The Complete Short Fiction

by Peter Watts

  That’s the rub, of course. It doesn’t last: the high frequencies excite some synapses and put others to sleep, but they don’t actually change any of the pre-existing circuitry. The brain eventually bounces back to normal once the signal stops. Which is not only profitable for those doling out the waves, but a lot less messy in the courts. There’s that whole integrity-of-the-self thing to worry about. Having your brain rewired every time you hopped a commuter flight might raise some pretty iffy legal issues.

  Still. I’ve got to admit it speeds things up. No more time-consuming background checks, no more invasive “random” searches, no litany of questions designed to weed out the troublemakers in our midst. A dash of transcranial magnetism; a squirt of ultrasound; next. A year ago I’d have been standing in line for hours. Today I’ve been here scarcely fifteen minutes and I’m already in the top ten. And it’s more than mere convenience: it’s security, it’s safety, it’s a sigh of relief after a generation of Russian roulette. No more Edmonton Infernos, no more Rio Insurrections, no more buildings slagged to glass or cities sickening in the aftermath of some dirty nuke. There are still saboteurs and terrorists loose in the world, of course. Always will be. But when they strike at all, they strike in places unprotected by SWanky McBuzz. Anyone who flies these friendly skies is as harmless as—as I am.

  Who can argue with results like that?

  In the old days I could have wished I was a psychopath. They had it easy back then. The machines only looked for emotional responses: eye saccades, skin galvanism. Anyone without a conscience could stare them down with a wide smile and an empty heart. But SWank inspired a whole new generation. The tech looks under the surface now. Prefrontal cortex stuff, glucose metabolism. Now, fiends and perverts and would-be saboteurs all get caught in the same net.

  Doesn’t mean they don’t let us go again, of course. It’s not as if sociopathy is against the law. Hell, if they screened out everyone with a broken conscience, Executive Class would be empty.

  There are children scattered throughout the line. Most are accompanied by adults. Three are not, two boys and a girl. They are nervous and beautiful, like wild animals, easily startled. They are not used to being on their own. The oldest can’t be more than nine, and he has a freckle on the side of his neck.

  I can’t stop watching him.

  Suddenly children roam free again. For months now I’ve been seeing them in parks and plazas, unguarded, innocent and so vulnerable, as though SWank has given parents everywhere an excuse to breathe. No matter that it’ll be years before it trickles out of airports and government buildings and into the places children play. Mommy and Daddy are tired of waiting, take what comfort they can in the cameras mounted on every street corner, panning and scanning for all the world as if real people stood behind them. Mommy and Daddy can’t be bothered to spend five minutes on the web, compiling their own predator’s handbook on the use of laser pointers and blind spots to punch holes in the surveillance society. Mommy and Daddy would rather just take all those bromides about “civil safety” on faith.

  For so many years we’ve lived in fear. By now people are so desperate for any pretence of safety that they’ll cling to the promise of a future that hasn’t even arrived yet. Not that that’s anything new; whether you’re talking about a house in the suburbs or the browning of Antarctica, Mommy and Daddy have always lived on credit.

  If something did happen to their kids it would serve them right.

  The line moves forward. Suddenly I’m at the front of it.

  A man with Authority waves me in. I step forward as if to an execution. I do this for you, Father. I do this to pay my respects. I do this to dance on your grave. If I could have avoided this moment—if this cup could have passed from me, if I could have walked to the Northwest Territories rather than let this obscene technology into my head—

  Someone has spray-painted two words in stencilled black over the mouth of the machine: The Shadow. Delaying, I glance a question at the guard.

  “It knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men,” he says. “Bwahaha. Let’s move it along.”

  I have no idea what he’s talking about.

  The walls of the booth glimmer with a tight weave of copper wire. The helmet descends from above with a soft hydraulic hiss; it sits too lightly on my head for such a massive device. The visor slides over my eyes like a blindfold. I am in a pocket universe, alone with my thoughts and an all-seeing God. Electricity hums deep in my head.

