Peter Watts - Echopraxia

Floaters swarmed in his eyes. Half visible in the encroaching fog, Jim Moore stood against the deck without benefit of webs or incantations or anything but the crushing awareness of his own actions. Darkness closed in. With the last few synapses sparking in his cache, Brüks wondered what Luckett might have said in the face of such a toll.

Probably that everything was going according to plan.

HE WOKE UPweightless. Unseen hands guided him like a floating log through the Hub, through a southern hemisphere that didn’t move any more than he could. Rakshi Sengupta called in from somewhere far away, and she did not bray or bark but spoke in tones as soft as any cockroach: “This is taking too long we’re gonna start falling back if we don’t restart the burn in five minutes tops.”

“Three minutes.” Moore’s voice, much closer. “Start your clock.”

And that’s all of us, Brüks thought distantly. Just Jim, and Rakshi, and me. No vampires left, no undead bodyguards. Bicamerals all gone. Lianna dead. Oh God, Lianna. You poor kid, you poor beautiful innocent corpse. You didn’t deserve this; your only crime was faith…

One of the axial hatches passed around him. In the next instant he was swinging around an unaccustomed right angle: the Crown ’s spokes, rigged for thrust, still laid back along her spine. Rungs scrolled past his face as Moore pushed him headfirst to stern.

All our children, gone. Smarter, stronger, leaner. All those souped-up synapses, all those Pleistocene legacy issues stripped away. Where did it get them? Where are they now? Dead. Gone. Turned to plasma.

Where we’ll be, probably, before long…

Maintenance and Repair. Moore folded out the medbed and strapped him in just as the Crown began clearing her throat. By the time he turned to leave, weight was seeping back into the world. Brüks tried to turn his head, and almost succeeded. He tried to clear his throat, and did.

“Uh… Jim…” It was barely above a whisper. The Colonel paused at the ladder, a vague silhouette in the corner of Brüks’s eye. The ongoing burn seemed to sink him into the deck.

“…Th—thanks,” Brüks managed.

The silhouette stood silently in the burgeoning gravity.

“That wasn’t me,” he said finally, and climbed away.

Moore was not the only one to visit. Lianna returned to him from the grave, a dark flickering plasma who smiled down on his frozen features and shook her head and whispered You poor man, so lost, so arrogant before the sun called her back home. Chinedum Ofoegbu stood for hours at his side and spoke with fingers and eyes and sounds that stuttered from the back of his throat, and somehow Brüks understood him at last: not the ululating cipher, not the intelligent hive cancer, but a kind old man whose fondest childhood memory was the family of raccoons he’d surreptitiously befriended with a few handfuls of kibble and subtle sabotage inflicted on the latch of the household organics bin. Wait—you had a childhood? Brüks tried to ask, but Ofoegbu’s face and hands had disappeared under eruptions of buboes and great ropy tumors, and he could no longer get out the words.

Rhona even came back from Heaven, though she’d sworn she never would. She stood with her back to him, and fumed; he tried to turn her around and make her smile, but when she did the expression was bitter and furious and her eyes were full of sparks. Oh, do you miss her? she raged. You miss your mindless puppet, your sweet adoring ego-slave? Or is it just the fact that you’ve lost the one small fake part of your whole small fake life where you had some kind of control ? Well the chains are off, Dan, they’re off for good. You can rot out here for all I care.

But that’s not what I meant, he tried, and I never thought of you that way, and—when he finally ran out of denials and had nothing else to say: Please. I need you. I can’t do it on my own…

Of course you can’t, she sneered. You can’t do anything on your own, can you? I’ll give you that much: you’ve actually turned incompetence into a survival strategy. Whatever would you do if you actually lost your excuses, if you augged up like everyone else? How would you ever survive without your disability to invoke when you can’t keep up?

He wondered what Heaven could possibly be like, to make her so vindictive. He would have asked but Rhona had turned into Rakshi Sengupta right in front of his fossiled eyes, and her train of thought seemed to have jumped to a whole different track. You gotta stay away from the bow, she whispered urgently, glancing nervously over her shoulder. You gotta stay out of the attic, he’s in there now and maybe something else. I wish you’d come back this could be bad and I’m only good with numbers, you know? I’m not so hot in meatspace.

You’re doing fine, Brüks tried to say. You’re even starting to talk like one of us roaches . But all he could manage was a croak and a cough and whatever Rakshi heard seemed to scare her more than his silence had.