Firefall

by Peter Watts

  He could fly now at least, without thought or self-subversion. He’d learned that much through years of practice, through the induction hardware that had once guided his visions when REM started up, through the exercises that eventually let him ditch those training wheels and do it all in his own head. He could fly, into orbit and beyond and back if he wanted to. He could fly all the way to Heaven. That was where he was going now: the northern lights swirled in the sky directly ahead, a blue-green curtain shimmering above his destination like a star of Bethlehem for the Holographic Age.

  But no talking clouds. He’d also learned not to push it.

  Now, ghostlike, he passed through Heaven’s fortifications and descended into its deepest levels. Rho languished there as she always did, alone in her cell, still wearing the paper smock and slippers she’d worn in Departures when they’d told each other it wasn’t good-bye. A cuff around her left ankle and a dozen links of corroded chain shackled her to the wall. Hair hung across her downcast face like a dark curtain.

  Her face lit up, though, as he descended through the ceiling.

  He settled beside her on the stone floor. “I’m sorry. I would’ve come sooner, I just—”

  He stopped. No point in wasting precious REM with dreamed apologies. He tweaked the script, started again.

  “You wouldn’t believe what’s happening,” he said.

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ve got caught up in some kind of war, I’m trapped behind enemy lines with a bunch of—really. You wouldn’t believe me.”

  “Monks and zombies,” she said. “And a vampire.”

  Of course she knew.

  “I don’t even know how I can be here. You’d think with all this stuff happening I’d be too wired to even sit down, but—”

  “You’ve been going straight for twenty-four hours.” She laid her hand on his. “Of course you’re going to crash.”

  “These people don’t,” he grumbled. “I don’t think they even sleep, not all at once, anyway. Different parts of their brains take—shifts, or something. Like a bunch of dolphins.”

  “You’re not a dolphin, and you’re not some augmented wannabe, either. You’re natural. Just the way I like it. And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “You’re going to keep up with them. You always do.”

  Not always, he thought.

  “You should come back,” he said suddenly. Somewhere far away, his fingers and toes tingled faintly.

  She shook her head. “We’ve been over this.”

  “Nobody’s saying you have to go back to the job. There are a million other options.”

  “In here,” she told him, “there are a billion.”

  He looked at her chain. He had never consciously forged those links. He’d simply found her like this. He could have changed her circumstance with a thought, of course, as he could change anything in this world—but there were always risks.

  He’d learned not to push it.

  “You can’t like it here,” he said quietly.

  She laughed. “Why not? I didn’t put that thing on.”

  “But—” His temples throbbed. He willed them to stop.

  “Dan,” she said gently, “You can keep up out there. I can’t.”

  The tingling intensified in his extremities. Rho’s face wavered before him, fading to black. He couldn’t keep her together much longer. All this careful conservatism, these shackled environments that barely edged beyond the laws of physics—they only guarded against the Inner Heckler, not these unwelcome sensations intruding from outside. Headaches. Pins and needles. They distracted from his own contrivance; suddenly the whole façade was falling apart around him. “Come back soon,” his wife called through the rising static. “I’ll be waiting...”

  She was gone before he could answer. He tried to construct something spectacular—the implosion of Heaven itself, a fiery inward collapse toward some ravenous singularity deep below the Canadian Shield—but he was rising too fast toward the light.

  There’d been a time when he’d derided his own lack of imagination, cursed his inability to slip his shackles and just dream like everyone else, with glorious hallucinogenic abandon. Even now, sometimes, he had to remind himself: it wasn’t a failing at all. It was a strength.

  Even in sleep, Dan Brüks didn’t take anything on faith.

  SUNSHINE STABBED HIS eyes through the cell’s slotted window. His mouth was dry, his head athrob. His fingers pulsed with dull electricity. Slept on my hands, he thought, and tried to imagine how he might have actually done that as he swung his legs over the edge of the bed.

  The same pins and needles flooded the soles of his feet when he planted them on the floor.

  Great.

  He found his way to the lav that Luckett had shown him the night before, emptied his bladder while every extremity tingled and burned. The discomfort was beginning to fade by the time he flushed; he headed off down the empty hall in search of other warm bodies, only slightly unsteady on his feet.

  Something thumped behind one of the closed doors. He paused for a moment before continuing, his attention drawn by another door opening farther down the hall.

  By the naked blotchy thing that fell into view, choking and twitching as if electrocuted.

  He stood there for a moment, shocked into paralysis. Then he was moving again, his own trivial discomfort forgotten in a greater shock of recognition: Masashi the scarecrow, back arched, teeth bared, flesh stretched so tight across cheekbones that it was a wonder his face hadn’t split down the middle. Brüks was almost at the man’s side before realization stopped him in his tracks.

  Every muscle thrown into tetany. This was some kind of motor disorder.

  This was neurological.

  The pins and needles were back in full force. Brüks looked down in disbelief at his own fingertips. Try as he might, he couldn’t stop them from trembling.

  When the screaming started, he barely heard it.

  Whatever it was, it killed quietly. For the most part.

