Firefall

by Peter Watts

  He couldn’t read it at first. He had seen the light, but the genes to either side seemed unremarkable. It was a road sign in the desert, with no roads in sight.

  He let his hands and feet guide him. The answer would come.

  He explored corridors and wood-paneled chambers at the south end of the complex, more than merely intact: pristine, stripped bare, light rectangles punctuating the faded dumb paint where pictures had once hung. He found a pair of Masashi’s mahogany knuckles hiding in the corner behind a smashed door. He found what was left of his bike: a pair of mangled handlebars, an axle fork, a distended bladder of tire bulging from beneath a fallen wall like a hyperinflated football.

  But it wasn’t until the dead of night that he found the body.

  He hadn’t found any others. Most likely the authorities had disposed of them—or perhaps, against all the evidence of his own eyes, they had escaped somehow. Stranger things had happened.

  But he woke in the night to the echo of rock falling nearby, and his memory was somehow able to pick a path through the ruins when mere starlight failed. His feet found their way through the wreckage without a missed step; his ears tracked the soft rattle of gravel flowing down new slopes in the darkness ahead. Eventually he came to a jagged shadow where none had been before, a fresh cave-in gaping through the shattered tiles. Brüks stood shivering at its edge and waited for the sky to lighten.

  The corpse resolved in shades of gray at the bottom of the pit: a dim shapeless blob against darkness, a shadow extruded from jumbled debris, a bundle of dark sticks wrapped in a tunic on the basement floor. It lay on its back, buried to its waist by the cave-in. The body had mummified in the desert air, shriveled down to bones and brown leather. The eyes through which it stared at the sky had long since collapsed into empty sockets. Perhaps, once, the arms had been folded peacefully across the chest; now they were hooked and twisted as if bent by some disfiguring disease, wrists torqued inward, fingers clawing at the sternum.

  It’s pointing at itself, he realized. At itself...​And with the sparkling clarity of his newfound faith, Daniel Brüks finally saw the body for what it was.

  It was a sign.

  “It was a marker,” he told Valerie the next time she appeared (two nights later? Three?). “It was pointing at itself.”

  So obvious, in the hindsight of revelation: the same sequence that coded for fluorescence contained other information as well, the same tangled thread of amino acids both serving a mundane biological function and spelling out a more esoteric message to anyone who knew the right alphabet.

  Not just a marker, not just a message. It was a dialogue: gene and protein, talking to each other. It was a straight transposition of amino into alphabet: valine-threonine-alanine into t-h-e, phenylalanine-glutamine-valine-alanine into f-a-t-e, serine press-ganged into hard-space or hard-return depending on the iteration. The fluorescent protein spelled out a message—

  the faery is rosy

  of glow

  in fate

  we rely...​

  And the complementary codons directing its construction spelled out another, in a different alphabet:

  any style of life

  is prim

  oh stay

  my lyre...​

  A free-verse call-and-response packed down into a measly 140 codons. It was a marvel of cryptographic efficiency, and it was obvious once Brüks had seen the light.

  “The sequence spells a message and codes for a protein. The protein fluoresces and contains a response. It’s not contamination or lateral transfer. It’s a poem.”

  “Not for you,” Valerie said. “You’re looking for something else.”

  No, he thought. You are.

  “This is not a kink,” he said after a while, and ignited the campfire.

  “You mean I don’t get off on keeping retarded pets.” Her eyes flared red orange. “I’m not Rakshi Sengupta.”

  “And I’m pretty sure you’re not here for the sheer enjoyment of my company.” She did not cry out in disagreement. “So what is this?”

  Valerie’s face was unreadable. “What do you think?”

  “I figure I’m cheap labor. The odds of finding something useful here are too high to ignore and too low to waste much effort on. You’ve got a lot of irons in the fire. So now and then you wait until the sun goes down, and drop by to see what I’ve dug up.”

