Firefall

by Peter Watts

  What had Lianna called it? God. The Face of God.

  Maybe, Brüks thought. Give it time.

  “Scale-invariant shit it time-shares!”

  He’d almost gotten used to it by now. Barely even jumped at the sound of Rakshi Sengupta exclaiming unexpectedly at his side. He peeled the hood back and there she was, a meter to his left: eavesdropping on his models through an ancillary bulkhead feed.

  He sighed and nodded. “Emulates larger networks a piece at a time. That one little piece of Portia could—”

  “Portia.” Sengupta stabbed the air, stabbed ConSensus. “After the spider right?”

  “Yeah. That one little piece could probably model a human brain if it had to.” He pursed his lips. “I wonder if it’s conscious.”

  “No chance it’d take days just to chug through a half-second brain slice and networks only wake up—”

  “Right.” He nodded. “Of course.”

  Her eyes jiggled and another window sprouted off to one side: AUX/RECOMP, and the postbiological wonder painted on its guts. “Bet that could be though. What else you got?”

  “I think it was designed specifically for this kind of environment,” Brüks said after a moment.

  “What space stations?”

  “Empty space stations. Smart mass isn’t anything special. But something this small, running cognition-level computations—there’s a reason you don’t run into that a lot on Earth.”

  Sengupta frowned. “ ’Cause being a thousand times smarter than the thing that’s trying to eat you isn’t much help if it takes you a month to be a thousand times smarter.”

  “Pretty much. Glacial smarts only pay off if your environment doesn’t change for a long time. ’Course, it’s not such a bottleneck at higher masses, but—well, I think this was designed to work no matter how much or how little managed to sneak through. Which implies that it’s optimized for telematter dispersal—although if it isn’t using our native protocols, how it hijacks the stream in the first place is beyond me.”

  “Oh they figured that out couple days ago,” Sengupta told him.

  “Really?” Fuckers.

  “Know how when you pack a layer of ball bearings into the bottom of a crate and the second layer fits into the bumps and valleys laid down by the first and the third fits onto the second so it all comes down to the first layer, first layer determines all the turtles all the way up, right?”

  Brüks nodded.

  “Like that. ’Cept the ball bearings are atoms.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Yah because I got nothing better to do than play tricks on roaches.”

  “But—that’s like laying down a set of wheels and expecting it to act as a template for a car.”

  “More like laying down a set of tread marks and expecting it to act as a template for a car.”

  “Come on. Something has to tell the nozzles where to squirt that first layer. Something has to tell the second layer of atoms when to come though so that they can line up with the first. Might as well call it magic and be done with it.”

  “You call it magic. Hive calls it the Face of God.”

  “Yeah. Well, the tech may be way beyond us, but superstitious labels aren’t bringing it any closer.”

  “Oh that’s rich you think God’s a thing God’s not a thing.”

  “I’ve never thought God was a thing,” Brüks said.

  “Good ’cause it’s not. It’s water into wine it’s life from clay it’s waking meat.”

  Sweet smoking Jesus. Not you, too.

  He summed it up to move it along. “So God’s a chemical reaction.”

  Sengupta shook her head. “God’s a process.”

  Fine. Whatever.

  But she wasn’t letting it go. “Everything’s numbers you go down far enough don’t you know?” She poked him, pinched his arm. “You think this is continuous? You think there’s anything but math?”

  He knew there wasn’t. Digital physics had reigned supreme since before he’d been born, and its dictums were as incontrovertible as they were absurd. Numbers didn’t just describe reality; numbers were reality, discrete step functions smoothing up across the Planck length into an illusion of substance. Roaches still quibbled over details, doubtless long since resolved by precocious children who never bothered to write home: Was the universe a hologram or a simulation? Was its boundary a program or merely an interface—and if the latter, what sat on the other side, watching it run? (A few latter-day religions had predictably answered that question with the names of their favorite deities, although Brüks had never been entirely clear on what an omniscient being would need a computer for. Computation, after all, implied a problem not yet solved, insights not yet achieved. There was really only one sort of program for which foreknowledge of the outcome didn’t diminish the point of the exercise, and Brüks had never been able to find any religious orders that described God as a porn addict.)

  So. The laws of physics were the OS of some inconceivable supercomputer called reality. At least that explained why reality had a resolution limit; Planck length and Planck time had always looked a bit too much like pixel dimensions for comfort. Past that, though, it had always seemed like angels dancing on the head of a pin. None of it changed anything way up here where life happened, and besides, positing universe as program didn’t seem to answer the Big Questions so much as kick them down the road another order of magnitude. Might as well just say that God did it after all, head off the infinite regress before it drove you crazy.

  Still...​

  “A process,” Brüks mused. That sounded more—modest, at least. He wondered why Lianna had never spelled it out during their debates.

  Sengupta’s head bobbed. “What kind of process though that’s the question. Master algorithm defining the laws of physics or some daemon reaching up to break ’em?” Her eyes flickered briefly toward his, flickered away at the last instant. “That’s how we know it exists in the first place. Miracles.”

  “Miracles.”

