Echopraxia

by Peter Watts

  “I don’t think they’re like that,” Lianna said softly.

  “Sure you do. You told me as much, remember? Reset the sensory biases, randomize the errors.”

  They watched in silence as the hive poked a stick at something dangerous.

  “A lot of them died, not so long ago,” Brüks said after a while.

  “I remember.”

  “Me, too. And you know what I remember the most, you know what I can’t forget? Luckett rolling around in his own shit while his spinal cord shorted out, smiling and insisting that everything was going according to plan.”

  Lianna turned away, eyes bright. “I liked him. He was a good man.”

  “I wouldn’t know. All I know is, he sounded just like every hapless Yahweh junkie who ever looked around at all the horror and injustice in the world and mumbled some shit about how It’s not the place of the clay to question the potter. The only difference is that everyone else lays it all on God’s master plan and your Bicamerals talk about their own.”

  “You’re wrong. They don’t think of themselves that way at all.”

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t, either. Maybe you shouldn’t have quite so much faith—”

  “Dan, shut the fuck up. You don’t know anything about it, you can’t know—”

  “I was there, Lee. I saw you. They’ve got you so convinced they’re infallible, they’ve got everything so factored five ways to Sunday that you didn’t even need a hole cut into your brain. You went straight into the lion’s den without missing a beat, you got right up in Valerie’s face and it didn’t occur to you for a microsecond that she’s your goddamn predator, she could rip your throat out without even thinking about it—”

  “Do not put that on them.” Lianna’s voice was flinty. “That was my mistake. Chinedum was—I will not let you blame anyone else for my stupidity.”

  “Isn’t that the way, though? Isn’t that how it’s always been? Just obey the guys in the funny hats and if it’s a win it’s all praise be to Allah but if your ass gets kicked it’s your fault. You read scripture the wrong way. You weren’t worthy. You didn’t have enough faith.”

  Some of the fight seemed to bleed out of her then; some of the old Lianna Lutterodt peeked through. She sighed, and shook her head, and ghosted a smiled. “Hey, remember when this used to be fun?”

  He spread his hands, feeling helpless. “I just…”

  “You mean well. I know. But after all you’ve seen, you can’t deny how far ahead of us they are.”

  “Oh they’re scary smart, I’ll give them that. They run circles around the best we roaches can throw at them, they snap this ship like a twig and pitch it all the way to the sun, drop us dead center onto Icarus’s dark side from a hundred million kilometers with barely a thruster tweak. But they glitch, just like we do. They still wash away their sins, because after all that rewiring their brains still mix up sensation and metaphor. They’re more glitchy than we are, because half their upgrades are barely out of beta—and while we’re on the subject, has anyone factored in the neuropsychologic impairment that a few weeks of hyperbaric exposure must be inflicting on all that extra brain tissue?”

  Lianna shook her head. “We’re not on the steppes anymore, Dan. We don’t measure success by how far you can throw a spear in a crosswind. They think rings around us in every way that matters.”

  “Uh-huh. And Masaso and Luckett are still dead. And all that poor bastard could cling to while his lights went out was that it was all according to plan.” He put his hands on her shoulders. “Lee, it’s not just that these people can’t wrap their heads around mortality. They can’t even entertain the possibility they could be wrong. If that doesn’t scare the shit out of you—”

  She shook him off. “The plan was to get us to Icarus. Here we are.”

  “Here we are.” Brüks pointed to a hole in the wall, where a hived demigod communed with something that could change the laws of physics. “And how does it feel to know our lives depend on the judgment of something that can’t even imagine it could die?”

  WARS TEACH US NOT TO LOVE OUR ENEMIES, BUT TO HATE OUR ALLIES.

  —W. L. GEORGE

  “WHAT’S RAKSHI GOT against you guys?”

  The lights were dimmed, the mutants and monsters were off pursuing their alien agendas, and the Glenmorangie was back on the table. Moore grimaced at Brüks, refriended, over the lip of his glass. “Who’s us guys?”

