Peter Watts - Echopraxia

“And yet.” Brüks glanced at the wall, where AEROSOL DELIVERY glowed in shades of yellow and orange. Where a murderous tornado had rampaged the night before. “They seem to solve their conflicts pretty much the same way as us retarded ol’ baselines.”

Moore smiled faintly. “That they do.”

He found Lianna back on the front steps, supper balanced on her knees, watching the sun go down. She looked back over her shoulder as he pushed through the door.

“I asked about your brain-boosters,” she said. “No luck. The assembly line’s booked or something.”

“Thanks for trying,” he said.

“Jim might still be holding. If you haven’t asked him already.”

He shifted his tray to one hand, used the other to rub away the vague pain behind his eyes. “Mind if I join you?”

She spared one hand to take in the staircase, as broad and excessive as a cathedral’s.

He sat beside her, picked at his own plate. “About this morning, I, uh…”

She stared at the horizon. The sun stared back, highlighting her cheekbones.

“… sorry,” he finished.

“Forget it. Nobody likes being in a cage.”

“Still. I shouldn’t have shot the messenger.” A sudden chilly breeze crawled across his shoulders.

Lianna shrugged. “You ask me, nobody should shoot anybody.”

He raised his eyes. Venus twinkled back at them. He wondered briefly if those photons had followed a straight line to his eyes, or if they’d been shunted around some invisible spillway of curves and angles at the last nanosecond. He looked around at the cracked desert floor, lifted his gaze to the more jagged topography in the distance. Wondered how many unseen agents were looking back.

“You always eat out here?”

“When I can.” The lowering sun stretched her shadow along the ramparts behind them, a giantess silhouetted in orange. “It’s—stark, you know?”

Ribbed clouds, a million shades of salmon, scudding against an orange and purple sky.

“How long does this go on?” he wondered.

“This?”

“They lurk out there, we wait in here. When does somebody actually make a move?”

“Oldschool, you gotta relax .” She shook her head, smiled a twilit smile. “You could obsess and second-guess for a solid month and I guarantee you wouldn’t be able to think of anything our hosts haven’t already factored five ways to Sunday. They’ve been making moves all day.”

“Such as?”

“Don’t ask me.” She shrugged. “I probably wouldn’t understand even if they told me. They’re wired up way differently.”

Hive mind, he reminded himself. Synesthetes, too, if he wasn’t mistaken.

“You do understand them, though,” he said. “That’s your job.”

“Not the way you think. And not without a fair bit of modding on my own.”

“How , then?”

“I’m not sure,” she admitted.

“Come on.”

“No, really. It’s a kind of Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven. The moment you start to think about what you’re doing, you screw up. You just have to get into the zone.”

“They must have trained you at some point,” Brüks insisted. “There must have been some kind of conscious learning curve.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” She squinted up at some invisible behemoth he still couldn’t see. “But they kind of—bypassed that. Zapped my fornix with just the right burst of ultrasound and next thing I know it’s four days later and I have all these reflexes. Not so much that I understand them as my fingers do, you know? Phonemes, rhythms, gestures—eye movements, sometimes—” She frowned. “I take in all these cues and equations just—come to me, piece by piece. I copy them down and I send ’em off. And the next day they show up in the latest issue of Science .”

“You never examined these reflexes afterward? Played the piano really slowly, taken the time to watch what your fingers were doing?”

“Dan, they won’t fit . Consciousness is a scratchpad. You can store a grocery list, jot down a couple of phone numbers—but were you even aware of finishing your supper?”

Brüks looked down at his plate. It was empty.

“And that’s just a couple of swallows half a minute in the past. You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?” Her dreads swept back and forth in the gloom. “Whatever I’m doing, it’s got too many variables. Won’t fit in the global workspace.” She flashed him a small, apologetic smile.

They program us like clockwork dolls, he thought. Way off to the west, the sun touched gently down on a distant ridge.

He looked at her. “Why are we still in charge?”

She grinned. “Who’s we, white boy?”

He didn’t. “These people you—work for. They’re supposed to be helpless, that’s what everyone says. You can optimize a brain for down there or up here, not both. Anyone comfortable thinking at Planck scales, they can barely cross the street unassisted up in the real world. That’s why they set up in the desert. That’s why they have people like you. That’s what they tell us.”

“All true, more or less,” Lianna said.

He shook his head. “They micromanage tornadoes, Lee. They turn people into puppets with a wink and a wave, they own half the patent office. They’re about as helpless as a T. rex in a daycare center. So why haven’t they been running things for years?”

“That’s like a chimp asking why those hairless apes aren’t slinging bigger feces than everyone else, if they’re so damned clever.”

He tried not to smile, and failed. “That’s not really an answer.”

“Sure it is. Everybody goes on about hive mind this and synesthesia that like they were some kind of superpowers.”

“After last night, you’re going to tell me they’re not ?”

“It goes so much deeper than that. It’s perceptual . We’re so—impoverished, you know? We don’t look out at reality at all, we look in at this model, this caricature our brains cobble together out of wavelengths and pressure points. We squint down over handwritten notes that say two blocks east, turn left at the bridge and we think that reading those stupid scribbles is the same as seeing the universe passing by on the other side of the windshield.” She glanced over her shoulder, to the edifice at their backs.

Brüks frowned. “You think Bicamerals can see outside the windshield.”

“Dunno. Maybe.”

“Then I’ve got some bad news for you. Reality went out the window the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or model-building? Become a protozoan.”

A smile lit her face, startlingly bright in the deepening gloom. “Wouldn’t that be just like them. Build a group mind complex enough to put any hundred baseline geniuses to shame, and use it to think like a paramecium.”

“That wasn’t exactly my point,” he said.

The sun winked good-bye and slid below the horizon.

“I don’t know how they do it,” she admitted. “But if what they see is even closer to reality—well, that’s what you call transcendence. Not the ability to micromanage tornados, just—seeing a little more of what’s out there .” She tapped her temple. “Instead of what’s in here .”

She stood, stretched like a cat. Brüks rose beside her and brushed the desert from his clothes. “Then transcendence is out of reach. For our brains, anyway.”