Firefall

by Peter Watts

  The scarecrow clicked his tongue, eyes never leaving the table.

  “Don’t mind Masashi,” Luckett remarked. “He’s not much for what you’d call normal conversation.”

  “Does everyone around here speak in tongues?”

  “Speak—oh, I see what you mean.” Luckett laughed softly. “No, with Masashi here it’s more like a kind of aphasia. When he’s not linked in, anyway.”

  The scarecrow spilled a few more mahogany knuckles with chaotic precision. Luckett laughed again, shook his head.

  “He talks through board games,” Brüks surmised.

  “Close enough. Who knows? I might be doing the same thing by the time I graduate.”

  “You’re not—?” Of course he wasn’t. His eyes didn’t sparkle.

  “Not yet. Acolyte.”

  It was enough that he spoke English. “I’m trying to find the room I was in last night. Basement, spiral stairs, kind of a war room bunker feel to it?”

  “Ah. The Colonel’s lair. North hall, first right, second door on the left.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  “Not at all.” Luckett turned away as Masashi clicked and rolled the bones. “More than enough antimatter to break orbit, anyway. Least it saves on chemical mass.”

  Brüks stopped, hand on the doorknob. “What was that?”

  Luckett glanced back at him. “Just drawing up plans. Nothing to worry about.”

  “You guys have antimatter?”

  “Before long.” Luckett grinned and dipped his hands into the washbasin. “God willing.”

  Most of the tactical collage was dark, or writhing with analog static. A half-dozen windows flickered fitfully through random points of view: desert, desert, desert. No satcam imagery. Either Moore had shut down those feeds or whoever was behind the blockade had walled off the sky as well as the horizon.

  Brüks tapped experimentally on an unlit patch of paint. His touch provoked a brief flicker of red, but nothing else.

  The active windows kept changing, though. Some kind of motion sensor built into the feed, maybe: views would pan and pounce, flash-zooming on this flickering shadow or that distant escarpment. Sometimes Brüks couldn’t see anything noteworthy at the center of attention: a falcon grooming itself on a skeletal branch, or the burrow of a desert rodent halfway to the horizon. Once or twice a little fall of rock skittering down a distant slope, scree dislodged by some unseen disturbance.

  Once, partially eclipsed by leaves and scrub, a pair of glassy reflections looking back.

  “Help you?”

  Jim Moore reached past Brüks’s shoulder and tapped the display. A new window sprang to life at his fingertip. Brüks stepped aside while the soldier stretched the window across the paint, called up a feed, zoomed on a crevice splitting a hillock to the south.

  “I was trying to get online,” Brüks admitted. “See if anyone out there’s picked up on this whole—quarantine thing.”

  “Net’s strictly local. I don’t think the Bicamerals actually have Quinternet access.”

  “What, they’re afraid of getting hacked?” It was an ongoing trend, Brüks had heard: defensive self-partitioning in the face of Present Shock, and damn the legal consequences. People were starting to weigh costs against benefits, opt for a day or two outside the panopticon even in the face of the inevitable fines and detentions.

  But Moore was shaking his head. “I don’t think they need it. Do you feel especially lost without access to the telegraph network?”

  “What’s a telegraph?”

  “Exactly.” Something caught the Colonel’s eye. “Huh. That’s not good.”

  Brüks followed the other man’s gaze to the window he’d opened, to the crevice centered there. “I don’t see anything.”

  Moore played a little arpeggio on the wall. The image blossomed into false color. Something glowed Euclidean yellow in all that fractal blue.

  He grunted. “Aerosol delivery, looks like.”

  “Your guys?”

  The corner of Moore’s mouth curled the slightest bit. “Can’t really say.”

  “What’s to say? You’re a soldier, right? They’re soldiers, unless the government’s started subcontracting to—”

  “Biothermals, too. They’re not trusting their bots to run things.” There was a hint of amusement in the old soldier’s voice. “Probably baselines, then.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Fragile egos. Low self-esteem.” His fingers skipped across the darkened wall. Bright windows flared everywhere they touched.