  “Impossible events. Physics violations.”

  “Such as?”

  “Star formation way below the z-limit. Photons doing things they’re not supposed to the metarules changing over by the Cloverleaf Nebula. They vindicated the Smolin model or something I dunno it’s beyond me so you’d never get it in a million years. But they found something impossible. Way down deep.”

  “A miracle.”

  “I think more than one but that’s what I said.”

  “Wait a second.” Brüks frowned. “If the laws of physics are part of some universal operating system and God, by definition, breaks them...​you’re basically saying...”

  “Don’t stop now roach you’re almost there.”

  “You’re basically saying God’s a virus.”

  “Well that’s the question isn’t it?”

  Portia iterated before them.

  What was it Lianna had said? We’ve always thought c and friends ruled supreme, out to the quasars and beyond. What if they’re just some kind of local ordinance?

  “What if they’re a bug?” he murmured.

  Sengupta grinned and stared at his wrist. “Change the whole mission wouldn’t it?”

  “This mission?”

  “Bicameral mission the mission of the whole Order. Reality’s iterating everywhere but there’re these inconsistencies. Maybe not the right reality, mmm? Change alpha a just bit and the universe stops supporting life. Maybe alpha’s wrong. Maybe life’s just a parasitic offshoot of a corrupted OS.”

  Somewhere in Brüks’s head, a penny dropped.

  For fifteen billion years, the universe had been shooting for maximum entropy. Life didn’t throw entropy into reverse—nothing did—but it put on the brakes, even as it spewed chaos out the other end. The gradient of Life was the first scale any aspiring biologist learned to sing: the further you kept yourself from thermodynamic equilibrium, the more alive you were.

  It’s the anthropic principle’s evil twi
n, he thought.

  “What—what is this mission, exactly?” Brüks asked softly.

  “Mmmm.” Sengupta rocked gently back and forth. “They know God exists already that’s old. I think now they’re trying to figure what to do with It.”

  “What to do with God.”

  “Maybe worship. Maybe disinfect.”

  The word hung there, reeking of blasphemy.

  “How do you disinfect God?” Brüks said after a very long time.

  “Don’t ask me I just fly the ship.” Her gaze slid back to the bulkhead, to the church of AUX/RECOMP and the alien emissary there.

  “I think that puppy’s giving them some ideas though,” she said.

  Lianna Lutterodt was lost in inner space when he sailed through the Commons ceiling. She blinked as he bounced off the deck, shook her head: her eyes came back to the here and now as a courtesy window opened on the bulkhead. A flatscreen concession to the neurologically disabled.

  Icarus. The confessional. A rosette of spacesuited monks, outward facing, visors raised to bare their souls before the Face of God.

  “Hi,” Brüks said carefully.

  She nodded around a mouthful of couscous. “Rakshi says you made some serious headway. Even gave it name.”

  He nodded. “Portia. It’s pretty amazing, it...”

  Her gaze drifted back to the window. She can’t take her eyes off them, he thought, just as she did and caught him looking: “What?”

  “It’s not just amazing,” he told her. “It’s actually kind of scary.” He dipped his chin at the feed. “And they cut pieces out of it.”

  “They take samples,” Lianna said. “Almost like real scientists.”

  “Something that reaches down across half a light-year and makes our own machines do backflips around the laws of physics.”

  “Not like they can get all the answers by just staring at it all day.”

  “I thought that was exactly how they got their answers.”

  “They know what they’re doing, Dan.”

  “That’s one hypothesis. Want to hear another?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Ever hear of induced thanoparorasis?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh.” Lianna shrugged. “Common procedure among the augmented. Keeps ’em from collapsing into existential angst.”

  “It’s a bit more fundamental than that,” Brüks said. “Have you got it?”

  “Thanoparorasis? ’Course not.”

  “Are you going to die?”

  “Eventually. Hopefully not for a while.”

  “Good to know,” Brüks told her. “Because if you were a victim of ITP, you wouldn’t be able to answer that question. You might not even have heard it.”

  “Dan, I don’t—”

  “You and I”—raising his voice over hers—“we’re blessed with a certain amount of denial. You admit you’re going to die, you even know it intellectually on some level, but you don’t really believe it. You can’t. The thought of dying is just too damn scary. So we invent some Fairyland Heaven to take us in after we pass on, or we look to your friends and their friends to give us immortality on a chip or—if we’re hard-core realists—we just pay lip service to death and decay and keep right on feeling immortal anyway.

  “But some folks”—he nodded at the feed—“just get too damn smart. They put their heads together and develop insights way too deep to paper over with a few million years’ worth of whistling past the graveyard. People like that would know they were going to die, they’d feel it in the gut. They’d know what death means in a way you or I never could. And the only way they can keep from collapsing into whimpering puddles is to give denial a hand, cut a cognitive hole into the middle of their heads. We may live in denial most of the time but those people—they didn’t even show a fright response when it looked like their whole damn hive was an hour from the morgue. Like those agnosiacs who’d die of thirst in their own homes after some tumor’s destroyed their ability to recognize water.”

