The Complete Short Fiction

by Peter Watts

The exorcism was successful, they say. I will be back with my company within the month. The restraints are merely a precaution. I will be free of them soon, as I am free of the demon.

  “Bring me to God,” I croak. My throat burns like a desert.

  They hold a prayer wand to my head. I feel nothing.

  I feel nothing.

  The wand is in working order. The batteries are fully charged. It’s probably nothing, they say. A temporary aftereffect of the exorcism. Give it time. Probably best to leave the restraints for the moment, but there’s nothing to worry about.

  Of course they are right. I have dwelt in the Spirit, I know the mind of the Almighty—after all, were not all of we chosen made in His image? God would never abandon even the least of his flock. I do not have to believe this, it is something I know. Father, you will not forsake me.

  It will come back. It will come back.

  They urge me to be patient. After three days they admit that they’ve seen this before. Not often, mind you; it was a rare procedure, and this is an even rarer consequence. But it’s possible that the demon may have injured the part of the mind that lets us truly know God. The physicians recite medical terms which mean nothing to me. I ask them about the others that preceded me down this path: How long before they were restored to God’s sight? But it seems there are no hard and fast rules, no overall patterns.

  Trajan burns on the wall beside my bed. Trajan burns daily there and is never consumed, a little like the Burning Bush itself. My keepers have been replaying his cremation daily, a thin gruel of recorded images thrown against the wall; I suspect they are meant to be inspirational. It is always just past sundown in these replays. Trajan’s fiery passing returns a kind of daylight to the piazza, an orange glow reflecting in ten thousand upturned faces.

  He is with God now, forever in His presence. Some say that was true even before he passed, that Trajan lived his whole life in the Spirit. I don’t know whether that’s true; maybe people just couldn’t explain his zeal and devotion any other way.

  A whole lifetime in the presence of God. I’d give a lifetime now for even a minute.

  We are in unexplored territory, they say. That is where they are, perhaps.

  I am in Hell.

  Finally they admit it: none of the others have recovered. They have been lying to me all along. I have been cast into darkness, I am cut off from God. And they called this butchery a success.

  “It will be a test of your faith,” they tell me. My faith. I gape like a fish at the word. It is a word for heathens, for people with made-up gods. The cross would have been infinitely preferable. I would kill these smug meat-cutters with my bare hands, if my bare hands were free.

  “Kill me,” I beg. They refuse. The bishop himself has commanded that I be kept alive and in good health. “Then summon the bishop,” I tell them. “Let me talk to him. Please.”

  They smile sadly and shake their heads. One does not summon the bishop.

  More lies, perhaps. Maybe the bishop has forgotten that I even exist, maybe these people just enjoy watching the innocent suffer. Who else, after all, would dedicate their lives to potions and bloodletting?

  The cut in my head keeps me awake at night, itches maddeningly as scar tissue builds and puckers along its curved edges. I still can’t remember where I’ve seen its like before.

  I curse the bishop. He told me there would be risks, but he only mentioned death. Death is not a risk to me here. It is an aspiration.

  I refuse food for four days. They force-feed me liquids through a tube in my nose.

  It’s a strange paradox. There is no hope here; I will never again know God, I am denied even surcease. And yet these butchers, by the very act of refusing me a merciful death, have somehow awakened a tiny spark that wants to live. It is their sin I am suffering for, after all. This darkness is of their making. I did not turn away from God; they hacked God out of me like a gobbet of gangrenous flesh. It can’t be that they want me to live, for there is no living apart from God. It can only be that they want me to suffer.

  And with this realization comes a sudden desire to deny them that satisfaction.

  They will not let me die. Perhaps, soon, they will wish they had.

  God damn them.

  God damn them. Of course.

  I’ve been a fool. I’ve forgotten what really matters. I’ve been so obsessed by these petty torments that I’ve lost sight of one simple truth: God does not turn on his children. God does not abandon His own.

