by Peter Watts
Strike a spark…
Because hydrogen sulfide isn’t just poisonous, you idiot. It’s flammable.
“Holy shit,” the Lieutenant whispers as the zone goes up.
• • •
IT’S A COUNTER-COUNTERMEASURE, improvised on the fly. It’s a queen sacrifice; some of these bodies are doomed but maybe the fire will burn off enough gas to give the rest a chance, suck back and consume enough of that spreading poison for eleven bodies to make it to safety while two burn like living torches.
For a few seconds the Colonel thinks it’s going to work. As Hail-Marys go it’s a good one; no baseline would have even come up with a plan in that split-second, much less put it into action. But faint hope is only a little better than none, and not even demigods can change the laws of physics. The sacrificial nodes blaze and blacken and crumble like dead leaves. Three others make it halfway up the chain-link before the gas reaches them, still thick enough to kill if not to burn. The rest die convulsing in the dirt, flesh oiled and guttering with spotty candlelight, jerking with the impact of bullets that can finally kick at targets once they’re down.
The poisonous carpet spreads invisibly into the jungle, off to kill whatever weedy life it might still find there.
The Lieutenant swallows, face pale with nausea and the unleashed memories of ancient war crimes. “We’re sure this isn’t against the—” she trails off, unwilling to challenge a superior officer, unconvinced by legalistic hairsplitting, unable to assess the threat posed by this vanquished enemy.
But the threat is so very real. These things are fucking dangerous. If not for some happenstance bit of intel—unpredictable as a quantum flutter, never to be repeated—this hive would have accomplished its goal without discovery or opposition. Or maybe it did; maybe everything that’s just happened was part of the plan, maybe that lucky tip-off was deliberately crafted to make him dance on command. Maybe this was a defeat and he’ll never know.
That’s the thing about hives. Always ten steps ahead. The fact that there are still jurisdictions where such abominations remain legal scares the Colonel more than he can say.
“Why are we doing this, sir?”
He scowls. “Doing what, exactly? Fighting for the survival of the individual?”
But the Lieutenant shakes her head. “Why are we still just—fighting all the time? Among ourselves? I mean, weren’t the aliens supposed to make us all forget our petty differences? Unite humanity against the common threat?”
The ranks are full of them, these days.
“They didn’t threaten us, Lieutenant. They only took our picture.” That’s what everyone assumes, anyway. Sixty-four thousand objects of unknown origin, simultaneously igniting in a precise incandescent grid encircling the globe. Screaming back into space along half the EM spectrum as the atmosphere burned them to ash.
“But they’re still out there. Whatever sent them is, anyway. Even after thirteen years—”
Fourteen. The Colonel feels muscles tighten at the corners of his mouth. But who’s counting.
“And with Theseus lost—”
“There’s no evidence Theseus is lost,” he says shortly.
“Yes, sir.”
“Nobody said it was going to be a weekend mission.”
“Yes sir.” She returns her attention to the board, but he thinks there was something in her face as she turned away. He wonders if it might have been recognition.
Unlikely. It was a long time ago. And he always kept behind the scenes.
“Well—” he heads for the door. “Might as well send in the clowns.”
“Sir?”
He stops but doesn’t turn.
“I was wondering—if it isn’t above my pay grade, sir—but you seemed really concerned about what that hive would do when it booted. No way we could keep up when it was engaged, you said.”
“I’m waiting for a question, Lieutenant.”
“Why did we wait? We could’ve gassed the lot of them before they ever linked up, and if they were that dangerous—well, it seems like bad strategy.”
He can’t disagree. Which is not to say it was unwarranted.
“Hives are dangerous, Lieutenant. Never doubt that for an instant. That said …”
He considers, and settles for something like the truth.
“If killing’s the only option, I’d rather kill one than thirteen.”
• • •
SOME THREATS LURK CLOSER TO HOME. Some are somewhat less—overt.