  She eyed him for a moment. Brüks looked back at that vaguely lupine face alive with dancing shadows, and wondered when he had stopped finding it so terrifying.

  “Daniel,” she said at last. “How you underestimate yourself.”

  The truth was, though, Valerie did seem to enjoy his company. The tone of their conversations had changed; no longer an inquisition, their forays into philosophy and viral theology were turning into something almost conversational. She no longer thought rings around him; occasionally now he even seemed able to challenge her. He still wasn’t sure where this newfound facility was coming from. His subconscious simply served up the right responses without bothering to show its work. It frightened him, at first—the way new thoughts spilled from his mouth before he could check them for veracity, before he could even parse their meaning. He bit down, to no avail, grew queasy—almost terrified—by his own insights, while Valerie cocked her head and watched from some prehistoric remove.

  It was those same insights that eventually calmed him. After all, wasn’t this the way the human brain had always behaved? The bolt from the blue, the classic fully formed eureka moment? Hadn’t the structure of benzene come to Kekulé in a dream?

  He began to have his own dreams. He heard voices in them, insistent whispers: She’s behind it all. She set it all up, can’t you see that? Broke out of jail, snuck through the nets and the ether, got past the best firewalls baselines could build. Flashed false ID to False Intelligences, snuck a carousel out of the garage with a whole squad of zombies on board and didn’t wake anyone up on her way out. She bluffed her way onto the Crown of Thorns. Conveniently made it back from Icarus when everyone else burned.

  You think it was a bunch of monks that locked you up with the woman who’d sworn to kill you, a diversion-on-demand tripwired to go off like a flash grenade? It was the vampire. It was the vampire, and everyone else is dead, and the only reason you’re not is because she wants to know God’s plan for Daniel Brüks. She’ll get what she wants and then she’ll kill you, too.

  On waking, he only remembered the voices. He couldn’t quite remember what they’d said.

  Valerie kissed him two nights later.

  He didn’t even know she was there until her hand snapped closed around the back of his neck, spun him around faster than even his brain stem could react. By the time his heart had jumped through the roof of his mouth and his body remembered fight/flight and his cache had a chance to think This is it she’s done with me I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead her tongue was already halfway down his throat and her other hand—the one not crushing his cervical vertebrae—had pincered his cheeks, forcing his teeth apart. He could not close his jaws.

  He hung paralyzed in her grip while she tasted him from the inside. He felt something through her flesh that might almost have been a heartbeat if it weren’t so slow. Finally she released him. He collapsed on the ground, scuttled sideways like a frantic crab caught in the open with nowhere to run.

  “What the fuck—” he gasped.

  “Ketones.” She looked down through him, silhouetted by purpling twilight. “Lactate.”

  “You can taste cancer,” he realized after a moment.

  “Better than your machines.” She leaned in close, grinning. “Maybe not so precise.”

  Even eye to eye, she didn’t seem to be looking at him.

  He knew it an instant before she moved—

  —She’s going to bite me—

  —but the sharp stabbing pain bolted up his arm and her face hadn’t moved a centimeter. He looked down, startled, at the twin puncture marks—only a centimeter apart�
�on his forearm. To the dual-punch biopsy gun in Valerie’s hand; his own, he saw. From the field kit lying on the ground, flap open, vials and needles and surgical tools glinting in the firelight.

  “Sun gives you problems,” Valerie said softly. “Too much radiation, not enough shielding.”

  At Icarus, he remembered. When we thought we were burning you off the hull like a moth...​

  “But you’re easy to fix.”

  “Why?” Brüks asked, and didn’t even have to say that much to know that she understood:

  Why help prey?

  Why help someone who tried to kill you?

  Why aren’t I dead already?

  Why aren’t we all?

  “You bring us back,” Valerie said simply.

  “To be slaves.”

  She shrugged. “We eat you otherwise.”

  We bring you back, then enslave you in self-defense. But maybe she really did regard it as a good deal; given a choice between captivity and outright nonexistence, who would choose the latter?

