Echopraxia

by Peter Watts

  As if those were good things.

  In a way, of course, they were. All those gut feelings, right or wrong, that had kept the breed alive on the Pleistocene savannah—and they were wrong, so much of the time. False negatives, false positives, the moral algebra of fat men pushed in front of onrushing trolleys. The strident emotional belief that children made you happy, even when all the data pointed to misery. The high-amplitude fear of sharks and dark-skinned snipers who would never kill you; indifference to all the toxins and pesticides that could. The mind was so rotten with misrepresentation that in some cases it literally had to be damaged before it could make a truly rational decision—and should some brain-lesioned mother abandon her baby in a burning house in order to save two strangers from the same fire, the rest of the world would be more likely to call her a monster than laud the rationality of her lifeboat ethics. Hell, rationality itself—the exalted Human ability to reason—hadn’t evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will.

  Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.

  Fossil feelings. Better off without them, once you’d outgrown the savannah and decided that Truth mattered after all. But Humanity wasn’t defined by arms and legs and upright posture. Humanity had evolved at the synapse as well as at the opposable thumb—and those misleading gut feelings were the very groundwork on which the whole damn clade had been built. Capuchins felt empathy. Chimps had an innate sense of fair play. You could look into the eyes of any cat or dog and see a connection there, a legacy of common subroutines and shared emotions.

  The Bicamerals had cut away all that kinship in the name of something their stunted progenitors called Truth, and replaced it with—something else. They might look human. Their cellular metabolism might lie dead on the Kleiber curve. But to merely call them a cognitive subspecies was denial to the point of delusion. The wiring in those skulls wasn’t even mammalian anymore. A look into those sparkling eyes would show you nothing but—

  “Hey.”

  Lianna’s reflection bobbed upside down next to his in the window. He turned as she reached past and unhooked her pressure suit from its alcove. “Hey.”

  His eyes wandered back to the window. The back-to-back Bicamerals had ended their joint trance; they turned, simultaneously plunged their hands into the wobbling sphere at their side (Water, Brüks realized: it’s just a blob of water), dried off on a towel leashed to the bulkhead.

  “I didn’t know,” he said, too quietly. As if afraid they’d hear him through the bulkhead. “How they work. What they—are.”

  “Really.” She checked her suit O2. “I would’ve thought the eyes’d be a giveaway.”

  “I just assumed that was for night vision. Hell, I know people who retro fluorescent proteins as a fashion statement.”

  “Yeah, now. Back in the day they were—”

  “Diagnostic markers. I figured it out.” After Moore had inspired him to go back and actually look at the thing that had left all those corpses twisted like so much driftwood in the Oregon desert. It still lingered in his own blood, after all—and it had been almost too easy, the way the lab had taken that chimera apart and spread-eagled every piece for his edification. Streptococcal subroutines lifted from necrotizing myelitis; viral encephalitides laterally promoted from their usual supporting role in limbic encephalitis; a polysaccharide in the cell wall with a special affinity for the nasal mucosa. A handful of synthetic subroutines, built entirely from scratch, to glue all those incompatible pieces together and keep them from fighting.

  But it had been the heart of that piecemeal bug that had betrayed the hive to Brüks’s investigations: a subroutine targeting a specific mutation of the p53 gene. He hadn’t got any direct hits when he’d run a search on that mutation, but the nearest miss was close enough to spill the secret: a tumor antagonist patented almost thirty years before.

  As if someone had weaponized an anticancer agent.

  “Doesn’t it bother you?” he wondered now.

  The suit had swallowed her to the waist. “Why should it?”

  “They’re tumors, Lee. Literally. Thinking tumors.”

  “That’s a pretty gross oversimplification.”

  “Maybe.” He wasn’t clear on the details. Hypomethylation, CpG islands, methylcytosine—black magic, all of it. The precise and deliberate rape of certain methylating groups to turn interneurons cancerous, just so: a synaptic superbloom that multiplied every circuit a thousandfold. It was no joyful baptism, as far as Brüks could tell. There’d be no ecstasy in that rebirth. It was a breakneck overgrowth of weedy electricity that nearly killed its initiates outright, pulled sixty-million-year-old circuits out by the roots.

  Lianna was right: the path was subtle and complex beyond human imagining, controlled with molecular precision, tamed by whatever drugs and dark arts the Bicamerals used to keep all that overgrowth from running rampant. But when the rites and incantations had been spoken, when the deed had been done and the patient sewn up, it all came down to one thing:

  They’d turned their brains into cancer.

  “I was so worked up about Luckett.” Brüks shook his head at his own stupidity. “We just left him back there to die, you know, we left all of them—but he would have died anyway, wouldn’t he? As soon as he graduated. Every pathway that ever made him what he was, the cancer would eat it all and replace it with something…”

  “Something better,” Lianna said.

