Bethlehem and Others: Collected Stories

by Peter Watts

  Human torches, blazing in the Ecuadorian rainforest.

  “—any more than you’d care about a single cell in your liver.”

  Lutterodt glances down at her drink. “It’s what they aspire to, Colonel. Freedom from sa?s?ra. I can’t pretend it’s a choice I’d make for myself.” She looks back up, catches his gaze, holds it. “But that’s not what’s bothering you.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because no matter how much you disapprove of their lifestyle, eight million happily-catatonic souls aren’t any kind of military threat.”

  “You sure about that? Can you even begin to imagine what kind of plans could be brewing in a coherent thinking entity with the mass of eight million human brains?”

  “World conquest.” Lutterodt nods, deadpan. “Because that’s what the Dharmic faiths are all about.”

  He doesn’t laugh. “People subscribe to a faith. That hive is something else entirely.”

  “And if they’re a threat,” she says quietly, “what are we?”

  Her masters, she means. And the answer is, Terrifying.

  “Moksha’s not so radical when you get right down to it,” she continues. &;dquo;It’s built out of garden-variety brains after all. My guys played around with the cortical architecture. We’ve got entanglement on the brain, we’ve got quantum bioradio grown on principles you won’t stumble across for another twenty years. You can’t even define it as technology any more. That’s why you and I are talking right now, isn’t it? Because if a bunch of networked baselines has you worried, how could the Bicamerals not be a threat?”

  “Are they?” he asks at last.

  She snorts. “Look, you can optimize a brain for down there or up here. Not both. Bicams think at Planck scales. All that quantum craziness is as intuitive to them as the trajectory of a baseball is to you. But you know what?”

  He’s heard it before: “They don’t get baseballs.”

  “They don’t get baseballs. Oh, they get around okay. They can wipe their asses and feed themselves. But stick ’em in a big city and—well, saying it would make them uncomfortable is putting it mildly.”

  He doesn’t buy it.

  “Why do you think they need people like me? You think they set up way out in the desert so they can build some kind of supervillain lair?” Lutterodt rolls her eyes. “They’re no threat, believe me. They’d have a hard time getting across a busy street.”

  “Their physical prowess is the last thing I’m worried about. Something that advanced could crush us underfoot and never even notice.”

  “Colonel, I live with them. They haven’t crushed me yet.”

  “We both know how destabilizing it would be if the Bicams marketed even a fraction—”

  “But they haven’t, have they? Why would they? You think they care about a fucking profit margin in your fantasy-world economy?” Lutterodt shakes her head. “You should be thanking whatever Gods you subscribe to that they do hold those patents. Anyone else probably would have kicked the anthill over by now, for no more reason than a good fiscal quarterly.”

  So we’re ants to you now.

  “Whether you admit it or not, your world’s better off with them in it. They keep to themselves, they don’t bother anyone, and when they do come out to play you cavemen make out like bandits. You should know that already; the Armed Forces have been licensing our cryption tech for over a decade.”

  “Not lately we haven’t.” Not since someone up the chain got antsy about back doors. Although perhaps the Colonel had something to do with that decision as well.

  “Your loss. Just a couple months back Coahuila came up with a Ramanujan-symmetric variant you guys would kill for. Nothing lays a hand on our algos.” She reconsiders. “Nothing baseline, anyway.”

  “It won’t work, Dr. Lutterodt.”

  She raises her eyebrows, the very picture of innocence.

  He leans in across the table. “Maybe you really do feel safe, sleeping with your giants. They haven’t rolled over and crushed you in your sleep yet; maybe you think that’s some kind of guarantee they never will. I will never be that reckless—”

  Again.

  Even after all this time, the qualifier still kicks him in the gut.

  “They’re not the enemy, Colonel.”

  He takes a breath, marvels at its control. “That’s what scares me. At least you can hope to understand what an enemy wants. That thing—” He shakes his head. “You’ve admitted it yourself. Its ambitions won’t even fit into a human skull.”

  “Right now,” Lutterodt says, “it wants to help you.”

  “Right.”

  She peels off a fingernail and slides it across the table. He looks but doesn’t touch.

  “It’s a crystal,” she says after a moment.

  “I know what it is. You couldn’t have just sacc’d it to me?”

  “You would have accepted it? You would have let a Bicameral stooge dump data directly into your head?”

  He concedes the point with a small grimace. “What is it?”

  “It’s a transmission. We decrypted it a few weeks ago.”

  “A transmission.”

  “From the Oort. As far as we can tell.”

  She’s lying. She has to be.

  The Colonel shakes his head. “We would have—” Every day, for the better part of ten years. Checking the pilot light. Squeezing the microwave background for a word, a whisper, a sigh. Eyes always fixed on the heavens, even now, even after the losses have been tallied and all other eyes have moved on to better prospects.

  There’s no evidence Theseusis lost …

  “We’ve been scanning ever since the launch. If there’d been any kind of signal I’d know about it.”

  Lutterodt shrugs. “They can do things you can’t. Isn’t that what keeps you up at night?”

  “They don’t even have an array. Where’d they get the telemetry?”

  She smiles the faintest smile.

