Питер Уоттс - Gut Feelings

The soundproofing must be really good.

She storms back in like a green-eyed thundercloud, tablet still in one hand, a small brown bag in the other. She thrusts it at him. “They want a stool sample.”

“What? Why?” He looks inside. “This is someone’s lunch box.”

“You think we keep fecal kits in the broom closet? We’re getting some droned over from Staples, but deliveries are backed up. We’re making do in the meantime.”

“What’s the hurry?”

She hesitates. Cocks her head, as though listening to — listening for — some inner voice. “I have to remind, you, Marius, this whole no-police thing is contingent on your co-operation.”

The penny drops.

“I’m — I’m not the only one.” He tries the words out, feels the truth of them.

Hancock’s eyes flicker.

“I bet I’m not even the first….”

Her shoulders shift. Something in her posture says Fuck it .

“You’re the fourth. That I know of.”

“ Shit .”

“First civilian, though. For whatever that’s worth.”

“Civilian?”

“Couple of hours ago some code monkey up in ATAP just — went crazy. Started attacking people, hitting anything that moved, a few things that didn’t. Wild, undirected rage.” She hesitates, looks around as if expecting something to happen. Nothing does. “Security tazed him and dragged him off, and I don’t know if anyone’s even talked to him yet. Half-hour later, someone else over in Stroop. Same thing.”

“Office environment,” Ghazali says.

She nods.

“Surrounded by letterheads and screensavers and shit.”

“We didn’t make that connection. Can’t swing a cat without hitting a logo, nobody — and then you happened to wander by outside, and your rage was anything but undirected . And someone did make the connection.”

“This Marrano dude.”

“Had a hunch. Tried it out.”

“Without telling you?”

“Said he had to seize the moment. Didn’t want me chickening out, flipping the pad over. Thought I’d ruin the experiment .” She snorts softly, adopts some nasal sing-song Marrano-voice: “ I turned it right off after a couple of seconds, you were never in any danger… ”

Ghazali shakes his head. “Asshole.”

“Yeah.” She offers up a bitter smile, points it at the birds-eye in the corner. “Real management material.”

He looks back to the bag in his hand. “He thinks it’s something I ate?”

“Oh, that’s not Marrano. That’s just some algorithm.”

“An algorithm thinks it’s— ”

“How should I know?”

“You’re the — parameterization specialist.”

“Marius.” She takes a breath. “The thing about deep-learning networks is, they’re — opaque. Too many layers. We train them on these huge data sets and they always seem to serve up the right answers, but nobody really knows how, exactly.”

“So an algo wants me to shit into someone’s Tupperware. Because that’ll explain why the Google logo suddenly turns me into…”

Hancock spreads her hands. “Honestly, I don’t know. They don’t tell me anything.”

“And you’re good with that?”

She doesn’t answer.

“You could always try finding out for yourself.” He taps imaginary smart specs at his temple. “Unless, of course, Marrano would disapprove…”

Something hardens in her expression. “Actually, I haven’t heard a peep from that asshole since I came back in here.”

Beyond the door, a murmur of low worried voices. The sound of large objects being moved.

Ghazali smiles grimly. “I think he has other things on his mind.”

“Something you ate. Start with that.”

She reawakens the tablet (Ghazali flinches, but the logo doesn’t reappear), scrolls back through the time-series. “Just before you snapped. This thing here, this nerve, lit up.”

He leans in, squints at a translucent 3D image of his own brain. A strand of bright tinsel hangs off the bottom and fades to black. Hancock taps it, brings up a label.

“Vagus nerve,” she says. “Connects the gut brain to the head brain.”

“Gut brain?”

“Neural net wrapped around the GI tract. Smart as a cat, if you go by the synapse count.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Says here it’s programmed by gut flor — huh. You can literally change someone’s personality with a fecal transplant. Even cure bipolar disorder.” Hancock’s green eyes flicker madly back and forth: tiny snowstorms swirl across their irises. She’s immersed in rapid-fire AR now: “Gut bugs — yeah, gut bugs influence memory formation. Send neuroinhibitors to the prefrontal cortex and amyg — ooh, Marius. The amygdala. Fear. Anger. All that nasty id stuff. D’you know you can increase aggression by tweaking gut bacteria?”

I do now. The sting of raw knuckles reawakens at the thought.

“Hey Marius, know what else the cortex and the amygdala have in common? Pattern-matching macros. Colors. Shapes.” Maybe she’s not even Selma Hancock any more, he muses. Maybe she’s just a vessel now, a mouthpiece for some all-seeing all-knowing entity that spans the globe in a web of correlates and false-positives. “So gut bugs talk to gut brain. Gut brain talks to head brain. Gut bugs program head brain. But — ” She fixes him with a bright manic data-stare. “What programs gut brain? Weaponized yoghurt? Chicken satay ?”

“That’s bullshit. How would gut bugs even know what Google looks like?”

“ Brain knows what Google looks like. They spent millions making sure your brain jizzes out its own special cocktail whenever it sees that special Fisher-Price template. You ask me, bugs’re keying on the cocktail.”

Another thump on the window. Big one , Ghazali thinks. Seagull at the very least.

“GTA database.” Hancock lifts her hands. Her fingers tap the air. “Face morphometrics associated with felony assault in proximity to Google iconography, stratified Voronoi. Cross with faces capped entering public eating establishments over the past, say — what’s a reasonable incubation period?”

Ghazali shrugs. “No idea.”

“Two weeks,” Hancock says — “Two weeks is good,” — and wiggles her fingers as though casting a spell. “Euler correlation.”

Amen , he thinks.

“Run,” she says, and lowers her arms. Her eyes dim.

“Wouldn’t your algos have done this already?” Ghazali wonders.

“If someone told them to. They wouldn’t notice it on their own unless you got up over 80, 90 incidents.”

“Seems like kind of a blind spot.”

She shrugs. “Our sample sizes run into the billions. Anything that shows up in less than a hundred’s almost bound to be an artifact. I’m pushing it as it is. Ah.” Her eyes reignite. “There we go.”

It took less than ten seconds , he realizes.

“Twenty more cases in the past hour.” She grunts. “Yeah, there you are. You do like eating out of Rosa’s, don’t you?”

“Yeah. So?”

“So did at least three other hits. Wonder if they had the satay.”

“I know the Rosa guys. They wouldn’t — ”

“Wouldn’t what, Marius?”

“They’re just some mom’n’pop operation that — ”

“Mom’s wife has a friend with a Master’s in plasmid vector architecture, did you know that?”

“You’ve gotta be kidding.”

“Well, regional distributor, anyway.” She grunts. “Both within the past three days, though. Too recent. We need Patient Zero. Maybe two weeks wasn’t long enough. Or maybe — ”

It’s not a bird this time. It crashes low into the window with a crack, births a jagged spiderweb across the pane. Ghazali jumps. The window flickers around the damage, a small patch of heat lightning in an overcast sky.