The New Space Opera 2 by Gardner Dozois Page A

other to the end of time.
    After all the moves and countermoves, the truth is we need each other.
    So I wash the rotten-egg stench from my hair and step into Eri ’s silent cathedral hallways. Sure enough, the enemy waits in the darkness, turns the lights on as I approach, shuts them off behind me—but it does not break the silence.
    Dix.
    A strange one, that. Not that you’d expect anyone born and raised on Eriophora to be an archetype of mental health, but Dix doesn’t even know what side he’s on. He doesn’t even seem to know he has to choose a side. It’s almost as though he read the original mission statements and took them seriously , believed in the literal truth of the ancient scrolls: Mammals and Machinery, working together across the ages to explore the Universe! United! Strong! Forward the Frontier!
    Rah.
    Whoever raised him didn’t do a great job. Not that I blame them; it can’t have been much fun having a child underfoot during a build, and none of us were selected for our parenting skills. Even if bots changed the diapers and VR handled the infodumps, socializing a toddler couldn’t have been anyone’s idea of a good time. I’d have probably just chucked the little bastard out an airlock.
    But even I would’ve brought him up to speed.
    Something changed while I was away. Maybe the war’s heated up again, entered some new phase. That twitchy kid is out of the loop for a reason. I wonder what it is.
    I wonder if I care.
    I arrive at my suite, treat myself to a gratuitous meal, jill off. Three hours after coming back to life, I’m relaxing in the starbow commons. “Chimp.”
    â€œYou’re up early,” it says at last.
    I am. Our answering shout hasn’t even arrived at its destination yet. No real chance of new data for another two months, at least.
    â€œShow me the forward feeds,” I command.
    DHF428 blinks at me from the center of the lounge: Stop. Stop. Stop.
    Maybe. Or maybe the chimp’s right, maybe it’s pure physiology. Maybe this endless cycle carries no more intelligence than the beating of a heart.
    But there’s a pattern inside the pattern, some kind of flicker in the blink. It makes my brain itch.
    â€œSlow the time-series,” I command. “By a hundred.”
    It is a blink. DHF428’s disk isn’t darkening uniformly, it’s eclipsing . Asthough a great eyelid were being drawn across the surface of the sun, from right to left.
    â€œBy a thousand.”
    Chromatophores , the chimp called them. But they’re not all opening and closing at once. The darkness moves across the membrane in waves .
    A word pops into my head: latency .
    â€œChimp. Those waves of pigment. How fast are they moving?”
    â€œAbout fifty-nine thousand kilometers per second.”
    The speed of a passing thought.
    And if this thing does think, it’ll have logic gates, synapses—it’s going to be a net of some kind. And if the net’s big enough, there’s an I in the middle of it. Just like me, just like Dix. Just like the chimp. (Which is why I educated myself on the subject, back in the early tumultuous days of our relationship. Know your enemy and all that.)
    The thing about I is, it only exists within a tenth-of-a-second of all its parts. When we get spread too thin—when someone splits your brain down the middle, say, chops the fat pipe so the halves have to talk the long way around; when the neural architecture diffuses past some critical point and signals take just that much longer to pass from A to B—the system, well, decoheres . The two sides of your brain become different people with different tastes, different agendas, different senses of themselves.
    I shatters into we .
    It’s not just a human rule, or a mammal rule, or even an Earthly one. It’s a rule for any circuit that processes information, and it applies as much to the things we’ve yet to meet as it