Peter Watts - Echopraxia

“Besides.” He spread his hands. “These days, half the time we don’t even know who the real enemy is .”

“And that’s easier than just tweaking them so they flat-out want to work for you.”

“Not easier. Marginally more legal.” The Colonel sipped his drink. “A small agnosia to protect state secrets is one thing. Changing someone’s basic personality without consent—that’s in a whole other league.”

Neither spoke for a while.

“That is really fucked up,” Brüks said at last.

“Uh-huh.”

“So why’s she here?”

“Driving the ship.”

“ Crown ’s perfectly capable of driving itself, unless it’s even more old school than I am.”

“Better to have meat and electronics backing each other up in low-intel scenarios. Complementary vulnerabilities.”

“But why her ? Why would she agree to work under someone she hated—”

“This mission’s under Bicameral command,” the Colonel reminded him. “And anyone in Sengupta’s position would jump at an opportunity like this. Most of those people spend their time babysitting low-orbit crap-zappers from their bedrooms, praying that one of them glitches enough to warrant human intervention. Actual deep-space missions—anything with enough of a time lag to need onboard real-time piloting—those’ve been scarcer than snowstorms ever since Firefall. The Bicamerals had their pick of the field.”

“Rakshi must be very good at her job.”

Moore drained his glass, set it down. “I think in her case it was more a function of motivation. She has a wife on class-four life support.”

“And no way to pay the bills,” Brüks guessed.

“She does now.”

“So they didn’t want the best and the brightest,” Brüks said slowly. “They wanted someone who’d do anything to save her wife.”

“Motivation,” Moore repeated.

“They wanted a hostage .”

The soldier looked at him with something that might almost have been pity. “You disapprove.”

“You don’t.”

“You’d rather they picked someone who just wanted to get out of the house? Someone who was in it for the thrills or the bank balance? This was the humane choice, Daniel. Celu would have been dead. Now she’s got a chance.”

“Celu,” Brüks said, and swallowed on a throat gone suddenly dry.

Moore nodded. “Rakshi’s wife.”

“What was, um… what was wrong with her?” Thinking: There’s no chance. It would be one in a million .

Moore shrugged. “Bio attack, about a year ago. New England. Some kind of encephalitis variant, I think.”

Then you’re wrong . She doesn’t have a chance. She doesn’t. I don’t care how much they spend keeping her heart beating, there’s no coming back from something like that.

Oh my God. I killed her.

I killed Rakshi’s wife .

It hadn’t been anything radical. It hadn’t even been anything new .

The methodology was decades old, a proven tent pole for a thousand peer-reviewed studies or more. Everyone knew you couldn’t simulate a pandemic without simulating its victims; everyone knew that human behavior was too complex to thumbnail with a few statistical curves. Populations weren’t clouds, and people weren’t points; people were agents, autonomous and multifaceted. There was always the outlier who ran into the hot zone after a loved one, the frontline medic whose unsuspected fear of centipedes might cause him to freeze at some critical juncture. And since pandemics, by definition, involved millions of people, your simulation had better be running millions of human-level AIs if you wanted to get realistic results.

Or you could piggyback on a preexisting model where each of a million data points was already being run by a human-level intelligence.

Game worlds weren’t nearly as popular as they’d once been—Heaven had stolen away those myriad souls who preferred to play with themselves, free of community standards—but their virtual sandboxes were still more than large enough to keep them way out front as the CDC’s favorite platform for epidemiological research. For decades now, the plagues and sniffles that afflicted wizards and trolls alike had been tweaked and nudged toward specs that made them ideal analogs for the more pedestrian outbreaks afflicting what some still called the real world . Corrupted Blood bore more than a passing similarity to ectopic fibrodysplasia. The transmission dynamics of Beowulf’s Bane, an exotic glowing fungus that ate the flesh of elves, bore an uncanny resemblance to those of necrotizing fasciitis. Flying carpets and magic portals mapped onto airlines and customs bottlenecks; Mages to jet-setting upper-echelon elites with unlimited carbon ceilings. For a generation now, public health policies the world over had been informed by the lurid fantasy afflictions of clerics and wights.

It was just bad timing that a Realist faction out of Peru figured how to hack that system when Dan Brüks and his merry band were running a sim on emerging infectious diseases in Latin America.

Nobody caught it at the time. The Realists had been subtle. They’d left the actual disease parameters strictly alone: any sudden changes to mutation rate or infectivity would’ve shown up in the dailies. They’d tweaked the superficial appearance of infected players instead, according to location and demographic. Certain victims looked a bit sicklier than they should have, while others—wealthier PCs with gold and flying mounts at their command—looked a little healthier. It didn’t change the biology one whit, but it edged Human responses just a hair to the left. Subsequent outbreaks edged them a bit farther. The ripples spread out of gamespace and into the reports, out of the reports and into policy. Nobody noticed the tiny back door that had opened in the resulting contingency plans until six months later, when someone discovered a suspicious empty vial in the garbage behind the Happy Humpback Daycare Center. By then, a shiny new encephalitis mod had already slipped past Daniel Brüks’s first-response algorithms and was carving a bloody swathe from Bridgeport to Philadelphia.

Celu MacDonald had survived unscathed. She’d hadn’t even been in the kill zone; she’d been on the other side of the world, growing freelance code next to the girl of her dreams. Those weren’t as rare as they’d once been. In fact they’d grown pretty common ever since Humanity had learned to edit the dream as well as the girl. Soul mates could be made to order now: monogamous, devoted, fiercely passionate. The kind of love that prior generations had barely tasted before their hollow sacraments withered into miserable life sentences, or shattered outright as the bloom faded, the eye wandered, the genes reasserted themselves.

Not for Macdonald and her kind, that empty hypocrisy. They’d ripped the lie right out of their heads, rewired and redeemed it, turned it into joyful truth with a lifetime warranty. First-person sex had even made a modest comeback in the shelter of that subculture, or so Brüks had heard.

He didn’t know any of that at the time, of course. Celu MacDonald was just a name on a list of subcontractors, a monkey hired to grow code the academics couldn’t be bothered with. Brüks only learned of her after the fact: a bloody little coda at the end of the massacre.

There’d been no conspiracy. No one had thrown her to the wolves. But the academics had had deans and CEOs and PR hotshots keeping their identities confidential, keeping their connections from staining the good names of venerable institutions. Nobody had given any cover to Celu MacDonald. When the dust had finally settled, when the inquiries and ass-covering and alibis had all run their course, there’d she’d been: standing alone in the crosshairs with hacked code dribbling from her hands.