  The light dawns at last. “You—you knew …”

  Lutterodt reaches across the table and pushes her dismembered fingernail a few centimeters closer. “Take it.”

  “You knew I was going to reach out to you. You planned on it.”

  “See what it says.”

  “You know about my son.” He feels his breath hissing through teeth suddenly clenched. “You fuckers. You’re using my own son against me now?”

  “I promise you’ll find it worth—”

  He stands. “If your masters think they can hold him hostage …”

  “Hos—” Lutterodt blinks. “Of course not. I told you, they want to help—”

  “A hive wants to help. It was a fucking hive in the first place that …”

  “Jim. They’re giving it to you.” He sees nothing in that face but earnest entreaty. “Take it. Open it wherever, whenever you want. Run it through whatever filters or bomb detectors, whatever security you deem appropriate.”

  He eyes it as though it’s sprouted teeth. “You’re giving it to me. No strings attached.”

  “Just one.”

  “Of course.” He shakes his head, disgusted. “And that would be.”

  “This is for you, Jim. Not your masters. Not Mission Control.”

  “You know I can’t make that promise.”

  “Then don’t take the offer. I don’t have to tell you what happens if word gets out. You’re willing to talk to us, at least. Others might not be so reasonable. And despite your deepest fears, we can’t summon lightning from the heavens to strike down our adversaries. You spread this around and there’ll be bots and jackboots stomping through every monastery in WestHem.”

  “Why trust me at all? How do you know I won’t authorize an op on the strength of this conversation?”

  She counts the ways. “Because you’re not that kind of man. Because maybe I’m lying, and you don’t want to risk lives and assets only to discover we can bring down the lightning after all. And because—” She taps the fake fingernail with a rea
l one. “Because what if this is from Theseus, and you never get another chance?”

  “If. You don’t know?”

  “You don’t,” Lutterodt says, and the temptation pulls so relentlessly at his soul that he barely notices she hasn’t answered the question.

  The device sits between them like something coiled.

  “Why?” he asks at last.

  “They come across things, sometimes,” she tells him. “Spin-offs, you might say. In the course of other pursuits. Things which aren’t necessarily relevant to the Bicams, but which others might find meaningful.”

  “Why should they care?”

  “But they do, Jim. You think they’re beyond us, you think we can’t possibly understand their motives. It’s an article of faith with you. But here’s a motive staring you in the face and you can’t even see it.”

  “What motive?” He sees nothing but leg-hold traps, gaping on all sides.

  “It’s how you know they’re not gods after all,” she tells him. “They have compassion.”

  • • •

  THEY DON’T, OF COURSE. It’s manipulation, pure and simple. It’s clay being shaped by the potter, it’s a hotwire to centers of longing in the heart of the brain. It’s the pulling of strings that reach all the way into the stratosphere.

  Unbreakable ones, apparently.

  Zephyr’s claws click furtively in the next room as he opens the cache. There are directories within directories here: files of raw static, fourier transforms, interpretations of signal to noise reduced to least-squares and splines. It all opens instantly and without fuss: no locks, no passwords, no ruby sweep of laser across iris. (He would not have been surprised if there had been. Why couldn’t those giants have reached up from the Planck length to snatch his eyeprints from some quantum-encrypted file?) Maybe none of that’s necessary. Maybe everything’s embedded in some invisible failsafe, some impossible mind-reading algorithm that scans his conscience in an instant, ready to wipe everything clean should he be found guilty of violating the hive’s trust.

  Maybe they simply know him better than he does.

  He recognizes the faint echo of the microwave background, stamped across the data like a smudged fingerprint from the dawn of time. He sees something like a transponder code in the residuals. He has to take most of the analyses on faith; if any of this was sent from Theseus, it either passed through some very heavy weather en route or the transmitter was damaged. What remains appears to be the remnants of a multichannel braid, its intelligence woven as much into the way its frequencies interact as in the signals themselves. A data hologram.

  Finally he extracts a single thread from the tapestry: an arid stream of linear text. The metatags suggest that it was gleaned from some kind of acoustic signal—a voice channel, most likely—but one so faint that the reconstruction isn’t so much filtered from static as built from the stuff. The resulting text is simple and unadorned. Much of it is conjectural.

  Imagine you are Siri Keeton, it begins.

  The Colonel’s legs buckle beneath him.

  • • •

  HE USED TO GO TO HEAVEN ONCE A WEEK. Then once a month. Now it’s been over a year.

  There just hasn’t seemed to be any point.

  It’s not a hive, not the sort that falls within his mandate anyway. Heaven’s brains are networked but it’s all subconscious—interneurons surplus to current needs, rented out for the processing power while their waking souls float on top in dream worlds of their own imagining. It’s the ultimate business model: Give us your brain to run our machinery and we’ll keep its conscious left-overs entertained.

  Helen Keeton is still technically his wife. Annulments are straightforward enough when a spouse ascends, but a few forms don’t alter the reality of the situation one way or another and the Colonel never got around to doing the paperwork. She doesn’t answer at first, keeps him in Limbo while she finishes whatever virtual pastime he’s caught her in the middle of. Or maybe just to make him wait. After a year, he supposes he can’t complain.

