The Island - Peter Watts

Peter Watts 34 The Island
himself in a beetle carapace and goes walkabout. He is not alone;
one of the chimp's teleops accompanies him out on Eri's hull, lest
he lose his footing and fall back into the starry past.
Maybe this will never be more than a drill, maybe this scenario
— catastrophic control-systems failure, the chimp and its backups
offline, all maintenance tasks suddenly thrown onto shoulders of
flesh and blood— is a dress rehearsal for a crisis that never
happens. But even the unlikeliest scenario approaches certainty
over the life of a universe; so we go through the motions. We
practice. We hold our breath and dip outside. We're on a tight
deadline: even armored, moving at this speed the blueshifted
background rad would cook us in hours.
Worlds have lived and died since I last used the pickup in my
suite. "Chimp."
"Here as always, Sunday." Smooth, and glib, and friendly. The
easy rhythm of the practiced psychopath.
"I know what you’re doing."
"I don't understand."
"You think I don't see what's going on? You're building the next
release. You're getting too much grief from the old guard so you're
starting from scratch with people who don't remember the old
days. People you've, you've simplified."
The chimp says nothing. The drone's feed shows Dix
clambering across a jumbled terrain of basalt and metal matrix
composites.
"But you can't raise a human child, not on your own." I know it
tried: there's no record of Dix anywhere on the crew manifest until
his mid-teens, when he just showed up one day and nobody asked
about it because nobody ever…
"Look what you've made of him. He's great at conditional
If/Thens. Can't be beat on number-crunching and Do loops. But
he can't think. Can't make the simplest intuitive jumps. You're
like one of those— " I remember an Earthly myth, from the days
when reading did not seem like such an obscene waste of lifespan
— "one of those wolves, trying to raise a Human child. You can
teach him how to move around on hands and knees, you can teach
him about pack dynamics, but you can't teach him how to walk on