  But test them—yes. God tests us all the time. Did He not strip Job of all his worldly goods and leave him picking his boils in the dust? Did He not tell Abraham to kill his own son? Did He not restore them to His sight, once they had proven worthy of it?

  I believe that God rewards the righteous. I believe that the Christ said Blesséd are those who believe even though they have not seen. And now, at last, I believe that perhaps faith is not the obscenity I once thought, for it can give strength when one is cut off from the truth.

  I am not abandoned. I am tested.

  I send for the bishop. Somehow, this time I know he’ll come.

  He does.

  “They say I’ve lost the Spirit,” I tell him. “They’re wrong.”

  He sees something in my face. Something changes in his.

  “Moses was denied the Promised Land,” I continue. “Constantine saw the flaming cross but twice in his lifetime. God spoke to Saul of Tarsus only once. Did they lose faith?”

  “They moved the world,” the bishop says.

  I bare my teeth. My conviction fills the room. “So will I.”

  He smiles gently. “I believe you.”

  I stare at him, astonished by my own blindness. “You knew this would happen.”

  He shakes his head. “I could only hope. But yes, there is a—strange truth we are only learning now. I’m still not sure I believe it myself. Sometimes it isn’t the experience of redemption that makes the greatest champions, but the longing for it.”

  On the panel beside me, Trajan burns and is not consumed. I wonder briefly if my fall from grace was entirely accidental. But in the end it does not matter. I remember, at last, where I once saw a scar like mine.

  Before today, the acts I committed in God’s name were pale, bloodless things. No longer. I will return to the Kingdom of Heaven. I will raise my sword-arm high and I will not lay it down until the last of the unbelievers has been slaughtered. I will build mountains of flesh in His name. Rivers will flow from the throats that I cut. I will not stop until I have earned my way back into His sight.

  The bishop leans forward and loosens my straps. “I don’t think we need these any more.”

  They couldn’t hold me anyway. I could tear them like paper.

  I am the fist of God.

  MAYFLY

  with Derryl Murphy

  “I hate you.”

  A four-year-old girl. A room as barren as a fishbowl.

  “I hate you.”

  Little fists, clenching: one of the cameras, set to motion-cap, zoomed on them automatically. Two others watched the adults, mother, father on opposite sides of the room. The machines watched the players: half a world away, Stavros watched the machines.

  “I hate you I hate you I HATE you!”

  The girl was screaming now, her face contorted in anger and anguish. There were tears at the edge of her eyes but they stayed there, never falling. Her parents shifted like nervous animals, scared of the anger, used to the outbursts but far from comfortable with them.

  At least this time she was using words. Usually she just howled.

  She leaned against the blanked window, fists pounding. The window took her assault like hard white rubber, denting slightly, then rebounding. One of the few things in the room that bounced back when she struck out; one less thing to break.

  “Jeannie, hush …” Her mother reached out a hand. Her father, as usual, stood back, a mixture of anger and resentment and confusion on his face.

  Stavros fro
wned. A veritable pillar of paralysis, that man.

  And then: They don’t deserve her.

  The screaming child didn’t turn, her back a defiant slap at Kim and Andrew Goravec. Stavros had a better view: Jeannie’s face was just a few centimeters away from the southeast pickup. For all the pain it showed, for all the pain Jeannie had felt in the four short years of her physical life, those few tiny drops that never fell were the closest she ever came to crying.

  “Make it clear,” she demanded, segueing abruptly from anger to petulance.

  Kim Goravec shook her head. “Honey, we’d love to show you outside. Remember before, how much you liked it? But you have to promise not to scream at it all the time. You didn’t used to, honey, you—”

  “Now!” Back to rage, the pure, white-hot anger of a small child.

  The pads on the wall panel were greasy from Jeannie’s repeated, sticky-fingered attempts to use them herself. Andrew flashed a begging look at his wife: Please, let’s just give her what she wants.

  His wife was stronger. “Jeannie, we know it’s difficult—”

  Jeannie turned to face the enemy. The north pickup got it all: the right hand rising to the mouth, the index finger going in. The defiant glare in those glistening, focused eyes.

