Echopraxia

by Peter Watts

  At least, that was the closest word Brüks could summon to describe the tableaux: movements both inhumanly precise and inhumanly fast, humanoid simulacra engaged in some somatic call-and-response unlike anything he’d ever seen. There was a lead, but it kept changing; there were steps, but they never seemed to repeat. It was ballet, it was semaphore, it was some kind of conversation that engaged every part of the body except the tongue. It was utterly silent but for the machine-gun staccato of boots on the deck, faint and intermittent through the soft roar of the wind and the crackling of the flames.

  And faintly familiar, somehow.

  Moore ended it all with a blow to the back of the head. One moment the dancing marionettes were alone on the stage; the next the Colonel had materialized from the smoke, his hand already blurring toward the target. The gray-clad dancer jerked and thrashed and collapsed twitching onto the deck, a disconnected puppet gone suddenly grand mal; the other threw himself down at the same instant, although Moore hadn’t touched him. He lay twisting beside his fallen partner, still in frantic clockwork motion but only twitching now, amplitude reined in to complement these new and unexpected steps brought so suddenly into the routine.

  “Echopraxia echofuckingpraxia,” Sengupta hissed at his shoulder.

  Moore was back. “This way.”

  A broken door gaped around the corner. Inside, brain-dead smart paint sparked and sizzled along those few control surfaces that hadn’t already been put to the flame.

  Brüks glanced over his shoulder. “What about—”

  “They’re in a feedback loop. We don’t have to worry until the mechanic comes back.” A companionway gaped from the far bulkhead. A fallen cabinet blocked the way. Moore pushed it aside.

  “Isn’t that bad for them?” Brüks wondered, and immediately felt like an idiot. “I mean, wouldn’t it be better if we broke the loop? Split them up?”

  Moore paused at the top of the stairs. “Best-case scenario, they’d do as well as you would if someone split you down the middle.”

  “Oh.” After a moment: “Worst-case?”

  “They wake up,” Moore said, “and come after us.”

  IF YOU CHOOSE NOT TO DECIDE, YOU STILL HAVE MADE A CHOICE.

  —NEIL PEART

  THEY CAME ACROSS a sloping commons area, dark and derelict but for a cone of emergency light spilling in from the corridor and a smattering of icons winking fitfully from the far bulkhead: a row of comm cubbies, snoozing until some lonely grunt chose to phone home or eavesdrop on the happening world. They could only access Main Street—no windows into anything that might require security clearance—but ConSensus and perscomm links floated free to one and all, serenely untroubled by whatever small apocalypse that had taken out the upper deck.

  Moore moved on in search of greater privilege and darker secrets. Sengupta hung around long enough to make sure the links were solid before disappearing in his wake.

  Brüks sat in the leaning darkness and did not move.

  What do I say to her? What do I say?

  Hey, you know how Icarus went away and world fell apart? Funny story …

  You know how we thought there was no God? Well, it’s worse than you think …

  Hi, honey. I’m home.

  He took a deep breath.

  This is a stupid idea. We’re way past this. I should just—catch up with the others.

  Let it out again.

  Someone has to tell her. She needs to know.

  He felt the corners of his mouth pull back in a grimace of self-loathing.

  This isn’t even about her. This is about Dan Brüks and his imploding worldview. This is about running back to the only person who ever gave you any shred of comfort whether you deserved it or not …

  He sacc’ed the interface.

  He tried four times before the system could even find the address; the lump in his throat grew with each attempt. The Quinternet was falling apart; everything was. But it had deep roots, old roots reaching back over a century: a design both completely uncephalized and massively redundant. Functionality in the face of overwhelming entropy had been built into its DNA from the start.

  LINK ESTABLISHED: WELCOME TO HEAVEN

  TIMMINS FRANCHISE

  VISITOR’S LOBBY

  Still there. Still online. Still alive. He hadn’t entirely believed it. “Uh, Rhona McLennan, November 13, 2086.”

  PINGING.

  Please pick up.

