Firefall

by Peter Watts

  She didn’t seem to hear him. “You should see this,” she said, and withdrew.

  And poked her head out again after a few seconds: “Well come on.”

  He hunkered gingerly down into the tent. Sengupta crouched at its center. Patches of flickering intelligence swarmed across the fabric: columns of numbers; crude plastic-skinned portraits rendered by some computer sketch artist struggling with insufficient eye-witness data; rows of—home addresses, from the look of it.

  “What’s this?”

  “Nothing you care about.” Reflected lightning played across her face. “Just some fucker going to be eating his own guts when I get hold of him.” She waved one hand and the collage disappeared.

  “You do realize they’ve got a whole hab set up as a dorm,” Brüks said.

  “That’s too crowded nobody uses this one.”

  “I use—” Never mind.

  A roommate might not be so bad, he reflected. He’d have never sought one out—good parasites do not draw attention to themselves, no matter how lonely the lifestyle—but if things went south, maybe Valerie would eat Rakshi first. Buy him some time.

  “Watch this best party trick ever.”

  She threw a video feed onto the wall: rowdy voices, flashing lights, a maglev table wobbling at an insane angle thanks to the drunken asshole trying to dance on the damn thing. Campus bar. The student ambience would be a dead giveaway anywhere on the planet but Brüks was pretty sure it was somewhere in Europe. The subtitler was off but he caught snatches of German and Hungarian at least.

  A couple of grad students had randomly arranged a dozen empty beer glasses on a table. A crowd of others cheered and chanted and pulled chairs away, clearing a surrounding space. Something was happening stage left, just out of camera range: an antidisturbance, a sudden contagious quelling of noise and commotion that drew eyes and spread around the circle in an instant. The camera turned toward the eye in the storm. Brüks sucked in his breath.

  Valerie again.

  She stalked into the cleared floor space like a spring-loaded panther, unleashed, autonomous. She wore the cheap throwaway smart-paper weave ubiquitous to lab rats and convicts the world over; it seemed absurd against the jostling background of blazers and holograms and bioluminescent tattoos. Valerie didn’t seem to notice her own violation of the dress code; didn’t notice the way the front lines pushed back against the crowd as she passed, or the way the murmuring horde fell silent when she got too close. She had eyes only for the glasses on the table.

  What kind of suicidal idiot would take a vampire to a bar? How zoned had these people been, to not be fleeing for the exits?

  “Where did you get—”

  “Shut up and watch!”

  Valerie circled the table, once. She hesitated for a moment, her eyes unfocused, something that might almost have been a smile playing across her lips.

  In the next instant, she sprang.

  She came down on one bare foot, almost three meters from a standing start; snapped the other down with a stomp, spun and stamped again and jumped—arcing backward this time, over the table itself, flipping in midair and landing in a four-point crouch (left foot right foot right knee left hand) before hopping to the left (stomp), hand-springing forward to land chest-to-face with some semisober sessional who still had enough animal sense to turn greeny-white under a face loaded with retconned chloroplasts. Straight up now: a vertical one-meter leap with a one-legged landing; about-face (stomp), two diagonal steps toward the table (stomp). Both elbows, one knee crashing simultaneously against ancient floorboards that bounced her smoothly back into a standing position. Finis. After a moment, the camera, shaking despite the very best image-stabilization algorithms a student budget could buy, panned back to the table.

  The glasses were arranged in a perfectly straight, evenly spaced line.

  “Hard to find this one someone snuck her out the back door you take a vampire out without authorization and your career is over so they really kept the evidence locked up I think it was an initiation or something...”

  The view hovered over the tableau for a long, disbelieving moment. Swung back to the monster who had created it. Valerie stared straight through the camera and a thousand kilometers beyond, smiled that patented bone-chilling smile. She wasn’t even breathing hard.

  Everyone else was, though. Reality was finally cutting through the drinks and the drugs and the sheer idiotic bravado of spoiled children raised on promises of immortality. They were in the presence of black magic. They were in the presence of something whose most trivial efforts turned the very laws of motion into feats of telekinesis. And one sodden instant behind all that awe and stunned disbelief, perhaps, the realization of just what all that vast intelligence, all those superconducting motor skills had evolved in the service of.

  Hunting.

  It didn’t matter what bedtime stories these privileged brats had been told. They were not immortal in such a presence. They were only breakfast. And it was obvious to Brüks—from the way they pulled back and muttered their excuses, the way they edged for doors while keeping their backs to walls, the way even those pretending to be in charge averted their eyes as they scuttled sidelong up to Valerie and told her in weak and shaking voices that it was time to come in now—that they finally knew it.

  It was also obvious, in hindsight, that Brüks had been uncharitable to the baselines who’d stolen their rat from its cage for one wild night out. Whoever they were, they hadn’t been suicidal. They hadn’t been idiots. No matter what they might have told themselves before or after, no matter who remembered having the idea.

  It hadn’t really been their decision at all.

  The gimp hood did amp his learning curve. Brüks had to admit that much.

  Data once forced to time-share the cramped real estate between bands of astroturf stretched luxuriously around him along three axes and three hundred sixty degrees of infinite space. Options he would have had to make eye contact with on a smart-paint display leapt front and center the moment he so much as thought about them. Information that he’d normally have to read, and repeat, and review—it seemed to just stick in the brain with a glance and a swallow. He was used to cognitive enhancers, of course, but this had to be Bicameral tech; he couldn’t imagine that even surgical augments would deliver a bigger boost.

