Peter Watts Is an Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays

by Peter Watts

  In the Flesh rubs your face in that impact. It rubs my face in my own inadequacy.

  Echopraxia has its share of zombies, you see. They show up at the beginning of the book, in the Oregon desert; through the course of the story, various cast members wrestle with zombiesque aspects of their own behavior. Echopraxia’s zombies come in two flavors: the usual viral kind sowing panic and anarchy, and a more precise, surgically-induced breed used by the military for ops with high body counts, ops for which self-awareness might prove an impediment. Both breeds get screen time; both highlight philosophical issues which challenge the very definition of what it means to be Human.

  Neither really tries to answer questions like: How do you deal with the guilt? Or How do you handle the dissonance of becoming a local hero through the indiscriminate slaughter of rabid zombies, only to have your son come back from Afghanistan partially-deceased with a face full of staples?

  In the Flesh does a lot of the same things I’ve done in my own writing. It even serves up a pseudosciencey rationale to explain the zombie predilection for brains: victims of PDS lose the ability to grow “gial” cells in their brains, and so must consume those of others to make up the deficit. (I’m not sure whether this is an inadvertent misspelling of “glial” or if the writers were savvy enough to invent a new cell type with a similar name, the better to fend off the nitpickery of geeks like me.) It doesn’t hold up to rigorous scrutiny any better than Blindsight’s invocation of protocadherin deficits to justify obligate cannibalism in my own undead, but in a way that’s the point: they’ve taken pretty much the same approach that I have.

  The difference is, they’ve done so much more with it.

  I used technobabble to justify a philosophical debate about free will. In the Flesh used it to show us grief-stricken parents dealing with a beloved son after he’s taken his own life—and come back. Side by side, it’s painfully obvious which of us used our resources to better effect.

  I only wish I’d have been able to see that without the object lesson.

  The Black Knight. In Memoriam.

  Blog May 11 2012

  Two months ago my brother Jon—my senior by eight years—suffered a stroke which bled into his cerebellum. The time since has been, as his wife Tracy described it, a roller coaster: neurosurgeons reluctant to operate while Jon was on heart meds, cardiologists unwilling to take him off those meds for fear of fatal clots. Periods of delirium and intervals of clarity. Organ systems spinning the daily roulette wheel to decide whose turn it was to shut down today. Brain damage—then No, motor damage but cognitive functions probably okay. Squeezed hands and eye movements on even days; total unresponsiveness on odd ones. Two, three occasions when all was lost and plugs were pulled and the fucker just kept living. A gradual, incremental climb out of the well, enough to justify a move from ICU to a long-term rehab facility where he could learn how to do things like swallow again. Relapse. Liver and kidney failure, and recovery. The whole deal.

  I couldn’t be there for any of it: thanks to a gang of ignorant fucktards with far more power than brains, I am banned from my brother’s adopted country. It never really mattered until now. In fact, it was a badge of honor. But for the past two months there’s been nothing to do but wait, and hope, and squeeze whatever data we could out of Tracy’s daily updates to see whether the line, on balance, was going up or down.

  The line ended around 2:15am on Thursday May 10. I don’t know quite how to process it.

  There’s a part of me that just doesn’t believe he’s dead. This was hardly the first time the reaper came calling, after all. It was thirty years ago that some pernicious bug got past Jon’s pericardium and ate away two thirds of his heart muscle; the doctors gave him two years then, three at the most. Every birthday he celebrated since 1985 was spit in their eyes.

  Things—deteriorated, though. Over the decades. Bad heart function, reduced peripheral circulation: diabetes and neuropathies, a plastic umbilical leading back to a little tank of oxygen that lived in the bedroom and accompanied him on his travels. A workaholic suddenly reduced to three or four productive hours a day, although he kept pushing it. One day he passed out and collapsed onto a water heater, burning a swath of his skin to a crisp: but the resulting adrenaline shock kick-started his heart and kept him alive long enough for the doctors to get to him.

  Even then, he seemed unkillable. Like Monty Python’s Black Knight—no matter how many pieces he lost, he just laughed and kept fighting.

