Peter Watts: Echopraxia

Heading directly for him.

He pulled up the satcam thermals. The remains of the old 380 ran like a thin vein along the northern perimeter, yesterday’s stale sunshine seeping from cracked asphalt. Diaphanous thermals and microclimatic hot spots, dying since nightfall, flickered at the threshold of visibility. Nothing else but the yellow nimbus of his own tent at center stage.

Twenty-one reported sudden warmth, and disappeared.

Cameras lurked here and there along the traplines. Brüks had never found much use for them but they’d come bundled as part of the package. One sat on a booster that happened to be line of sight to number nineteen. He brought it up: StarlAmp painted the nighttime desert in blues and whites, a surrealistic moonscape full of contrast. Brüks panned the view—

—and almost missed it: a slither of motion from stage right, an amplified blur. Something that moved faster than anything Human had any right to. The camera was dead before number nineteen even felt the heat.

The booster went down. Another dozen feeds died in an instant. Brüks barely noticed. He was staring at that last frozen frame, feeling his gut clench and his bowels turn to ice.

Faster than a man, and so much less. And just a little bit colder inside.

The field sensors weren’t sensitive enough to register that difference, of course. To see the truth from heat signatures alone you’d need to look inside the very head of your target, to squint until you could see deltas of maybe a tenth of a degree. You’d look at the hippocampus, and see that it was dark. You’d listen to the prefrontal cortex, and hear that it was silent. And then maybe you’d notice all that extra wiring, the force-grown neural lattices connecting midbrain to motor strip, the high-speed expressways bypassing the anterior cingulate gyrus—and those extra ganglia clinging like tumors to the visual pathways, fishing endlessly for the telltale neural signatures of seek and destroy .

It would be a lot easier to spot those differences in visible light: Just look into the eyes, and see nothing at all looking back. Of course, if it ever got that close you’d be dead already. It wouldn’t leave you time to beg. It wouldn’t even understand your pleas. It would simply kill you, if that’s what it had been told to do, more efficiently than any conscious being because there was nothing left to get in the way: no second thoughts, no pulled punches, not even the basic glucose-sucking awareness of its own existence. It was stripped down to pure reptile, and it was dedicated .

Less than a kilometer away, now.

Something inside Daniel Brüks split down the middle. One half clamped its hands over its ears and denied everything— what the fuck why would anyone must be some kind of mistake— but the other remembered the universal human fondness for scapegoats, the thousands who’d died thanks to dumb ol’ Backdoor Brüks, the odds that at least one of those victims might have been survived by next of kin with the resources to set a military-grade zombie on his trail.

How could they.

How could you let them …

The ATB hissed beneath him as its tires inhaled. The charge cord pulled him briefly off balance before tearing free. He plunged through a gap in the trees and down the scree, skidding sideways: hit the base of the slope and the desert spun around him, slimy and frictionless. The stream nearly took him out right there. Brüks fought for control as the bike one-eightied, but those marvelous marshmallow tires kept him miraculously upright. Then he was racing east across the fractured valley floor.

Sagebrush tore at him as he passed. He cursed his own blindness; these days, no self-respecting grad student would be caught dead in the field without rattlesnake receptors in their eyes. But Brüks was an old man, baseline, night-blind. He didn’t even dare use the headlamp. So he hurtled through the night, smashing through petrified shrubs, bucking over unseen outcroppings of bedrock. He fumbled one-handed through the bike’s saddlebags, came up with the gogs, slapped them over his eyes. The desert sprang into view, green and grainy.

0247, the goggles told him from the corner of his eye. Three hours to sunrise. He tried pinging his network but if any part of it remained alive, it was out of range. He wondered if the zombie had made it to camp yet. He wondered how close it had come to catching him.

Doesn’t matter. Can’t catch me now, motherfucker. Not on foot. Not even undead. You can kiss my ass good-bye.

Then he checked the charge gauge and his stomach dropped away all over again.

Cloudy skies. An old battery, a year past its best-before. A charging blanket that hadn’t been cleaned in a month.

The ATB had ten kilometers in it. Fifteen, tops.

He braked and brought it around in a spray of dirt. His own trail extended behind him, an unmistakable line of intermittent carnage wrought upon the desert floor: broken plants, sun-cracked tiles of ancient lakebed crushed in passing. He was running but he wasn’t hiding. As long as he stayed on the valley floor, they’d be able to track him.

Who, exactly?

He switched from StarlAmp to infrared, zoomed the view.

That .

A hot tiny spark leapt against a distant slope, right about where his camp would be.

Closer, though. And closing fast. That thing could run .

Brüks swung the bike around and kicked it back into gear. He almost didn’t notice the second spark sweeping across his field of vision, it was so faint.

He saw the third clearly enough, though. And the fourth. Too distant to make out shapes on thermal, but all hot as humans. All closing.

Five, six, seven…

Shit .

They were fanned out along the valley as far as he could see.

What did I do , what did I do , don’t they know it was an accident ? It wasn’t even me , for chrissakes, I didn’t kill anyone , I just—left the door open…

Ten kilometers. Then they’d be on him like ravenous wolves.

The ATB leapt forward. Brüks pinged 911: nothing. ConSensus was live enough but deaf to his pleas; somehow he could surf but not send. And his pursuers still weren’t showing up on satellite thermal; as far as the skeyes could see he was alone down here with the microweather and the monastery.

The monastery .

They’d be online. They’d be able to help. At the very least the Bicamerals lived behind walls . Anything was better than fleeing naked through the desert.

He aimed for the tornado. It writhed in his enhanced sight, a distant green monster nailed to the earth. Its roar carried across the desert as it always did, faint but omnipresent. For a moment, Brüks heard something strange in that sound. The monastery resolved in the gogs, huddling in the shadow of the great engine. A myriad pinpoint stars burned there against a low jumble of stepped terraces, almost painfully bright.

Three in the morning, and every window was ablaze.

Not so faint anymore: the vortex roared like an ocean now, its volume rising imperceptibly with each turn of the wheels. It was no longer stuck to the horizon. StarlAmp turned it into a pillar of fire, big enough to hold up the sky or to tear it down. Brüks craned his neck: over a kilometer away and still the funnel seemed to lean over him. Any second now it would break free. Any second it would leap from the ground and slam back down, there or there or right fucking here like the finger of some angry god, and it would rip the world apart wherever it touched.

He stayed on course even though the monster ahead couldn’t possibly be made of air and moisture, couldn’t possibly be anything so—so soft . It was something else entirely, some insane Old Testament event horizon that chewed up the very laws of physics. It caught the glow from the monastery, trapped that light and shredded it and spun it together with everything else that fell within reach. A small gibbering thing inside Daniel Brüks begged him to turn back, knew that the creatures stalking him couldn’t be worse than this, because whatever they were they were only the size of men but this, this was the very wrath of God.