Peter Watts - Firefall

He pulled the gimp hood over his head, linked into the lab’s ConSensus channel, and time just—stopped. It stopped, then shot ahead in an instant. He threw himself down through orders of magnitude, watched molecules in motion, built stick-figure caricatures and tried to coax them into moving the same way. He felt distant surprise at his own proficiency, marveled at how much he’d accomplished in just a few minutes; wondered vaguely why his throat felt so dry and somehow eighteen hours had passed.

What are you? he thought in amazement.

Not computronium, anyway. Not organic. More like a Tystovich plasma helix than anything built out of protein. Things that looked like synaptic gates were ticking away in there to the beat of ions; some carried pigment as well as electricity, like chromatophores moonlighting as associative neurons. Trace amounts of magnetite, too; this thing could change color if it ran the right kind of computations.

Not much more computational density than your garden-variety mammalian brain, though. That was surprising.

And yet…​the way it was arranged …​

He resented his own body for needing water, ignored the increasing need to take a piss until his bladder threatened to burst. He built tabletop vistas of alien technology and shrank himself down into their centers, wandered thunderstruck through streets and cityscapes and endlessly shifting lattices of intelligent crystal. He stood humbled by the sheer impossibility held in that little fleck of alien matter, and by the sheer mind-boggling simplicity of its execution.

It was as though someone had taught an abacus to play chess. It was as though someone had taught a spider to argue philosophy.

“You’re thinking, ” he murmured, and couldn’t keep an amazed smile off his face.

It actually did remind him of a spider, in fact. One particular genus that had become legendary among invertebrate zoologists and computational physicists alike: a problem-solver that improvised and drew up plans far beyond anything that should have been able to fit into such a pinheaded pair of ganglia. Portia . The eight-legged cat, some had called it. The spider that thought like a mammal.

It took its time, mind you. Sat on its leaf for hours, figuring out the angles without ever making a move, and then zap : closed on its prey along some roundabout route that broke line of sight for minutes at a time. Somehow it hit every waypoint, never lost track of the target. Somehow it just remembered all those three-dimensional puzzle pieces with a brain barely big enough to register light and motion.

As far as anyone could tell, Portia had learned to partition its cognitive processes: almost as if it were emulating a larger brain piece by piece, saving the results of one module to feed into the next. Slices of intellect, built and demolished one after another. No one would ever know for sure—a rogue synthophage had taken out the world’s Salticids before anyone had gotten around to taking a closer look—but the Icarus slime mold seemed to have taken the same basic idea and run with it. There’d be some upper limit, of course—some point at which scratchpads and global variables took up so much room there’d be none left over for actual cognition—but this was just a fleck, this was barely the size of a ladybug. The condenser chamber was awash in the stuff.

What had Lianna called it? God. The Face of God.

Maybe, Brüks thought. Give it time.

“Scale-invariant shit it time-shares !”

He’d almost gotten used to it by now. Barely even jumped at the sound of Rakshi Sengupta exclaiming unexpectedly at his side. He peeled the hood back and there she was, a meter to his left: eavesdropping on his models through an ancillary bulkhead feed.

He sighed and nodded. “Emulates larger networks a piece at a time. That one little piece of Portia could—”

“ Portia .” Sengupta stabbed the air, stabbed ConSensus. “After the spider right?”

“Yeah. That one little piece could probably model a human brain if it had to.” He pursed his lips. “I wonder if it’s conscious.”

“No chance it’d take days just to chug through a half-second brain slice and networks only wake up—”

“Right.” He nodded. “Of course.”

Her eyes jiggled and another window sprouted off to one side: AUX/RECOMP, and the postbiological wonder painted on its guts. “Bet that could be though. What else you got?”

“I think it was designed specifically for this kind of environment,” Brüks said after a moment.

“What space stations?”

“ Empty space stations. Smart mass isn’t anything special. But something this small, running cognition-level computations—there’s a reason you don’t run into that a lot on Earth.”

Sengupta frowned. “ ’Cause being a thousand times smarter than the thing that’s trying to eat you isn’t much help if it takes you a month to be a thousand times smarter.”

“Pretty much. Glacial smarts only pay off if your environment doesn’t change for a long time. ’Course, it’s not such a bottleneck at higher masses, but—well, I think this was designed to work no matter how much or how little managed to sneak through. Which implies that it’s optimized for telematter dispersal—although if it isn’t using our native protocols, how it hijacks the stream in the first place is beyond me.”

“Oh they figured that out couple days ago,” Sengupta told him.

“Really?” Fuckers.

“Know how when you pack a layer of ball bearings into the bottom of a crate and the second layer fits into the bumps and valleys laid down by the first and the third fits onto the second so it all comes down to the first layer, first layer determines all the turtles all the way up, right?”

Brüks nodded.

“Like that. ’Cept the ball bearings are atoms.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Yah because I got nothing better to do than play tricks on roaches.”

“But—that’s like laying down a set of wheels and expecting it to act as a template for a car.”

“More like laying down a set of tread marks and expecting it to act as a template for a car.”

“Come on. Something has to tell the nozzles where to squirt that first layer. Something has to tell the second layer of atoms when to come though so that they can line up with the first. Might as well call it magic and be done with it.”

“You call it magic. Hive calls it the Face of God.”

“Yeah. Well, the tech may be way beyond us, but superstitious labels aren’t bringing it any closer.”

“Oh that’s rich you think God’s a thing God’s not a thing .”

“I’ve never thought God was a thing,” Brüks said.

“Good ’cause it’s not. It’s water into wine it’s life from clay it’s waking meat.”

Sweet smoking Jesus. Not you, too.

He summed it up to move it along. “So God’s a chemical reaction.”

Sengupta shook her head. “God’s a process .”

Fine. Whatever.

But she wasn’t letting it go. “Everything’s numbers you go down far enough don’t you know?” She poked him, pinched his arm. “You think this is continuous ? You think there’s anything but math ?”

He knew there wasn’t. Digital physics had reigned supreme since before he’d been born, and its dictums were as incontrovertible as they were absurd. Numbers didn’t just describe reality; numbers were reality, discrete step functions smoothing up across the Planck length into an illusion of substance. Roaches still quibbled over details, doubtless long since resolved by precocious children who never bothered to write home: Was the universe a hologram or a simulation? Was its boundary a program or merely an interface—and if the latter, what sat on the other side, watching it run? (A few latter-day religions had predictably answered that question with the names of their favorite deities, although Brüks had never been entirely clear on what an omniscient being would need a computer for . Computation, after all, implied a problem not yet solved, insights not yet achieved. There was really only one sort of program for which foreknowledge of the outcome didn’t diminish the point of the exercise, and Brüks had never been able to find any religious orders that described God as a porn addict.)