Echopraxia

by Peter Watts

  Plagues and firestorms in a single package. How very apocalyptic. Some splicer somewhere had a refreshingly biblical approach to weaponized biologicals.

  He had a visitor that afternoon, watched for almost an hour as it grew from speck to heat-shimmer to biped staggering across the eastern flats. Stuck with roach vision he almost didn’t identify it in time, almost started out to meet it before that peculiar stagger tipped him off and sent him scuttling for cover. The newcomer wasn’t running, but he moved fast and unencumbered: no pack, no canteen, only one sneaker on the end of a leg as dark and leathery as beef jerky. Whoever he was, he was more than dehydrated; he was almost skeletal. His left arm hung as if snapped at the humerus.

  He didn’t seem to care. He kept up that jerking half-panicked stride, stumbled past the monastery without a glance, zigzagged on to the western horizon under a lethal simmering sun. Brüks hid in the ruins and watched him pass and did not get a good look at his eyes. He didn’t think they danced, though. He was not that kind of undead.

  He hunkered down in the calm between the stones, and tried to remember which way the wind was blowing.

  Valerie appeared after sundown. She materialized from the darkness, half visible in the bloody flickering light of his campfire, and dropped a bag of supplies at his feet: tinned food now, mostly. No more of the magic foil pouches that instantly heated your stew or froze your ice cream when you ripped them open. The pickings out there must be getting slim.

  He grunted a greeting. “Haven’t seen you since—since…”

  He couldn’t exactly remember. She’d brought him here, he remembered that much. Hadn’t she? He had flashes sometimes: a rain-soaked shoreline, a man who’d thought a contraption of metal and plastic was worth dying for. A disembodied eye trailing ragged shreds of nerve and tendon, almost too cloudy to unlock the retina-coded driver’s door. A pair of polarized sunglasses in her hand, terrible backlit eyes staring right through him while she clicked bared teeth and asked Do I?

  He remembered saying Yes. He’d said Please, and hadn’t even tried to keep the whine from his voice. She had been merciful. She had masked herself a little, a lion’s concession to the lamb.

  Tonight there was a light beyond his own: a dim orange glow on the northwestern horizon, some distant fire reflecting off the underbelly of a low-hanging cloud bank. Brüks put it in the general direction of Bend.

  He pointed back over her shoulder. “Did you do that?”

  She didn’t look. “You do.”

  He nodded at the lizard mash sizzling on the fire, held out the half-eaten Vitabar he’d been nibbling to take the edge off. Valerie shook her head: “I eat already.”

  Even now, it was a relief to hear that.

  He sat back down on the corner of a shattered and empty mausoleum. “Found my room today.” More precisely, he’d uncovered his goggles—one lens gone completely, the other a spiderweb of cracks embedded in the frame—and finally recognized the remains of the cell where he’d spent his last night on Earth before escaping to the sun. He’d spent the rest of the day searching those foundations on his hands and knees. “Thought someone might have left something there, but…”

  Her pupils glowed like embers in the firelight. “Doesn’t matter,” she told him, but somehow there was something under the words, an unspoken addendum. Brüks wasn’t entirely sure how he knew that; some subtle telltale in the way Valerie held herself, perhaps, some twitch of the lip that his subconscious had parsed and served up as an executive summary—

  —wrong scale; look down—

  —and suddenly Brüks saw the truth of it: they’d known him, these hive-minded transHumans who’d called him back home. They’d known his background, and what he’d been doing in the desert all those months before. Any answers they’d left for him would be for him alone: too subtle to show up under the ham-fisted forensics of mortal Man, too durable for bombs or bulldozers to destroy. They’d be ubiquitous, indestructible, invisible to all but their intended recipient.

  He mentally kicked himself for not having seen that before.

  He wasn’t exactly sure how he’d seen it now—exactly what cues he’d read in Valerie’s body language, or even whether those cues had been deliberate or inadvertent. It had been happening more often, though; as though the desert had cleared his head, washed away the electronics and the interference and the ubiquitous quantum chaos of the twenty-first century to leave his mind as sharp and pristine as an undergrad’s. His newfound clarity might have even saved his life on occasion; he’d got the strong sense that a wrong answer to some of Valerie’s campfire questions might have carried severe penalties.

  Is this what augmentation feels like? he wondered, but it couldn’t be. He hadn’t even taken Cognital for weeks.

  He was seeing things more clearly now, though, no doubt about it. Faces in the clouds. Patterns that made his brain itch. Rakshi would have been proud.

  Even Valerie seemed to be.

  Her visits, once rare, had become more frequent. The first time she’d been a shadow with a face, there and gone so quickly that Brüks had written her off as a posttraumatic flashback. But she’d returned six nights later, and two nights after that—and then she had stayed, lurking just beyond the campfire, twin spots of eyeshine hovering in the darkness.

