Peter Watts - Firefall

“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—”