Firefall
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It’s been a while. Three editors, three family deaths, one near-fatal brush with flesh-eating disease. A felony conviction. A marriage.
Now this.
I’m not quite sure what “this” is, exactly—but for good or ill, I couldn’t have pulled it off without help. In fact, I wouldn’t even be alive now without help. So first and foremost, let me acknowledge the contribution of one Caitlin Sweet. Echopraxia would not exist without her, because I would not exist without her; I would have died of necrotizing fasciitis on February 12, 2011. (Darwin Day. Seriously. Look it up.) As a perverse reward for saving my life, Caitlin got to endure endless hours in the shower, or in bed, or at restaurants, listening to me whinge endlessly about how this scene was too talky and that climax too contrived; she would then suggest some elegant solution that might have occurred to me eventually, but probably not before deadline. Her insights are golden. If their implementation sucks it’s my fault, not hers.
The first couple of chapters also had the benefit of being workshopped by two different groups of writers: those at Gibraltar Point (Michael Carr, Laurie Channer, John McDaid, Becky Maines, Elisabeth Mitchell, Dave Nickle, Janis O’Connor, and Rob Stauffer); and those at Cecil Street (Madeline Ashby, Jill Lum, Dave Nickle—again—Helen Rykens, Karl Schroeder, Sara Simmons, Michael Skeet, Doug Smith, Hugh Spencer, Dale Sproule, and Dr. Allan Weiss).
I’ve kept lists over the years, tried to document the various insights, references, and crazy-ass hallucinatory what-ifs that informed the writing of this book. I’ve tried to keep track of those who sent me papers and those who actually wrote the damn things, those who made offhand remarks in blog posts or jabbed a finger at my chest while making some drunken point during a barroom debate. I wanted to list everyone by the nature of their contribution: beta reader; scientific authority; infopipe; devil’s advocate.
For the most part, I couldn’t do it. There’s just too much overlap. All those superimposed colors turn the Venn diagram into a muddy gray disk. So, for the most part, I’ll have to fall back on alphabetical order when I thank Nick Alcock, Beverly Bambury, Hannu Bloomila, Andrew Buhr, Nancy Cerelli, Alexey Cheberda, Dr. Krystyna Chodorowksa, Jacob Cohen, Anna Davour, Alyx Dellamonica, Sibylle Eisbach, Jon Enerson, Val Grimm, Norm Haldeman, Thomas Hardman, Dr. Andrew Hessel, Keith Honeyborne, Seth Keiper, Dr. Ed Keller, Chris Knall, Leonid Korogodski, Do-Ming Lum, Danielle MacDonald, Dr. Matt McCormick, Chinedum Ofoegbu, Jesús Olmo, Chris Pepper, Janna Randina, Kelly Robson, Patrick “Bahumat” Rochefort, Dr. Kaj Sotala, Dr. Brad Templeton, and Rob Tucker. And some mysterious dude who only goes by the name “Random J.”
Some folks, however, went above and beyond in singular and specific ways. Dr. Dan Brooks ranted and challenged and acted as occasional traveling companion. Kristin Choffe did her best to teach me the essentials of DNA barcoding, although she couldn’t keep me from sucking at it. (She also fronted me a vial containing the refined DNA of a dozen plant and animal species, with which I washed out my mouth before submitting a cheek swab to the Department of Homeland Security.) Leona Lutterodt described God as a Process, which lit an LED in my brain. Dr. Deborah McLennan snuck me through the paywalls. Sheila Miguez pointed me to a plug-in that made it vastly easier to insert citations into Notes and References (I will understand if, after reading that section, you decide to hate her for the same reason). Ray Neilson kept me on my toes and kept my Linux box running. Mark Showell saw me working on a laptop that was literally held together with binder clips, and took pity. Cat Sparks moved me halfway around the world; she was the fulcrum that tipped the worst year of my life into the best.
Some of these people are meatspace friends; others are pixelpals. They’ve argued with me online and off, punched holes in whatever bits of Echopraxia leaked out during gestation, passed me countless references on everything from hominid genetics to machine consciousness to metal-eating bacteria. They are a small army but a very smart one, and despite my best efforts I’m probably forgetting some of them. I hope those I’ve neglected here will forgive me.
Howard Morhaim. After dealing with agents whose advice ran the gamut from Buy my book to I’ll only represent you if you write a near-future techno-thriller about a marine biologist, Howard told me to write what I was inspired to: selling it, he in
sisted, was his job. This might not be the most opportunistic attitude to adopt in a Darwinian marketplace, but man it was nice to run into someone who put the writing first for a change.
