Echopraxia

by Peter Watts

  Then he checked the charge gauge and his stomach dropped away all over again.

  Cloudy skies. An old battery, a year past its best-before. A charging blanket that hadn’t been cleaned in a month.

  The ATB had ten kilometers in it. Fifteen, tops.

  He braked and brought it around in a spray of dirt. His own trail extended behind him, an unmistakable line of intermittent carnage wrought upon the desert floor: broken plants, sun-cracked tiles of ancient lakebed crushed in passing. He was running but he wasn’t hiding. As long as he stayed on the valley floor, they’d be able to track him.

  Who, exactly?

  He switched from StarlAmp to infrared, zoomed the view.

  That.

  A hot tiny spark leapt against a distant slope, right about where his camp would be.

  Closer, though. And closing fast. That thing could run.

  Brüks swung the bike around and kicked it back into gear. He almost didn’t notice the second spark sweeping across his field of vision, it was so faint.

  He saw the third clearly enough, though. And the fourth. Too distant to make out shapes on thermal, but all hot as humans. All closing.

  Five, six, seven …

  Shit.

  They were fanned out along the valley as far as he could see.

  What did I do, what did I do, don’t they know it was an accident? It wasn’t even me, for chrissakes, I didn’t kill anyone, I just—left the door open …

  Ten kilometers. Then they’d be on him like ravenous wolves.

  The ATB leapt forward. Brüks pinged 911: nothing. ConSensus was live enough but deaf to his pleas; somehow he could surf but not send. And his pursuers still weren’t showing up on satellite thermal; as far as the skeyes could see he was alone down here with the microweather and the monastery.

  The monastery.

  They’d be online. They’d be able to help. At the very least the Bicamerals lived behind walls. Anything was better than fleeing naked through the desert.

  He aimed for the tornado. It writhed in his enhanced sight, a distant green monster nailed to the earth. Its roar carried across the desert as it always did, faint but omnipresent. For a moment, Brüks heard something strange in that sound. The monastery resolved in the gogs, huddling in the shadow of the great engine. A myriad pinpoint stars burned there against a low jumble of stepped terraces, almost painfully bright.

  Three in the morning, and every window was ablaze.

  Not so faint anymore: the vortex roared like an ocean now, its volume rising imperceptibly with each turn of the wheels. It was no longer stuck to the horizon. StarlAmp turned it into a pillar of fire, big enough to hold up the sky or to tear it down. Brüks craned his neck: over a kilometer away and still the funnel seemed to lean over him. Any second now it would break free. Any second it would leap from the ground and slam back down, there or there or right fucking here like the finger of some angry god, and it would rip the world apart wherever it touched.

  He stayed on course even though the monster ahead couldn’t possibly be made of air and moisture, couldn’t possibly be anything so—so soft. It was something else entirely, some insane Old Testament event horizon that chewed up the very laws of physics. It caught the glow from the monastery, trapped that light and shredded it and spun it together with everything else that fell within reach. A small gibbering thing inside Daniel Brüks begged him to turn back, knew that the creatures stalking him couldn’t be worse than this, because whatever they were they were only the size of men but this, this was the very wrath of God.

  But that hesitant little voice spoke again, and this time the question lingered: Why is this thing running so hard?

  It shouldn’t have been. Vortex engines never really stopped, but at night they weakened in the cooling air, diffused and idled until the rising sun brought them back to full strength. To keep a funnel this size running so hot, so late at night—that would almost draw more energy than it yielded. The vapor from the cooling cells would have to be verging on live steam—and now Brüks was close enough to hear something else against the jet-engine roar, a faint creaking counterpoint of great metal blades, twisting past their normative specs …

  The monastery lights went out.

  It took a moment for his goggles to amp back up; but in that moment of pure, illuminating darkness Daniel Brüks finally saw himself for the fool he was. For the first time he saw the pinpoint heatprints ahead of him, closing from the east as well as from behind. He saw forces powerful enough to hack surveillance satellites in geostationary orbit, but somehow unable to blind his antique Telonics network to the same heatprints. He saw a military automaton, ruthless as a shark, fast as a superconductor, betraying its own approach from kilometers away when it could have avoided his traplines entirely and killed him in his sleep.

