Echopraxia

by Peter Watts

  Brüks nodded. “Plus I think the hive—fragments sometimes, you know? Sometimes I think I’m looking at one network, sometimes two or three. They drop in and out of sync all the time. I’m correcting for that—trying to, anyway—but I still can’t get any correlations that make sense.” He sighed. “At least with the Catholics, you know that when someone hands you a cracker there’s gonna be wine in the mix at some point.”

  Lianna shrugged, unconcerned. “You gotta have faith. You’ll figure it out, if it’s God’s will.”

  He couldn’t help himself. “Jesus Christ, Lee, how can you keep saying that? You know there’s not the slightest shred of evidence—”

  “Really.” In an instant her body language had changed; suddenly there was fire in her eyes. “And what kind of evidence would be good enough for you, Dan?”

  “I—”

  “Voices in the clouds? Fiery letters in the sky proclaiming I Am the Lord thy God, you insignificant weasel? Then would you believe?”

  He held up his hands, reeling in the face of her anger. “Lee, I didn’t mean—”

  “Oh, don’t back down now. You’ve been shitting on my beliefs since the day we met. The least you can do is answer the goddamn question.”

  “I—well…” Probably not, he had to admit. The first thought that fiery skywriting would bring to his mind would be hoax, or hallucination. God was such an absurd proposition at its heart that Brüks couldn’t think of any physical evidence for which it would be the most parsimonious explanation.

  “Hey, you’re the one who keeps talking about the unreliability of human senses.” It sounded feeble even to himself.

  “So no evidence could ever change your mind. Tell me how that doesn’t make you a fundamentalist.”

  “The difference,” he said slowly, feeling his way, “is that brain hack is an alternate hypothesis entirely consistent with the observed data. And Occam likes it a lot more than omnipotent sky wizard.”

  “Yeah. Well, the people you’re putting under your nanoscope know a thing or two about observed data too, and I’m pretty sure their publication record kicks yours all over the innersys. Maybe you don’t know everything. I gotta go.”

  She turned to the ladder, gripped the rails so hard her knuckles whitened.

  Stopped. Unclenched, a little.

  Turned back.

  “Sorry. I just…”

  “S’okay,” he told her. “I didn’t mean to, well…” Except he had, of course. They both had. They’d been doing this dance the whole trip downhill.

  It just hadn’t seemed so personal before.

  “I don’t know what got into me,” Lianna said.

  He didn’t call her on it. “It’s okay. I can be kind of a brain stem sometimes.”

  She tried on a smile.

  “Anyhow, I do have to go. We’re good?”

  “We’re good.”

  She climbed away, smile still fastened to her face, bent just slightly to the left. Favoring ribs that medical technology had long since completely healed.

  He wasn’t a scientist, not to these creatures. He was a baby in a playpen, an unwelcome distraction to be kept busy with beads and rattles while the grown-ups convened on more adult matters. This gift Lianna had brought him wasn’t a sample; it was a pacifier.

  But by all the laws of thermodynamics, it did its job. Brüks was hooked at first sight.

  He pulled the gimp hood over his head, linked into the lab’s ConSensus channel, and time just—stopped. It stopped, then shot ahead in an instant. He threw himself down through orders of magnitude, watched molecules in motion, built stick-figure caricatures and tried to coax them into moving the same way. He felt distant surprise at his own proficiency, marveled at how much he’d accomplished in just a few minutes; wondered vaguely why his throat felt so dry and somehow eighteen hours had passed.

  What are you? he thought in amazement.

  Not computronium, anyway. Not organic. More like a Tystovitch plasma helix than anything built out of protein. Things that looked like synaptic gates were ticking away in there to the beat of ions; some carried pigment as well as electricity, like chromatophores moonlighting as associative neurons. Trace amounts of magnetite, too; this thing could change color if it ran the right kind of computations.

  Not much more computational density than your garden-variety mammalian brain, though. That was surprising.

