Firefall

by Peter Watts

They’d turned their brains into cancer.

  “I was so worked up about Luckett.” Brüks shook his head at his own stupidity. “We just left him back there to die, you know, we left all of them—but he would have died anyway, wouldn’t he? As soon as he graduated. Every pathway that ever made him what he was, the cancer would eat it all and replace it with something...”

  “Something better,” Lianna said.

  “That’s a matter of opinion.”

  “You make it sound so horrible.” Wrist seals. Click click. “But you know, you went through pretty much the same thing yourself and you don’t seem any the worse for it.”

  He imagined coming apart. He imagined every thread of conscious experience fraying and dissolving and being eaten away. He imagined dying, while the body lived on.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “Sure. When you were a baby.” She laid a gloved hand on his shoulder. “We all start out with heads full of random mush; it’s the neural pruning afterward that shapes who we are. It’s like, like sculpture. You start with a block of granite, chip away the bits that don’t belong, end up with a work of art. The Bicams just start over with a bigger block.”

  “But it’s not you.”

  “Enough of it is.” She plucked her helmet out of the air.

  “Sure, the memories stick.” Some elements were spared: in the thalamus and cerebellum, hippocampus and brain stem all left carefully unscathed by a holocaust with the most discriminating taste. “But something else is remembering them.”

  “Dan, you gotta let go of this whole self thing. Identity changes by the second, you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain. You’re already a different person than you were ten minutes ago.” She lowered the helmet over her head, yanked it counterclockwise until it clicked into place. His fish-eye reflection slid bulging across her faceplate as she turned.

  “What about you, Lianna?” he asked softly.

  “What about me?” Her voice muffled and breathy across the glass.

  “You aspiring to the same fate?”

  She eyed him sadly from the bowl of her helmet. “It’s not like you think. Really.” And passed on to some farther shore.

  LOOK, BRÜKS WANTED to say: fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain, and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger, and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy, he thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and a tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations—and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren’t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid. Even here in the twenty-first century you can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now, we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.

  And it came to pass that certain people figured out how to use that. They painted their faces or they wore funny hats, they shook their rattles and waved their crosses and they said, Yes, there are tigers in the grass, there are faces in the sky, and they will be very angry if you do not obey their commandments. You must make offerings to appease them, you must bring grain and gold and altar boys for our delectation or they will strike you down and send you to the Awful Place. And people believed them by the billions, because after all, they could see the invisible tigers.

  And you’re a smart kid, Lianna. You’re a bright kid and I like you but someday you’ve got to grow up and realize that it’s all a trick. It’s all just eyes scribbled on the wall, to make you think there’s something looking back.

  That’s what Brüks wanted to say. And Lianna would listen, and ponder this new information, and she would come to see the wisdom of his argument. She would change her mind.

  The only problem with this scenario was that it rapidly became obvious that she already knew all that stuff, and believed in invisible tigers anyway. It drove him up the fucking wall.

  “That’s not God,” she said one morning in the Commons, wide eyed with astonishment that he could have made such a stupid mistake. “That’s just a bunch of ritualistic junk that got stuck onto God by people who wanted to hijack the agenda.”

  A derisive snort from over by the galley dispenser. “Between you two arguing about ghosts and Carnage stringing out on rotten bits”—Sengupta grabbed her breakfast and headed for the ladder—“I don’t think I can handle five more minutes of this shit.”

  Brüks watched her go, turned his attention to a bulkhead window Lianna had opened into the Hold: shadows, machine parts, weightless bodies drawing dismembered components together into tangled floating jigsaws. Binary stars, sparkling in the gloom.

  “If it’s junk, why do they keep doing it?” He jerked his thumb at the display. “Why can’t those guys go thirty minutes without doing that hand-washing thing of theirs?”

  “Hand-washing reduces doubt and second-guessing in the wake of making a decision,” Lianna told him. “Brains tend to take metaphors literally.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Her eyes defocused for an instant. “I’ve just sent you the citation. Of course, an actual tweak would be more efficient—I bet they do that, too, actually—but I think they like to remember where they came from. You’d be surprised how much folklore has survival value when you rip it up and look at the roots.”

  “I never said religious beliefs weren’t adaptive. That doesn’t make them true.” Brüks spread his hands, palms up.

  “What do you think vision is?” she asked him. “You don’t see a fraction of the things that surround you, and at least half the things you do see are deceptive. Hell, color doesn’t even exist outside your own head. Vision’s just plain wrong; it only persists because it works. If you’re going to dismiss the idea of God, you better stop believing your own eyes in the bargain.”

  “My eyes never told me to murder anyone who doesn’t share my worldview.”

  “My God never told me to do that, either.”

  “Lots of people’s Gods have.”

  “Riiight. And we’re just gonna ignore everybody who quoted Darwin to justify turning people into slaves? Or wiping them out altogether?” He opened his mouth; she preempted him with a raised hand: “Let’s just agree that neither side has a monopoly on assholes. The point is, once you recognize that every human model of reality is fundamentally unreal, then it all just comes down to which one works best. And science has had a damn good run, no question. But the sun is setting on the Age of Empiricism.”