  “At least you’re all on the same side, then, right?”

  “Doesn’t really work like that.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “The chain of command isn’t what it used to be.” Moore smiled faintly. “It’s more—organic, these days. Anyway.” Another finger dance; the window dwindled and slid to an empty spot along the edge of the wall. “They’re still setting up. We’ve got time.”

  “How was the meeting?” Brüks asked.

  “Still going on. Not much point hanging around after the opening ceremonies, though. I’d just slow them down.”

  “And let me guess: you can’t tell me what’s going on, and it’s none of my business anyway.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Lianna said—”

  “Dr. Lutterodt wasn’t at the meeting,” Moore reminded him.

  “Okay. So is there anything you can—”

  “The Fireflies,” Moore said.

  Brüks blinked. “What about—oh. Your common enemy.”

  Moore nodded.

  Memories of intercepted negotiations, scrolling past in Christmas colors: “Theseus. They found something out there?”

  “Maybe. Nothing’s certain yet, just—hints and inferences. No solid intel.”

  “Still.” An alien agency capable of simultaneously dropping sixty thousand surveillance probes into the atmosphere without warning. An agency that came and went in seconds, that caught the planet with its pants down and took God knew how many compromising pictures along God knew how many wavelengths before letting the atmosphere burn its own paparazzi down to a sprinkle of untraceable iron floating through the stratosphere. An agency never seen before and never since, for all the effort put into finding it. “I guess that qualifies as a common threat,” Brüks admitted.

  “I guess it does.” Moore turned back to his war wall.

  “Why were they fighting in the first place? What does a vampire have against a bunch of monks?”

  Moore didn’t answer for a moment. Then: “It’s not personal, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “What, then?”

  Moore took a breath. “It’s—more of the same, really. Entropy, increasing. The Realists and their war on Heaven. The Nanohistomites over in Hokkaido. Islamabad on fire.”

  Brüks blinked. “Islamabad’s—”

  “Oops. Getting ahead of myself. Give it time.” The Colonel shrugged. “I’m not trying to be coy, Dr. Brüks. You’re already in the soup, so I’ll tell you what I can so long as it doesn’t endanger you further. But you’re going to have to take a lot on—well, on faith.”

  Brüks stifled a laugh. Moore looked at him.

  “Sorry,” Brüks said. “It’s just, you hear so much about the Bicamerals and their scientific breakthroughs and their quest for Truth. And I finally get inside this grand edifice and all I hear is Trust and God willing and Take it on faith. I mean, the whole order’s supposed to be founded on the search for knowledge, and Rule Number One is Don’t ask questions?”

  “It’s not that they don’t have answers,” Moore said after a moment. “It’s just that we can’t understand them for the most part. You could resort to analogies, I suppose. Force transhuman insights into human cookie-cutter shapes. But most of the time that would just get you a bleeding metaphor with all its bones broken.” He held up a hand, warding off Brüks’s rejoinder. “I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people h
ave an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke’s liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one’s looking.”

  “And yet.” Brüks glanced at the wall, where AEROSOL DELIVERY glowed in shades of yellow and orange. Where a murderous tornado had rampaged the night before. “They seem to solve their conflicts pretty much the same way as us retarded ol’ baselines.”

  Moore smiled faintly. “That they do.”

  . . .

  He found Lianna back on the front steps, supper balanced on her knees, watching the sun go down. She looked back over her shoulder as he pushed through the door.

  “I asked about your brain-boosters,” she said. “No luck. The assembly line’s booked or something.”

  “Thanks for trying,” he said.

  “Jim might still be holding. If you haven’t asked him already.”

  He shifted his tray to one hand, used the other to rub away the vague pain behind his eyes. “Mind if I join you?”

  She spared one hand to take in the staircase, as broad and excessive as a cathedral’s.