  And yet … the way it was arranged …

  He resented his own body for needing water, ignored the increasing need to take a piss until his bladder threatened to burst. He built tabletop vistas of alien technology and shrank himself down into their centers, wandered thunderstruck through streets and cityscapes and endlessly shifting lattices of intelligent crystal. He stood humbled by the sheer impossibility held in that little fleck of alien matter, and by the sheer mind-boggling simplicity of its execution.

  It was as though someone had taught an abacus to play chess. It was as though someone had taught a spider to argue philosophy.

  “You’re thinking,” he murmured, and couldn’t keep an amazed smile off his face.

  It actually did remind him of a spider, in fact. One particular genus that had become legendary among invertebrate zoologists and computational physicists alike: a problem-solver that improvised and drew up plans far beyond anything that should have been able to fit into such a pinheaded pair of ganglia. Portia. The eight-legged cat, some had called it. The spider that thought like a mammal.

  It took its time, mind you. Sat on its leaf for hours, figuring out the angles without ever making a move, and then zap: closed on its prey along some roundabout route that broke line-of-sight for minutes at a time. Somehow it hit every waypoint, never lost track of the target. Somehow it just remembered all those three-dimensional puzzle pieces with a brain barely big enough to register light and motion.

  As far as anyone could tell, Portia had learned to partition its cognitive processes: almost as if it were emulating a larger brain piece by piece, saving the results of one module to feed into the next. Slices of intellect, built and demolished one after another. No one would ever know for sure—a rogue synthophage had taken out the world’s Salticids before anyone had gotten around to taking a closer look—but the Icarus slime mold seemed to have taken the same basic idea and run with it. There’d be some upper limit, of course—some point at which scratchpads and global variables took up so much room there’d be none left over for actual cognition—but this was just a fleck, this was barely the size of a ladybug. The condenser chamber was awash in the stuff.

  What had Lianna called it? God. The Face of God.

  Maybe, Brüks thought. Give it time.

  “Scale-invariant shit it timeshares!”

  He’d almost gotten used to it by now. Barely even jumped at the sound of Rakshi Sengupta exclaiming unexpectedly at his side. He peeled the hood back and there she was, a meter to his left: eavesdropping on his models through an ancillary bulkhead feed.

  He sighed and nodded. “Emulates larger networks a piece at a time. That one little piece of Portia could—”

  “Portia.” Sengupta stabbed the air, stabbed ConSensus. “After the spider right?”

  “Yeah. That one little piece could probably model a human brain if it had to.” He pursed his lips. “I wonder if it’s conscious.”

  “No chance it’d take days just to chug through a half-second brain slice and networks only wake up—”

  “Right.” He nodded. “Of course.”

  Her eyes jiggled and another window sprouted off to one side: AUX/RECOMP, and the postbiological wonder painted on its guts. “Bet that could be though. What else you got?”

  “I think it was designed specifically for this kind of environment,” Brüks said after a moment.

  “What space stations?”

  “Empty space stations. Smart mass isn’t anything special. But something this small, running cognition-level computations—there’s a reason you don’t run into that a lot on Earth.”<
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  Sengupta frowned. “’Cause being a thousand times smarter than the thing that’s trying to eat you isn’t much help if it takes you a month to be a thousand times smarter.”

  “Pretty much. Glacial smarts only pay off if your environment doesn’t change for a long time. ’Course it’s not such a bottleneck at higher masses, but—well, I think this was designed to work no matter how much or how little managed to sneak through. Which implies that it’s optimized for telematter dispersal—although if it isn’t using our native protocols, how it hijacks the stream in the first place is beyond me.”

  “Oh they figured that out couple days ago,” Sengupta told him.

  “Really?” Fuckers.

  “Know how when you pack a layer of ball bearings into the bottom of a crate and the second layer fits into the bumps and valleys laid down by the first and the third fits onto the second so it all comes down to the first layer, first layer determines all the turtles all the way up, right?”

  Brüks nodded.

  “Like that. ’Cept the ball bearings are atoms.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Yah because I got nothing better to do than play tricks on roaches.”