  “I don’t think they’re like that,” Lianna said softly.

  “Sure you do. You told me as much, remember? Reset the sensory biases, randomize the errors.”

  They watched in silence as the hive poked a stick at something dangerous.

  “A lot of them died, not so long ago,” Brüks said after a while.

  “I remember.”

  “Me, too. And you know what I remember the most, you know what I can’t forget? Luckett rolling around in his own shit while his spinal cord shorted out, smiling and insisting that everything was going according to plan.”

  Lianna turned away, eyes bright. “I liked him. He was a good man.”

  “I wouldn’t know. All I know is, he sounded just like every hapless Yahweh junkie who ever looked around at all the horror and injustice in the world and mumbled some shit about how It’s not the place of the clay to question the potter. The only difference is that everyone else lays it all on God’s master plan and your Bicamerals talk about their own.”

  “You’re wrong. They don’t think of themselves that way at all.”

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t, either. Maybe you shouldn’t have quite so much faith—”

  “Dan, shut the fuck up. You don’t know anything about it, you can’t know—”

  “I was there, Lee. I saw you. They’ve got you so convinced they’re infallible, they’ve got everything so factored five ways to Sunday that you didn’t even need a hole cut into your brain. You went straight into the lion’s den without missing a beat, you got right up in Valerie’s face and it didn’t occur to you for a microsecond that she’s your goddamn predator, she could rip your throat out without even thinking about it—”

  “Do not put that on them.” Lianna’s voice was flinty. “That was my mistake. Chinedum was—I will not let you blame anyone else for my stupidity.”

  “Isn’t that the way, though? Isn’t that how it’s always been? Just obey the guys in the funny hats and if it’s a win it’s all praise be to Allah but if your ass gets kicked it’s your fault. You read scripture the wrong way. You weren’t worthy. You didn’t have enough faith.”

  Some of the fight seemed to bleed out of her then; some of the old Lianna Lutterodt peeked through. She sighed, and shook her head, and ghosted a smiled. “Hey, remember when this used to be fun?”

  He spread his hands, feeling helpless. “I just...”

  “You mean well. I know. But after all you’ve seen, you can’t deny how far ahead of us they are.”

  “Oh, they’re scary smart, I’ll give them that. They run circles around the best we roaches can throw at them, they snap this ship like a twig and pitch it all the way to the sun, drop us dead center onto Icarus’s dark side from a hundred million kilometers with barely a thruster tweak. But they glitch, just like we do. They still wash away their sins, because after all that rewiring their brains still mix up sensation and metaphor. They’re more glitchy than we are, because half their upgrades are barely out of beta—and while we’re on the subject, has anyone factored in the neuropsychologic impairment that a few weeks of hyperbaric exposure must be inflicting on all that extra brain tissue?”

  Lianna shook her head. “We’re not on the steppes anymore, Dan. We don’t measure success by how far you can throw a spear in a crosswind. They think rings around us in every way that matters.”

  “Uh-huh. And Masashi and Luckett are still dead. And all that poor bastard could cling to while his lights went out was that it was all according to plan.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “Lee, it’s not just that these people can’t wrap their heads around mortality. They can’t even entertain the possibility they could be wrong. If that doesn’t scare the shit out of you—”

  She shook him off. “The plan was to get us to Icarus. Here we are.”

  “Here we are.” Brüks pointed to a hole in the wall, where a hived demigod communed with something that could change the laws of physics. “And how does it feel to know our lives depend on the judgment of
something that can’t even imagine it could die?”

  “WHAT’S RAKSHI GOT against you guys?”

  The lights were dimmed, the mutants and monsters were off pursuing their alien agendas, and the Glenmorangie was back on the table. Moore grimaced at Brüks, refriended, over the lip of his glass. “Who’s us guys?”

  “Military,” Brüks said. “Why’s she got such a hate-on for you?”

  “Not sure. Self-loathing, maybe.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Sengupta’s as much of a soldier as I am. She just doesn’t know it. Not consciously, at least.”

  “Metaphorically, you mean.”

  Moore shook his head, took another sip; his cheeks puckered as he swirled the single malt around in his mouth. He swallowed. “WestHem Alliance. Same as me.”

  “And she doesn’t know.”

  “Nope.”

  “What’s her rank?”

  “Doesn’t work like that.”

  “Some kind of sleeper agent?”

  “It’s not like that, either.”

  “Then what—”

  Moore raised a hand. Brüks fell silent.

  “I say army,” Moore told him, “you think boots on the ground. Drones, zombies, battlefield robots. Things you can see. Fact is, if you’ve reached the point where you need that kind of brute force, you’ve already lost.”

  Visions of the Oregon desert sprang into Brüks’s head. “Brute force seemed to work just fine for those fuckers who attacked the monastery.”

  “They were trying to stop us. Here we are.”

  Human bodies, turned to stone. The screams of dying Bicamerals.

  Not bodies, he reminded himself. Body parts. Here in the dusk of the twenty-first century it was so easy to confuse murder with the amputation of a fingertip. None of the usual definitions made sense when a single supersoul stretched across so many bodies.