Echopraxia

by Peter Watts

  Brüks tried to move his tongue: it barely trembled against the palate. He focused on moving his lips. A sound emerged. A groan. It contained nothing but frustration and distress.

  “I know,” Moore agreed. “And at first it felt more like just—reports, you know? Letters home, but full of facts. About the mission. I listened to that signal, oh, I would have listened forever, even if all he’d ever done was tell the tale. I learned so much about the boy, so much I never suspected.”

  Take two…: “Jim…”

  “And then it—changed. As though he ran out of facts and had nothing left but feelings. He stopped the reportage and started talking to me…”

  “Jim—Rak—Rakshi thought—”

  “I can even hear him now, Daniel. That’s the remarkable thing. The signal’s so weak it shouldn’t even be able to penetrate the atmosphere, especially with all the broadband chatter going on. And yet I can hear him, right here in the room.”

  “Rakshi thought—your zombie switch—”

  “I think he’s trying to warn me about something…”

  “—you might have been—hacked—”

  “Something about you.”

  “She said you—you might not be in—control—”

  Moore stopped turning the gun in his hands. Looked down at it. Brüks fired every command he could, along every motor nerve in his body. His fingers wiggled.

  Moore smiled a sad little smile. “Nobody’s in control, Daniel. Do you really think you don’t have one of these zombie switches in your own head, you don’t think everyone does? We’re all just along for the ride, it’s the coming of the Lord is what it is. God’s on Its way. It’s the Angels of the Asteroids, calling the shots…”

  Angels again. Divine teleoperators, powerful creatures with neither soul nor will. God’s sock puppets.

  Jim Moore was turning into one before his eyes.

  “What if it’s not—Siri?” Brüks managed. His tongue seemed to be thawing a bit. “What if, what if it’s something else…”

  The Colonel smiled again. “You don’t think I’d know my own son.”

  “It knows your son, Jim.” Of course it knows him, it mutilated him, can’t you remember the goddamn slide show? “It knows Siri, and Siri knows you, and—and it’s smart Jim, it’s so fucking smart…”

  “So are you.” Moore eyed him curiously. “Smarter than you let on, anyway.”

  If only.

  He wasn’t smart enough to get out of this. Not smart enough to outthink some interstellar demon who could hack a man’s brain across five trillion kilometers and a six-month time lag, who could trickle its own parasitic subroutines into the host’s head and lead him around in real time. Assuming that Moore hadn’t just gone batshit crazy on his own, of course. That was probably the most parsimonious explanation.

  Not that it mattered. Brüks wasn’t smart enough to get out of that either.

  Moore lowered his eyes. “I didn’t want to do that, you know. She was a good person, she was just—misguided. I suppose I may have overreacted. I only did it to protect you.”

  Behind him, up among the crossbeams that ribbed the ceiling, one shadow stirred among others. Brüks blinked and it was gone.

  “I wonder if that was such a good idea…”

  “It was,” Brüks croaked. “Really. It—”

  Faster than he could finish: a shape detached itself from the ceiling, swayed silently against the light and folded down over Moore like a praying mantis. Inhuman fingers, blurred in motion; silhouetted lips in motion.

  Without any fuss at all, Moore stopped moving.

  Valerie dropped soundlessly to the deck, crossed the room, stared down at Daniel Brüks as he slowly, painfully bent one knee. It was the closest thing to fight/flight left in him. She bent close and whispered—

  “The tomb at Aramathea.”

  His body unlocked.

  He gulped air. The vampire stood, stepped back, gave him a small cryptic smile.

  Brüks swallowed. “Saw you burn,” he managed. Twice.

  She didn’t even dignify it with an answer.

  We expect a trick, and we find one, and we pat ourselves on the back. We find her pinned to the hull—think we do, anyway—and just stop looking. Of course she’s out there: there she is. There goes her hab and all its tripwires. Why look any further?

  Why look inside the Crown? Why check the hatches in the shuttle…?

  He propped himself up on his elbows; the sodden jumpsuit peeled from the deck as if steeped in half-set epoxy. Valerie watched impassively as he got to his feet.

