Echopraxia

by Peter Watts

  LUTTERODT.

  It can’t be, Brüks thought. I saw her, she was dead, her faceplate was in pieces. She was not unconscious. She was not stunned. That was not her I saw pounding on the hatch, awake again, running for her life, too frantic to notice that she’d awakened in someone else’s suit. It was not Lianna we left to burn, it was Valerie. It was Valerie. We abandoned no others who were not already dead.

  We did not do this.

  Sengupta was making noises somewhere between laughter and hysteria: “I told you I told you I told you.

  “Not stupid at all. She knows what she’s doing.”

  Out there all this time, Brüks thought. Hiding. I would never have found her. I would never have even looked.

  Maybe Portia’s hiding, too. Maybe I just haven’t looked hard enough.

  “We have to tell Jim,” he said.

  “Will you look at that,” Moore remarked.

  Lianna’s spacesuit flickered on the dome, a snapshot taken before Sengupta had pulled the drone back for fear of setting off alarms. Not that a live feed would have been any more dynamic.

  “It’s Valerie it’s fucking Valerie—”

  “Apparently.”

  It can’t be, Brüks thought for the thousandth time, the voice in his head weaker with each iteration. By now it was barely whispering.

  “I told you we can’t trust—”

  “She seems harmless enough for now,” the Colonel remarked.

  “Harmless are you felching crazy don’t you remember what she—”

  Moore cut her off: “There’s no way that suit could support an active metabolism all the way back to Earth and there’s no sign of any kind of octopus rig. She’s gone undead for the trip home. Probably expects to revive and jump ship when we dock in LEO. Waking up earlier wouldn’t accomplish anything except using up her O2.”

  “Good then I say we give the bot some teeth and go scrape her off the hull like a goddamn barnacle while we got the chance.”

  “By all means, if you think she hasn’t set up any defenses against just that scenario. If you’re certain the hull isn’t booby-trapped with a nanogram of antimatter set to blow a hole in the ship if anything disturbs her. I assumed you realized that she’s smart. You certainly pulled your drone back fast enough.”

  That gave her pause. “Whadda we do then?”

  “She’s waiting for us to dock. So we don’t dock.” Moore shrugged. “We jump ship and let the Crown burn up on reentry.”

  “And then what surf back through the atmosphere on top of a passing comsat? If I was supposed to pack a shuttle nobody told me.”

  “One thing at a time. For now, just continue your hull crawl in case she’s left anything else out there for us to find. If you’ll excuse me”—he drifted around his own axis and pushed himself off the deck—“I have my own work to do.”

  He disappeared into the attic. Brüks and Sengupta stayed at the mirrorball. Buried in the shadows of some obscure province on the hull, Valerie lay still as death in her stolen skin.

  “What does she want?” Brüks wondered.

  “What all of them want I guess to touch the Face of God.”

  The common enemy, he remembered. “That whole enemy-of-my-enemy thing went down the toilet the moment she slaughtered the Bicams. Whatever it was, she wanted sole access.”

  “She’s got plans for God oh yah they all did. Too bad God had plans for them, too.”

  Maybe she wasn’t happy just touching the Face of God, he mused. Maybe she wants to bring God home as a pet. Maybe, while we’ve been going crazy looking for Portia in here, it’s been out there all along sealed up in a ziplock bag.

  Another good reason to burn this fucking ship. As if we needed one.

  “Whatever those plans were,” he said, “they’re all dead in the water now.”

  “Oh you think so huh?”

  “Jim’s—”

  “Oh Jim that’s a good one. Because vampires are no match for roach plans are they? So how did she get out then in the first place huh? How come she isn’t still strapped to a chair solving puzzles at SFU?”

  Every vampire ever brought back from the junkyard: scrupulously isolated from their own kind, every aspect of their environment regulated and monitored. Hemmed in by crosses and right angles, mortally dependent on precisely rationed drugs to keep them from seizing at the sight of a windowpane. Creatures that, for all their terrifying strength and intelligence, couldn’t even open their eyes on a city street without keeling over.