  “But—that’s like laying down a set of wheels and expecting it to act as a template for a car.”

  “More like laying down a set of tread marks and expecting it to act as a template for a car.”

  “Come on. Something has to tell the nozzles where to squirt that first layer. Something has to tell the second layer of atoms when to come though so that they can line up with the first. Might as well call it magic and be done with it.”

  “You call it magic. Hive calls it the Face of God.”

  “Yeah. Well, the tech may be way beyond us, but superstitious labels aren’t bringing it any closer.”

  “Oh that’s rich you think God’s a thing God’s not a thing.”

  “I’ve never thought God was a thing,” Brüks said.

  “Good ’cause it’s not. It’s water into wine it’s life from clay it’s waking meat.”

  Sweet smoking Jesus. Not you, too.

  He summed it up to move it along. “So God’s a chemical reaction.”

  Sengupta shook her head. “God’s a process.”

  Fine. Whatever.

  But she wasn’t letting it go. “Everything’s numbers you go down far enough don’t you know?” She poked him, pinched his arm. “You think this is continuous? You think there’s anything but math?”

  He knew there wasn’t. Digital physics had reigned supreme since before he’d been born, and its dictums were as incontrovertible as they were absurd. Numbers didn’t just describe reality; numbers were reality, discrete step functions smoothing up across the Planck length into an illusion of substance. Roaches still quibbled over details, doubtless long since resolved by precocious children who never bothered to write home: was the universe a hologram or a simulation? Was its boundary a program or merely an interface—and if the latter, what sat on the other side, watching it run? (A few latter-day religions had predictably answered that question with the names of their favorite deities, although Brüks had never been entirely clear on what an omniscient being would need a computer for. Computation, after all, implied a problem not yet solved, insights not yet achieved. There was really only one sort of program for which foreknowledge of the outcome didn’t diminish the point of the exercise, and Brüks had never been able to find any religious orders that described God as a porn addict.)

  So. The laws of physics were the OS of some inconceivable supercomputer called reality. At least that explained why reality had a resolution limit; Planck length and Planck time had always looked a bit too much like pixel dimensions for comfort. Past that, though, it had always seemed like angels dancing on the head of a pin. None of it changed anything way up here where life happened, and besides, positing universe as program didn’t seem to answer the Big Questions so much as kick them down the road another order of magnitude. Might as well just say that God did it after all, head off the infinite regress before it drove you crazy.

  Still …

  “A process,” Brüks mused. That sounded more—modest, at least. He wondered why Lianna had never spelled it out during their debates.

  Sengupta’s head bobbed. “What kind of process though that’s the question. Master algorithm defining the laws of physics or some daemon reaching up to break ’em?” Her eyes flickered briefly toward his, flickered away at the last instant. “That’s how we know it exists in the first place. Miracles.”

  “Miracles.”

  “Impossible events. Physics violations.”

  “Such as?”

  “Star formation way below the z-limit. Photons doing things they’re not supposed to the metarules changing over by the Cloverleaf Nebula. They vindicated the Smolin model or something I dunno it’s beyond me so you’d never get it in a million years. But they found something impossible. Way down deep.”

  “A miracle.”

  “I think more than one but that’s what I said.”

  “Wait a second.” Brüks frowned. “If the laws of physics are part of some universal operating system and God, by definition, breaks them … you’re basically saying…”

  “Don’t stop now roach you’re almost there.”

  “You’re basically saying God’s a virus.”

  “Well that’s the question isn’t it?”

  Portia iterated before them.

  What was it Lianna had said? We’ve always thought c and friends ruled supreme, out to the quasars and beyond. What if they’re just some kind of local ordinance?

  “What if they’re a bug?” he murmured.

  Sengupta grinned and stared at his wrist. “Change the whole mission wouldn’t it?”

  “This mission?”

