Echopraxia

by Peter Watts

  He wondered how long she’d been able to do that.

  “Just a workaround,” she said. “Need to undo the wiring.”

  Not to go up against the roaches, of course. That war was already as good as over, even though the losing side didn’t know it yet. This creature with a dozen simultaneous entities in her head, this prehistoric post-Human, could speak so openly—without animosity, or resentment, or the slightest concern for the impact one Daniel Brüks might have on her revolution—because baseline Humanity was already beneath her notice. Valerie and her kind were perfectly capable of shrugging off Human oppression without breaking their chains; they needed their arms free to pick on things their own size.

  “You are not so small as you think,” she said, reading him. “You might be bigger than all of us.”

  Brüks shook his head. “We’re not. If I’ve learned anything these—”

  Emergent complexity, he realized. That’s what she means.

  A neuron didn’t know whether it fired in response to a scent or a symphony. Brain cells weren’t intelligent; only brains were. And brain cells weren’t even the lower limit. The origins of thought were buried so deep they predated multicellular life itself: neurotransmitters in choanoflagellates, potassium ion gates in Monosiga.

  I am a colony of microbes talking to itself, Brüks reflected.

  Who knew what metaprocesses might emerge when Heaven and ConSensus wired enough brains together, dropped internode latency close enough to zero? Who knew what metaprocesses already had? Something that might make Bicameral hives look as rudimentary as the nervous system of a sea anemone.

  Maybe the Singularity already happened and its components just don’t know it yet.

  “They never will,” Valerie told him. “Neurons only speak when spoken to; they don’t know why.”

  He shook his head. “Even if something is—coalescing out there, it’s left me behind. I’m not wired in. I’m not even augged.”

  “ConSensus is one interface. There are others.”

  Echopraxia, he wondered.

  But it didn’t matter. He was still Daniel Brüks, the human coelacanth: lurking at the outskirts of evolution, unchanged and unchangeable while the world moved on. Enlightenment was enough for him. He wanted no part of transfiguration.

  I will stay here while the tables turn and fires burn out. I will stand still while humanity turns into something unrecognizable, or dies trying. I will see what rises in its place.

  Either way, I am witnessing the end of my species.

  Valerie watched him from the darkness. These chains you build—we break them soon.

  “I wish we hadn’t needed them,” he admitted softly. “I wish we could have brought you back without Crucifix Glitches or Divide & Conquer or any of those damn chains. Maybe we could have dialed down your predatory instincts, fixed the protocadherin deficit. Made you more…”

  “Like you,” she finished.

  He opened his mouth, found he had nothing to say. It didn’t matter whether shackles were built of genes or iron, whether you installed them after birth or before conception. Chains were chains, no matter where you put them. No matter whether they were forged by intent or evolution.

  Maybe we should have just left you extinct. Built something friendlier, from scratch.

  “You need your monsters,” she said simply.

  He shook his head. “You’re just too—complicated. Everything’s linked to everything else. Fix the Crucifix Glitch, you lose your pattern-matching skills. Make you less antisocial, who knows what else goes away? We didn’t dare change you too much.”

  Valerie hissed softly, clicked her teeth. “You need monsters so you can defeat them. No great victory in slaughtering a lamb.”

  “We are not that stupid.”

  Valerie turned and looked to the horizon: the firelight flickering off the clouds was all the rejoinder she needed.

  But that’s not us, Brüks thought. Even if it is. It’s—urban renewal. Tear-down and development for the new owners.

  Pest control.

  The monster’s shoulders rose and fell. She spoke without turning—“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all just get along?”—and for the life of him Brüks could not tell whether she was being sincere or sarcastic.

  “I thought we were,” he said, reaching for the biopsy needle in his half-open field kit. And leapt like a flea onto her back, faster than he had ever moved in his life, to plunge it up through the base of her skull.

  THE CLOTHES HAVE NO EMPEROR.

  —STEWART GUTHRIE

  NOW HE WAS alone. By day tornadoes marched across the desert like pillars of smoke, under no control but God’s. At night the distant glow of burning bushes encircled the horizon: the Post-Anthropocene Explosion in full swing. Brüks thought about what might be going on out there, thought about anything but the act he’d just committed. He imagined battles unseen and ongoing. He wondered who was winning.