Ironically, my next novel is most likely going to be a near-future techno-thriller about a marine biologist.
I am naked as I type this.
I was naked writing the whole damn book.
I aspire to a certain degree of discomfort in my writing, on the principle that if you never risk a face-plant you never go anywhere new. And if there’s one surefire way to get me out of my comfort zone, it’s the challenge of taking invisible omnipotent sky fairies seriously enough to incorporate into a hard SF novel. The phrase “faith-based hard SF” may, in fact, be the ultimate oxymoron—Clarke’s Third notwithstanding—which means that Echopraxia could be my biggest face-plant since βehemoth (especially in the wake of Blindsight, which continues to surprise with all the love it’s garnered over the years). And thanks to a lack of empirical evidence (as of this writing, anyway) for the existence of deities, I can’t even fall back on my usual strategy of shielding my central claims behind papers from Nature.
I can try to shield everything else there, though. Perhaps that will do.
PSY-OPS AND THE CONSCIOUSNESS GLITCH
I’m not dwelling too much on consciousness this time around—I pretty much shot my load on that subject with Blindsight—except to note in passing that the then-radical notion of consciousness-as-nonadaptive-side-effect has started appearing in the literature,1 and that more and more “conscious” activities (including math!2) are turning out to be nonconscious after all3,4,5 (though holdouts remain6).
One fascinating exception informs Keith Honeyborne’s report on “Prismatics,” who nearly drown themselves to achieve a heightened state of awareness. The premise of Ezequiel Morsella’s PRISM model7,8 is that consciousness originally evolved for the delightfully mundane purpose of mediating conflicting motor commands to the skeletal muscles. (I have to point out that exactly the same sort of conflict—the impulse to withdraw one’s hand from a painful stimulus, versus the knowledge that you’ll die if you act on that impulse—was exactly how the Bene Gesserit assessed whether Paul Atreides qualified as “Human” during their gom jabbar test in Frank Herbert’s Dune.)
Everything else comes down to tricks and glitches. The subliminal “gang signs” Valerie programmed onto the Crown’s bulkheads seem a logical (if elaborate) extension of the newborn field of optogenetics.9 The “sensed presence” Dan Brüks and Lianna Lutterodt experienced in the attic results from a hack on the temporoparietal junction that screws up the brain’s body map10,11 (basically, the part of your brain that keeps track of your body parts gets kicked in the side and registers a duplicate set of body parts off-center). Sengupta’s induced misiphonia is a condition in which relatively innocuous sounds—a slurp, a hiccup—are enough to provoke violent rage.12 All of this was inflicted in the service of education, though: as Brüks points out, fear promotes memory formation.13,14
Fear and belief can also kill you,15 a trick used to good effect in certain religious practices.16 And in case you were wondering what was up with the fusiform gyrus there at the end (a couple of my beta readers did), it’s the structure containing the face-recognition circuitry17 we tweaked to amp up the mutual-agonism response in vampires. It’s part of the same circuitry that evolved to let us see faces in the clouds, involved—once again—in the evolution of our religious impulse (see below).
The brain’s habit of literalizing metaphors—the tendency to regard people as having “warmer” personalities when you happen to be holding a mug of coffee, the Bicamerals’ use of hand-washing to mitigate feelings of guilt and uncertainty—is also an established neurological fact.18
I pulled “induced thanoparorasis” out of my ass. It’s a cool idea, though, huh?
UNDEAD UPDATE
Back in Blindsight I laid out a fair bit of groundwork on the biology and evolution of vampires. I’m not going to revisit that here (you can check out FizerPharm’s stockholder presentation19 if you need a refresher), except for the citation in Blindsight implying that female vampires were impossible (the gene responsible for their obligate primatovory being located on the Y chromosome20). More recent work by Cheberda et al have established a more general protocadherin dysfunction on both X and Y chromosomes,21 resolving this inadvertent paradox.
At any rate, zombies are more relevant to the current tale. Both surgical and viral varieties appear in Echopraxia; the surgically induced military model is essentially the “p-zombie” favored by philosophers22; it already got a workout back in Blindsight. Examples of the viral model would include victims of the Pakistan pandemic: “civilian hordes reduced to walking brain stems by a few kilobytes of weaponized code drawn to the telltale biochemistry of conscious thought.”
