Bethlehem and Others: Collected Stories

by Peter Watts

  He stands there, weighing costs, weighing risks. The threat of greater gods, the hazards of beatific indifference. The threat posed by aliens from another world; the threat posed by aliens from this one. The delusional arrogance in the thought that some puny caveman, scarcely climbed down from the trees, might be able to use one against the other.

  The cost of a son.

  “I believe that my service record has earned me some leeway. I’m asking you to refrain from investigating my whereabouts during my absence.”

  He’s not trusting them to do that, though. The Nissan is stolen, logs doctored, all traces of truancy erased. His own vehicle tours the Olympic Peninsula on its own recognizance, laying a trail of bread crumbs for any forensic algos that happen by after the fact.

  “I’m—aware of the breach this represents. You know I’d never do such a thing unless I thought it absolutely vital.”

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

  Again.

  It doesn’t take a hive to grasp the simple, straightforward ease with which he’s been manipulated. It’s caveman strategy: find the Achilles heel, craft the exploit, slide it home. Forge hope from static. Let remorse and the faint hope of redemption do the rest.

  All too easy to dismiss, if not for one thing: the sheer, mind-boggling egotism it would take to believe that a lonely old baseline could possibly matter to a collective of such godlike intellect. The thought that this unremarkable caveman would even merit notice, much less manipulation.

  “I’ve set my apartment to run in autonomous mode for the duration of my absence. I would nonetheless appreciate it if someone could drop by occasionally to check in on my cat.”

  He has to admit, in the face of all his fear and mistrust: compassion, after all, might be the most parsimonious explanation.

  He thumbs Send, lets the transmitter slip from his fingers. His valediction has travelled a thousand kilometers by the time his boot grinds the little device into the dirt; it will reveal itself to the chain of command in due course. The Colonel leaves behind everything but the clothes on his back, two broad-spectrum antivenom capsules, and enough rations for a one-way hike to the monastery. If Bicameral thought processes are rooted in any kind of religious philosophy, hopefully it will be one of those faiths that preach charity to lost souls, and the forgiveness of trespass.

  No guarantees, of course. There are so many ways to read the sliver of intelligence the hive has granted him.Perhaps he’s merely a pawn in some greater game after all; or a starving insect who once seized a crumb from the Heavens, and now presumes to think it has a relationship with God. Only one thing is certain out of all the scenarios, all the competing hypotheses. One insight, after all these years, that leaves the Colonel so hungry for more he’ll risk everything: His son was lost, but now is found.

  His son is coming home.

  “Go home,” he tells the Nissan, and sets out across the desert. ■

  Colony Creature

  I ONCE SPOKE TO A MAN WHO’D SHARED consciousness with an octopus.

  I’d expected his tale to be far less frightening than those I’d studied up to that point. Identity has a critical mass, after all; fuse with a million-brain hive and you become little more than a neuron in that network, an insignificant lobe at most. Is the Olfactory Bulb self-aware? Does Broca’s Area demand the vote? Hives don’t just assimilate the self; they annihilate it. They are not banned in the West without reason.

  But octopi? Mere invertebrates. Glorified snails. There’s no risk of losing yourself in a mind that small. I might have even tried it myself, for the sheer voyeuristic thrill of perceiving the world through alien eyes.

  Before I met Guo, at least.

  We met at lunchtime in Stanley Park, but we did not eat. He could not stomach the thought of food while reflecting on his own experience. I suspect he reflected on it a lot; talking to Guo was like interviewing a scarecrow.

  It had been, he told me, a simple interface for a simple system: a Pacific Octopus liberated from the captive colony at Yaquina Bay, outfitted with a B2B wrapped around its brain like a spiderweb. Guo had one of his own, a force-grown lattice permeating his corpus callosum in service of some Cloud-killing gig he’d held in Guangdong. The protocols weren’t completely compatible, but could be tweaked.

  “So what’s it like to be an octopus?” I asked him.

  He didn’t speak for a while. I got the sense he wasn’t so much gathering his thoughts as wrestling with them.