  “That’s a matter of opinion.”

  “You make it sound so horrible.” Wrist seals. Click click. “But you know, you went through pretty much the same thing yourself and you don’t seem any the worse for it.”

  He imagined coming apart. He imagined every thread of conscious experience fraying and dissolving and being eaten away. He imagined dying, while the body lived on.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “Sure. When you were a baby.” She laid a gloved hand on his shoulder. “We all start out with heads full of random mush; it’s the neural pruning afterward that shapes who we are. It’s like, like sculpture. You start with a block of granite, chip away the bits that don’t belong, end up with a work of art. The Bicams just start over with a bigger block.”

  “But it’s not you.”

  “Enough of it is.” She plucked her helmet out of the air.

  “Sure, the memories stick.” Some elements were spared: in the thalamus and cerebellum, hippocampus and brain stem all left carefully unscathed by a holocaust with the most discriminating taste. “But something else is remembering them.”

  “Dan, you gotta let go of this whole self thing. Identity changes by the second, you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain. You’re already a different person than you were ten minutes ago.” She lowered the helmet over her head, yanked it counterclockwise until it clicked into place. His fish-eye reflection slid bulging across her faceplate as she turned.

  “What about you, Lianna?” he asked softly.

  “What about me?” Her voice muffled and breathy across the glass.

  “You aspiring to the same fate?”

  She eyed him sadly from the bowl of her helmet. “It’s not like you think. Really.” And passed on to some farther shore.

  THE INTUITIVE MIND IS A SACRED GIFT AND THE RATIONAL MIND IS A FAITHFUL SERVANT. WE HAVE CREATED A SOCIETY THAT HONORS THE SERVANT AND HAS FORGOTTEN THE GIFT.

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  LOOK, BRÜKS WANTED to say: fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain, and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger, and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy, he thought it
was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and a tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations—and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren’t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid. Even here in the twenty-first century you can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now, we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.

  And it came to pass that certain people figured out how to use that. They painted their faces or they wore funny hats, they shook their rattles and waved their crosses and they said, Yes, there are tigers in the grass, there are faces in the sky, and they will be very angry if you do not obey their commandments. You must make offerings to appease them, you must bring grain and gold and altar boys for our delectation or they will strike you down and send you to the Awful Place. And people believed them by the billions, because after all, they could see the invisible tigers.

  And you’re a smart kid, Lianna. You’re a bright kid and I like you but some day you’ve got to grow up and realize that it’s all a trick. It’s all just eyes scribbled on the wall, to make you think there’s something looking back.

  That’s what Brüks wanted to say. And Lianna would listen, and ponder this new information, and she would come to see the wisdom of his argument. She would change her mind.

  The only problem with this scenario was that it rapidly became obvious that she already knew all that stuff, and believed in invisible tigers anyway. It drove him up the fucking wall.

  “That’s not God,” she said one morning in the Commons, wide eyed with astonishment that he could have made such a stupid mistake. “That’s just a bunch of ritualistic junk that got stuck onto God by people who wanted to hijack the agenda.”

  A derisive snort from over by the galley dispenser. “Between you two arguing about ghosts and Carnage stringing out on rotten bits”—Sengupta grabbed her breakfast and headed for the ladder—“I don’t think I can handle five more minutes of this shit.”

  Brüks watched her go, turned his attention to a bulkhead window Lianna had opened into the Hold: shadows, machine parts, weightless bodies drawing dismembered components together into tangled floating jigsaws. Binary stars, sparkling in the gloom.

  “If it’s junk, why do they keep doing it?” He jerked his thumb at the display. “Why can’t those guys go thirty minutes without doing that hand-washing thing of theirs?”

  “Hand-washing reduces doubt and second-guessing in the wake of making a decision,” Lianna told him. “Brains tend to take metaphors literally.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Her eyes defocused for an instant. “I’ve just sent you the citation. Of course an actual tweak would be more efficient—I bet they do that too, actually—but I think they like to remember where they came from. You’d be surprised how much folklore has survival value when you rip it up and look at the roots.”

  “I never said religious beliefs weren’t adaptive. That doesn’t make them true.” Brüks spread his hands, palms up.

  “What do you think vision is?” she asked him. “You don’t see a fraction of the things that surround you, and at least half the things you do see are wrong. Hell, color doesn’t even exist outside your own head. Vision’s just plain wrong; it only persists because it works. If you’re going to dismiss the idea of God, you better stop believing your own eyes in the bargain.”

  “My eyes never told me to murder anyone who doesn’t share my worldview.”

  “My God never told me to do that either.”

  “Lots of people’s Gods have.”

