by Peter Watts
Opponent, Brüks realized. Those open-handed strikes on empty air, that heel coming down with a snap against a passing bulkhead; those were combat moves. Whether he was interacting with a virtual partner in ConSensus or merely faking it old school, Brüks had no idea.
The dancing warrior caught a loose strap of cargo webbing floating from the grille, swung legs overhead and planted them against the bulkhead: hands pulling against strap in lieu of gravity, legs pushing back from the grille in opposition, a human tripod planted against the wall like a three-legged spider. Brüks could clearly see his face. Moore wasn’t even breathing through the mouth.
“Nice moves,” Brüks said.
Moore looked right past him and lifted his feet without a word, turning slowly around the strap like a windmill in a light breeze.
“Uh…”
“Shhh.”
He jumped a little at the hand on his arm. “You don’t want to wake him up,” Lianna said softly.
“He’s asleep?” Brüks looked back at the ceiling; Moore was spinning more quickly now, head out, legs spread in a V, the strap winding tighter between man and metal. In the next instant he was airborne again.
“Sure.” Lianna’s dreads bobbed gently in the wake of her nod. “What, you stay awake when you exercise? You don’t find it, um, boring?”
He didn’t know whether she was taking a shot at the thought of Dan Brüks coming equipped with some kind of sleepwalking option, or the equally ludicrous thought of Dan Brüks working out.
“Why do it at all? A dose of AMPK agonist and he’s a hardbody even if he lies in bed snarfing bonbons all day.”
“Maybe he doesn’t want to depend on augments that can be hacked. Maybe the endorphins give him happier dreams. Maybe old habits die hard.”
Moore sailed over their heads, stabbing the air. Brüks ducked despite himself.
Lianna chuckled. “Don’t worry about that. He can see us just fine.” She caught herself: “Something in there can, anyway.” A kick and a glide took her to the port staircase. “Anyway, don’t waste your time with that loser—the moment he wakes up he’ll just dive back into his Theseus files.” She jerked her chin. “I’ve got some time to kill. Come play with me instead.”
“Play w—” But she’d already turned like a fish and darted down the spoke. He followed her back to the heavy quarters, to the Commons where Moore’s green bottle and his own abandoned gimp hood clung to the bulkhead between bands of minty astroturf.
“Play what?” he asked, catching up. “Tag?”
She grabbed his hood off the wall and tossed it to him, flumping into a convenient hammock in a single smooth motion. “Anything you want. Deity Smackdown. Body-swap boxing is kinda fun. Oh, and there’s a Kardashev sim I’m pretty good at, but I promise to go easy on you.”
He turned the Interloper Accessory over in his hands. The frontal superconductors stared up at him like a pair of startled eyes.
“You do remember that’s mainly a gaming hood, right?”
He shook his head. “I don’t game.”
Lianna eyed him as though he’d just claimed to be a hydrangea. “Why ever not?”
Of course he couldn’t tell her. “It’s not real.”
“It’s not supposed to be,” she explained, surprisingly patient. “That’s what makes them games.”
“Doesn’t feel real.”
“Yeah it does.”
“Not to me.”
“Yeah it does.”
“Not to—”
“Not to put too fine a point on it, Oldschool, but Yes it does.”
“Don’t lecture me about my own perceptions, Lee.”
“It’s the same neurons! The same signal running up the same wiring, and there’s absolutely no way your brain can tell the difference between an electron that came all the way from your retina and one that got injected midstream. Absolutely no way.”
“Doesn’t feel real,” he insisted. “Not to me. And I’m not playing Porn Star Cat Wars with you.”
“Just try, man.”
“Play the AI. It’ll give you a better run for your money anyway.”
“It’s not the sa—”
“Hah!”
Lianna’s face fell. “Fuck. Skewered by my own position statement.”
“By a roach, no less. How’s it feel?”
“Like I just punched myself in the nose,” she admitted.
Neither spoke for a moment.