Take the woman on the feed, for example: a tiny thing, maybe 160 cm. Nothing about Liana Lutterodt suggests anything other than contagious enthusiasm for a world of wonders. No hint of the agency that pays her expenses, sends her on these goodwill tours to dispense rainbows and a promise of Utopia.
No hint of forces deep in the Oregon desert, using her as a sock puppet.
“We climbed this hill,” she says now, to the attentive host of In Conversation. “Each step up we could see farther, so of course we kept going. Now we’re at the top. Science has been at the top for a few centuries now.”
Her background’s unremarkable, for the most part: born in Ghana, raised in the UKapelago, top of her class in systems theory and theistic virology.
“Now we look out across the plain and we see this other tribe dancing around above the clouds, even higher than we are. Maybe it’s a mirage, maybe it’s a trick. Or maybe they just climbed a higher peak we can’t see because the clouds are blocking the view.”
Little in the way of overt criminal activity. Charged with possession of a private database at thirteen, interfering with domestic surveillance pickups at twelve. The usual fines and warnings racked up by the young before they learn to embrace the panopticon.
“So we head off to find out—but every step takes us downhill. No matter what direction we go, we can’t move off our peak without losing our vantage point. Naturally we climb back up again. We’re trapped on a local maximum.”
Finally managed to drop off the grid legally by signing up with the Bicameral Order, which gets special exemption by virtue of being largely incomprehensible even when you do keep an eye on them.
“But what if there is a higher peak out there, way across the plain? The only way to get there is bite the bullet, come down off our foothill and trudge along the riverbed until we finally start going uphill again. And it’s only then you realize: Hey, this mountain reaches way higher than that foothill we were on before, and we can see so much better from up here.”
The Bicamerals. Named, apparently, for some prototype of reinvention that involved massive rewiring of their cerebral hemispheres. The name’s a coelacanth these days, though. It’s not even certain the Bicams have cerebral hemispheres any more.
“But you can’t get there unless you leave behind all the tools that made you so successful in the first place. You have to take that first step downhill.”
“You buy any of this?” The Lieutenant (a different Lieutenant—the Colonel has one in every port) glances away from the screen, lip pulled sideways in a skeptical grimace. “Faith-based science?”
“It’s not science,” the Colonel says. “They don’t pretend that it is.”
“Even worse. You don’t build a better brainchip by speaking in tongues.”
“Hard to argue with the patents.”
It’s the patents that have him worried. The Bicamerals don’t seem to have any martial ambitions, no designs of conquest—don’t seem especially interested in the outside world at all, for that matter. So far they’ve been content to hunker down in their scattered desert monasteries, contemplating whatever reality underlies reality.
But there are other ways to throw the world on its side. Things are—fragile, these days. Whole societies have been known to fall in the wake of a single paradigm shift, and the Bicamerals own half the patent office. They could make the global economy eat itself overnight if they wanted to. It wouldn’t even be illegal.
Lutterodt isn’t actually part of that h
ive, as far as anyone can tell. She just fronts for it; a friendly face, a charismatic spokesperson to grease wheels and calm fears. She’s out in the world for the next couple of weeks, doing the rounds: a fellow standalone human being, with access to the deepest Bicameral secrets. Completely at home in a world where a thought doesn’t know enough to stop at the edge of the skull, doesn’t even know when it’s left one head and entered another.
“You want to bring her in?” the Lieutenant asks as Lutterodt disarms the world with a smile and a pocketful of metaphors.
He has to admit it’s tempting: cut her off from the herd, draw the curtain of Global Security across the interrogation. Who knows what insights she might share, given the right incentive?
He shakes his head. “I’ll go to her.”
“Really?” Evidently not what this new Lieutenant signed up for, setting forth on bended knee.
“She’s on a goodwill tour. Let’s give her a chance to spread some good will.”
It’s not as generous as it seems, of course. You never want to strong-arm an adversary until you know how hard they can push back.
