Peter Watts - Echopraxia

But Brüks was on to it. He wasn’t the first to be tempted in the desert, and he knew how that story went. He was supposed to defy the voice. Do not test the Lord thy God, he was supposed to say, and step back from the precipice and into history. It was in the script.

But he was so very fucking sick of scripts. He couldn’t remember a time when he’d made up his own lines. Herded into the desert by invisible hands, packed into some post-Human field kit with the nanoscopes and petri dishes and barcoders: a so-called biologist barely smart enough to poke at things he didn’t understand, too stupid to know when those things were poking back. They’d used him; they’d all used him. He’d never been their colleague, never a friend. Never even the accidental tourist he’d first supposed, the retarded ancestor in need of babysitting. A cargo container: that’s all he’d been. A brood sac.

But he was not an automaton, not yet. He was still Daniel Brüks, and for just this moment he was slaved to no one’s stage directions. He would make his own fucking destiny.

You wouldn’t dare , something hissed in his head.

“Watch me,” he said, and stepped forward.

THERE’S NOT MUCHto work with. Barely a melanoma’s worth. Enough to rewire the circuitry of the midbrain, certainly; but to deal with shattered bones? Enough to keep osteoblasts and striated muscles alive in the face of such massive damage, to keep the metabolic fires flickering? Enough to keep decomposition at bay?

Barely. Perhaps. One piece at a time.

The body shouts, wordless alarm-barks, when the scavengers come calling. Judicious twitches scare away most of the birds. Even so, something pecks out an eye before the body’s whole enough to crawl for shelter; and there will be necrosis at the extremities. The system triages itself, focuses on feet and legs and the architecture of locomotion. Hands can be replaced, if need be. Later.

And something else: a tiny shard of God, reprogrammed and wrapped in a crunchy encephalitis jacket. A patch, targeted to a specific part of the vampire brain: Portia processors, homesick for the pattern-matching wetware of the fusiform gyrus.

There’s no longer any light behind these eyes. The parasitic, self-reflective homunculus has been expunged. The system still has access to stored memories, though, and if there was sufficient cause it could certainly replay the awestruck words of the late Rakshi Sengupta.

Can you imagine what those fuckers could do if they could actually stand to be in the same room together?

An end to loneliness. By now, the system that was Daniel Brüks seethes with it. His is the blood of the covenant; it will be shed for many.

It hauls its broken, stiff-legged chassis to its feet—only an observer for now, but soon, perhaps, an ambassador. The resurrection walks east, toward the new world.

Valerie’s legacy goes along for the ride.

It’s been a while. Three editors, three family deaths, one near-fatal brush with flesh-eating disease. A felony conviction. A marriage.

Now this.

I’m not quite sure what “this” is, exactly—but for good or ill, I couldn’t have pulled it off without help. In fact I wouldn’t even be alive now without help. So first and foremost, let me acknowledge the contribution of one Caitlin Sweet. Echopraxia would not exist without her, because I would not exist without her; I would have died of necrotizing fasciitis on February 12, 2011. (Darwin Day. Seriously. Look it up.) As a perverse reward for saving my life, Caitlin got to endure endless hours in the shower, or in bed, or at restaurants, listening to me whinge endlessly about how this scene was too talky and that climax too contrived; she would then suggest some elegant solution that might have occurred to me eventually, but probably not before deadline. Her insights are golden. If their implementation sucks it’s my fault, not hers.

The first couple of chapters also had the benefit of being workshopped by two different groups of writers: those at Gibraltar Point (Michael Carr, Laurie Channer, John McDaid, Becky Maines, Elisabeth Mitchell, Dave Nickle, Janis O’Connor, and Rob Stauffer); and those at Cecil Street (Madeline Ashby, Jill Lum, Dave Nickle—again—Helen Rykens, Karl Schroeder, Sara Simmons, Michael Skeet, Doug Smith, Hugh Spencer, Dale Sproule, and Dr. Allan Weiss).

I’ve kept lists over the years, tried to document the various insights, references, and crazy-ass hallucinatory what-ifs that that informed the writing of this book. I’ve tried to keep track of those who sent me papers and those who actually wrote the damn things, those who made offhand remarks in blog posts or jabbed a finger at my chest while making some drunken point during barroom debate. I wanted to list everyone by the nature of their contribution: beta reader; scientific authority; infopipe; devil’s advocate.

For the most part, I couldn’t do it. There’s just too much overlap. All those superimposed colors turn the Venn diagram into a muddy gray disk. So, for the most part, I’ll have to fall back on alphabetical order when I thank Nick Alcock, Beverly Bambury, Hannu Bloomila, Andrew Buhr, Nancy Cerelli, Alexey Cheberda, Dr. Krystyna Chodorowksa, Jacob Cohen, Anna Davour, Alyx Dellamonica, Sibylle Eisbach, Jon Enerson, Val Grimm, Norm Haldeman, Thomas Hardman, Dr. Andrew Hessel, Keith Honeyborne, Seth Keiper, Dr. Ed Keller, Chris Knall, Leonid Korogodski, Do-Ming Lum, Dr. Matt McCormick, Danielle MacDonald, Chinedum Ofoegbu, Jesús Olmo, Chris Pepper, Janna Randina, Kelly Robson, Patrick “Bahumat” Rochefort, Dr. Kaj Sotala, Dr. Brad Templeton, and Rob Tucker. And some mysterious dude who only goes by the name “Random J.”

Some folks, however, went above and beyond in singular and specific ways. Dr. Dan Brooks ranted and challenged and acted as occasional traveling companion. Kristin Choffe did her best to teach me the essentials of DNA barcoding, although she couldn’t keep me from sucking at it. (She also fronted me a vial containing the refined DNA of a dozen plant and animal species, with which I washed out my mouth before submitting a cheek swab to the Department of Homeland Security.) Leona Lutterodt described God as a Process, which lit an LED in my brain. Dr. Deborah McLennan snuck me through the paywalls. Sheila Miguez pointed me to a plug-in that made it vastly easier to insert citations into Notes and References (I will understand if, after reading that section, you decide to hate her for the same reason). Ray Neilson kept me on my toes and kept my Linux box running. Mark Showell saw me working on a laptop that was literally held together with binder clips, and took pity. Cat Sparks moved me halfway around the world; she was the fulcrum that tipped the worst year of my life into the best.

Some of these people are meatspace friends; others are pixelpals. They’ve argued with me online and off, punched holes in whatever bits of Echopraxia leaked out during gestation, passed me countless references on everything from hominid genetics to machine consciousness to metal-eating bacteria. They are a small army but a very smart one, and despite my best efforts I’m probably forgetting some of them. I hope those I’ve neglected here will forgive me.

Howard Morhaim. After dealing with agents whose advice ran the gamut from Buy my book to I’ll only represent you if you write a near-future technothriller about a marine biologist, Howard told me to write what I was inspired to: selling it, he insisted, was his job. This might not be the most opportunistic attitude to adopt in a Darwinian marketplace, but man it was nice to run into someone who put the writing first for a change.