by Peter Watts
“They are not going to let this pass, Dan. Now that they’ve caught a glimpse behind the curtain they’ll have thrown a net over the whole reserve.”
And I, Brüks reflected, don’t blame them one goddamned bit. “I’m not part of this. You said it yourself.”
“You’re a witness. They’ll debrief you.”
“So they’ll debrief me.” Brüks shrugged. “You haven’t told me anything. I haven’t seen anything they haven’t, if they deployed drones.”
“You’ve seen more than you realize. Everyone does. And they will know that, so your debriefing with be aggressive.”
“So that makes you, what? My personal guard? Here to feed me, and walk me, and make sure I don’t wander off into any of the rooms where the grown-ups are talking. And yank on my leash if I try to leave. That about sum it up?”
“Dan—”
“Look, you’re giving me a choice between a vampire with her zombie army and you baselines, as you so delicately put it.”
She got to her feet. “I’m not giving you a choice.”
“I have to leave sometime. I can’t spend the rest of my life here.”
“If you try to leave now,” she said, “that’s exactly what you’ll have done.”
He looked down at her: thin as a pussy willow, she only came up to his chest.
“You going to stop me?”
She looked back without blinking. “I’m gonna try. If I have to. But I really hope it doesn’t come to that.”
He stood there for the longest time. Then he picked up his plate.
“Fuck you,” he said, and went back inside.
Within his prison, she gave him all the space in the world. She backed right off as he stalked down the hall, past the murmuring of the devout and the hyperkinetic gaze of the frozen zombies, past the closed-door deliberations of enemies-of-enemies and the open doors of dorms and studies and bathrooms. He moved without direction at first, following any corridor that presented itself, backtracking from every cul-de-sac, his feet exploring autonomously while his gut churned. After a while, some dull sullen pain behind his eyes brought him back to the here-and-now; he took more conscious note of his surroundings and decided to revisit Moore’s basement watchtower, as much for its relative familiarity as for any tactical insights he might glean.
He couldn’t find it. He remembered Lianna leading him through a hole in the wall; he remembered emerging from it after the armistice. It had to be off the main corridor, had to lie behind one of these identical oaken doors that lined the hall, but no perspective along that length seemed familiar. It was as though he was in some off-kilter mock-up of the place he’d been just an hour before, as though the layout of the monastery had changed subtly when he wasn’t looking. He started trying doors at random.
The third was ajar. Low voices murmured behind it. It swung inward easily; flat panels of vat-cloned hardwood lined the space beyond, a kind of library or map room that looked out onto a grassy compound (half sunlit, half in shadow) past the opposite end of the room. Past sliding glass doorways, arcane objects rose haphazardly from that immaculate lawn. Brüks couldn’t tell whether they were machines or sculptures or some half-assed hybrid of the two. The only thing that looked at all familiar out there was a shallow washbasin set atop a boxy waist-high pedestal.
There was another one of those inside, too, just past a conference table that dominated the center of the room itself. Two mismatched Bicamerals stood at the table’s edge, gazing at a collection of dice-size objects scattered across some kind of hard-copy map or antique game board. The Japanese monk was gaunt as a scarecrow; the Caucasian could have passed for Santa Claus at the departmental Christmas party, given the right threads and a pillow stuffed down his front.
“From Queensland, maybe,” Santa remarked. “That place always bred the best neurotoxins.”
The scarecrow scooped up a handful of objects (not dice, Brüks saw now; a collection of multifaceted lumps that made him think of mahogany macramé) and arranged them in a rough crescent across the board.
Santa considered. “Still not enough. Even if we could sift the Van Allens dry on short notice.” He absently scratched the side of his neck, seemed to notice Brüks at last. “You’re the refugee.”
“Biologist.”
“Welcome anyway.” Santa smacked his lips. “I’m Luckett.”
“Dan Brüks.” He took the other man’s nod for an invitation and stepped closer to the table. The pattern decorating the game board—a multicolored spiral of interlocking Penrose tiles—was far more complex than any he remembered from his grandfather’s attic. It seemed to move at the corner of his eye, to crawl just so when he wasn’t quite looking.
The scarecrow clicked his tongue, eyes never leaving the table.
“Don’t mind Masaso,” Luckett remarked. “He’s not much for what you’d call normal conversation.”
“Does everyone around here speak in tongues?”
“Speak—oh, I see what you mean.” Luckett laughed softly. “No, with Masaso here it’s more like a kind of aphasia. When he’s not linked in, anyway.”
The scarecrow spilled a few more mahogany knuckles with chaotic precision. Luckett laughed again, shook his head.
“He talks through board games,” Brüks surmised.
“Close enough. Who knows? I might be doing the same thing by the time I graduate.”
“You’re not—?” Of course he wasn’t. His eyes didn’t sparkle.
“Not yet. Acolyte.”
It was enough that he spoke English. “I’m trying to find the room I was in last night. Basement, spiral stairs, kind of a war room bunker feel to it?”
