Peter Watts - Echopraxia

Something thumped behind one of the closed doors. He paused for a moment before continuing, his attention drawn by another door opening farther down the hall.

By the naked blotchy thing that fell into view, choking and twitching as if electrocuted.

He stood there for a moment, shocked into paralysis. Then he was moving again, his own trivial discomfort forgotten in a greater shock of recognition: Masaso the scarecrow, back arched, teeth bared, flesh stretched so tight across cheekbones that it was a wonder his face hadn’t split down the middle. Brüks was almost at the man’s side before realization stopped him in his tracks.

Every muscle thrown into tetany. This was some kind of motor disorder.

This was neurological .

The pins and needles were back in full force. Brüks looked down in disbelief at his own fingertips. Try as he might, he couldn’t stop them from trembling.

When the screaming started, he barely heard it.

Whatever it was, it killed quietly. For the most part.

Not because it was painless. Its victims staggered from hiding and thrashed on the floors, faces twisted into agonized devil masks. Even the dead kept them on: veins bulging, eyes splattered crimson with pinpoint embolisms, each face frozen in the same calcified rictus. Not a word, not a groan from any of them. There was nothing he could do but step over the bodies as he tracked that lone voice screaming somewhere ahead; nothing he could feel but that terrifying electricity growing in his fingers and toes; nothing he could think but It’s in me too it’s in me too it’s in me too—

Creatures in formation rounded the corner ahead of him: four human bodies moving in perfect step, more live than the bodies on the floor, just as dead inside. Valerie kept pace in their midst. Four sets of jiggling eyes locked on to Brüks for an instant, then resumed their frantic omnidirectional dance. Valerie didn’t even look in his direction. She moved as if spring-loaded, as if her joints were subtly out of place. One of her zombies was missing below the knees; the carbon prosthetics it used for legs squeaked softly against the floor as they approached. Apart from that subtle friction, Brüks couldn’t hear so much as a footfall from any of them. He flattened instinctively against the wall, praying to some Pleistocene god for invisibility—or at least, for insignificance. Valerie swept abreast of him, eyes straight ahead.

Brüks squeezed his eyes shut. Soft screams filled the darkness. He felt a small distant pride that none of them came from him. When he opened his eyes again the monster was gone.

The screaming had grown fainter. More—intimate. Some horrific lighthouse beacon running low on batteries, calling through the fog of war. Except this was no fucking war: this was a massacre, this was one tribe of giants slaughtering another, and any baseline fossil stupid enough to get caught underfoot didn’t even rate the brutal mercy of a slashed throat on the battlefield.

Welcome to the armistice.

He followed the sound. He doubted there was anything he could do—euthanasia, perhaps—but if it could scream, maybe it could talk. Maybe it could tell him—something…

It already had, in a way. It had told him that all victims were not equal in the eyes of this pestilence. All the Bicamerals he’d seen so far seemed to have fallen within minutes of each other, seized by the throat and turned to tortured stone before they’d even had a chance to cry out. Not everyone, though. Not the vampire and her minions. Not the screamer. Not Dan Brüks.

Not yet.

But he was infected, oh yes he was. Something was at work on his distal circuitry, shorting out his fine motor control, working its way up the main cables. Maybe the screamer was just a little farther along. Maybe the screamer was Daniel Brüks in another ten minutes.

Maybe it was right here, behind this door.

Brüks pushed it open.

Luckett. He squirmed like a hooked eelpout in a cell identical to the one where Brüks had slept, slid around on a floor slippery with his own fluids. Sweat turned his tunic into a soaked dishrag, ran in torrents from his face and limbs; darker stains spread from his crotch.

The hook hadn’t caught him by the mouth, though. It sprouted from a port at the back of his neck, a shivering fiber running to a socket low on the wall. Luckett convulsed. His head struck the edge of an overturned chair. The blow seemed to bring him back a little; the screaming stopped, the eyes cleared, something approaching awareness filtered through the dull animal pain that filled them.

“Brüks,” he moaned, “Brüks, get it— fuck it hurts…”

Brüks knelt, laid a hand on the other man’s shoulder. “I—”

The acolyte thrashed away from the touch, screaming all over again: “Fucking hell that hurts—!” He flailed one arm: a deliberate gesture, Brüks guessed, an instruction trying to dig its way out past the roaring static of a million short-circuiting motor nerves. Brüks followed its path to a small glass-fronted cabinet set into the wall. Lozenges of doped ceramic rested in neat labeled rows behind the sliding pane: HAPPINESS, ORGASM, APPETITE SUPPRESSANT—

ANALGESIC.

He grabbed it off the shelf, dropped to Luckett’s side, grabbed the fiberop at the cervical end: fumbled, as fingers misheard brain. Luckett screamed again, arched his back like a drawn bow. The smell of shit filled the room. Brüks gripped the plug, twisted. The socket clicked free. Seething light flooded the walls: camera feeds, spline plots, deserts painted in garish blizzards of false color. Some tame oracle, deprived of direct access to Luckett’s brain, continuing its conversation in meatspace.

Brüks jammed the painkiller home, click-twisted it into place. Luckett sagged instantly; his fingers continued to twitch and shiver, purely galvanic. For a moment Brüks thought the acolyte had lost consciousness. Then Luckett took a great heaving gulp of air, let it out again.

“That’s better,” he said.

Brüks eyed Luckett’s trembling fingers, eyed his own. “It’s not. This is—”

“Not my department,” Luckett coughed. “Not yours either, thank your lucky stars.”

“But what is it? There’s got to be a fix.” He remembered: a rosette of monsters, the vampire at its heart, moving with frictionless efficiency through the dying fields. “Valerie—”

Luckett shook his head. “She’s on our side.”

“But she’s—”

“Not her.” Luckett turned his head, rested his eyes an overhead real-time tactical of the surrounding desert: the monastery at the bull’s-eye, a perimeter of arcane hieroglyphics around the edges. “Them.”

We’ve been making moves all day.

“What did you do? What did you do? ”

“Do?” Luckett coughed, wiped blood from his mouth with the back of his hand. “You were here, my friend. We got noticed . And now we’re—reaping the whirlwind, you might say.”

“They wouldn’t just—” Then again, why wouldn’t they? “Wasn’t there some kind of, of ultimatum? Didn’t they give us a chance to surrender, or—”

The look Luckett gave him was an even mix of pity and amusement.

Brüks cursed himself for an idiot. Headaches for most of the day before. Moore’s aerosol delivery . But there’d been no artillery, no lethal canisters lobbed whistling across the desert. This thing had drifted in on the breeze, undetected. And not even engineered germs killed on contact. There was always an incubation period, it always took time for a few lucky spores to hatch out in the lungs and breed an army big enough to take down a human body. Even the magic of exponential growth took hours to manifest.