Peter Watts - Firefall

Not for Macdonald and her kind, that empty hypocrisy. They’d ripped the lie right out of their heads, rewired and redeemed it, turned it into joyful truth with a lifetime warranty. First-person sex had even made a modest comeback in the shelter of that subculture, or so Brüks had heard.

He didn’t know any of that at the time, of course. Celu MacDonald was just a name on a list of subcontractors, a monkey hired to grow code the academics couldn’t be bothered with. Brüks only learned of her after the fact: a bloody little coda at the end of the massacre.

There’d been no conspiracy. No one had thrown her to the wolves. But the academics had had deans and CEOs and PR hotshots keeping their identities confidential, keeping their connections from staining the good names of venerable institutions. Nobody had given any cover to Celu MacDonald. When the dust had finally settled, when the inquiries and ass-covering and alibis had all run their course, there’d she’d been: standing alone in the crosshairs with hacked code dribbling from her hands.

Maybe it had been Rakshi who’d found her, staring slack-jawed at the ceiling after some bereaved next of kin decided to make the punishment fit the crime. She would still have been breathing. The variant didn’t kill its victims. It burned them out and moved on; you could tell when it had finished because the convulsions stopped, at long last, and left nothing behind but vegetation.

They’d found the guy who did it, eventually: dead for days, at the center of a micro-outbreak that had imploded under quarantine. Evidently he’d slipped up. But Rakshi Sengupta was still hunting . That was the word she’d used. Denied her revenge on the hand that had pulled the trigger, she was looking for the gunsmith. All that seething anger. All those hours spent trawling the cache. All that implanted idealized love, transmuted into grief: all that grief, transmuted into rage. The growled threats and mutterings about hunting dead men and debts owed and Some fucker going to be eating his own guts when I get hold of him .

Rakshi Sengupta didn’t know it yet, but she was gunning for Backdoor Brüks.

She was waiting at the mouth of his tent.

“Roach. Got something for you.”

He tried to read her eyes, but they were averted. He tried to read her body language, but it had always been a cipher to him.

He tried to keep the wariness out of his voice. “What you got?”

“Just watch.” She called a window to the adjacent bulkhead.

She doesn’t know. She couldn’t know.

She’d have to look into my eyes for that…​

“What are you looking at?”

“No—nothing. Just—”

“Look at the window, ” Sengupta said.

I am so sorry, he thought. Oh God, I am so very sorry .

He forced his eyes to the bulkhead: an over-the-shoulder view of a diagnostic chair, facing a flatscreen. A tropical savanna glowed there, lit by the grimy yellow light of a fading afternoon (Africa, Brüks guessed, although there were no telltale animals in frame). Telemetry framed the tableaux on every side: ribbons of heart rate, respiration, skin galvanics. A translucent brain scan glowed to the left, writhing with the iridescence of neurons firing in real time.

Someone sat in that chair, almost totally eclipsed by its back. The top of their skull crested above a padded headrest, wrapped in the superconducting spiderweb of a tomo matrix. The tip of one armrest peeked into view; a hand rested there. The rest of the person existed only by inference. Fragments of a body, almost lost among the bright flayed images of its own electricity.

Sengupta wiggled a finger: the still life began to move. A chrono readout ticked out the time at one second per second: 03/05/2090—0915:25.

“What do you see?” Not Sengupta talking. Someone in the video, speaking offstage.

“Grassland,” said the person in the chair, face still hidden, voice instantly recognizable.

Valerie.

The grasses dissolved into storm-tossed waves; the yellowish sky hardened down to wintry blue. The horizon didn’t change position, though; it still bisected the scene halfway up the frame.

Something tapped faintly on the soundtrack, like fingernails on plastic.

“What do you see?”

“Ocean. Subarctic Pacific, Oyashio Current, early Feb—”

“Ocean’s fine. Basic landscape, that’s all we want. One word.”

A hint of motion, center right: Valerie’s fingers, just visible, drumming against the armrest.

A salt flat, shimmering in summer heat. The edge of a mesa rose in the hazy distance, a dark terrace that split-leveled the horizon.

“What now?”

“Desert.” Tick… ​tick tick tick… ​tap…​

Brüks glanced at Sengupta. “What is —”

“Shhhh.”

Same salt flat: the mesa had magically disappeared. Now a skeletal tree rose from the cracked earth, halfway to the horizon: leafless, yellow as old bone, a crown of naked branches atop a stripped featureless trunk almost too straight for nature. The trunk’s shadow reached directly toward the camera, like an unbroken phantom extension of the object itself.

“Now?”

“Desert.”

“Good, good.”

Down in the glass brain, a smattering of crimson pinpoints swept briefly across the visual cortex and disappeared.

“Now?”

Same picture, higher magnification: the tree was front and center now, its trunk straight as a flagpole, close enough to vertically split the horizon and a good chunk of the sky above. The speckles reappeared, a faint red rash staining the soap-bubble rainbows swirling across the back of Valerie’s brain. Her fingers had stopped moving.

“Same. Desert.” There wasn’t a trace of expression in her voice.

Right angles, Brüks realized. They’re turning the landscape into a natural cross …​

“Now.”

“Same.”

It wasn’t. Now the branches were out of frame: all that remained was the white of the land, the hard crystalline blue of the sky and the hypothetical razor-edged line between, splitting the world side to side. And that impossibly straight vertical trunk, splitting it top to bottom.

They’re trying to trigger a glitch…​

No longer a mere rash, glowing across the back of the vampire’s skull: a pulsing tumor. And yet her voice remained empty and untroubled; her body rested unmoving in the chair.

Her face still unseen. Brüks wondered why the archivists had been so afraid to record it.

Now the world on the screen began to come apart. The salt flat behind the tree came unstuck just a little at the bottom (the tree stayed in place, like a decal on glass), shrank up from the lower edge of the display like old curling parchment, and revealed a strip of azure beneath: as if more sky had been hiding under the sand.

“Now?”

The desert pixels compressed a little further, squeezed tighter against the skyline—

“Same.”

—compressed from landscape to land strip, the undersky pushing it up from below, the horizon holding it down from above—

“Now?”

“S-same. I…”

Scarlet auroras squirmed across Valerie’s brain. SKIN GALV and RESP shuddered along their time series.

CARDIAC beat strong and steady and did not change at all.

“And now?”

The ground was almost all sky now. The desert had been reduced to a bright squashed band running across the screen like a flatlined EEG, like a crossbeam at Calvary. The tree trunk cut it vertically at right angles.

“I—sky, I think, I—”

“Now?”

“—know what you’re doing.”

“Now?”

The flattened desert shrank some critical fraction further; horizontal and vertical axes split quadrants of sky with borders of nearly equal thickness.