  “Riiight. And we’re just gonna ignore all those racist assholes who quoted Darwin to justify turning people into slaves? Or wiping them out altogether?” He opened his mouth; she preempted him with a raised hand: “Let’s just agree that neither side has a monopoly on assholes. The point is, once you recognize that every human model of reality is fundamentally unreal, then it all just comes down to which one works best. And science has had a damn good run, no question. But the sun is setting on the Age of Empiricism.”

  He snorted. “The Age of Empiricism is just getting started.”

  “Come on, Oldschool. We’re long past the days when all you had to do was clock a falling apple or compare beak length in finches. Science has been running into limits ever since it started trying to get Schrödinger’s cat to play with balls of invisible string. Go down a few orders of mag and everything’s untestable conjecture again. Math and philosophy. You know as well as I do that reality has a substructure. Science can’t go there.”

  “Nothing can. Faith may claim—”

  “Knot theory,” Lianna said. “Invented it for the sheer beauty of the artifact. We didn’t have particle accelerators back then; we had no evidence at all that it would turn out to describe subatomic physics a century or two down the road. Pre-Socratic Greeks intuited atomic theory in two hundred B.C. Buddhists were saying centuries ago that we can’t trust our senses, that sensation itself is an act of faith. Hinduism’s predicated on the Self as illusion: no NMRs a thousand years ago, no voxel readers. No evidence. And damned if I can see the adaptive advantage of not believing in your own existence; but neurologically it happens to be true.”

  She beamed at him with the beatific glow of the true convert. “There’s an intuition, Dan. It’s capricious, it’s unreliable, it’s corruptible—but it’s so powerful when it works, and it’s no coincidence that it ties into the same parts of the brain that give you the rapture. The Bicamerals harnessed it. They amped the temporal and they rewired the parietals—”

  “You mean ripped them out completely.”

  “—and they had to leave conventional language back in the dust, but they figured it out. Their religion, for want of a better word, goes places science can’t. Science backs it up, as far as science can go; there’s no reason to believe it doesn’t keep right on working after it leaves science behind.”

  “You mean you have faith it keeps working,” Brüks observed drily.

  “Do you measure Earth’s gravity every time you step outside? Do you reinvent quantum circuits from scratch whenever you boot up, just in case the other guys missed something?” She gave him a moment to answer. “Science depends on faith,” she continued, when he didn’t. “Faith that the rules haven’t changed, faith that the other guys got the measurements right. All science ever did was measure a teensy sliver of the universe and assume that everything else behaved the same way. But the whole exercise falls apart if the universe doesn’t follow consistent laws. How do you test if that’s true?”

  “If two experiments yield different results—”

  “Happens all the time, my friend. And when it does, every good scientist discounts those results because they failed to replicate. One of the experiments must have been flawed. Or they both were. Or there’s some unknown variable that’ll make everything balance out just as soon as we discover what it is. The idea that physics itself might be inconsistent? Even if you considered the possibility in your wildest dreams, how could you test for it when the scientific method only works in a consistent universe?”

  He tried to think of an answer.

  “We’ve always thought c and friends ruled supreme, right out to the quasars and beyond,” Lianna mused. “What if they’re just—you know, some kind of local ordinance? What if they’re a bug? Anyway”—she fed her plate into the recycler—“I gotta go. We’re test-firing the chamber today.”

  “Look, science—” He marshaled his thoughts, unwilling to let it go. “It’s not just that it works. We know how it works. There’s no secret to it. It makes sense.”

  She wasn’t looking at him. Brüks followed her eyes to the bulkhead feed. They all seemed more or less mended by now—Chinedum, Amratu, a handful of other demi
gods who’d never be more than names and ciphers to him—although the pressure still kept them captive for the moment. Still insufficiently omnipotent to speed the physics of decompression. It was a small comfort.

  “Those guys do not make sense,” he continued. “They roll around on the floor and ululate and you write up the patent applications. We don’t know how it works, we don’t know if it’s going to keep working, it could stop working at any moment. Science is more than magic and rituals—”

  He stopped.

  Ululations. Incantations. Hive harmonics.

  Rituals.

  These feeds have motion cap, he remembered.

  Colonel Jim Moore crouched sideways against the Commons wall like a monstrous grasshopper: legs folded tight at the knees, spring-loaded and ready to pop; thorax folded over them like a protective carapace; one hand dancing with some unseen ConSensus interface while the other, wrapped around a convenient cargo strap, held body to bulkhead. His eyes jiggled and danced beneath closed lids: blind to this impoverished little shell of a world, immersed in some other denied Daniel Brüks.

  The grasshopper opened its eyes: glazed at first, clearing by degrees.

  “Daniel,” it said dully.

  “You look awful.”

  “I asked for an onboard cosmetics spa before we launched. They went for a lab instead.”

  “When was the last time you ate?”

  Moore frowned.

  “That does it. I’m buying, you’re eating.” Brüks stepped over to the galley.