  There were pacemakers then, and an armored emergency vest equipped with defib paddles, explosive bolts, and a wireless internet connection—the idea being that in the event of another heart failure, the bolts would detonate and spread conductant goop across his chest; the paddles would then shock his heart back into action while the vest called online for an ambulance. After a while he ditched those training wheels and became a bona-fide cyborg, with the implantation of a Ventricular Assist Device: the same type of battery-operated demiheart that so paradoxically humanized Dick Cheney when his shriveled old pumper gave up the ghost. Jon traded in his pulse for a second shot, for more strength and energy than he’d had in years.

  That may have been the one leap forward the poor bastard got, though. Everything else was rearguard. And yet I never heard him whine or complain about his own predicament, no matter how dire. He was the Black Knight: he’d disappear into ICU and he’d come back three steps closer to death and we’d talk on the phone and he’d laugh. Pshaw. Just a flesh wound.

  There’s so much to say about my brother, and the internet is only so large. The time the Feds cut off his disability benefits—Hey, who cares if what we’re doing is illegal? Without benefits, none of these people can afford to take us to court!—and he took them to court. And won (although his victory was diluted somewhat by the endless series of “random” tax audits that followed.) Or that time he ran the winning campaign for the mayor of Hamilton. (I learned about attack ads at my brother’s knee; by today’s standards, his were subtle to the point of meta. They never even explicitly named the person they were attacking.) His good-natured descent into the dark side, his repudiation of all things Canadian and whole-hearted embrace of what some would call the American Health-care System. (Let’s just say that the Watts brothers could not claim unanimity on the question of whether the quality of your medical care should scale to the size of your bank account.)

  Actually, that’s a big one: his delight in argument, for the sheer joy of the exercise. I hardly ever agreed with the guy on anything. (Actually, scratch that; I think when you came right down to it, we agreed on more than he’d ever admit to, but he just really liked yanking my chain on general principles.) Half the time he was full of shit, and he knew he was full of shit, and he’d throw it against the wall anyway just to see if it would stick. Once he tried to lecture me on seal-fisheries interactions off Canada’s east coast, a subject with which I had more than a passing familiarity (a script I’d done on that subject had just won the Environment Canada trophy for Best Film on the Environment). He pulled his argument out of his ass; I busted him; he laughed. He was far more interested in the fun of the joust than in anything so boring as winning.

  We didn’t see each other often: he and Tracy down New York state, me up here in Toronto. I’d drop by for a day or two on my way back from Readercon, perhaps. They’d come up here a bit more frequently, although Jon’s health constrained his travel options. Caitlin and I had a chance to hang out at their place back in 2009, just a few months before the border slammed shut. We won’t forget the feral peacock that had taken up residence in their back yard, or the neighbors’ orange cat who spent far more time hanging out in Jon and Tracy’s company than he ever did at his official home across the street. We won’t forget the horde of raccoons advancing over the crest of the hill every night just after sundown, their beady little eyes glinting in the backyard light as they closed on the food that Tracy left scattered about the lawn to lure them in. The endless quantities of lobster bi
sque. The wine and companionship and late-night conversations/arguments. (Oh, and the scotch: when I wanted to thank my agent for sticking it out with me, it was Jon’s expertise that pointed me to just the right single-malt to express my gratitude.)

  That was the one and only time that Caitlin had a chance to see Jon in his native habitat before the US and I went dead to each other. Since then it’s been Christmas, maybe once or twice in the summer, always in Canada. Mostly my contact with Jon was by phone or e-mail. We talked every month or so, exchanged dueling links on everything from Obamacare to Climate Change. He was never a frequent presence in my life but he was a vital one, always there for the high points and the low. A 47” flatscreen in our bedroom was part of that legacy, a gift he and Tracy bought to celebrate my first Hugo nomination. He was researching Michigan lawyers within hours of my arrest at Port Huron. A man with a malfunctioning heart and maybe four good hours a day in him, he was on the phone to Caitlin at 1:30a.m. while the doctors were scraping rotten meat from the inside of my leg. (In fact I’m pretty sure he was on the phone to me, too, between operations; I seem to remember Caitlin’s cell against my ear in the ICU, and Jon’s voice mocking my position on climate change. I remember finding it vaguely unfair that he would take advantage of my drug-addled impairment. But morphine was involved, so details remain elusive).

