by Peter Watts
“All true, more or less,” Lianna said.
He shook his head. “They micromanage tornadoes, Lee. They turn people into puppets with a wink and a wave, they own half the patent office. They’re about as helpless as a T. rex in a daycare center. So why haven’t they been running things for years?”
“That’s like a chimp asking why those hairless apes aren’t slinging bigger feces than everyone else, if they’re so damned clever.”
He tried not to smile, and failed. “That’s not really an answer.”
“Sure it is. Everybody goes on about hive mind this and synesthesia that like they were some kind of superpowers.”
“After last night, you’re going to tell me they’re not?”
“It goes so much deeper than that. It’s perceptual. We’re so—impoverished, you know? We don’t look out at reality at all, we look in at this model, this caricature our brains cobble together out of wavelengths and pressure points. We squint down over handwritten notes that say two blocks east, turn left at the bridge and we think that reading those stupid scribbles is the same as seeing the universe passing by on the other side of the windshield.” She glanced over her shoulder, to the edifice at their backs.
Brüks frowned. “You think Bicamerals can see outside the windshield.”
“Dunno. Maybe.”
“Then I’ve got some bad news for you. Reality went out the window the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or model-building? Become a protozoan.”
A smile lit her face, startlingly bright in the deepening gloom. “Wouldn’t that be just like them. Build a group mind complex enough to put any hundred baseline geniuses to shame, and use it to think like a paramecium.”
“That wasn’t exactly my point,” he said.
The sun winked good-bye and slid below the horizon.
“I don’t know how they do it,” she admitted. “But if what they see is even closer to reality—well, that’s what you call transcendence. Not the ability to micromanage tornados, just—seeing a little more of what’s out there.” She tapped her temple. “Instead of what’s in here.”
She stood, stretched like a cat. Brüks rose beside her and brushed the desert from his clothes. “Then transcendence is out of reach. For our brains, anyway.”
Lianna shrugged. “Change your brain.”
“Then it’s not your brain anymore. It’s something else. You’re something else.”
“That’s kinda the point. Transcendence is transformation.”
He shook his head, unconvinced. “Sounds more like suicide to me.”
He felt his eyes start up under closed lids, stepped out onto that razor-thin line between dreamtime and the waking edge: just enough awareness to see the curtain, not enough to notice the man behind.
Lucid dreaming was a delicate exercise.
He sat up on the pallet, phantom legs still wearing corporeal ones like the abdomen of some half-molted insect. He looked around at furnishings that would have been spartan to anyone who hadn’t just spent two months sleeping on the desert floor: a raised sleeping pallet a couple of meters long, dipped in some softer, thicker variant of the fleshy synthetic lining the floors. An alcove in the wall, a medicine cabinet fronted with frosted glass. Another one of those washbasin pedestals, this one with a towel bar bolted to the side facing the bed: a hand towel draped over it. The cubby Luckett had tucked him into for the night, all pretty much the way it looked when he was awake.
He’d learned to launch his dreams from a platform anchored in reality. It made the return trip easier.
Brüks flexed his temporoparietal and ascended through a ceiling of polished granite (that was surmise—he’d forgotten to take note of its composition in the waking world). The monastery spread out around, then below him: dwindled from a life-size fortress to a tabletop model on a cracked gray moonscape. A fingernail moon shone bone-white overhead; everywhere else, a million stars glinted hard as ice crystals against the darkness.
He flew north.
It was minimalist magic: no rainbow bridges or talking clouds, no squadrons of aircraft piloted by tyrannosaurs. He’d long since learned not to strain the credulity of whatever mental processes indulged his presence here, critics that had lived in his head since before his dreams had even been lucid. Some inner skeptic frowned at the thought of a space-faring bicycle and dreaming eight-year-old Danny Brüks found himself stranded between the stars. Some forebrain killjoy snorted at the giddy delight of flying and suddenly he was entangled in high-tension wires, or simply ejected back into consciousness at three in the morning, spat out of sleep by his own incredulity. Even in dreams, his brain had been selling him out since before he’d had hair on his crotch. As an adult he’d had no use for them until his limited baseline learning curve had run out of waking hours, forced him to learn new techniques in his sleep lest academia’s new-and-improving generation devoured him from behind.