  PINGING

  Please be busy.

  PINGING

  “Dan.”

  Oh God. Here she is.

  I must be dreaming …

  “Hi, Rho.”

  “I wondered where you’d got off to. Things have been so confused out there lately…”

  She was a voice in the darkness, distant, disembodied. There was no visual.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch…”

  “I wasn’t expecting you to get in touch.” Maybe there was warmth in her voice, now. Wry amusement at least. “When was the last time you dropped by?”

  “You didn’t want me to drop by! You said—”

  “I said I wasn’t going to come back out, love. I said I didn’t want you to spend all our time together trying to change my mind.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “I’m glad you did come by,” she said after a while. “It’s good to see you.”

  “I can’t see you,” he said softly.

  “Dan. What would be the point?”

  He shook his head.

  “Is it important? I could show you—something. If that would make it any easier.”

  “Rho, you can’t stay in there.”

  “I’m not having this argument again, Dan.”

  “This is not the same argument! Things have changed…”

  “I know. I’m in Heaven, not Andromeda. I can see everything out there that I want to. Upheaval, rebellion, environmental collapse. Plus ça change.”

  “It’s a loss worse since Icarus went down.”

  “Yeah,” she said slowly. “Icarus.”

  “Everything’s stretched to the breaking point, there’re outages and brownouts everywhere you look. Took me four tries to even find you, did you know that? And Heaven’s hardly the most obscure address on the planet. The whole network’s—forgetting things…”

  “Dan, it’s been forgetting things for ages. That’s why we call it the Splinternet.”

  “I didn’t know you called it that,” he said, vaguely surprised.

  “How is an elephant like a schizophrenic?”

  “I—what?”

  “An elephant never forgets.”

  He said nothing.

  “That’s an AI joke,” she said after a while.

  “Could be the worst one I’ve ever heard.”

  “I got a million of ’em. You sure you want me to come back out?”

  More than ever.

  “But really, how long do you think you could stay sane if you remembered everything you’d ever experienced? It’s good to forget, no matter what kind of network you are. It’s not a breakdown, it’s an adaptation.”

  “That’s bullshit, Rho. Losing network addresses is a good thing? What’s next, the voltage protocols? What happens when the grid forgets to shunt power to Timmins?”

  “There are risks,” she said gently. “I get it. The backups could fail. The Realists could strike. The AIRheads probably still want me for war crimes just on general principles, and I can’t say I really blame them. Every day in here could be my last, and how’s that any different from life out there?” Some tiny lens sent her the sight of Daniel Brüks opening his mouth; she rushed on, preempting him: “I’ll tell you. I don’t have anything anyone could want. I’m not a threat to anyone. My footprint’s a tiny fraction of yours, even factoring in your kink for spending so much time in tents. I can experience literally everything in here that you can out there, and a billion other things besides. Oh, and one other thing.”

  She paused some preci
se number of milliseconds.

  “I don’t have to kill intelligent beings to pay the rent.”

  “Nobody’s saying you’d have to—”

  “Now let’s look out there, shall we? Infectious zombieism running rampant in at least twenty countries I know of. Realists and Rearguard Catholics taking shots at any heretics they can lay their crosshairs on. Food poisoning on the rise for anyone who can’t afford a consumables-class printer. They haven’t even bothered tracking species extinction rates for a decade now, and—oh, and have you heard about that new weaponized echopraxia that’s going around? Jitterbug, they call it. Used to be pure monkey-see-monkey-do, but they say it’s mutating. Now you get to die dancing, bring a friend along for the ride.”

  “The difference,” he said grimly, “is that when the power fails out here, you can curl up under a blanket. If it fails in Heaven you’re brain dead in five minutes. You’re helpless in there, Rhona, and it’s all just a house of cards waiting for…”

  She didn’t answer. He couldn’t finish.

  He wondered how much she’d changed already, how much of her remained behind that gentle, utterly unyielding and unreal voice. Was he even talking to an intact brain, or to some hybrid emulation of neurons and arsenide? How much of his wife had been replaced over the past two years? That incremental cannibalism, that ongoing fossilization of flesh by minerals—it had always scared the living shit out of him.

