Echopraxia

by Peter Watts

  “What you said before, about losing people. Different people deal in different ways that’s what you said right?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “How do you deal?”

  “I—” He didn’t quite know how to answer. “Maybe the person you lose comes back, someday. Maybe someday someone else fits into the same space.”

  Sengupta snorted softly, and there was an echo of the old derision there: “You just sit around and wait?”

  “No, I—get on with my life. Do other things.” Brüks shook his head, vaguely irritated. “I suppose you’d just whip up some customized ConSensus playmate—”

  “Don’t you fucking tell me what I’d do.”

  Brüks bit his lip. “Sorry.”

  Stupid old man. You know where the hot buttons are and still you can’t help pushing the damn things.

  There was a bright side, though, to Colonel Carnage’s deepening insanity, to Valerie’s lethal waiting games, to ghosts haunting the ether and uncertain fates waiting to pounce: at least Rakshi wasn’t hunting him anymore. He wondered at that thought, a little surprised at Sengupta’s place atop his own personal hierarchy of fear. She was just a human being, after all. Unarmed flesh and blood. She wasn’t some prehistoric nightmare or alien shapeshifter, no god or devil. She was just a kid—a friend even, insofar as she could even think in those terms. An innocent who didn’t even know his secret. Who was Rakshi Sengupta, next to monsters and cancers and a whole world on the brink? What was her grudge, next to all these other terrors closing in on all sides?

  It was a rhetorical question, of course. Sure the universe was full of terrors.

  She was the only one he’d brought upon himself.

  His own hunt wasn’t going so well.

  Of course, Portia wasn’t quite so visible a target as Daniel Brüks. Brüks couldn’t subsist on the ambient thermal energy of bulkhead atoms vibrating at room temperature, couldn’t flatten himself down to paper and wrap himself around a water pipe to mask even that meager heatprint. He’d wondered about albedo or spectro, wondered if a probe built of very short wavelengths might be able to pick up the diffraction gratings that Portia used to talk—perhaps it used them as camouflage as well—but the improvised detectors he fabbed turned up nothing. Which didn’t mean they didn’t work, necessarily. Maybe it only meant that Portia kept to the Crown’s infinite fractal landscape of holes and crannies too small for bots and men.

  He was almost certain it couldn’t launch an open attack without letting some tell slip beforehand: the heat signature of muscle analogs building a charge, the reallocation of mass sufficient to construct an appendage at some given set of coordinates. It could run, though, in some sort of postbiological baseline state, powered by the subtle energy resonating from the crude mass of the real substrate into the superconducting intelligence of the false one. It could think and plan forever in that mode, if Bicameral calculations had been right. It could hide.

  The less he found, the more he feared. Something nearby was watching him; he felt it in his gut.

  “Ship’s too damn noisy,” he confided to Sengupta. “Thermally, allometrically. Portia could be anywhere, everywhere. How would we know?”

  “It’s not,” she told him.

  “Why so sure? You were the one who warned me, back when—”

  “I thought it might have got in yeah. Maybe it did. But not enough to get everywhere it didn’t coat everything. It didn’t swallow us.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It wanted to keep us in Icarus. It wouldn’t have tried to stop us from leaving if we were still inside it. It’s not everywhere.”

  He thought. “It could still be anywhere.”

  “Yah. But not enough to take over, just a—a little bit. Lost and alone.”

  There was something in her voice. Almost like sympathy.

  “Yah well why not?” she asked, although he had said nothing. “We know how that feels.”

  Sailing up the center of the spine, navigating through the grand rotating bowl of the southern hemisphere, up through the starboard rabbit hole with the mirrorball gleaming to his left: Daniel Brüks, consummate parasite, finally at home in the weightless intestines of the Crown of Thorns. “I checked the numbers three times. I don’t think Portia—”

  He stopped. His own face looked down at him across half the sky.

  Oh fuck—

  Rakshi Sengupta was a presence near the edge of vision, a vague blur of motion and color more felt than seen. He had only to turn his head and she would come into focus.

