Peter Watts - Firefall

Three trillion nodes and a ten-thousand-link search radius was a pretty impoverished echo of the actual Quinternet, but you could still dig for a thousand lifetimes and never reach its edge. Instant expertise in a million disciplines. Interactive novels you didn’t even have to play, first-person eidetic memories that planted themselves directly into your head if you had the interface (Brüks didn’t, but this came close), served up all the thrills and wonder and experience of just having played without even needing to set aside the time to inhabit the story in real time. Indelible footprints of all the things the Noosphere deemed worthy of remembrance.

Even after fourteen years, Theseus was all over it.

The shock, the disbelief in the wake of Firefall. Riots in every color of the rainbow: terrified hordes fleeing the coming apocalypse, not knowing which way to run; demonstrations against movers and shakers who’d always known more than they let on; looters with short attention spans, thinking only of all that swag left undefended while panicked populations hid under their beds or lashed back against uniforms whose guns and drones and area-denial weaponry were finally, after uncounted decades of casual and brutal unaccountability, just not up to the challenge. Tens of thousands returning from Heaven, fearful of new threats from the real world. Millions more fleeing into it, for pretty much the same reason.

And then, Theseus : the Mother Of All Megaprojects. A mission, a metaphor, a symbol of a shattered world reunited against the common threat. The brave souls who manned her, that small select force standing for Humanity against the cosmos. Amanda Bates, champion of countless WestHem campaigns: her skills so broad, her talents so highly classified that no one had even heard of her before her ascension to the Dream Team. Lisa Takamatsu, Nobel laureate, linguist, and den mother to a half-dozen separate personalities living in her own head. Jukka Sarasti, the noble vampire, the lion who’d lain down with lambs and was ready to give his life on their behalf. Siri Keeton, synthesist, ambassador to ambassadors, bridge between—

Wait a second— Siri?

He’d heard that name before. He sifted through dusty old memories laid down before the upgrade. Bulletins and biography washed over them in the meantime: Siri Keeton, synthesist, top of a field consisting exclusively of people at the top of their field. Possessed by demons at the age of six, some convulsive virus straight out of the Middle Ages that lit up his brain with electrical storms. It would have killed him outright if radical surgery hadn’t snatched him back from the brink, patched him up, left him scarred and scared and possessed of something altogether new: a fierce never-say-die dedication to beating the odds, the world, to beating his own mutinous brain into submission and getting the job done, all the way out to the very edge of the solar system and beyond.

( Siri’s not exactly baseline himself, actually… )

Almost nothing about his home life. No home vids, no leaked grade-school psych work-ups. An only child, apparently. Mother not mentioned at all, father left unnamed, a shadowy background figure that refused to come into focus except for one passing reference in TimeSpace :

…owes his single-minded pursuit of personal goals as much to his childhood battle with epilepsy as to his upbringing as a soldier’s son…​

Brüks turned the words over in his head, searching for coincidence.

“Yah Colonel Carnage had to go out and get his baby almost killed don’tcha know. Before he was even born.”

The low gravity was no friend; Brüks jumped so high he cracked his head on the ceiling.

“ Je- sus!” He pulled back the hood. Sengupta appeared between the interface dissolving in his head and the backup resurrecting on the bulkhead behind her. I have got to figure out the privacy settings on this thing, Brüks told himself. Not that they’d keep her from looking over his shoulder if she really wanted to, he supposed.

“Where did you come from?”

“I’ve been here all along five minutes at least.”

“Well say something next time. Announce yourself.” He rubbed the sore spot on his head. “What are you doing here anyway?”

Sengupta smacked her lips and cast sidelong eyes at her tent. “Hunting a dead man.”

I am the only meat sack on this whole damn ship who isn’t some kind of predator. “Hunting what?” One of the zombies?

“Not on board I mean like you”—snapping her fingers at the ConSensus display—“hunting him .”

Brüks looked back at the wall: a factoid collage, a palimpsest of puff pieces. It didn’t come anywhere close to biography.

“Jim nearly got him killed?”

“Yah I said that.” Snap snap .

“Says here he had some kind of viral epilepsy.”

Sengupta snorted. “They had to cut out half his brain for viral epilepsy right. Like anyone on Carnage’s salary has to settle for leeches and laudanum when his brat gets sick.”

“So what was it, then?”

“Viral something, ” Sengupta crowed. “Viral zombieism .”

Ventilator sounds filled the sudden silence.

“Bullshit,” Brüks said softly.

“Oh he didn’t do it deliberately the larva was just collateral. Some evildoer cooked up a basement bug but he got the fine-tuning wrong. Virus likes fetus brains way better than grown-up brains right? All that growth metabolism all that neural pruning everything moves faster so they give it to Mommy and she gives it to Daddy but it really takes off when it gets past that old-time placenta in the third tri. Goes through baby’s brain faster’n flesh-eating. Wake up next morning the little fucker’s already seizing in the womb and it’s lucky for them it’s their canary in the coal mine, they go down to Emerg and shoot up on antizombals, get cleaned out just in time. But too late for little Siri Keeton. He comes into the world and he’s already damaged goods and they deal with it best they can they try all the best drugs and all the best lattices but it’s downhill all the way and after a few years the seizures start up and that’s all they wrote on Siri Keeton’s left hemisphere right? Had to scrape it out like a rotten coconut.”

“ Jesus, ” Brüks whispered, and glanced around despite himself.

“Oh you don’t have to worry about him he’s way down deep in his precious Theseus signals.” An odd, single-shouldered shrug. “Anyway it all turned out okay though better’n before like I say. Storm troopers have really good medical plans. Replacement hemisphere’s a big improvement. Made him the man for the mission.”

“What a horrible thing to do to a kid.”

“If you can’t grow the code stay out of the incubator. Fucker probably did it himself to God knows how many others, that’s what they do .”

Brüks had seen the footage, of course: civilian hordes reduced to walking brain stems by a few kilobytes of weaponized code drawn to the telltale biochemistry of conscious thought. It wasn’t the precise surgical excision of cognitive inefficiency, not the military’s reversible supersoldiers or Valerie’s programmed bodyguards. It was consciousness and intellect just chewed away from cortex to hypothalamus, Humanity reduced to fight/flight/fuck. It was people turned back into reptiles.

It was also a hell of an effective strategy for anyone on a budget: cheap, contagious, terrifyingly effective. If you were caught in some panicking crowd you could never be sure whether the person pushing from behind was trying to rape you, or bash in your skull, or just get the fuck out of the zone. If you were above the crowd all your state-of-the-art telemetry would never tell the undead from the merely undone; not even Tran tech could pick out the fractional chill of a zombie brain inside its skull, not from a distance, not through a wall or a roof, not in the middle of a riot. All you could do was seal off the area and try to keep upwind until the flamethrowers showed up.