  He sat beside her, picked at his own plate. “About this morning, I, uh...”

  She stared at the horizon. The sun stared back, highlighting her cheekbones.

  “...sorry,” he finished.

  “Forget it. Nobody likes being in a cage.”

  “Still. I shouldn’t have shot the messenger.” A sudden chilly breeze crawled across his shoulders.

  Lianna shrugged. “You ask me, nobody should shoot anybody.”

  He raised his eyes. Venus twinkled back at them. He wondered briefly if those photons had followed a straight line to his eyes, or if they’d been shunted around some invisible spillway of curves and angles at the last nanosecond. He looked around at the cracked desert floor, lifted his gaze to the more jagged topography in the distance. Wondered how many unseen agents were looking back.

  “You always eat out here?”

  “When I can.” The lowering sun stretched her shadow along the ramparts behind them, a giantess silhouetted in orange. “It’s—stark, you know?”

  Ribbed clouds, a million shades of salmon, scudding against an orange and purple sky.

  “How long does this go on?” he wondered.

  “This?”

  “They lurk out there, we wait in here. When does somebody actually make a move?”

  “Oldschool, you gotta relax.” She shook her head, smiled a twilit smile. “You could obsess and second-guess for a solid month and I guarantee you wouldn’t be able to think of anything our hosts haven’t already factored five ways to Sunday. They’ve been making moves all day.”

  “Such as?”

  “Don’t ask me.” She shrugged. “I probably wouldn’t understand even if they told me. They’re wired up way differently.”

  Hive mind, he reminded himself. Synesthetes, too, if he wasn’t mistaken.

  “You do understand them, though,” he said. “That’s your job.”

  “Not the way you think. And not without a fair bit of modding on my own.”

  “How, then?”

  “I’m not sure,” she admitted.

  “Come on.”

  “No, really. It’s a kind of Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven. The moment you start to think about what you’re doing, you screw up. You just have to get into the zone.”

  “They must have trained you at some point,” Brüks insisted. “There must have been some kind of conscious learning curve.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” She squinted up at some invisible behemoth he still couldn’t see. “But they kind of—bypassed that. Zapped my fornix with just the right burst of ultrasound and next thing I know it’s four days later and I have all these reflexes. Not so much that I understand them as my fingers do, you know? Phonemes, rhythms, gestures—eye movements, sometimes—” She frowned. “I take in all these cues, and equations just—come to me, piece by piece. I copy them down and I send ’em off. And the next day they show up in the latest issue of Science.”

  “You never examined these reflexes afterward? Played the piano really slowly, taken the time to watch what your fingers were doing?”

  “Dan, they won’t fit. Consciousness is a scratchpad. You can store a grocery list, jot down a couple of phone numbers—but were you even aware of finishing your supper?”

  Brüks looked down at his plate. It was empty.

  “And that’s just a couple of swallows half a minute in the past. You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?” Her dreads swept back and forth in the gloom. “Whatever I’m doing, it’s got too many variables. Won’t fit in the global workspace.” She flashed him a small, apologetic smile.

  They program us like clockwork dolls, he thought. Way off to the west, the sun touched gently down on a distant ridge.

  He looked at her. “Why are we still in charge?”

  She grinned. “Who’s we, white boy?”

  He didn’t. “These people you—work for. They’re supposed to be helpless, that’s what everyone says. You can optimize a brain for down there or up here, not both. Anyone comfortable thinking at Planck scales, they can barely cross the street unassisted up in the real world. That’s why they set up in the desert. That’s why they have people like you. That’s what they tell us.”

  “All true, more or less,” Lianna said.

  He shook his head. “They micromanage tornadoes, Lee. They turn people into puppets with a wink and a wave, they own half the patent office. They’re about as helpless as a T. rex in a daycare center. So why haven’t they been running things for years?”

  “That’s like a chimp asking why those hairless apes aren’t slinging bigger feces than everyone else, if they’re so damned clever.”