  “There’s no such thing as an octopus,” he said at last, softly. “They’re all— colonies.”

  “Colonies.”

  “Those arms.” His Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat. “Those fucking crawly arms. You know, that thing they call the brain— it’s nothing, really. Ring of neurons around the esophagus, basically just a router. Most of the nervous system’s in the arms, and those arms… every one of them is awake…”

  I gave him time.

  “People talk about the eyes,” he continued after a bit. “You know, how amazing it is that something without a backbone could have eyes like ours, eyes that put ours to shame even. And the way they change color, right? The way they blend into the background. Eyes gotta figure front and center in that too, you’d think.”

  “You’d think.”

  Guo shook his head. “It’s all just— reflex. I mean, maybe that little neuron doughnut has its own light on somewhere, you’d think it would pretty much have to, but I guess the interface didn’t access that part. Either that or it just got— drowned out…”

  “The arms,” I reminded him.

  “They don’t see.” He closed his eyes. “They don’t hear. There’s this vague distant sense of light I guess, if you really focus you can sort of squint down the optic nerve, but mostly it’s— chemical. Taste and touch. Suckers by the fucking hundreds, like tongues, and they’re always moving. Can you imagine what it’s like to have a thousand tongues squirming across your body, pulsing in your guts and your muscles, sprouting out of your skin in, in clumps like— hungry parasites…”

  I shook my head.

  “Now multiply that by eight.” Guo shuddered. “Eight blind squirming things, each one rotten with taste and smell and, and touch. The density of the sensory nerves, it’s— obscene. That’s the only way I can describe it. And every one of those arms is self-aware.”

  “But they’re so small.” I was mystified and repulsed in equal measure. “Just in terms of sheer neuron count you outgun them three hundred to one, no matter how many— partitions they’re running. It’s not like they’re going to swallow you into some kind of Moksha Mind. More the other way around.”

  “Oh, you’re exactly right. It doesn’t swallow you up at all, it climbs inside. It infests you. You can feel them crawling through your brain.”

  Neither of us spoke for a while.

  “Why did you do it?” I asked him.

  “Fuck, I don’t know.” A short bitter laugh. “Why does anyone do anything? Wanted to know what it was like, I guess.”

  “Nobody told you it would be— unpleasant?”

  Guo shook his head. “They said it wasn’t like that for everyone. Afterward. Tried to blame me, actually, said my interface didn’t meet minimum compatibility standards. But I think they were just trying to get me to stop.”

  “Stop?”

  “I killed the fucking thing. Ripped it apart with my bare hands.” His eyes drilled right through me, black and hollow and unrepentant. “I’m still paying off the damages.”

  —from The 21-Second God, by Keith Honeyborne*

  *Identity unverified. Possible alias. ■

  The Second Coming of Jasmine Fitzgerald

  WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

  Not much, at first glance. Blood pools in a pattern entirely consistent with the location of the victim. No consp
icuous arterial spray; the butchery’s all abdominal, more spilled than spurted. No slogans either. Nobody’s scrawled Helter Skelter or Satan is Lord or even Elvis Lives on any of the walls. It’s just another mess in another kitchen in another one-bedroom apartment, already overcrowded with the piecemeal accumulation of two lives. One life’s all that’s left now, a thrashing gory creature screaming her mantra over and over as the police wrestle her away— “I have to save him I have to save him I have to save him—”

  —more evidence, not that the assembled cops need it, of why domestic calls absolutely suck.

  She hasn’t saved him. By now it’s obvious that no one can. He lies in a pool of his own insides, blood and lymph spreading along the cracks between the linoleum tiles, crossing, criss-crossing, a convenient clotting grid drawing itself across the crime scene. Every now and then a red bubble grows and breaks on his lips. Anyone who happens to notice this, pretends not to.

  The weapon? Right here: run-of-the-mill steak knife, slick with blood and coagulating fingerprints, lying exactly where she dropped it.