  The BUG and I kept our marriage secret but that didn’t stop Jon and Tracy from dumping a case of champagne on our doorstep the next time they were in town. And I’ll never forget the letter he wrote me—the last letter, as it turned out—following the death of Banana: short and to the point, a reminiscence of some eighties-era episode when I’d taken a cat off his hands when Jon had found himself unable to continue providing a home for him. I’d long since forgotten. Jon never had, and had been watching from a distance ever since: “I have subsequently come to understand that this is one of his roles in life,” he wrote. “Stepping in to take responsibility for those less caring, or less able to care, for the Fur Patrol of whatever race or phylum.” Enclosed was a cheque that went a long way toward mitigating the financial cost of Banana’s ending.

  Two weeks after writing that my brother was in Tufts Cardiac Intensive Care Unit. He never saw home again.

  Married three times or four—depending on whether you count common-law—starting at age sixteen. (You only have to spend ten minutes with Tracy to know that he kept trying until he got it right.) World-class organist—came in third in an international competition in Bruges, before arthritis truncated that future in his mid-twenties. Top-forty tweaker for MCA. Distributor of weird-ass glassware from his basement. Dean of the Hamilton College of Music. Christ knows what else; I know next to nothing of the lost years he spent on the west coast.

  The faintest echoes persist on my blog; Jon posted comments here occasionally, under the handle “Finster Mushwell” (Don’t ask). They are pallid things, though. You can read them all and come away with no sense at all of the man he was: Fighter. Stalwart. Infuriating life-saver. Pain in the ass. The Black Knight, indomitable.

  Until Thursday.

  I don’t know what to say. I don’t even know what to think. Except, maybe this: Any number born to the Watts name can lay claim to being part of my family.

  Jon, alone among them, felt like one.

  Viva Zika!

  Blog Feb 03 2016

  There’s this guy I know, Dan Brooks. Retired now, an eminent parasitologist and evolutionary biologist back in the day. He did a lot of work on emerging infectious diseases (EIDs, for you acronym fetishists) down in Latin America. A few years back I wrote some introductory text for an online database he was compiling. Part of it went like this:

  You will find no public health advisories about Lyme Disease in Costa Rica. On the face of it, this is perfectly reasonable; Lyme Disease has never been reported there, and none of the local tick species is known to carry the bacterium that causes it.

  Some of those ticks, however, are closely related to those in other regions which do carry that bacterium, and many pathogens are able to infect a far greater range of species than they actually occupy; simple isolation is the only thing that keeps them from reaching their true infectious potential. Thus, while Costa Rica is free of Lyme Disease at present, potential vectors already occur in abundance there. The infrastructure for an outbreak is already in place: a single asymptomatic tourist may be all it takes to loose this painful, debilitating disease on the local population.

  Lyme Disease is by no means unique. Climate change alters movement and home range for myriad organisms. Our transport of people and goods carries countless pathogens around the globe. Isolated species come into sudden contact; parasites and diseases find themselves surrounded by naïve and vulnerable new hosts. And so maladies literally unknown only four or five decades ago—AIDS in humans, Ebola in humans and gorillas, West Nile virus and Avian Influenza in humans and birds, chytrid fungi in amphibians, distemper in sea lions—have today become almost commonplace. Pathogens encounter new hosts with no resistance and no time to evolve any. In such a world EIDs are inevitable. They are ongoing. A month scarcely passes without news of some freshly-discovered strain of influenza trading up to a human host.

  This month, it’s Zika. Spread by the tropical mosquito Aedes aegypti, so we northern folks (as they assured us only last week) don’t have to worry. Hell, even 80% of the people who do get infected never show any symptoms. The other 20% have to suffer through joint pain, fever, a mild skin rash before Zika gets bored and wanders off to bother someone else. Ebola this ain’t; it’s never even killed anyone, as far as we know. I’m guessing that’s why no one’s bothered to develop a vaccine.

