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

by Peter Watts

  I spend the time until Meso and Caitlin’s sister arrive choosing what proves to be the most godawful root-infested part of the garden to dig the grave, and then hacking through roots as thick as my wrist with the edge of a shovel. I get the hole deep enough to foil any attempts by the local dogs or raccoons to disinter the body (or at least, if they do get down that far, they’ll have earned their spoils). I go collect my glasses from across the yard where I hurled them in a fit of unexpected rage halfway through the excavation; we all line up in the cold. I lower Banana into the ground. Nobody has anything to say. We each drop a shovelful of soil into the hole. I retrieve the shovel and move the rest of the earth back into place. Mesopone pours a cup of half’n’half onto the dirt. We go inside.

  I can’t stop thinking about that puffed-out tail, about Banana’s panicked terrified flight from the reaper. I can’t stop thinking that he knew what was happening, and it scared the shit out of him, and I couldn’t do fuck-all to make him feel even a little bit better. I spent six years making up for the ten that had gone before, making the life sausage of his retirement so fat that he’d forget all about the dried leathery string of jerky that preceded it. He went to sleep with us the night before, a furry pain in the ass somehow capable of monopolizing 70% of the bed with 10% of the mass; just minutes before everything turned to shit, he was purring under my hand. But in the end, he didn’t die basking in the reflection of his golden years. He died in the present, in the thirty-minutes-to-an-endless-goddamned-hour when he felt something killing him from the inside, something that somehow effortlessly kept up no matter how fast he tried to run. I keep telling myself that those last minutes don’t obliterate the previous six years. I will never be entirely convinced.

  He’s still here, of course, even though he isn’t. I go into my office and he’s asleep on the desk. I go into the kitchen and he’s figure-eighting around my ankles. I reach down to scritch him here on the bed and it’s only when the ears feel wrong that I look down and realize it’s been Chip or Nutmeg or Minion all along.

  The Gang of Fur goes on, leaderless for now. Minion continues to jump onto the bedside windowsill, pull the window open and jump down again without even going outside; she’s always been less interested in going walkabout than in freezing me to death in my bathrobe. Chip continues to swat at me from atop the fridge, trying for a repeat of that long-past glory day when he scooped the contact lens right off my eyeball with a single claw. Nutmeg is still a furry slut. None of them are Banana, of course; just as Banana was never Zombie, or Cygnus, or Strange Cat. They’re just who they are, and someday they’ll all be dead. Chip’s probably next to go. Positive for both Fe-leuk and FIV, he was supposed to be dead last summer, not running around robust and full of beans the way he is. And as I am typing these very words—I shit you not—the pones have just started yelling about A Cat That Looks Just Like Banana! trotting out of our back yard along the fence. And they’re right: I just watched him cross the street. Same walk. Same well-fed tum. Same dirt-common brown tabby markings.

  Different ears, of course. No one will ever again have Banana’s ears.

  The pones want to leave a bowl of kibble out on the porch tonight. I’m not sure what that means.

  1 This was back when Paris Hilton was A Thing.

  No Brainer

  Nowa Fantastyka May 2015

  Blog Jul 28 2015

  For decades now, I have been haunted by the grainy, black-and-white x-ray of a human skull.

  It is alive but empty, with a cavernous fluid-filled space where the brain should be. A thin layer of brain tissue lines that cavity like an amniotic sac. The image hails from a 1980 review article in Science: Roger Lewin, the author, reports that the patient in question had “virtually no brain”1. But that’s not what scared me; hydrocephalus is nothing new, and it takes more to creep out this ex-biologist than a picture of Ventricles Gone Wild.

  What scared me was the fact that this virtually brain-free patient had an IQ of 126.

  He had a first-class honors degree in mathematics. He presented normally along all social and cognitive axes. He didn’t even realize there was anything wrong with him until he went to the doctor for some unrelated malady, only to be referred to a specialist because his head seemed a bit too large.

