Firefall

by Peter Watts

  “Suppose you’re a political heavyweight,” Moore was saying. “A mover and shaker, a titan. And down around your ankles are all those folks you never used to worry about. The moved and the shaken. They don’t like you much. They never have, but historically that never mattered. Little people. Back in the day you just ignored them. The business of titans is other titans.

  “But now they get into the nodes, they decrypt your communiqués, they hack your best-laid plans. They hate your guts, Daniel, because you are big and they are small, because you turn their lives upside down with a wave of your hand and they don’t care about realpolitik or the big picture. They only care about monkey-wrenching and whistle blowing.

  “And you find out about them. You find out about Rakshi Sengupta and Caitlin deFranco and Parvad Gamji and a million others. You give them what they want. You leave the back door open just a crack, so they can see your files on the African Hegemony. You let them sniff out a weakness in your firewall. Maybe one day they find out how to provoke a firestorm in one of your subsidiary accounts, bankrupt some puppet government you kept under your thumb for tax purposes.”

  “Except that’s not what they’re doing,” Brüks surmised.

  “No it’s not.” There was a hint of sadness in Moore’s smile. “It’s all window dressing. They think they’re really sticking it to you, but they’re being—herded. Into the service of agendas they’d never support in a thousand years, if they only knew. And they’re dedicated, Daniel. They’re ferocious. They fight your wars with a passion you could never buy and never coerce, because they’re doing it out of pure ideology.”

  “Should you be telling me this?” Brüks wondered.

  “You mean, state secrets? What’s a state, these days?”

  “I mean, what if I tell her?”

  “Go ahead. She won’t believe you.”

  “Why not? She already hates you guys.”

  “She can’t believe you.” Moore tapped his temple. “Recruits get—tweaked.”

  Brüks stared.

  “Or at least,” Moore elaborated, “she can’t believe she believes you.” He eyed his scotch. “On some level, I think she already knows.”

  Brüks shook his head. “You don’t even have to pay them.”

  “Sure we do. Sometimes. We make sure they have enough to make ends meet. Let them skim some cream from an offshore account, drop a legitimate contract into their in-box before the rent comes due. Mostly, though, we inspire them. Oh, they get bored sometimes. Kids, you know. But all it takes is a little judicious injustice, some new atrocity visited on the little people. Get them all fired up again, and off they go.”

  “That seems a bit—”

  Moore raised an eyebrow. “Immoral?”

  “Complicated. Why herd them into hating you? Why not just leave a trail of bread crumbs pointing back at the other guy?”

  “Ah. Demonize your enemy.” Moore nodded sagely. “I wonder why we never thought of that.”

  Brüks grimaced.

  “Rakshi and her kind, they’re wise to the old school. You leak footage showing the slants skewering babies and it’ll take them maybe thirty seconds to find a pixel that doesn’t belong. Discredit the whole campaign. People put a lot less effort into picking apart evidence that confirms what they already believe. The great thing about making yourself the villain is nobody’s likely to contradict you.

  “Besides.” He spread his hands. “These days, half the time we don’t even know who the real enemy is.”

  “And that’s easier than just tweaking them so they flat-out want to work for you.”

  “Not easier. Marginally more legal.” The Colonel sipped his drink. “A small agnosia to protect state secrets is one thing. Changing someone’s basic personality without consent—that’s in a whole other league.”

  Neither spoke for a while.

  “That is really fucked-up,” Brüks said at last.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So why’s she here?”

  “Driving the ship.”

  “Crown’s perfectly capable of driving itself, unless it’s even more old school than I am.”

  “Better to have meat and electronics backing each other up in low-intel scenarios. Complementary vulnerabilities.”

  “But why her? Why would she agree to work under someone she hated—”

  “This mission’s under Bicameral command,” the Colonel reminded him. “And anyone in Sengupta’s position would jump at an opportunity like this. Most of those people spend their time babysitting low-orbit crap-zappers from their bedrooms, praying that one of them glitches enough to warrant human intervention. Actual deep-space missions—anything with enough of a time lag to need onboard real-time piloting—those’ve been scarcer than snowstorms ever since Firefall. The Bicamerals had their pick of the field.”