  She knows she knows she knows—

  “I found the fucker,” she said, and there was blood and triumph and terrible promise in her voice. He could not bring himself to face her. He could only stare at that incriminating portrait in front of him, at his personal and professional lives scrolling across the heavens big as the zodiac: transcripts, publications, home addresses; Rhona, ascendant; his goddamn swimming certificate from the third grade.

  “This is him. This is the asshole who killed my—who killed seven thousand four hundred eighty two people. Daniel. Brüks.”

  She was no longer talking like Rakshi Sengupta, he realized at some horrible remove. She was talking like someone else entirely.

  “I said I would find him. And I found him. And here. He. Is.”

  She’s talking like Shiva the fucking Destroyer.

  He floated there, dead to rights, waiting for some killing blow.

  “And now that I know who he is,” Shiva continued, “I am going to survive that thing on the hull and I am going to survive that thing in Colonel Carnage’s head and I am going to make it back to Earth. And I will hunt this fucker down and make him wish he had never been born.”

  Wait, what—?

  He forced back his own paralysis. He turned his head. His pilot, his confidante, his sworn nemesis came into focus. Her face, raised to the heavens, crawled with luminous reflections of his own damnation.

  She spared him a sidelong glance; her lips were parted in a smile that would have done Valerie proud. “Want to come along for the ride?”

  She’s toying with me? This is some kind of twisted—

  “Uh, Rakshi—” He coughed, cleared a throat gone drier than Prineville, tried again. “I don’t know—”

  She raised one preemptive hand. “I know, I know. Priorities. Counting chickens. We have other things to do. But I’ve had friends wiped by the storm troopers for hacking some senator’s diary, and then this asshole racks up a four-digit death toll and those same storm troopers protect him, you know what I mean? So yah, there are vampires and alien slime molds and a whole damn planet coming apart at the seams but I can’t do anything about that.” Her gaze on the ground, she pointed to the sky. “This I can do something about.”

  You don’t know who I am. I’m right here in front of you and you’ve dredged up my whole sorry life and you’re not putting it together how can you not be putting it together?

  “Bring back a little balance into the social equation.”

  Maybe it’s the eye contact thing. He suppressed a hysterical little giggle. Maybe she just never looked at me in meatspace …

  “There’s no fucking justice anywhere, unless you make your own.”

  Wow, Brüks thought, distantly amazed. Jim and his orthogonal networks. They really got your number.

  Why don’t you have mine?

  “What did they do to her? Why doesn’t she know me?”

  “Do…?” Moore shook his head, managed a half smile under listless eyes. “They didn’t do anything, son. Nobody does anything, we’re done to…”

  The lights were always low in the attic, the better for Moore to see the visions in his head. He was a half-seen half-human shape in the semidarkness, one arm tracing languid circles in the air, all other limbs entwined among the rafters. As though the Crown was incorporating him into her very bones, as though he were some degenerate parasitic anglerfish in conjugal fusion with a monstrous mate.
The smell of old sweat and pheromones hung around him like a shroud.

  “She found out about Bridgeport,” Brüks hissed. “She found out about me, she had all my stats right up there on the screen and she didn’t recognize me.”

  “Oh that,” Moore said, and nothing else.

  “This goes way beyond some tweak to protect state secrets. What did they do? What did you do?”

  Moore frowned, an old man losing track of seconds barely past. “I—I didn’t do anything. This is the first I’ve heard of it. She must have a filter.”

  “A filter.”

  “Cognitive filter.” The Colonel nodded, intact procedural memories booting up over corrupt episodic ones. “Selectively interferes with the face-recognition wetware in the fusiform gyrus. She sees you well enough in the flesh, she just can’t recognize you in certain … contexts. Triggers an agnosia. Probably even mangles the sound of your name…”

  “I know what a cognitive filter is. What I want to know is why someone took explicit measures to keep Rakshi from recognizing me when nobody knew I was going to be on this goddamn ship. Because I just happened to go on sabbatical just before a bunch of postals decided to duke it out in the desert, right? Because I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “I was wondering when you were going to figure that out,” Moore said absently. “I thought maybe someone had spiked your Cognital.”