  He tried not to smile, and failed. “That’s not really an answer.”

  “Sure it is. Everybody goes on about hive mind this and synesthesia that like they were some kind of superpowers.”

  “After last night, you’re going to tell me they’re not?”

  “It goes so much deeper than that. It’s perceptual. We’re so—impoverished, you know? We don’t look out at reality at all, we look in at this model, this caricature our brains cobble together out of wavelengths and pressure points. We squint down over handwritten notes that say two blocks east, turn left at the bridge and we think that reading those stupid scribbles is the same as seeing the universe passing by on the other side of the windshield.” She glanced over her shoulder, to the edifice at their backs.

  Brüks frowned. “You think Bicamerals can see outside the windshield.”

  “Dunno. Maybe.”

  “Then I’ve got some bad news for you. Reality went out the window the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or model-building? Become a protozoan.”

  A smile lit her face, startlingly bright in the deepening gloom. “Wouldn’t that be just like them. Build a group mind complex enough to put any hundred baseline geniuses to shame, and use it to think like a paramecium.”

  “That wasn’t exactly my point,” he said.

  The sun winked good-bye and slid below the horizon.

  “I don’t know how they do it,” she admitted. “But if what they see is even closer to reality—well, that’s what you call transcendence. Not the ability to micromanage tornados, just—seeing a little more of what’s out there.” She tapped her temple. “Instead of what’s in here.”

  She stood, stretched like a cat. Brüks rose beside her and brushed the desert from his clothes. “Then transcendence is out of reach. For our brains, anyway.”

  Lianna shrugged. “Change your brain.”

  “Then it’s not your brain anymore. It’s something else. You’re something else
.”

  “That’s kinda the point. Transcendence is transformation.”

  He shook his head, unconvinced. “Sounds more like suicide to me.”

  . . .

  He felt his eyes start up under closed lids, stepped out onto that razor-thin line between dreamtime and the waking edge: just enough awareness to see the curtain, not enough to notice the man behind.

  Lucid dreaming was a delicate exercise.

  He sat up on the pallet, phantom legs still wearing corporeal ones like the abdomen of some half-molted insect. He looked around at furnishings that would have been spartan to anyone who hadn’t just spent two months sleeping on the desert floor: a raised sleeping pallet a couple of meters long, dipped in some softer, thicker variant of the fleshy synthetic lining the floors. An alcove in the wall, a medicine cabinet fronted with frosted glass. Another one of those washbasin pedestals, this one with a towel bar bolted to the side facing the bed: a hand towel draped over it. The cubby Luckett had tucked him into for the night, all pretty much the way it looked when he was awake.

  He’d learned to launch his dreams from a platform anchored in reality. It made the return trip easier.

  Brüks flexed his temporoparietal and ascended through a ceiling of polished granite (that was surmise—he’d forgotten to take note of its composition in the waking world). The monastery spread out around, then below him: dwindled from a life-size fortress to a tabletop model on a cracked gray moonscape. A fingernail moon shone bone-white overhead; everywhere else, a million stars glinted hard as ice crystals against the darkness.

  He flew north.

  It was minimalist magic: no rainbow bridges or talking clouds, no squadrons of aircraft piloted by tyrannosaurs. He’d long since learned not to strain the credulity of whatever mental processes indulged his presence here, critics that had lived in his head since before his dreams had even been lucid. Some inner skeptic frowned at the thought of a space-faring bicycle and dreaming eight-year-old Danny Brüks found himself stranded between the stars. Some forebrain killjoy snorted at the giddy delight of flying and suddenly he was entangled in high-tension wires, or simply ejected back into consciousness at three in the morning, spat out of sleep by his own incredulity. Even in dreams, his brain had been selling him out since before he’d had hair on his crotch. As an adult he’d had no use for them until his limited baseline learning curve had run out of waking hours, forced him to learn new techniques in his sleep lest academia’s new-and-improving generation devoured him from behind.