  Valerie, walking blithely out of her cage one night and scaring the piss out of prey in a local bar for chrissakes and then walking back in again, just to show that she could.

  “I don’t know,” Brüks admitted.

  “I do.” A single, jerky nod. “It wasn’t just her there were others there were three other vampires in that lab and they worked together.”

  He shook his head. “They’d never have met. Vampires are hardly ever allowed in the same wing of a building at the same time, let alone the same room. And if they did meet they’d be more likely to tear out each other’s throats than draw up escape plans.”

  “Oh they drew up their plans all right they all just did it alone.”

  Brüks felt a contradiction rising on his tongue. Then it sunk in.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “Yah.”

  “You’re saying they just knew what the others were going to do. They just—”

  “Elevated respiration from the short redhead prey consistent with conspecific encounter within the past two hundred breaths,” Sengupta chanted. “East south corridors public so exclude them; conspecific must have been moved twenty meters along the north tunnel no more than one hundred twenty five breaths ago. Like that.”

  Each observing the most insignificant behavioral cues, the subtlest architectural details as their masters herded them from lab to cell to conference room. Each able to infer the presence and location of the others, to independently derive the optimal specs for a rebellion launched by X individuals in Y different locations at Z time. And then they’d acted in perfect sync, knowing that others they’d never met would have worked out the same scenario.

  “How do you know?” he whispered.

  “It’s the only way I tried to make it work from every other angle but it’s the only model that fits. You roaches never stood a chance.”

  Jesus, Brüks thought.

  “Pretty good hack right?” Admiration mingled with the fear in Sengupta’s voice. “Can you imagine what those fuckers could do if they actually could stand to be in the same room together?”

  He shook his head, amazed, trying to take it in. “That’s why we made sure they couldn’t.”

  “Made? I thought they were just you know. Really territorial.”

  “Nobody’s that territorial. Someone must’ve amped their responses to keep them from ganging up on us.” Brüks shrugged. “Like the Crucifix Glitch, only—deliberate.”

  “How do you know that I haven’t seen that anywhere.”

  “Like you said, Rak: it’s the only the model that fits. How do you think the line could even breed if their default response was to eviscerate each other on sight? Call it the, the Divide and Conquer Glitch.” He smiled bitterly. “Oh, we were good.”

  “They’re better,” Sengupta said. “Look I don’t care how helpless Carnage thinks that thing is I’m not taking my fucking eyes off it. And I’m firewalling every onboard app and every subroutine I can find until I check every last one for logic bombs.”

  Now there’s a quick weekend project. Aloud: “Anything else?”

  “I don’t know I’m working on it but how do I know she hasn’t already figured everything I could think of? No matter what I do I could be playing right into her hands.”

  “Well, for starters,” Brüks suggested, “what about welding the airlocks shut? You can’t hack sheet metal.”

  Sengupta took her eyes off the horizon, turned her head. For a moment Brüks even thought she m
ight look at him.

  “When it’s time to leave, we cut a hole,” he continued. “Or blow one. I assume this isn’t a rental. If it is, I’m pretty sure the damage deposit’s already a write-off.”

  He waited for the inevitable put-down.

  “That’s a great idea,” Sengupta said at last. “Brute-force baseline thinking shoulda thought of it myself. Fuck safety protocols. I’ll do the hold and the spokes you do the attic.”

  The docking hatch wouldn’t take a weld: it was too reactive, its reflexes almost the stuff of living systems. Clenched tight it could withstand the point-blank heat of lasers and still dilate on command like a dark-adjusting eye. Brüks had to make do with bulkhead panels from the attic, strip them from their frames and weld them into place across the airlock’s inner wall.

  Jim Moore appeared at his side, wordlessly helped him maneuver the panels into place. “Thanks,” Brüks grunted.