  He saw himself from high overhead, stumbling across someone else’s game board: caught in a net that closed around but not on him.

  They didn’t even know I was here. They’re after the Bicamerals.

  He pulled to a stop. The monastery loomed fifty meters ahead, low and black against the stars. All windows abruptly shuttered, all approaches suddenly dark, it rose from the landscape as though born of it: a pile of deep rock strata breaching the surface of the world. The tornado loomed beyond like a whirling gash in space-time, barely a hundred meters on the other side. The sound of its rage filled the world.

  On all sides, candles closed in the darkness.

  0313, his goggles reminded him. Less than an hour ago he’d been asleep. It wasn’t nearly long enough to come to terms with your own imminent death.

  YOU ARE IN DANGER, the gogs told him helpfully.

  Brüks blinked. The little red letters persisted, hovering off at the corner of his eye where the chrono readout should be.

  COME ON THEN. DOOR’S OPEN.

  He looked past the command line, panned across the darkened façades of the monastery. There, ground level: just to the left of a broad staircase that underscored the main entrance. An opening, barely big enough for a man. Something burned there at body temperature. It had arms and legs. It waved.

  MOVE YOUR ASS BRÜKS YOU SELF-ABSORBED IDIOT.

  SEALING ENTRANCE IN

  15S

  14S

  13S …

  Brüks moved his self-absorbed idiot ass.

  FOR THEY HAVE SOWN THE WIND, AND THEY SHALL REAP THE WHIRLWIND.

  —HOSEA 8:7

  INSIDE, THE DARKNESS was bright chaos.

  Human heat signatures flickered across Brüks’s goggles at point-blank range, coruscations of false color in frantic motion. The heat of their passing painted the surroundings with fainter washes of red and yellow: rough-hewn walls, a flat dead light panel for a ceiling, a floor that yielded unexpectedly beneath his feet like some ungodly hybrid of rubber and flesh. Off in an indeterminate distance, something stuttered and wailed; here in the hallway the human rainbows moved with silent urgency. The woman who’d invited him in—a petite writhing heatprint no more than 160 centimeters tall—grabbed his hand and pulled him forward: “I’m Lianna. Stay close.”

  He followed, switching the gogs to StarlAmp. The heatprints vanished; bright greenish stars moved in the void left behind, always in pairs, binary constellations jostling and blinking in the dark. A word popped into his head: luciferin. Photophores in the retinas.

  These people had eyes that doubled as flashlights. Brüks had once known a grad student with similar augments. Sex had been—disquieting, in the dark.

  His guide threaded him through the starfield. That distant wailing rose and fell, rose and fell; not words exactly, but syllables at least. Clicks and cries and diphthongs in the dark. Bright eyes rose before him, seething with cold blue light. Amplified photons limned a gray face full of lines and angles. Brüks tried to steer his way around but that face blocked his way, eyes glowing with such furious intensity that his goggles had to dial back the amplification to almost nothing.

  “Gelan,” the face cr
oaked. “Thofe tessrodia.”

  Brüks tried to take a step back; bumped into traffic, rebounded.

  “Eptroph!” cried the face, as the body beneath gave way.

  Lianna pushed him sideways into the wall—“Stay right there”—and dropped to the floor. Brüks switched back to thermal. The rainbows returned. Brüks’s assailant was on his back, heat sig bright as a solar flare, muttering nonsense. His fingers fluttered as if stabbing an invisible keyboard; his left foot tapped an agitated tattoo against the elastic flooring. Lianna cradled his head in her lap and spoke to him in the same incomprehensible tongue.

  The chronic background roar of the vortex engine rose subtly in pitch. Stone trembled at Brüks’s back.

  A hot bright figure appeared down the corridor, swimming against the stream. Within moments it had reached them; Brüks’s guide passed her charge to the newcomer and was on her feet in an instant. “Let’s go.”

  “What was—”

  “Not here.”