  Not because it was painless. Its victims staggered from hiding and thrashed on the floors, faces twisted into agonized devil masks. Even the dead kept them on: veins bulging, eyes splattered crimson with pinpoint embolisms, each face frozen in the same calcified rictus. Not a word, not a groan from any of them. There was nothing he could do but step over the bodies as he tracked that lone voice screaming somewhere ahead; nothing he could feel but that terrifying electricity growing in his fingers and toes; nothing he could think but It’s in me too it’s in me too it’s in me too—

  Creatures in formation rounded the corner ahead of him: four human bodies moving in perfect step, more live than the bodies on the floor, just as dead inside. Valerie kept pace in their midst. Four sets of jiggling eyes locked onto Brüks for an instant, then resumed their frantic omnidirectional dance. Valerie didn’t even look in his direction. She moved as if spring-loaded, as if her joints were subtly out of place. One of her zombies was missing below the knees; the carbon prosthetics it used for legs squeaked softly against the floor as they approached. Apart from that subtle friction, Brüks couldn’t hear so much as a footfall from any of them. He flattened instinctively against the wall, praying to some Pleistocene god for invisibility—or at least, for insignificance. Valerie swept abreast of him, eyes straight ahead.

  Brüks squeezed his eyes shut. Soft screams filled the darkness. He felt a small distant pride that none of them came from him. When he opened his eyes again the monster was gone.

  The screaming had grown fainter. More—intimate. Some horrific lighthouse beacon running low on batteries, calling through the fog of war. Except this was no fucking war: this was a massacre, this was one tribe of giants slaughtering another, and any baseline fossil stupid enough to get caught underfoot didn’t even rate the brutal mercy of a slashed throat on the battlefield.

  Welcome to the armistice.

  He followed the sound. He doubted there was anything he could do—euthanasi
a, perhaps—but if it could scream, maybe it could talk. Maybe it could tell him—something...​

  It already had, in a way. It had told him that all victims were not equal in the eyes of this pestilence. All the Bicamerals he’d seen so far seemed to have fallen within minutes of each other, seized by the throat and turned to tortured stone before they’d even had a chance to cry out. Not everyone, though. Not the vampire and her minions. Not the screamer. Not Dan Brüks.

  Not yet.

  But he was infected, oh yes he was. Something was at work on his distal circuitry, shorting out his fine motor control, working its way up the main cables. Maybe the screamer was just a little farther along. Maybe the screamer was Daniel Brüks in another ten minutes.

  Maybe it was right here, behind this door.

  Brüks pushed it open.

  Luckett. He squirmed like a hooked eelpout in a cell identical to the one where Brüks had slept, slid around on a floor slippery with his own fluids. Sweat turned his tunic into a soaked dishrag, ran in torrents from his face and limbs; darker stains spread from his crotch.

  The hook hadn’t caught him by the mouth, though. It sprouted from a port at the back of his neck, a shivering fiber running to a socket low on the wall. Luckett convulsed. His head struck the edge of an overturned chair. The blow seemed to bring him back a little; the screaming stopped, the eyes cleared, something approaching awareness filtered through the dull animal pain that filled them.

  “Brüks,” he moaned, “Brüks, get it—fuck it hurts...”

  Brüks knelt, laid a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “I—”

  The acolyte thrashed away from the touch, screaming all over again: “Fucking hell that hurts—!” He flailed one arm: a deliberate gesture, Brüks guessed, an instruction trying to dig its way out past the roaring static of a million short-circuiting motor nerves. Brüks followed its path to a small glass-fronted cabinet set into the wall. Lozenges of doped ceramic rested in neat labeled rows behind the sliding pane: HAPPINESS, ORGASM, APPETITE SUPPRESSANT—

  ANALGESIC.

  He grabbed it off the shelf, dropped to Luckett’s side, grabbed the fiberop at the cervical end: fumbled as fingers misheard brain. Luckett screamed again, arched his back like a drawn bow. The smell of shit filled the room. Brüks gripped the plug, twisted. The socket clicked free. Seething light flooded the walls: camera feeds, spline plots, deserts painted in garish blizzards of false color. Some tame oracle, deprived of direct access to Luckett’s brain, continuing its conversation in meatspace.

  Brüks jammed the painkiller home, click-twisted it into place. Luckett sagged instantly; his fingers continued to twitch and shiver, purely galvanic. For a moment Brüks thought the acolyte had lost consciousness. Then Luckett took a great heaving gulp of air, let it out again.

  “That’s better,” he said.

  Brüks eyed Luckett’s trembling fingers, eyed his own. “It’s not. This is—”

  “Not my department,” Luckett coughed. “Not yours, either, thank your lucky stars.”

  “But what is it? There’s got to be a fix.” He remembered: a rosette of monsters, the vampire at its heart, moving with frictionless efficiency through the dying fields. “Valerie—”

  Luckett shook his head. “She’s on our side.”

  “But she’s—”

  “Not her.” Luckett turned his head, rested his eyes on an overhead real-time tactical of the surrounding desert: the monastery at the bull’s-eye, a perimeter of arcane hieroglyphics around the edges. “Them.”

  We’ve been making moves all day.

  “What did you do? What did you do?”

