Peter Watts - Firefall

“It wanted to keep us in Icarus. It wouldn’t have tried to stop us from leaving if we were still inside it. It’s not everywhere.”

He thought. “It could still be any where.”

“Yah. But not enough to take over, just a—a little bit. Lost and alone.”

There was something in her voice. Almost like sympathy.

“Yah well why not?” she asked, although he had said nothing. “We know how that feels.”

Sailing up the center of the spine, navigating through the grand rotating bowl of the southern hemisphere, up through the starboard rabbit hole with the mirrorball gleaming to his left: Daniel Brüks, consummate parasite, finally at home in the weightless intestines of the Crown of Thorns . “I checked the numbers three times. I don’t think Portia —”

He stopped. His own face looked down at him across half the sky.

Oh fuck —

Rakshi Sengupta was a presence near the edge of vision, a vague blur of motion and color more felt than seen. He had only to turn his head and she would come into focus.

She knows she knows she knows—

“I found the fucker,” she said, and there was blood and triumph and terrible promise in her voice. He could not bring himself to face her. He could only stare at that incriminating portrait in front of him, at his personal and professional lives scrolling across the heavens big as the zodiac: transcripts, publications, home addresses; Rhona, ascendant; his goddamn swimming certificate from the third grade.

“This is him. This is the asshole who killed my—who killed seven thousand four hundred eighty-two people. Daniel. Brüks.”

She was no longer talking like Rakshi Sengupta, he realized at some horrible remove. She was talking like someone else entirely.

“I said I would find him. And I found him. And here. He. Is.”

She’s talking like Shiva the fucking Destroyer.

He floated there, dead to rights, waiting for some killing blow.

“And now that I know who he is,” Shiva continued, “I am going to survive that thing on the hull and I am going to survive that thing in Colonel Carnage’s head and I am going to make it back to Earth. And I will hunt this fucker down and make him wish he had never been born.”

Wait, what—?

He forced back his own paralysis. He turned his head. His pilot, his confidante, his sworn nemesis came into focus. Her face, raised to the heavens, crawled with luminous reflections of his own damnation.

She spared him a sidelong glance; her lips were parted in a smile that would have done Valerie proud. “Want to come along for the ride?”

She’s toying with me? This is some kind of twisted—

“Uh, Rakshi—” He coughed, cleared a throat gone drier than Prineville, tried again. “I don’t know—”

She raised one preemptive hand. “I know, I know. Priorities. Counting chickens. We have other things to do. But I’ve had friends wiped by the storm troopers for hacking some senator’s diary, and then this asshole racks up a four-digit death toll and those same storm troopers protect him, you know what I mean? So yah, there are vampires and slime molds and a whole damn planet coming apart at the seams but I can’t do anything about that.” Her gaze on the ground, she pointed to the sky. “ This I can do something about.”

You don’t know who I am . I’m right here in front of you and you’ve dredged up my whole sorry life and you’re not putting it together how can you not be putting it together?

“Bring back a little balance into the social equation.”

Maybe it’s the eye contact thing . He suppressed a hysterical little giggle. Maybe she just never looked at me in meatspace…​

“There’s no fucking justice anywhere, unless you make your own.”

Wow, Brüks thought, distantly amazed. Jim and his orthogonal networks . They really got your number .

Why don’t you have mine?

“What did they do to her? Why doesn’t she know me?”

“Do…?” Moore shook his head, managed a half smile under listless eyes. “They didn’t do anything, son. Nobody does anything, we’re done to …”

The lights were always low in the attic, the better for Moore to see the visions in his head. He was a half-seen half-human shape in the semidarkness, one arm tracing languid circles in the air, all other limbs entwined among the rafters. As though the Crown was incorporating him into her very bones, as though he were some degenerate parasitic anglerfish in conjugal fusion with a monstrous mate. The smell of old sweat and pheromones hung around him like a shroud.

“She found out about Bridgeport,” Brüks hissed. “She found out about me, she had all my stats right up there on the screen, and she didn’t recognize me .”

“Oh that,” Moore said, and nothing else.

“This goes way beyond some tweak to protect state secrets . What did they do? What did you do?”

Moore frowned, an old man losing track of seconds barely past. “I—I didn’t do anything. This is the first I’ve heard of it. She must have a filter.”

“A filter.”

“Cognitive filter.” The Colonel nodded, intact procedural memories booting up over corrupt episodic ones. “Selectively interferes with the face-recognition wetware in the fusiform gyrus. She sees you well enough in the flesh, she just can’t recognize you in certain…​contexts. Triggers an agnosia. Probably even mangles the sound of your name…”

“I know what a cognitive filter is. What I want to know is why someone took explicit measures to keep Rakshi from recognizing me when nobody knew I was going to be on this goddamn ship . Because I just happened to go on sabbatical just before a bunch of postals decided to duke it out in the desert, right? Because I just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“I was wondering when you were going to figure that out,” Moore said absently. “I thought maybe someone had spiked your Cognital.”

Brüks hit him in the face.

At least he tried to. Somehow the blow went wide; somehow Moore was just a little left of where he’d been an instant before and his fist was ramming like a piston into Brüks’s diaphragm. Brüks sailed backward; something with too many angles and not enough padding cracked the back of his skull. He doubled over, breathless, floaters swarming in his head.

“Unarmed biologist with no combat experience attacking a career solder with thirty years in the field and twice your mitochondrial count,” Moore remarked as Brüks struggled to breathe. “Not generally a good idea.”

Brüks looked across the compartment, holding his stomach. Moore looked back through eyes that seemed a bit more focused in the wake of his outburst.

“How far back, Jim? Did they drop some subliminal cue into my in-box to make me choose Prineville? Did they make me fuck up the sims and kill all those people just so I’d feel the urge to get lost for a while? Why did they want me along for the ride anyway, what possible reason could a bunch of superintelligent cancers have for taking a cockroach on their secret mission?”

“You’re alive,” Moore said. “They’re not.”

“Not good enough.”

“ We’re alive, then. The closer you are to baseline, the better your odds of surviving the mission.”

“Tell that to Lianna.”

“I wouldn’t have to. I’ve told you before, Daniel: roach isn’t an insult. We’re the ones still standing after the mammals build their nukes, we’re the ones with the stripped-down OS’s so damned simple they work under almost any circumstances. We’re the goddamned Kalashnikovs of thinking meat.”