  Kim took a step forward. “Jean, honey, no!”

  They were baby teeth, still, but sharp. They’d bitten to the bone before Mommy even got within touching distance. A red stain blossomed from Jeannie’s mouth, flowed down her chin like some perverted reenactment of mealtime messes as a baby, and covered the lower half of her face in an instant. Above the gore, bright angry eyes said gotcha.

  Without a sound Jeannie Goravec collapsed, eyes rolling back in her head as she pitched forward. Kim caught her just before her head hit the floor. “Oh God Andy she’s fainted she’s in shock she—”

  Andrew didn’t move. One hand was buried in the pocket of his blazer, fiddling with something.

  Stavros felt his mouth twitch. Is that a remote control in your pocket or are you just glad to—

  Kim had the tube of liquid skin out, sprayed it onto Jeannie’s hand while cradling the child’s head in her lap. The bleeding slowed. After a moment Kim looked back at her husband, who was standing motionless and unhelpful against the wall. He had that look on his face, that giveaway look that Stavros was seeing so often these days.

  “You turned her off,” Kim said, her voice rising. “After everything we’d agreed on, you still turned her off?”

  Andrew shrugged helplessly. “Kim …”

  Kim refused to look at him. She rocked back and forth, tuneless breath whistling between her teeth, Jeannie’s head still in her lap. Kim and Andrew Goravec with their bundle of joy. Between them, the cable connecting Jeannie’s head to the server shivered on the floor like a disputed boundary.

  Stavros had this metaphoric image of her: Jean Goravec, buried alive in the airless dark, smothered by tonnes of earth—finally set free. Jean Goravec coming up for air.

  Another image, of himself this time: Stavros Mikalaides, liberator. The man who made it possible for her to experience, however briefly, a world where the virtual air was sweet and the bonds nonexistent. Certainly there’d been others in on the miracle—a dozen tech-heads, twice as many lawyers—but they’d all vanished over time, their interest fading with proof-of-principal or the signing of the last waiver. The damage was under control, the project was in a holding pattern; there was no need to waste more than a single Terracon employee on mere cruise control. So only Stavros remained—and to Stavros, Jeannie had never been a project. She was his as much as the Goravecs. Maybe more.

  But even Stavros still didn’t know what it was really like for her. He wondered if it was physically possible for anyone to know. When Jean Goravec slipped the leash of her fleshly existence, she awoke into a reality where the very laws of physics had expired.

  It hadn’t started that way, of course. The system had booted up with years of mundane, real-world environments on file, each lovingly rendered down to the dust motes. But they’d been flexible, responsive to the needs of any developing intellect. In hindsight, maybe too flexible. Jean Goravec had edited her personal reality so radically that even Stavros’ mechanical intermediaries could barely parse it. This little girl could turn a forest glade into a bloody Roman coliseum with a thought. Unleashed, Jean lived in a world where all bets were off.

  A thought-experiment in child abuse: place a newborn into an environment devoid of vertical lines. Keep her there until the brain settles, until the wiring has congealed. Whole assemblies of pattern-matching retinal cells, aborted for lack of demand, will be forever beyond recall. Telephone poles, the trunks of trees, the vertical aspects of skyscrapers—your victim will be neurologically blind to such things for life.

  So what happens to a child raised in a world where vertical lines dissolve, at a whim, into circles or fractals or a favorite toy?

  We’re the impoverished ones, Stavros thought. Next to Jean, we’re blind.

  He could see what she started with, of course. His software read the patterns off her occipital cortex, translated them flawlessly into images projected onto his own tactical contacts. But images aren’t sight, they’re just … raw material. There are filters all along the path: receptor cells, firing thresholds, pattern-matching algorithms. Endless stores of past images, an experiential visual library to draw on. More than vision, sight is interpretation, a subjective stew of infinitesimal enhancements and corruptions. Nobody in the world could interpret Jean’s visual environment better than Stavros Mikalaides, and he’d barely been able to make sense of those shapes for years.

