Peter Watts - Echopraxia

The scarecrow spilled a few more mahogany knuckles with chaotic precision. Luckett laughed again, shook his head.

“He talks through board games,” Brüks surmised.

“Close enough. Who knows? I might be doing the same thing by the time I graduate.”

“You’re not—?” Of course he wasn’t. His eyes didn’t sparkle.

“Not yet. Acolyte.”

It was enough that he spoke English. “I’m trying to find the room I was in last night. Basement, spiral stairs, kind of a war room bunker feel to it?”

“Ah. The Colonel’s lair. North hall, first right, second door on the left.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

“Not at all.” Luckett turned away as Masaso clicked and rolled the bones. “More than enough antimatter to break orbit, anyway. Least it saves on chemical mass.”

Brüks stopped, hand on the doorknob. “What was that?”

Luckett glanced back at him. “Just drawing up plans. Nothing to worry about.”

“You guys have antimatter ?”

“Before long.” Luckett grinned and dipped his hands into the washbasin. “God willing.”

Most of the tactical collage was dark, or writhing with analog static. A half dozen windows flickered fitfully through random points of view: desert, desert, desert. No satcam imagery. Either Moore had shut down those feeds or whoever was behind the blockade had walled off the sky as well as the horizon.

Brüks tapped experimentally on an unlit patch of paint. His touch provoked a brief flicker of red, but nothing else.

The active windows kept changing, though. Some kind of motion sensor built into the feed, maybe: views would pan and pounce, flash-zooming on this flickering shadow or that distant escarpment. Sometimes Brüks couldn’t see anything noteworthy at the center of attention: a falcon grooming itself on a skeletal branch, or the burrow of a desert rodent halfway to the horizon. Once or twice a little fall of rock skittering down a distant slope, scree dislodged by some unseen disturbance.

Once, partially eclipsed by leaves and scrub, a pair of glassy reflections looking back.

“Help you?”

Jim Moore reached past Brüks’s shoulder and tapped the display. A new window sprang to life at his fingertip. Brüks stepped aside while the soldier stretched the window across the paint, called up a feed, zoomed on a crevice splitting a hillock to the south.

“I was trying to get online,” Brüks admitted. “See if anyone out there’s picked up on this whole— quarantine thing.”

“Net’s strictly local. I don’t think the Bicamerals actually have Quinternet access.”

“What, they’re afraid of getting hacked?” It was an ongoing trend, Brüks had heard: defensive self-partitioning in the face of Present Shock, and damn the legal consequences. People were starting to weigh costs against benefits, opt for a day or two outside the panopticon even in the face of the inevitable fines and detentions.

But Moore was shaking his head. “I don’t think they need it. Do you feel especially lost without access to the telegraph network?”

“What’s a telegraph?”

“Exactly.” Something caught the Colonel’s eye. “Huh. That’s not good.”

Brüks followed the other man’s gaze to the window he’d opened, to the crevice centered there. “I don’t see anything.”

Moore played a little arpeggio on the wall. The image blossomed into false color. Something glowed Euclidean yellow in all that fractal blue.

He grunted. “Aerosol delivery, looks like.”

“Your guys?”

The corner of Moore’s mouth curled the slightest bit. “Can’t really say.”

“What’s to say? You’re a soldier, right? They’re soldiers, unless the government’s started subcontracting to—”

“Biothermals, too. They’re not trusting their bots to run things.” There was a hint of amusement in the old soldier’s voice. “Probably baselines, then.”

“Why’s that?”

“Fragile egos. Low self-esteem.” His fingers skipped across the darkened wall. Bright windows flared everywhere they touched.

“At least you’re all on the same side then, right?”

“Doesn’t really work like that.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The chain of command isn’t what it used to be.” Moore smiled faintly. “It’s more—organic, these days. Anyway.” Another finger dance; the window dwindled and slid to an empty spot along the edge of the wall. “They’re still setting up. We’ve got time.”

“How was the meeting?” Brüks asked

“Still going on. Not much point hanging around after the opening ceremonies, though. I’d just slow them down.”

“And let me guess: you can’t tell me what’s going on, and it’s none of my business anyway.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Lianna said—”

“Dr. Lutterodt wasn’t at the meeting,” Moore reminded him.

“Okay. So is there anything you can—”

“The Fireflies,” Moore said.

Brüks blinked. “What about—oh. Your common enemy.”

Moore nodded.

Memories of intercepted negotiations, scrolling past in Christmas colors: “ Theseus . They found something out there?”

“Maybe. Nothing’s certain yet, just—hints and inferences. No solid intel.”

“Still.” An alien agency capable of simultaneously dropping sixty thousand surveillance probes into the atmosphere without warning. An agency that came and went in seconds, that caught the planet with its pants down and took God knew how many compromising pictures along God knew how many wavelengths before letting the atmosphere burn its own paparazzi down to a sprinkle of untraceable iron floating through the stratosphere. An agency never seen before and never since, for all the effort put into finding it. “I guess that qualifies as a common threat,” Brüks admitted.

“I guess it does.” Moore turned back to his war wall.

“Why were they fighting in the first place? What does a vampire have against a bunch of monks?”

Moore didn’t answer for a moment. Then: “It’s not personal, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“What, then?”

Moore took a breath. “It’s—more of the same, really. Entropy, increasing. The Realists and their war on Heaven. The Nanohistomites over in Hokkaido. Islamabad on fire.”

Brüks blinked. “Islamabad’s—”

“Oops. Getting ahead of myself. Give it time.” The Colonel shrugged. “I’m not trying to be coy, Dr. Brüks. You’re already in the soup, so I’ll tell you what I can so long as it doesn’t endanger you further. But you’re going to have to take a lot on—well, on faith.”

Brüks stifled a laugh. Moore looked at him.

“Sorry,” Brüks said. “It’s just, you hear so much about the Bicamerals and their scientific breakthroughs and their quest for Truth. And I finally get inside this grand edifice and all I hear is Trust and God willing and Take it on faith . I mean, the whole order’s supposed to be founded on the search for knowledge, and Rule Number One is Don’t ask questions ?”

“It’s not that they don’t have answers,” Moore said after a moment. “It’s just that we can’t understand them for the most part. You could resort to analogies, I suppose. Force transhuman insights into human cookie-cutter shapes. But most of the time that would just get you a bleeding metaphor with all its bones broken.” He held up a hand, warding off Brüks’s rejoinder. “I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke’s liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one’s looking.”