Peter Watts - Echopraxia

The enemy—

— People like you, Lianna had said—

—must have set this plan in motion the moment they’d set up their perimeter. It wouldn’t have mattered one good goddamn if the whole Bicameral Order had marched out across the desert with their hands in the air; the weapon was already in their blood, and it was blind to white flags.

“How could you let them do this?” Brüks hissed. “You’re supposed to be smarter than us, you’re post-fucking- singular, you’re supposed to be ten steps ahead of any plan we poor stupid cavemen could ever put together. How could you let them? ”

“Oh, but this is all according to plan.” Luckett patted him on the arm with one spastic, short-circuiting hand.

“What plan ?” Brüks choked back a hysterical giggle. “We’re dead already—”

“Even God can’t plan for everything. Too many variables.” Luckett coughed again. “Not to worry, though. We planned for the things we couldn’t plan for…”

Faintly, through the open door—drifting down the corridor, through high narrow windows; through barred gates, though glass panes looking into deserts and gardens: a whistling sound, Doppler-shifted. The muffled thud of some nearby impact.

“Ah. The mopping-up begins.” Luckett nodded serenely. “No point being stealthy now, eh?”

Brüks put his head in his hands.

“Don’t worry, old chap. It’s not over yet, not for you anyway. Jim’s lair. He’s waiting for you.”

Brüks raised his head. “Jim—but—”

“I told you,” Luckett said. “According to plan.” Spasms rippled across his body. “ Go .”

And now Brüks heard another sound, a deeper sound, rumbling up the scale behind the hacking of the maimed and whistling shriek of inbound paralysis. He felt the vibration of great blades spinning up far down in the earth, heard the muffled hiss of steam injected into deep silos. He heard the growing drumbeat of an elemental monster straining against its chains.

“Now that, ” he said, “is more fucking like it.”

Moore was in his bunker, but he wasn’t running the show. No controls blinked on the smart paint, no sliders or dials or virtual buttons to press. The readouts were all one-way. Somewhere else, the Bicamerals were bringing their engine online; Moore was only watching from the bleachers.

He turned at Brüks’s approach. “They’re dug in.”

“Doesn’t matter, though, right? We’re gonna tear them to pieces.”

The soldier turned back to the wall and shook his head.

“What’s the problem? They out of range?”

“We’re not fighting.”

“ Not fighting? Have you seen what they’re doing to us?”

“I see.”

“Everyone’s dead or halfway there!”

“We’re not.”

“Right.” Nerves sang ominously in Brüks’s fingers. “And how long is that going to last?”

“Long enough. This bug was customized for Bicamerals. We’ve got more time.” Moore frowned. “You don’t engineer something like that in the field, not overnight. They’ve been planning this a while.”

“They didn’t even fire a warning shot, for fucksake! They didn’t even try to negotiate!”

“They’re scared.”

“ They’re scared.”

“They’d assume that giving us any advance warning would put them at an unacceptable disadvantage. They don’t know what we’re capable of.”

“Then maybe it’s time we showed them.”

Moore turned back to face the other man. “Perhaps you’re not familiar with Bicameral philosophy. It’s predominantly nonviolent.”

“You and Luckett and all your friends can argue the philosophical subtleties of unilateral pacifism while we all turn into predominantly nonviolent corpses.” Friends. “Is Lianna—”

“She’s fine.”

“None of us are fine .” Brüks turned back to the stairs. Maybe he could find her before the ceiling crashed in. Maybe there was some broom closet he could hide in.

Moore’s hand closed on his shoulder and spun him as though he were made of balsa.

“We will not attack these people,” he said calmly. “We don’t know if they’re responsible.”

“You just said they’d been planning this,” Brüks croaked. “They were just waiting for some kind of excuse. You watched them lock and load. For all I know you listened in on their fucking comm chatter, you heard them give the orders. You know .”

“Doesn’t matter. Even if we were right there in their command center. Even if we could take their brains apart synapse by synapse and backtrace every neuron that went into the go-ahead. We would still not know.”

“Fuck you. I’m not going to suck your dick just because you trot out the old no free will shtick.”

“These people could have been used without their knowledge. They could be slaved to an implanted agenda and they’d swear they were making their own decisions the whole time. We will not kill cat’s-paws.”

“They’re not zombies, Moore.”

“Whole different species.”

“ They’re killing us .”

“You’re just going to have to trust me on this. Or”—Moore cocked his head, evidently amused—“we could leave you behind to hash it out with them personally.”

“Leave me—?”

“We’re getting out of here. Why do you think they’re warming up the engine?”

Someone had rolled a giant soccer ball into the compound. A dozen fallen monks twitched wide-eyed and tetanic around a geodesic sphere of interlocking padded pentagons, maybe four meters across at the equator. A door-size polygon bent back from that surface like a snapped fingernail.

Some kind of escape pod. No obvious means of propulsion. No onboard propulsion, anyway; but rising high above the walls of the enclosure, the funnel spun and roared like an angry jet engine. Brüks craned his neck in search of the top of the thing, and swallowed, and—

And looked again. Something was scratching an arc across the sky.

“Get in,” Moore said at his elbow. “We don’t have much time.”

Of course they know. They’ve got satellites, they’ve got microdrones, they can look right past these walls and see what we’re doing and just blow it all to shit…

“ Missile…, ” he croaked.

The sky shattered where he was pointing.

The contrail just stopped high overhead, its descending arc amputated halfway to the jet stream; a new sun bloomed at its terminus, a blinding pinpoint, impossibly small and impossibly bright. Brüks wasn’t sure what he really saw in the flash-blinded split-second that followed. A great flickering hole opening in the morning sky, a massive piece of that dome peeled back as though God Itself had popped the lid off Its terrarium. The sky crinkled : wisps of high-flying cirrus cracking into myriad shards; expanses of deep and endless blue collapsing into sharp-edged facets; half of heaven folded into lunatic origami. The sky imploded and left another sky behind, serene and unscarred.

A thunderclap split Brüks’s skull like an icepick. The force of it lifted him off his feet, dangled him for an endless moment before dropping him back onto the grass. Something pushed him from behind. He turned; Moore’s mouth was moving, but the only sound Brüks could hear was a high-pitched ringing that filled the world. Past Moore’s shoulder, above the ramparts of the monastery, dark smoldering wreckage fell from the sky like the charred bones of some giant stick man. Its empty skin fled sideways across the sky in ragged pieces, great streamers of tinsel drawn toward the shackled tornado. The vortex engine seemed to draw strength from the meal: it grew thicker, somehow. Faster. Darker.