Echopraxia

by Peter Watts

  Maybe there’d been some dissection after all.

  “Where’s Jim?” Lianna said.

  “Right here,” Moore said from the depths of the Crown. He’d been off-shift but he was back in the game. “I’m on my way.”

  “Uh, that’s a negative, Jim. We’d rather you stay back for now. Give us your insights from there.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “You know why. This thing’s using Theseus’s contact protocols. Your stock just went up.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Moore said mildly. “I’ve been over there many times.”

  “It was never active before.” The slightest hint of exasperation tinged Lianna’s voice. “Come on, Jim, you know the rules about high-value assets better than anyone.”

  “I do,” Moore agreed. “Which means my expert opinion should prevail. I’m coming over.”

  No sound over comm. On the great surveilling compound eye, points of view shifted and bobbed.

  “Fine,” Lianna said at last. “Don’t forget to suit up.”

  Brüks and Sengupta, the last of the daycare buddies. They watched through one camera eye as Moore, fore in the attic, slid into his suit. They watched through a half dozen others as Ofoegbu et al returned to their rituals at the altar of First Contact, as Portia continued to iterate through stolen protocols; Sengupta grunted something about building a pidgin but all Brüks could see was plasma plots and dancing stick figures.

  “Little warm in there,” Sengupta remarked. Brüks barely heard her.

  Up in one corner of the compound eye, one of the Bicamerals—AMINA, according to the feed—panned away from the shrine and floated out of the sanctum; EULALI followed a moment later. The two began to trace a path back to the docking hatch. (Brüks felt a twinge of resentment on Moore’s behalf—as though the poor dumb caveman might get lost without a couple of grown-ups to show him the way.)

  Metal guts sailed past Moore’s feed: grilles, bulkheads, conduits and plumbing turning around his axis in constant lazy rotation. Landmarks passed in faster succession than Brüks had ever seen through Bicameral feeds: the radiator bus, the T-junction leading off to the LEAR hoop, that row of fluorescent pink high-pressure tanks he’d never been able to find on any schematic. Moore moved as if he’d been born to this place; he rounded one last corner like a dolphin twisting onto a new heading and he was there. Lianna and Ofoegbu moved aside to let him enter.

  Somehow he’d missed Amina and Eulali. Probably took a short cut, Brüks thought, glancing up at the nondescript passageway floating past in their feeds. That’ll teach ’em.

  Soft ululations from the sanctum. On Lianna’s feed Moore frowned stage left, evidently squeezing some kind of intelligence from those sounds.

  “I think I see the problem,” he said after a moment.

  Somewhere—else—Eulali and Amina had stopped moving. They hesitated for a moment, looming in each other’s feeds; then Janused back-to-back, turning slowly. Signage and hazard striping adorned a hatch in the background: VPR H2 storage, thruster assembly. Hard vacuum beyond.

  “It’s as you said,” Moore was saying back in the sanctum. “These are standard protocols.” His helmet cam held a tight focus on Portia’s paintings. Lianna’s feed showed him from the side, visor raised, cheek eclipsed by his helmet, his profile visible past the forward edge of the seal. Just past him, the node called Ofoegbu wasn’t looking at Moore or Portia: he was looking back through the open hatchway, into the corridor beyond—

  Wait a second, Brüks thought. Shouldn’t there be—

  That shadow, hinting at an unseen presence by the hatch. Gone now.

  Moore: “It’s using the same protocols we are.”

  Valerie had been there, just a few minutes ago. Now she was gone.

  “It’s reflecting our own protocols back at us. It’s completely rote.”

  Amina and Eulali. They weren’t going to meet Jim at all, Brüks realized. I bet they’re tracking Valerie …

  He foregrounded their feeds. They still faced in opposite directions, each presumably sharing in the wraparound vista of a conjoined visual field. Icarus drifted about them like a sharp-edged dream.

  “We’re not talking to an alien intelligence,” Moore continued. “We’re talking to a mirror.”