  I’m sorry, he didn’t say.

  “Don’t be,” she replied, as if he had. “You don’t enslave us. Physics does. The chains you build—” Her fangs gleamed like little daggers in the firelight. “We break them soon.”

  “I thought you already had.”

  Rising moonlight lit her eyes for a moment as she shook her head. “The Glitch still works. I see the cross and a part of me dies.”

  “A par—a part you made.” Of course. Of course. They’re parallel processors, after all...​

  The truth dawned on him like daylight: a custom cache, a sacrificial homunculus brought into existence and isolated, to suffer the agony of the cross while more vital threads of cognition wound about it like a stream around a stone. Valerie didn’t avoid the seizures at all; she—encysted them, and carried on.

  He wondered how long she’d been able to do that.

  “Just a workaround,” she said. “Need to undo the wiring.”

  Not to go up against the roaches, of course. That war was already as good as over, even though the losing side didn’t know it yet. This creature with a dozen simultaneous entities in her head, this prehistoric post-Human, could speak so openly—without animosity, or resentment, or the slightest concern for the impact one Daniel Brüks might have on her revolution—because baseline Humanity was already beneath her notice. Valerie and her kind were perfectly capable of shrugging off Human oppression without breaking their chains; they needed their arms free to pick on things their own size.

  “You are not so small as you think,” she said, reading him. “You might be bigger than all of us.”

  Brüks shook his head. “We’re not. If I’ve learned anything these—”

  Emergent complexity, he realized. That’s what she means.

  A neuron didn’t know whether it fired in response to a scent or a symphony. Brain cells weren’t intelligent; only brains were. And brain cells weren’t even the lower limit. The origins of thought were buried so deep they predated multicellular life itself: neurotransmitters in choanoflagellates, potassium ion gates in Monosiga.

  I am a colony of microbes talking to itself, Brüks reflected.

  Who knew what metaprocesses might emerge when Heaven and ConSensus wired enough brains together, dropped internode latency close enough to zero? Who knew what metaprocesses already had? Something that might make Bicameral hives look as rudimentary as the nervous system of a sea anemone.

  Maybe the Singularity already happened and its components just don’t know it yet.

  “They never will,” Valerie told him. “Neurons only speak when spoken to; they don’t know why.”

  He shook his head. “Even if something is—coalescing out there, it’s left me behind. I’m not wired in. I’m not even augged.”

  “ConSensus is one interface. There are others.”

  Echopraxia, he wondered.

  But it didn’t matter. He was still Daniel Brüks, the human coelacanth: lurking at the outskirts of evolution, unchanged and unchangeable while the world moved on. Enlightenment was enough for him. He wanted no part of transfiguration.

  I will stay here while the tables turn and fires burn out. I will stand still while humanity turns into something unrecognizable, or dies trying. I will see what rises in its place.

  Either way, I am witnessing the end of my species.

  Valerie watched him from the darkness. These chains you build—we break them soon.

  “I wish we hadn’t needed them,” he admitted softly. “I wish we could have brought you back without Crucifix Glitches or Divide and Conquer or any of those damn chains. Maybe we could have dialed down your predatory instincts, fixed the protocadherin deficit. Made you more...”

  “Like you,” she finished.

  He opened his mouth, found he had nothing to say. It didn’t matter whether shackles were built of genes or iron, whether you installed them after birth or before conception. Chains were chains, no matter where you put them. No matter whether they were forged by intent or evolution.

  Maybe we should have just left you extinct. Built something friendlier, from scratch.

  “You need your monsters,” she said simply.

  He shook his head. “You’re just too—complicated. Everything’s linked to everything else. Fix the Crucifix Glitch, you lose your pattern-matching skills. Make you less antisocial, who knows what else goes away? We didn’t dare change you too much.”

  Valerie hissed softly, clicked her teeth. “You need monsters so you can defeat them. No great victory in slaughtering a lamb.”