  I’m innocent of any wrongdoing. I’ve never broken the law. Maybe God will see that if I think it hard enough. Why does it have to see anything, why does it have to read the palimpsest if it’s just going to scribble over it again? But brains don’t work like that. Each individual is individual, wired up in a unique and glorious tangle that must be read before it can be edited. And motivations, intents—these are endless, multiheaded things, twining and proliferating from frontal cortex to cingulate gyrus, from hypothalamus to claustrum. There’s no LED that lights up when your plans are nefarious, no Aniston Neuron for mad bombers. For the safety of everyone, they must read it all. For the safety of everyone.

  I have been under this helmet for what seems like forever. Nobody else took this long.

  The line is not moving forward.

  “Well,” Security says softly. “Will you look at that.”

  “I’m not,” I tell him. “I’ve never—”

  “And you’re not about to. Not for the next nine hours, anyway.”

  “I never acted on it.” I sound petulant, childish. “Not once.”

  “I can see that,” he says, but I know we’re talking about different things.

  The humming changes subtly in pitch. I can feel magnets and mosquitoes snapping in my head. I am changed by something not yet cheap enough for the home market: an ache evaporates, a dull longing so chronic I feel it now only in absentia.

  “There. Now we could put you in charge of two Day Cares and a chorus of altar boys, and you wouldn’t even be tempted.”

  The visor rises; the helmet floats away. Authority stares back at me from a gaggle of contemptuous faces.

  “This is wrong,” I say quietly.

  “Is it now.”

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “We haven’t either. We haven’t locked down your pervert brain, we haven’t changed who you are. We’ve protected your precious constitutional rights and your God-given identity. You’re as free to diddle kiddies in the park as you ever were. You just won’t want to for a while.”

  “But I haven’t done anything.” I can’t stop saying it.

  “Nobody does, until they do.” He jerks his head towards Departure. “Get out of here. You’re cleared.”

  I am not a criminal. I have done nothing wrong. But my name is on a list now, just the same. Word of my depravity races ahead of me, checkpoint after checkpoint, like a fission of dominoes. They’ll be watching, though they have to let me pass.

  That could change before long. Even now, Community Standards barely recognise the difference between what we do and what we are; nudge them just a hair further and every border on the planet might close at my approach. But this is only the dawning of the new enlightenment, and the latest rules are not yet in place. For now, I am free to stand at your unconsecrated graveside, and mourn on my own recognizance.

  You always were big on the power of forgiveness, Father. Seventy times seven, the most egregious sins washed away in the sight of the Lord. All it took, you insisted, was true penitence. All you had to do was accept His love.

  Of course, it sounded a lot less self-serving back then.

  But even the unbelievers get a clean slate now. My redeemer is a machine, and my salvation has an expiry date—but then again, I guess yours did too.

  I wonder about the machine that programmed you, Father, that great glacial contraption of dogma and moving parts, clacking and iterating its way through two thousand years of bloody history. I can’t help but wonder at the way it rewir
ed your synapses. Did it turn you into a predator, weigh you down with lunatic strictures that no sexual being could withstand, deny your very nature until you snapped? Or were you already malfunctioning when you embraced the Church, hoping for some measure of strength you couldn’t find in yourself?

  I knew you for years, Father. Even now, I tell myself I know you—and while you may have been many things, you were never a coward. I refuse to believe that you opted for death because it was the easy way out. I choose to believe that in those last days, you found the strength to rewrite your own programming, to turn your back on obsolete algorithms two millennia out of date, and decide for yourself the difference between a mortal sin and an act of atonement.

  You loathed yourself, you loathed the things you had done. And so, finally, you made absolutely certain you could never do them again. You acted.

  You acted as I never could, though I’d pay so much smaller a price.

  There is more than this temporary absolution, you see. We have machines now that can burn the evil right out of a man, deep-focus microwave emitters that vaporise the very pathways of depravity. No one can force them on you; not yet, anyway. Members’ bills wind through Parliament, legislative proposals that would see us preemptively reprogrammed for good instead of evil, but for now the procedure is strictly voluntary. It changes you, you see. It violates some inalienable essence of selfhood. Some call it a kind of suicide in its own right.

