Echopraxia

by Peter Watts

  “Jesus,” Brüks whispered, and glanced around despite himself.

  “Oh you don’t have to worry about him he’s way down deep in his precious Theseus signals.” An odd, single-shouldered shrug. “Anyway it all turned out okay though better’n before like I say. Storm troopers have really good medical plans. Replacement hemisphere’s a big improvement. Made him the man for the mission.”

  “What a horrible thing to do to a kid.”

  “If you can’t grow the code stay out of the incubator. Fucker probably did it himself to God knows how many others, that’s what they do.”

  Brüks had seen the footage, of course: civilian hordes reduced to walking brainstems by a few kilobytes of weaponized code drawn to the telltale biochemistry of conscious thought. It wasn’t the precise surgical excision of cognitive inefficiency, not the military’s reversible supersoldiers or Valerie’s programmed bodyguards. It was consciousness and intellect just chewed away from cortex to hypothalamus, Humanity reduced to fight/flight/fuck. It was people turned back into reptiles.

  It was also a hell of an effective strategy for anyone on a budget: cheap, contagious, terrifyingly effective. If you were caught in some panicking crowd you could never be sure whether the person pushing from behind was trying to rape you, or bash in your skull, or just get the fuck out of the zone. If you were above the crowd all your state-of-the-art telemetry would never tell the undead from the merely undone; not even Tran tech could pick out the fractional chill of a zombie brain inside its skull, not from a distance, not through a wall or a roof, not in the middle of a riot. All you could do was seal off the area and try to keep upwind until the flamethrowers showed up.

  They had special squads for that in India, Brüks had heard. People with off switches in their heads, fighting fire with fire. They were really good at their jobs.

  “Had it coming you ask me,” Sengupta hissed.

  “Jesus, Rakshi.” Brüks shook his head. “What do you have against that guy?”

  “Nothing I don’t have against any jackboot who fucks people over and then’s all just following orders.” She poked at some unseen irritant with the toe of her boot. “Look I know you two are dating or whatever okay? Fine with me tell him whatever you want just don’t be surprised when he fucks you over. He’ll feed you into the meat grinder the moment he thinks it serves his greater good. Feed himself in, too, for that matter. I swear sometimes I don’t know which is worse.”

  Neither spoke for a few moments.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Brüks asked at last.

  “Why not?”

  “You’re not afraid I’ll pass it on?”

  Sengupta barked. “Like you would. Besides he can’t blame me if he stomps his muddy footprints all over the ’base for anyone to see. You coulda seen ’em even.”

  Why do I put up with her? Brüks asked himself for the tenth time. And then, for the first: Why does she put up with me?

  But he thought he knew that answer already. He’d suspected it at least since she’d moved in next door: Sengupta liked him, in a weird twisted way. Not sexually. Not as a colleague or a peer, not even as a friend. Sengupta liked Daniel Brüks because he was easy to impress. She didn’t think of him as a person at all; she thought of him as a kind of pet.

  Shitty social skills. Rakshi Sengupta was too contemptuous of etiquette to be bothered. But the fact that she didn’t abide by social cues didn’t mean she couldn’t read them. She’d read him well enough, at least; there was no way he’d ever tell Jim Moore what Sengupta had learned about his son. Not Dan Brüks.

  He was a good boy.

  The next time he saw Lianna, he didn’t.

  He heard her voice—“Whoa, watch that—” just a second before the hab tilted crazily askance and pain shot up from—in from …

  Actually, he didn’t know where the pain was coming from. It just hurt.

  “Holy Heyzeus Dan, you didn’t see that?” Lianna popped magically into existence beside the Commons coffee table as he blinked up from the deck.

  The table, he realized. I ran into the table …

  He shook his head to clear it. Lianna vanished again—

  “Hey—”

  —and reappeared.

  Brüks hauled himself to his feet, pulled the gimp mask off his face as the pain settled in his left shin. “There’s something wrong with this thing. It’s screwing with my eyes.”

  She reached out and took it. “Looks okay. What were you doing?”

  “Just trawling the cache. Thought I’d bookmarked an article but I can’t find the damn thing.”

  “You encrypt the search?”