  “Military,” Brüks said. “Why’s she got such a hate-on for you?”

  “Not sure. Self-loathing, maybe.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Sengupta’s as much of a soldier as I am. She just doesn’t know it. Not consciously, at least.”

  “Metaphorically, you mean.”

  Moore shook his head, took another sip; his cheeks puckered as he swirled the single malt around in his mouth. He swallowed. “WestHem Alliance. Same as me.”

  “And she doesn’t know.”

  “Nope.”

  “What’s her rank?”

  “Doesn’t work like that.”

  “Some kind of sleeper agent?”

  “It’s not like that, either.”

  “Then what—”

  Moore raised a hand. Brüks fell silent.

  “I say army,” Moore told him, “you think boots on the ground. Drones, zombies, battlefield robots. Things you can see. Fact is, if you’ve reached the point where you need that kind of brute force, you’ve already lost.”

  Visions of the Oregon desert sprang into Brüks’ head. “Brute force seemed to work just fine for those fuckers who attacked the monastery.”

  “They were trying to stop us. Here we are.”

  Human bodies, turned to stone. The screams of dying Bicamerals.

  Not bodies, he reminded himself. Body parts. Here in the dusk of the twenty-first century it was so easy to confuse murder with the amputation of a fingertip. None of the usual definitions made sense when a single supersoul stretched across so many bodies.

  “Suppose you’re a political heavyweight,” Moore was saying. “A mover and shaker, a titan. And down around your ankles are all those folks you never used to worry about. The moved and the shaken. They don’t like you much. They never have, but historically that never mattered. Little people. Back in the day you just ignored them. The business of titans is other titans.

  “But now they get into the nodes, they decrypt your communiqués, they hack your best-laid plans. They hate your guts, Daniel, because you are big and they are small, because you turn their lives upside down with a wave of your hand and they don’t care about realpolitik or the big picture. They only care about monkey-wrenching and whistleblowing.

  “And you find out about them. You find out about Rakshi Sengupta and Caitlin deFranco and Parvad Gamji and a million others. You give them what they want. You leave the back door open just a crack, so they can see your files on the African Hegemony. You let them sniff out a weakness in your firewall. Maybe one day they find out how to provoke a firestorm in one of your subsidiary accounts, bankrupt some puppet government you kept under your thumb for tax purposes.”

  “Except that’s not what they’re doing,” Brüks surmised.

  “No it’s not.” There was a hint of sadness in Moore’s smile. “It’s all window dressing. They think they’re really sticking it to you, but they’re being—herded. Into the service of agendas they’d never support in a thousand years, if they only knew. And they’re dedicated, Daniel. They’re ferocious. They fight your wars with a passion you could never buy and never coerce, because they’re doing it out of pure ideology.”

  “Should you be telling me this?” Brüks wondered.

  “You mean, state secrets? What’s a state, these days?”

  “I mean, what if I tell her?”

  “Go ahead. She won’t believe you.”

  “Why not? She already hates you guys.”

  “She can’t believe you.” Moore tapped his temple. “Recruits get—t
weaked.”

  Brüks stared.

  “Or at least,” Moore elaborated, “she can’t believe she believes you.” He eyed his scotch. “On some level, I think she already knows.”

  Brüks shook his head. “You don’t even have to pay them.”

  “Sure we do. Sometimes. We make sure they have enough to make ends meet. Let them skim some cream from an offshore account, drop a legitimate contract into their in-box before the rent comes due. Mostly, though, we inspire them. Oh, they get bored sometimes. Kids, you know. But all it takes is a little judicious injustice, some new atrocity visited on the little people. Get them all fired up again, and off they go.”

  “That seems a bit—”

  Moore raised an eyebrow. “Immoral?”

  “Complicated. Why herd them into hating you? Why not just leave a trail of bread crumbs pointing back at the other guy?”

  “Ah. Demonize your enemy.” Moore nodded sagely. “I wonder why we never thought of that.”