  Something caught Brüks’s eye, a tiny bright sparkle in the upper-left corner of Amina’s feed. A faint star drifting on the recycled breeze. He skimmed the stereocam menu, selected 27E—VAPOR CORE REACTOR—EXT. CORRIDOR. Same corridor, dorsal view. Now he stared down at the tops of two open helmets; that floating star twinkled in the foreground. He zoomed the feed onto a sliver of glass—something like that, anyway—barely the size of a hangnail. A shard of something broken.

  A big place, Icarus. It went on forever, breathed through more than a thousand kilometers of ductwork. This glass speck could have come from anywhere.

  “You want to make any progress at all—” Moore said.

  No signs of stress or metal fatigue nothing popped nothing broken no bits floating around.

  …’Course you gotta go in there and check to be sure…

  “—you’ve got to break it.”

  In the sanctum, Jim Moore extended his arm. Too late, Ofoegbu rushed to intervene. A bright little figurine sprang into existence on the palm of Moore’s hand, a hologram, an offering in the shape of a man.

  “This is my son.” Moore’s voice carried soft and clear along the channel. “Do you know him?”

  Portia’s interface imploded and disappeared.

  Holy shit holy shit— “Holy shit holy shit holy—” That was Sengupta beside him, locked in a loop, synced with another voice in Brüks’s own head. “Shut up,” Brüks said; amazingly, both obeyed.

  Moore’s hand didn’t move. The offering on its palm glowed steadily. Portia lay silent on its shrine while every sapient being within a hundred million kilometers held its breath.

  After an endless moment, a single bright eye opened in the middle of that surface. Light spilled from its pupil, fountained swirling across some canvas of melanin and magnetite, settled finally into an image with arms and legs. Siri Keeton looked back at himself, arms spread just slightly at his sides, palms out.

  Brüks leaned forward. “Another mirror image.”

  Sengupta clicked and ticked and shook her head. “Not a mirror look at the hand the right hand.” She zoomed the feed to make it easy: a ragged line there, from the heel of the palm right up to the webbing between the index and ring fingers. As if something had torn Keeton’s hand apart, right down to the wrist, and glued it back together.

  Brüks glanced at Sengupta, trying to remember: “That’s not on Jim’s—”

  “Of course not that’s the whole fucking point isn’t—”

  A sudden strangled sound from somewhere in the network: Bicameral sounds, a host of complex harmonics that probably held volumes. All Brüks could decipher there was surprise: over at 27E—EXT. CORRIDOR. Eulali was charging up the passageway at full speed. Amina floated transfixed, staring straight at the camera—no, not at the camera. At that telltale shard floating in front of it.

  Everywhere, suddenly: pandemonium.

  The helmet feeds at the shrine were all in frantic motion, swinging like drunken pendulums and sweeping the scenery too fast to make out whatever had scared them. Off down 27E Eulali bounced off a bulkhead (Wait a second; had there even been a bulkhead there a moment ago?) and retreated back toward Amina; another instant and both were gone from third-person view, lost but for the frantic blurry sweep of their suit cams. Sengupta grabbed AUX/RECOMP and spread it front and center across the dome, a top-down view of the shrine and its resident deity and its misbegotten acolytes caroming off solid metal where an open hatchway had gaped only a few moments before. Portia lay quiet as clay along condenser, its subtle mutilation of Siri Keeton glowing soft and steady as a child’s nightlight: the oily gray tentacle that lashed out toward Chinedum Ofoegbu sprouted from the far bulkhead, and Moore barely had time to p
ush the monk out of the way.

  All in those final furious moments before the feeds went dark.

  Sengupta gibbered faintly to port. Brüks barely heard her. I know what that is, he thought as those last seconds played over in his head. I’ve seen these before, I’ve used these before, I know exactly what this is …

  Magnetite and chromatophores and crypsis. Cages broken and painstakingly rebuilt. Footprints wiped clean, disturbing alien smells erased, sensors and samplers carefully planted and natural habitat reconstructed along all axes.

  This is a sampling transect.

  He yanked the quick-release buckle on his harness, floated free. “We’ve got to get them out.”