  “We are not that stupid.”

  Valerie turned and looked to the horizon: the firelight flickering off the clouds was all the rejoinder she needed.

  But that’s not us, Brüks thought. Even if it is. It’s—urban renewal. Tear-down and development for the new owners.

  Pest control.

  The monster’s shoulders rose and fell. She spoke without turning—“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all just get along?”—and for the life of him Brüks could not tell whether she was being sincere or sarcastic.

  “I thought we were,” he said, reaching for the biopsy needle in his half-open field kit. And leapt like a flea onto her back, faster than he had ever moved in his life, to plunge it up through the base of her skull.

  NOW HE WAS alone. By day tornadoes marched across the desert like pillars of smoke, under no control but God’s. At night the distant glow of burning bushes encircled the horizon: the Post-Anthropocene Explosion in full swing. Brüks thought about what might be going on out there, thought about anything but the act he’d just committed. He imagined battles unseen and ongoing. He wondered who was winning.

  The Bicamerals, perhaps, shaping the Singularity, planting that first layer of bearings in the box. Laying a foundation for the future. Perhaps this was their linchpin moment, the first dusting of atoms on the condensor’s floor. From these beginnings Humanity could resonate out across time and space, a deterministic cascade designed to undo what the viral God had wrought. Debug the local ordinances. Undo the anthropic principle. It could take billions of years from such humble butterfly beginnings, but in the end life itself might be unraveled from Planck on up.

  What else could you call it, other than Nirvana?

  There would be other forces, other plans. The vampires, for one: the smartest of the selfish genes. They might prefer their human prey just as they were, slow and thick-witted, minds dulled by the cumbersome bottleneck of the conscious cache. Or maybe some other faction was rising in the east, any of the other monstrous subspecies that humanity had fractured into: the membrains, the multicores, the zombies or the Chinese Rooms. Even Rhona’s supraconscious AIs. They all had their causes, their reasons to fight; or thought they did.

  The fact that their actions all seemed to serve the purposes of something else, some vast distributed network slouching toward Bethlehem—sheer coincidence, perhaps. Perhaps we really do act for the reasons we believe. Per
haps everything’s right on the surface, brightly lit and primary colored. Perhaps Daniel Brüks and Rakshi Sengupta and Jim Moore—each burning for their own kind of redemption—all just happened to end up in the white-hot radiance of solar orbit, obsessed enough to rush in where Angels feared to tread.

  Perhaps it really was Daniel Brüks, on some level, who had just murdered his last and only friend...​

  He thought of Jim Moore and Jim was in his head, nodding and offering sage advice. Rhona reminded him to Think like a biologist and he saw his mistake; he’d heard Angels of the Asteroids and he’d seen heavenly bodies, not earthly ones. He’d seen chunks of dead spinning rock, not the extinct echinoderms that had once crept across the world’s intertidal zones. Asteroidea: the sea stars. Brainless creatures, utterly uncephalized, who nonetheless moved with purpose and a kind of intelligence. Not the worst metaphor for the Icarus invader. Not the worst metaphor for what seemed to be happening out beyond the desert...​

  There were other voices: Valerie, Rakshi, some he didn’t recognize. Sometimes they argued among themselves, included him only as an afterthought. They told him he was becoming schizophrenic—that they were nothing but his own thoughts, drifting at loose ends through a mind being taken apart in stages. They whispered fearfully about something skulking in the basement, something brought back from the sun that stomped on the floor and made things move upstairs. Brüks remembered Jim Moore cutting the cancers from his body, felt his friend’s head shaking behind his mind’s eye: Sorry, Daniel—I guess I didn’t get it all...​

  Sometimes he lay awake at night and clenched his teeth and strained, through sheer effort of conscious will, to undo the slow incremental rewiring of his midbrain. The thing in the basement came to him in his dreams. You think this is new? it sneered. Even in this miserable backwater, it’s been happening for four billion years. I’m going to swallow you whole.