  And she embraced it.

  “I’ve seen things,” he told her. “World-shaking things.”

  “We all have. It’s a shaky world.”

  “Will you just shut up and listen to me? I’m not talking about the goddamned news feeds, I’m talking about things that—I’ve seen things that—I know why you went away, now, you know? I finally get it. I never did before, but right now I swear I’d join you in a second if I could. But I can’t. It doesn’t feel like transcendence to me, it doesn’t feel like rising into some better world, it feels like being—replaced. I mean, I can’t even stand to have a ConSensus augment in my head. It’s like anything that changes what I am kills what I am. Do you understand?”

  “Of course. You’re scared.”

  He nodded miserably.

  “You’ve always been scared, Dan. As long as I’ve known you. You’ve spent your whole life being an asshole just to keep people from finding out. Lucky for you I could see through it, mmm?”

  He said nothing.

  “Know what else I see?”

  He didn’t. He didn’t have a clue.

  “That’s what makes you brave.”

  It took a moment for that to sink in. “What?”

  “You think I don’t know? Why you keep mouthing off to the wrong people? Why you sabotaged your own career every step of the way? Why you can’t help but face off against anybody who has any power over you?”

  Climbing an endless ladder toward a hungry monster. Charging into a leghold labyrinth with living walls. Biting the head off a girl half his size when she told him he couldn’t go home.

  Maybe not such a proud moment, that last one …

  “You’re saying I overcame my fear,” he began.

  “I’m saying you gave in to it! Every time! You’re so scared of being seen as a coward you’d jump off a cliff just to prove you weren’t! You think I never saw it? I was your wife, for God’s sake. I saw your knees knocking every time you ever stood up to the schoolyard bully and got your teeth kicked in for your troubles. Your whole damn life has been one unending act of overcompensation, and you know something, love? It’s just as well. Because people need to stand up now and then, and who else is going to?”

  It didn’t sink in at first. All he could do was frown and replay and try to figure out when the conversation had switched tracks like that.

  “That has to be the most heart-warming definition of asshole I’ve ever heard,” he said at last.

  “I liked it.”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter, though. I still can’t—follow you…”

  “Follow me.” Her voice was flat with sudden insight. “You think…”

  She won’t come out, and I can’t go in—

  “Dan.” A window opened on the wall. “Look at me.”

  He looked away.

  He looked back.

  He saw something that resembled a pickled fetus more than it did a grown woman. He saw arms and legs drawn close against the body in defiance of the cuffs at wrists and ankles, of the contractile microtubes that pulled them straight three times a day in a rearguard battle against atrophy and the shortening of tendons. He saw a shriveled face and a hairless scalp and a million carbon fibers sprouting from the base of the skull, floating like a nimbus around her head.

  “This is not what I’m talking about,” something said with her voice, and her lips did not move.

  “Rhona, why are you—”

  “You call this change, but it isn’t,” the voice said. “Heaven isn’t the future. It’s a refuge for gutless wonders who want to hide from the future, a nature preserve for people who can’t adapt. It’s, it’s wish fulfillment for passenger pigeons. You think I was lording this over you? This is nothing but a dumping ground for useless also-rans. You don’t belong here.”

  “Useless?” Brüks blinked, stunned. “Rho, don’t ever—”

  “I ran away. I threw in the towel years ago. But you—you may be doing everything for the wrong reasons and you may be pissing yourself when you do it, but at least you haven’t given up. You could be hiding with the rest of us but you’re out there in a world with no reset button, a place you have no control over, a place where other people can take your whole life’s work and twist it to such horrible ends and there’s no way to ever take back what they did.”

