Peter Watts - Echopraxia

Not clandestine enough, apparently.

He shivered at Moore’s shoulder. “What happened here?”

The Colonel shrugged. “Something convenient.”

“How so?”

“It’s been abandoned. We won’t have to talk our way in.”

“Is it still plugged in? What if it—”

Moore shook his head. “Shouldn’t be a problem. Nobody who’d have done this would care about Heaven.” He pointed at the distant flames. “That way.”

Brüks turned as Sengupta came up behind them; the shuttle cooled in the background, half-melted ablative oozing like candle wax around its belly. “Huh,” he remarked. “I’d have thought there’d be, you know. Landing gear.”

“Too expensive,” Moore told him. “Everything’s disposable.”

You got that right .

A halting, freezing hike up a shallow slope. A walk on the water. An invisible bridge to the visible tip of a derelict iceberg. Gutted structures spread out before them like little pieces of Gehenna, some still aflame, others merely smoldering. Finally they reached the visible edge of that levitating island: little more than a patina of black greasy soot floating in midair. It was still a relief to see something underfoot; it was a greater relief to stop and catch his breath.

Moore laid a sudden hand on his shoulder. Sengupta said, “ Wha— ” and fell silent.

Ahead, barely visible through a curtain of oily smoke, things moved.

They’d arrived at what had once been some kind of air-traffic hub: a low-slung control shack whose walls and roof came together in a wraparound band of soot-stained windows angled at the sky. Two dead helicopters and a one-winged jump jet littered a scorched expanse of tarmac and landing bull’s-eyes, barely visible beneath the scoring. The nozzles of retracted fuel lines poked through the deck here and there; one burned fitfully, a monstrous candle or a fuse set to detonate whatever reservoir fed the flame. In the middle of it all, bodies moved.

The bodies were human. Their movements were anything but.

Moore waved the others back against the shack, spared a backward glance and a raised hand: Stay here . Brüks nodded. Moore slipped around the corner and disappeared.

A swirling gust blew sparks and acrid smoke into Brüks’s face. He suppressed a cough, eyes stinging, and squinted through the haze. Human, yes. Two, maybe three, near the edge of one of the bull’s-eyes. Gray coveralls, blue uniform, insignia impossible to make out from this distance.

They were dancing .

At least, that was the closest word Brüks could summon to describe the tableaux: movements both inhumanly precise and inhumanly fast, humanoid simulacra engaged in some somatic call-and-response unlike anything he’d ever seen. There was a lead, but it kept changing; there were steps, but they never seemed to repeat. It was ballet, it was semaphore, it was some kind of conversation that engaged every part of the body except the tongue. It was utterly silent but for the machine-gun staccato of boots on the deck, faint and intermittent through the soft roar of the wind and the crackling of the flames.

And faintly familiar, somehow.

Moore ended it all with a blow to the back of the head. One moment the dancing marionettes were alone on the stage; the next the Colonel had materialized from the smoke, his hand already blurring toward the target. The gray-clad dancer jerked and thrashed and collapsed twitching onto the deck, a disconnected puppet gone suddenly grand mal; the other threw himself down at the same instant, although Moore hadn’t touched him. He lay twisting beside his fallen partner, still in frantic clockwork motion but only twitching now, amplitude reined in to complement these new and unexpected steps brought so suddenly into the routine.

“Echopraxia echofucking praxia, ” Sengupta hissed at his shoulder.

Moore was back. “This way.”

A broken door gaped around the corner. Inside, brain-dead smart paint sparked and sizzled along those few control surfaces that hadn’t already been put to the flame.

Brüks glanced over his shoulder. “What about—”

“They’re in a feedback loop. We don’t have to worry until the mechanic comes back.” A companionway gaped from the far bulkhead. A fallen cabinet blocked the way. Moore pushed it aside.

“Isn’t that bad for them?” Brüks wondered, and immediately felt like an idiot. “I mean, wouldn’t it be better if we broke the loop? Split them up?”

Moore paused at the top of the stairs. “Best-case scenario, they’d do as well as you would if someone split you down the middle.”

“Oh.” After a moment: “Worst-case?”

“They wake up,” Moore said, “and come after us.”

THEY CAME ACROSSa sloping commons area, dark and derelict but for a cone of emergency light spilling in from the corridor and a smattering of icons winking fitfully from the far bulkhead: a row of comm cubbies, snoozing until some lonely grunt chose to phone home or eavesdrop on the happening world. They could only access Main Street—no windows into anything that might require security clearance—but ConSensus and perscomm links floated free to one and all, serenely untroubled by whatever small apocalypse that had taken out the upper deck.

Moore moved on in search of greater privilege and darker secrets. Sengupta hung around long enough to make sure the links were solid before disappearing in his wake.

Brüks sat in the leaning darkness and did not move.

What do I say to her? What do I say?

Hey, you know how Icarus went away and world fell apart? Funny story…

You know how we thought there was no God? Well, it’s worse than you think…

Hi, honey. I’m home.

He took a deep breath.

This is a stupid idea. We’re way past this. I should just—catch up with the others.

Let it out again.

Someone has to tell her. She needs to know.

He felt the corners of his mouth pull back in a grimace of self-loathing.

This isn’t even about her. This is about Dan Brüks and his imploding worldview. This is about running back to the only person who ever gave you any shred of comfort whether you deserved it or not…

He sacc’ed the interface.

He tried four times before the system could even find the address; the lump in his throat grew with each attempt. The Quinternet was falling apart; everything was. But it had deep roots, old roots reaching back over a century: a design both completely uncephalized and massively redundant. Functionality in the face of overwhelming entropy had been built into its DNA from the start.

Still there. Still online. Still alive. He hadn’t entirely believed it. “Uh, Rhona McLennan, November 13, 2086.”

Please pick up.

Please be busy.

“Dan.”

Oh God. Here she is.

I must be dreaming…

“Hi, Rho.”

“I wondered where you’d got off to. Things have been so confused out there lately…”

She was a voice in the darkness, distant, disembodied. There was no visual.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch…”

“I wasn’t expecting you to get in touch.” Maybe there was warmth in her voice, now. Wry amusement at least. “When was the last time you dropped by?”

“You didn’t want me to drop by! You said—”