He could fly now at least, without thought or self-subversion. He’d learned that much through years of practice, through the induction hardware that had once guided his visions when REM started up, through the exercises that eventually let him ditch those training wheels and do it all in his own head. He could fly, into orbit and beyond and back if he wanted to. He could fly all the way to Heaven. That was where he was going now: the Northern Lights swirled in the sky directly ahead, a blue-green curtain shimmering above his destination like a Star of Bethlehem for the Holographic Age.
But no talking clouds. He’d also learned not to push it.
Now, ghostlike, he passed through Heaven’s fortifications and descended into its deepest levels. Rho languished there as she always did, alone in her cell, still wearing the paper smock and slippers she’d worn in Departures when they’d told each other it wasn’t goodbye. A cuff around her left ankle and a dozen links of corroded chain shackled her to the wall. Hair hung across her downcast face like a dark curtain.
Her face lit up, though, as he descended through the ceiling.
He settled beside her on the stone floor. “I’m sorry. I would’ve come sooner, I just—”
He stopped. No point in wasting precious REM with dreamed apologies. He tweaked the script, started again.
“You wouldn’t believe what’s happening,” he said.
“Tell me.”
“I’ve got caught up in some kind of war, I’m trapped behind enemy lines with a bunch of—really. You wouldn’t believe me.”
“Monks and zombies,” she said. “And a vampire.”
Of course she knew.
“I don’t even know how I can be here. You’d think with all this stuff happening I’d be too wired to even sit down, but—”
“You’ve been going straight for twenty-four hours.” She laid her hand on his. “Of course you’re going to crash.”
“These people don’t,” he grumbled. “I don’t think they even sleep, not all at once anyway. Different parts of their brains take—shifts, or something. Like a bunch of dolphins.”
“You’re not a dolphin, and you’re not some augmented wannabe either. You’re natural. Just the way I like it. And you know what?”
“What?”
“You’re going to keep up with them. You always do.”
Not always, he thought.
“You should come back,” he said suddenly. Somewhere far away, his fingers and toes tingled faintly.
She shook her head. “We’ve been over this.”
“Nobody’s saying you have to go back to the job. There are a million other options.”
“In here,” she told him, “there are a billion.”
He looked at her chain. He had never consciously forged those links. He’d simply found her like this. He could have changed her circumstance with a thought, of course, as he could change anything in this world—but there were always risks.
He’d learned not to push it.
“You can�
��t like it here,” he said quietly.
She laughed. “Why not? I didn’t put that thing on.”
“But—” His temples throbbed. He willed them to stop.
“Dan,” she said gently, “You can keep up out there. I can’t.”
The tingling intensified in his extremities. Rho’s face wavered before him, fading to black. He couldn’t keep her together much longer. All this careful conservatism, these shackled environments that barely edged beyond the laws of physics—they only guarded against the Inner Heckler, not these unwelcome sensations intruding from outside. Headaches. Pins and needles. They distracted from his own contrivance; suddenly the whole façade was falling apart around him. “Come back soon,” his wife called through the rising static. “I’ll be waiting…”
She was gone before he could answer. He tried to construct something spectacular—the implosion of Heaven itself, a fiery inward collapse toward some ravenous singularity deep below the Canadian Shield—but he was rising too fast toward the light.
There’d been a time when he’d derided his own lack of imagination, cursed his inability to slip his shackles and just dream like everyone else, with glorious hallucinogenic abandon. Even now, sometimes, he had to remind himself: it wasn’t a failing at all. It was a strength.
Even in sleep, Dan Brüks didn’t take anything on faith.
