Peter Watts - Echopraxia

Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.

Fossil feelings. Better off without them, once you’d outgrown the savannah and decided that Truth mattered after all. But Humanity wasn’t defined by arms and legs and upright posture. Humanity had evolved at the synapse as well as at the opposable thumb—and those misleading gut feelings were the very groundwork on which the whole damn clade had been built. Capuchins felt empathy. Chimps had an innate sense of fair play. You could look into the eyes of any cat or dog and see a connection there, a legacy of common subroutines and shared emotions.

The Bicamerals had cut away all that kinship in the name of something their stunted progenitors called Truth, and replaced it with—something else. They might look human. Their cellular metabolism might lie dead on the Kleiber curve. But to merely call them a cognitive sub species was denial to the point of delusion. The wiring in those skulls wasn’t even mammalian anymore. A look into those sparkling eyes would show you nothing but—

“Hey.”

Lianna’s reflection bobbed upside down next to his in the window. He turned as she reached past and unhooked her pressure suit from its alcove. “Hey.”

His eyes wandered back to the window. The back-to-back Bicamerals had ended their joint trance; they turned, simultaneously plunged their hands into the wobbling sphere at their side ( Water, Brüks realized: it’s just a blob of water ), dried off on a towel leashed to the bulkhead.

“I didn’t know,” he said, too quietly. As if afraid they’d hear him through the bulkhead. “How they work. What they—are.”

“Really.” She checked her suit O 2. “I would’ve thought the eyes’d be a giveaway.”

“I just assumed that was for night vision. Hell, I know people who retro fluorescent proteins as a fashion statement.”

“Yeah, now . Back in the day they were—”

“Diagnostic markers. I figured it out.” After Moore had inspired him to go back and actually look at the thing that had left all those corpses twisted like so much driftwood in the Oregon desert. It still lingered in his own blood, after all—and it had been almost too easy, the way the lab had taken that chimera apart and spread-eagled every piece for his edification. Streptococcal subroutines lifted from necrotizing myelitis; viral encephalitides laterally promoted from their usual supporting role in limbic encephalitis; a polysaccharide in the cell wall with a special affinity for the nasal mucosa. A handful of synthetic subroutines, built entirely from scratch, to glue all those incompatible pieces together and keep them from fighting.

But it had been the heart of that piecemeal bug that had betrayed the hive to Brüks’s investigations: a subroutine targeting a specific mutation of the p53 gene. He hadn’t got any direct hits when he’d run a search on that mutation, but the nearest miss was close enough to spill the secret: a tumor antagonist patented almost thirty years before.

As if someone had weaponized an anticancer agent.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” he wondered now.

The suit had swallowed her to the waist. “Why should it?”

“They’re tumors, Lee. Literally. Thinking tumors.”

“That’s a pretty gross oversimplification.”

“Maybe.” He wasn’t clear on the details. Hypomethylation, CpG islands, methylcytosine—black magic, all of it. The precise and deliberate rape of certain methylating groups to turn interneurons cancerous, just so : a synaptic superbloom that multiplied every circuit a thousandfold. It was no joyful baptism, as far as Brüks could tell. There’d be no ecstasy in that rebirth. It was a breakneck overgrowth of weedy electricity that nearly killed its initiates outright, pulled sixty-million-year-old circuits out by the roots.

Lianna was right: the path was subtle and complex beyond human imagining, controlled with molecular precision, tamed by whatever drugs and dark arts the Bicamerals used to keep all that overgrowth from running rampant. But when the rites and incantations had been spoken, when the deed had been done and the patient sewn up, it all came down to one thing:

They’d turned their brains into cancer.

“I was so worked up about Luckett.” Brüks shook his head at his own stupidity. “We just left him back there to die, you know, we left all of them—but he would have died anyway, wouldn’t he? As soon as he graduated. Every pathway that ever made him what he was, the cancer would eat it all and replace it with something…”

“Something better,” Lianna said.

“That’s a matter of opinion.”

“You make it sound so horrible.” Wrist seals. Click click . “But you know, you went through pretty much the same thing yourself and you don’t seem any the worse for it.”

He imagined coming apart. He imagined every thread of conscious experience fraying and dissolving and being eaten away. He imagined dying, while the body lived on.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

“Sure. When you were a baby.” She laid a gloved hand on his shoulder. “We all start out with heads full of random mush; it’s the neural pruning afterward that shapes who we are. It’s like, like sculpture. You start with a block of granite, chip away the bits that don’t belong, end up with a work of art. The Bicams just start over with a bigger block.”

“But it’s not you .”

“Enough of it is.” She plucked her helmet out of the air.

“Sure, the memories stick.” Some elements were spared: in the thalamus and cerebellum, hippocampus and brain stem all left carefully unscathed by a holocaust with the most discriminating taste. “But something else is remembering them.”

“Dan, you gotta let go of this whole self thing. Identity changes by the second, you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain. You’re already a different person than you were ten minutes ago.” She lowered the helmet over her head, yanked it counterclockwise until it clicked into place. His fish-eye reflection slid bulging across her faceplate as she turned.

“What about you, Lianna?” he asked softly.

“What about me?” Her voice muffled and breathy across the glass.

“You aspiring to the same fate?”

She eyed him sadly from the bowl of her helmet. “It’s not like you think. Really.” And passed on to some farther shore.

LOOK, BRÜKS WANTEDto say: fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain, and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger, and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy, he thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and a tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations—and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren’t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid. Even here in the twenty-first century you can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now, we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.