  A side door. A flight of stairs, sheathed in the same rubbery skin that turned their footsteps into soft squeaks. It corkscrewed down through cooling bedrock that dimmed with each step in the goggles’ sights, but that compact body glowed like a beacon ahead of him. Suddenly the world was silent again but for their own footsteps and the distant, almost subsonic thrumming of the vortex engine.

  “What’s going on?” Brüks asked.

  “Oh. Mahmood.” Lianna glanced back, her eyes bright garish blobs, her mouth a crimson slash of heat. “Can’t always control when the rapture hits, much less which node. Not the most convenient thing in the world but you don’t want to miss the insights, you know? Could be time travel, for all we know. Could be a cure for golem.”

  “You understood what he was saying.”

  “Kinda. It’s what I do, when I’m not bringing lost sheep in from the desert.”

  “You’re a synthesist?” Jargonaut was the street name. Glorified translators, charged with bringing esoteric transhuman tablets down from the mountain, carved in runes simple enough for pitiful baseline Humans to half-understand.

  Rhona had called them Moses mammals, back when she’d been in the world.

  But Lianna was shaking her head. “Not exactly. More of a—you’re a biologist, right? Synthesists would be rats. I’m more of a koala bear.”

  “Specialist.” Brüks nodded. “Narrower niche.”

  “Exactly.”

  A faint orange stain appeared on the thermoptics: warmth from below.

  “And you know who I am because…”

  “We’re on the bleeding edge of theistic virology here. You think we don’t know how to access a public database?”

  “I just thought you’d have better things to look up when you were being attacked by zombies.”

  “We keep an eye on the neighborhood, Dr. Brüks.”

  “Yeah, but what—”

  She stopped. Brüks nearly ran into her, then realized they’d reached the bottom of the stairs. Bright heat spilled around a corner dead ahead; Lianna turned and tapped his goggles. “You won’t be needing those.”

  He pushed them onto his forehead. The world reverted to a dim wash of blues and grays. The rough stone to his left broke the feeble ambient light into jagged fragments; to his right the wall was smooth gray metal.

  Lianna was already past him, heading back up the stairs. “I gotta go. You can watch from down here.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t touch anything!” she called back, and was gone.

  He stepped around the corner. The ceiling panels here were as dead and dark as every other he’d seen in this place. The room—really, more of a cul-de-sac—was lit solely by a band of smart paint covering the far wall from waist-height to ceiling. It glowed with a haphazard collage of tactical displays ranging from hand-size to two meters across. Some of the feeds were coarse green mosaics; others rendered images hi-res and razor-sharp.

  A man in a loose tan coverall paced back and forth before the displays, at least two meters from his fuzzy slippers (slippers?) to the cropped salt-and-pepper thicket on his head. He spared a glance as Brüks approached, muttered “Glas-not,” and turned back to the welter of intel.

  Great.

  Lianna the koala had told him he could watch, though. He stepped forward and tried to make sense of the chaos.

  Upper-left: a satellite view so crisp it nearly hurt his eyes. The monastery sat dead center, a bull’s-eye on the board, aglow with telltale thermal emissions. But it was the only hot spot in the whole window; whatever orbital eye he was looking through had been precisely blinded to all those other heatprints closing in the darkness. Brüks reached for the display, his fingers set to zoom the mag; a grunt and a glare from the slippered monk and he desisted.

  So much for orbital surveillance. The monastery had its own cameras though, judging by the mix of StarlAmp and thermal windows looking out across the desert. They painted the nightscape in palettes from every band of the visible spectrum, cool blues and rubies intense as lasers, color schemes so chaotic Brüks wondered whether they were really functional or just a reflection of some deviant bicameral aesthetic. Candles glowed in each of those windows, and they all looked the same.

  Four klicks out, and closing fast.

  Something sparkled on one of the displays, a tiny bright sundog in the dead of night. The image flared a moment; bright electronic snow fuzzed the display. A brief, bright nova. Then a dark dead hole in the wall, NO SIGNAL flashing from its center.

  The monk’s fingers flew across the paint, calling up keyboards, zooming displays. Windows sprouted, panned brief landscapes, evaporated in turn. Three of those views sparked and died before the Bicameral had the chance to retire them gracefully.

  They’re taking out our cameras, Brüks realized, and wondered distantly when he had started to think of these rapture-stricken deviants as part of we.