  Brüks shook his head. Lianna far-focused into ConSensus. “Szpindel et al? ‘Gamma-protocadherin and the role of the PCDH11Y ortholog’”?

  “That’s the one.”

  “It’s right here.” She frowned, handed back the gimp hood. “Try again.”

  He pulled it back on over his head. Search results reappeared in the air before him, but Szpindel wasn’t among them. “Still nothing.”

  “Hmm,” Lianna said, and vanished.

  “Where are you? You just dis—”

  She leaned back into view from nowhere in particular.

  “—appeared.”

  “There’s the problem,” she said, and peeled the gimp hood back off his scalp. “Induced hemineglect. Probably a bad superconductor.”

  “Hemineglect?”

  “See why you should get augged? You could just pull up a subtitle, know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  “See why I don’t?” Brüks conjured up a definition out of smart paint. “Nobody has to cut my head open to replace a bad superconductor.”

  Broken brains that split the body down the middle and threw half of it away: an inability to perceive anything to the left of the body’s midline, to even conceive of anything there. People who only combed their hair on the right side with their right hands, who only saw food on the right side of their plates. People who just forgot about half the universe.

  “That is fucked,” Brüks said, quietly awed.

  Lianna shrugged. “Like I said, a bad superconductor. We got spares, though; faster’n fabbing a replacement.”

  He followed her through the ceiling. “So you never told me why you were so old school,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Fear of vivisection. When superconductors go bad. We covered this.”

  “The reason that stuff goes bad is because it’s crappy old tech. Internal augs are less failure-prone than your own brain.”

  “So they’ll work flawlessly when some spambot hacks in and leaves me with an irresistible urge to buy a year’s supply of bubble bath for cats.”

  “Hey, at least the augs are firewalled. It’s way easier to hack a raw brain, if that’s what you’re worried about.

  “Then again,” she added, “I don’t think it is.”

  He sighed. “No. I guess it isn’t.”

  “What, then?”

  They emerged into the southern hemisphere. Their reflections, thin as eels, slid across the mirrorball as they passed.

  “Know what a funnel-web spider is?” Brüks asked at last.

  After the barest hesitation: “I do now.” And a moment later, “Oh. The neurotoxins.”

  “Not just any neurotoxins. This one was special. Pharm refugee maybe, or just some open-source hobby that got loose. Might have even been beneficial under other circumstances, for all I know. The little fucker got away. But I felt a nip, right about here”—he spread the fingers of one hand, tapped the webbing between thumb and forefinger with the other—“and I was flat on my back ten seconds later.” He snorted softly. “Taught me not to go sampling without gloves, anyway.”

  They crossed the equator, single file. No one in the northern hemisphere.

  “Didn’t kill you though,” Lianna observed shrewdly.

  “Nah. Just induced the mother of all allergic responses to nanopore antiglials. Any kind of direct neural interface finis
hes what that little bugger started.”

  “They could fix that, you know.” Lianna bounced off the deck and glided along the forward ladder, Brüks clambering in her wake.

  “Sure they could. I could take some proprietary drug for the rest of my life and let FizerPharm squeeze my balls every time they change their terms and conditions. Or I could get my whole immune system ripped out and replaced. Or I can take a couple of pills every day.”

  The attic.

  A warren of pipes and conduits, an engineering subbasement at the top of the ship. Plumbing, docking hatches, great wraparound bands full of tools and spacesuits and EVA accessories. Stone Age control panels in the catastrophic event that anyone might need to take manual control. A stale breeze caressed Brüks’s face from some overhead ventilator; he tasted oil and electricity. Up ahead the docking airlock bulged to starboard like a tinfoil hubcap three meters across; a smaller lock, merely man-size, played sidekick across the compartment. Spacesuits drifted in their alcoves like dormant silver larvae. Portals and panels crowded the spaces between struts and LOX tanks and CO2 scrubbers: lockers, bus boards, a head gimbaled for variable gee.

  Lianna cracked one of the lockers and began rummaging about inside.

