The Colonel

by Peter Watts

  “But what if there is a higher peak out there, way across the plain? The only way to get there is bite the bullet, come down off our foothill and trudge along the riverbed until we finally start going uphill again. And it’s only then you realize: Hey, this mountain reaches way higher than that foothill we were on before, and we can see so much better from up here.”

  The Bicamerals. Named, apparently, for some prototype of reinvention that involved massive rewiring of their cerebral hemispheres. The name’s a coelacanth these days, though. It’s not even certain the Bicams have cerebral hemispheres any more.

  “But you can’t get there unless you leave behind all the tools that made you so successful in the first place. You have to take that first step downhill.”

  “You buy any of this?” The Lieutenant (a different Lieutenant—the Colonel has one in every port) glances away from the screen, lip pulled sideways in a skeptical grimace. “Faith-based science?”

  “It’s not science,” the Colonel says. “They don’t pretend that it is.”

  “Even worse. You don’t build a better brainchip by speaking in tongues.”

  “Hard to argue with the patents.”

  It’s the patents that have him worried. The Bicamerals don’t seem to have any martial ambitions, no designs of conquest—don’t seem especially interested in the outside world at all, for that matter. So far they’ve been content to hunker down in their scattered desert monasteries, contemplating whatever reality underlies reality.

  But there are other ways to throw the world on its side. Things are—fragile, these days. Whole societies have been known to fall in the wake of a single paradigm shift, and the Bicamerals own half the patent office. They could make the global economy eat itself overnight if they wanted to. It wouldn’t even be illegal.

  Lutterodt isn’t actually part of that hive, as far as anyone can tell. She just fronts for it; a friendly face, a charismatic spokesperson to grease wheels and calm fears. She’s out in the world for the next couple of weeks, doing the rounds: a fellow standalone human being, with access to the deepest Bicameral secrets. Completely at home in a world where a thought doesn’t know enough to stop at the edge of the skull, doesn’t even know when it’s left one head and entered another.

  “You want to bring her in?” the Lieutenant asks as Lutterodt disarms the world with a smile and a pocketful of metaphors.

  He has to admit it’s tempting: cut her off from the herd, draw the curtain of Global Security across the interrogation. Who knows what insights she might share, given the right incentive?

  He shakes his head. “I’ll go to her.”

  “Really?” Evidently not what this new Lieutenant signed up for, setting forth on bended knee.

  “She’s on a goodwill tour. Let’s give her a chance to spread some good will.”

  It’s not as generous as it seems, of course. You never want to strong-arm an adversary until you know how hard they can push back.

  * * *

  This global survey, this threat-assessment of hived minds: it’s not his only assignment. It’s only his most recent. A dozen others idle in the background, only occasionally warranting examination or update. Realist incursions into the UKapelago; a newly-separatist Baptist Convention, building their armed gyland on the high seas. The occasional court-martial of some antique flesh-and-blood infantry whose cybernetic augments violate the Rules of Engagement. They all sit in his queue, pilot-lit, half-forgotten. They’ll flag him if they need his attention.

  But there’s one candle the Colonel has never forgotten, though it hasn’t flickered for the better part of a decade. It, too, is programmed to call out in the event of any change in status. He checks it anyway, daily. Now—back for a couple of days in the large empty apartment he kept even after his wife went to Heaven—he checks it again.

  No change.

  He puts his inlays to sleep, takes grateful refuge in the silence that fills his head once the overlays and the status reports stop murmuring through his temporal lobe. He grows belatedly aware of a real sensation, the soft tick of claws on the tiles behind him. He turns and glimpses a small furry black-and-white face before it ducks out of sight around the corner.

  The Colonel adjourns to the kitchen.

