Peter Watts - Echopraxia

“ Do not put that on them .” Lianna’s voice was flinty. “That was my mistake. Chinedum was—I will not let you blame anyone else for my stupidity.”

“Isn’t that the way, though? Isn’t that how it’s always been? Just obey the guys in the funny hats and if it’s a win it’s all praise be to Allah but if your ass gets kicked it’s your fault. You read scripture the wrong way. You weren’t worthy . You didn’t have enough faith .”

Some of the fight seemed to bleed out of her then; some of the old Lianna Lutterodt peeked through. She sighed, and shook her head, and ghosted a smiled. “Hey, remember when this used to be fun ?”

He spread his hands, feeling helpless. “I just…”

“You mean well. I know. But after all you’ve seen, you can’t deny how far ahead of us they are.”

“Oh they’re scary smart, I’ll give them that. They run circles around the best we roaches can throw at them, they snap this ship like a twig and pitch it all the way to the sun, drop us dead center onto Icarus’s dark side from a hundred million kilometers with barely a thruster tweak. But they glitch, just like we do. They still wash away their sins, because after all that rewiring their brains still mix up sensation and metaphor. They’re more glitchy than we are, because half their upgrades are barely out of beta—and while we’re on the subject, has anyone factored in the neuropsychologic impairment that a few weeks of hyperbaric exposure must be inflicting on all that extra brain tissue?”

Lianna shook her head. “We’re not on the steppes anymore, Dan. We don’t measure success by how far you can throw a spear in a crosswind. They think rings around us in every way that matters.”

“Uh-huh. And Masaso and Luckett are still dead. And all that poor bastard could cling to while his lights went out was that it was all according to plan .” He put his hands on her shoulders. “Lee, it’s not just that these people can’t wrap their heads around mortality. They can’t even entertain the possibility they could be wrong . If that doesn’t scare the shit out of you—”

She shook him off. “The plan was to get us to Icarus. Here we are.”

“Here we are.” Brüks pointed to a hole in the wall, where a hived demigod communed with something that could change the laws of physics. “And how does it feel to know our lives depend on the judgment of something that can’t even imagine it could die?”

“WHAT’S RAKSHI GOTagainst you guys?”

The lights were dimmed, the mutants and monsters were off pursuing their alien agendas, and the Glenmorangie was back on the table. Moore grimaced at Brüks, refriended, over the lip of his glass. “Who’s us guys ?”

“Military,” Brüks said. “Why’s she got such a hate-on for you?”

“Not sure. Self-loathing, maybe.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Sengupta’s as much of a soldier as I am. She just doesn’t know it. Not consciously, at least.”

“Metaphorically, you mean.”

Moore shook his head, took another sip; his cheeks puckered as he swirled the single malt around in his mouth. He swallowed. “WestHem Alliance. Same as me.”

“And she doesn’t know.”

“Nope.”

“What’s her rank?”

“Doesn’t work like that.”

“Some kind of sleeper agent?”

“It’s not like that, either.”

“Then what—”

Moore raised a hand. Brüks fell silent.

“I say army, ” Moore told him, “you think boots on the ground. Drones, zombies, battlefield robots. Things you can see . Fact is, if you’ve reached the point where you need that kind of brute force, you’ve already lost.”

Visions of the Oregon desert sprang into Brüks’ head. “Brute force seemed to work just fine for those fuckers who attacked the monastery.”

“They were trying to stop us. Here we are.”

Human bodies, turned to stone. The screams of dying Bicamerals.

Not bodies, he reminded himself. Body parts . Here in the dusk of the twenty-first century it was so easy to confuse murder with the amputation of a fingertip. None of the usual definitions made sense when a single supersoul stretched across so many bodies.

“Suppose you’re a political heavyweight,” Moore was saying. “A mover and shaker, a titan. And down around your ankles are all those folks you never used to worry about. The moved and the shaken. They don’t like you much. They never have, but historically that never mattered. Little people. Back in the day you just ignored them. The business of titans is other titans.

“But now they get into the nodes, they decrypt your communiqués, they hack your best-laid plans. They hate your guts, Daniel, because you are big and they are small, because you turn their lives upside down with a wave of your hand and they don’t care about realpolitik or the big picture. They only care about monkey-wrenching and whistleblowing.

“And you find out about them. You find out about Rakshi Sengupta and Caitlin deFranco and Parvad Gamji and a million others. You give them what they want. You leave the back door open just a crack, so they can see your files on the African Hegemony. You let them sniff out a weakness in your firewall. Maybe one day they find out how to provoke a firestorm in one of your subsidiary accounts, bankrupt some puppet government you kept under your thumb for tax purposes.”

“Except that’s not what they’re doing,” Brüks surmised.

“No it’s not.” There was a hint of sadness in Moore’s smile. “It’s all window dressing. They think they’re really sticking it to you, but they’re being—herded. Into the service of agendas they’d never support in a thousand years, if they only knew. And they’re dedicated, Daniel. They’re ferocious. They fight your wars with a passion you could never buy and never coerce, because they’re doing it out of pure ideology.”

“Should you be telling me this?” Brüks wondered.

“You mean, state secrets? What’s a state, these days?”

“I mean, what if I tell her ?”

“Go ahead. She won’t believe you.”

“Why not? She already hates you guys.”

“She can’t believe you.” Moore tapped his temple. “Recruits get—tweaked.”

Brüks stared.

“Or at least,” Moore elaborated, “she can’t believe she believes you.” He eyed his scotch. “On some level, I think she already knows.”

Brüks shook his head. “You don’t even have to pay them.”

“Sure we do. Sometimes. We make sure they have enough to make ends meet. Let them skim some cream from an offshore account, drop a legitimate contract into their in-box before the rent comes due. Mostly, though, we inspire them. Oh, they get bored sometimes. Kids, you know. But all it takes is a little judicious injustice, some new atrocity visited on the little people. Get them all fired up again, and off they go.”

“That seems a bit—”

Moore raised an eyebrow. “Immoral?”

“Complicated. Why herd them into hating you ? Why not just leave a trail of bread crumbs pointing back at the other guy?”

“Ah. Demonize your enemy.” Moore nodded sagely. “I wonder why we never thought of that.”

Brüks grimaced.

“Rakshi and her kind, they’re wise to the old school. You leak footage showing the slants skewering babies and it’ll take them maybe thirty seconds to find a pixel that doesn’t belong. Discredit the whole campaign. People put a lot less effort into picking apart evidence that confirms what they already believe. The great thing about making yourself the villain is, nobody’s likely to contradict you.