  Brüks hit him in the face.

  At least he tried to. Somehow the blow went wide; somehow Moore was just a little left of where he’d been an instant before and his fist was ramming like a piston into Brüks’s diaphragm. Brüks sailed backward; something with too many angles and not enough padding cracked the back of his skull. He doubled over, breathless, floaters swarming in his head.

  “Unarmed biologist with no combat experience attacking a career solder with thirty years in the field and twice your mitochondrial count,” Moore remarked as Brüks struggled to breathe. “Not generally a good idea.”

  Brüks looked across the compartment, holding his stomach. Moore looked back through eyes that seemed a bit more focused in the wake of his outburst.

  “How far back, Jim? Did they drop some subliminal cue into my in-box to make me choose Prineville? Did they make me fuck up the sims and kill all those people just so I’d feel the urge to get lost for a while? Why did they want me along for the ride anyway, what possible reason could a bunch of superintelligent cancers have for taking a cockroach on their secret mission?”

  “You’re alive,” Moore said. “They’re not.”

  “Not good enough.”

  “We’re alive, then. The closer you are to baseline, the better your odds of surviving the mission.”

  “Tell that to Lianna.”

  “I wouldn’t have to. I’ve told you before, Daniel: roach isn’t an insult. We’re the ones still standing after the mammals build their nukes, we’re the ones with the stripped-down OS’s so damned simple they work under almost any circumstances. We’re the goddamned Kalashnikovs of thinking meat.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t the Bicams at all,” Brüks said. “Maybe I’m Sengupta’s paycheck. That’s how you operate, isn’t it? You trade in ideology, you exploit passion. Sengupta does her job and you remove the blinders and let her loose to take her revenge.”

  “That’s not it,” Moore told him softly.

  “How do you know? Maybe you’re just out of the loop, maybe those orthogonal stealthnets are running you the way you think you’re running Rakshi. You think everyone on the planet’s a puppet except for Colonel Jim Moore?”

  “Do you really think that’s a likely scenario?”

  “Scenario? I don’t even know what the goddamned goal is! No matter who’s pulling the strings, what have we accomplished other than nearly getting killed a hundred fifty million klicks from home?”

  Moore shrugged. “God knows.”

  “Oh, very clever.”

  “What do you want from me, Daniel? I’m not much more clued in than you are, no matter what Machiavellian motives you want to lay at my feet. The Bicamerals see God in everything from the Virgo Supercluster to a flushing toilet. Who knows why they might want us on board? And as for Rakshi’s filter—how do you know your own people didn’t do it?”

  “My own people?”

  “Public Relations. Faculty Affairs. Whatever your academic institutions use to keep their dirty laundry out of the public eye. They did a lot of mopping up after Bridgeport; how do you know Rakshi’s tweak wasn’t just another bit of insurance? Preemptive damage control, as it were?”

  “I—” He didn’t actually. The thought hadn’t even occurred to him.

  “Still doesn’t explain why we both ended up on the same mission,” he said at last.

  “Why.” The Colonel snorted softly. “We’re lucky if we even know what we’ve done. Any why simple enough for either of us to consciously understand would certainly be wrong.”

  “Just not enough room in the cache,” Brüks said bitterly.

  Moore inclined his head.

  “So it’s just God’s will. All these augments and all this technology and four hundred years of so-called enlightenment and you still just come around to God’s will.”

  “For all we know,” Moore said, “your presence on the mission is the last thing God wants. Maybe that’s the whole point.”

  Sengupta’s voice in his head: Maybe worship. Maybe disinfect.