  Moore nodded. “Good idea. Although you could probably fab a better—”

  “We’re keeping it low-tech. In case Valerie hacked the fabbers.”

  “Ah.” The Colonel nodded. “Rakshi’s idea, I’m guessing.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Moore held the panel steady at one end while Brüks set the focus. “Serious trust issues, that one. Doesn’t like me at all.”

  “You can’t really blame her, given the way you folks—manipulated her.” Brüks lined up the keyhole, fired. Down at the tip of the welder, metal flared bright as a sun with an electrical snap; but the lensing field damped that searing light down to a candle flame. The tang of metal vapor stung Brüks’s sinuses.

  “I don’t think she knows about that,” Moore said mildly. “And that wasn’t me in any case.”

  “Someone like you, anyway.” Aim. Fire. Snap.

  “Not necessarily.”

  Brüks looked up from the weld. Jim Moore stared back impassively.

  “Jim, you told me how it works. Herded into the service of agendas they’d never support in a thousand years, remember? Somebody thought that up.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” Moore’s eyes focused on some spot just past Brüks’s left shoulder.

  You’re barely even here, Brüks thought. Even now, half of you is caught up in some kind of—séance …

  “There’s a whole other network out there,” Moore was saying. “Orthogonal to all the clouds, interacting with them like—I don’t know, the way dark matter interacts with baryonic matter maybe. Weak effects, and subtle. Very tough to trace, but omnipresent. Ideally suited for the kind of tweaks we use to marshal our forces, as we like to say. And do you know what’s really remarkable about it, Daniel?”

  “Tell me.”

  “As far as we know, nobody built the damn thing. We just discovered it. Turned it to our own ends. The theorists say it could just be an emergent property of networked social systems. Like your wife’s supraconscious networks.”

  “Uh-huh,” Brüks said after a moment.

  “You don’t buy it.”

  He shook his head. “A stealth supernet fine-tuned for the manipulation of pawns with a specific skill set suited to military applications. And it just emerged?”

  Moore smiled faintly. “Of course. No complex finely tuned system could ever just evolve. Something must have created it.”

  Ouch, Brüks thought.

  “I’ll admit I’ve heard that argument before,” Moore said. “I just never thought I’d hear it from a biologist.”

  Evidently half of him was enough.

  AN INSTRUMENT HAS BEEN DEVELOPED IN ADVANCE OF THE NEEDS OF ITS POSSESSOR

  —ALFRED RUSSELL WALLACE

  HE AWOKE TO the sound of jagged breathing. Shadows moved across the skin of his tent.

  “Rak?”

  The flap split down the middle. She crawled inside like some heartbroken infant returning to the womb. Even in here, cheek to jowl, she would not look at his face; she squirmed around and lay down with her back to him, curled up, fists clenched.

  “Uh…,” Brüks began.

  “I told you I didn’t like him I never did and now look,” Sengupta said softly. “We can’t trust him roach, I never really liked him but you could count on him at least you knew where he stood. Now he’s just—gone all the time. Don’t know what he is anymore.”

  “He lost his son. He blames himself. People deal with it in different ways.”

  “It’s more than that he lost his kid years ago.”

  “But then he got him back. In a small way, for a little while. Can you imagine what that must be like—to, to deal with the loss of someone you loved only to find out that they’re still out there somewhere, and they’re talking and it doesn’t matter if they’re talking to you or not it’s still them, it’s new, you’re not just playing a sim or wallowing in the same old video she’s actually out there and—”

  He caught himself, and wondered if she’d noticed.

  I could have her back, he told himself. Not in the flesh maybe, not here in the real world but real time at least, better than this thin graveside monologue Jim clings to. All I have to do is knock on Heaven’s door …

  Which was, of course, the one thing he’d sworn to never do.

  “He says Siri’s alive,” Sengupta whispered. “Says he’s coming home.”

  “Maybe he is. That clip from the transmission, right near the beginning, you know? The coffin.”

