Peter Watts: Echopraxia

Greg’s words.

Valerie cocked her head and studied the artifact. Any second now, Sachie knew, this nightmare creature would collapse in a twitching mass of tetany and shorting synapses. That wasn’t faith; it was neurology .

The monster leaned close, and didn’t even shiver. Sachita Bhar pissed herself.

“ Please, ” she sobbed. The vampire said nothing.

Words flooded out: “I’m sorry, I was never really part of it you know, I’m just a research associate, I’m just doing it for my degree that’s all, I know it’s wrong, I know it’s like, like slavery almost, I know that and it’s a shitty system, it’s a shitty thing we did to you but it wasn’t really me, do you understand? I didn’t make any of those decisions, I just came in afterward, I’m barely involved, it was just for my degree . And I, I can understand how you must feel, I can understand why you’d hate us I would too probably but please oh please, I’m just… I’m just a student …”

After a while, still alive, she dared to look up again. Valerie was staring at some point just to the left and a thousand light-years away. She seemed distracted. But then they always seemed distracted, their minds running a dozen parallel threads simultaneously, a dozen perceptual realities each every bit as real as the one mere humans occupied.

Valerie cocked her head as if listening to faint music. She almost smiled.

“Please…,” Sachie whispered.

“Not angry,” Valerie said. “Don’t want revenge. You don’t matter.”

“You don’t—but…” Bodies. Blood. A building full of corpses and the monsters who’d made them. “What do you want, then? Anything, please, I’ll—”

“Want you to imagine something: Christ on the Cross.”

And of course, once the image had been incanted it was impossible not to imagine. Sachita Bhar had a few moments to wonder at the sudden spasms seizing her limbs, at the way her jaw locked into startling dislocation, at the feel of a thousand blood-hot strokes exploding like pinpricks across the back of her skull. She tried to close her eyes but it doesn’t matter what kind of light falls on the retina, that’s not vision . The mind generates its own images, much farther upstream, and there’s no way to shut those out.

“Yes.” Valerie clicked thoughtfully to herself. “I learn.”

Sachie managed to speak. It was the hardest thing she’d ever done, but she knew that was fitting; it was also the last thing she would ever do. So she summoned all her willpower, every shred of every reserve, every synapse that hadn’t already been commandeered for self-destruction, and she spoke. Because nothing else mattered any more, and she really wanted to know:

“Learn… wha…”

She couldn’t quite get it out. But the short-circuiting brain of Sachita Bhar managed to serve up one last insight anyway, amid the rising static: This is what the Crucifix Glitch feels like. This is what we do to them . This is…

“Judo,” Valerie whispered.

DEEP IN THEOregon desert, crazy as a prophet, Daniel Brüks opened his eyes to the usual litany of death warrants.

It had been a slow night. A half-dozen traps on the east side were offline—damn booster station must have gone down again—and most of the others were empty. But number eighteen had caught a garter snake. A sage grouse pecked nervously at the lens in number thirteen. The video feed from number four wasn’t working, but judging by mass and thermal there was probably a juvenile Scleroperus scrambling around in there. Twenty-three had caught a hare.

Brüks hated doing the hares. They smelled awful when you cut them open—and these days, you almost always had to cut them open.

He sighed and described a semicircle with his index finger; the feeds vanished from the skin of his tent. Headlines resolved in their wake, defaulting to past interests: Pakistan’s ongoing zombie problem; first anniversary of the Redeemer blowout; a sad brief obituary for the last wild coral reef.

Nothing from Rho.

Another gesture and the fabric lit with soft tactical overlays, skewed to thermal: public-domain real-time satellite imagery of the Prineville Reserve. His tent squatted in the center of the display, a diffuse yellow smudge: cold crunchy outer shell, warm chewy center. No comparable hotspots anywhere else in range. Brüks nodded to himself, satisfied. The world continued to leave him alone.

Outside, invisible in the colorless predawn, some small creature skittered away across loose rattling rock as he emerged. His breath condensed in front of him; frost crunched beneath his boots, bestowed a faint transient sparkle to the dusty desert floor. His ATB leaned against one of the scraggly larches guarding the camp, marshmallow tires soft and flaccid.

He grabbed mug and filter from their makeshift hook and stepped into the open, down a loose jumble of scree. The vestiges of some half-assed desert stream quenched his thirst at the foot of the slope, slimy and sluggish and doomed to extinction within the month. Enough to keep one large mammal watered in the meantime. Out across the valley the Bicamerals’ pet tornado squirmed feebly against a gray eastern sky but stars were still visible overhead, icy, unwinking, and utterly meaningless. Nothing up there tonight but entropy, and the same imaginary shapes that people had been imposing on nature since they’d first thought to wonder at the heavens.

It had been a different desert fourteen years ago. A different night. But it had felt the same, until the moment he’d glanced up—and for a few shattering moments it had even been a different sky, robbed of all randomness. A sky where every star blazed in brilliant precise formation, where every constellation was a perfect square no matter how desperately human imaginations might strain. February 13, 2082. The night of First Contact: sixty-two thousand objects of unknown origin, clenching around the world in a great grid, screaming across the radio spectrum as they burned. Brüks remembered the feeling: as though he were witnessing some heavenly coup, a capricious god deposed and order restored.