  It happens occasionally. Someone grows up to become a construction worker or a schoolteacher, before learning that they should have been a rutabaga instead. Lewin’s paper reports that one out of ten hydrocephalus cases are so extreme that cerebrospinal fluid fills 95% of the cranium. Anyone whose brain fits into the remaining 5% should be nothing short of vegetative; yet apparently, fully half have IQs over 100. (Why, here’s another example from 20072; and yet another.3) Let’s call them VNBs, or “Virtual No-Brainers.”

  The paper is titled “Is Your Brain Really Necessary?”, and it seems to contradict pretty much everything we think we know about neurobiology. This Forsdyke guy over in Biological Theory argues that such cases open the possibility that the brain might utilize some kind of extracorporeal storage4, which sounds awfully woo both to me and to the anonymous neuroskeptic over at Discovery.com5; but even Neuroskeptic, while dismissing Forsdyke’s wilder speculations, doesn’t really argue with the neurological facts on the ground. (I myself haven’t yet had a chance to more than glance at the Forsdyke paper, which might warrant its own post if it turns out to be sufficiently substantive. If not, I’ll probably just pretend it is and incorporate it into Omniscience.)

  On a somewhat less peer-reviewed note, VNBs also get routinely trotted out by religious nut jobs who cite them as evidence that a God-given soul must be doing all those things the uppity scientists keep attributing to the brain. Every now and then I see them linking to an off-hand reference I made way back in 2007 (apparently rifters.com is the only place to find Lewin’s paper online without having to pay a wall) and I roll my eyes.

  And yet, 126 IQ. Virtually no brain. In my darkest moments of doubt, I wondered if they might be right.

  So on and off for the past twenty years, I’ve lain awake at night wondering how a brain the size of a poodle’s could kick my ass at advanced mathematics. I’ve wondered if these miracle freaks might actually have the same brain mass as the rest of us, but squeezed into a smaller, high-density volume by the pressure of all that cerebrospinal fluid (apparently the answer is: no). While I was writing Blindsight—having learned that cortical modules in the brains of autistic savants are relatively underconnected, forcing each to become more efficient—I wondered if some kind of network-isolation effect might be in play.

  Now, it turns out the answer to that is: Maybe.

  Three decades after Lewin’s paper, we have “Revisiting hydrocephalus as a model to study brain resilience” by de Oliveira et al 6 (actually published in 2012, although I didn’t read it until last spring). It’s a “Mini Review Article”: only four pages, no new methodologies or original findings—just a bit of background, a hypothesis, a brief “Discussion” and a conclusion calling for further research. In fact, it’s not so much a review as a challenge to the neuro community to get off its ass and study this fascinating phenomenon—so that soon, hopefully, there’ll be enough new research out there warrant a real review.

  The authors advocate research into “Computational models such as the small-world and scale-free network”—networks whose nodes are clustered into highly-interconnected “cliques”, while the cliques themselves are more sparsely connected one to another. De Oliveira et al suggest that they hold the secret to the resilience of the hydrocephalic brain. Such networks result in “higher dynamical complexity, lower wiring costs, and resilience to tissue insults.” This also seems reminiscent of those isolated hyper-efficient modules of autistic savants, which is unlikely to be a coincidence: networks from social to genetic to neural have all been described as “small-world.” (You might wonder—as I did—why de Oliveira et al. would credit such networks for the normal intelligence of some hydrocephalics when the same configuration is
presumably ubiquitous in vegetative and normal brains as well. I can only assume they meant to suggest that small-world networking is especially well-developed among high-functioning hydrocephalics.) (In all honesty, it’s not the best-written paper I’ve ever read.)

  The point, though, is that under the right conditions, brain damage may paradoxically result in brain enhancement. Small-world, scale-free networking—focused, intensified, overclocked—might turbocharge a fragment of a brain into acting like the whole thing.

  Can you imagine what would happen if we applied that trick to a normal brain?

  If you’ve read Echopraxia, you’ll remember the Bicameral Order: the way they used tailored cancer genes to build extra connections in their brains, the way they linked whole brains together into a hive mind that could rewrite the laws of physics in an afternoon. It was mostly bullshit, of course: neurological speculation, stretched eight unpredictable decades into the future for the sake of a story.