  “Bicameral mission the mission of the whole Order. Reality’s iterating everywhere but there’re these inconsistencies. Maybe not the right reality, mmm? Change alpha a just bit and the universe stops supporting life. Maybe alpha’s wrong. Maybe life’s just a parasitic offshoot of a corrupted OS.”

  Somewhere in Brüks’s head, a penny dropped.

  For fifteen billion years, the universe had been shooting for maximum entropy. Life didn’t throw entropy into reverse—nothing did—but it put on the brakes, even as it spewed chaos out the other end. The gradient of Life was the first scale any aspiring biologist learned to sing: the further you kept yourself from thermodynamic equilibrium, the more alive you were.

  It’s the Anthropic Principle’s evil twin, he thought.

  “What—what is this mission, exactly?” Brüks asked softly.

  “Mmmm.” Sengupta rocked gently back and forth. “They know God exists already that’s old. I think now they’re trying to figure what to do with It.”

  “What to do with God.”

  “Maybe worship. Maybe disinfect.”

  The word hung there, reeking of blasphemy.

  “How do you disinfect God?” Brüks said after a very long time.

  “Don’t ask me I just fly the ship.” Her gaze slid back to the bulkhead, to the church of AUX/RECOMP and the alien emissary there.

  “I think that puppy’s giving them some ideas though,” she said.

  Lianna Lutterodt was lost in inner space when he sailed through the Commons ceiling. She blinked as he bounced off the deck, shook her head: her eyes came back to the here and now as a courtesy window opened on the bulkhead. A flatscreen concession to the neurologically disabled.

  Icarus. The confessional. A rosette of spacesuited monks, outward facing, visors raised to bare their souls before the face of God.

  “Hi,” Brüks said carefully.

  She nodded around a mouthful of couscous. “Rakshi says you made some serious headway. Even gave it name.”

  He nodded. “Portia. It’s pretty amazing, it…”

  Her gaze drifted back to the window. She can’t take her eyes off them, he thought, just as she did and caught him looking: �
�What?”

  “It’s not just amazing,” he told her. “It’s actually kind of scary.” He dipped his chin at the feed. “And they cut pieces out of it.”

  “They take samples,” Lianna said. “Almost like real scientists.”

  “Something that reaches down across half a light-year and makes our own machines do backflips around the laws of physics.”

  “Not like they can get all the answers by just staring at it all day.”

  “I thought that was exactly how they got their answers.”

  “They know what they’re doing, Dan.”

  “That’s one hypothesis. Want to hear another?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Ever hear of induced thanoparorasis?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh.” Lianna shrugged. “Common procedure among the augmented. Keeps ’em from collapsing into existential angst.”

  “It’s a bit more fundamental than that,” Brüks said. “Have you got it?”

  “Thanoparoasis? ’Course not.”

  “Are you going to die?”

  “Eventually. Hopefully not for a while.”

  “Good to know,” Brüks told her. “Because if you were a victim of ITP, you wouldn’t be able to answer that question. You might not even have heard it.”

  “Dan, I don’t—”

  “You and I”—raising his voice over hers—“we’re blessed with a certain amount of denial. You admit you’re going to die, you even know it intellectually on some level, but you don’t really believe it. You can’t. The thought of dying is just too damn scary. So we invent some Fairyland Heaven to take us in after we pass on, or we look to your friends and their friends to give us immortality on a chip or—if we’re hardcore realists—we just pay lip service to death and decay and keep right on feeling immortal anyway.

  “But some folks”—he nodded at the feed—“just get too damn smart. They put their heads together and develop insights way too deep to paper over with a few million years’ worth of whistling past the graveyard. People like that would know they were going to die, they’d feel it in the gut. They’d know what death means in a way you or I never could. And the only way they can keep from collapsing into whimpering puddles is to give denial a hand, cut a cognitive hole into the middle of their heads. We may live in denial most of the time but those people—they didn’t even show a fright response when it looked like their whole damn hive was an hour from the morgue. Like those agnosiacs who’d die of thirst in their own homes after some tumor’s destroyed their ability to recognize water.”