  I kept telling the man at Security: I never acted on it. But he could see that for himself.

  I never had it fixed. I must like what I am.

  I wonder if that makes a difference.

  I wonder which of us is more guilty.

  HILLCREST V. VELIKOVSKY

  The facts of the case were straightforward. Lacey Hillcrest of Pensacola, fifty years old and a devout Pentecostal, had been diagnosed with inoperable lymphatic cancer and given six months to live. Five years later she was still alive, albeit frail. She attributed her survival to a decorative silver-plated cross received from her sister, Gracey Balfour. Witnesses attested that Mrs. Hillcrest’s condition improved dramatically upon acquisition of the totem, a product of the Graceland Mint alleged to contain an embedded fragment of the original Crucifix of Golgotha.

  On the morning of June 27, Mrs. Hillcrest and her sister patronised The Museum of Quackery and Pseudoscience, owned and managed by one Linus C. Velikovsky. The museum contained a variety of displays concerning discredited beliefs, theories, and outright hoaxes perpetrated throughout American history. Mrs. Balfour entered into a heated discussion with another museum patron at the Intelligent Design exhibit, temporarily losing track of her sister; they eventually reconnected at a display concerning psychosomatic phenomena, specifically placebo effects and faith healing. Mrs. Hillcrest had evidently spent some time perusing the display and was subsequently described as “subdued and uncommunicative.” Within a month she was dead.

  The charge against Mr. Velikovsky was negligent homicide.

  The Prosecution called Dr. Andrew deTritus, a clinical psychologist with an impressive record of expert testimony on any (and sometimes conflicting) sides of a given issue. Dr. deTritus testified to the uncontested reality of the placebo effect, pointing out that “attitude” and “outlook”—like any other epiphenomenon—were ultimately electrochemical in nature. Belief literally rewired the brain, and the existence of placebo effects showed that such changes could have a real impact on human health.

  Velikovsky took the stand in his own defence, which was straightforward: all claims presented by his displays were factually accurate and supported by scientific evidence. The prosecution objected to this point on the grounds of relevance but was, after some discussion, overruled.

  Far from disputing Velikovsky’s claims during cross-examination, however, the Prosecution used them to bolster its own case. The defendant had deliberately set up shop in “one of our great country’s most devout regions, with no thought to the welfare of the Lacey Hillcrests of the world.” By his own admission, Mr. Velikovsky had chosen Florida “because of all the creation museums,” and had clearly been intent on rubbing people’s noses in the alleged falsity of their beliefs. Furthermore, Mr. Velikovsky was obviously well-versed in placebo effects, having built an erudite display on the subject. What did he think would happen, the Prosecution thundered, when he forced his so-called truth down the throat of someone whose motto—knitted into her favourite throw-cushion—was If ye have faith the size of a mustard seed, ye shall move mountains? In telling “the truth” Velikovsky had knowingly and recklessly endangered the very life of another human being.

  Velikovsky pointed out that he hadn’t even known Lacey Hillcrest existed, adding that needlepointing something onto a pillowcase did not necessarily make it true. The Prosecution responded that the man who plants land mines in a playground doesn’t know the names of his victims either, and asked if the defendant’s needlepoint remark meant that he was now calling Jesus a liar.

  The Defence objected repeatedly throughout.

  The Defence had, in fact, fought an uphill battle ever since her client’s swearing-in, during which Velikovsky had asked whether swearing to tell the truth on “a book of falsehoods” might undermine the court’s alleged devotion to empiricism. The jury had seemed unimpressed by that question, and did not appear to have subsequently become more sympathetic.

