Peter Watts - Echopraxia

She said nothing. Her eyes jiggled in their sockets. Every now and then a ruby highlight winked off her cornea as some unseen laser read commands there.

“Meatspace display,” Brüks tried after a moment.

“What about it?”

“I thought everyone here used ConSensus.”

“This is ConSensus.”

He tapped his temple. “I mean, you know. Cortical.”

“Wireless can bite my clit anyone can peek.”

The fruit of her labor sprawled across a good twenty degrees of the dome, a light storm of numbers and images and—over on the far left side—a stack of something that looked like voiceprints. It didn’t look like any kind of astrogation display Brüks had ever seen.

She was spelunking the cache.

“ I can peek,” he said. “I’m peeking right now.”

“Why should I care about you ?” Sengupta snorted.

Cats and dogs, he thought, and held his tongue.

He tried again. “So I guess I’ve got you to thank for that?”

“Thank for what?”

He gestured at weeks-old echoes plastered across the sky. “Grabbing that snapshot on the way out. Don’t know what I’d do for the next twelve days if I didn’t have some kind of Quinternet access.”

“Sure why not. You’re eating our food you’re huffing our O2 why not suck our data while you’re at it.”

I give up .

He turned and headed back to the exit. He felt Sengupta shift in the couch behind him.

“I hate that fucking vampire she moves all wrong.”

It was nice to know that basic predator-aversion subroutines survived the augments, Brüks reflected.

“And I wouldn’t trust Colonel Carnage, either,” Sengupta added. “No matter how much he cozies up to you.”

He looked back. The pilot floated against the loose restraints of her couch, unmoving, staring straight ahead.

“Why’s that?” Brüks asked.

“Trust him then do what you want. I don’t give a shit.”

He waited a moment longer. Sengupta sat as still as a stick insect.

“Thanks,” he said at last, and dropped through the floor.

So that’s what I am then . A parasite.

He descended into the Lab.

Some half-dead fossil, scooped up in passing from the battlefield. Patched together for no better reason than the firing of a few mirror neurons, some vestigial itch we might have once called pity.

The equipment wasn’t his, but the workbench provided some degree of plastic comfort: a bit of surrogate familiarity in a ship too full of long bones and strange creatures.

Worse than ballast: I suck their O 2 and eat their supplies and take up precious airspace millions of klicks from the nearest real atmosphere. Less than a pet: they don’t want my company, feel no urge to scritch my ears, aren’t interested in any tricks I might know except staying invisible and playing dead.

Sequence/splicer, universal incubator, optoelectron nanoscope with a respectable thirty-picometer threshold. All reassuringly familiar in a world where he’d half expected the very dust to be built out of miracles and magic crystals. Maybe that was deliberate: a security blanket for strays who’d missed the Singularity.

Okay, then. I’m a parasite. Parasites are not destroyed by the powerful: parasites feed on them. Parasites use the powerful to their own ends.

The lower level was empty except for a short stack of folded chairs and half-dozen cargo cubes (fab-matter stockpiles, according to the manifest). Brüks unslung the tent and spread it across the deck against a curve of bulkhead.

A tapeworm may not be as smart as its host but that doesn’t stop it from scamming shelter and nourishment and a place to breed. Good parasites are invisible; the best are indispensable. Gut bacteria, chloroplasts, mitochondria: all parasites, once. All invisible in the shadow of vaster beings. Now their hosts can’t live without them.

The structure inflated into a kind of bulbous lozenge. It swelled igloolike toward the center of the compartment, molded itself against the walls and flooring behind. It wasn’t too different from his abandoned tent back in the desert; the piezoelectricity that buttressed the structure also powered the GUI sheathing its inner surface. Brüks ran an index finger down the center of the door. Its membranous halves snapped gently apart like a sheet of mesentery split down the middle.

Some go even farther. Some get the upper hand, dig down and change the wiring right at the synapse. Dicrocoelium, Sacculina, Toxoplasma . Brainless things, all of them. Mindless creatures that turn inconceivably greater intellects into puppets.

He dropped to his knees and crawled inside. The built-in hammock clung to the inner surface of the tent, ready to peel free and inflate at a touch. The default config only provided enough headroom for a crouch but Brüks couldn’t be bothered to dial up the headroom. Besides, the tight confines were strangely comforting down here at the very bottom of the spoke, just a few layers of alloy and insulation from the whole starry drum of the heavens rolling past beneath his feet.

So I’m a parasite? Fine. It is an honorable title.

Down here, nestled in this warm and self-regulating little structure, he was as heavy as the Crown would let him be. He felt almost stable, almost rooted. And while he wouldn’t quite call it safety, he almost managed not to notice how like a burrow his quarters were: how deep in the earth, how far removed from other inhabitants of this pocket ecosystem. And how Daniel Brüks huddled against the deck like a mouse squeezed into the farthest corner of a great glass terrarium full of cobras, the lights turned up as bright as they would go.

EVERY HAB STARTEDout like every other: same stand-alone life support, same snap-and-stretch frame guides to subdivide the living space to personal preference. Same basic bulkhead galley panel with a toilet on the other side. They all came with the same emergency hibe hookups, compatible with most popular pressure suits and long-distance coffins (not included). It was Boeing’s most generic all-purpose personarium, plucked off the shelf, bought in bulk, stuck on the ends of the Crown ’s spokes on short notice. In the almost inconceivable event that one of those spokes should snap and send a hab tumbling off on its own, corporate guarantees ensured that the bodies therein would keep fresh and breathing (if inert) for up to a year or until atmospheric reentry, whichever came first.

Which was not to say that custom features were out of the question. The fabber in Commons could whip up food with actual taste.

Moore was the only other warm body in evidence when Brüks climbed down for breakfast. The Colonel didn’t return the other man’s smile at first—Brüks recognized the thousand-meter stare of the ConSensused—but the sound of Brüks feet on the deck brought him back to the impoverished world of mere meatspace.

“Daniel,” he said.

“Didn’t mean to disturb you,” Brüks said, which was a lie. He’d waited until the sparse constellations arrayed across the Crown ’s intercom had aligned just so—Lianna or Moore in the Commons, Valerie anywhere else—before venturing forth in search of forage.

Moore waved the apology away. “I could do with a break anyway.”

Brüks told the fabber to print him up a plate of French toast and bacon. “Break from what?”

“ Theseus telemetry,” Moore told him. “What little there is of it. Brushing up for the main event.”