The Island - Peter Watts

Peter Watts 37 The Island
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.
Or, if our course corrections are off by even a hair— if our
trillion-kilometer curve drifts by as much as a thousand meters—
we will be dead. Before we know it.
Our instruments report that we are precisely on target. The
chimp tells me that we are precisely on target. Eriophora falls
forward, pulled endlessly through the void by her own magicallydisplaced
mass.
I turn to the drone's-eye view relayed from up ahead. It's a
window into history— even now, there's a timelag of several
minutes— but past and present race closer to convergence with
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