by Peter Watts
A womb, with all the blood on the outside.
Her name was Sachita Bhar and all that blood was in her head, too. By now they’d killed the cameras just like everything else but there was no way to take back the images from those first moments: the lounge, the Histo lab, even the broom closet for chrissakes, a grungy little cubby on the third floor where Gregor had hidden. Sachie hadn’t been watching when Gregor had been found. She’d been flipping through the channels, frantically scanning for life and finding only the dead, their insides all out now. By the time she’d cycled through to the closet feed the monsters had already been and gone.
Gregor, who was in love with that stupid pet ferret of his. She’d shared an elevator with him this morning. She remembered the stripes on his shirt. Otherwise she’d have had no idea what to call the mess in the closet.
She’d seen some fraction of the carnage before the cameras went down: friends and colleagues and rivals cut down without remorse or favoritism, their gutted remains sprawled across lab benches and workstations and toilet stalls. And with all those feeds running through the implants in her head—with all her access to all that ubiquitous surveillance—Sachita Bhar had not caught so much as a glimpse of the creatures who’d done this. Shadows, at most. A flicker of darkness cast by some solitary stalker from a blind spot in the camera’s eye. They’d done it all without ever being seen, without ever seeing each other.
They’d always been kept isolated. For their own good, of course: stick two vampires in the same room and their own hardwired territoriality would put them at each other’s throats in an instant. And yet they were working together, somehow. At least half a dozen, confined, incommunicado, acting in sudden precise concert. They’d done it all without ever meeting face-to-face—and even at the height of the slaughter, in those last moments before the cameras died, they had remained invisible. The whole massacre had happened from the corner of Sachie’s eye.
How did they do it? How did they survive the angles?
Someone else might have enjoyed the irony; she hid in a refuge for monsters, one of the few places in the whole damn building where they could open their eyes without risking a death sentence. Right angles were verboten here. This was where Achilles’ heels were put to the test, a cross-free zone where geometry was precisely controlled and neurological leashes optimized. Elsewhere, civilized geometry threatened on all sides: tabletops, windowpanes, a million intersections of appliance and architecture just waiting for the right viewpoint to send vampires into convulsions. Those monsters wouldn’t—
—shouldn’t—
—last an hour out there without the antiEuclideans that suppressed the Crucifix Glitch. Only here, in the white womb—where poor, stupid Sachita Bhar had run when the lights went out—could they dare to open unprotected eyes.
And now one of them was in here with her.
She couldn’t see it. Her own eyes were shut, squeezed tight against the butchery flash-burned into her head. She heard no sound but the endless animal keening in her own throat. But something drank a little of the light falling on her face. The swirling red darkness inside her eyelids dimmed some infinitesimal, telltale fraction, and she knew.
“Hello,” it said.
She opened her eyes. It was one of the females: Valerie, they’d named her, after some departmental chairman who’d retired the year before. Valerie the Vampire.
Valerie’s eyes red-shifted the light and threw it back at her, blood-orange stars in a face flushed with aftermath. She towered over Sachie like an insectile statue, motionless, even her breathing imperceptible. Moments from death and with nothing better to do, some subroutine in Sachie’s head ticked off the morphometrics: such inhumanly long limbs, the attenuate heat-dissipating allometry of a metabolic engine running hot. Subtly jutting mandible, lupine as a hominid’s could be, to hold all those teeth. Stupid turquoise smock, smart-paper/telemetry composite weave: Valerie must have been scheduled for physio work today. Ruddy complexion, the bloody flash-flood vasodilation of the predator in hunting mode. And the eyes, those terrifying luminous pinpoints—
Finally it registered: Contracted pupils.
She’s not on Auntie U...
Suddenly Sachie’s cross was out, last-ditch kill switch, the talisman everyone got on day one along with their ID: empirically tested, proven in the crunch, redeemed by science after uncounted centuries spent slumming as a religious fetish. Sachie held it up with sudden desperate bravado, thumbed the stud. Spring-loaded extensions shot from each tip and her little pocket totem was suddenly a meter on a side.
