Peter Watts - Echopraxia

Lianna did not look sheepish at all. If anything, she looked more worried than she had in the attic. “She must have hacked the sensors.”

“What do you mean?”

She wiggled her fingers in midair; INTERCOM appeared on the bulkhead. Sengupta was astern near the Hold; Moore was back in the Dorm.

Valerie’s icon glowed reassuring green, down in her own private hab with the grays.

“Ship doesn’t know where she is anymore,” Lianna said. “She could be anywhere. Other side of any door you open.”

“Why would she do that?” Brüks glanced up at the hole in the ceiling as Lianna grabbed the ladder. “What was she even doing up there?”

“Did you see her?”

He shook his head. “Couldn’t look.”

“Me neither.”

“So for all we know, she wasn’t even up there.”

She managed a nervous laugh. “You wanna go back and check?”

Here among the bright lights and the gleaming machinery, it was hard not to feel utterly ridiculous. Brüks shook his head. “Even if she is up there, so what? It’s not like she’s confined to quarters. It’s not like she did anything other than—grind her teeth.”

“She’s a predator,” Lianna pointed out.

“She’s a sadist. She’s been pushing my buttons since day one; I think she just gets off on it. Jim’s right: if she wanted to kill us we’d be dead already.”

“Maybe this is how she kills us,” Lianna said. “Maybe she mambos .”

“Mambos.”

“Vodou works, Oldschool. Fear messes up your cardiac rhythms. Adrenaline kills heart cells. You can literally scare someone to death if you hack the sympathetic nervous system the right way.”

So voodoo’s real, Brüks mused.

Chalk one up for organized religion.

Moore was heading down when Brüks was heading out.

“Hey Jim.”

“Daniel.”

It didn’t happen often anymore. Whether at meals or after, during the Crown ’s bright blue day or the warmer shadows of its night cycle, the Colonel always seemed to be deep in ConSensus these days. He never talked about what he did there. Cramming for Icarus, of course. Reviewing the telemetry Theseus had sent before disappearing into the fog. But he kept those details to himself, even when he came out to breathe.

Brüks stopped at the foot of the Commons ladder. “Hey, you want to see a movie?”

“A what?”

“ The Silences of Pone . Like a game you can only watch. Lee says it’s one of—you know, back when they couldn’t just induce desired states directly. They had to manipulate you into feeling things. With plot and characters and so on.”

“Art,” Moore said. “I remember.”

“Pretty crude by current standards but apparently it won a whole bunch of awards for neuroinduction back in the day. Lee found it in the cache, set up a feed. Says it’s worth watching.”

“That woman is getting to you,” the Colonel remarked.

“This whole fucking voyage is getting to me. You in?”

He shook his head. “Still reviewing the telemetry.”

“You’ve been doing that for a week now. You hardly come up for air.”

“There’s a lot of telemetry.”

“I thought they went in and went dark.”

“They did.”

“Almost immediately, you said.”

“ Almost is a relative term. Theseus had more eyes than a small corporation. Take a lifetime to sift through even a few minutes of that feed.”

“For a baseline, maybe. Surely the Bicams have everything in hand.”

Moore looked at him. “I thought you didn’t approve of blind faith in higher powers.”

“I don’t approve of breaking your back pushing boulders uphill when you’re eyeprinted for the heavy lifter across the street, either. You said it yourself. They’re a hundred steps ahead of us. We’re just here to enjoy the ride.”

“Not necessarily.”

“How so?”

“We’re here. They’re stuck in decompression for the next six days.”

“Right,” Brüks remembered. “Field-tested.”

“Why they brought us along.”

Brüks grimaced. “They brought me along because I happened to stumble onto the highway and they didn’t have the heart to see me turn into roadkill.”

The Colonel shrugged. “Doesn’t mean they can’t make the most of an opportunity when it presents itself.”

Brüks’ fingertips tingled in remembrance. Opportunities, he realized with sudden dull surprise.

I’m missing one.

It was a window in the crudest possible sense: a solid pane of transparent alloy, set into the rear bulkhead. You couldn’t zoom it or resize it or lay a tactical false-color overlay across its surface. You couldn’t even turn it off, unless someone on the other side brought down the blast shield. It was a clear, impenetrable hole in the ship: a circular viewport into an alien terrarium where, out past the ghostly reflection of his own face, strange hyperbaric creatures built monstrous artifacts out of sand and coral. Their eyes twinkled like green stars in the gloom.

Six of the monks were resting, suspended in medical cocoons like dormant grubs waiting out the winter. The others moved purposeful as ants across a background of shadows and half-built machinery: a jumbled cityscape of tanks and stacked ceramic superconductors and segments of pipe big enough to walk through without ducking. Brüks was pretty sure that the patchwork sphere coming together near the center of the hold was shaping up to be the fusion chamber.

Two of the Bicamerals huddled off to one side in some sort of wordless back-to-back communion. A glistening gelatinous orb floated beside them. Someone else (Evans, that was it) seized a nearby hand tool and lobbed it to starboard. It spun lazily end over end until Chodorowska reached up and snatched it from the air, without ever taking her eyes off the component in her other hand.

She’d never even looked. Which was not to say she hadn’t seen it coming.

But of course there was no her . Not right now, anyway. There was no Evans or Ofoegbu either.

There was only the hive.

How had Moore put it? Cognitive subspecies . But the Colonel didn’t get it. Neither did Lianna; she’d shared her enthusiastic blindness with Brüks over breakfast that very morning, ticked off in hushed and reverent tones the snips and splices that had so improved her masters: No TPN suppression, no Semmelweis reflex. They’re immune to inattentional blindness and hyperbolic discounting, and Oldschool, that synesthesia of theirs—they reset millions of years of sensory biases with that trick. Randomized all the errors, just like that. And it’s not just the mundane sensory stuff, it’s not just feeling color and tasting sounds. They can literally see time …

As if those were good things.

In a way, of course, they were. All those gut feelings, right or wrong, that had kept the breed alive on the Pleistocene savannah—and they were wrong, so much of the time. False negatives, false positives, the moral algebra of fat men pushed in front of onrushing trolleys. The strident emotional belief that children made you happy, even when all the data pointed to misery. The high-amplitude fear of sharks and dark-skinned snipers who would never kill you; indifference to all the toxins and pesticides that could. The mind was so rotten with misrepresentation that in some cases it literally had to be damaged before it could make a truly rational decision—and should some brain-lesioned mother abandon her baby in a burning house in order to save two strangers from the same fire, the rest of the world would be more likely to call her a monster than laud the rationality of her lifeboat ethics. Hell, rationality itself—the exalted Human ability to reason —hadn’t evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will.