Peter Watts - Echopraxia

He knew this. He had faith.

A great pit gaped off the northeast corner of the ruin: walls had shattered and spilled toward it during the purge, but that loose scree had only made it halfway. Some other force had flattened the waist-high guardrail that had once ringed the pit at a safe distance. Brüks stepped over it with ease, and across the concrete apron.

He could not see the bottom, not clearly. Sometimes, when the sun was high, he caught the dim glint of great radial teeth, deep in the earth, cutting across the shaft. He would kick pebbles over the edge: water splashed, after a long time, and occasionally he would see the fitful blue spark of short-circuiting electricity. Still life down there, then, of a sort. He idly considered exploring farther—there had to be some kind of access to those depths, an air intake at least—but there was plenty of time for that.

There were other, more ambulatory hazards to contend with. Rattlesnakes seemed to be making a comeback, or at least changing their distribution; an unthinking reach into dark places while clearing debris resulted in a couple of close calls, and a welcome supplement to his freeze-dried rations. Some exotic species of locust had discovered fire while he’d been away, set a patch of dead grass alight one morning while Brüks was digging nearby. He watched it crackle and blacken and only later discovered the charred little carcasses along the edge of the burn, not quite strong enough to leap clear of their own conflagration. The coder couldn’t ID them below Family but named Chortoicetes as the closest known relative: Australian plague locust, too far from home and freshly equipped with a novel variant of chitin whose frictional coefficient proved positively incendiary during mating calls.

Plagues and firestorms in a single package. How very apocalyptic. Some splicer somewhere had a refreshingly biblical approach to weaponized biologicals.

He had a visitor that afternoon, watched for almost an hour as it grew from speck to heat-shimmer to biped staggering across the eastern flats. Stuck with roach vision he almost didn’t identify it in time, almost started out to meet it before that peculiar stagger tipped him off and sent him scuttling for cover. The newcomer wasn’t running, but he moved fast and unencumbered: no pack, no canteen, only one sneaker on the end of a leg as dark and leathery as beef jerky. Whoever he was, he was more than dehydrated; he was almost skeletal. His left arm hung as if snapped at the humerus.

He didn’t seem to care. He kept up that jerking half-panicked stride, stumbled past the monastery without a glance, zigzagged on to the western horizon under a lethal simmering sun. Brüks hid in the ruins and watched him pass and did not get a good look at his eyes. He didn’t think they danced, though. He was not that kind of undead.

He hunkered down in the calm between the stones, and tried to remember which way the wind was blowing.

Valerie appeared after sundown. She materialized from the darkness, half visible in the bloody flickering light of his campfire, and dropped a bag of supplies at his feet: tinned food now, mostly. No more of the magic foil pouches that instantly heated your stew or froze your ice cream when you ripped them open. The pickings out there must be getting slim.

He grunted a greeting. “Haven’t seen you since—since…”

He couldn’t exactly remember. She’d brought him here, he remembered that much. Hadn’t she? He had flashes sometimes: a rain-soaked shoreline, a man who’d thought a contraption of metal and plastic was worth dying for. A disembodied eye trailing ragged shreds of nerve and tendon, almost too cloudy to unlock the retina-coded driver’s door. A pair of polarized sunglasses in her hand, terrible backlit eyes staring right through him while she clicked bared teeth and asked Do I?

He remembered saying Yes . He’d said Please , and hadn’t even tried to keep the whine from his voice. She had been merciful. She had masked herself a little, a lion’s concession to the lamb.

Tonight there was a light beyond his own: a dim orange glow on the northwestern horizon, some distant fire reflecting off the underbelly of a low-hanging cloud bank. Brüks put it in the general direction of Bend.

He pointed back over her shoulder. “Did you do that?”

She didn’t look. “You do.”

He nodded at the lizard mash sizzling on the fire, held out the half-eaten Vitabar he’d been nibbling to take the edge off. Valerie shook her head: “I eat already.”

Even now, it was a relief to hear that.

He sat back down on the corner of a shattered and empty mausoleum. “Found my room today.” More precisely, he’d uncovered his goggles—one lens gone completely, the other a spiderweb of cracks embedded in the frame—and finally recognized the remains of the cell where he’d spent his last night on Earth before escaping to the sun. He’d spent the rest of the day searching those foundations on his hands and knees. “Thought someone might have left something there, but…”

Her pupils glowed like embers in the firelight. “Doesn’t matter,” she told him, but somehow there was something under the words, an unspoken addendum. Brüks wasn’t entirely sure how he knew that; some subtle telltale in the way Valerie held herself, perhaps, some twitch of the lip that his subconscious had parsed and served up as an executive summary—

—wrong scale; look down—

—and suddenly Brüks saw the truth of it: they’d known him, these hive-minded transHumans who’d called him back home. They’d known his background, and what he’d been doing in the desert all those months before. Any answers they’d left for him would be for him alone: too subtle to show up under the ham-fisted forensics of mortal Man, too durable for bombs or bulldozers to destroy. They’d be ubiquitous, indestructible, invisible to all but their intended recipient.

He mentally kicked himself for not having seen that before.

He wasn’t exactly sure how he’d seen it now—exactly what cues he’d read in Valerie’s body language, or even whether those cues had been deliberate or inadvertent. It had been happening more often, though; as though the desert had cleared his head, washed away the electronics and the interference and the ubiquitous quantum chaos of the twenty-first century to leave his mind as sharp and pristine as an undergrad’s. His newfound clarity might have even saved his life on occasion; he’d got the strong sense that a wrong answer to some of Valerie’s campfire questions might have carried severe penalties.

Is this what augmentation feels like? he wondered, but it couldn’t be. He hadn’t even taken Cognital for weeks.

He was seeing things more clearly now, though, no doubt about it. Faces in the clouds. Patterns that made his brain itch. Rakshi would have been proud.

Even Valerie seemed to be.

Her visits, once rare, had become more frequent. The first time she’d been a shadow with a face, there and gone so quickly that Brüks had written her off as a posttraumatic flashback. But she’d returned six nights later, and two nights after that—and then she had stayed, lurking just beyond the campfire, twin spots of eyeshine hovering in the darkness.

At first he’d thought she was toying with him again, getting her usual sadistic kicks out of scaring prey. But then he remembered that she wasn’t like that after all, and she obviously didn’t want him dead; the fact that he was alive was all the proof he needed. One night he’d shouted a challenge into the darkness—“Hey! Don’t you ever get bored playing the Monster Card?”—and she’d stepped into the light: hands spreads, lips sealed, watching him watching her. She’d left a few minutes later but by then he’d realized what she was doing. She was an anthropologist, incrementally acclimating some primitive tribesman to her presence. She was a primatologist of days past, easing her way into a doomed colony of bonobos: one last behavioral study before the species checked out for good.