Providence - Max Barry Page 0,89

to seeing a familiar face.”

He paused.

“We lost the ship through a combination of failures. I should have refused to prepare the AI kill switch. Jackson shouldn’t have activated it, even to save my life. We underestimated the enemy, who were getting closer to us each time, and overestimated ourselves. We overestimated the ship . . .” He hesitated. “No, that’s not right. We underestimated the ship, too. We expected it to behave like a machine, when it’s more like . . .” No one listening now, so he might as well say it. “. . . a living creature. Not in all aspects, of course, but in some ways that matter. We have to treat it as such if we’re to understand it. And I think we do need to understand it, and can’t continue to treat it like a benign black box, or some kind of benevolent deity. Surplex AI is in every Providence. There’s similar software in Freco and many other corporates. We need to improve our understanding of how it thinks, what it wants—we need to find ways to translate its versions of that into concepts we can understand. Because I don’t think there’s just one alien species out here. I think there are two.”

In the void, something winked. He squinted. A minute later, a star disappeared. This time he saw it happen. It could have been anything: spinning debris, the sun catching new objects. But when a third star winked out, he was sure: Something was out there. And getting bigger, or appearing to, because it was approaching.

He fumbled at the suit to toggle his ping. If they were close enough for him to see them, they must know he was here, but he wanted to make sure. A green beacon on his shoulder strobed energetically, singing inaudible frequencies into the night.

More stars vanished. The object had no running lights at all. They might be disabled, but something felt off. It was too large. And the wrong shape: not a simple angular jetpod, but irregular, with gaps, large ones, through which he could glimpse stars. He had the sudden thought that the ship had heard him: He had spoken against it and it had become angry, and was sloughing its way toward him, blackened and burnt but still alive, to punish him. When it drew within a few hundred yards, he could see it wasn’t one object at all, but many.

He jerked his limbs, flailing. He yelled and twisted and none of this made any difference as the salamanders came out of the dark. A blocky golem head filled his view. Its jaws opened and vomited resin across his face. His film bleated protests. He felt his limbs stiffening. He was being encased. “Damn it,” he said. “Goddamn it!” He struggled until he couldn’t any longer.

He knew the salamanders were still there from bumps and dull scraping sounds that resonated through the resin. But he couldn’t see and couldn’t move. He shouted for a while and that didn’t help, either. After enough hours of this, he slept.

* * *

—

His timer ticked over forty hours, the limit he’d set himself for rescue. Over recent hours, the bumping had grown more intense, and he’d felt the stirrings of gravity. This grew until it was stronger than any he’d ever felt. He was dragged and turned over and finally thumped against something solid.

A streak of resin was clawed from his film. In the glow of his suit light was a salamander, its face wide and white, its eyes small and dark, its lipless clown mouth stretching from one earhole to the other. He recognized it as a worker, which he’d always thought of as small, but it wasn’t: It was the size of a bear. It pawed at him, stripping away resin in hunks. A smell like cat urine crawled up his nostrils, penetrating the suit filter.

It didn’t attack and didn’t eat him. When it was done shredding resin, it simply turned and trotted away, moving on all six legs. He breathed. He was alone.

He was in a tight, cavelike space with smooth, curved walls, which he could make out even with his suit light on its lowest setting. He tried to move but found himself bonded to the wall. Not only was