  Three trillion nodes and a ten-thousand-link search radius was a pretty impoverished echo of the actual Quinternet, but you could still dig for a thousand lifetimes and never reach its edge. Instant expertise in a million disciplines. Interactive novels you didn’t even have to play, first-person eidetic memories that planted themselves directly into your head if you had the interface (Brüks didn’t, but this came close), served up all the thrills and wonder and experience of just having played without even needing to set aside the time to inhabit the story in real time. Indelible footprints of all the things the Noosphere deemed worthy of remembrance.

  Even after fourteen years, Theseus was all over it.

  The shock, the disbelief in the wake of Firefall. Riots in every color of the rainbow: terrified hordes fleeing the coming apocalypse, not knowing which way to run; demonstrations against movers and shakers who’d always known more than they let on; looters with short attention spans, thinking only of all that swag left undefended while panicked populations hid under their beds or lashed back against uniforms whose guns and drones and area-denial weaponry were finally, after uncounted decades of casual and brutal unaccountability, just not up to the challenge. Tens of thousands returning from Heaven, fearful of new threats from the real world. Millions more fleeing into it, for pretty much the same reason.

  And then, Theseus: the Mother Of All Megaprojects. A mission, a metaphor, a symbol of a shattered world reunited against the common threat. The brave souls who manned her, that small select force standing for Humanity against the cosmos. Amanda Bates, champion of countless WestHem campaigns: her skills so broad, her talents so highly classified that no one had even heard of
her before her ascension to the Dream Team. Lisa Takamatsu, Nobel laureate, linguist, and den mother to a half-dozen separate personalities living in her own head. Jukka Sarasti, the noble vampire, the lion who’d lain down with lambs and was ready to give his life on their behalf. Siri Keeton, synthesist, ambassador to ambassadors, bridge between—

  Wait a second—Siri?

  He’d heard that name before. He sifted through dusty old memories laid down before the upgrade. Bulletins and biography washed over them in the meantime: Siri Keeton, synthesist, top of a field consisting exclusively of people at the top of their field. Possessed by demons at the age of six, some convulsive virus straight out of the Middle Ages that lit up his brain with electrical storms. It would have killed him outright if radical surgery hadn’t snatched him back from the brink, patched him up, left him scarred and scared and possessed of something altogether new: a fierce never-say-die dedication to beating the odds, the world, to beating his own mutinous brain into submission and getting the job done, all the way out to the very edge of the solar system and beyond.

  (Siri’s not exactly baseline himself, actually...)

  Almost nothing about his home life. No home vids, no leaked grade-school psych work-ups. An only child, apparently. Mother not mentioned at all, father left unnamed, a shadowy background figure that refused to come into focus except for one passing reference in TimeSpace:

  ...owes his single-minded pursuit of personal goals as much to his childhood battle with epilepsy as to his upbringing as a soldier’s son...​

  Brüks turned the words over in his head, searching for coincidence.

  “Yah Colonel Carnage had to go out and get his baby almost killed don’tcha know. Before he was even born.”

  The low gravity was no friend; Brüks jumped so high he cracked his head on the ceiling.

  “Je-sus!” He pulled back the hood. Sengupta appeared between the interface dissolving in his head and the backup resurrecting on the bulkhead behind her. I have got to figure out the privacy settings on this thing, Brüks told himself. Not that they’d keep her from looking over his shoulder if she really wanted to, he supposed.

  “Where did you come from?”

  “I’ve been here all along five minutes at least.”

  “Well say something next time. Announce yourself.” He rubbed the sore spot on his head. “What are you doing here anyway?”

  Sengupta smacked her lips and cast sidelong eyes at her tent. “Hunting a dead man.”

  I am the only meat sack on this whole damn ship who isn’t some kind of predator. “Hunting what?” One of the zombies?

  “Not on board I mean like you”—snapping her fingers at the ConSensus display—“hunting him.”

  Brüks looked back at the wall: a factoid collage, a palimpsest of puff pieces. It didn’t come anywhere close to biography.

  “Jim nearly got him killed?”

  “Yah I said that.” Snap snap.

  “Says here he had some kind of viral epilepsy.”

  Sengupta snorted. “They had to cut out half his brain for viral epilepsy right. Like anyone on Carnage’s salary has to settle for leeches and laudanum when his brat gets sick.”

  “So what was it, then?”

  “Viral something,” Sengupta crowed. “Viral zombieism.”

  Ventilator sounds filled the sudden silence.

  “Bullshit,” Brüks said softly.

  “Oh he didn’t do it deliberately the larva was just collateral. Some evildoer cooked up a basement bug but he got the fine-tuning wrong. Virus likes fetus brains way better than grown-up brains right? All that growth metabolism all that neural pruning everything moves faster so they give it to Mommy and she gives it to Daddy but it really takes off when it gets past that old-time placenta in the third tri. Goes through baby’s brain faster’n flesh-eating. Wake up next morning the little fucker’s already seizing in the womb and it’s lucky for them it’s their canary in the coal mine, they go down to Emerg and shoot up on antizombals, get cleaned out just in time. But too late for little Siri Keeton. He comes into the world and he’s already damaged goods and they deal with it best they can they try all the best drugs and all the best lattices but it’s downhill all the way and after a few years the seizures start up and that’s all they wrote on Siri Keeton’s left hemisphere right? Had to scrape it out like a rotten coconut.”

  “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 brain stems 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 tim
e he saw Lianna, he didn’t.

  He heard her voice—“Whoa, watch that”—just a second before the hab tilted crazily askew 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.