Collateral: Collected Stories by Peter Watts

Author:Peter Watts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Argonautidae
Published: 2022-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

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How do you even do it?

How do you stage a mutiny when you’re only awake a few days in a century, when your tiny handful of coconspirators gets reshuffled every time they’re called on deck? How do you plot against an enemy that never sleeps, that has all those empty ages to grind its brute-force way down every avenue, stumble across every careless clue you might have left behind? An enemy with eyes that span your whole world, an enemy that can see through your eyes, hear through your ears in glorious hi-def first-person? Sure, those channels come with off switches; use them too often and you might as well be sending up an alarm—Conspiracy In Progress! Mission Risk Critical!—to any idiot abacus wired in to the network.

How do you even begin?

In more ways than I’d ever imagined.

It was so much more than words posing as music. It was words posing as other words, the lyrics to long-dead songs resurrected and revised to embed new meaning in old verses. It was plans buried in hieroglyphs, messages encoded in chess moves and game dialog. Graffiti copied and commandeered for purposes of subtle cartography: three dots and a peculiar squiggle to say 1425 scanned and clear; 1470 in progress; someone wanna call dibs on 2190? We whispered secret messages down the aeons, sang songs and painted on cave walls and let the Chimp chalk it all up to the quirky evolution of island cultures.

Between builds, we sent messages in bottles. Within builds the revolution found ways to speak privately in real time. Eri’s natural blind spots—the radio shadows, the nooks and corners blocking the views of cameras—provided an initial foothold. We built out from those: equipment caches rearranged to make room for Francine’s art installation, or an improvised maze for a time-wasting tournament of Capture the Flag while we waited for the vons to process the latest asteroid. Embedded cameras were sparsely distributed along most service crawlways by design; that left a good chunk of the ship’s nervous system vulnerable to infiltration. Some spots were more transparent than blind: looped footage of empty corridors on endless replay, spliced into the main feed so the dead could walk the halls while the Chimp saw nothing. Proximity sensors that cut back to live feed whenever an unsuspecting roach or bot happened to pass the same way. We double agents smiled for the cameras and moved in the light; the zombies from the Glade, all those Missing and Presumed Deads, crept undetected like mice through the walls.

We slept away the gigasecs as we always had, summoned back to life when the variables got too messy or the Knowable proved Unprovable or the Chimp suffered an episode of insecurity from the noise we bled into its sensory nerves. We took cues from songs and orders from the Glade: Lian slept through as many builds as she woke up for, but she always left notes on the kitchen table.

The first order of business was finding Enemy HQ.

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