  But maybe the reality is simpler than the fiction. Maybe you don’t have to tweak genes or interface brains with computers to make the next great leap in cognitive evolution. Right now, right here in the real world, the cognitive function of brain tissue can be boosted—without engineering, without augmentation—by literal orders of magnitude. All it takes, apparently, is the right kind of stress. And if the neuroscience community heeds de Oliveira et al’s clarion call, we may soon know how to apply that stress to order. The singularity might be a lot closer than we think.

  Also a lot squishier.

  Wouldn’t it be awesome if things turned out to be that easy?

  1 http://rifters.com/real/articles/Science_No-Brain.pdf

  2 https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(07)61127-1

  3 http://mymultiplesclerosis.co.uk/ep/sharon-parker-the-woman-with-the-mysterious-brain/

  4 http://rifters.com/real/articles/Forsdyke-2015-BrainScansofHydrocephalicsChallengeCherishedAssumptions.pdf

  5 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2015/07/26/is-your-brain-really-necessary-revisited/

  6 http://rifters.com/real/articles/Oliveira-et-al-2012-RevisitingHydrocephalus.pdf

  The Yogurt Revolution.

  Nowa Fantastyka Sep 2015

  Blog Oct 29 2015

  Pick something you hate.

  A government, maybe, or a church. Some multinational that treats its customers like shit. Any institution powerful enough to keep people under its thumb, to crush its competition (or at least fix prices with them) so you have nowhere else to go. Something you’d really like to see burned to the ground, although you know that’s never going to happen.

  A good example, here in Toronto, would be a telecommunications giant called Bell Canada. (Rogers would also be a good candidate—they suck almost as hard—but I think Bell owns more media.) If you’ve ever dealt with these guys—and you probably have, if you’ve ever watched Canadian TV—the following scenario might warm you up at night:

  Gustav runs a cellphone kiosk for Bell. Walking home from work one night, a passing stranger notices the perky corporate logo on his employee polo shirt—and punches Gustav in the face.

  Gustav goes down. “Fucking Bell,” his assailant growls, kicking him in the ribs.

  Gustav’s no dummy. He knows everyone hates Bell. He knows all about the bandwidth throttling, the extortionate overpriced contracts, the abusive telemarketing and contemptuous customer service, the routine surveillance of customers for the benefit of any government snoop with her hand out. But—“That’s not me!” he cries around a mouthful of broken teeth. “I don’t make those decisions—I just sell phones!”

  “It . . . doesn’t . . . matter!” the attacker spits out, emphasizing each word with another vicious kick. “You . . . knew. You . . . chose . . . to . . . work . . . for . . . them . . . .” Eventually he tires himself out and wanders away, leaving Gustav to bleed out on the pavement.

  Just a psycho with anger-management issues, you might think if you’re a Bell CEO reading about it the next day. Nothing for you to worry about, even if you did just cut Tech Support’s budget by another 10% because you want a fatter year-end bonus. The peasants will never get to you; you’re safe up here on the 50th floor. Shame about poor ol’ Gustav, though.

  But then it happens to Shirley. And then Piotr. And Mahmoud, and George. All those underpaid drones hawking your wares at the local malls are suddenly getting the shit kicked out them by random strangers. It’s the weirdest thing. None of the attackers even have criminal records.

  Now no one wants to work for you. Drones quit in droves for fear of being kicked to death like dogs in the street, and not even the unprecedented promise of a decent wage can lure in replacements. Management’s safe—they don’t deal with the public—but how can the top of a pyramid stay standing when the base just up and leaves? Bell has but two choices: go broke, or stop pissing off their customers. For the rest of us, it’s win-win.

  Isn’t that a wonderful little scenario? I call it “The Justice Plague,” and I fully intend to write it as soon as I can come up with an actual storyline. So far it’s all premise and no plot.

  It’s a terrific premise, though. It hinges on yogurt—more precisely, on the ways gut microbes affect your behavior.