  Sengupta shook her head so hard Brüks thought it might come off. “No fucking way no fucking way we gotta get outta here—”

  He spun above the mirrorball, grabbed her by the shoulders—

  —“Don’t fucking touch me!”—

  —let her go but kept close, face-to-face, mere centimeters between them though she squirmed and turned her face away: “It doesn’t know we’re here do you understand? You said it yourself, too dumb to track the camera too dumb to know we’re here, they never let us onto Icarus so it’s never seen us. We can take it by surprise—”

  “Roach logic that’s stupid that doesn’t mean anything man we gotta leave—”

  “Don’t leave. Do you hear me? Stay here if you want but don’t you fucking leave until I get back. Boot up the engines if the damn things even work yet, but stay put.”

  She shook her head. An arc of spittle spread from her lips and fanned through the air. “What are you gonna do huh they’re ten times smarter than you and they never even saw it coming—”

  Good question. “In some ways, Rakshi. They’re ten times dumber in others. They know all about quarks and amplituhedrons but they didn’t get nailed by a piece of quantum foam, do you understand? They got nailed by a goddamned field biologist. And that’s a game I know inside out.”

  He cupped her head in his hands and kissed her on the crown—

  —“Don’t leave.”—

  —and leapt into the attic.

  He shot through the rafters like a pinball, bouncing from strut to handhold, knocking aside straps and buckles and glistening blobs of oily water that splattered on contact. Brüks the baseline. Brüks the roach. Give it up, Danny-boy: don’t even try to think, you’ll only embarrass yourself in front of the grown-ups. Just nod and swallow what they feed you. Keep your mouth shut when Sengupta brushes off a discrepancy of a few millimeters as insignificant thermal expansion. Play it safe when Moore points out that Portia, wonder of wonders, grows; point to a puddle of candle wax on the machinery and dismiss it with a shrug. Don’t bother wondering whether the infiltration really stopped at such an obvious border. Forget that Portia computes and pattern-matches, forget its capacity to build mosaics of such intricate resolution that no meatball eye could tell the difference between a naked bulkhead and one sheathed in the thinnest layer of thinking plastic. Don’t let the results of your own half-assed research point you to the obvious: that Portia might coat everything like an invisible intelligent skin, that it’s there between whenever anyone boots up an interface or turns on the goddamn lights: watching everything we do, feeling every sequence our fingers tap against the panels. Just sit back and smile as the adults blunder innocently into an alien cage painted inside the man-made one.

  And when the traps snaps shut and all those pieces come together you can comfort yourself that the grown-ups didn’t see it either, that these brain-damaged groupthink Bicamerals aren’t so smart after all. You can die smug and vindicated with the best of them in a mass grave swinging around the sun.

  The lamprey gaped ahead and to port, highlighting edges and angles in blue pastel. Three empty spacesuits floated in their alcoves. Brüks considered and dismissed them in an instant: by the time he wriggled into one of those things, everyone on Icarus might be pickled in whatever Portia used for formalin. Up past the ’lock, though, encircling the forward reaches of the docking bay: an array of tools sufficient to cut a ship in two and build it back again.

  Portia could obviously lock its molecules into something like armor: Ofoegbu was not a small man and yet the slime mold—stretched thin across the hatch, drawn tight in seconds—had bounced him back into the compartment without even bending. But Brüks had seen this fucker from the inside, close up. He’d seen the pieces that let Portia talk, and think, and blend in; he had a least a rough idea of how those parts were structured and what they were made of.

  He was pretty sure they couldn’t all be fireproof.

  He yanked a welding laser from its mount and pulled himself aft, flipping off the safety and wrapping the tether around his wrist as he moved. An electric insect whined faintly up toward the ultrasonic as the capacitors charged.

  Down the lamprey’s throat: a glowing semiflexible trachea, reinforced by skeletal hoops at three-meter intervals. Soft padded striations extending the length of the passageway, the ligaments and muscles that moved the tunnel during docking. A biosteel frame hove into view around the curve, a massive square hatch embedded within: Icarus’s main airlock, sealed and solid as a mountain, reassuringly industrial after all this squishy biotecture.