Thirty degrees of visual arc, Sachie. Maybe forty for the tough ones. Make sure it’s perpendicular to line of sight, the angles only work when they’re close to ninety degrees, but once this little baby covers enough arc the visual cortex fries like a circuit in a shitstorm...
Greg’s words.
Valerie cocked her head and studied the artifact. Any second now, Sachie knew, this nightmare creature would collapse in a twitching mass of tetany and shorting synapses. That wasn’t faith; it was neurology.
The monster leaned close, and didn’t even shiver. Sachita Bhar pissed herself.
“Please,” she sobbed. The vampire said nothing.
Words flooded out: “I’m sorry, I was never really part of it, you know, I’m just a research associate, I’m just doing it for my degree, that’s all, I know it’s wrong, I know it’s like, like slavery almost, I know that and it’s a shitty system, it’s a shitty thing we did to you but it wasn’t really me, do you understand? I didn’t make any of those decisions, I just came in afterward, I’m barely involved, it was just for my degree. And I—I can understand how you must feel, I can understand why you’d hate us, I would too probably but please, oh please, I’m just...I’m just a student...”
After a while, still alive, she dared to look up again. Valerie was staring at some point just to the left and a thousand light-years away. She seemed distracted. But then they always seemed distracted, their minds running a dozen parallel threads simultaneously, a dozen perceptual realities, each every bit as real as the one mere humans occupied.
Valerie cocked her head as if listening to faint music. She almost smiled.
“Please...,” Sachie whispered.
“Not angry,” Valerie said. “Don’t want revenge. You don’t matter.”
“You don’t—but...” Bodies. Blood. A building full of corpses and the monsters who’d made them. “What do you want, then? Anything, please, I’ll—”
“Want you to imagine something: Christ on the Cross.”
And of course, once the image had been incanted it was impossible not to imagine. Sachita Bhar had a few moments to wonder at the sudden spasms seizing her limbs, at the way her jaw locked into startling dislocation, at the feel of a thousand blood-hot strokes exploding like pinpricks across the back of her skull. She tried to close her eyes but it doesn’t matter what kind of light falls on the retina, that’s not vision. The mind generates its own images, much farther upstream, and there’s no way to shut those out.
“Yes.” Valerie clicked thoughtfully to herself. “I learn.”
Sachie managed to speak. It was the hardest thing she’d ever done, but she knew that was fitting; it was also the last thing she would ever do. So she summoned all her willpower, every shred of every reserve, every synapse that hadn’t already been commandeered for self-destruction, and she spoke. Because nothing else mattered anymore, and she really wanted to know:
“Learn...wha...”
She couldn’t quite get it out. But the short-circuiting brain of Sachita Bhar managed to serve up one last insight anyway, amid the rising static: This is what the Crucifix Glitch feels like. This is what we do to them. This is...
“Judo,” Valerie whispered.
Ultimately, all science is correlation. No matter how effectively it may use one variable to describe another, its equations will always ultimately rest upon the surface of a black box. (Saint Herbert might h
ave put it most succinctly when he observed that all proofs inevitably reduce to propositions that have no proof.) The difference between Science and Faith, therefore, is no more and no less than predictive power. Scientific insights have proven to be better predictors than Spiritual ones, at least in worldly matters; they prevail not because they are true, but simply because they work.
The Bicameral Order represents a stark anomaly in this otherwise consistent landscape. Their explicitly faith-based methodologies venture unapologetically into metaphysical realms that defy empirical analysis—yet they yield results with consistently more predictive power than conventional science. (How they do this is not known; our best evidence suggests some kind of rewiring of the temporal lobe in a way that amplifies their connection to the Divine.)