“Just once? For me?”
“I don’t game.”
“Okay, okay. No harm in asking.”
“Now you’ve asked.”
“Okay.” She swung back and forth in the hammock for a few seconds. (There was something a little off about that motion, a hinted half-spiral oscillation. Coriolis was a subtle trickster.)
“If it makes you feel any better,” she said after a while, “I kinda know what you mean.”
“About?”
“About things not seeming real. I actually feel that way all the time. Gaming’s the only time I don’t feel that way.”
“Huh,” Brüks grunted, a little surprised. “I wonder why.”
And after a moment’s thought: “Probably the company you keep.”
Someone had set up a second tent next to his, stuck it like an engorged white blood cell right at the base of the ladder. Brüks had to effect a half hop sideways off the second rung to avoid bumping it. Something rustled and muttered inside.
“Hello?”
Sengupta stuck her head out, stared at the deck. “Roach.”
Brüks coughed. “You know, that doesn’t actually sound as much like a compliment as you might think.”
She didn’t seem to hear him. “You should see this,” she said, and withdrew.
And poked her head out again after a few seconds: “Well come on.”
He hunkered gingerly down into the tent. Sengupta crouched at its center. Patches of flickering intelligence swarmed across the fabric: columns of numbers; crude plastic-skinned portraits rendered by some computer sketch artist struggling with insufficient eye-witness data; rows of—home addresses, from the look of it.
“What’s this?”
“Nothing you care about.” Reflected lightning played across her face. “Just some fucker going to be eating his own guts when I get hold of him.” She waved one hand and the collage disappeared.
“You do realize they’ve got a whole hab set up as a dorm,” Brüks said.
“That’s too crowded nobody uses this one.”
“I use—” Never mind.
A roommate might not be so bad, he reflected. He’d have never sought one out—good parasites do not draw attention to themselves, no matter how lonely the lifestyle—but if things went south, maybe Valerie would eat Rakshi first. Buy him some time.
“Watch this best party trick ever.”
She threw a video feed onto the wall: rowdy voices, flashing lights, a mag-lev table wobbling at an insane angle thanks to the drunken asshole trying to dance on the damn thing. Campus bar. The student ambience would be a dead giveaway anywhere on the planet but Brüks was pretty sure it was somewhere in Europe. The subtitler was off but he caught snatches of German and Hungarian at least.
A couple of grad students had randomly arranged a dozen empty beer glasses on a table. A crowd of others cheered and chanted and pulled chairs away, clearing a surrounding space. Something was happening stage left, just out of camera range: an antidisturbance, a sudden contagious quelling of noise and commotion that drew eyes and spread around the circle in an instant. The camera turned toward the eye in the storm. Brüks sucked in his breath.
Valerie again.
She stalked into the cleared floor space like a spring-loaded panther, unleashed, autonomous. She wore the cheap throwaway smart-paper weave ubiquitous to lab rats and convicts the world over; it seemed absurd against the jostling background of blazers and holograms and bioluminescent tattoos. Valerie didn’t seem to notice her own violation of the dress code; didn’t no
tice the way the front lines pushed back against the crowd as she passed, or the way the murmuring horde fell silent when she got too close. She had eyes only for the glasses on the table.
What kind of suicidal idiot would take a vampire to a bar? How zoned had these people been, to not be fleeing for the exits?
“Where did you get—”
“Shut up and watch!”
Valerie circled the table, once. She hesitated for a moment, her eyes unfocused, something that might almost have been a smile playing across her lips.
In the next instant, she sprang.
She came down on one bare foot, almost three meters from a standing start; snapped the other down with a stomp, spun and stamped again and jumped—arcing backward this time, over the table itself, flipping in midair and landing in a four-point crouch (left foot right foot right knee left hand) before hopping to the left (stomp), hand-springing forward to land chest-to-face with some semisober sessional who still had enough animal sense to turn greeny-white under a face loaded with retconned chloroplasts. Straight up, now: a vertical one-meter leap with a one-legged landing; about-face (stomp), two diagonal steps toward the table (stomp). Both elbows, one knee crashing simultaneously against ancient floorboards that bounced her smoothly back into a standing position. Finis. After a moment, the camera, shaking despite the very best image-stabilization algorithms a student budget could buy, panned back to the table.