  Zephyr’s willing to let the apartment feed him—he pretty much has to be, given the intermittent availability of his human servant—but he doesn’t like it much. He refused outright at first, rendered psychotic by some cross-species dabbler who must have thought it would be enlightening or transcendent or just plain cute to “share consciousness” with a small soul weighing in at one-tenth the synapse count. The Colonel tries to imagine what that kind of forced fusion must have been like: thrust into a maelstrom of incomprehensible thought and sensation, blinding as a naked sun; thrown back into stunned bleeding darkness once some narcissistic god got bored and cut the connection.

  Zephyr hid in the closet for weeks after the Colonel brought him home, hissed and spat at the sight of sockets and fiberop and the low-slung housecleaner trundling quietly on its rounds. After two years his furry little brain has at least rejigged the cost/benefit stats for the kibble dispenser in the kitchen but he’s still more phantom than fur, still mostly visible only from the corner of the eye. He can be coaxed into the open if he’s hungry and if the Colonel is very still; he still recoils at physical contact. The Colonel indulges him, and pretends not to notice the ragged fraying of the armrest on the living room couch. He doesn’t even have the heart to get the socket removed from the patch of twisted scar tissue on Zephyr’s head. No telling what post-traumatic nightmares might be reawakened by a trip to the vet.

  Now he fills the kibble bowl and stands back the requisite two meters. (This is progress; just six months ago he could never stray closer than three.) Zephyr creeps into the kitchen, nose twitching, eyes darting to every corner.

  The Colonel hopes that whoever inflicted that torment went on to try more exotic interfaces once they got bored with mammals. A cephalopod, perhaps. By all accounts, things get a lot less cuddly when you go B2B with a Pacific octopus.

  At least Human hives can lay claim to mutual consent. At least its members choose the violence they inflict on themselves, the emergence of some voluntary monster from the pool of all those annihilated identities. If only it stopped there. If only the damage ended where the hive did.

  His son’s candle slumbers in its own little corner of his network, a pilot light in purgatory. Zephyr glances around with every second bite, still fearful of some Second Coming.

  The Colonel knows how he feels.

  * * *

  They meet on a patio off Riverside: one of those heritage bistros where everything from food prep to table service is performed by flesh-and-blood, and where everything from food prep to table service suffers as a result. People seem willing to pay extra for the personal touch anyway.

  “You disapprove,” Dr. Lutterodt says, getting straight to the point.

  “Of many things,” The Colonel admits. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

  “Of us. What we do.” She glances at the menu (literally—it’s printed on dumb stock). “Of hives in general, I’m guessing.”

  “There’s a reason they’re against the law.” Most of them, anyway.

  “There is: because people get scared when things they can’t understand have control over their lives. Doesn’t matter how rational or beneficial any given law or a policy might be. When you need ten brains to understand the nuts and bolts, the unibrains get skittish.” The sock puppet shrugs. “The thing is, Bicam hives don’t make laws or set policies. They keep their eyes on nature and their hands to themselves. Maybe that’s why they’re not against the law.”

  “Or maybe it’s just a loophole. If anyone had seen meat interfaces coming down the pike, you can bet we’d have defined technology a bit more explicitly.”

  “Except the Interface Act passed a good ten years ago and they still haven’t got their definition right. How could they
? Brains rewire themselves every time we have an idle thought; how do you outlaw cortical editing without outlawing life at the same time?”

  “Not my department.”

  “Still. You disapprove.”

  “I’ve just seen too much damage. You put such a happy face on it, you go on and on about the transcendent insights of the group mind. All the insight to be had by joining some greater whole. Nobody talks about—”

  What the rest of us pay for your enlightenment—

  “—what happens to you afterward.”

  “A glimpse of heaven,” Lutterodt murmurs, “that turns your life to hell.”

  The Colonel blinks. “Exactly.” What must it be like to be given godsight only to have it snatched away again, to have your miserable baseline existence plagued by muddy, incomprehensible half-memories of the sublime? No wonder people get addicted. No wonder some have to be ripped screaming from their sockets.

  Ending a life suffered in the shadows of such incandescence—why, that would almost be an act of mercy.