It would be dangerously naïve to regard this as a victory for traditional religion. It is not. It is a victory for a radical sect barely half a century old, and the cost of that victory has been to demolish the wall between Science and Faith. The Church’s concession of the physical realm informed the historic armistice that has allowed faith and reason to coexist to this day. One may find it heartening to see faith ascendant once again across the Human spectrum; but it is not our faith. Its hand still guides lost sheep away from the soulless empiricism of secular science, but the days in which it guided them into the loving arms of Our Savior are waning.
—An Enemy Within: The Bicameral Threat to
Institutional Religion in the Twenty-First Century
(An Internal Report to the Holy See by
the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 2093)
DEEP IN THE Oregon desert, crazy as a prophet, Daniel Brüks opened his eyes to the usual litany of death warrants.
It had been a slow night. A half-dozen traps on the east side were offline—damn booster station must have gone down again—and most of the others were empty. But number eighteen had caught a garter snake. A sage grouse pecked nervously at the lens in number thirteen. The video feed from number four wasn’t working, but judging by mass and thermal there was probably a juvenile Scleroperus scrambling around in there. Twenty-three had caught a hare.
Brüks hated doing the hares. They smelled awful when you cut them open—and these days, you almost always had to cut them open.
He sighed and described a semicircle with his index finger; the feeds vanished from the skin of his tent. Headlines resolved in their wake, defaulting to past interests: Pakistan’s ongoing zombie problem; first anniversary of the Redeemer blowout; a sad brief obituary for the last wild coral reef.
Nothing from Rho.
Another gesture and the fabric lit with soft tactical overlays, skewed to thermal: public-domain real-time satellite imagery of the Prineville Reserve. His tent squatted in the center of the display, a diffuse yellow smudge: cold crunchy outer shell, warm chewy center. No comparable hot spots anywhere else in range. Brüks nodded to himself, satisfied. The world continued to leave him alone.
Outside, invisible in the colorless predawn, some small creature skittered away across loose rattling rock as he emerged. His breath condensed in front of him; frost crunched beneath his boots, bestowed a faint transient sparkle to the dusty desert floor. His ATB leaned against one of the scraggly larches guarding the camp, marshmallow tires soft and flaccid.
He grabbed mug and filter from their makeshift hook and stepped into the open, down a loose jumble of scree. The vestiges of some half-assed desert stream quenched his thirst at the foot of the slope, slimy and sluggish and doomed to extinction within the month. Enough to keep one large mammal watered in the meantime. Out across the valley the Bicamerals’ pet tornado squirmed feebly against a gray eastern sky but stars were still visible overhead, icy, unwinking, and utterly meaningless. Nothing up there tonight but entropy, and the same imaginary shapes that people had been imposing on nature since they’d first thought to wonder at the heavens.
It had been a different desert fourteen years ago. A different night. But it had felt the same, until the moment he’d glanced up—and for a few shattering moments it had even been a different sky, robbed of all randomness. A sky where every star blazed in brilliant precise formation, where every constellation was a perfect square no matter how desperately human imaginations might strain. February 13, 2082. The night of First Contact: sixty-two thousand objects of unknown origin, clenching around the world in a great grid, screaming across the radio spectrum as they burned. Brüks remembered the feeling: as though he were witnessing some heavenly coup, a capricious god deposed and order restored.
The revolution had lasted only a few seconds. The upstaged constellations had reasserted themselves as soon as those precise friction trails had faded from the upper atmosphere. But the damage had been done, Brüks knew. The sky would never look the same again.
That’s what he’d thought at the time, anyway. That’s what everyone had thought. The whole damn species had come together in the wake of that common threat, even if they didn’t know what it was exactly, even if it hadn’t actually threatened anything but Humanity’s own self-importance. The world had put its petty differences aside, spared no expense, thrown together the best damn ship the twenty-first century could muster. They’d crewed it with expendable bleeding-edgers and sent them off along some best-guess bearing, carrying a phrase book that spelled take me to your leader in a thousand languages.