  Finally a jagged-edged cloud of rainbows descends into his presence, the shattered fragments of a stained-glass window. Its shards swirl and dance like schooling fish: some nearest-neighbor flocking algo that conjures arabesques out of chaos. The Colonel still doesn’t know whether it’s deliberate affectation or just some off-the-shelf avatar.

  It’s always struck him as a little over-the-top.

  A voice from swirling glass: “Jim …”

  She sounds distant, distracted. As disjointed as her own manifestation. Fourteen years in a world where the very laws of physics root in dreams and wish-fulfillment: he’s probably lucky she can speak at all.

  “I thought you should know. There was a signal.”

  “A … signal …”

  “From Theseus. Maybe.”

  The flock slows, as though the very air is turning to treacle. It locks into freeze-frame. The Colonel counts off seven seconds in which there is no motion at all.

  Helen coalesces. Abstraction congeals towards humanity: ten thousand fragments fall together, an interlocking three-dimensional puzzle whose pieces desaturate from bright primary down to muted tones of flesh and blood. The Colonel imagines a ghost, dressing in formal attire for some special occasion.

  “S—Siri?” She has a face now. The particles of its lower half jostle in time to the name. “Is he—”

  “I don’t know. The signal’s—very faint. Garbled.”

  “He’d be forty-two,” she says after a moment.

  “He is,” the Colonel says, not giving a micron.

  “You sent him out there.”

  It’s true enough; he didn’t speak out, after all. He didn’t object, even added his own voice to the chorus when it became obvious which way the wind was blowing. What weight would his protests have carried anyway? All the others were already on board, in thrall to a networked mob so far beyond caveman mentality that all those experts and officers might as well have been a parliament of mice.

  “We sent all of them, Helen. Because they were all the most qualified.”

  “And have you forgotten why he was most qualified?”

  He wishes he could.

  “You sent him into space chasing ghosts,” she says. “At best. At worst you fed him to monsters.”

  And you, he does not reply, abandoned him for this place before the monsters even showed up.

  “You sent him up against something that was too big for anyone to handle.”

  I will not be drawn into this argument again. “We didn’t know how big it was. We didn’t know anything. We had to find out.”

  “And you’ve done a fine job on that score.” Helen’s fully integrated now, all that simmering resentment resurrected as though it had never been laid to rest at all.

  “Helen, we were surveyed. The whole damn planet.” Surely she remembers. Surely she hasn’t got so wrapped up in her fantasy world that she’s forgotten what happened in the real one. “Should we just have just ignored that? You think anyone else would miss their child less, even if Siri wasn’t the best man for the job? It was bigger than him. It was bigger than all of us.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to tell me. For Colonel Moore so loved the fucking world that he gave his only begotten son.”

  His shoulders rise, and fall.

  “If this pans out—”

  “If—”

  He cuts her off: “Siri could be alive, Helen. Can’t you put aside your hatred long enough to take any hope at all from that?”

  She hovers before him like an avenging angel, but her sword arm is stayed for the moment. She’s beautiful—more so than she ever was in the flesh—although the Colonel has a pretty good idea of what her physical corpus must look like, after so many years spent pickling in the catacombs. He tries to squeeze a little vindictive satisfaction from that knowledge, and fails.

  “Thank you for telling me,” she says at last.

  “Nothing’s certain—”

  “But there
’s a chance. Yes, of course.” She leans forward. “Do you expect—that is, when will you have a better idea of what it says? The signal?”

  “I don’t know. I’m—pursuing options. I’ll tell you the moment I learn anything.”

  “Thank you,” the angel says, already beginning to dissipate—then recongeals at a sudden thought. “Of course you won’t let me share this, will you?”

  “Helen, you know—”

  “You’ve already security-locked my domain. The wall goes up the moment I try to tell anyone my son could be alive. Doesn’t it?”

  He sighs. “It’s not my call.”

  “It’s an intrusion. That’s what it is. It’s a form of bullying.”

  “Would you rather I just didn’t tell you?” But he knows, as Helen disconnects and Heaven dissolves and the barren walls of his apartment reappear around him, that it’s all just part of the dance. The steps never change: he mans the barricades, she rages against them, energy flows downhill to the same empty equilibrium. It probably doesn’t even matter whether the security locks are in place or not. Who would she tell, after all?

  Down in Heaven, all her friends are imaginary.

  • • •

  “THIS IS JIM MOORE.”

  The Colonel stands at the edge of the desert. The Nissan idles at his side like a faithful pet.

  “I will be unavailable for the foreseeable future. I can’t tell you where I’m going.”

  He’s been effectively naked for the past twenty-four hours: no springsoles, no sidearm, no dog tags. No watch: window to the Noosphere, keeper of secrets, hub and booster and event coordinator for all those everyday pieces of smartwear he left behind. He’s even shut down his cortical inlays, thrown away his vision along with his garments. All that’s left is this last-minute voicemail, to be held in abeyance until he is beyond reach.

  “I hope to provide a full debriefing upon my return. I don’t know exactly when that might be.”