  “Rakshi must be very good at her job.”

  Moore drained his glass, set it down. “I think in her case it was more a function of motivation. She has a wife on class-four life support.”

  “And no way to pay the bills,” Brüks guessed.

  “She does now.”

  “So they didn’t want the best and the brightest,” Brüks said slowly. “They wanted someone who’d do anything to save her wife.”

  “Motivation,” Moore repeated.

  “They wanted a hostage.”

  The soldier looked at him with something that might almost have been pity. “You disapprove.”

  “You don’t.”

  “You’d rather they picked someone who just wanted to get out of the house? Someone who was in it for the thrills or the bank balance? This was the humane choice, Daniel. Celu would have been dead. Now she’s got a chance.”

  “Celu,” Brüks said, and swallowed on a throat gone suddenly dry.

  Moore nodded. “Rakshi’s wife.”

  “What was, um...​what was wrong with her?” Thinking: There’s no chance. It would be one in a million.

  Moore shrugged. “Bio attack, about a year ago. New England. Some kind of encephalitis variant, I think.”

  Then you’re wrong. She doesn’t have a chance. She doesn’t. I don’t care how much they spend keeping her heart beating, there’s no coming back from something like that.

  Oh my God. I killed her.

  I killed Rakshi’s wife.

  . . .

  It hadn’t been anything radical. It hadn’t even been anything new.

  The methodology was decades old, a proven tent pole for a thousand peer-reviewed studies or more. Everyone knew you couldn’t simulate a pandemic without simulating its victims; everyone knew that human behavior was too complex to thumbnail with a few statistical curves. Populations weren’t clouds, and people weren’t points; people were agents, autonomous and multifaceted. There was always the outlier who ran into the hot zone after a loved one, the frontline medic whose unsuspected fear of centipedes might cause him to freeze at some critical juncture. And since pandemics, by definition, involved millions of people, your simulation had better be running millions of human-level AIs if you wanted to get realistic results.

  Or you could piggyback on a preexisting model where each of a million data points was already being run by a human-level intelligence.

  Game worlds weren’t nearly as popular as they’d once been—Heaven had stolen away those myriad souls who preferred to play with themselves, free of community standards—but their virtual sandboxes were still more than large enough to keep them way out front as the CDC’s favorite platform for epidemiological research. For decades now, the plagues and sniffles that afflicted wizards and trolls alike had been tweaked and nudged toward specs that made them ideal analogs for the more pedestrian outbreaks afflicting what some still called the real world. Corrupted Blood bore more than a passing similarity to ectopic fibrodysplasia. The transmission dynamics of Beowulf’s Bane, an exotic glowing fungus that ate the flesh of elves, bore an uncanny resemblance to those of necrotizing fasciitis. Flying carpets and magic portals mapped
onto airlines and customs bottlenecks; Mages to jet-setting upper-echelon elites with unlimited carbon ceilings. For a generation now, public health policies the world over had been informed by the lurid fantasy afflictions of clerics and wights.

  It was just bad timing that a Realist faction out of Peru figured how to hack that system when Dan Brüks and his merry band were running a sim on emerging infectious diseases in Latin America.

  Nobody caught it at the time. The Realists had been subtle. They’d left the actual disease parameters strictly alone: any sudden changes to mutation rate or infectivity would’ve shown up in the dailies. They’d tweaked the superficial appearance of infected players instead, according to location and demographic. Certain victims looked a bit sicklier than they should have, while others—wealthier PCs with gold and flying mounts at their command—looked a little healthier. It didn’t change the biology one whit, but it edged Human responses just a hair to the left. Subsequent outbreaks edged them a bit farther. The ripples spread out of gamespace and into the reports, out of the reports and into policy. Nobody noticed the tiny back door that had opened in the resulting contingency plans until six months later, when someone discovered a suspicious empty vial in the garbage behind the Happy Humpback Daycare Center. By then, a shiny new encephalitis mod had already slipped past Daniel Brüks’s first-response algorithms and was carving a bloody swathe from Bridgeport to Philadelphia.