  “So what now? You give me a ten-second head start to make it sporti—”

  A blur and a hiss and he was off his feet, strangling and kicking a meter from the deck with her hand around his throat. In the next instant he was back on the floor, collapsed in a heap while Valerie grinned down with far too many teeth.

  “All this experience,” she remarked while he gasped for breath, “and you’re still an idiot.”

  Catch and release. Cat and mouse. Just having fun, he supposed. In her way.

  “Aircraft are all dead,” Valerie said. “I find a ride in the moon pool, though. Get us to the mainland at least.”

  “Us,” Brüks said.

  “Swim if you’d rather. Or stay.” She dropped her chin in the direction of the statue frozen on its chair. “If you stay you should kill him though. Or he kills you when he unlocks.”

  “He’s my friend. He protected me, before—”

  “Only part of him. OS conflict. It resolves soon enough, it’s resolving now.” Valerie turned toward the door. “Don’t wait too long. He’s on a mission from God.”

  She stepped into the light. Brüks looked back at his friend: Jim Moore sat staring at the floor, face unreadable. He blinked, very slowly, as Brüks watched.

  He did not cry out against his abandonment.

  Brüks followed the monster along slanting corridors and companionways, down endless flights of emergency-lit stairs into the bowels of the gyland, unto its very anus: an airlock that would have felt too small at five times the size, given present company. The chamber beyond echoed like a cave and looked a little like one, too: pipes and hoses and cylinders of compressed gas jutted like stalactites from the angled ceiling. The room was half underwater; the ocean had breached the banks of the moon pool as the gyland listed, flooded down to some temporary equilibrium halfway up the far bulkhead. Diffuse gray-green light filtered up from outside and wriggled dimly across every surface.

  It was only a small port in the storm. There was probably a bay big enough to dock a Kraken or a Swordfish somewhere else on this floating behemoth, but here the berths were for smaller vehicles. A dozen parking racks hung from an overhead conveyer train, most of them empty. A two-person midwater scout rested snuggly in one clenched set of grappling claws, the end of a service crane still embedded in its shattered crystal snout. Another dangled precariously from the ceiling, nose submerged, tail entangled in its broken perch.

  A third, apparently intact, floated just off the flooded deck: broad shark body, whale’s flat flukes, the great saucer eyes of some mesopelagic hatchetfish bridging the snout. Aspidontus, according to the letters etched just above the countershade line. It bumped gently against the edge of the moon pool—tail to the bulkhead, nose poking out over the hole in the floor—a waist-deep wade down the flooded incline.

  A fucking cold wade, as it turned out. Valerie leapt the distance from a standing start, sailed over Brüks’s head and landed one step from the hatch. The vessel dipped and rolled under the impact; she didn’t even wobble. By the time Brüks had dragged his soaking legs and shriveled testicles onto the hull, she was inside and the little sub was humming awake.

  Three seats. Brüks dropped into shotgun, pulled the hatch down overhead, dogged it. Valerie tapped the dashboard; Aspidontus shook herself, thrashed her flukes, humped forward half-stranded over loose canisters and bits of broken podmates. She hung balanced for a moment, bell
y scraping the submerged edge of the pool; her flukes slapped the water like a dolphin’s and she was free.

  Still dark overhead, though, for all the hours that must have passed since sunrise. The derelict gyland loomed above them like the belly of a mountain, all too visible from underneath, ready to drop down and squash them flat without warning. There was nothing beyond the cockpit: no fish, no plankton swarms, no sun-dappled waves sending shafts of light dancing through the water. Not even the indestructible drifts of immortal plastic debris so ubiquitous from pole to pole. Nothing but heavy blackness above and dim green murk everywhere else. And Aspidontis: a speck embedded in glass.

  And where to now? he wondered. Why did I even come along, why did she even take me, what am I to this thing other than a walking lunch? How the hell did I ever decide that Jim Moore was less dangerous than a goddamn vampire?

  But he knew it was a meaningless question. It was predicated on the assumption that the decision had ever been his to begin with.

  Darkness receded above, encroached from below: Aspidontus was diving. A hundred meters. A hundred fifty. They were in the middle of the Pacific. The seabed was four kilometres down. There was nothing in between, unless Valerie had arranged a rendezvous with another submarine.