• • •
THIS GLOBAL SURVEY, this threat-assessment of hived minds: it’s not his only assignment. It’s only his most recent. A dozen others idle in the background, only occasionally warranting examination or update. Realist incursions into the UKapelago; a newly-separatist Baptist Convention, building their armed gyland on the high seas. The occasional court-martial of some antique flesh-and-blood infantry whose cybernetic augments violate the Rules of Engagement. They all sit in his queue, pilot-lit, half-forgotten. They’ll flag him if they need his attention.
But there’s one candle the Colonel has never forgotten, though it hasn’t flickered for the better part of a decade. It, too, is programmed to call out in the event of any change in status. He checks it anyway, daily. Now—back for a couple of days in the large empty apartment he kept even after his wife went to Heaven—he checks it again.
No change.
He puts his inlays to sleep, takes grateful refuge in the silence that fills his head once the overlays and the status reports stop murmuring through his temporal lobe. He grows belatedly aware of a real sensation, the soft tick of claws on the tiles behind him. He turns and glimpses a small furry black-and-white face before it ducks out of sight around the corner.
The Colonel adjourns to the kitchen.
Zephyr’s willing to let the apartment feed him—he pretty much has to be, given the intermittent availability of his human servant—but he doesn’t like it much. He refused outright at first, rendered psychotic by some cross-species dabbler who must have thought it would be enlightening or transcendent or just plain cute to “share consciousness” with a small soul weighing in at one-tenth the synapse count. The Colonel tries to imagine what that kind of forced fusion must have been like: thrust into a maelstrom of incomprehensible thought and sensation, blinding as a naked sun; thrown back into stunned bleeding darkness once some narcissistic god got bored and cut the connection.
Zephyr hid in the closet for weeks after the Colonel brought him home, hissed and spat at the sight of sockets and fiberop and the low-slung housecleaner trundling quietly on its rounds. After two years his furry little brain has at least rejigged the cost/benefit stats for the kibble dispenser in the kitchen but he’s still more phantom than fur, still mostly visible only from the corner of the eye. He can be coaxed into the open if he’s hungry and if the Colonel is very still; he still recoils at physical contact. The Colonel indulges him, and pretends not to notice the ragged fraying of the armrest on the living room couch. He doesn’t even have the heart to get the socket removed from the patch of twisted scar tissue on Zephyr’s head. No telling what post-traumatic nightmares might be reawakened by a trip to the vet.
Now he fills the kibble bowl and stands back the requisite two meters. (This is progress; just six months ago he could never stray closer than three.) Zephyr creeps into the kitchen, nose twitching, eyes darting to every corner.
The Colonel hopes that whoever inflicted that torment went on to try more exotic interfaces once they got bored with mammals. A cephalopod, perhaps. By all accounts, things get a lot less cuddly when you go B2B with a Pacific octopus.
At least Human hives can lay claim to mutual consent. At least its members choose the violence they inflict on themselves, the emergence of some voluntary monster from the pool of all those annihilated identities. If only it stopped there. If only the damage ended where the hive did.
His son’s candle slumbers in its own little corner of his network, a pilot light in purgatory. Zephyr glances around with every second bite, still fearful of some Second Coming.
The Colonel knows how he feels.
• • •
THEY MEET ON A PATIO OFF Riverside: one of those heritage bistros where everything from food prep to table service is performed by flesh-and-blood, and where everything from food prep to table service suffers as a result. People seem willing to pay extra for the personal touch anyway.
“You disapprove,” Dr. Lutterodt says, getting straight to the point.
“Of many things,” The Colonel admits. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
“Of us. What we do.” She glances at the menu (literally—it’s printed on dumb stock). “Of hives in general, I’m guessing.”
“There’s a reason they’re against the law.” Most of them, anyway.
“There is: because people get scared when things they can’t understand have control over their lives. Doesn’t matter how rational or beneficial any given law or a policy might be. When you need ten brains to understand the nuts and bolts, the unibrains get skittish.” The sock puppet shrugs. “The thing is, Bicam hives don’t make laws or set policies. They keep their eyes on nature and their hands to themselves. Maybe that’s why they’re not against the law.”
