Peter Watts: Echopraxia

But that hesitant little voice spoke again, and this time the question lingered: Why is this thing running so hard?

It shouldn’t have been. Vortex engines never really stopped, but at night they weakened in the cooling air, diffused and idled until the rising sun brought them back to full strength. To keep a funnel this size running so hot, so late at night—that would almost draw more energy than it yielded. The vapor from the cooling cells would have to be verging on live steam—and now Brüks was close enough to hear something else against the jet-engine roar, a faint creaking counterpoint of great metal blades, twisting past their normative specs …

The monastery lights went out.

It took a moment for his goggles to amp back up; but in that moment of pure, illuminating darkness Daniel Brüks finally saw himself for the fool he was. For the first time he saw the pinpoint heatprints ahead of him, closing from the east as well as from behind. He saw forces powerful enough to hack surveillance satellites in geostationary orbit, but somehow unable to blind his antique Telonics network to the same heatprints. He saw a military automaton, ruthless as a shark, fast as a superconductor, betraying its own approach from kilometers away when it could have avoided his traplines entirely and killed him in his sleep.

He saw himself from high overhead, stumbling across someone else’s game board: caught in a net that closed around but not on him.

They didn’t even know I was here . They’re after the Bicamerals.

He pulled to a stop. The monastery loomed fifty meters ahead, low and black against the stars. All windows abruptly shuttered, all approaches suddenly dark, it rose from the landscape as though born of it: a pile of deep rock strata breaching the surface of the world. The tornado loomed beyond like a whirling gash in space-time, barely a hundred meters on the other side. The sound of its rage filled the world.

On all sides, candles closed in the darkness.

0313, his goggles reminded him. Less than an hour ago he’d been asleep. It wasn’t nearly long enough to come to terms with your own imminent death.

YOU ARE IN DANGER, the gogs told him helpfully.

Brüks blinked. The little red letters persisted, hovering off at the corner of his eye where the chrono readout should be.

COME ON THEN. DOOR’S OPEN.

He looked past the command line, panned across the darkened façades of the monastery. There, ground level: just to the left of a broad staircase that underscored the main entrance. An opening, barely big enough for a man. Something burned there at body temperature. It had arms and legs. It waved.

MOVE YOUR ASS BRÜKS YOU SELF-ABSORBED IDIOT.

SEALING ENTRANCE IN

15S

14S

13S…

Brüks moved his self-absorbed idiot ass.

INSIDE, THE DARKNESSwas bright chaos.

Human heat signatures flickered across Brüks’s goggles at point-blank range, coruscations of false color in frantic motion. The heat of their passing painted the surroundings with fainter washes of red and yellow: rough-hewn walls, a flat dead light panel for a ceiling, a floor that yielded unexpectedly beneath his feet like some ungodly hybrid of rubber and flesh. Off in an indeterminate distance, something stuttered and wailed; here in the hallway the human rainbows moved with silent urgency. The woman who’d invited him in—a petite writhing heatprint no more than 160 centimeters tall—grabbed his hand and pulled him forward: “I’m Lianna. Stay close.”

He followed, switching the gogs to StarlAmp. The heatprints vanished; bright greenish stars moved in the void left behind, always in pairs, binary constellations jostling and blinking in the dark. A word popped into his head: luciferin . Photophores in the retinas.

These people had eyes that doubled as flashlights. Brüks had once known a grad student with similar augments. Sex had been—disquieting, in the dark.

His guide threaded him through the starfield. That distant wailing rose and fell, rose and fell; not words exactly, but syllables at least. Clicks and cries and diphthongs in the dark. Bright eyes rose before him, seething with cold blue light. Amplified photons limned a gray face full of lines and angles. Brüks tried to steer his way around but that face blocked his way, eyes glowing with such furious intensity that his goggles had to dial back the amplification to almost nothing.

“ Gelan ,” the face croaked. “ Thofe tessrodia .”

Brüks tried to take a step back; bumped into traffic, rebounded.

“ Eptroph! ” cried the face, as the body beneath gave way.

Lianna pushed him sideways into the wall—“Stay right there ”—and dropped to the floor. Brüks switched back to thermal. The rainbows returned. Brüks’s assailant was on his back, heat sig bright as a solar flare, muttering nonsense. His fingers fluttered as if stabbing an invisible keyboard; his left foot tapped an agitated tattoo against the elastic flooring. Lianna cradled his head in her lap and spoke to him in the same incomprehensible tongue.

The chronic background roar of the vortex engine rose subtly in pitch. Stone trembled at Brüks’s back.

A hot bright figure appeared down the corridor, swimming against the stream. Within moments it had reached them; Brüks’s guide passed her charge to the newcomer and was on her feet in an instant. “Let’s go.”

“What was—”

“Not here.”

A side door. A flight of stairs, sheathed in the same rubbery skin that turned their footsteps into soft squeaks. It corkscrewed down through cooling bedrock that dimmed with each step in the goggles’ sights, but that compact body glowed like a beacon ahead of him. Suddenly the world was silent again but for their own footsteps and the distant, almost subsonic thrumming of the vortex engine.

“What’s going on?” Brüks asked.

“Oh. Mahmood.” Lianna glanced back, her eyes bright garish blobs, her mouth a crimson slash of heat. “Can’t always control when the rapture hits, much less which node. Not the most convenient thing in the world but you don’t want to miss the insights, you know? Could be time travel, for all we know. Could be a cure for golem.”

“You understood what he was saying.”

“Kinda. It’s what I do, when I’m not bringing lost sheep in from the desert.”

“You’re a synthesist?” Jargonaut was the street name. Glorified translators, charged with bringing esoteric transhuman tablets down from the mountain, carved in runes simple enough for pitiful baseline Humans to half-understand.

Rhona had called them Moses mammals, back when she’d been in the world.

But Lianna was shaking her head. “Not exactly. More of a—you’re a biologist, right? Synthesists would be rats. I’m more of a koala bear.”

“Specialist.” Brüks nodded. “Narrower niche.”

“Exactly.”

A faint orange stain appeared on the thermoptics: warmth from below.

“And you know who I am because…”

“We’re on the bleeding edge of theistic virology here. You think we don’t know how to access a public database?”

“I just thought you’d have better things to look up when you were being attacked by zombies.”

“We keep an eye on the neighborhood, Dr. Brüks.”

“Yeah, but what—”

She stopped. Brüks nearly ran into her, then realized they’d reached the bottom of the stairs. Bright heat spilled around a corner dead ahead; Lianna turned and tapped his goggles. “You won’t be needing those.”