  Two hundred meters. Aspidontus levelled off.

  Right. Beneath the thermocline. Stealthed to sonar.

  The vessel angled to port. Valerie hadn’t touched the controls since they’d left the surface. She’d probably given the sub its marching orders while Dan Brüks had been pleading with a brain in a tank. The course was laid out right there on the dashboard, a faint golden thread wound along the eastern North Pacific. The viewing angle was bad, though; too small, too many contours. He could not make out the details.

  He knew where he’d have chosen to go. This had all started in the desert; the Bicamerals had manipulated him onto their goddamned chessboard for reasons of their own, and if they’d ever planned on letting him in on the joke, Portia and Valerie and taken them out of the game before they’d had the chance. But the Bicamerals were legion, and not all of them had been burned on the altar. If there were answers to be had, the hive would have them.

  He leaned sideways until the road map angled into clearer view: grunted to himself, completely unsurprised. Valerie stared into the abyss and said nothing.

  She’d laid in a course for the Oregon coast.

  PROPHET

  There are people here who repeatedly drown themselves in the name of enlightenment. They climb into glass coffins called “prisms,”, seal the lid, and open the spigot until they’re completely submerged. Sometimes they leave a bubble of air at the top, barely big enough to stick their noses into; other times, not even that much.

  This is not suicide (although occasional deaths have been reported). They would tell you that it is exactly the opposite, that you haven’t lived until you’ve nearly died. But there’s more to this than the superficial thrill-seeking of the adrenaline junkie. The Prismatic kink derives from the evolutionary underpinnings of consciousness itself.

  Put your hand in an open flame and subconscious reflex will snatch it back long before you’re even aware of the pain. It is only when some other agenda is in conflict—your hand hurts, but you don’t want to spill the contents of a hot serving tray all over your clean rug—that the self awakens and decides which impulse to obey. Long before art and science and philosophy arose, consciousness had but one function: not to merely implement motor commands, but to mediate between commands in opposition.

  In a submerged body starving for air, it’s difficult to imagine two imperatives more opposed than the need to breathe and the need to hold your breath. As one Prismatic told me, “Put yourself in one of those things, and tell me you aren’t more intensely conscious than you’ve ever been in your life.”

  The fetish—it seems grandiose to call it a “movement”—would itself seem to be the manifestation of an opposing impulse, a reaction against something. By all accounts drowning is an intensely unpleasant experience (although I did not take my interviewee up on her offer). It’s difficult to imagine what kind of stimulus might provoke such intense pushback, why the need to assert one’s consciousness of all things would seem so pressing. None of the Prismatics I asked were able to cast any light on this question. They simply didn’t think of their actions in those terms. “It’s just important to know who you are,” one twenty-eight-year-old TATmaster told me after a few moments’ thought, but his words seemed as much question as answer.

  —Keith Honeyborne, 2080: Travels with My Ant: A Baseline Guide to Imminent Obsolescence

  MONSTERS GIVE US COURAGE TO CHANGE THE THINGS WE CAN: THEY ARE OUR PRIMAL FEARS GIVEN FORM, TERRIBLE PREDATORS WHO CAN BE VANQUISHED IF ONLY WE RISE TO THE CHALLENGE. GODS GIVE US SERENITY TO ACCEPT THE THINGS WE CAN’T: THEY EXIST TO EXPLAIN FLOODS AND EARTHQUAKES AND ALL THAT WHICH LIES BEYOND OUR CONTROL.

  IT DID NOT SURPRISE ME IN THE LEAST TO LEARN THAT VAMPIRES DO NOT BELIEVE IN MONSTERS. I’LL ADMIT THEIR BELIEF IN GODS WAS A BIT OF A SURPRISE.

  —DAVID NICKLE

  DEEP IN THE Oregon desert, crazy as a prophet, Daniel Brüks opened his eyes to the usual accumulation of wreckage.

  The monastery lay in ruins. The broad stone steps of the main entrance sloped away before him, cracked and fissured but still intact for the most part. Past them, to the left of some small patch of desert mysteriously slagged to glass, his tent shivered in the morning breeze. He’d salvaged it from across the valley—he must have, along with his supplies and his equipment, although he wasn’t quite sure when—but he could barely remember the last time he’d slept there. Too constraining, somehow. The sky made a better ceiling. These days he didn’t use the tent for much more than storage.