  She ran her finger across the inside of the tent. Words wrote themselves in her wake: Point of view matters: I see that now, blind, talking to myself, trapped in a coffin falling past the edge of the solar system.

  Brüks nodded. “That’s the one. If you take that at face value, he’s not on board Theseus anymore.”

  “Lifeboat,” Sengupta said. “Shuttle.”

  “Sounds like he’s coasting in. It’ll take him forever, but there’ll be a hibernaculum on board.” He rested a hand on her shoulder. “Maybe Jim’s not wrong: maybe his son’s coming home.”

  He lay there, breathing in the scent of oil and mold and plastic and sweat, watching his breath ruffle her hair.

  “Something’s coming,” she said at last. “Maybe not Siri.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It just sounds wrong the way it talks there are these tics in the speech pattern it keeps saying Imagine you’re this and Imagine you’re that and it sounds so recursive sometimes it sounds like it’s trying to run some kind of model…”

  Imagine you’re Siri Keeton, he remembered. And gleaned from a later excerpt of the same signal: Imagine you’re a machine.

  “It’s a literary affectation. He’s trying to be poetic. Putting yourself in the character’s head, that kind of thing.”

  “Why do you have to put yourself in your own head though eh why do you have to imagine what it’s like to be you?” She shook her head, a sharp little jerk of denial. “All those splines and filters and NCAs they take out so much you know, you can’t hear the words without them but you can’t hear the voice unless you strip them away. So I went back through all the steps I looked for some sweet spot where you might be able to hear and I don’t know if I did the signal’s so weak and there’s so much fucking noise but there’s this one little spot forty-seven minutes in where you can’t make out the words but you can sort of make out the voice, I can’t be sure you can never be sure but I think the harmonics are off.”

  “Off how?”

  “Siri Keeton’s male I don’t think this is male.”

  “A woman’s voice?”

  “Maybe a woman. If we’re lucky.”

  “What are you saying, Rakshi? You’re saying it might not be human?”

  “I don’t know I don’t know but it just feels wrong and what if it’s not a—a literary affectation what if it’s some kind of simulation? What if something out there is literally trying to imagine what it’s like to be Siri Keeton?”

  “The voice of God,” Brüks murmured.

  “I don’t know I really don’t. But whatever it is it’s
got its hooks into a professional killer with a zombie switch in his brain. And I don’t know why but I know a hack a when I see one.”

  “How could it know enough to hack him? How would it even know he exists?”

  “It must’ve known Siri and Siri knew him. Maybe that’s enough.”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted after a bit. “Hacking a human mind over a six-month time lag, it seems—”

  “That’s enough touching,” she said.

  “What?”

  She shrugged his hand off her shoulder. “I know you gerries like to touch and have meat sex and everything but the rest of us don’t need people to get us off if you don’t mind. I’ll stay here but it doesn’t mean anything okay?”

  “Uh, this is my—”

  “What?” she said, facing away.

  “Nothing.” He settled back down, maneuvered his back against the wall of the tent. It left maybe thirty centimeters between them. He might even be able to sleep, if neither of them rolled over.

  If he felt the least bit tired.

  Rakshi wasn’t sleeping either, though. She was scratching at her own commandeered side of the tent, bringing up tiny light shows on the wall: a little animatic of the Crown, centered on the rafters where MOORE, J. clung to a ghost, or danced on the strings of some unknowable alien agenda, or both; the metal landscape the drone traversed in search of countermeasures; the merest smudge of infrared where a sleeping monster hid in the shadows. There really weren’t any safe places, Brüks reflected. Might as well feign what safety you could in numbers. The company of a friend, the warmth of a pet, it was all the same; all that mattered was the simple brain-stem comfort of a body next to yours, huddled against the night.

  Sengupta turned her face a little: a cheekbone, the tip of a nose in partial eclipse. “Roach?”

  “I really wish you’d stop calling me that.”