«But I'm your son,» they say.
I don't even dignify it with a denial.
«Get out of my home.»
A human periscope. The Trojan Dix. That's a new one.
The chimp's never tried such overt infiltration while we were up and about before. Usually it waits until we're all undead before invading our territories. I imagine custom-made drones never seen by human eyes, cobbled together during the long dark eons between builds; I see them sniffing through drawers and peeking behind mirrors, strafing the bulkheads with X-rays and ultrasound, patiently searching Eriophora 's catacombs millimeter by endless millimeter for whatever secret messages we might be sending each other down through time.
There's no proof to speak of. We've left tripwires and telltales to alert us to intrusion after the fact, but there's never been any evidence they've been disturbed. Means nothing, of course. The chimp may be stupid but it's also cunning, and a million years is more than enough time to iterate through every possibility using simpleminded brute force. Document every dust mote; commit your unspeakable acts; afterwards, put everything back the way it was.
We're too smart to risk talking across the eons. No encrypted strategies, no long-distance love letters, no chatty postcards showing ancient vistas long lost in the red shift. We keep all that in our heads, where the enemy will never find it. The unspoken rule is that we do not speak, unless it is face to face.
Endless idiotic games. Sometimes I almost forget what we're squabbling over. It seems so trivial now, with an immortal in my sights.
Maybe that means nothing to you. Immortality must be ancient news from whatever peaks you've ascended by now. But I can't even imagine it, although I've outlived worlds. All I have are moments: two or three hundred years, to ration across the lifespan of a universe. I could bear witness to any point in time, or any hundred-thousand if I slice my life thinly enough — but I will never see everything. I will never see even a fraction.
My life will end. I have to choose.
When you come to fully appreciate the deal you've made — ten or fifteen builds out, when the trade-off leaves the realm of mere knowledge and sinks deep as cancer into your bones — you become a miser. You can't help it. You ration out your waking moments to the barest minimum: just enough to manage the build, to plan your latest countermove against the chimp, just enough (if you haven't yet moved beyond the need for Human contact) for sex and snuggles and a bit of warm mammalian comfort against the endless dark. And then you hurry back to the crypt, to hoard the remains of a human lifespan against the unwinding of the cosmos.
There's been time for education. Time for a hundred postgraduate degrees, thanks to the best caveman learning tech. I've never bothered. Why burn down my tiny candle for a litany of mere fact, fritter away my precious, endless, finite life? Only a fool would trade book-learning for a ringside view of the Cassiopeia Remnant, even if you do need false-color enhancement to see the fucking thing.
Now, though. Now, I want to know. This creature crying out across the gulf, massive as a moon, wide as a solar system, tenuous and fragile as an insect's wing: I'd gladly cash in some of my life to learn its secrets. How does it work? How can it even live here at the edge of absolute zero, much less think? What vast, unfathomable intellect must it possess to see us coming from over half a lightyear away, to deduce the nature of our eyes and our instruments, to send a signal we can even detect, much less understand?
And what happens when we punch through it at a fifth the speed of light?
I call up the latest findings on my way to bed, and the answer hasn't changed: not much. The damn thing's already full of holes. Comets, asteroids, the usual protoplanetary junk careens through this system as it does through every other. Infra picks up diffuse pockets of slow outgassing here and there around the perimeter, where the soft vaporous vacuum of the interior bleeds into the harder stuff outside. Even if we were going to tear through the dead center of the thinking part, I can't imagine this vast creature feeling so much as a pinprick. At the speed we're going we'd be through and gone far too fast to overcome even the feeble inertia of a millimeter membrane.
And yet. Stop. Stop. Stop.
It's not us, of course. It's what we're building. The birth of a gate is a violent, painful thing, a spacetime rape that puts out almost as much gamma and X as a microquasar. Any meat within the white zone turns to ash in an instant, shielded or not. It's why we never slow down to take pictures.
One of the reasons, anyway.
We can't stop, of course. Even changing course isn't an option except by the barest increments. Eri soars like an eagle between the stars but she steers like a pig on the short haul; tweak our heading by even a tenth of a degree and you've got some serious damage at twenty percent lightspeed. Half a degree would tear us apart: the ship might torque onto the new heading but the collapsed mass in her belly would keep right on going, rip through all this surrounding superstructure without even feeling it.