  Brüks grimaced.

  “Rakshi and her kind, they’re wise to the old school. You leak footage showing the slants skewering babies and it’ll take them maybe thirty seconds to find a pixel that doesn’t belong. Discredit the whole campaign. People put a lot less effort into picking apart evidence that confirms what they already believe. The great thing about making yourself the villain is, nobody’s likely to contradict you.

  “Besides.” He spread his hands. “These days, half the time we don’t even know who the real enemy is.”

  “And that’s easier than just tweaking them so they flat-out want to work for you.”

  “Not easier. Marginally more legal.” The Colonel sipped his drink. “A small agnosia to protect state secrets is one thing. Changing someone’s basic personality without consent—that’s in a whole other league.”

  Neither spoke for a while.

  “That is really fucked up,” Brüks said at last.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So why’s she here?”

  “Driving the ship.”

  “Crown’s perfectly capable of driving itself, unless it’s even more old school than I am.”

  “Better to have meat and electronics backing each other up in low-intel scenarios. Complementary vulnerabilities.”

  “But why her? Why would she agree to work under someone she hated—”

  “This mission’s under Bicameral command,” the Colonel reminded him. “And anyone in Sengupta’s position would jump at an opportunity like this. Most of those people spend their time babysitting low-orbit crap-zappers from their bedrooms, praying that one of them glitches enough to warrant human intervention. Actual deep-space missions—anything with enough of a time lag to need onboard real-time piloting—those’ve been scarcer than snowstorms ever since Firefall. The Bicamerals had their pick of the field.”

  “Rakshi must be very good at her job.”

  Moore drained his glass, set it down. “I think in her case it was more a function of motivation. She has a wife on class-four life support.”

  “And no way to pay the bills,” Brüks guessed.

  “She does now.”

  “So they didn’t want the best and the brightest,” Brüks said slowly. “They wanted someone who’d do anything to save her wife.”

  “Motivation,” Moore repeated.

  “They wanted a hostage.”

  The soldier looked at him with something that might almost have been pity. “You disapprove.”

  “You don’t.”

  “You’d rather they picked someone who just wanted to get out of the house? Someone who was in it for the thrills or the bank balance? This was the humane choice, Daniel. Celu would have been dead. Now she’s got a chance.”

  “Celu,” Brüks said, and swallowed on a throat gone suddenly dry.

  Moore nodded. “Rakshi’s wife.”

  “What was, um … what was wrong with her?” Thinking: There’s no chance. It would be one in a million.

  Moore shrugged. “Bio attack, about a year ago. New England. Some kind of encephalitis variant, I think.”

  Then you’re wrong. She doesn’t have a chance. She doesn’t. I don’t care how much they spend keeping her heart beating, there’s no coming back from something like that.

  Oh my God. I killed her.

  I killed Rakshi’s wife.

  It hadn’t been anything radical. It hadn’t even been anything new.

  The methodology was decades old, a proven tent pole for a thousand peer-reviewed studies or more. Everyone knew you couldn’t simulate a pandemic without simulating its victims; everyone knew that human behavior was too complex to thumbnail with a few statistical curves. Populations weren’t clouds, and people weren’t points; people were agents, autonomous and multifaceted. There was always the outlier who ran into the hot zone after a loved one, the frontline medic whose unsuspected fear of centipedes might cause him to freeze at some critical juncture. And since pandemics, by definition, involved millions of people, your simulation had better be running millions of human-level AIs if you wanted to get realistic results.

  Or you could piggyback on a preexisting model where each of a million data points was already being run by a human-level intelligence.