  Celu MacDonald had survived unscathed. She’d hadn’t even been in the kill zone; she’d been on the other side of the world, growing freelance code next to the girl of her dreams. Those weren’t as rare as they’d once been. In fact they’d grown pretty common ever since Humanity had learned to edit the dream as well as the girl. Soul mates could be made to order now: monogamous, devoted, fiercely passionate. The kind of love that prior generations had barely tasted before their hollow sacraments withered into miserable life sentences, or shattered outright as the bloom faded, the eye wandered, the genes reasserted themselves.

  Not for Macdonald and her kind, that empty hypocrisy. They’d ripped the lie right out of their heads, rewired and redeemed it, turned it into joyful truth with a lifetime warranty. First-person sex had even made a modest comeback in the shelter of that subculture, or so Brüks had heard.

  He didn’t know any of that at the time, of course. Celu MacDonald was just a name on a list of subcontractors, a monkey hired to grow code the academics couldn’t be bothered with. Brüks only learned of her after the fact: a bloody little coda at the end of the massacre.

  There’d been no conspiracy. No one had thrown her to the wolves. But the academics had had deans and CEOs and PR hotshots keeping their identities confidential, keeping their connections from staining the good names of venerable institutions. Nobody had given any cover to Celu MacDonald. When the dust had finally settled, when the inquiries and ass-covering and alibis had all run their course, there’d she’d been: standing alone in the crosshairs with hacked code dribbling from her hands.

  Maybe it had been Rakshi who’d found her, staring slack-jawed at the ceiling after some bereaved next of kin decided to make the punishment fit the crime. She would still have been breathing. The variant didn’t kill its victims. It burned them out and moved on; you could tell when it had finished because the convulsions stopped, at long last, and left nothing behind but vegetation.

  They’d found the guy who did it, eventually: dead for days, at the center of a micro-outbreak that had imploded under quarantine. Evidently he’d slipped up. But Rakshi Sengupta was still hunting. That was the word she’d used. Denied her revenge on the hand that had pulled the trigger, she was looking for the gunsmith. All that seething anger. All those hours spent trawling the cache. All that implanted idealized love, transmuted into grief: all that grief, transmuted into rage. The growled threats and mutterings about hunting dead men and debts owed and Some fucker going to be eating his own guts when I get hold of him.

  Rakshi Sengupta didn’t know it yet, but she was gunning for Backdoor Brüks.

  She was waiting at the mouth of his tent.

  “Roach. Got something for you.”

  He tried to read her eyes, but they were averted. He tried to read her body language, but it had always been a cipher to him.

  He tried to keep the wariness out of his voice. “What you got?”

  “Just watch.” She called a window to the adjacent bulkhead.

  She doesn’t know. She couldn’t know.

  She’d have to look into my eyes for that...​

  “What are you looking at?”

  “No—nothing. Just—”

  “Look at the window,” Sengupta said.

  I am so sorry, he thought. Oh God, I am so very sorry.

  He forced his eyes to the bulkhead: an over-the-shoulder view of a diagnostic chair, facing a flatscreen. A tropical savanna glowed there, lit by the grimy yellow light of a fading afternoon (Africa, Brüks guessed, although there were no telltale animals in frame). Telemetry framed the tableaux on every side: ribbons of heart rate, respiration, skin galvanics. A translucent brain scan glowed to the left, writhing with the iridescence of neurons firing in real time.

  Someone sat in that chair, almost totally eclipsed by its back. The top of their skull crested above a padded headrest, wrapped in the superconducting spiderweb of a tomo matrix. The tip of one armrest peeked into view; a hand rested there. The rest of the person existed only by inference. Fragments of a body, almost lost among the bright flayed images of its own electricity.

  Sengupta wiggled a finger: the still life began to move. A chrono readout ticked out the time at one second per second: 03/05/2090—0915:25.

  “What do you see?” Not Sengupta talking. Someone in the video, speaking offstage.