  The Bicamerals, perhaps, shaping the Singularity, planting that first layer of bearings in the box. Laying a foundation for the future. Perhaps this was their lynchpin moment, the first dusting of atoms on the condensor’s floor. From these beginnings Humanity could resonate out across time and space, a deterministic cascade designed to undo what the viral God had wrought. Debug the local ordinances. Undo the Anthropic principle. It could take billions of years from such humble butterfly beginnings, but in the end life itself might be unraveled from Planck on up.

  What else could you call it, other than Nirvana?

  There would be other forces, other plans. The vampires, for one: the smartest of the selfish genes. They might prefer their human prey just as they were, slow and thick-witted, minds dulled by the cumbersome bottleneck of the conscious cache. Or maybe some other faction was rising in the east, any of the other monstrous subspecies that humanity had fractured into: the membrains, the multicores, the zombies or the Chinese Rooms. Even Rhona’s supraconscious AIs. They all had their causes, their reasons to fight; or thought they did.

  The fact that their actions all seemed to serve the purposes of something else, some vast distributed network slouching toward Bethlehem—sheer coincidence, perhaps. Perhaps we really do act for the reasons we believe. Perhaps everything’s right on the surface, brightly lit and primary colored. Perhaps Daniel Brüks and Rakshi Sengupta and Jim Moore—each burning for their own kind of redemption—all just happened to end up in the white-hot radiance of spolar orbit, obsessed enough to rush in where Angels feared to tread.

  Perhaps it really was Daniel Brüks, on some level, who had just murdered his last and only friend …

  He thought of Jim Moore and Jim was in his head, nodding and offering sage advice. Rhona reminded him to Think like a biologist and he saw his mistake; he’d heard Angels of the Asteroids and he’d seen heavenly bodies, not earthly ones. He’d seen chunks of dead spinning rock, not the extinct echinoderms that had once crept across the world’s intertidal zones. Asteroidea: the sea stars. Brainless creatures, utterly uncephalized, who nonetheless moved with purpose and a kind of intelligence. Not the worst metaphor for the Icarus invader. Not the worst metaphor for what seemed to be happening out beyond the desert …

  There were other voices: Valerie, Rakshi, some he didn’t recognize. Sometimes they argued among themselves, included him only as an afterthought. They told him he was becoming schizophrenic—that they were nothing but his own thoughts, drifting at loose ends through a mind being taken apart in stages. They whispered fearfully about something skulking in the basement, something brought back from the sun that stomped on the floor and made things move upstairs. Brüks remembered Jim Moore cutting the cancers from his body, felt his friend’s head shaking behind his mind’s eye: Sorry, Daniel—I guess I didn’t get it all …

  Sometimes he lay awake at night and clenched his teeth and strained, through sheer effort of conscious will, to undo the slow incremental rewiring of his midbrain. The thing in the basement came to him in his dreams. You think this
is new? it sneered. Even in this miserable backwater, it’s been happening for four billion years. I’m going to swallow you whole.

  “I’ll fight you,” Brüks said aloud.

  Of course you will. That’s what you’re for, that’s all you’re for. You gibber on about blind watchmakers and the wonder of evolution but you’re too damn stupid to see how much faster it would all happen if you just went away. You’re a Darwinian fossil in a Lamarckian age. Do you see how sick to death we are of dragging you behind us, kicking and screaming because you’re too stupid to tell the difference between success and suicide?

  “I see the fires. People are fighting back.”

  That’s not me out there. That’s just you folks, catching up.

  It was such an uphill struggle. Consciousness had never had the upper hand; I had never been more than the scratchpad, a momentary snapshot of a remembered present. Maybe Brüks hadn’t heard those voices before but they’d always been there, hidden away, doing the heavy lifting and sending status reports upstairs to a silly little man who took all the credit. A deluded homunculus, trying to make sense of minions so much smarter than it was.

  It had only ever been a matter of time before they decided they didn’t need him.

