Peter Watts - Echopraxia

Brüks glanced at a bulkhead window where three Bicamerals floated at the compiler, their gazes divergent as was their wont. (Not any Senguptoid aversion to eye contact, he’d come to realize; just the default preference for a 360-degree visual field, adopted by a collective with eyes to share.) “Are they throwing me a bone, or do they just want someone expendable doing the dissections?”

“A bone, maybe. But you know, this thing does have certain biological properties. And you are the only biologist on board.”

“Roach biologist. And that slime mold’s got to be post biological if it’s anything at all. And you know as well as I do that I’ve got better odds of getting a blow job from Valerie than—”

He caught himself, too late. Idiot. Stupid, insensitive—

“Maybe not,” Leona said after a pause so brief it might have been imaginary. “But you’re the only one in the neighborhood with a biologist’s perspective.”

“You—you think that makes a difference?”

“Sure. More to the point, I think they do, too.”

Brüks thought about that. “I’ll try not to let them down, then.” And then: “Lee—”

“So what you doing here, anyway?” She leaned in for a closer look at his display. “You’re running mo-cap.”

He nodded, wary of speech.

“What for? Slimey hasn’t moved since we got here.”

“I’m, uh…” He shrugged and confessed. “I’m watching the Bicams.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“I’ve been trying to figure out their methodology,” he confessed. “Everyone’s got to have one, right? Scientific or superstitious or just some weird gut instinct, there’s at least got to be some kind of pattern …”

“You’re not finding one?”

“Sure I am. They’re rituals . Eulali and Ofoegbu raise their hands just so, Chodorowska howls at the moon for precisely three-point-five seconds, the whole lot of them throw their heads back and gargle, for fucksake. The behaviors are so stereotyped you’d call them neurotic if you saw them in one of those old labs with the real animals in cages. But I can’t correlate them to anything else that happens. You’d think there’d be some kind of sequence, right? Try something, if that doesn’t work try something else. Or just follow some prescribed set of steps to chase away the evil spirits.”

Lianna nodded and said nothing.

“I don’t even know why they bother to make sounds,” he grumbled. “That quantum callosum or whatever they have has got to be faster than any kind of acoustic—”

“Don’t spend too much effort on that,” Lianna told him. “Half those phonemes are just a side effect of booting up the hyperparietals.”

Brüks nodded. “Plus I think the hive—fragments sometimes, you know? Sometimes I think I’m looking at one network, sometimes two or three. They drop in and out of sync all the time. I’m correcting for that—trying to, anyway—but I still can’t get any correlations that make sense.” He sighed. “At least with the Catholics, you know that when someone hands you a cracker there’s gonna be wine in the mix at some point.”

Lianna shrugged, unconcerned. “You gotta have faith. You’ll figure it out, if it’s God’s will.”

He couldn’t help himself. “Jesus Christ, Lee, how can you keep saying that? You know there’s not the slightest shred of evidence—”

“ Really .” In an instant her body language had changed; suddenly there was fire in her eyes. “And what kind of evidence would be good enough for you, Dan?”

“I—”

“Voices in the clouds? Fiery letters in the sky proclaiming I Am the Lord thy God, you insignificant weasel ? Then would you believe?”

He held up his hands, reeling in the face of her anger. “Lee, I didn’t mean—”

“Oh, don’t back down now . You’ve been shitting on my beliefs since the day we met. The least you can do is answer the goddamn question.”

“I—well…” Probably not, he had to admit. The first thought that fiery skywriting would bring to his mind would be hoax, or hallucination . God was such an absurd proposition at its heart that Brüks couldn’t think of any physical evidence for which it would be the most parsimonious explanation.

“Hey, you’re the one who keeps talking about the unreliability of human senses.” It sounded feeble even to himself.

“So no evidence could ever change your mind. Tell me how that doesn’t make you a fundamentalist.”

“The difference,” he said slowly, feeling his way, “is that brain hack is an alternate hypothesis entirely consistent with the observed data. And Occam likes it a lot more than omnipotent sky wizard .”

“Yeah. Well, the people you’re putting under your nanoscope know a thing or two about observed data too, and I’m pretty sure their publication record kicks yours all over the innersys. Maybe you don’t know everything. I gotta go.”

She turned to the ladder, gripped the rails so hard her knuckles whitened.

Stopped. Unclenched, a little.

Turned back.

“Sorry. I just…”

“S’okay,” he told her. “I didn’t mean to, well…” Except he had, of course. They both had. They’d been doing this dance the whole trip downhill.

It just hadn’t seemed so personal before.

“I don’t know what got into me,” Lianna said.

He didn’t call her on it. “It’s okay. I can be kind of a brain stem sometimes.”

She tried on a smile.

“Anyhow, I do have to go. We’re good?”

“We’re good.”

She climbed away, smile still fastened to her face, bent just slightly to the left. Favoring ribs that medical technology had long since completely healed.

He wasn’t a scientist, not to these creatures. He was a baby in a playpen, an unwelcome distraction to be kept busy with beads and rattles while the grown-ups convened on more adult matters. This gift Lianna had brought him wasn’t a sample; it was a pacifier.

But by all the laws of thermodynamics, it did its job. Brüks was hooked at first sight.

He pulled the gimp hood over his head, linked into the lab’s ConSensus channel, and time just—stopped. It stopped, then shot ahead in an instant. He threw himself down through orders of magnitude, watched molecules in motion, built stick-figure caricatures and tried to coax them into moving the same way. He felt distant surprise at his own proficiency, marveled at how much he’d accomplished in just a few minutes; wondered vaguely why his throat felt so dry and somehow eighteen hours had passed.

What are you? he thought in amazement.

Not computronium, anyway. Not organic. More like a Tystovitch plasma helix than anything built out of protein. Things that looked like synaptic gates were ticking away in there to the beat of ions; some carried pigment as well as electricity, like chromatophores moonlighting as associative neurons. Trace amounts of magnetite, too; this thing could change color if it ran the right kind of computations.

Not much more computational density than your garden-variety mammalian brain, though. That was surprising.

And yet… the way it was arranged …

He resented his own body for needing water, ignored the increasing need to take a piss until his bladder threatened to burst. He built tabletop vistas of alien technology and shrank himself down into their centers, wandered thunderstruck through streets and cityscapes and endlessly shifting lattices of intelligent crystal. He stood humbled by the sheer impossibility held in that little fleck of alien matter, and by the sheer mind-boggling simplicity of its execution.