Peter Watts - Echopraxia

“We are not that stupid.”

Valerie turned and looked to the horizon: the firelight flickering off the clouds was all the rejoinder she needed.

But that’s not us, Brüks thought. Even if it is. It’s—urban renewal . Tear-down and development for the new owners.

Pest control.

The monster’s shoulders rose and fell. She spoke without turning—“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all just get along?”—and for the life of him Brüks could not tell whether she was being sincere or sarcastic.

“I thought we were,” he said, reaching for the biopsy needle in his half-open field kit. And leapt like a flea onto her back, faster than he had ever moved in his life, to plunge it up through the base of her skull.

NOW HE WASalone. By day tornadoes marched across the desert like pillars of smoke, under no control but God’s. At night the distant glow of burning bushes encircled the horizon: the Post-Anthropocene Explosion in full swing. Brüks thought about what might be going on out there, thought about anything but the act he’d just committed. He imagined battles unseen and ongoing. He wondered who was winning.

The Bicamerals, perhaps, shaping the Singularity, planting that first layer of bearings in the box. Laying a foundation for the future. Perhaps this was their lynchpin moment, the first dusting of atoms on the condensor’s floor. From these beginnings Humanity could resonate out across time and space, a deterministic cascade designed to undo what the viral God had wrought. Debug the local ordinances. Undo the Anthropic principle. It could take billions of years from such humble butterfly beginnings, but in the end life itself might be unraveled from Planck on up.

What else could you call it, other than Nirvana?

There would be other forces, other plans. The vampires, for one: the smartest of the selfish genes. They might prefer their human prey just as they were, slow and thick-witted, minds dulled by the cumbersome bottleneck of the conscious cache. Or maybe some other faction was rising in the east, any of the other monstrous subspecies that humanity had fractured into: the membrains, the multicores, the zombies or the Chinese Rooms. Even Rhona’s supraconscious AIs. They all had their causes, their reasons to fight; or thought they did.

The fact that their actions all seemed to serve the purposes of something else, some vast distributed network slouching toward Bethlehem—sheer coincidence, perhaps. Perhaps we really do act for the reasons we believe. Perhaps everything’s right on the surface, brightly lit and primary colored. Perhaps Daniel Brüks and Rakshi Sengupta and Jim Moore—each burning for their own kind of redemption—all just happened to end up in the white-hot radiance of spolar orbit, obsessed enough to rush in where Angels feared to tread.

Perhaps it really was Daniel Brüks, on some level, who had just murdered his last and only friend…

He thought of Jim Moore and Jim was in his head, nodding and offering sage advice. Rhona reminded him to Think like a biologist and he saw his mistake; he’d heard Angels of the Asteroids and he’d seen heavenly bodies, not earthly ones. He’d seen chunks of dead spinning rock, not the extinct echinoderms that had once crept across the world’s intertidal zones. Asteroidea : the sea stars. Brainless creatures, utterly uncephalized, who nonetheless moved with purpose and a kind of intelligence. Not the worst metaphor for the Icarus invader. Not the worst metaphor for what seemed to be happening out beyond the desert…

There were other voices: Valerie, Rakshi, some he didn’t recognize. Sometimes they argued among themselves, included him only as an afterthought. They told him he was becoming schizophrenic—that they were nothing but his own thoughts, drifting at loose ends through a mind being taken apart in stages. They whispered fearfully about something skulking in the basement, something brought back from the sun that stomped on the floor and made things move upstairs. Brüks remembered Jim Moore cutting the cancers from his body, felt his friend’s head shaking behind his mind’s eye: Sorry, Daniel—I guess I didn’t get it all…

Sometimes he lay awake at night and clenched his teeth and strained, through sheer effort of conscious will, to undo the slow incremental rewiring of his midbrain. The thing in the basement came to him in his dreams. You think this is new ? it sneered. Even in this miserable backwater, it’s been happening for four billion years. I’m going to swallow you whole.

“I’ll fight you,” Brüks said aloud.

Of course you will. That’s what you’re for, that’s all you’re for. You gibber on about blind watchmakers and the wonder of evolution but you’re too damn stupid to see how much faster it would all happen if you just went away. You’re a Darwinian fossil in a Lamarckian age. Do you see how sick to death we are of dragging you behind us, kicking and screaming because you’re too stupid to tell the difference between success and suicide?

“I see the fires. People are fighting back.”

That’s not me out there. That’s just you folks, catching up.

It was such an uphill struggle. Consciousness had never had the upper hand; I had never been more than the scratchpad, a momentary snapshot of a remembered present. Maybe Brüks hadn’t heard those voices before but they’d always been there, hidden away, doing the heavy lifting and sending status reports upstairs to a silly little man who took all the credit. A deluded homunculus, trying to make sense of minions so much smarter than it was.

It had only ever been a matter of time before they decided they didn’t need him.

He no longer sought his answers among the ruins. He looked for them across the whole wide desert. His very senses were coming apart now; each sunrise seemed paler than the last, every breeze against his skin felt more distant than the one before. He cut himself to feel alive; the blood spilled out like water. He deliberately broke his little finger, and felt not pain but faint music. The voices wouldn’t leave him alone. They told him what to eat and he put rocks in his mouth. He could no longer tell bread from stone.

One day he came across a body desiccating in the parched desert air, its side torn open by scavengers, its head abuzz in a halo of flies. He was almost sure this wasn’t where he’d left it. He thought he saw it move a little, undead nerves still twitching against their own desecration. Guilt rose like acid in his throat.

You killed her , Brüks told the thing inside.

And that’s the only reason you’re alive. I am your salvation.

You’re a parasite.

Am I. I pay the rent. I do renovations. I’ve only just got started and this system’s already clocking fast enough to outsmart a vampire. What did you ever do except suck glucose and contemplate your navel?

What are you, then?

I’m manna from heaven. I’m a Rorschach blot. The monks look at me and see the Hand of God, the Vampires see an end to loneliness. What do you see, Danny Boy?

He saw a duck blind, an ROV. He saw some other Singularity looking back. He saw Valerie’s body twitching at his feet. Whatever was left of Daniel Brüks remembered her last words, just after she’d pierced him with a biopsy that wasn’t a biopsy: “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could all just get along?”

You know she wasn’t talking about you .

He knew.

He found himself on the edge of a cliff, high above the desert. The ruined monastery shimmered in the heat but he felt nothing. He seemed a million miles away, as though watching the world unfold through distant cameras. You have to crank the amplitude, his tormentor said. It’s the only way you’ll feel anything. You have to increase the gain.