  At first he’d thought she was toying with him again, getting her usual sadistic kicks out of scaring prey. But then he remembered that she wasn’t like that after all, and she obviously didn’t want him dead; the fact that he was alive was all the proof he needed. One night he’d shouted a challenge into the darkness—“Hey! Don’t you ever get bored playing the Monster Card?”—and she’d stepped into the light: hands spreads, lips sealed, watching him watching her. She’d left a few minutes later but by then he’d realized what she was doing. She was an anthropologist, incrementally acclimating some primitive tribesman to her presence. She was a primatologist of days past, easing her way into a doomed colony of bonobos: one last behavioral study before the species checked out for good.

  Sometimes now she sat across the fire and asked him riddles, like some demonic inquisitor assessing his fitness to survive another night: questions about traveling salesmen or Hamiltonian circuits. He’d been terrified at first: afraid to answer, afraid not to, convinced somehow that whatever Valerie’s interest in keeping him alive, it could end in an instant with the wrong response. He had done his best, and knew that it wasn’t good enough—what did he know about bin packing or polynomial time, how could any mortal keep up with a vampire?—but she hadn’t killed him yet. She had not turned him back to stone with a few words. She no longer drummed out strange tattoos with her fingertips or left mind-altering hieroglyphics scratched into the sand. They were beyond that now.

  Besides. He didn’t quite know how, but he was starting to guess some of the right answers.

  He began again with the most obvious signpost: the magic washbasin, the defiant patch of grass that circled it like a green pupil. He sampled the water, scraped flecks from the stone, pulled leaves from the ground and ran them through his barcoder. He found a thousand common bacteria, a few purebred, most rotten with lateral transfer.

  He only found one that glowed in the dark.

  It wasn’t obvious, of course: it wouldn’t have lit up the night to any naked eye, not in the miniscule densities the machines reported. The only way he could tell it fluoresced was from the gene sequence itself: 576 nucleotides that shouldn’t have been there, an assembly line for a protein that glowed red in the presence of oxygen. A marker of some kind. A beacon.

  He couldn’t read it at first. He had seen the light, but the genes to either side seemed unremarkable. It was a road sign in the desert, with no roads in sight.

  He let his hands and feet guide him. The answer would come.

  He explored corridors and wood-paneled chambers at the south end of the complex, more than merely intact: pristine, stripped bare, light rectangles punctuating the faded dumb paint where pictures had on
ce hung. He found a pair of Masaso’s mahogany knuckles hiding in the corner behind a smashed door. He found what was left of his bike: a pair of mangled handlebars, an axle fork, a distended bladder of tire bulging from beneath a fallen wall like a hyperinflated football.

  But it wasn’t until the dead of night that he found the body.

  He hadn’t found any others. Most likely the authorities had disposed of them—or perhaps, against all the evidence of his own eyes, they had escaped somehow. Stranger things had happened.

  But he woke in the night to the echo of rock falling nearby, and his memory was somehow able to pick a path through the ruins when mere starlight failed. His feet found their way through the wreckage without a missed step; his ears tracked the soft rattle of gravel flowing down new slopes in the darkness ahead. Eventually he came to a jagged shadow where none had been before, a fresh cave-in gaping through the shattered tiles. Brüks stood shivering at its edge and waited for the sky to lighten.

  The corpse resolved in shades of gray at the bottom of the pit: a dim shapeless blob against darkness, a shadow extruded from jumbled debris, a bundle of dark sticks wrapped in a tunic on the basement floor. It lay on its back, buried to its waist by the cave-in. The body had mummified in the desert air, shriveled down to bones and brown leather. The eyes through which it stared at the sky had long since collapsed into empty sockets. Perhaps, once, the arms had been folded peacefully across the chest; now they were hooked and twisted as if bent by some disfiguring disease, wrists torqued inward, fingers clawing at the sternum.

  It’s pointing at itself, he realized. At itself … And with the sparkling clarity of his newfound faith, Daniel Brüks finally saw the body for what it was.

  It was a sign.

  “It was a marker,” he told Valerie the next time she appeared (two nights later? Three?). “It was pointing at itself.”

  So obvious, in the hindsight of revelation: the same sequence that coded for fluorescence contained other information as well, the same tangled thread of amino acids both serving a mundane biological function and spelling out a more esoteric message to anyone who knew the right alphabet.

  Not just a marker, not just a message. It was a dialogue: gene and protein, talking to each other. It was a straight transposition of amino into alphabet: valine, threonine, alanine into t-h-e, phenylalanine-glutamine-valine-alanine into f-a-t-e, serine press-ganged into hard-space or hard-return depending on the iteration. The fluorescent protein spelled out a message—

  the faery is rosy

  of glow

  in fate

  we rely …

  And the complementary codons directing its construction spelled out another, in a different alphabet:

  any style of life

  is prim

  oh stay

  my lyre …

  A free-verse call-and-response packed down into a measly 140 codons. It was a marvel of cryptographic efficiency, and it was obvious once Brüks had seen the light.

  “The sequence spells a message and codes for a protein. The protein fluoresces and contains a response. It’s not contamination or lateral transfer. It’s a poem.”

  “Not for you,” Valerie said. “You’re looking for something else.”

  No, he thought. You are.

  “This is not a kink,” he said after a while, and ignited the campfire.

  “You mean I don’t get off on keeping retarded pets.” Her eyes flared red orange. “I’m not Rakshi Sengupta.”