  Perhaps, if worst came to worst, their verdict might be set aside on technical grounds. But the closest thing to a precedent the Defence could unearth was Dexter v. HerpBGone, involving a mail-order scheme in which a mixture of sugar and baking soda had been marketed as a cure for herpes at $200/treatment. Although this “cure” had (unsurprisingly) proven ineffective, HerpBGone’s council had cited Waber et al 2008[*]—which clearly showed that a placebo’s efficacy increased with price—arguing that the treatment could have worked if Dexter had only paid more for it. As he had refused to do so (the same product was sold under a different name at $4,000), responsibility devolved to the plaintiff. The case had been dismissed.

  It would have been a risky gambit. The parallels were far from exact. Instead, the Defence recalled Grace Balfour to the stand and asked whether she believed the Bible to be the revealed Word of God. Mrs. Balfour readily conceded as much. It was her faith, she maintained, that allowed her to stay strong when that horrible man at the Creation display had mocked her with his talk of monkeymen and radioisotopes. She had seen fossils for what they truly were, the tests of faith described in Deuteronomy 13.

  Asked then why her sister evidently did not share her strength of belief, Mrs. Balfour allowed—somewhat reluctantly—that “that horrid little Russian” had shattered her sister’s faith with his “lies and deceit.”

  But did not the Bible itself arm the faithful against such wickedness? Did not Matthew warn that “false prophets shall rise, and deceive many”? Could Second Peter have been any more explicit than “There shall be false teachers among you, who shall bring in damnable heresies”?

  Well, yes, Mrs. Balfour allowed. Certainly, Velikovsky was a False Prophet. Sadly, as the Defence reminded her, false prophecy was not a criminal offence.

  Ultimately there was no need to resort to technical exemptions. The jury, having been presented with the facts of the case, was unanimous: Lacey Hillcrest had not shown the courage for their conviction.

  Whose fault was it, after all, that her faith had been so much smaller than a mustard seed?

  [*] Waber, R. L., Shiv, B., Carmon, Z. & Ariely, D. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 299, 1016-1017 (2008).

  THE ISLAND

  We are the cave men. We are the Ancients, the Progenitors, the blue-collar steel monkeys. We spin your webs and build your magic gateways, thread each needle’s eye at sixty thousand kilometers a second. We never stop. We never even dare to slow down, lest the light of your coming turns us to plasma. All for you. All so you can step from star to star without dirtying your feet in these endless, empty wastes between.

  Is i
t really too much to ask, that you might talk to us now and then?

  I know about evolution and engineering. I know how much you’ve changed. I’ve seen these portals give birth to gods and demons and things we can’t begin to comprehend, things I can’t believe were ever human; alien hitchhikers, maybe, riding the rails we’ve left behind. Alien conquerors.

  Exterminators, perhaps.

  But I’ve also seen those gates stay dark and empty until they faded from view. We’ve inferred diebacks and dark ages, civilizations burned to the ground and others rising from their ashes—and sometimes, afterwards, the things that come out look a little like the ships we might have built, back in the day. They speak to each other—radio, laser, carrier neutrinos—and sometimes their voices sound something like ours. There was a time we dared to hope that they really were like us, that the circle had come round again and closed on beings we could talk to. I’ve lost count of the times we tried to break the ice.

  I’ve lost count of the eons since we gave up.

  All these iterations fading behind us. All these hybrids and posthumans and immortals, gods and catatonic cavemen trapped in magical chariots they can’t begin to understand, and not one of them ever pointed a comm laser in our direction to say, Hey, how’s it going, or Guess what? We cured Damascus Disease! or even Thanks, guys, keep up the good work.

  We’re not some fucking cargo cult. We’re the backbone of your goddamn empire. You wouldn’t even be out here if it weren’t for us.

  And—and you’re our children. Whatever you’ve become, you were once like this, like me. I believed in you once. There was a time, long ago, when I believed in this mission with all my heart.

  Why have you forsaken us?

  And so another build begins.

  This time I open my eyes to a familiar face I’ve never seen before: only a boy, early twenties perhaps, physiologically. His face is a little lopsided, the cheekbone flatter on the left than the right. His ears are too big. He looks almost natural.