Peter Watts - Echopraxia

He couldn’t help laughing.

“What?” Sengupta said. “ What? ”

“You know the secret of a good memory?” He bit back on another laugh. “You know what really kicks the hippocampus into overdrive, burns tracks into your brain faster and deeper than anything this side of direct neuroinduction?”

“Roach you gotta—”

“Fear.” Brüks shook his head. “All that time, playing the monster. I thought she was just into sadistic games, you know? I thought she just got off on scaring us. But she was never that—gratuitous. She was only cranking up the baud rate…”

Sengupta smacked her lips and looked out the window.

He snorted softly. “Even that time in the attic, Lee and I—we couldn’t even look. We just knew she was up there, but we were facing each other , Rak. We were each terrified by something to our left but we were facing each other —” Of course we were, it’s obvious. Why didn’t I see it before? “I bet she wasn’t there at all, it was just—temporoparietal hallucinations. Night hags. Sensed-presence bullshit.”

“Roach remembers.” Sengupta was almost whispering. “Roach is starting to wake up …”

“She was moving us around like checkers.” Brüks didn’t know whether to be awed or terrified. “The whole time…”

“And what else did she program into us huh? We gonna start seeing things that aren’t there or go walking naked on the hull?”

Brüks thought about it. “I don’t—think so. Not if she hacked us all the same way, anyway. Basic things, sure. Fear. Lust. Stuff that’s universal.” He smiled, a bit grimly, at the thought of the Crown ’s surviving denizens sprouting preprogrammed hard-ons and spiked nipples. And that is really not a picture I need in my head right now . “You want to hack higher-level behavior, you’re getting into formative childhood experiences, specific memory pathways. Too many individual differences for one-size-fits-all.”

Sengupta clicked her teeth. “That’s old roach talking new roach should know better. Who knows what that—”

“She couldn’t hack the Bicamerals,” he said slowly.

“What?”

“These tricks—they exploit classic pathways, they’d never work on someone who’d remixed their brain circuitry. She had to get them out of the way.” A thousand pieces fell suddenly, blindingly into place. “That’s why she attacked the monastery, that’s why she didn’t just knock on the front door with an offer. She wanted to goad them into getting noticed . She knew how the roaches would respond, right down to a weaponized biological just lethal enough to keep the hive out of the way for the trip but not lethal enough to derail the mission completely. Fuck .” He sucked in his breath at the thought.

“You see the problem,” Sengupta said.

I don’t see anything but problems. “Which one in particular?”

“She’s a vampire she’s prepost-Human all wrapped up into one. These fuckers solve NP-complete problems in their heads and they drop us like go stones and she’s stupid enough to just accidentally get locked outside when we leave?”

Brüks shook his head. “She burned. I saw her. Ask Jim.”

“ You ask him.” She turned, her eyes lifting from the deck the moment his face fell from view. “Go on. He’s right up there.”

“No hurry,” Brüks said after a moment. “I’ll see him when he comes down.”

To stern the transplanted parasol held back the sun: a great black shield, coruscations of flame still flickering intermittently past its edges. Ahead, the stars: one at least crawled with life and chaos, too distant yet to draw the eye, more hypothesis than hope but closing, closing. That was something.

In between:

A metal spine webbed in scaffolding, lumpy with metal tumors. Spokes and habs and cauterized stumps sweeping one way across the sky; a weighted baton sweeping the other to balance the vectors. The Hub. The Hold: a cylindrical cavern abutting the shield to stern, its back end ragged and gaping into space. Once it had been full of cargo and components and thinking cancers: now it was packed with tonnes of uranium and precious micrograms of antihydrogen and great toroidal superconductors big as houses.

And shadows everywhere: webs and jigsaws cast by a hundred dim lanterns decorating the tips of antennae or the latches of access panels or mounted as porch lights around the edges of half-forgotten emergency airlocks. Sengupta had turned them all on and maxed them all out but they were waypoints, not searchlights: they didn’t so much illuminate the darkness as throw it into contrast.

No matter. Her drone didn’t need light to see.

She’d eschewed the usual maintenance ’bots that crawled spiderlike along the hull, patching and probing and healing the scars left by micrometeorites. Too obvious, she’d said. Too easy to hack. Instead she’d built one from scratch, remote-printed it on the fabricator still humming away in the refitted Hold: decompiled one of the standard bots for essential bits of lanthanum and thulium and built the rest from the Crown ’s matter stockpile like Yahweh breathing life into clay. Now it made its painstaking way over a landscape of struts and conduits, shadows and darkness overlaid with false-color maps on a dozen wavelengths.

“ There! ” Sengupta cried for the fourth time in as many hours, and then “ Fuck .”

Just another pocket of outgassing. By now Brüks had learned not to worry about the myriad leaks in the hull. The Crown of Thorns was a sieve. Most ships were. Fortunately the holes in that mesh were pretty small: it would take years for the internal air pressure to decline significantly, barring a direct hit from anything larger than a lentil. They’d die of starvation or radiation sickness long before they had to worry about asphyxiation.

“Felching hell another leak I swear…” Sengupta’s voice trailed off, rebooted: “Wait a second…”

The telltales looked the same to Brüks: the faintest wisp of yellow on infrared, the kind of heat a few million molecules might retain for a moment or two after bleeding out from some warmer core. “Looks like more microgassing to me. Smaller than that last one, even.”

“Yeah but look where it is .”

Along one of the batwing struts where the droplet radiator sprouted from the spine. “So?”

“No atmo there no tanks or lines either.”

One long arm swept through the near distance, like the candle-lit vane of a skeletal windmill. Another.

Sengupta played with herself. Her marionette picked a careful route through dark jumbled topography. Something hunkered on the hull ahead, its visible outlines buried in shadow. Infrared showed nothing but that diaphanous micronebula dissipating across the hull.

Can’t cloak thermal emissions, Brüks remembered. Not if you’re an endotherm . “That’s not enough of a heat trace—”

“Not if you’re a cockroach. Plenty big enough if you can shut yourself off for a few decades …”

“Just LIDAR it.”

Sengupta jerked her head back and forth. “No chance nothing active there could be tripwires.”

It can’t be her, Brüks told himself. I saw her burn… “What about StarlAmp?” he wondered.

“I’m using StarlAmp we just gotta get closer.”

“But if she’s tripwired against active sensors—”

“Proximity alert I know”—Sengupta nodded and tapped and kept her eyes on the prize—“but that would be active too and I could pick it up. Plus I’m hiding a lot.”