“Ah. The Colonel’s lair. North hall, first right, second door on the left.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
“Not at all.” Luckett turned away as Masaso clicked and rolled the bones. “More than enough antimatter to break orbit, anyway. Least it saves on chemical mass.”
Brüks stopped, hand on the doorknob. “What was that?”
Luckett glanced back at him. “Just drawing up plans. Nothing to worry about.”
“You guys have antimatter?”
“Before long.” Luckett grinned and dipped his hands into the washbasin. “God willing.”
Most of the tactical collage was dark, or writhing with analog static. A half dozen windows flickered fitfully through random points of view: desert, desert, desert. No satcam imagery. Either Moore had shut down those feeds or whoever was behind the blockade had walled off the sky as well as the horizon.
Brüks tapped experimentally on an unlit patch of paint. His touch provoked a brief flicker of red, but nothing else.
The active windows kept changing, though. Some kind of motion sensor built into the feed, maybe: views would pan and pounce, flash-zooming on this flickering shadow or that distant escarpment. Sometimes Brüks couldn’t see anything noteworthy at the center of attention: a falcon grooming itself on a skeletal branch, or the burrow of a desert rodent halfway to the horizon. Once or twice a little fall of rock skittering down a distant slope, scree dislodged by some unseen disturbance.
Once, partially eclipsed by leaves and scrub, a pair of glassy reflections looking back.
“Help you?”
Jim Moore reached past Brüks’s shoulder and tapped the display. A new window sprang to life at his fingertip. Brüks stepped aside while the soldier stretched the window across the paint, called up a feed, zoomed on a crevice splitting a hillock to the south.
“I was trying to get online,” Brüks admitted. “See if anyone out there’s picked up on this whole—quarantine thing.”
“Net’s strictly local. I don’t think the Bicamerals actually have Quinternet access.”
“What, they’re afraid of getting hacked?” It was an ongoing trend, Brüks had heard: defensive self-partitioning in the face of Present Shock, and damn the legal consequences. People were starting to weigh costs against benefits, opt for a day or two outside the panopticon eve
n in the face of the inevitable fines and detentions.
But Moore was shaking his head. “I don’t think they need it. Do you feel especially lost without access to the telegraph network?”
“What’s a telegraph?”
“Exactly.” Something caught the Colonel’s eye. “Huh. That’s not good.”
Brüks followed the other man’s gaze to the window he’d opened, to the crevice centered there. “I don’t see anything.”
Moore played a little arpeggio on the wall. The image blossomed into false color. Something glowed Euclidean yellow in all that fractal blue.
He grunted. “Aerosol delivery, looks like.”
“Your guys?”
The corner of Moore’s mouth curled the slightest bit. “Can’t really say.”
“What’s to say? You’re a soldier, right? They’re soldiers, unless the government’s started subcontracting to—”
“Biothermals, too. They’re not trusting their bots to run things.” There was a hint of amusement in the old soldier’s voice. “Probably baselines, then.”
“Why’s that?”
“Fragile egos. Low self-esteem.” His fingers skipped across the darkened wall. Bright windows flared everywhere they touched.
“At least you’re all on the same side then, right?”
“Doesn’t really work like that.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The chain of command isn’t what it used to be.” Moore smiled faintly. “It’s more—organic, these days. Anyway.” Another finger dance; the window dwindled and slid to an empty spot along the edge of the wall. “They’re still setting up. We’ve got time.”
“How was the meeting?” Brüks asked
“Still going on. Not much point hanging around after the opening ceremonies, though. I’d just slow them down.”
“And let me guess: you can’t tell me what’s going on, and it’s none of my business anyway.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Lianna said—”
“Dr. Lutterodt wasn’t at the meeting,” Moore reminded him.
“Okay. So is there anything you can—”
“The Fireflies,” Moore said.
Brüks blinked. “What about—oh. Your common enemy.”
Moore nodded.
Memories of intercepted negotiations, scrolling past in Christmas colors: “Theseus. They found something out there?”
“Maybe. Nothing’s certain yet, just—hints and inferences. No solid intel.”
“Still.” An alien agency capable of simultaneously dropping sixty thousand surveillance probes into the atmosphere without warning. An agency that came and went in seconds, that caught the planet with its pants down and took God knew how many compromising pictures along God knew how many wavelengths before letting the atmosphere burn its own paparazzi down to a sprinkle of untraceable iron floating through the stratosphere. An agency never seen before and never since, for all the effort put into finding it. “I guess that qualifies as a common threat,” Brüks admitted.
“I guess it does.” Moore turned back to his war wall.
“Why were they fighting in the first place? What does a vampire have against a bunch of monks?”
Moore didn’t answer for a moment. Then: “It’s not personal, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“What, then?”
Moore took a breath. “It’s—more of the same, really. Entropy, increasing. The Realists and their war on Heaven. The Nanohistomites over in Hokkaido. Islamabad on fire.”
Brüks blinked. “Islamabad’s—”
“Oops. Getting ahead of myself. Give it time.” The Colonel shrugged. “I’m not trying to be coy, Dr. Brüks. You’re already in the soup, so I’ll tell you what I can so long as it doesn’t endanger you further. But you’re going to have to take a lot on—well, on faith.”
