Beyond the Rift by Peter Watts Read Free Book Online Page A

my hands. “Okay, it’s not a chimp. We just call it that because it’s got roughly the same synapse count.”
    “So gave him a small brain, then complain that he’s stupid all the time.”
    My patience is just about drained. “Do you have a point or are you just blowing CO 2 in—”
    “Why not make him smarter?”
    “Because you can never predict the behavior of a system more complex than you. And if you want a project to stay on track after you’re gone, you don’t hand the reins to anything that’s guaranteed to develop its own agenda.” Sweet smoking Jesus, you’d think someone would have told him about Ashby's Law.
    “So they lobotomized him,” Dix says after a moment.
    “No. They didn’t turn it stupid, they built it stupid.”
    “Maybe smarter than you think. You’re so much smarter, got your agenda, how come he’s still in control?”
    “Don’t flatter yourself,” I say.
    “What?”
    I let a grim smile peek through. “You’re only following orders from a bunch of other systems way more complex than you are.” You’ve got to hand it to them, too; dead for stellar lifetimes and those damn project admins are still pulling the strings.
    “I don’t— I’m following?—”
    “I’m sorry, dear.” I smile sweetly at my idiot offspring. “I wasn’t talking to you. I was talking to the thing that’s making all those sounds come out of your mouth.”
    Dix turns whiter than my panties.
    I drop all pretense. “What were you thinking, Chimp? That you could send this sock-puppet to invade my home and I wouldn’t notice?”
    “Not—I’m not—it’s me ,” Dix stammers. “ Me talking.”
    “It’s coaching you. Do you even know what ‘lobotomised’ means ?” I shake my head, disgusted. “You think I’ve forgotten how the interface works just because we all burned ours out?” A caricature of surprise begins to form on his face. “Oh, don’t even fucking try . You’ve been up for other builds, there’s no way you couldn’t have known. And you know we shut down our domestic links too. And there’s nothing your lord and master can do about that because it needs us, and so we have reached what you might call an accommodation .”
    I am not shouting. My tone is icy, but my voice is dead level. And yet Dix almost cringes before me.
    There is an opportunity here, I realize.
    I thaw my voice a little. I speak gently: “You can do that too, you know. Burn out your link. I’ll even let you come back here afterwards, if you still want to. Just to—talk. But not with that thing in your head.”
    There is panic in his face, and against all expectation it almost breaks my heart. “Can’t , ” he pleads. “How I learn things, how I train . The mission ...”
    I honestly don’t know which of them is speaking, so I answer them both: “There is more than one way to carry out the mission. We have more than enough time to try them all. Dix is welcome to come back when he’s alone.”
    They take a step towards me. Another. One hand, twitching, rises from their side as if to reach out, and there’s something on that lopsided face that I can’t quite recognize.
    “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