeze tugged me backward for a moment, dissipated in the next second with a distant clang.

The corpse held out the handpad, configured for keys and a text display: Seizng. Cldnt cntrl.

We were at the shuttle locks. Robot soldiers let us pass, their attention elsewhere.

U go, the Captain said.

Someone screamed in the distance. Way off up the spine, the drum hatch slammed shut; I turned and saw a pair of distant grunts welding the seal. They seemed to move faster now than they ever had before. Maybe it was only my imagination.

The starboard shuttle lock slid back. Charybdis' interior lights winked on, spilling brightness into the passageway; the spine's emergency lighting seemed even dimmer in contrast. I peered through the opening. There was almost no cabin space left—just a single open coffin jammed between coolant and fuel tanks and massive retrofitted shockpads. Charybdis had been refitted for high-G and long distance.

And me.

Sarasti's corpse urged me on from behind. I turned and faced it.

"Was it ever him?" I asked.

Go.

"Tell me. Did he ever speak for himself? Did he decide anything on his own? Were we ever following his orders, or was it just you all along?"

Sarasti's undead eyes stared glassy and uncomprehending. His fingers jerked on the handpad.

U dislke ordrs frm mchnes. Happier ths way.

I let it strap me in and close the lid. I lay there in the dark, feeling my body lurch and sway as the shuttle slid into its launch slot. I withstood the sudden silence as the docking clamps let go, the jerk of acceleration that spat me hard into the vacuum, the ongoing thrust that pushed against my chest like a soft mountain. Around me the shuttle trembled in the throes of a burn that far exceeded its normative specs.

My inlays came back online. Suddenly I could see outside if I wanted. I could see what was happening behind me.

I chose not to, deliberately and fervently, and looked anyway.

Theseus was dwindling by then, even on tactical. She listed down the well, wobbling toward some enemy rendezvous that must have been intentional, some last-second maneuver to get her payload as close to target as possible. Rorschach rose to meet her, its gnarled spiky arms uncoiling, spreading as if in anticipation of an embrace. But it was the backdrop, not the players, that stole the tableau: the face of Big Ben roiling in my rearview, a seething cyclonic backdrop filling the window. Magnetic contours wound spring-tight on the overlay; Rorschach was drawing all of Ben's magnetosphere around itself like a bright swirling cloak, twisting it into a concentrated knot that grew and brightened and bulged outward...

Like a torsion flare from an L-class dwarf, my commander had said once, but we should see anything big enough to generate that effect and the sky's dark on that bearing. IAU calls it a statistical artefact.

As, in fact, it had been. An impact splash perhaps, or the bright brief bellow of some great energy source rebooting after a million years of dormancy. Much like this one: a solar flare, with no sun beneath it. A magnetic cannon ten thousand times stronger than nature gave it any right to be.

Both sides drew their weapons. I don't know which fired first, or even if it mattered: how many tonnes of antimatter would it take to match something that could squeeze the power of a sun from a gas ball barely wider than Jupiter? Was Rorschach also resigned to defeat, had each side opted for a kamikaze strike on the other?

I don't know. Big Ben got in the way just minutes before the explosion. That's probably why I'm still alive. Ben stood between me and that burning light like a coin held against the sun.

Theseus sent everything it could, until the last microsecond. Every recorded moment of hand-to-hand combat, every last countdown, every last soul. All the moves and all the vectors. I have that telemetry. I can break it down into any number of shapes, continuous or discrete. I can transform the topology, rotate it and compress it and serve it up in dialects that any ally might be able to use. Perhaps Sarasti was right, perhaps some of it is vital.

I don't know what any of it means.