  The only thing that’s missing is a motive. They were a quiet couple, the neighbours say. He was sick, he’d been sick for months. They never went out much. There was no history of violence. They loved each other deeply.

  Maybe she was sick too. Maybe she was following orders from some tumour in her brain. Or maybe it was a botched alien abduction, grey-skinned creatures from Zeta II Reticuli framing an innocent bystander for their own incompetence. Maybe it’s a mass hallucination, maybe it isn’t really happening at all. Maybe it’s an act of God.

  • • •

  THEY GOT TO HER EARLY. This is one of the advantages of killing someone during office hours. They’ve taken samples, scraped residue from clothes and skin on the off chance that anyone might question whose blood she was wearing. They’ve searched the apartment, questioned neighbours and relatives, established the superficial details of identity: Jasmine Fitzgerald, 24-year-old Caucasian brunette, doctoral candidate. In Global General Relativity, whatever the fuck that is. They’ve stripped her down, cleaned her up, bounced her off a judge into Interview Room 1, Forensic Psychiatric Support Services.

  They’ve put someone in there with her.

  “Hello, Ms. Fitzgerald. I’m Dr. Thomas. My first name’s Myles, if you prefer.”

  She stares at him. “Myles it is.” She seems calm, but the tracks of recent tears still show on her face. “I guess you’re supposed to decide whether I’m crazy.”

  “Whether you’re fit to stand trial, yes. I should tell you right off that nothing you say to me is necessarily confidential. Do you understand?” She nods. Thomas sits down across from her. “What would you like me to call you?”

  “Napoleon. Mohammed. Jesus Christ.” Her lips twitch, the faintest smile, gone in an instant. “Sorry. Just kidding. Jaz’s fine.”

  “Are you doing okay in here? Are they treating you all right?”

  She snorts. “They’re treating me pretty damn well, considering the kind of monster they think I am.” A pause, then, “I’m not, you know.”

  “A monster?”

  “Crazy. I’ve— I’ve just recently undergone a paradigm shift, you know? The whole world looks different, and my head’s there but sometimes my gut— I mean, it’s so hard to feel differently about things…”

  “Tell me about this paradigm shift,” Thomas suggests. He makes it a point not to take notes. He doesn’t even have a notepad. Not that it matters. The microcassette recorder in his blazer has very sensitive ears.

  “Things make sense now,” she says. “They never did before. I think, for the first time in my life, I’m actually happy.” She smiles again, for longer this time. Long enough for Thomas to marvel at how genuine it seems.

  “You weren’t very happy when you first came here,” he says gently. “They say you were very upset.”

  “Yeah.” She nods, seriously. “It’s tough enough to do that shit to yourself, you know, but to risk someone else, someone you really care about—” She wipes at one eye. “He was dying for over a year, did you know that? Each day he’d hurt a little more. You could almost see it spreading through him, like some sort of— leaf, going brown. Or maybe that was the chemo. Never could decide which was worse.” She shakes her head. “Heh. At least that’s over now.”

  “Is that why you did it? To end his suffering?” Thomas doubts it. Mercy killers don’t generally disembowel their beneficiaries. Still, he asks.

  She answers. “Of course I fucked up, I only ended up making things worse.” She clasps her hands in front of her. “I miss him already. Isn’t that crazy? It only happened a few hours ago, and I know it’s no big deal, but I still miss him. That head-heart thing again.”

  “You say you fucked up,” Thomas says.

  She takes a deep breath, nods. “Big time.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  “I don’t know shit about debugging. I thought I did, but when you’re dealing with organics— all I really did was go in and mess randomly with the code. You make a mess of everything, unless you know exactly what you’re doing. That’s what I’m working on now.”

  “Debugging?”

  “That’s what I call it. There’s no real word for it yet.”

  Oh yes there is. Aloud: “Go on.”

  Jasmine Fitzgerald sighs, her eyes closed. “I don’t expect you to believe this under the circumstances, but I really loved him. No: I love him.” Her breath comes out in a soft snort, a whispered laugh.

  “There I go again. That bloody past tense.” “Tell me about debugging.”