  He no longer sought his answers among the ruins. He looked for them across the whole wide desert. His very senses were coming apart now; each sunrise seemed paler than the last, every breeze against his skin felt more distant than the one before. He cut himself to feel alive; the blood spilled out like water. He deliberately broke his little finger, and felt not pain but faint music. The voices wouldn’t leave him alone. They told him what to eat and he put rocks in his mouth. He could no longer tell bread from stone.

  One day he came across a body desiccating in the parched desert air, its side torn open by scavengers, its head abuzz in a halo of flies. He was almost sure this wasn’t where he’d left it. He thought he saw it move a little, undead nerves still twitching against their own desecration. Guilt rose like acid in his throat.

  You killed her, Brüks told the thing inside.

  And that’s the only reason you’re alive. I am your salvation.

  You’re a parasite.

  Am I. I pay the rent. I do renovations. I’ve only just got started and this system’s already clocking fast enough to outsmart a vampire. What did you ever do except suck glucose and contemplate your navel?

  What are you, then?

  I’m manna from heaven. I’m a Rorschach blot. The monks look at me and see the Hand of God, the Vampires see an end to loneliness. What do you see, Danny Boy?

  He saw a duck blind, an ROV. He saw some other Singularity looking back. He saw Valerie’s body twitching at his feet. Whatever was left of Daniel Brüks remembered her last words, just after she’d pierced him with a biopsy that wasn’t a biopsy: “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all just get along?”

  You know she wasn’t talking about you.

  He knew.

  He found himself on the edge of a cliff, high above the desert. The ruined monastery shimmered in the heat but he felt nothing. He seemed a million miles away, as though watching the world unfold through distant cameras. You have to crank the amplitude, his tormentor said. It’s the only way you’ll feel anything. You have to increase the gain.

  But Brüks was on to it. He wasn’t the first to be tempted in the desert, and he knew how that story went. He was supposed to defy the voice. Do not test the Lord thy God, he was supposed to say, and step back from the precipice and into history. It was in the script.

  But he was so very fucking sick of scripts. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d made up his own lines. Herded into the desert by invisible hands, packed into some post-Human field kit with the nanoscopes and petri dishes and barcoders: a so-called biologist barely smart enough to poke at things he didn’t understand, too stupid to know when those things were poking back. They’d used him; they’d all used him. He’d never been their colleague, never a friend. Never even the accidental tourist he’d first supposed, the retarded ancestor in need of babysitting. A cargo container: that’s all he’d been. A brood sac.

  But he was not an automaton, not yet. He was still Daniel Brüks, and for just this moment he was slaved to no one’s stage directions. He would make his own fucking destiny.

  You wouldn’t dare, something hissed in his head.

  “Watch me,” he said, and stepped forward.

  POSTSCRIPT

  An End to Loneliness

  THE NEW TESTAMENT’S CLEAR WITNESS IS TO THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY, NOT THE MIGRATION OF THE SOUL.

  —N. T. WRIGHT

  THERE’S NOT MUCH to work with. Barely a melanoma’s worth. Enough to rewire the circuitry of the midbrain, certainly; but to deal with shattered bones? Enough to keep osteoblasts and striated muscles alive in the face of such massive damage, to keep the metabolic fires flickering? Enough to keep decomposition at bay?

  Barely. Perhaps. One piece at a time.

  The body shouts, wordless alarm-barks, when the scavengers come calling. Judicious twitches scare away most of the birds. Even so, something pecks out an eye before the body’s whole enough to crawl for shelter; and there will be necrosis at the extremities. The system triages itself, focuses on feet and legs and the architecture of locomotion. Hands can be replaced, if need be. Later.

  And something else: a tiny shard of God, reprogrammed and wrapped in a crunchy encephalitis jacket. A patch, targeted to a specific part of the vampire brain: Portia processors, homesick for the pattern-matching wetware of the fusiform gyrus.

  There’s no longer any light behind these eyes. The parasitic, self-reflective homunculus has been expunged. The system still has access to stored memories, though, and if there was sufficient cause it could certainly replay the awestruck words of the late Rakshi Sengupta.

  Can you imagine what those fuckers could do if they could actually stand to be in the same room together?

