One hundred and thirteen times a second, nothing answers and it reaches out. It feels no frustration, though parts of it do. It is not designed to incorporate consciousness or will, but to use whatever it finds. The minds within it are encysted, walled off. They are used when they are of use, as is everything and it reaches out.
It is not a plan. It is not even a desire, or it is only a desire without knowledge of that longing’s object. It is a selective pressure pressed against chaos. It does not think of itself this way because it does not think, but the environment changes, a new branch of possibilities opens, and it forms the investigator and leans into the new crack. The new space. The minds within it interpret this differently. As a hand reaching up through graveyard soil. As finding a door in a room where no door had been before. As a breath of air to a drowning woman. It is not aware of these images, but awareness of them is part of it.
The investigator puts pressure on the aboriginal, and the aboriginal takes action. The environment changes again. Patterns begin to match patterns, but there can be no recognition because it is not conscious to recognize. It would be aware of the aboriginal accelerating, of it slowing, the vectors shifting zero to one to a different zero in a different location, if it were aware, but it is not aware. It reaches out.
Patterns match, and it reorients and reaches out. Cascades of implicit information bloom, and the conscious parts of it see a lotus opening forever, hear a shout that is made of other shouts that are made of other shouts in a fractal constructed of sound, pray to God for a death that does not come.
It reaches out, but the ways in which it reaches change. It improvises, as it always has, the insect twitch, the spark closing the gap it reaches out.
It touches something, and for a moment, a part of it that can feel, feels hope. It is unaware of hope. The reply does not come. It is not over. It will never be over. It reaches out, and finds new things. Old things. It flows into places that are comfortable for it to flow. There are responses, and the responses feed the impulses that caused them, and there are more responses. All automatic and empty and dead as it is. Nothing reaches back. It feels no disappointment. It does not shut down. It reaches out.
It does not experience the wariness, but the wariness is part of it. It reaches out, rushing into the new possibility space, and something deep in it, wider than it should be, watches it reach.
Doors and corners. It reaches out it reaches out it reaches out. Doors and corners.
This could get ugly, kid.
Chapter Twelve: Basia
James Holden came too late.
Along with everyone else in the colony, Basia watched the drive plume of the Rocinante light the sky of Ilus. For him, maybe, it was already too late. He’d made the bombs that destroyed the RCE shuttle and killed the UN governor. He’d been there when Coop and the others murdered the RCE security team. And maybe there was no coming back from that. Maybe he was already a dead man, or a man destined for life in prison, the same thing really. But looking up at the line of white fire in sky, he couldn’t help but feel a spark of hope. Jim Holden had saved the Ganymede children, too late for Katoa, but he’d saved the others. He’d brought down the evil corporation that had killed Basia’s little boy. Neither Mao-Kwikowski nor Protogen existed anymore because of Holden. And while Basia had never met the man in person, he’d watched him on video casts and read about him in newsfeeds. It created a strange sense of intimacy, to watch the man who’d avenged Katoa on-screen, talking and smiling.
And that man was coming to Ilus. Perhaps he could save Basia too?
So when the bright line in the sky vanished, and Basia knew Holden and his crew were in orbit, he let himself feel a swell of hope. The first he’d felt in a long time.
And when he heard the thunderclap of a descending shuttle, he ran outside just like all the other colonists, watching to see where it would land. The UN mediator is coming! they shouted to each other. The man who saved Earth, they meant. The man who saved Ganymede. The man who will save us.
A small shuttle dropped out of the sky and settled on the hard-packed earth to the south of First Landing, and half the town’s population ran to meet it. Basia ran too.
The shuttle sat on five squat legs, ticking with heat. The town waited in silence, too excited to talk. Then a ramp lowered to the ground, and a squat Earther with gray hair and a deeply lined face walked down it. It wasn’t Holden. One of his crew, maybe? But the man was wearing armor with the RCE logo on it, and Holden was supposed to be an impartial mediator.
The man stopped halfway down the ramp and smiled a humorless smile at them. Basia realized he was holding his breath, then realized everyone else was too.
“Hello,” the man said. “My name is Adolphus Murtry. I’m chief of security for Royal Charter Energy.”
Was it another RCE ship they’d seen braking into orbit? The man walked down the ramp, still smiling that predator’s smile, and as one the crowd backed away. Basia backed up with them.
“Because of the attack on the shuttle that claimed the lives of many RCE employees and UN officials, I am taking direct control of security on this world. If that sounds like martial law, that’s because it is.” Murtry whistled, and ten more people in security armor descended the ramp. They carried automatic weapons and slug-throwing sidearms. Not a non-lethal deterrent in sight.
“Please be aware,” Murtry continued, “that because of the attack on the first security team —”
“No one proved they were attacked!” someone shouted from the crowd. Coop, it was Coop. Standing at the back with his arms crossed and a smug smile on his face.
“Because of that attack,” Murtry continued, “I have given my people ‘shoot first’ authorization. They may, if they feel threatened, utilize lethal force to defuse the threat.”
Carol pushed through the crowd to confront Murtry at the bottom of the ramp, and Coop followed her.
“You’re not the government here,” Carol said, anger making the tendons in her neck stand out. Her hands were in fists, but she kept them at her sides. “You can’t just land here with a bunch of guns and tell us you have the right to shoot us. This is our world.”
“That’s right!” Coop yelled and turned to face the crowd, inviting them to join in.
“No,” Murtry said, his smile not changing, “it is not.”
The air was split with thunder as another ship dropped into the atmosphere and landed on the western side of town. Murtry barely glanced up at it. More troops dropping in, Basia thought.