  Game worlds weren’t nearly as popular as they’d once been—Heaven had stolen away those myriad souls who preferred to play with themselves, free of community standards—but their virtual sandboxes were still more than large enough to keep them way out front as the CDC’s favorite platform for epidemiological research. For decades now, the plagues and sniffles that afflicted wizards and trolls alike had been tweaked and nudged toward specs that made them ideal analogs for the more pedestrian outbreaks afflicting what some still called the real world. Corrupted Blood bore more than a passing similarity to ectopic fibrodysplasia. The transmission dynamics of Beowulf’s Bane, an exotic glowing fungus that ate the flesh of elves, bore an uncanny resemblance to those of necrotizing fasciitis. Flying carpets and magic portals mapped onto airlines and customs bottlenecks; Mages to jet-setting upper-echelon elites with unlimited carbon ceilings. For a generation now, public health policies the world over had been informed by the lurid fantasy afflictions of clerics and wights.

  It was just bad timing that a Realist faction out of Peru figured how to hack that system when Dan Brüks and his merry band were running a sim on emerging infectious diseases in Latin America.

  Nobody caught it at the time. The Realists had been subtle. They’d left the actual disease parameters strictly alone: any sudden changes to mutation rate or infectivity would’ve shown up in the dailies. They’d tweaked the superficial appearance of infected players instead, according to location and demographic. Certain victims looked a bit sicklier than they should have, while others—wealthier PCs with gold and flying mounts at their command—looked a little healthier. It didn’t change the biology one whit, but it edged Human responses just a hair to the left. Subsequent outbreaks edged them a bit farther. The ripples spread out of gamespace and into the reports, out of the reports and into policy. Nobody noticed the tiny back door that had opened in the resulting contingency plans until six months later, when someone discovered a suspicious empty vial in the garbage behind the Happy Humpback Daycare Center. By then, a shiny new encephalitis mod had already slipped past Daniel Brüks’s first-response algorithms and was carving a bloody swathe from Bridgeport to Philadelphia.

  Celu MacDonald had survived unscathed. She’d hadn’t even been in the kill zone; she’d been on the other side of the world, growing freelance code next to the girl of her dreams. Those weren’t as rare as they’d once been. In fact they’d grown pretty common ever since Humanity had learned to edit the dream as well as the girl. Soul mates could be made to order now: monogamous, devoted, fiercely passionate. The kind of love that prior generations had barely tasted before their hollow sacraments withered into miserable life sentences, or shattered outright as the bloom faded, the eye wandered, the genes reasserted themselves.

 
Not for Macdonald and her kind, that empty hypocrisy. They’d ripped the lie right out of their heads, rewired and redeemed it, turned it into joyful truth with a lifetime warranty. First-person sex had even made a modest comeback in the shelter of that subculture, or so Brüks had heard.

  He didn’t know any of that at the time, of course. Celu MacDonald was just a name on a list of subcontractors, a monkey hired to grow code the academics couldn’t be bothered with. Brüks only learned of her after the fact: a bloody little coda at the end of the massacre.

  There’d been no conspiracy. No one had thrown her to the wolves. But the academics had had deans and CEOs and PR hotshots keeping their identities confidential, keeping their connections from staining the good names of venerable institutions. Nobody had given any cover to Celu MacDonald. When the dust had finally settled, when the inquiries and ass-covering and alibis had all run their course, there’d she’d been: standing alone in the crosshairs with hacked code dribbling from her hands.

  Maybe it had been Rakshi who’d found her, staring slack-jawed at the ceiling after some bereaved next of kin decided to make the punishment fit the crime. She would still have been breathing. The variant didn’t kill its victims. It burned them out and moved on; you could tell when it had finished because the convulsions stopped, at long last, and left nothing behind but vegetation.

  They’d found the guy that did it, eventually: dead for days, at the center of a micro-outbreak that had imploded under quarantine. Evidently he’d slipped up. But Rakshi Sengupta was still hunting. That was the word she’d used. Denied her revenge on the hand that had pulled the trigger, she was looking for the gunsmith. All that seething anger. All those hours spent trawling the cache. All that implanted idealized love, transmuted into grief: all that grief, transmuted into rage. The growled threats and mutterings about hunting dead men and debts owed and Some fucker going to be eating his own guts when I get hold of him.