  Of course, we’ve always known that your gut affects your mood. But the extent and complexity of those effects is only now coming to light—and it goes way beyond the cramps you get from salmonella, or the tryptophan drowsiness that lays you low after a turkey dinner. It’s not much of an overstatement to say that your gut bacteria are a large part of what makes you you, psychologically. Transfer gut biota from one animal to another, and you transfer personality traits as well.

  Think about that. You can literally transplant personality traits via feces. To that extent, we all have shitty personalities.

  How does it work? For starters, your gut has a mind of its own: a standalone neural net with the computational complexity of a cat brain (no surprise there—cats are basically stomachs sheathed in fur anyway). Your gut microbes pull its strings by feeding it a complex cocktail of hormones and neurotransmitters; gutnet, in turn, tugs at the brain along the Vagus nerve. (Gut bacteria also have a more direct pipe into the brain via the endocrine system. Most of your brain’s neurotransmitters—half the dopamine, most of the serotonin—are actually produced in the gut.) Via such avenues, your gut bacteria influence the formation of memories, especially those with strong emotional components. They affect aggression and anxiety responses by influencing neuroinhibitors in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala (which is responsible for fear, aggression, and the intensity of one’s response to personal-space violations). You can make rats more or less aggressive by tweaking their gut biota.

  You see where I’m going with this. Engineered gut bacteria—spread through shipments of spiked yogurt, perhaps—tweaked to promote violent, uncontrollable rage in their hosts. It’s barely even speculation; rabies does that much, and it’s not even engineered.

  The big problem is targeting, of course—how to trigger reflexive aggression at the sight of a specific corporate logo. Corporations actually give us a lot of help here; they spend millions designing logos that are simple, striking, and immediately recognizable. So you could tweak responses in the V1 and V2 areas of the visual cortex—those pattern-matching parts of the brain that identify specific shapes and edges. If you could bend such circuits to your will, you could provoke a response in anyone who saw a given shape.

  But it would be a lot simpler to let the brain do all that heavy lifting on its own, targeting instead those circuits that connect a general sense of “recognition” to the emotional response one feels at the sight of a given brand. You’d have to be familiar with that brand for this trigger to work—it keys on feelings of recognition, not the specific geometry of the stimulus—but who doesn’t recognize the logos of major corporations these days? The best part is that all those recognition/response macros are located in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and in the—w
ait for it—

  The amygdala. Back down in the limbic system, where gut bugs already affect aggression.

  Why, we might be able to pull this whole thing off without ever leaving the basement. We don’t even have to create the response; just magnify pre-existing resentment and let it off the leash. A thousand, a million disgruntled customers: turned into weapons of mass corporate destruction with a little help from the yogurt industry.

  Hey, all you basement biologists. All you DIY Lifehackers.

  Looking for a project?

  [Postscript 2019: And it took a while, but I finally wrote the damn story. “Gut Feelings” appeared in the Toronto 2033 anthology edited by Jim Munroe, for Spacing Media. Good luck finding it, though.

  A Ray of Sunshine

  Nowa Fantastyka July 2015

  I’m going to try some optimism on for size. I think it might be a bit tight around the middle.

  Of course, if you’ve read any of the interviews I’ve given over the years you might remember that I’ve always claimed to be an optimist. I build dark futures full of no-win scenarios, critics clutch their bosoms and wonder how anyone with such a nihilistic outlook can even get out of bed in the morning, and I say But my characters try to do the right thing! It’s not their fault they’re stuck in such a hellish future, that they have to kill a thousand people to save a million; that’s the future we’re building for them right now. If I ignored that fact I’d be writing wish-fulfillment fantasy instead of SF!

  Real people are scum, I continue. They launch jihads; they rob the poor to further fatten the rich; they trick countries into going to war just to line the pockets of their oil-industry buddies! And if they’re not scum, they’re idiots! Nobody in my novels would deny the reality of evolution or climate change. Why, when it comes to human nature, my writing is almost childishly optimistic!