Peter Watts - Echopraxia

Moore waited until he’d run out of words. “Are you finished?”

Brüks fumed and glared. Moore took his silence for a yes. “I apologize for the inconvenience,” he said drily. “Once things have calmed down a bit, maybe we can check in with your wife. Tell her you’re working late.”

Brüks closed his eyes. “I haven’t checked in with my wife, ” he said through gritted teeth, “in years.” My real wife, anyway .

“Really.” Moore refused to take the hint. “Why not?”

“She’s in Heaven.”

“Huh.” Moore grunted. Then, more softly: “So’s mine.”

Brüks rolled his eyes. “Small world.” His ears popped again. “Are we going to get out of here before our blood starts boiling?”

“Let’s go, then,” Moore said.

Up past a leaning cityscape of cargo cubes, man-size alcoves flanked an ovoid airlock, two to each side. Spacesuits hung there like flensed silver skins, held in place by cargo straps. They billowed gently at the knees and elbows. Moore helped Brüks across the slanted deck, passed him a loose cargo strap to cling to while unbuckling the suit in the leftmost alcove; it sagged sideways into the soldier’s arms.

A breeze hissed softly against Brüks’s cheek. Moore held out the suit: gutted from crotch to neck, a split exoskeleton shed by some previous owner. Brüks stood angled and bouncing slightly on his good foot, let Moore guide his bad one into the suit. The low gravity helped; by now Brüks couldn’t have weighed more than ten kilos. He felt like some overgrown pupa plagued by second thoughts, trying to climb back into its husk.

An itch crawled across the back of his free hand; he held it up, eyed the blood-brown tracery of elastic filaments webbed across the skin. “Why—”

“So what’s she in for?” Moore asked, jerking Brüks’s leg hard to seat his injured foot in its boot. Bits of bone ground against each other down there—his tibia carried the vibration past whatever nerve block Moore had installed. It didn’t hurt. Brüks grimaced anyway.

“Uh, what?”

“Your wife.” The right leg was trickier, without the left to stand on; Moore offered himself as a crutch again. “What’s she in Heaven for?”

“That’s a strange way of putting it,” Brüks remarked.

I’m sick of it, she’d said softly, looking out the window. They’re alive, Dan. They’re sapient.

Moore shrugged. “Everyone’s running from something.”

They’re just systems, he’d reminded her. Engineered.

So are we, she’d said. He hadn’t argued with her; she’d known better. Neither of them had been engineered, not unless you counted natural selection as some kind of designer and neither of them was woolly-minded enough to entertain such sloppy thinking. She hadn’t wanted an argument anyway; she’d been long past the verbal jousts that had kept them sparking all those years. Now, she’d only wanted to be left alone.

“She—retired,” he told Moore as his right foot slid smoothly into its boot.

“From what?”

He’d respected her wishes. Left her alone when she’d lobotomized her last victim, left her alone to tender her resignation. He’d wanted to reach out when she’d started eyeing Heaven, would have done anything to keep her on his side of the afterlife, but by then it was long past being about what he wanted. So he’d left her alone even when she leased out her brain to pay her rent in the Collective Conscious, withdrew from the outer world to the inner. She’d left a link behind, at least. He could always talk to her, there on Styx’s farthest shore. She always honored her obligations. But he’d known that’s all it was, so even then—after she’d stopped slaughtering artificial systems and started being one—he left her alone.

“She was a cloud-killer,” Brüks said at last.

“Huh,” Moore grunted. Then, helping Brüks’s arms into their sleeves: “Not a very good one, I hope.”

“Why?”

“Let’s just say that not every distributed AI’s emergent, and not every emergent AI’s rogue.” Moore handed over his gauntlets. “We don’t publicize it, but every now and then some of the better CKs have been known to pick targets we’d really rather they didn’t.”

Brüks swallowed on a throat gone suddenly dry. “The fucked-up thing is, she agreed with them. The AI Rights idiots, I mean. She quit because she got sick of killing conscious beings whose only crime was—” How had she put it? “ Growing up too fast .”

Suit zipped up. Gauntlets clicked into place. A solid yank on the boa-cord and the suit squirmed around him, cinching from flaccid to skintight in a few disquieting seconds. Moore handed him the helmet: “Seat it facing your three, turn counterclockwise until it clicks. Keep the visor up until I say.”

“Really?” Brüks was starting to feel light-headed. “The air seems a little—thin…”

“Plenty of time.” Moore grabbed another suit off the wall. “I don’t want your hearing compromised.” He bounced off the deck, brought knees to chest and spread his suit open with both hands. With one fluid motion he kicked his legs straight back onto the deck, suited to the waist. He bounced lightly.

“So she wasn’t afraid of the conscious AIs.” Moore shrugged arms into sleeves. “How about the smart ones?”

“W-What?”

“Smart AIs.” He clicked his own helmet into place. “Was she afraid of them?”

Brüks gulped oily alpine air and tried to concentrate. The smart ones. Past that minimum complexity threshold where networks wake up: past the Sapience Limit where they go to sleep again, where self-awareness dissolves in the vaster reaches of networks grown too large, in the signal lags that reduce synchrony to static. Up where intelligence continues to grow even though the self has been left behind.

“Those, she—was a little worried about,” he admitted, trying to ignore the faint roaring in his ears.

“Smart woman.” The Colonel’s voice was strangely tinny. He leaned over and checked Brüks’s seals and sockets with precise mechanical efficiency, nodded. “Okay, drop your visor,” he said, dropping his.

A louder hiss replaced the fainter one: a blessed wash of fresh air caressed Brüks’s face the moment his visor sealed. Relief flooded in a moment later. An arcane mosaic of icons and acronyms flickered to life across the crystal.

Moore’s helmet bumped against his own, his voice buzzing distantly across the makeshift connection: “It’s a saccadal interface. Comm tree’s upper left.” Sure enough an amber star blinked there: a knock at the door. Brüks focused his gaze just so and accepted the call.

“That’s better.” Suddenly, it was as though Moore was speaking from right inside Brüks’s helmet.

“Let’s get out of here,” Brüks said.

Moore held his arm out, watched it drop. “Not quite yet. Another minute or two.”

Out beyond Brüks’s helmet, the air—the lack of it, maybe—grew somehow hard . Through that impoverished atmosphere and two layers of convex crystal, Jim Moore’s face was calm and cryptic.

“What about yours?” he asked after a moment.

“My what?”

“Your wife. What was she—in for?”

“Yes. Helen.” A frown may have flickered across Moore’s face then, but it was gone in an instant and he was answering before Brüks had a chance to regret the question. “She just got—tired, I suppose. Or maybe scared.” His gaze dropped for a moment. “Twenty-first century’s not for everyone.”

“When did she ascend?”

“Almost fourteen years ago now.”