  “—a common misconception,” Lutterodt is saying. “The hive’s not some jigsaw with a thousand little personalities, it’s integrated. Jim Moore doesn’t turn into Superman; Jim Moore doesn’t even exist when the hive’s active. Not unless you’ve got your latency dialed way down, anyway.”

  “Even worse.”

  She shakes her head, a little impatiently. “If it was bad thing you’d already know it first-hand. You’re a hive mind. You always have been.”

  “If that’s your perspective on the Chain of Command—”

  “Everyone’s a hive.”

  He snorts.

  She presses on: “You’ve got two cerebral hemispheres, right? Each one fully capable of running its own standalone persona, running multiple personae in fact. If I were to put one of those hemispheres down for the count, anesthetize it or scramble it with enough TMS, the other would carry on just fine, and you know what? It would be different than you. It might have different political beliefs, a different gender—hell, it might even have a sense of humor. Right up until the other hemisphere woke up, and fused, and became you again.

  “So tell me, Colonel; are your hemispheres suffering right now? Are there multiple selves in your head, bound and gagged, thinking Oh Great Ganesh I’m trapped! If only the Hive would let me out to play!”

  I don’t know, he realizes. How could I know?

  “Course not,” Lutterodt answers herself. “It’s just timesharing. Completely transparent.”

  “And Post-Coalescent Psychosis is just an urban legend spread by the tinfoil brigade.”

  She sighs. “No, PCP is very real. And it is tragic, and it fucks up thousands of lives. Yes. And it is entirely a result of defective interface technology. Our guys don’t get it.”

  “Not everyone’s so lucky,” the Colonel says.

  A man with cosmetic chlorophyll in his eyes arrives, bearing their orders. Lutterodt gives him a smile and digs into a cloned crab salad. The Colonel picks through bits of avocado he barely remembers ordering. “Have you ever visited the Moksha Mind?”

  “Only in virt.”

  “You know you can’t trust anything you experience in virt.”

  “You can’t trust anything you experience at this table. Do you see that big honking blind spot in the middle of your visual field?”

  “I’m not talking about nature’s shortcuts. I’m talking about something with an agenda.”

  “Okay.” She chews, speaks around a mouthful. “So what’s the Moksha agenda?”

  “Nobody knows. Eight million human minds linked together, and they just—lie there. Sure, you’ve seen the feeds from Bangalore and Hyderabad, the nice clean dorms with the smart beds to exercise the bodies and keep everything supple. Have you seen the nodes living at the ass end of five hundred kilometers of dirt track? People with nothing more than a cot and a hut and a C-square router by the village well?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  He takes it for a no. “You should pay them a visit sometime. Some of them have people checking in on them. Some—don’t. I’ve seen children covered with stinking bedsores lying in their own shit, people with half their teeth fallen out because they’re wired into that hive. And they don’t care. They can’t care, because there is no them any more, and the hive doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the pieces it’s built out of any more than—”

  Human torches, blazing in the Ecuadorian rainforest.

  “—any more than you’d care about a single cell in your liver.”

  Lutterodt glances down at her drink. “It’s what they aspire to, Colonel. Freedom from saṃsāra. I can’t pretend it’s a choice I’d make for myself.” She looks back up, catches his gaze, holds it. “But that’s not what’s bothering you.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because no matter how much you disapprove of their lifestyle, eight million happily-catatonic souls aren’t any kind of military threat.”

  “You sure about that? Can you even begin to imagine what kind of plans could be brewing in a coherent thinking entity with the mass of eight million human brains?”

  “World conquest.” Lutterodt nods, deadpan. “Because that’s what the Dharmic faiths are all about.”

  He doesn’t laugh. “People subscribe to a faith. That hive is something else entirely.”

  “And if they’re a threat,” she says quietly, “what are we?”

  Her masters, she means. And the answer is, Terrifying.