  “I don’t think you’re up for it, Myles. I don’t even think you’re all that interested.” Her eyes open, point directly at him. “But for the record, Stu was dying. I tried to save him. I failed. Next time I’ll do better, and better still the time after that, and eventually I’ll get it right.”

  “And what happens then?” Thomas says.

  “Through your eyes or mine?”

  “Yours.”

  “I repair the glitches in the string. Or if it’s easier, I replicate an undamaged version of the subroutine and insert it back into the main loop. Same difference.”

  “Uh huh. And what would I see?”

  She shrugs. “Stu rising from the dead.”

  • • •

  WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

  Spread out across the table, the mind of Jasmine Fitzgerald winks back from pages of standardised questions. Somewhere in here, presumably, is a monster.

  These are the tools used to dissect human psyches. The WAIS. The MMPI. The PDI. Hammers, all of them. Blunt chisels posing as microtomes. A copy of the DSM-IV sits off to one side, a fat paperback volume of symptoms and pathologies. A matrix of pigeonholes. Perhaps Fitzgerald fits into one of them. Intermittent Explosive, maybe? Battered Woman? Garden-variety Sociopath?

  The test results are inconclusive. It’s as though she’s laughing up from the page at him. True or false: I sometimes hear voices that no one else hears. False, she’s checked. I have been feeling unusually depressed lately. False. Sometimes I get so angry I feel like hitting something. True, and a hand-written note in the margin:

  Hey, doesn’t everyone?

  There are snares sprinkled throughout these tests, linked questions designed to catch liars in subtle traps of self-contradiction. Jasmine Fitzgerald has avoided them all. Is she unusually honest? Is she too smart for the tests? There doesn’t seem to be anything here that— Wait a second.

  Who was Louis Pasteur? asks the WAIS, trying to get a handle on educational background.

  A virus, Fitzgerald said.

  Back up the list. Here’s another one, on the previous page: Who was Winston Churchill? And again: a virus.

  And fifteen questions before that: Who was Florence Nightingale?

  A famous nurse, Fitzgerald responded to that one. And her responses to all previous questions on historical personalities are unremarkably correct. But everyone after
Nightingale is a virus.

  Killing a virus is no sin. You can do it with an utterly clear conscience. Maybe she’s redefining the nature of her act. Maybe that’s how she manages to live with herself these days.

  Just as well. That raising-the-dead shtick didn’t cut any ice at all.

  • • •

  SHE’S SLUMPED ACROSS the table when he enters, her head resting on folded arms. Thomas clears his throat. “Jasmine.”

  No response. He reaches out, touches her lightly on the shoulder. Her head comes up, a fluid motion containing no hint of grogginess.

  She settles back into her chair and smiles. “Welcome back. So, am I crazy or what?”

  Thomas smiles back and sits down across from her. “We try to avoid prejudicial terms.”

  “Hey, I can take it. I’m not prone to tantrums.”

  A picture flashes across the front of his mind: beloved husband, entrails spread-eagled like butterfly wings against a linoleum grid. Of course not. No tantrums for you. We need a whole new word to describe what it is you do.

  ‘Debugging’, wasn’t it?

  “I was going over your test results,” he begins.

  “Did I pass?”

  “It’s not that kind of test. But I was intrigued by some of your answers.”

  She purses her lips. “Good.”

  “Tell me about viruses.”

  That sunny smile again. “Sure. Mutable information strings that can’t replicate without hijacking external source code.”

  “Go on.”

  “Ever hear of Core Wars?”

  “No.”

  “Back in the early eighties some guys got together and wrote a bunch of self-replicating computer programs. The idea was to put them into the same block of memory and have them compete for space. They all had their own little tricks for self-defence and reproduction and, of course, eating the competition.” “Oh, you mean computer viruses,” Thomas says.

  “Actually, before all that.” Fitzgerald pauses a moment, cocks her head to one side. “You ever wonder what it might be like to be one of those little programs? Running around laying eggs and dropping logic bombs and interacting with other viruses?”