  Yet another ladder climbed farther forward, out of the attic and up along a spire of dimly lit scaffolding. Afferent sensor array up there, according to the map. Maneuvering thrusters. And the parasol: that great wide conic of programmable metamaterial the Crown would hide behind when the sun got too close. Photosynthetic, according to the specs. Brüks didn’t know whether it would shuttle enough electrons to run whatever backup drive the Bicamerals were putting together, but at least hot showers were always an option.

  “Got it.” Lianna held up a greasy-looking gray washer, smiling.

  For a moment. The look of triumph drained from her face while Brüks watched; the expression left behind was bloodless and terrified.

  “Lee…?”

  She sucked in breath, and didn’t let it out. She stared past his right shoulder as if he were invisible.

  He spun, expecting monsters. Nothing to see but the airlock. Nothing to hear but the clicks and sighs of the Crown of Thorns, talking to itself.

  “Do you hear that?” she whispered. Her eyes moved in terrified little saccades. “That—ticking…”

  He heard the sigh of recycled air breathed into cramped spaces, the soft rustle of empty spacesuits stirring in the breeze. He heard faint muffled sounds of movement from below: a scrape, a hard brief footfall. Brüks looked around the compartment, swept his eyes past alcoves and airlocks—

  Now he heard something: sharp, soft, arrhythmic. Not a ticking so much as a clicking, a sound like, like a clicking tongue perhaps. A hungry sound, from overhead.

  His stomach dropped away.

  He didn’t have to look. He didn’t dare to. Somehow he could feel her up there in the rafters: a dark predatory shadow, watching from places where the light couldn’t quite reach.

  The sound of teeth tapping together.

  “Shit,” Lianna whispered.

  She can’t be up there, Brüks thought. He’d checked the board before leaving the Commons. He always checked. Valerie’s icon had been down in her hab where it always was, a green dot among gray ones. She must have really moved.

  Of course, they could do that.

  Now those clicking teeth were so loud he didn’t know how he could have missed them. There was no pattern to that sound, no regular predictable rhythm. The silences between clicks stretched forever, drove him insane with trivial suspense; or snapped unexpectedly closed after a split second.

  “Let’s—” Brüks swallowed, tried again. “Let’s get…”

  But Lianna was already headed aft.

  The Hub was bright light and sterile reflections: the soft glow of the walls chased Brüks’s fears back to the basement where they belonged. He looked at Lianna a bit sheepishly as they rounded the mirrorball.

  Lianna did not look sheepish at all. If anything, she looked more worried than she had in the attic. “She must have hacked the sensors.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She wiggled her fingers in midair; INTERCOM appeared on the bulkhead. Sengupta was astern near the Hold; Moore was back in the Dorm.

  Valerie’s icon glowed reassuring green, down in her own private hab with the grays.

  “Ship doesn’t know where she is anymore,” Lianna said. “She could be anywhere. Other side of any door you open.”

  “Why would she do that?” Brüks glanced up at the hole in the ceiling as Lianna grabbed the ladder. “What was she even doing up there?”

  “Did you see her?”

  He shook his head. “Couldn’t look.”

  “Me neither.”

  “So for all we know, she wasn’t even up there.”

  She managed a nervous laugh. “You wanna go back and check?”

  Here among the bright lights and the gleaming machinery, it was hard not to feel utterly ridiculous. Brüks shook his head. “Even if she is up there, so what? It’s not like she’s confined to quarters. It’s not like she did anything other than—grind her teeth.”

  “She’s a predator,” Lianna pointed out.

  “She’s a sadist. She’s been pushing my buttons since day one; I think she just gets off on it. Jim’s right: if she wanted to kill us we’d be dead already.”

  “Maybe this is how she kills us,” Lianna said. “Maybe she mambos.”

  “Mambos.”

  “Vodou works, Oldschool. Fear messes up your cardiac rhythms. Adrenaline kills heart cells. You can literally scare someone to death if you hack the sympathetic nervous system the right way.”

  So voodoo’s real, Brüks mused.

  Chalk one up for organized religion.

  Moore was heading down when Brüks was heading out.

  “Hey Jim.”

  “Daniel.”