The world had been holding its breath for over a decade now, waiting for the Second Coming. There’d been no encore, no second act. Fourteen years is a long time for a species raised on instant gratification. Brüks had never considered himself a great believer in the nobility of the Human spirit but even he had been surprised at how little time it took for the sky to start looking the same as it always had, at the speed with which the world’s petty differences returned to the front page. People, he reflected, were like frogs: take something out of their visual field, and they’d just—forget it.
The Theseus mission would be well past Pluto by now. If it had found anything, Brüks hadn’t heard about it. For his part, he was sick of waiting. He was sick of life on hold, waiting for monsters or saviors to make an appearance. He was sick of killing things, sick of dying inside.
Fourteen years.
He wished the world would just hurry up and end.
He spent the morning as he’d spent every other for the past two months: running his traplines and poking the things inside, in the faint hope of finding some piece of nature left untwisted.
The clouds were already closing in by sunrise, before his bike had soaked up a decent charge; he left it behind and ran the transects on foot. It was almost noon by the time he got to the hare, only to find that something had beaten him to the punch. The trap had been torn open and its contents emptied by some other predator who’d lacked even the good grace to leave a blood spatter behind for analysis.
The garter snake was still slithering around in number eighteen, though: a male, one of those brown-on-brown morphs that vanished against the dirt. It writhed in Brüks’s grasp, clenched around his forearm like a scaly tentacle; its scent glands smeared stink across his skin. Brüks drew a few microliters of blood without much hope, plugged them into the barcoder on his belt. He swigged from his canteen while the device worked its magic.
Far across the desert the monastery’s tornado had swollen to three times its predawn size, pumped by the midday heat. Distance reduced it to a brown thread, an insignificant smoky smudge; but get too close to that funnel and you’d end up scattered over half the valley. Just the year before, some Ugandan vendetta theocracy had hacked a transAt shuttle out of Dartmouth, sent it through a vortex engine on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Not much but rivets and teeth had come out the other side.
The barcoder meeped in plaintive surrender: too many genetic artifacts for a clean read. Brüks sighed, unsurprised. The little machine could tag any gut parasite from the merest speck of shit, ID any host species from the smallest shred of pure tissue—but pure tissue was so hard t
o come by, these days. There was always something that didn’t belong. Viral DNA, engineered for the greater good but too indiscriminate to stay on target. Special marker genes, designed to make animals glow in the dark when exposed to some toxin the EPA had lost interest in fifty years before. Even DNA computers, custom-built for a specific task and then tramped carelessly into wild genotypes like muddy footprints on a pristine floor. Nowadays it seemed like half the technical data on the planet were being stored genetically. Try sequencing a lung fluke and it was even money whether the base pairs you read would code for protein or the technical specs on the Denver sewer system.
It was okay, though. Brüks was an old man, a field man from a day when people could tell what they were looking at by—well, by looking at it. Check the chin shields. Count the fin rays, the hooks on the scolex. Use your eyes, dammit. At least if you screw up you’ve only got yourself to blame, not some dumb-ass machine that can’t tell the difference between cytochrome oxidase and a Shakespearean sonnet. And if the things you’re trying to ID happen to live inside other things, you kill the host. You cut it open.
Brüks was good at that, too. He’d never got around to liking it much, though.
Now he whispered to his latest victim—“Shhh...sorry...it won’t hurt, I promise...”—and dropped it into the kill sack. He’d found himself doing that a lot lately, murmuring meaningless comforting lies to victims who couldn’t possibly understand what he was saying. He kept telling himself to grow up. In all the billions of years that life had been iterating on this planet, had any predator ever tried to comfort its prey? Had “natural” death ever been so quick and painless as the killings Dan Brüks inflicted for the greater good? And yet it still bothered him to see those small diffuse shadows flopping and squirming behind the translucent white plastic, to hear the soft thumps and hisses as simple minds tried to drive bodies, suddenly and terrifyingly unresponsive, toward some kind of imaginary escape.