What telltale signatures might these bugs be targeting? Consciousness appears to be largely a property of distributed activity—the synchronous firing of far-flung provinces of the brain23,24—but it is also correlated with specific locations and structures.25 In terms of specific cellular targets I’m thinking maybe “von Economo neurons” or VENs: disproportionately large, anomalously spindly, sparsely branched neurons that grow 50 to 200 percent larger than the human norm.26,27 They aren’t numerous—they occupy only 1 percent of the anterior cingulate gyrus and the fronto-insular cortex—but they appear to be crucial to the conscious state.
Zombie brains—freed from the metabolic costs of self-awareness—exhibit reduced glucose metabolism in those areas, as well as in the prefrontal cortex, superior parietal gyrus, and the left angular gyrus; this accounts the fractionally-reduced temperature of the zombie brain. Interestingly, the same metabolic depression can be found in the brains of clinically insane murderers.28
PORTIA
I’d like to start this section by emphasising how utterly cool Portia’s eight-legged namesake is in real life. That stuff about improvisational hunting strategies, mammalian-level problem-solving, and visual acuity all contained within a time-sharing bundle of neurons smaller than a pinhead—God’s own truth, all of it.29,30,31,32
That said, the time-sharing cognitive slime mold at Icarus is even cooler. Given the limitations of Human telematter technology at the end of the twenty-first century—and given that any invasive agent hitching a ride on someone else’s beam would be well-advised to keep its structural complexity to a minimum—the capacity for some kind of self-assembly is going to be highly desirable once you reach your destination. Miras et al describe a process that might fit the rudiments of such a bill, at least.33,34 Once it starts assembling itself, I imagine that Portia might function something like Cooper’s “iCHELLs”35: inorganic metal cells, capable of reactions you could call “metabolic” without squinting too hard. Maybe with a sprinkling of magical fairy-dust plasma36 (although I’m guessing those two processes might be incompatible).
ADAPTIVE DELUSIONAL SYSTEMS...
An enormous amount of recent research has been published about the natural history of the religious impulse and the adaptive value of theistic superstition.37,38,39,40,41,42,43,44 It’s no great surprise that religion confers adaptive benefits, given the near-universality of that impulse among our species.45,46,47,48 If you’re interested and you’ve got ninety minutes to spare, I’d strongly recommend Robert Sapolsky’s brilliant lecture on the evolutionary and neurological roots of religious belief.49
It’s not all food taboos and slashed foreskins, though. Far more relevant to the current discussion is the fact that religious minds exhibit certain characteristic neurological traits.50 Believers, for example, are better than nonbelievers at finding patterns in visual data.51 Buddhist meditation increases the thickness of the prefrontal cortex and right anterior insula (structures associated with attention, interoception, and sensory processing).52 There’s even circumstantial evidence that Christians are less ruled by their emotions than are nonbelievers53 (although whether the rules they follow in
stead are any more rational is another question). Certain religious rituals are so effective at focusing the mind and relieving stress that some have suggested coopting them into a sort of “religion for atheists.”54
An obvious significant downside is that most religious beliefs—gods, souls, Space Disneyland—are held at best in the complete absence of empirical evidence (and are more frequently held in the face of opposing evidence). While it remains impossible to disprove the negative, for most practical purposes it’s reasonable to describe such beliefs as simply wrong.
It was only during the writing this book that it occurred to me to wonder if one couldn’t say the same about science.
Lutterodt’s comparison of religious faith with the physiology of vision came to me while I was reading Inzlicht et al,55 a paper that describes religion as an internal model of reality that confers benefits even though it’s wrong. While that idea is nothing new, the way it was phrased was so reminiscent of the way our brains work—the old survival-engines-not-truth-detectors shtick—that I had to wonder if the whole right/wrong distinction might be off the table the moment any worldview passes through a Human nervous system. And the next paper56 I read suggested that certain cosmic mysteries might not be a function of dark energy so much as inconstancies in the laws of physics—and if that were the case, there’d really be no way to tell...
Of course, there’s absolutely no denying the functional utility of the scientific method, especially when you compare it to the beads and rattles of those guys with the funny hats. Still, I have to admit: not entirely comfy with where that seemed to be heading for a bit.
...AND THE BICAMERAL CONDITION
The Bicameral Order did not begin as a hive. They began as a fortunate juxtaposition of adaptive malfunctions and sloppy fitness.
The name does not derive from Julian Jaynes.57 Rather, both Jaynes and the Order recall a time when paired hemispheres were the only option: the right a pragmatic and unimaginative note-taker, the left a pattern-matcher.58 Think of “gene duplication,” that process by which genetic replication occasionally goes off the rails to serve up multiple copies of a gene where only one had existed before; these become “spares” available for evolutionary experimentation. Hemispheric lateralization was a little like that. A pragmatist core; a philosopher core.