  Less than three and a half kilometers, now.

  A new set of windows bloomed across the wall. The pictures flickering in these frames were grainier than the others, desaturated, almost monochrome. And while they too panned the desert, there was something about those views, something different yet familiar—

  There. Third window over: a tiny monastery hunkered on the horizon, a tiny vortex engine. This camera was looking back from way the hell across the desert.

  That’s my network, Brüks realized. My cameras. I guess the zombies left some alive after all …

  Brother Slippers had tapped into a half dozen of them, zoomed and cycled through each in turn. Brüks wasn’t sure how useful they’d be: cheap off-the-shelf things, party favors to lure impoverished researchers into springing for a package deal. They had the usual enhancements but the range was nothing special.

  They seemed to be sufficient for Slippers’s purposes, though. Second window from the left, a heat source moved left to right about a hundred meters out. The camera panned automatically, tracking the target while he amped the zoom. The image resolved in slow degrees.

  Another one of the monastery’s eyes flared and died, its overlaid range finder fading a moment later: 3.2 kilometers.

  That’s almost nine meters per second. On foot …

  “What happens when they get here?” he asked.

  Slippers seemed more interested in a distant heatprint caught on number three: a small vehicle, an ATB, same basic design as—

  Wait a minute—

  “That’s my bike,” Brüks murmured, frowning. “That’s—me…”

  Slippers spared him a glance and a head shake. “Assub.”

  “No, listen—” It was far from a perfect mug shot, and Telonics’s steadicam tracking algorithms were the envy of no one in the field. But whoever sat astride that bike had Brüks’s mustache, the square lines of his face, the same multipocketed field vest that had been years out of style even when he’d inherited the damn thing two decades before. “You’re being hacked,” Brüks insisted. “That’s some kind of recording, someone must�
�ve—” Someone was recording me? “I mean, look at it!”

  Two more cameras down. Seven so far. Slippers wasn’t even bothering to clear the real estate by closing the channels. Something else had caught his eye. He tapped the edge of a window that looked onto a naked-eye view of the desert sky. The stars strewn across that display glittered like sugar on velvet. Brüks wanted to fall into that sky, get lost in the stark peaceful beauty of a night without tactical overlays or polarized enhancements.

  But even here, the monk had found something to ruin the view: a brief flicker, a dim red nimbus framing an oval patch of starscape for the blink of an eye. The display clicked softly, an infinitesimal sharpening of focus—and in the next instant the stars returned, unsullied and pristine.

  Except for a great hole in the night hanging over the western ridge, a vast dark oval where no stars shone.

  Something was crawling toward them across the sky, eating the stars as it went. It was as cold as the stratosphere—at least, it didn’t show up on any of the adjacent thermal views. And it was huge; it covered a good twenty degrees of arc even though it was still—

  No range finder. No heatprint. If not for whatever microlensing magic Slippers had just performed, not even this eclipse of ancient starlight would have given it away.

  I, Brüks realized, have definitely picked the wrong side.

  Twenty-three hundred meters. In five minutes the zombies would be knocking at the door.

  “Carousel,” Slippers murmured, and something in his voice made Brüks look twice.

  The monk was smiling. But he wasn’t looking at the cloaked behemoth marching across Orion’s Belt. His eyes were on a ground’s-eye view of the vortex engine. There was no audio feed; the tornado whirled silently in the StarlAmped window, a shackled green monster tearing up airspace. Brüks could hear it anyway—roaring in his memory, bending the ducts and the blades of the substructure that birthed it, vibrating through the very bedrock. He could feel it in the soles of his feet. And now Brother Slippers brought up a whole new window, a panel not of camera views or tactical overlays but of engineering readouts, laminar feed and humidity injection rates, measures of torque and velocity and compressible flow arrayed along five hundred meters of altitude. Offset to one side a luminous wire-frame disc labeled VEC/PRIME sprouted a thousand icons around its perimeter; a hundred more described spokes and spirals toward its heart. Heating elements. Countercurrent exchangers. The devil’s own mixing board. Slippers nodded, as if to himself: “Watch.”