  “Moksha’s not so radical when you get right down to it,” she continues. “It’s built out of garden-variety brains after all. My guys played around with the cortical architecture. We’ve got entanglement on the brain, we’ve got quantum bioradio grown on principles you won’t stumble across for another twenty years. You can’t even define it as technology any more. That’s why you and I are talking right now, isn’t it? Because if a bunch of networked baselines has you worried, how could the Bicamerals not be a threat?”

  “Are they?” he asks at last.

  She snorts. “Look, you can optimize a brain for down there or up here. Not both. Bicams think at Planck scales. All that quantum craziness is as intuitive to them as the trajectory of a baseball is to you. But you know what?”

  He’s heard it before: “They don’t get baseballs.”

  “They don’t get baseballs. Oh, they get around okay. They can wipe their asses and feed themselves. But stick ‘em in a big city and—well, saying it would make them uncomfortable is putting it mildly.”

  He doesn’t buy it.

  “Why do you think they need people like me? You think they set up way out in the desert so they can build some kind of supervillain lair?” Lutterodt rolls her eyes. “They’re no threat, believe me. They’d have a hard time getting across a busy street.”

  “Their physical prowess is the last thing I’m worried about. Something that advanced could crush us underfoot and never even notice.”

  “Colonel, I live with them. They haven’t crushed me yet.”

  “We both know how destabilizing it would be if the Bicams marketed even a fraction—”

  “But they haven’t, have they? Why would they? You think they care about a fucking profit margin in your fantasy-world economy?” Lutterodt shakes her head. “You should be thanking whatever Gods you subscribe to that they do hold those patents. Anyone else probably would have kicked the anthill over by now, for no more reason than a good fiscal quarterly.”

  So we’re ants to you now.

  “Whether you admit it or not, your world’s better off with them in it. They keep to themselves, they don’t bother anyone, and when they do come out to play you cavemen make out like bandits. You should know that already; the Armed Forces have been licensing our cryption tech for over a decade.”

  “Not lately we haven’t.” Not since someone up the chain got antsy about back doors. Although perhaps the Colonel had something to do with that decision as well.

  “Your loss. Just
a couple months back Coahuila came up with a Ramanujan-symmetric variant you guys would kill for. Nothing lays a hand on our algos.” She reconsiders. “Nothing baseline, anyway.”

  “It won’t work, Dr. Lutterodt.”

  She raises her eyebrows, the very picture of innocence.

  He leans in across the table. “Maybe you really do feel safe, sleeping with your giants. They haven’t rolled over and crushed you in your sleep yet; maybe you think that’s some kind of guarantee they never will. I will never be that reckless—”

  Again.

  Even after all this time, the qualifier still kicks him in the gut.

  “They’re not the enemy, Colonel.”

  He takes a breath, marvels at its control. “That’s what scares me. At least you can hope to understand what an enemy wants. That thing—” He shakes his head. “You’ve admitted it yourself. Its ambitions won’t even fit into a human skull.”

  “Right now,” Lutterodt says, “it wants to help you.”

  “Right.”

  She peels off a fingernail and slides it across the table. He looks but doesn’t touch.

  “It’s a crystal,” she says after a moment.

  “I know what it is. You couldn’t have just sacc’d it to me?”

  “You would have accepted it? You would have let a Bicameral stooge dump data directly into your head?”

  He concedes the point with a small grimace. “What is it?”

  “It’s a transmission. We decrypted it a few weeks ago.”

  “A transmission.”

  “From the Oort. As far as we can tell.”

  She’s lying. She has to be.

  The Colonel shakes his head. “We would have—” Every day, for the better part of ten years. Checking the pilot light. Squeezing the microwave background for a word, a whisper, a sigh. Eyes always fixed on the heavens, even now, even after the losses have been tallied and all other eyes have moved on to better prospects.

  There’s no evidence Theseus is lost…

  “We’ve been scanning ever since the launch. If there’d been any kind of signal I’d know about it.”