  “And I’m pretty sure you’re not here for the sheer enjoyment of my company.” She did not cry out in disagreement. “So what is this?”

  Valerie’s face was unreadable. “What do you think?”

  “I figure I’m cheap labor. The odds of finding something useful here are too high to ignore and too low to waste much effort on. You’ve got a lot of irons in the fire. So now and then you wait until the sun goes down, and drop by to see what I’ve dug up.”

  She eyed him for a moment. Brüks looked back at that vaguely lupine face alive with dancing shadows, and wondered when he had stopped finding it so terrifying.

  “Daniel,” she said at last. “How you underestimate yourself.”

  The truth was, though, Valerie did seem to enjoy his company. The tone of their conversations had changed; no longer an inquisition, their forays into philosophy and viral theology were turning into something almost conversational. She no longer thought rings around him; occasionally, now, he even seemed able to challenge her. He still wasn’t sure where this newfound facility was coming from. His subconscious simply served up the right responses without bothering to show its work. It frightened him, at first—the way new thoughts spilled from his mouth before he could check them for veracity, before he could even parse their meaning. He bit down, to no avail, grew queasy—almost terrified—by his own insights, while Valerie cocked her head and watched from some prehistoric remove.

  It was those same insights that eventually calmed him. After all, wasn’t this the way the human brain had always behaved? The bolt from the blue, the classic fully formed eureka moment? Hadn’t the structure of benzene come to Kekulé in a dream?

  He began to have his own dreams. He heard voices in them, insistent whispers: She’s behind it all. She set it all up, can’t you see that? Broke out of jail, snuck through the nets and the ether, got past the best firewalls baselines could build. Flashed false ID to False Intelligences, snuck a carousel out of the garage with a whole squad of zombies on board and didn’t wake anyone up on her way out. She bluffed her way onto the Crown of Thorns. Conveniently made it back from Icarus when everyone else burned.

  You think it was a bunch of monks that locked you up with the woman who’d sworn to kill you, a diversion-on-demand tripwired to go off like a flash grenade? It was the vampire. It was the vampire, and everyone else is dead, and the only reason you’re not is because she wants to know God’s plan for Daniel Brüks. She’ll get what she wants and then she’ll kill you, too.

  On waking, he only remembered the voices. He couldn’t quite remember what they’d said.

  Valerie kissed him two nights later.

  He didn’t even know she was there until her hand snapped closed around the back of his neck, spun him around faster than even his brain stem could react. By the time his heart had jumped through the roof of his mouth and his body remembered fight/flight and his cache had a chance to think This is it she’s done with me I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead her tongue was already halfway down his throat and her other hand—the one not crushing his cervical vertebrae—had pincered his cheeks, forcing his teeth apart. He could not close his jaws.

  He hung paralyzed in her grip while she tasted him from the inside. He felt something through her flesh that might almost have been a heartbeat if it weren’t so slow. Finally she released him. He collapsed on the ground, scuttled sideways like a frantic crab caught in the open with nowhere to run.

  “What the fuck—” he gasped.

  “Ketones.” She looked down through him, silhouetted by purpling twilight. “Lactate.”

  “You can taste cancer,” he realized after a moment.

  “Better than your machines.” She leaned in close, grinning. “Maybe not so precise.”

  Even eye to eye, she didn’t seem to be looking at him.

  He knew it an instant before she moved—

  —She’s going to bite me—

  —but the sharp stabbing pain bolted up his arm and her face hadn’t moved a centimeter. He looked down, startled, at the twin puncture marks—only a centimeter apart—on his forearm. To the dual-punch biopsy gun in Valerie’s hand; his own, he saw. From the field kit lying on the ground, flap open, vials and needles and surgical tools glinting in the firelight.

  “Sun gives you problems,” Valerie said softly. “Too much radiation, not enough shielding.”

  At Icarus, he remembered. When we thought we were burning you off the hull like a moth …

  “But you’re easy to fix.”
r />   “Why?” Brüks asked, and didn’t even have to say that much to know that she understood:

  Why help prey?

  Why help someone who tried to kill you?

  Why aren’t I dead already?

  Why aren’t we all?

  “You bring us back,” Valerie said simply.

  “To be slaves.”

  She shrugged. “We eat you otherwise.”

  We bring you back, then enslave you in self-defense. But maybe she really did regard it as a good deal; given a choice between captivity and outright nonexistence, who would choose the latter?

  I’m sorry, he didn’t say.

  “Don’t be,” she replied, as if he had. “You don’t enslave us. Physics does. The chains you build—” Her fangs gleamed like little daggers in the firelight. “We break them soon.”

  “I thought you already had.”

  Rising moonlight lit her eyes for a moment as she shook her head. “The Glitch still works. I see the cross and a part of me dies.”

  “A par—a part you made.” Of course. Of course. They’re parallel processors, after all …

  The truth dawned on him like daylight: a custom cache, a sacrificial homunculus brought into existence and isolated, to suffer the agony of the cross while more vital threads of cognition wound about it like a stream around a stone. Valerie didn’t avoid the seizures at all; she—encysted them, and carried on.