  He snorted. “The Age of Empiricism is just getting started.”

  “Come on, Oldschool. We’re long past the days when all you had to do was clock a falling apple or compare beak length in finches. Science has been running into limits ever since it started trying to get Schrödinger’s cat to play with balls of invisible string. Go down a few orders of mag and everything’s untestable conjecture again. Math and philosophy. You know as well as I do that reality has a substructure. Science can’t go there.”

  “Nothing can. Faith may claim—”

  “Knot theory,” Lianna said. “Invented it for the sheer beauty of the artifact. We didn’t have particle accelerators back then; we had no evidence at all that it would turn out to describe subatomic physics a century or two down the road. Pre-Socratic Greeks intuited atomic theory in 200 BC Buddhists were saying centuries ago that we can’t trust our senses, that sensation itself is an act of faith. Hinduism’s predicated on the Self as illusion: no NMRs a thousand years ago, no voxel readers. No evidence. And damned if I can see the adaptive advantage of not believing in your own
existence; but neurologically it happens to be true.”

  She beamed at him with the beatific glow of the true convert. “There’s an intuition, Dan. It’s capricious, it’s unreliable, it’s corruptible—but it’s so powerful when it works, and it’s no coincidence that it ties into the same parts of the brain that give you the rapture. The Bicamerals harnessed it. They amped the temporal and they rewired the parietals—”

  “You mean ripped them out completely.”

  “—and they had to leave conventional language back in the dust, but they figured it out. Their religion, for want of a better word, goes places science can’t. Science backs it up, as far as science can go; there’s no reason to believe it doesn’t keep right on working after it leaves science behind.”

  “You mean you have faith it keeps working,” Brüks observed drily.

  “Do you measure Earth’s gravity every time you step outside? Do you reinvent quantum circuits from scratch whenever you boot up, just in case the other guys missed something?” She gave him a moment to answer. “Science depends on faith,” she continued, when he didn’t. “Faith that the rules haven’t changed, faith that the other guys got the measurements right. All science ever did was measure a teensy sliver of the universe and assume that everything else behaved the same way. But the whole exercise falls apart if the universe doesn’t follow consistent laws. How do you test if that’s true?”

  “If two experiments yield different results—”

  “Happens all the time, my friend. And when it does, every good scientist discounts those results because they failed to replicate. One of the experiments must have been flawed. Or they both were. Or there’s some unknown variable that’ll make everything balance out just as soon as we discover what it is. The idea that physics itself might be inconsistent? Even if you considered the possibility in your wildest dreams, how could you test for it when the scientific method only works in a consistent universe?”

  He tried to think of an answer.

  “We’ve always thought c and friends ruled supreme, right out to the quasars and beyond,” Lianna mused. “What if they’re just—you know, some kind of local ordinance? What if they’re a bug? Anyway”—she fed her plate into the recycler—“I gotta go. We’re test-firing the chamber today.”

  “Look, science—” He marshaled his thoughts, unwilling to let it go. “It’s not just that it works. We know how it works. There’s no secret to it. It makes sense.”

  She wasn’t looking at him. Brüks followed her eyes to the bulkhead feed. They all seemed more or less mended by now—Chinedum, Amratu, a handful of other demigods who’d never be more than names and ciphers to him—although the pressure still kept them captive for the moment. Still insufficiently omnipotent to speed the physics of decompression. It was a small comfort.

  “Those guys do not make sense,” he continued. “They roll around on the floor and ululate and you write up the patent applications. We don’t know how it works, we don’t know if it’s going to keep working, it could stop working at any moment. Science is more than magic and rituals—”

  He stopped.

  Ululations. Incantations. Hive harmonics.

  Rituals.

  These feeds have motion cap, he remembered.

  Colonel Jim Moore crouched sideways against the Commons wall like a monstrous grasshopper: legs folded tight at the knees, spring-loaded and ready to pop; thorax folded over them like a protective carapace; one hand dancing with some unseen ConSensus interface while the other, wrapped around a convenient cargo strap, held body to bulkhead. His eyes jiggled and danced beneath closed lids: blind to this impoverished little shell of a world, immersed in some other denied Daniel Brüks.

  The grasshopper opened its eyes: glazed at first, clearing by degrees.

  “Daniel,” it said dully.

  “You look awful.”

  “I asked for an onboard cosmetics spa before we launched. They went for a lab instead.”

  “When was the last time you ate?”

  Moore frowned.

  “That does it. I’m buying, you’re eating.” Brüks stepped over to the galley.

  “But—”

  “Unless you think that anorexia’s the best way to prep for an extended field op.”

  Moore hesitated.

  “Come on.” Brüks punched in an order for salmon steak (he was still tickled by the fabber’s proficiency with extinct meats). “Lianna’s back in the Hold, and Rakshi’s—being Rakshi. You want me eating with Valerie?”

  “So this is a rescue mission.” Moore unfolded himself onto the deck, relenting at last.