Brüks stifled a laugh. Moore looked at him.
“Sorry,” Brüks said. “It’s just, you hear so much about the Bicamerals and their scientific breakthroughs and their quest for Truth. And I finally get inside this grand edifice and all I hear is Trust and God willing and Take it on faith. I mean, the whole order’s supposed to be founded on the search for knowledge, and Rule Number One is Don’t ask questions?”
“It’s not that they don’t have answers,” Moore said after a moment. “It’s just that we can’t understand them for the most part. You could resort to analogies, I suppose. Force transhuman insights into human cookie-cutter shapes. But most of the time that would just get you a bleeding metaphor with all its bones broken.” He held up a hand, warding off Brüks’s rejoinder. “I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke’s liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one’s looking.”
“And yet.” Brüks glanced at the wall, where AEROSOL DELIVERY glowed in shades of yellow and orange. Where a murderous tornado had rampaged the night before. “They seem to solve their conflicts pretty much the same way as us retarded ol’ baselines.”
Moore smiled faintly. “That they do.”
He found Lianna back on the front steps, supper balanced on her knees, watching the sun go down. She looked back over her shoulder as he pushed through the door.
“I asked about your brain-boosters,” she said. “No luck. The assembly line’s booked or something.”
“Thanks for trying,” he said.
“Jim might still be holding. If you haven’t asked him already.”
He shifted his tray to one hand, used the other to rub away the vague pain behind his eyes. “Mind if I join you?”
She spared one hand to take in the staircase, as broad and excessive as a cathedral’s.
He sat beside her, picked at his own plate. “About this morning, I, uh…”
She stared at the horizon. The sun stared back, highlighting her cheekbones.
“… sorry,” he finished.
“Forget it. Nobody likes being in a cage.”
“Still. I shouldn’t have shot the messenger.” A sudden chilly breeze crawled across his shoulders.
Lianna shrugged. “You ask me, nobody should shoot anybody.”
He raised his eyes. Venus twinkled back at them. He wondered briefly if those photons had followed a straight line to his eyes, or if they’d been shunted around some invisible spillway of curves and angles at the last nanosecond. He looked around at the cracked desert floor, lifted his gaze to the more jagged topography in the distance. Wondered how many unseen agents were looking back.
“You always eat out here?”
“When I can.” The lowering sun stretched her shadow along the ramparts behind them, a giantess silhouetted in orange. “It’s—stark, you know?”
Ribbed clouds, a million shades of salmon, scudding against an orange and purple sky.
“How long does this go on?” he wondered.
“This?”
“They lurk out there, we wait in here. When does somebody actually make a move?”
“Oldschool, you gotta relax.” She shook her head, smiled a twilit smile. “You could obsess and second-guess for a solid month and I guarantee you wouldn’t be able to think of anything our hosts haven’t already factored five ways to Sunday. They’ve been making moves all day.”
“Such as?”
“Don’t ask me.” She shrugged. “I probably wouldn’t understand even if they told me. They’re wired up way differently.”
Hive mind, he reminded himself. Synesthetes, too, if he wasn’t mistaken.
“You do understand them, though,” he said. “That’s your job.”
“Not the way you think. And not without a fair bit of modding on my own.”
“How, then?”
“I’m not sure,” she admitted.
“Come on.”
“No, really. It’
s a kind of Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven. The moment you start to think about what you’re doing, you screw up. You just have to get into the zone.”
“They must have trained you at some point,” Brüks insisted. “There must have been some kind of conscious learning curve.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” She squinted up at some invisible behemoth he still couldn’t see. “But they kind of—bypassed that. Zapped my fornix with just the right burst of ultrasound and next thing I know it’s four days later and I have all these reflexes. Not so much that I understand them as my fingers do, you know? Phonemes, rhythms, gestures—eye movements, sometimes—” She frowned. “I take in all these cues and equations just—come to me, piece by piece. I copy them down and I send ’em off. And the next day they show up in the latest issue of Science.”
“You never examined these reflexes afterward? Played the piano really slowly, taken the time to watch what your fingers were doing?”
“Dan, they won’t fit. Consciousness is a scratchpad. You can store a grocery list, jot down a couple of phone numbers—but were you even aware of finishing your supper?”
Brüks looked down at his plate. It was empty.
“And that’s just a couple of swallows half a minute in the past. You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?” Her dreads swept back and forth in the gloom. “Whatever I’m doing, it’s got too many variables. Won’t fit in the global workspace.” She flashed him a small, apologetic smile.
They program us like clockwork dolls, he thought. Way off to the west, the sun touched gently down on a distant ridge.
He looked at her. “Why are we still in charge?”
She grinned. “Who’s we, white boy?”
He didn’t. “These people you—work for. They’re supposed to be helpless, that’s what everyone says. You can optimize a brain for down there or up here, not both. Anyone comfortable thinking at Planck scales, they can barely cross the street unassisted up in the real world. That’s why they set up in the desert. That’s why they have people like you. That’s what they tell us.”