  The things it does to fetuses, though. Now that’s pretty horrific, even if WHO is back-pedaling and admitting that no one’s yet proven beyond a doubt that Zika causes microcephaly. (If it doesn’t, someone’s going to have to explain the fact that Brazilian cases of microcephaly shot up by a factor of twenty-five since Zika debuted there last year—from a long-term annual average of 150 cases to well over four thousand, and climbing. That’s a pretty stark coincidence.)

  Even granting the argument that rampant Zikaphobia has resulted in the erroneous tagging of garden-variety small-headed babies—of a sample of 732 diagnoses, only 270 (37%) turned out to be truly microcephalic1—we’re still talking a tenfold increase over historical levels. (And that may be conservative; it implicitly assumes that even though so many recent cases were misdiagnosed, none of the previous decades’ baseline cases were.) Claims that Zika wasn’t confirmed even in the majority of the verified cases aren’t especially reassuring given that tests for Zika in the hot zone are “very inefficient”2—not to mention the fact that French Polynesia experienced a similar correlation between fetal CNS malformations and a Zika outbreak just the year before3.

  Back last week—when all us N’Ammers were being told we had nothing to fear because A. aegypti never got out of the subtropics—the first thing that came to my mind was Dan’s work on EIDs, and the ease with which certain microbes can swap hosts. “Sure, aegypti won’t make it this far,” I told the BUG, “but what if Zika hitches a ride with Anopheles in the overlap zone?” It was, for a science fiction writer and worst-case scenarist, an embarrassing failure of imagination. Because Zika has in fact found some new Uber driver to hitch a ride with over the past few days, and it isn’t a mosquito.

  It’s us4. Zika has learned to cut out the middleman. It is now a sexually transmitted human disease.

  And call me Pollyanna, but I can’t help nurture the outlandish-but-not-entirely-impossible dream that we might be looking at our own salvation. We might be looking at the salvation of the planet itself.

  Because there’s no denying that pretty much every problem in the biosphere hails from a common cause. Climate change, pollution, habitat loss, the emptying of biodiversity from land sea and air, an extinction rate unparalleled since the last asteroid and the transformation of our homeworld into a planet of weeds—all
our fault, of course. There are simply too many of us. Over seven billion already, and we still can’t keep it in our pants.

  Of course, nothing lasts forever. My money was on some kind of self-induced die-off: a global pandemic that left corpses piled in the streets, or some societal collapse that reduced us to savagery on the third day and a relict population on the three hundredth. Maybe a holy nuclear war, if you’re into golden oldies. The problem with these scenarios—other than the fact that they involve the violent suffering and extermination of billions of sapient beings—is that we’d wreck the environment even more on our way out, leave behind a devastated wasteland where only cockroaches and stromatolites could flourish. The cure would be worse than the disease.

  Many well-meaning folks have pointed out that birth rates decline as living standards improve; since so much of the world still lives in relative poverty, the obvious solution is to simply raise everyone’s quality of life to Norwegian levels. The obvious fly in that ointment is that your average first-worlder stamps a far bigger boot onto the face of the planet than some subsistence farmer in Burkina Faso no matter how many kids she might have. Mammals like me don’t need a brood of children to wreck the environment; we do it just fine with our cars and our imported groceries and our giant 4K TVs. Elevating 7.6 billion people to levels of North American gluttony does not strike me as a solution to anything other than fast-tracking the planet back to Scenario One.

  But look at Zika. It doesn’t kill you, doesn’t even present symptoms in most cases. The worst you have to fear is a few aches and pains, a rash, a couple of sick days.

  All it really does is stop you from breeding.

  In a way it’s almost secondary, all this hemming and hawing about whether Zika causes birth defects or whether it’s just mysteriously correlated with them somehow. Fear hangs in the air, and the benefits are already starting to roll in. Just two days ago, WHO declared Zika a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern.”5 Brazil, Colombia, Jamaica, El Salvador and Venezuela have all publicly advised their citizens against getting pregnant—all the more remarkable for the fact that all but Jamaica are bastions of Catholicism, which normally champions the whole Biblical fill-the-earth-with-thy-numbers imperative. And now that this baby-monsterizing bug can be transmitted directly, human to human, through the very act of intercourse? Why, none of us are safe!