  Pressed into the alloy off to the side, a handle nested within a crimson dimple. Brüks grabbed it, braced himself with one foot to either side; turned; pulled. The dimple turned green around his fist. The airlock sighed open. He grabbed its edge, swung it back, ignored the yellow flashing of nervous smart paint warning against DUAL HATCH DISCONNECT: stared through an open inner hatch into the labyrinth beyond.

  Enemy territory. He had no way of knowing how far it extended. Maybe Portia was looking back at him now.

  He hefted the welder and pushed off.

  No animatics to guide him. No convenient schematics rotating in his head, no bright icon to pinpoint his location. He remembered the way from a dozen suit feeds, from his own solitary voyeurism. He didn’t know how useful those memories might be. Maybe they were as reliable as any roach’s. Maybe the very architecture had changed.

  Gross anatomy would get him to the sanctum: down the longitudinal notochord, right fork past the LEAR hoop, turn right again under the coolant nexus. If he was lucky, someone would be making sounds to guide him the rest of the way.

  Should’ve grabbed a helmet, he thought, looking backward with perfect clarity. Should’ve brought something with a comm link. An extra laser or two for Jim and the boys.

  Shit shit shit.

  Sounds ahead, sounds to starboard, sounds behind: a glimpse of motion from the corner of his eye as he sailed past some side tunnel that had never made it onto his mental map. He grabbed at a passing rib; the laser sailed on, yanked him forward by the wrist, pulled him off balance and sent him tumbling into the bulkhead. His head cracked painfully against a strut; the laser, jerking at the end of its strap, recoiled through weightless space and punched him in the chest.

  Shouts from behind. A small chorus of wordless, panicky voices. An almost electrical slithering sound.

  Brüks cursed and launched himself back the way he’d come. The forgotten passageway slid toward him; he braked, grabbed, swung around the corner—

  —and nearly ran headlong into a wall congealing before him like a membrane of living clay.

  In the time it took him to stop and gibber to himself—

  —I almost touched it I almost touched it It almost got me—

  —the membrane had transmuted to biosteel, rigid and impenetrable and almost thick enough to muffle the sounds of carnage on the other side.

  Not biosteel, Brüks reminded himself. Not impenetrable.

  Not fireproof.

  He brought up the welder.

  No. Not fireproof at all.

  Portia squirmed where the beam hit, curled and blackened and iridesced like an oil slick. Brüks kept the focus tight, the beam as steady as free fall and nerves could keep it. It burned through, ope
ned a hole that dilated like an eye: stretched elastic tissue split apart, recoiling from the hit. The beam weaved briefly, scoring inert metal on the other side, barely missing one of the figures beyond before Brüks’s killed the circuit.

  And stopped, blinking.

  Taken in during that endless, frozen moment: a tunnel with no deck and no ceiling, its walls buried behind an infestation of pipes and conduits, capped by a T-junction ten meters in. Five spacesuited figures, helmets open, halfway down that length. At least one shattered visor: a cloud of coppery crystal shards following their own small trajectories, some polished as new mirrors, others stained and splattered by a band of crimson mist that arced from a small silvered body turning in midair. Brüks knew who it was even before the face came into view, even before he saw those sightless eyes staring bone-white from a black mask.

  Lianna.

  The others moved under their own power. Amina, making desperately for the faint hope Brüks had just opened before her. Evans, flailing through the carnage in search of a handhold or a brace point, finding only the rag-doll embrace of a corpse entangled in passing. Azagba, the legless zombie: lashing out quick as a striking snake, spinning Amina around by the shoulder, driving the straightened fingers of one bladed hand pistonlike into her open helmet and turning her off in an instant. Another of Valerie’s zombies bounding forward like something arboreal, reaching out after Evans to do the same.

  Brüks fired the torch. The zombie saw it coming and twisted like an eel but she was trapped in midair, purely ballistic, wed to inertia for just that instant too long. The beam bounced briefly off her silver abdomen, flash-burned a slash of cauterized charcoal across her exposed face. Amazingly she stayed on target: burned and half blind, one eye boiled and burst in its socket she lashed out and crushed Evan’s throat in passing, bounced off metal viscera, grabbed the nearest handhold without even looking.