The Island

«But he's nothing to me. You understand? He's worse than nothing, he's a liability. He's a spy, he's a spastic waste of O2. Give me one reason why I shouldn't just lock him out there until he cooks.»

«You're his mother,» the chimp says, because the chimp has read all about kin selection and is too stupid for nuance.

«You're an idiot.»

«You love him.»

«No.» An icy lump forms in my chest. My mouth makes words; they come out measured and inflectionless. «I can't love anyone, you brain-dead machine. That's why I'm out here. Do you really think they'd gamble your precious never-ending mission on little glass dolls that needed to bond.»

«You love him.»

«I can kill him any time I want. And that's exactly what I'll do if you don't move the gate.»

«I'd stop you,» the chimp says mildly.

«That's easy enough. Just move the gate and we both get what we want. Or you can dig in your heels and try to reconcile your need for a mother's touch with my sworn intention of breaking the little fucker's neck. We've got a long trip ahead of us, chimp. And you might find I'm not quite as easy to cut out of the equation as Kai and Connie.»

«You cannot end the mission,» it says, almost gently. «You tried that already.»

«This isn't about ending the mission. This is only about slowing it down a little. Your optimal scenario's off the table. The only way that gate's going to get finished now is by saving the Island, or killing your prototype. Your call.»

The cost-benefit's pretty simple. The chimp could solve it in an instant. But still it says nothing. The silence stretches. It's looking for some other option, I bet. It's trying to find a workaround. It's questioning the very premises of the scenario, trying to decide if I mean what I'm saying, if all its book-learning about mother love could really be so far off-base. Maybe it's plumbing historical intrafamilial murder rates, looking for a loophole. And there may be one, for all I know. But the chimp isn't me, it's a simpler system trying to figure out a smarter one, and that gives me the edge.

«You would owe me,» it says at last.

I almost burst out laughing. «What?»

«Or I will tell Dixon that you threatened to kill him.»

«Go ahead.»

«You don't want him to know.»

«I don't care whether he knows or not. What, you think he'll try and kill me back? You think I'll lose his love?» I linger on the last word, stretch it out to show how ludicrous it is.

«You'll lose his trust. You need to trust each other out here.»

«Oh, right. Trust. The very fucking foundation of this mission.»

The chimp says nothing.

«For the sake of argument,» I say after a while, «suppose I go along with it. What would I owe you, exactly?»

«A favor,» the chimp replies. «To be repaid in future.»

My son floats innocently against the stars, his life in balance.

* * *

We sleep. The chimp makes grudging corrections to a myriad small trajectories. I set the alarm to wake me every couple of weeks, burn a little more of my candle in case the enemy tries to pull another fast one; but for now it seems to be behaving itself. DHF428 jumps towards us in the stop-motion increments of a life's moments, strung like beads along an infinite string. The factory floor slews to starboard in our sights: refineries, reservoirs, and nanofab plants, swarms of von Neumanns breeding and cannibalizing and recycling each other into shielding and circuitry, tugboats and spare parts. The very finest Cro Magnon technology mutates and metastasizes across the universe like armor-plated cancer

And hanging like a curtain between it and us shimmers an iridescent life form, fragile and immortal and unthinkably alien, that reduces everything my species ever accomplished to mud and shit by the simple transcendent fact of its existence. I have never believed in gods, in universal good or absolute evil. I have only ever believed that there is what works, and what doesn't. All the rest is smoke and mirrors, trickery to manipulate grunts like me.

But I believe in the Island, because I don't have to. It does not need to be taken on faith: it looms ahead of us, its existence an empirical fact. I will never know its mind, I will never know the details of its origin and evolution. But I can see it: massive, mind boggling, so utterly inhuman that it can't help but be better than us, better than anything we could ever become.

I believe in the Island. I've gambled my own son to save its life. I would kill him to avenge its death.

I may yet.

In all these millions of wasted years, I have finally done something worthwhile.

* * *

Final approach.

Reticles within reticles line up before me, a mesmerising infinite regress of bullseyes centering on target. Even now, mere minutes from ignition, distance reduces the unborn gate to invisibility. There will be no moment when the naked eye can trap our destination. We thread the needle far too quickly: it will be behind us before we know it.