  She was simply, immeasurably, beyond him. It was one of the things he loved most about her.

  Now, mere seconds after her father had cut the cord, Stavros watched Jean Goravec ascend into her true self. Heuristic algorithms upgraded before his eyes; neural nets ruthlessly pared and winnowed trillions of redundant connections; intellect emerged from primordial chaos. Namps-per-op dropped like the heavy end of a teeter-totter; at the other end of that lever, processing efficiency rose into the stratosphere.

  This was Jean. They have no idea, Stavros thought, what you’re capable of.

  She woke up screaming.

  “It’s all right, Jean, I’m here.” He kept his voice calm to help her come down.

  Jean’s temporal lobe flickered briefly at the input. “Oh, God,” she said.

  “Another nightmare?”

  “Oh, God.” Breath too fast, pulse too high, adrenocortical analogs off the scale. It could have been the telemetry of a rape.

  He thought of short-circuiting those responses. Half a dozen tweaks would make her happy. But half a dozen tweaks would also turn her into someone else. There is no personality beyond the chemical—and while Jean’s mind was fashioned from electrons rather than proteins, analogous rules applied.

  “I’m here, Jean,” he repeated. A good parent knew when to step in, and when suffering was necessary for growth. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

  Eventually, she settled down.

  “Nightmare.” There were sparks in the parietal subroutines, a tremor lingering in her voice. “It doesn’t fit, Stav. Scary dreams, that’s the definition. But that implies there’s some other kind, and I can’t—I mean, why is it always like this? Was it always like this?”

  “I don’t know.” No, it wasn’t.

  She sighed. “These words I learn, none of them really seem to fit anything exactly, you know?”

  “They’re just symbols, Jean.” He grinned. At times like this he could almost forget the source of those dreams, the stunted, impoverished existence of some half-self trapped in distant meat. Andrew Goravec’s act of cowardice had freed her from that prison, for a while at least. She soared now, released to full potential. She mattered.

  “Symbols. That’s what dreams are supposed to be, but … I don’t know. There’re all these references to dreams in the library, and none of them seem that much
different from just being awake. And when I am asleep, it’s all just—screams, almost, only dopplered down. Really sludgy. And shapes. Red shapes.” A pause. “I hate bedtime.”

  “Well, you’re awake now. What are you up for today?”

  “I’m not sure. I need to get away from this place.”

  He didn’t know what place she meant. By default she woke up in the house, an adult residence designed for human sensibilities. There were also parks and forests and oceans, instantly accessible. By now, though, she’d changed them all past his ability to recognize.

  But it was only a matter of time before her parents wanted her back. Whatever she wants, Stavros told himself. As long as she’s here. Whatever she wants.

  “I want out,” Jean said.

  Except that. “I know,” he sighed.

  “Maybe then I can leave these nightmares behind.”

  Stavros closed his eyes, wished there was some way to be with her. Really with her, with this glorious, transcendent creature who’d never known him as anything but a disembodied voice.

  “Still having a hard time with that monster?” Jean asked.

  “Monster?”

  “You know. The bureaucracy.”

  He nodded, smiling—then, remembering, said, “Yeah. Always the same story, day in, day out.”

  Jean snorted. “I’m still not convinced that thing even exists, you know. I checked the library for a slightly less wonky definition, but now I think you and the library are both fucked in the head.”

  He winced at the epithet; it was certainly nothing he’d ever taught her. “How so?”

  “Oh, right, Stav. Like natural selection would ever produce a hive-based entity whose sole function is to sit with its thumb up its collective butt being inefficient. Tell me another one.”

  A silence, stretching. He watched as microcurrent trickled through her prefrontal cortex.

  “You there, Stav?” she said at last.

  “Yeah, I’m here.” He chuckled, quietly. Then: “You know I love you, right?”

  “Sure,” she said easily. “Whatever that is.”