Even tame singularities get set in their ways. They do not take well to change.
We resurrect again, and the Island has changed its tune.
It gave up asking us to stop stop stop the moment our laser hit its leading edge. Now it's saying something else entirely: dark hyphens flow across its skin, arrows of pigment converging towards some offstage focus like spokes pointing towards the hub of a wheel. The bullseye itself is offstage and implicit, far removed from 428's bright backdrop, but it's easy enough to extrapolate to the point of convergence six lightsecs to starboard. There's something else, too: a shadow, roughly circular, moving along one of the spokes like a bead running along a string. It too migrates to starboard, falls off the edge of the Island's makeshift display, is endlessly reborn at the same initial coordinates to repeat its journey.
Those coordinates: exactly where our current trajectory will punch through the membrane in another four months. A squinting God would be able to see the gnats and girders of ongoing construction on the other side, the great piecemeal torus of the Hawking Hoop already taking shape.
The message is so obvious that even Dix sees it. «Wants us to move the gate…» and there is something like confusion in his voice. «But how's it know we're building one?»
«The vons punctured it en route,» the chimp points out. «It could have sensed that. It has photopigments. It can probably see.»
«Probably sees better than we do,» I say. Even something as simple as a pinhole camera gets hi-res fast if you stipple a bunch of them across thirty million square kilometers.
But Dix scrunches his face, unconvinced. «So sees a bunch of vons bumping around. Loose parts — not that much even assembled yet. How's it know we're building something hot?»
Because it is very, very, smart, you stupid child. Is it so hard to believe that this, this — organism seems far too limiting a word — can just imagine how those half-built pieces fit together, glance at our sticks and stones and see exactly where this is going?
«Maybe's not the first gate it's seen,» Dix suggests. «Think there's maybe another gate out here?»
I shake my head. «We'd have seen the lensing artefacts by now.»
«You ever run into anyone before?»
«No.» We have always been alone, through all these epochs. We have only ever run away.
And then always from our own children.
I crunch some numbers. «Hundred eighty two days to insemination. If we move now we've only got to tweak our bearing by a few mikes to redirect to the new coordinates. Well within the green. Angles get dicey the longer we wait, of course.»
«We can't do that,» the chimp says. «We would miss the gate by two million kilometers.»
«Move the gate. Move the whole damn site. Move the refineries, move the factories, move the damn rocks. A couple hundred meters a second would be more than fast enough if we send the order now. We don't even have to suspend construction, we can keep building on the fly.»
«Every one of those vectors widens the nested confidence limits of the build. It would increase the risk of error beyond allowable margins, for no payoff.»
«And what about the fact that there's an intelligent being in our path?»
«I'm already allowing for the potential presence of intelligent alien life.»
«Okay, first off, there's nothing potential about it. It's right fucking there. And on our current heading we run the damn thing over.»
«We're staying clear of all planetary bodies in Goldilocks orbits. We've seen no local evidence of spacefaring technology. The current location of the build meets all conservation criteria.»
«That's because the people who drew up your criteria never anticipated a live Dyson sphere!» But I'm wasting my breath, and I know it. The chimp can run its equations a million times but if there's nowhere to put the variable, what can it do?
There was a time, back before things turned ugly, when we had clearance to reprogram those parameters. Before we discovered that one of the things the admins had anticipated was mutiny.
I try another tack. «Consider the threat potential.»
«There's no evidence of any.»
«Look at the synapse estimate! That thing's got orders of mag more processing power than the whole civilization that sent us out here. You think something can be that smart, live that long, without learning how to defend itself? We're assuming it's asking us to move the gate. What if that's not a request? What if it's just giving us the chance to back off before it takes matters into its own hands?»
«Doesn't have hands,» Dix says from the other side of the tank, and he's not even being flippant. He's just being so stupid I want to bash his face in.
I try to keep my voice level. «Maybe it doesn't need any.»
«What could it do, blink us to death? No weapons. Doesn't even control the whole membrane. Signal propagation's too slow.»