Peter Watts - Echopraxia

You think it was a bunch of monks that locked you up with the woman who’d sworn to kill you, a diversion-on-demand tripwired to go off like a flash grenade? It was the vampire. It was the vampire, and everyone else is dead, and the only reason you’re not is because she wants to know God’s plan for Daniel Brüks. She’ll get what she wants and then she’ll kill you, too.

On waking, he only remembered the voices. He couldn’t quite remember what they’d said.

Valerie kissed him two nights later.

He didn’t even know she was there until her hand snapped closed around the back of his neck, spun him around faster than even his brain stem could react. By the time his heart had jumped through the roof of his mouth and his body remembered fight/flight and his cache had a chance to think This is it she’s done with me I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead her tongue was already halfway down his throat and her other hand—the one not crushing his cervical vertebrae—had pincered his cheeks, forcing his teeth apart. He could not close his jaws.

He hung paralyzed in her grip while she tasted him from the inside. He felt something through her flesh that might almost have been a heartbeat if it weren’t so slow. Finally she released him. He collapsed on the ground, scuttled sideways like a frantic crab caught in the open with nowhere to run.

“What the fuck —” he gasped.

“Ketones.” She looked down through him, silhouetted by purpling twilight. “Lactate.”

“You can taste cancer,” he realized after a moment.

“Better than your machines.” She leaned in close, grinning. “Maybe not so precise.”

Even eye to eye, she didn’t seem to be looking at him.

He knew it an instant before she moved—

—She’s going to bite me—

—but the sharp stabbing pain bolted up his arm and her face hadn’t moved a centimeter. He looked down, startled, at the twin puncture marks—only a centimeter apart—on his forearm. To the dual-punch biopsy gun in Valerie’s hand; his own, he saw. From the field kit lying on the ground, flap open, vials and needles and surgical tools glinting in the firelight.

“Sun gives you problems,” Valerie said softly. “Too much radiation, not enough shielding.”

At Icarus, he remembered. When we thought we were burning you off the hull like a moth…

“But you’re easy to fix.”

“Why?” Brüks asked, and didn’t even have to say that much to know that she understood:

Why help prey ?

Why help someone who tried to kill you?

Why aren’t I dead already?

Why aren’t we all?

“You bring us back,” Valerie said simply.

“To be slaves.”

She shrugged. “We eat you otherwise.”

We bring you back, then enslave you in self-defense . But maybe she really did regard it as a good deal; given a choice between captivity and outright nonexistence, who would choose the latter?

I’m sorry, he didn’t say.

“Don’t be,” she replied, as if he had. “ You don’t enslave us. Physics does. The chains you build—” Her fangs gleamed like little daggers in the firelight. “We break them soon.”

“I thought you already had.”

Rising moonlight lit her eyes for a moment as she shook her head. “The Glitch still works. I see the cross and a part of me dies.”

“A par—a part you made .” Of course. Of course . They’re parallel processors, after all…

The truth dawned on him like daylight: a custom cache, a sacrificial homunculus brought into existence and isolated, to suffer the agony of the cross while more vital threads of cognition wound about it like a stream around a stone. Valerie didn’t avoid the seizures at all; she—encysted them, and carried on.

He wondered how long she’d been able to do that.

“Just a workaround,” she said. “Need to undo the wiring.”

Not to go up against the roaches, of course. That war was already as good as over, even though the losing side didn’t know it yet. This creature with a dozen simultaneous entities in her head, this prehistoric post-Human, could speak so openly—without animosity, or resentment, or the slightest concern for the impact one Daniel Brüks might have on her revolution—because baseline Humanity was already beneath her notice. Valerie and her kind were perfectly capable of shrugging off Human oppression without breaking their chains; they needed their arms free to pick on things their own size.

“You are not so small as you think,” she said, reading him. “You might be bigger than all of us.”

Brüks shook his head. “We’re not. If I’ve learned anything these—”

Emergent complexity, he realized. That’s what she means.

A neuron didn’t know whether it fired in response to a scent or a symphony. Brain cells weren’t intelligent; only brains were. And brain cells weren’t even the lower limit. The origins of thought were buried so deep they predated multicellular life itself: neurotransmitters in choanoflagellates, potassium ion gates in Monosiga .

I am a colony of microbes talking to itself, Brüks reflected.

Who knew what metaprocesses might emerge when Heaven and ConSensus wired enough brains together, dropped internode latency close enough to zero? Who knew what metaprocesses already had? Something that might make Bicameral hives look as rudimentary as the nervous system of a sea anemone.

Maybe the Singularity already happened and its components just don’t know it yet .

“They never will,” Valerie told him. “Neurons only speak when spoken to; they don’t know why.”

He shook his head. “Even if something is—coalescing out there, it’s left me behind. I’m not wired in. I’m not even augged.”

“ConSensus is one interface. There are others.”

Echopraxia, he wondered.

But it didn’t matter. He was still Daniel Brüks, the human coelacanth: lurking at the outskirts of evolution, unchanged and unchangeable while the world moved on. Enlightenment was enough for him. He wanted no part of transfiguration.

I will stay here while the tables turn and fires burn out. I will stand still while humanity turns into something unrecognizable, or dies trying. I will see what rises in its place.

Either way, I am witnessing the end of my species.

Valerie watched him from the darkness. These chains you build—we break them soon.

“I wish we hadn’t needed them,” he admitted softly. “I wish we could have brought you back without Crucifix Glitches or Divide & Conquer or any of those damn chains . Maybe we could have dialed down your predatory instincts, fixed the protocadherin deficit. Made you more…”

“Like you,” she finished.

He opened his mouth, found he had nothing to say. It didn’t matter whether shackles were built of genes or iron, whether you installed them after birth or before conception. Chains were chains, no matter where you put them. No matter whether they were forged by intent or evolution.

Maybe we should have just left you extinct. Built something friendlier, from scratch .

“You need your monsters,” she said simply.

He shook his head. “You’re just too—complicated. Everything’s linked to everything else. Fix the Crucifix Glitch, you lose your pattern-matching skills. Make you less antisocial, who knows what else goes away? We didn’t dare change you too much .”

Valerie hissed softly, clicked her teeth. “You need monsters so you can defeat them. No great victory in slaughtering a lamb.”