  “That’s the spirit. What do you want?”

  “Just coffee.”

  Brüks glared at him.

  “Okay, fine. Anything.” The Colonel waved a hand in surrender. “Kruggets. With tandoori sauce.”

  Brüks winced and relayed the order, tossed a ’bulb of coffee across the compartment (Coriolis turned it into a curveball but Moore caught it anyway with barely a glance), grabbed one for himself and twisted the heat tab en route. He set the wobbly warming sphere onto the table and wound his way back to collect their meals.

  “Still going over the Theseus data?” He pushed Moore’s fluorescent krill across the table and sat down opposite.

  “I thought the whole point of this was to get my mind off that.”

  “The point was to get you off your damn hunger strike,” Brüks said. “And to get me something to talk to besides the walls.”

  Moore chewed, swallowed. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Warn me?”

  “I distinctly remember raising the possibility—the likelihood, even—that you might be bored out of your skull.”

  “Believe me, I’m not complaining.”

  “Yes you are.”

  “Maybe a little.” (Why did everything from the galley taste like oil?) “But it’s not so bad. I got ConSensus, I got Lee to try and deprogram. Weigh a little cabin fever against getting stashed with the luggage for the next six months—”

  “Believe me.” Moore smiled faintly. “There are worse things than extended unconsciousness.”

  “For example?”

  Moore didn’t answer.

  The Crown did, though. In an instant she turned half the bulkhead bloody with Intercom alarms.

  SENGUPTA, they screamed.

  Moore commed the Hub while Brüks was still peeling himself off the ceiling. “Rakshi. What—”

  Her words cascaded back, high-pitched and panicky: “She’s coming oh shit she’s coming up she knows—”

  A pit opened in Brüks’s stomach.

  “I’m onto her I think she knows of course she knows she’s a fucking vampire she knows everything—”

  “Rakshi, where—”

  “Listen to me you stupid roach she kil—oh fu—”

  The channel died before she could finish, but it didn’t really matter. You could have heard the screaming halfway to Mars.

  Moore was through the ceiling in an instant. Brüks followed in his wake, a jump up the ladder, a grab for a passing handhold, the endless loop of the conveyor pulling him smoothly along the weight-loss gradient from hab to Hub. Moore had no time for that shit; he shot up the ladder two rungs at a time, then three, then four. He ricocheted free-falling out the top of the spoke before the belt had drawn Brüks even halfway. That was okay. Maybe he’d have everything fixed by the time Brüks made it to the top, maybe Sengupta’s screams of rage would end and calm soothing voices would murmur in their stead, intent on reconciliation...​

  Sengupta’s screams ended.

  He tried to ignore the other voices, the ones in his head saying Go back, you idiot. Let Jim handle it, he’s a soldier for chrissakes, what are you gonna do against a goddamn vampire? You’re collateral. You’re lunch.

  That’s right, Backdoor. Just turn around and run away. Again.

  The conveyor, insensitive, drew him forward into battle.

  He emerged into the so
uthern hemisphere, knees shaking. There were no calm voices. There were no voices at all.

  There was no reconciliation.

  The vampire clung one-handed to the grille. Her other hand held Sengupta by the throat, right at eye level, as if the pilot were a paper doll. Valerie looked impassively into her victim’s eyes; Sengupta squirmed and choked and didn’t look back.

  The south pole was a bright gaping pit to stern. Its reflection smeared across the mirrorball like a round toothless mouth. An image flashed across Brüks’s forebrain, courtesy of his hind: Valerie tossing Sengupta into that maw. The Crown of Thorns closing its mouth and chewing.

  Moore edged along the Tropic of Capricorn, feet just above the deck, hands open at his sides.

  “Okay, we can take it from here.”

  Not Moore. Lianna’s voice, ringing calm and clear from the back of the Crown’s throat. A moment later she sailed forth from its maw, fearless, light as air, heading directly for Valerie & Victim.

  What’s wrong with her? “Lianna, don’t—”

  “S’okay.” She spared a glance. “I’ve got it under—”

  And was cut down with the sudden crack of bones snapping under the impact of Valerie’s foot, an obscene and elegant en pointe fired like a piston into Lutterodt’s rib cage. She spun back toward the south pole, a rag doll with no fixed center of gravity; the Crown caught her spine in passing, bent it the wrong way, tossed her back down its throat from whence she’d come.

  Fuck fuck fuck—

  “Let her go,” Moore was saying, his eyes still on Sengupta, calm as death. As though Lianna Lutterodt had never even made an appearance, as though she hadn’t just been swatted like a mosquito. As though she couldn’t possibly be bleeding out against the bulkhead a hundred meters to stern.

  I have to help her.

  Valerie kept eyes on Sengupta, head cocked like a predatory bird sizing up something shiny. “She attacks me.” Her voice was distant, almost distracted: voicemail from a monster with other things on its mind.

  Brüks crept forward, belly against bulkhead: a strut here, a cargo strap there, hand over hand toward the south pole.