“Or maybe it’s just a loophole. If anyone had seen meat interfaces coming down the pike, you can bet we’d have defined technology a bit more explicitly.”
“Except the Interface Act passed a good ten years ago and they still haven’t got their definition right. How could they? Brains rewire themselves every time we have an idle thought; how do you outlaw cortical editing without outlawing life at the same time?”
“Not my department.”
“Still. You disapprove.”
“I’ve just seen too much damage. You put such a happy face on it, you go on and on about the transcendent insights of the group mind. All the insight to be had by joining some greater whole. Nobody talks about—”
What the rest of us pay for your enlightenment—
“—what happens to you afterward.”
“A glimpse of heaven,” Lutterodt murmurs, “that turns your life to hell.”
The Colonel blinks. “Exactly.” What must it be like to be given godsight only to have it snatched away again, to have your miserable baseline existence plagued by muddy, incomprehensible half-memories of the sublime? No wonder people get addicted. No wonder some have to be ripped screaming from their sockets.
Ending a life suffered in the shadows of such incandescence—why, that would almost be an act of mercy.
“—a common misconception,” Lutterodt is saying. “The hive’s not some jigsaw with a thousand little personalities, it’s integrated. Jim Moore doesn’t turn into Superman; Jim Moore doesn’t even exist when the hive’s active. Not unless you’ve got your latency dialed way down, anyway.”
“Even worse.”
She shakes her head, a little impatiently. “If it was bad thing you’d already know it first-hand. You’re a hive mind. You always have been.”
“If that’s your perspective on the Chain of Command—”
“Everyone’s a hive.”
He snorts.
She presses on: “You’ve got two cerebral hemispheres, right? Each one fully capable of running its own standalone persona, running multiple personae in fact. If I were to put one of those hemispheres dow
n for the count, anesthetize it or scramble it with enough TMS, the other would carry on just fine, and you know what? It would be different than you. It might have different political beliefs, a different gender—hell, it might even have a sense of humor. Right up until the other hemisphere woke up, and fused, and became you again.
“So tell me, Colonel; are your hemispheres suffering right now? Are there multiple selves in your head, bound and gagged, thinking Oh Great Ganesh I’m trapped! If only the Hive would let me out to play!”
I don’t know, he realizes. How could I know?
“Course not,” Lutterodt answers herself. “It’s just timesharing. Completely transparent.“
“And Post-Coalescent Psychosis is just an urban legend spread by the tinfoil brigade.”
She sighs. “No, PCP is very real. And it is tragic, and it fucks up thousands of lives. Yes. And it is entirely a result of defective interface technology. Our guys don’t get it.”
“Not everyone’s so lucky,” the Colonel says.
A man with cosmetic chlorophyll in his eyes arrives, bearing their orders. Lutterodt gives him a smile and digs into a cloned crab salad. The Colonel picks through bits of avocado he barely remembers ordering. “Have you ever visited the Moksha Mind?”
“Only in virt.”
“You know you can’t trust anything you experience in virt.”
“You can’t trust anything you experience at this table. Do you see that big honking blind spot in the middle of your visual field?”
“I’m not talking about nature’s shortcuts. I’m talking about something with an agenda.”
“Okay.” She chews, speaks around a mouthful. “So what’s the Moksha agenda?”
“Nobody knows. Eight million human minds linked together, and they just—lie there. Sure, you’ve seen the feeds from Bangalore and Hyderabad, the nice clean dorms with the smart beds to exercise the bodies and keep everything supple. Have you seen the nodes living at the ass end of five hundred kilometers of dirt track? People with nothing more than a cot and a hut and a C-square router by the village well?”
She doesn’t answer.
He takes it for a no. “You should pay them a visit sometime. Some of them have people checking in on them. Some—don’t. I’ve seen children covered with stinking bedsores lying in their own shit, people with half their teeth fallen out because they’re wired into that hive. And they don’t care. They can’t care, because there is no them any more, and the hive doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the pieces it’s built out of any more than—”