  “Grassland,” said the person in the chair, face still hidden, voice instantly recognizable.

  Valerie.

  The grasses dissolved into storm-tossed waves; the yellowish sky hardened down to wintry blue. The horizon didn’t change position, though; it still bisected the scene halfway up the frame.

  Something tapped faintly on the soundtrack, like fingernails on plastic.

  “What do you see?”

  “Ocean. Subarctic Pacific, Oyashio Current, early Feb—”

  “Ocean’s fine. Basic landscape, that’s all we want. One word.”

  A hint of motion, center right: Valerie’s fingers, just visible, drumming against the armrest.

  A salt flat, shimmering in summer heat. The edge of a mesa rose in the hazy distance, a dark terrace that split-leveled the horizon.

  “What now?”

  “Desert.” Tick...​tick tick tick...​tap...​

  Brüks glanced at Sengupta. “What is—”

  “Shhhh.”

  Same salt flat: the mesa had magically disappeared. Now a skeletal tree rose from the cracked earth, halfway to the horizon: leafless, yellow as old bone, a crown of naked branches atop a stripped featureless trunk almost too straight for nature. The trunk’s shadow reached directly toward the camera, like an unbroken phantom extension of the object itself.

  “Now?”

  “Desert.”

  “Good, good.”

  Down in the glass brain, a smattering of crimson pinpoints swept briefly across the visual cortex and disappeared.

  “Now?”

  Same picture, higher magnification: the tree was front and center now, its trunk straight as a flagpole, close enough to vertically split the horizon and a good chunk of the sky above. The speckles reappeared, a faint red rash staining the soap-bubble rainbows swirling across the back of Valerie’s brain. Her fingers had stopped moving.

  “Same. Desert.” There wasn’t a trace of expression in her voice.

  Right angles, Brüks realized. They’re turning the landscape into a natural cross...​

  “Now.”

  “Same.”

  It wasn’t. Now the branches were out of frame: all that remained was the white of the land, the hard crystalline b
lue of the sky and the hypothetical razor-edged line between, splitting the world side to side. And that impossibly straight vertical trunk, splitting it top to bottom.

  They’re trying to trigger a glitch...​

  No longer a mere rash, glowing across the back of the vampire’s skull: a pulsing tumor. And yet her voice remained empty and untroubled; her body rested unmoving in the chair.

  Her face still unseen. Brüks wondered why the archivists had been so afraid to record it.

  Now the world on the screen began to come apart. The salt flat behind the tree came unstuck just a little at the bottom (the tree stayed in place, like a decal on glass), shrank up from the lower edge of the display like old curling parchment, and revealed a strip of azure beneath: as if more sky had been hiding under the sand.

  “Now?”

  The desert pixels compressed a little further, squeezed tighter against the skyline—

  “Same.”

  —compressed from landscape to landstrip, the undersky pushing it up from below, the horizon holding it down from above—

  “Now?”

  “S-same. I...”

  Scarlet auroras squirmed across Valerie’s brain. SKIN GALV and RESP shuddered along their time series.

  CARDIAC beat strong and steady and did not change at all.

  “And now?”

  The ground was almost all sky now. The desert had been reduced to a bright squashed band running across the screen like a flatlined EEG, like a crossbeam at Calvary. The tree trunk cut it vertically at right angles.

  “I—sky, I think, I—”

  “Now?”

  “—know what you’re doing.”

  “Now?”

  The flattened desert shrank some critical fraction further; horizontal and vertical axes split quadrants of sky with borders of nearly equal thickness.

  Valerie began to convulse. She tried to arch her back; something stopped her. Her fingers fluttered, her arms shook against the padded arms of the chair; for the first time Brüks realized that she was strapped into the thing.

  Fireworks exploded across her brain. Her heart, so immutably stable until now, threw jagged spikes onto the time series and shut down completely. The body paused for a moment in midconvulsion, frozen in bone-breaking tetany for an endless moment; then the chair’s defibrillators kicked in and it resumed dancing to the rhythm of new voltage.