  Lazily, almost indifferently, Jim Moore disentangled himself from the rafters and moved spiderlike around the attic. Even in this artificial twilight Brüks could see the slow change in his eyes, the focus deepening in stages: into Brüks’s eyes, then past them; through the bulkhead, through the hull; past planets and ecliptics, past dwarfs and comets and transNeptunians, all the way out to some invisible dark giant lurking between the stars.

  He’s gone again, he thought, but not entirely: Moore dropped that distant gaze from Brüks’s face, took his hand, pointed to a freckle there that Brüks hadn’t noticed before.

  “Another tumor,” Brüks said, and Moore nodded distantly:

  “The wrong kind.”

  The sun diminished behind them; they jettisoned the parasol. Ahead, just a few degrees starboard, the Earth grew from dimensionless point to gray dot, edging infinitesimally closer to twelve o’clock with each arbitrary shipboard day. The solar wind no longer roared across every frequency; it spat and hissed and gave way to other voices, infinitely weaker but so much closer to the ear. Jim Moore continued to feed on the archives that carried his son; Sengupta squeezed signal from noise and insisted that other patterns lay embedded there, if she could only decipher them.

  But the ghost that called itself Siri Keeton was only one voice on the ether. There were others. Far too many for Brüks’s liking.

  The world they’d left behind had been almost voiceless, scared into silence by the memory of regimented apparitions burning in the sky. But the voices were coming back, now: the rapid-fire click-trains of encrypted data; grainy approximations of faces and landscapes flickering along the six-hundred megahertz band; the hiss of carrier waves on reawakened frequencies, nominally active but holding their tongues as if waiting for the firing of some starting pistol. A myriad languages; a myriad messages. Weather reports, newsfeeds rotten with static, personal calls connecting families scattered across continents. The content of the signals wasn’t nearly so troubling as their very existence, out here in the unshielded wastes. They should have been trapped in lasers and fiberop, should have been winking confidentially between lines of sight. These, these broadcasts were relics of another age. The airtight machinery of twenty-first century telecommunications had begun leaking at the seams; people were falling back into more patchwork technologies.

  It was what a brain might do, stunted for want of nutrients and oxygen. It was the predictable decoherence of any complex system starved of energy.

  But it was home, and they were almost there. There was groundwork to be laid;
Moore and Sengupta attended to the details, each returning from whatever far-off places they ventured when not guiding the Crown into port. The warrior divided the rest of his time between his tent and the attic; the widow continued to sleep obliviously with the enemy. The vampire lay like a fossil on the hull, undisturbed by whatever alarms or tripwires she might have put in place. Brüks measured the time to Earth by the size of its disk and the incremental unclenching of his own gut. He thought about getting back into gaming, briefly. He slept and dreamt his lucid dreams, but Rhona would not come to him and he no longer had the heart to seek her out. The guts of the Crown continued to not grow tentacles.

  He finished the last of the Glenmorangie by himself, toasting his lab bench while they crossed lunar orbit. If anyone even noticed their return, they were too busy to send a welcoming committee.

  TO TRAVEL HOPEFULLY IS A BETTER THING THAN TO ARRIVE.

  —ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

  LOW FAST ORBIT over a world in flames.

  A thousand cool political conflicts had turned hot while they’d been away. Twice as many epidemiological and environmental ones. A myriad voices cried out on long-forgotten radio bands from kilohertz to giga, tightbeams swamped, planetary gag orders rescinded or forgotten. The O’Neils were under quarantine. The space elevator had collapsed; burning wreckage still fell from orbit, wrought untold havoc along a splatter cone wrapped around a third of the equator. Jet-stream geoengineering had finally buckled beneath the weight of an insatiable atmosphere. Atlas had lost the strength to hold the heavens from the earth; atmospheric sulfates were plummeting and firestorms sparkled endlessly across six continents. Pretoria, Bruges, a hundred other cities had been overrun by zombies, millions reduced to fight/flight/fuck and the authorities weren’t even trying to control anything inside the hot zones. There was no end to the claims or the confusion. Icarus had fallen. The Fireflies had returned. The invasion had begun. The Realists had struck. The Bicamerals had destroyed the world.