  He stood and stretched, felt his joints crack as the sun peeked through a gap in the fallen stonework behind him. He turned and surveyed his domain. One end of the monastery stood reasonably intact; the other was a tumbledown pile of broken stone. The damage had been inflicted along a gradient, as though entropy were slowly devouring the structure from north to south.

  Entropy had left a path, though: a small canyon through the rubble, leading back to the garden. The parts of the lawn that hadn’t been buried outright were brown and brittle and long dead, except for a small green patch struggling bravely around one of the Bicamerals’ washbasin pedestals. That pedestal, blessed with some kind of magic, was intact and unmarked by the devastation that had rained down everywhere else. The basin even held half an aliquot of stagnant water; blazing noon or frozen midnight, the level never changed. Some kind of capillary action, probably. A core of porous stone that wicked up moisture from some deep aquifer. Together with the rations left over from his sabbatical, it was enough to keep him going for now.

  For what, though: that was another matter.

  He still had doubts, sometimes. Wondered occasionally—after some especially fruitless dig through the ruins—what he was really accomplishing out here, day after day. Whether this whole exercise might be a waste of time. A little voice in the back of his head wondered even now, as he squinted into the rising sun.

  Brüks bent over the pedestal, splashed water on his face, and drank. He washed his hands.

  That always made him feel better.

  He spent that day as he spent every other: as an amateur archeologist, sifting the wreckage in search of answers. He didn’t know what exactly had happened here after he’d left, why such massive physical destruction had proven necessary in the wake of their escape. Those left behind had been in no position to mount much of a defense, as far as he could tell. Maybe someone had just wanted to make an example of them. Back when he’d still been sleeping in his tent Brüks had gone to it for answers, voiced queries and search strings to the fabric and trawled through the closest hits that the clouds had to offer, but relevant insights seemed impossible to find. Perhaps humans had covered up the details. Perhaps networks, fearful of impending schizophrenia, had simply forgott
en them.

  It had been a long time since Brüks had used ConSensus. It didn’t really matter. Those weren’t the answers he was looking for.

  He realized now that Luckett had been right; there had been a plan, and all had happened in accordance with it. It was the only model that fit the data. The idea that mere baselines had been able to vanquish the Bicamerals made about as much sense as positing that a band of lemurs could outthink Jim Moore at battlefield chess. The hive had only lost because they’d been playing to lose; Dan Brüks had only escaped because they’d wanted him to; he was only back here now, looking for answers, because they had left answers for him to find. Eventually he would find them. It was only a matter of time.

  He knew this. He had faith.

  A great pit gaped off the northeast corner of the ruin: walls had shattered and spilled toward it during the purge, but that loose scree had only made it halfway. Some other force had flattened the waist-high guardrail that had once ringed the pit at a safe distance. Brüks stepped over it with ease, and across the concrete apron.

  He could not see the bottom, not clearly. Sometimes, when the sun was high, he caught the dim glint of great radial teeth, deep in the earth, cutting across the shaft. He would kick pebbles over the edge: water splashed, after a long time, and occasionally he would see the fitful blue spark of short-circuiting electricity. Still life down there, then, of a sort. He idly considered exploring farther—there had to be some kind of access to those depths, an air intake at least—but there was plenty of time for that.

  There were other, more ambulatory hazards to contend with. Rattlesnakes seemed to be making a comeback, or at least changing their distribution; an unthinking reach into dark places while clearing debris resulted in a couple of close calls, and a welcome supplement to his freeze-dried rations. Some exotic species of locust had discovered fire while he’d been away, set a patch of dead grass alight one morning while Brüks was digging nearby. He watched it crackle and blacken and only later discovered the charred little carcasses along the edge of the burn, not quite strong enough to leap clear of their own conflagration. The coder couldn’t ID them below Family but named Chortoicetes as the closest known relative: Australian plague locust, too far from home and freshly equipped with a novel variant of chitin whose frictional coefficient proved positively incendiary during mating calls.