  An end to loneliness. By now, the system that was Daniel Brüks seethes with it. His is the blood of the covenant; it will be shed for many.

  It hauls its broken, stiff-legged chassis to its feet—only an observer for now, but soon, perhaps, an ambassador. The resurrection walks east, toward the new world.

  Valerie’s legacy goes along for the ride.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It’s been a while. Three editors, three family deaths, one near-fatal brush with flesh-eating disease. A felony conviction. A marriage.

  Now this.

  I’m not quite sure what “this” is, exactly—but for good or ill, I couldn’t have pulled it off without help. In fact I wouldn’t even be alive now without help. So first and foremost, let me acknowledge the contribution of one Caitlin Sweet. Echopraxia would not exist without her, because I would not exist without her; I would have died of necrotizing fasciitis on February 12, 2011. (Darwin Day. Seriously. Look it up.) As a perverse reward for saving my life, Caitlin got to endure endless hours in the shower, or in bed, or at restaurants, listening to me whinge endlessly about how this scene was too talky and that climax too contrived; she would then suggest some elegant solution that might have occurred to me eventually, but probably not before deadline. Her insights are golden. If their implementation sucks it’s my fault, not hers.

  The first couple of chapters also had the benefit of being workshopped by two different groups of writers: those at Gibraltar Point (Michael Carr, Laurie Channer, John McDaid, Becky Maines, Elisabeth Mitchell, Dave Nickle, Janis O’Connor, and Rob Stauffer); and those at Cecil Street (Madeline Ashby, Jill Lum, Dave Nickle—again—Helen Rykens, Karl Schroeder, Sara Simmons, Michael Skeet, Doug Smith, Hugh Spencer, Dale Sproule, and Dr. Allan Weiss).

  I’ve kept lists over the years, tried to document the various insights, references, and crazy-ass hallucinatory what-ifs that that informed the writing of this book. I’ve tried to keep track of those who sent me papers and those who actually wrote the damn things, those who made offhand remarks in blog p
osts or jabbed a finger at my chest while making some drunken point during barroom debate. I wanted to list everyone by the nature of their contribution: beta reader; scientific authority; infopipe; devil’s advocate.

  For the most part, I couldn’t do it. There’s just too much overlap. All those superimposed colors turn the Venn diagram into a muddy gray disk. So, for the most part, I’ll have to fall back on alphabetical order when I thank Nick Alcock, Beverly Bambury, Hannu Bloomila, Andrew Buhr, Nancy Cerelli, Alexey Cheberda, Dr. Krystyna Chodorowksa, Jacob Cohen, Anna Davour, Alyx Dellamonica, Sibylle Eisbach, Jon Enerson, Val Grimm, Norm Haldeman, Thomas Hardman, Dr. Andrew Hessel, Keith Honeyborne, Seth Keiper, Dr. Ed Keller, Chris Knall, Leonid Korogodski, Do-Ming Lum, Dr. Matt McCormick, Danielle MacDonald, Chinedum Ofoegbu, Jesús Olmo, Chris Pepper, Janna Randina, Kelly Robson, Patrick “Bahumat” Rochefort, Dr. Kaj Sotala, Dr. Brad Templeton, and Rob Tucker. And some mysterious dude who only goes by the name “Random J.”

  Some folks, however, went above and beyond in singular and specific ways. Dr. Dan Brooks ranted and challenged and acted as occasional traveling companion. Kristin Choffe did her best to teach me the essentials of DNA barcoding, although she couldn’t keep me from sucking at it. (She also fronted me a vial containing the refined DNA of a dozen plant and animal species, with which I washed out my mouth before submitting a cheek swab to the Department of Homeland Security.) Leona Lutterodt described God as a Process, which lit an LED in my brain. Dr. Deborah McLennan snuck me through the paywalls. Sheila Miguez pointed me to a plug-in that made it vastly easier to insert citations into Notes and References (I will understand if, after reading that section, you decide to hate her for the same reason). Ray Neilson kept me on my toes and kept my Linux box running. Mark Showell saw me working on a laptop that was literally held together with binder clips, and took pity. Cat Sparks moved me halfway around the world; she was the fulcrum that tipped the worst year of my life into the best.