TO HIMSELF EVERYONE IS IMMORTAL; HE MAY KNOW THAT HE IS GOING TO DIE, BUT HE CAN NEVER KNOW THAT HE IS DEAD.
—SAMUEL BUTLER
SUNSHINE STABBED HIS eyes through the cell’s slotted window. His mouth was dry, his head athrob. His fingers pulsed with dull electricity. Slept on my hands, he thought, and tried to imagine how he might have actually done that as he swung his legs over the edge of the bed.
The same pins and needles flooded the soles of his feet when he planted them on the floor.
Great.
He found his way to the lav that Luckett had shown him the night before, emptied his bladder while every extremity tingled and burned. The discomfort was beginning to fade by the time he flushed; he headed off down the empty hall in search of other warm bodies, only slightly unsteady on his feet.
Something thumped behind one of the closed doors. He paused for a moment before continuing, his attention drawn by another door opening farther down the hall.
By the naked blotchy thing that fell into view, choking and twitching as if electrocuted.
He stood there for a moment, shocked into paralysis. Then he was moving again, his own trivial discomfort forgotten in a greater shock of recognition: Masaso the scarecrow, back arched, teeth bared, flesh stretched so tight across cheekbones that it was a wonder his face hadn’t split down the middle. Brüks was almost at the man’s side before realization stopped him in his tracks.
Every muscle thrown into tetany. This was some kind of motor disorder.
This was neurological.
The pins and needles were back in full force. Brüks looked down in disbelief at his own fingertips. Try as he might, he couldn’t stop them from trembling.
When the screaming started, he barely heard it.
Whatever it was, it killed quietly. For the most part.
Not because it was painless. Its victims staggered from hiding and thrashed on the floors, faces twisted into agonized devil masks. Even the dead kept them on: veins bulging, eyes splattered crimson with pinpoint embolisms, each face frozen in the same calcified rictus. Not a word, not a groan from any of them. There was nothing he could do but step over the bodies as he tracked that lone voice screaming somewhere ahead; nothing he could feel but that terrifying electricity growing in his fingers and toes; nothing he could think but It’s in me too it’s in me too it’s in me too—
Creatures in formation rounded the corner ahead of him: four human bodies moving in perfect step, more live than the bodies on the floor, just as dead inside. Valerie kept pace in their midst. Four sets of jiggling eyes locked on to Brüks for an instant, then resumed their frantic omnidirectional dance. Valerie didn’t even look in his direction. She moved as if spring-loaded, as if her joints were subtly out of place. One of her zombies was missing below the knees; the carbon prosthetics it used for legs squeaked softly against the floor as they approached. Apart from that subtle friction, Brüks couldn’t hear so much as a footfall from any of them. He flattened instinctively against the wall, praying to some Pleistocene god for invisibility—or at least, for insignificance. Valerie swept abreast of him, eyes straight ahead.
Brüks squeezed his eyes shut. Soft screams filled the darkness. He felt a small distant pride that none of them came from him. When he opened his eyes again the monster was gone.
The screaming had grown fainter. More—intimate. Some horrific lighthouse beacon running low on batteries, calling through the fog of war. Except this was no fucking war: this was a massacre, this was one tribe of giants slaughtering another, and any baseline fossil stupid enough to get caught underfoot didn’t even rate the brutal mercy of a slashed throat on the battlefield.
Welcome to the armistice.
He followed the sound. He doubted there was anything he could do—euthanasia, perhaps—but if it could scream, maybe it could talk. Maybe it could tell him—something …
It already had, in a way. It had told him that all victims were not equal in the eyes of this pestilence. All the Bicamerals he’d seen so far seemed to have fallen within minutes of each other, seized by the throat and turned to tortured stone before they’d even had a chance to cry out. Not everyone, though. Not the vampire and her minions. Not the screamer. Not Dan Brüks.
Not yet.