The glasses were arranged in a perfectly straight, evenly spaced line.
“Hard to find this one someone snuck her out the back door you take a vampire out without authorization and your career is over so they really kept the evidence locked up I think it was an initiation or something…”
The view hovered over the tableaux for a long, disbelieving moment. Swung back to the monster who had created it. Valerie stared straight through the camera and a thousand kilometers beyond, smiled that patented bone-chilling smile. She wasn’t even breathing hard.
Everyone else was, though. Reality was finally cutting through the drinks and the drugs and the sheer idiotic bravado of spoiled children raised on promises of immortality. They were in the presence of black magic. They were in the presence of something whose most trivial efforts turned the very laws of motion into feats of telekinesis. And one sodden instant behind all that awe and stunned disbelief, perhaps, the realization of just what all that vast intelligence, all those superconducting motor skills had evolved in the service of.
Hunting.
It didn’t matter what bedtime stories these privileged brats had been told. They were not immortal in such a presence. They were only breakfast. And it was obvious to Brüks—from the way they pulled back and muttered their excuses, the way they edged for doors while keeping their backs to walls, the way even those pretending to be in charge averted their eyes as they scuttled sidelong up to Valerie and told her in weak and shaking voices that it was time to come in now—that they finally knew it.
It was also obvious, in hindsight, that Brüks had been uncharitable to the baselines who’d stolen their rat from its cage for one wild night out. Whoever they were, they hadn’t been suicidal. They hadn’t been idiots. No matter what they might have told themselves before or after, no matter who remembered having the idea.
It hadn’t really been their decision at all.
The gimp hood did amp his learning curve. Brüks had to admit that much.
Data once forced to timeshare the cramped real estate between bands of astroturf stretched luxuriously around him along three axes and three hundred sixty degrees of infinite space. Options he would have had to make eye contact with on a smart-paint display leapt front and center the moment he so much as thought about them. Information that he’d normally have to read, and repeat, and review—it seemed to just stick in the brain with a glance and a swallow. He was used to cognitive enhancers, of course, but this had to be Bicameral tech; he couldn’t imagine that even surgical augments would deliver a bigger boost.
Three trillion nodes and a ten-thousand-link search radius was a pretty impoverished echo of the actual Quinternet, but you could still dig for a thousand lifetimes and never reach its edge. Instant expertise in a million disciplines. Interactive novels you didn’t even have to play, first-person eidetic memories that planted themselves directly into your head if you had the interface (Brüks didn’t, but this came close), served up all the thrills and wonder and experience of just having played without even needing to set aside the time to inhabit the story in real time. Indelible footprints of all the things the Noosphere deemed worthy of remembrance.
Even after fourteen years, Theseus was all over it.
The shock, the disbelief in the wake of Firefall. Riots in every color of the rainbow: terrified hordes fleeing the coming apocalypse, not knowing which way to run; demonstrations against movers and shakers who’d always known more than they let on; looters with short attention spans, thinking only of all that swag left undefended while panicked populations hid under their beds or lashed back against uniforms whose guns and drones and area-denial weaponry were finally, after uncounted decades of casual and brutal unaccountability, just not up to the challenge. Tens of thousands returning from Heaven, fearful of new threats from the real world. Millions more fleeing into it, for pretty much the same reason.