  It didn’t happen often anymore. Whether at meals or after, during the Crown’s bright blue day or the warmer shadows of its night cycle, the Colonel always seemed to be deep in ConSensus these days. He never talked about what he did there. Cramming for Icarus, of course. Reviewing the telemetry Theseus had sent before disappearing into the fog. But he kept those details to himself, even when he came out to breathe.

  Brüks stopped at the foot of the Commons ladder. “Hey, you want to see a movie?”

  “A what?”

  “The Silences of Pone. Like a game you can only watch. Lee says it’s one of—you know, back when they couldn’t just induce desired states directly. They had to manipulate you into feeling things. With plot and characters and so on.”

  “Art,” Moore said. “I remember.”

  “Pretty crude by current standards but apparently it won a whole bunch of awards for neuroinduction back in the day. Lee found it in the cache, set up a feed. Says it’s worth watching.”

  “That woman is getting to you,” the Colonel remarked.

  “This whole fucking voyage is getting to me. You in?”

  He shook his head. “Still reviewing the telemetry.”

  “You’ve been doing that for a week now. You hardly come up for air.”

  “There’s a lot of telemetry.”

  “I thought they went in and went dark.”

  “They did.”

  “Almost immediately, you said.”

  “Almost is a relative term. Theseus had more eyes than a small corporation. Take a lifetime to sift through even a few minutes of that feed.”

  “For a baseline, maybe. Surely the Bicams have everything in hand.”

  Moore looked at him. “I thought you didn’t approve of blind faith in higher powers.”

  “I don’t approve of breaking your back pushing boulders uphill when you’re eyeprinted for the heavy lifter across the street, either. You said it yourself. They’re a hundred steps ahead of us. We’re just here to enjoy the ride.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “How so?”

 
“We’re here. They’re stuck in decompression for the next six days.”

  “Right,” Brüks remembered. “Field-tested.”

  “Why they brought us along.”

  Brüks grimaced. “They brought me along because I happened to stumble onto the highway and they didn’t have the heart to see me turn into roadkill.”

  The Colonel shrugged. “Doesn’t mean they can’t make the most of an opportunity when it presents itself.”

  Brüks’ fingertips tingled in remembrance. Opportunities, he realized with sudden dull surprise.

  I’m missing one.

  It was a window in the crudest possible sense: a solid pane of transparent alloy, set into the rear bulkhead. You couldn’t zoom it or resize it or lay a tactical false-color overlay across its surface. You couldn’t even turn it off, unless someone on the other side brought down the blast shield. It was a clear, impenetrable hole in the ship: a circular viewport into an alien terrarium where, out past the ghostly reflection of his own face, strange hyperbaric creatures built monstrous artifacts out of sand and coral. Their eyes twinkled like green stars in the gloom.

  Six of the monks were resting, suspended in medical cocoons like dormant grubs waiting out the winter. The others moved purposeful as ants across a background of shadows and half-built machinery: a jumbled cityscape of tanks and stacked ceramic superconductors and segments of pipe big enough to walk through without ducking. Brüks was pretty sure that the patchwork sphere coming together near the center of the hold was shaping up to be the fusion chamber.

  Two of the Bicamerals huddled off to one side in some sort of wordless back-to-back communion. A glistening gelatinous orb floated beside them. Someone else (Evans, that was it) seized a nearby hand tool and lobbed it to starboard. It spun lazily end over end until Chodorowska reached up and snatched it from the air, without ever taking her eyes off the component in her other hand.

  She’d never even looked. Which was not to say she hadn’t seen it coming.

  But of course there was no her. Not right now, anyway. There was no Evans or Ofoegbu either.

  There was only the hive.

  How had Moore put it? Cognitive subspecies. But the Colonel didn’t get it. Neither did Lianna; she’d shared her enthusiastic blindness with Brüks over breakfast that very morning, ticked off in hushed and reverent tones the snips and splices that had so improved her masters: No TPN suppression, no Semmelweis reflex. They’re immune to inattentional blindness and hyperbolic discounting, and Oldschool, that synesthesia of theirs—they reset millions of years of sensory biases with that trick. Randomized all the errors, just like that. And it’s not just the mundane sensory stuff, it’s not just feeling color and tasting sounds. They can literally see time …