  “Do?” Luckett coughed, wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. “You were here, my friend. We got noticed. And now we’re—reaping the whirlwind, you might say.”

  “They wouldn’t just—” Then again, why wouldn’t they? “Wasn’t there some kind of, of ultimatum? Didn’t they give us a chance to surrender, or—”

  The look Luckett gave him was an even mix of pity and amusement.

  Brüks cursed himself for an idiot. Headaches for most of the day before. Moore’s aerosol delivery. But there’d been no artillery, no lethal canisters lobbed whistling across the desert. This thing had drifted in on the breeze, undetected. And not even engineered germs killed on contact. There was always an incubation period, it always took time for a few lucky spores to hatch out in the lungs and breed an army big enough to take down a human body. Even the magic of exponential growth took hours to manifest.

  The enemy—

  —People like you, Lianna had said—

  —must have set this plan in motion the moment they’d set up their perimeter. It wouldn’t have mattered one good goddamn if the whole Bicameral Order had marched out across the desert with their hands in the air; the weapon was already in their blood, and it was blind to white flags.

  “How could you let them do this?” Brüks hissed. “You’re supposed to be smarter than us, you’re post-fucking-singular, you’re supposed to be ten steps ahead of any plan we poor stupid cavemen could ever put together. How could you let them?”

  “Oh, but this is all according to plan.” Luckett patted him on the arm with one spastic, short-circuiting hand.

  “What plan?” Brüks choked back a hysterical giggle. “We’re dead already—”

  “Even God can’t plan for everything. Too many variables.” Luckett coughed again. “Not to worry, though. We planned for the things we couldn’t plan for...”

  Faintly, through the open door—drifting down the corridor, through high narrow windows; through barred gates, through glass panes looking into deserts and gardens: a whistling sound, Doppler-shifted. The muffled thud of some nearby impact.

  “Ah. The mopping-up begins.” Luckett nodded serenely. “No point being stealthy now, eh?”

  Brüks put his head in his hands.

  “Don’t worry, old chap. It’s not over yet, not for you anyway. Jim’s lair. He’s waiting for you.”

  Brüks raised his head. “Jim—but—”

  “I told you,” Luckett said. “According to plan.” Spasms rippled across his body. “Go.”

  And now Brüks heard another sound, a deeper sound, rumbling up the scale behind the hacking of the maimed and whistling shriek of inbound paralysis. He felt the vibration of great blades spinning up far down in the earth, heard the muffled hiss of steam injected into deep silos. He heard the growing drumbeat of an elemental monster straining against its chains.

  “Now that,” he said, “is more fucking like it.”

  Moore was in his bunker, but he wasn’t running the show. No controls blinked on the smart paint, no sliders or dials or virtual buttons to press. The readouts were all one-way. Somewhere else, the Bicamerals were bringing their engine online; Moore was only watching from the bleachers.

  He turned at Brüks’s approach. “They’re dug in.”

  “Doesn’t matter, though, right? We’re gonna tear them to pieces.”

  The soldier turned back to the wall and shook his head.

  “What’s the problem? They out of range?”

  “We’re not fighting.”

  “Not fighting? Have you seen what they’re doing to us?”

  “I see.”

  “Everyone’s dead or halfway there!”

  “We’re not.”

  “Right.” Nerves sang ominously in Brüks’s fingers. “And how long is that going to last?”

  “Long enough. This bug was customized for Bicamerals. We’ve got more time.” Moore frowned. “You don’t engineer something like that in the field, not overnight. They’ve been planning this awhile.”

  “They didn’t even fire a warning shot, for fucksake! They didn’t even try to negotiate!”

  “They’re scared.”

  “They’re scared.”

  “They’d assume that giving us any advance warning would put them at an unacceptable disadvantage. They don’t know what we’re capable of.”

 
“Then maybe it’s time we showed them.”

  Moore turned back to face the other man. “Perhaps you’re not familiar with Bicameral philosophy. It’s predominantly nonviolent.”

  “You and Luckett and all your friends can argue the philosophical subtleties of unilateral pacifism while we all turn into predominantly nonviolent corpses.” Friends. “Is Lianna—”

  “She’s fine.”

  “None of us are fine.” Brüks turned back to the stairs. Maybe he could find her before the ceiling crashed in. Maybe there was some broom closet he could hide in.

  Moore’s hand closed on his shoulder and spun him as though he were made of balsa.

  “We will not attack these people,” he said calmly. “We don’t know if they’re responsible.”

  “You just said they’d been planning this,” Brüks croaked. “They were just waiting for some kind of excuse. You watched them lock and load. For all I know you listened in on their fucking comm chatter, you heard them give the orders. You know.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Even if we were right there in their command center. Even if we could take their brains apart synapse by synapse and backtrace every neuron that went into the go-ahead. We would still not know.”

  “Fuck you. I’m not going to suck your dick just because you trot out the old no free will shtick.”

  “These people could have been used without their knowledge. They could be slaved to an implanted agenda and they’d swear they were making their own decisions the whole time. We will not kill cat’s-paws.”

  “They’re not zombies, Moore.”

  “Whole different species.”