But he was infected, oh yes he was. Something was at work on his distal circuitry, shorting out his fine motor control, working its way up the main cables. Maybe the screamer was just a little farther along. Maybe the screamer was Daniel Brüks in another ten minutes.
Maybe it was right here, behind this door.
Brüks pushed it open.
Luckett. He squirmed like a hooked eelpout in a cell identical to the one where Brüks had slept, slid around on a floor slippery with his own fluids. Sweat turned his tunic into a soaked dishrag, ran in torrents from his face and limbs; darker stains spread from his crotch.
The hook hadn’t caught him by the mouth, though. It sprouted from a port at the back of his neck, a shivering fiber running to a socket low on the wall. Luckett convulsed. His head struck the edge of an overturned chair. The blow seemed to bring him back a little; the screaming stopped, the eyes cleared, something approaching awareness filtered through the dull animal pain that filled them.
“Brüks,” he moaned, “Brüks, get it—fuck it hurts…”
Brüks knelt, laid a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “I—”
The acolyte thrashed away from the touch, screaming all over again: “Fucking hell that hurts—!” He flailed one arm: a deliberate gesture, Brüks guessed, an instruction trying to dig its way out past the roaring static of a million short-circuiting motor nerves. Brüks followed its path to a small glass-fronted cabinet set into the wall. Lozenges of doped ceramic rested in neat labeled rows behind the sliding pane: HAPPINESS, ORGASM, APPETITE SUPPRESSANT—
ANALGESIC.
He grabbed it off the shelf, dropped to Luckett’s side, grabbed the fiberop at the cervical end: fumbled, as fingers misheard brain. Luckett screamed again, arched his back like a drawn bow. The smell of shit filled the room. Brüks gripped the plug, twisted. The socket clicked free. Seething light flooded the walls: camera feeds, spline plots, deserts painted in garish blizzards of false color. Some tame oracle, deprived of direct access to Luckett’s brain, continuing its conversation in meatspace.
Brüks jammed the painkiller home, click-twisted it into place. Luckett sagged instantly; his fingers continued to twitch and shiver, purely galvanic. For a moment Brüks thought the acolyte had lost consciousness. Then Luckett took a great heaving gulp of air, let it out again.
“That’s better,” he said.
Brüks eyed Luckett’s trembling fingers, eyed his own. “It’s not. This is—”
“Not my department,” Luckett coughed. “Not yours either, thank your lucky stars.”
“But what is it? There’s got to be a fix.” He remembered: a rosette of monsters, the vampire at its heart, moving with frictionless efficiency through the dying fields. “Valerie—”
Luckett shook his head. “She’s on our side.”
“But she’s—”
“Not her.” Luckett turned his head, rested his eyes an overhead real-time tactical of the surrounding desert: the monastery at the bull’s-eye, a perimeter of arcane hieroglyphics around the edges. “Them.”
We’ve been making moves all day.
“What did you do? What did you do?”
“Do?” Luckett coughed, wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. “You were here, my friend. We got noticed. And now we’re—reaping the whirlwind, you might say.”
“They wouldn’t just—” Then again, why wouldn’t they? “Wasn’t there some kind of, of ultimatum? Didn’t they give us a chance to surrender, or—”
The look Luckett gave him was an even mix of pity and amusement.
Brüks cursed himself for an idiot. Headaches for most of the day before. Moore’s aerosol delivery. But there’d been no artillery, no lethal canisters lobbed whistling across the desert. This thing had drifted in on the breeze, undetected. And not even engineered germs killed on contact. There was always an incubation period, it always took time for a few lucky spores to hatch out in the lungs and breed an army big enough to take down a human body. Even the magic of exponential growth took hours to manifest.
The enemy—
—People like you, Lianna had said—
—must have set this plan in motion the moment they’d set up their perimeter. It wouldn’t have mattered one good goddamn if the whole Bicameral Order had marched out across the desert with their hands in the air; the weapon was already in their blood, and it was blind to white flags.