  “Rhona—what—”

  “I know, Dan. Of course I know. You didn’t have to hide it from me. You couldn’t hide it from me, I’m more plugged in than you are.” The voice was gentle, and kind, and still the face of that thing did not move. “The moment they quarantined Bridgeport I knew. I almost called you then, I thought maybe you’d finally give up and come inside but—”

  A mountain smashed into the back of his skull. His forehead smacked the wall of the cubby, rebounded; he toppled backward in his chair and sprawled across the deck. A red-shifted galaxy ignited, pulsing, in his head: light-years away, an upside-down giant stood silhouetted in the doorway.

  He blinked, moaned, tried to focus. The starfield dimmed; the roaring in his head faded a little; the giant shrank down to merely life-size. Its depths were so black they almost glowed.

  Rakshi Sengupta, meet Backdoor Brüks.

  Somewhere far away, a computer called out in the voice of his dead wife. Brüks tried to bring his hand to his head; Sengupta stomped on it and leaned over him. Fresh pain erupted off the midline and shot up his arm.

  “I want you to imagine something, you fucking roach.” Sengupta’s fingers danced and dipped overhead.

  Oh God no, Brüks thought dully. Not you, too … He let his head loll to the side, let his eyes stray somewhere anywhere else; Sengupta kicked him in the head and made him pay attention. Her fingers clenched and interlaced and bent backwards so far he thought they’d break.

  “Want you to imagine Christ on the Cross—”

  He was barely even surprised when the spasms started.

  Sengupta leaned in to admire her handiwork. Even now she could not look at his face. “Oh yes I have been waiting for this I have been working for this I have—”

  A sound: sharp, short, loud. Sengupta fell instantly silent. Stood up.

  A dark stain bloomed on her left breast.

  She collapsed onto Brüks like a rag doll. They lay there a moment, cheek to cheek, like slow-dancing lovers. She coughed, tried to rise; sprawled downhill to Brüks’s side. Her dimming eyes focused, unfocused, settled finally on some point near the hatch. Jim Moore stood there like a statue, his eyes so full of grief they might as well have been dead already.

 
; Something crossed Sengupta’s face in that moment. Not happiness, not quite. Not surprise. Enlightenment, maybe. After a moment, for the very first time, she looked Dan Brüks straight in the eye.

  “Oh fuck,” she whispered as her eyes went out. “Are you ever screwed.”

  “I know it doesn’t make any sense,” Moore was saying, turning the gun over in his hands. “We were never close. That may have been my fault, I suppose. Although, you know, he wasn’t what you’d call an easy child…”

  He’d pulled up a chair, sat hunched and leaning against the slant with his knees on his elbows, the light from the corridor catching him in quarter-profile. Brüks lay on the floor while Sengupta’s blood pooled against his side. It soaked through his clothing, stuck his jumpsuit to his ribs. His head throbbed. His throat was parched. He tried to swallow, was relieved and a bit surprised to find that he could.

  “Now, though … he’s a half a light-year away, and for the first time in his life I feel that we’re actually able to talk…”

  Pale nebulae clouded Sengupta’s open eyes. Brüks could see them clearly even in this dim light; could even turn his head a little to bring them into proper focus. Not Valerie’s best-laid glitch, not the total paralysis the vampire had layered down with weeks of graffiti and subtle gesticulation—or at least, not the same precision in the trigger stimulus. It probably was the same program, the same chain of photons to mirror neurons to motor nerves, still dozing in the back of his head should anyone sound the call to arms; Sengupta must have just improvised after the fact, gone back over old footage, figured out the basic moves and acted them out as best she could.

  “It’s as though he knew I’d be listening all those months ago, as though he knew what I’d be thinking when his words arrived…”

  She probably hadn’t even been planning for vendetta. It had probably been just another pattern-matching puzzle to keep that hyperactive brain occupied, fortuitously available when it turned out that her wife’s murderer and her adopted roach were one and the same. This rigor was half-assed and short-lived; he could feel it in his tendons. The tightness was already beginning to subside.

  Still pretty impressive, though.

  “I feel closer to Siri than I ever did when we were on the same planet,” Moore said. He leaned forward, assessed the living and the dead. “Does that make any sense to you?”