Peter Watts: Echopraxia

The revolution had only lasted a few seconds. The upstaged constellations had reasserted themselves as soon as those precise friction trails had faded from the upper atmosphere. But the damage had been done, Brüks knew. The sky would never look the same again.

That’s what he’d thought at the time, anyway. That’s what everyone had thought. The whole damn species had come together in the wake of that common threat, even if they didn’t know what it was exactly, even if it hadn’t actually threatened anything but Humanity’s own self-importance. The world had put its petty differences aside, spared no expense, thrown together the best damn ship the twenty-first century could muster. They’d crewed it with expendable bleeding-edgers and sent them off along some best-guess bearing, carrying a phrase book that spelled take me to your leader in a thousand languages.

The world had been holding its breath for over a decade now, waiting for the Second Coming. There’d been no encore, no second act. Fourteen years is a long time for a species raised on instant gratification. Brüks had never considered himself a great believer in the nobility of the Human spirit but even he had been surprised at how little time it took for the sky to start looking the same as it always had, at the speed with which the world’s petty differences returned to the front page. People, he reflected, were like frogs: take something out of their visual field, and they’d just—forget it.

The Theseus mission would be well past Pluto by now. If it had found anything, Brüks hadn’t heard about it. For his part, he was sick of waiting. He was sick of life on hold, waiting for monsters or saviors to make an appearance. He was sick of killing things, sick of dying inside.

Fourteen years.

He wished the world would just hurry up and end.

He spent the morning as he’d spent every other for the past two months: running his traplines and poking the things inside, in the faint hope of finding some piece of nature left untwisted.

The clouds were already closing in by sunrise, before his bike had soaked up a decent charge; he left it behind and ran the transects on foot. It was almost noon by the time he got to the hare, only to find that something had beaten him to the punch. The trap had been torn open and its contents emptied by some other predator who’d lacked even the good grace to leave a blood spatter behind for analysis.

The garter snake was still slithering around in number eighteen, though: a male, one of those brown-on-brown morphs that vanished against the dirt. It writhed in Brüks’s grasp, clenched around his forearm like a scaly tentacle; its scent glands smeared stink across his skin. Brüks drew a few microliters of blood without much hope, plugged them into the barcoder on his belt. He swigged from his canteen while the device worked its magic.

Far across the desert the monastery’s tornado had swollen to three times its predawn size, pumped by the midday heat. Distance reduced it to a brown thread, an insignificant smoky smudge; but get too close to that funnel and you’d end up scattered over half the valley. Just the year before, some Ugandan vendetta theocracy had hacked a transAt shuttle out of Dartmouth, sent it through a vortex engine on the outskirts of Johannesburg. Not much but rivets and teeth had come out the other side.

The barcoder meeped in plaintive surrender: too many genetic artifacts for a clean read. Brüks sighed, unsurprised. The little machine could tag any gut parasite from the merest speck of shit, ID any host species from the smallest shred of pure tissue—but pure tissue was so hard to come by, these days. There was always something that didn’t belong. Viral DNA, engineered for the greater good but too indiscriminate to stay on target. Special marker genes, designed to make animals glow in the dark when exposed to some toxin the EPA had lost interest in fifty years before. Even DNA computers, custom-built for a specific task and then tramped carelessly into wild genotypes like muddy footprints on a pristine floor. Nowadays it seemed like half the technical data on the planet were being stored genetically. Try sequencing a lung fluke and it was even money whether the base pairs you read would code for protein or the technical specs on the Denver sewer system.

It was okay, though. Brüks was an old man, a field man from a day when people could tell what they were looking at by—well, by looking at it. Check the chin shields. Count the fin rays, the hooks on the scolex. Use your eyes, dammit. At least if you screw up you’ve only got yourself to blame, not some dumb-ass machine that can’t tell the difference between cytochrome oxidase and a Shakespearean sonnet. And if the things you’re trying to ID happen to live inside other things, you kill the host. You cut it open.

Brüks was good at that, too. He’d never got around to liking it much, though.

Now he whispered to his latest victim—“ Shhh… sorry.. it won’t hurt, I promise…” —and dropped it into the kill sack. He’d found himself doing that a lot lately, murmuring meaningless comforting lies to victims who couldn’t possibly understand what he was saying. He kept telling himself to grow up. In all the billions of years that life had been iterating on this planet, had any predator ever tried to comfort its prey? Had “natural” death ever been so quick and painless as the killings Dan Brüks inflicted for the greater good? And yet it still bothered him to see those small diffuse shadows flopping and squirming behind the translucent white plastic, to hear the soft thumps and hisses as simple minds tried to drive bodies, suddenly and terrifyingly unresponsive, toward some kind of imaginary escape.

At least these deaths served a purpose, some constructive end transcending the disease or predation that nature would have inflicted. Life was a struggle to exist at the expense of other life. Biology was a struggle to understand life. And this particular bit of biology, this study of which he was author, principle, and sole investigator—this was a struggle to use biology to help the very populations he was sampling. These deaths were the closest that Darwin’s universe would ever come to altruism.

And that, said the little voice that always seemed to boot up at times like this, is so much shit. The only thing you’re struggling to do is wring a few more publications out of your grant before the funding dries up. Even if you nailed down every change inflicted on every clade over the past hundred years, even if you quantified species loss down to the molecules, it wouldn’t matter.

Nobody cares. The only thing you’re struggling against is reality.

That voice had become his constant companion over the years. He let it rant. Either way, he told it after it had run down, we’re a shitty biologist . And while his own guilty plea came easily enough, he could not bring himself to feel shame on that account.

It had stopped being a snake by the time he got back to camp. He stretched the limp and lifeless remains along the dissecting tray. Four seconds with the scasers and it was gutted, throat to cloaca; twenty more and the GI and respiratory tracts floated in separate watch glasses. The intestine would have the heaviest parasite load; Brüks loaded the GI tract into the ’scope and got to work.

Twenty minutes later, a retinue of flukes and cestodes only half-cataloged, something exploded in the distance.

That’s what it sounded like, anyway: the soft muffled whoompf of far-off ordinance. Brüks rose from his work, panned the desert between spindly gnarled trunks.

Nothing. Nothing. Noth—

Oh, wait…

The monastery.