The Island

membrane like, like cysts I guess. The chimp doesn't know how many, but we're only picking up this one so far so they might be pretty sparse.»

There's a different kind of frown on his face now. «Why Chimp?»

«What do you mean?»

«Why call him Chimp?»

«We call it the chimp.» Because the first step to humanising something is to give it a name.

«Looked it up. Short for chimpanzee. Stupid animal.»

«Actually, I think chimps were supposed to be pretty smart,» I remember.

«Not like us. Couldn't even talk. Chimp can talk. Way smarter than those things. That name — it's an insult.»

«What do you care?»

He just looks at me.

I spread 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 CO2 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 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