And then, Theseus: the Mother Of All Megaprojects. A mission, a metaphor, a symbol of a shattered world reunited against the common threat. The brave souls who manned her, that small select force standing for Humanity against the cosmos. Amanda Bates, champion of countless WestHem campaigns: her skills so broad, her talents so highly classified that no one had even heard of her before her ascension to the Dream Team. Lisa Takamatsu, Nobel laureate, linguist and den mother to a half dozen separate personalities living in her own head. Jukka Sarasti, the noble vampire, the lion who’d lain down with lambs and was ready to give his life on their behalf. Siri Keeton, synthesist, ambassador to ambassadors, bridge between—
Wait a second—Siri?
He’d heard that name before. He sifted through dusty old memories laid down before the upgrade. Bulletins and biography washed over them in the meantime: Siri Keeton, synthesist, top of a field consisting exclusively of people at the top of their field. Possessed by demons at the age of six, some convulsive virus straight out of the Middle Ages that lit up his brain with electrical storms. It would have killed him outright if radical surgery hadn’t snatched him back from the brink, patched him up, left him scarred and scared and possessed of something altogether new: a fierce never-say-die dedication to beating the odds, the world, to beating his own mutinous brain into submission and getting the job done, all the way out to the very edge of the solar system and beyond.
(Siri’s not exactly baseline himself, actually…)
Almost nothing about his home life. No home vids, no leaked grade-school psych work-ups. An only child, apparently. Mother not mentioned at all, father left unnamed, a shadowy background figure that refused to come into focus except for one passing reference in TimeSpace:
… owes his single-minded pursuit of personal goals as much to his childhood battle with epilepsy as to his upbringing as a soldier’s son …
Brüks turned the words over in his head, searching for coincidence.
“Yah Colonel Carnage had to go out and get his baby almost killed don’tcha know. Before he was even born.”
The low gravity was no friend; Brüks jumped so high he cracked his head on the ceiling.
“Je-sus!” He pulled back the hood. Sengupta appeared between the interface dissolving in his head and the backup resurrecting on the bulkhead behind her. I have got to figure out the privacy settings on this thing, Brüks told himself. Not that they’d keep her from looking over his shoulder if she really wanted to, he supposed.
“Where did you come from?”
“I’ve been here all along five minutes at least.”
“Well say something next time. Announce yourself.” He rubbed the sore spot on his
head. “What are you doing here anyway?”
Sengupta smacked her lips and cast sidelong eyes at her tent. “Hunting a dead man.”
I am the only meat sack on this whole damn ship who isn’t some kind of predator. “Hunting what?” One of the zombies?
“Not on board I mean like you—” Snapping her fingers at the ConSensus display—“hunting him.”
Brüks looked back at the wall: a factoid collage, a palimpsest of puff pieces. It didn’t come anywhere close to biography.
“Jim nearly got him killed?”
“Yah I said that.” Snap snap.
“Says here he had some kind of viral epilepsy.”
Sengupta snorted. “They had to cut out half his brain for viral epilepsy right. Like anyone on Carnage’s salary has to settle for leeches and laudanum when his brat gets sick.”
“So what was it then?”
“Viral something,” Sengupta crowed. “Viral zombieism.”
Ventilator sounds filled the sudden silence.
“Bullshit,” Brüks said softly.
“Oh he didn’t do it deliberately the larva was just collateral. Some evildoer cooked up a basement bug but he got the fine-tuning wrong. Virus likes fetus brains way better than grown-up brains right? All that growth metabolism all that neural pruning everything moves faster so they give it to Mommy and she gives it to Daddy but it really takes off when it gets past that old-time placenta in the third tri. Goes through baby’s brain faster’n flesh-eating. Wake up next morning the little fucker’s already seizing in the womb and it’s lucky for them it’s their canary in the coal mine, they go down to Emerg and shoot up on antizombals, get cleaned out just in time. But too late for little Siri Keeton. He comes into the world and he’s already damaged goods and they deal with it best they can they try all the best drugs and all the best lattices but it’s downhill all the way and after a few years the seizures start up and that’s all they wrote on Siri Keeton’s left hemisphere right? Had to scrape it out like a rotten coconut.”