Echopraxia

 

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For the BUG.
Who saved my life.

 

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Epigraphs

Illustration

Prelude

Primitive

Parasite

Prey

Predator

Prophet

Postscript

Acknowledgments

Notes and References

Tor Books by Peter Watts

Copyright

 

WE DO NOT DESTROY RELIGION BY DESTROYING SUPERSTITION.

—CICERO

TO CONCENTRATE ON HEAVEN IS TO CREATE HELL.

—TOM ROBBINS

 

We climbed this hill. Each step up we could see farther, so of course we kept going. Now we're at the top. Science has been at the top for a few centuries now. And we look out across the plain and we see this other tribe dancing around above the clouds, even higher than we are. Maybe it's a mirage, maybe it's a trick. Or maybe they just climbed a higher peak we can't see because the clouds are blocking the view. So we head off to find out—but every step takes us downhill. No matter what direction we head, we can't move off our peak without losing our vantage point. So we climb back up again. We're trapped on a local maximum.

But what if there
is
a higher peak out there, way across the plain? The only way to get there is to bite the bullet, come down off our foothill and trudge along the riverbed until we finally start going uphill again. And it's only then you realize: Hey, this mountain reaches
way
higher than that foothill we were on before, and we can see so much better from up here.

But you can't get there unless you leave behind all the tools that made you so successful in the first place. You have to take that first step downhill.

—Dr. Lianna Lutterodt, “Faith and the Fitness Landscape,”
In Conversation,
2091

 

PRELUDE

IT IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE SYSTEMATICALLY TO CONSTITUTE A NATURAL MORAL LAW. NATURE HAS NO PRINCIPLES. SHE FURNISHES US WITH NO REASON TO BELIEVE THAT HUMAN LIFE IS TO BE RESPECTED. NATURE, IN HER INDIFFERENCE, MAKES NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN GOOD AND EVIL.

—ANATOLE FRANCE

A WHITE ROOM,
innocent of shadow or topography. No angles: that's crucial. No corners or intrusions of furniture, no directional lighting, no geometries of light and shadow whose intersection, from any viewpoint, might call forth the Sign of the Cross. The walls—wall, rather—was a single curved surface, softly bioluminescent, a spheroid enclosure flattened at the bottom in grudging deference to biped convention. It was a giant womb three meters across, right down to the whimpering thing curled up on the floor.

A womb, with all the blood on the outside.

Her name was Sachita Bhar and all that blood was in her head, too. By now they'd killed the cameras just like everything else but there was no way to take back the images from those first moments: the lounge, the Histo lab, even the
broom closet
for chrissakes, a grungy little cubby on the third floor where Gregor had hidden. Sachie hadn't been watching when Gregor had been found. She'd been flipping through the channels, frantically scanning for life and finding only the dead, their insides all out now. By the time she'd cycled through to the closet feed the monsters had already been and gone.

Gregor, who was in love with that stupid pet ferret of his. She'd shared an elevator with him this morning. She remembered the stripes on his shirt. Otherwise she'd have had no idea what to call the mess in the closet.

She'd seen some fraction of the carnage before the cameras went down: friends and colleagues and rivals cut down without remorse or favoritism, their gutted remains sprawled across lab benches and workstations and toilet stalls. And with all those feeds running through the implants in her head—with all her access to all that ubiquitous surveillance—Sachita Bhar had not caught so much as a glimpse of the creatures who'd done this. Shadows, at most. A flicker of darkness cast by some solitary stalker from a blind spot in the camera's eye. They'd done it all without ever being seen, without ever seeing each
other
.

They'd always been kept isolated. For their own good, of course: stick two vampires in the same room and their own hardwired territoriality would put them at each other's throats in an instant. And yet they were working together, somehow. At least half a dozen, confined, incommunicado, acting in sudden precise concert. They'd done it all without ever meeting face-to-face—and even at the height of the slaughter, in those last moments before the cameras died, they had remained invisible. The whole massacre had happened from the corner of Sachie's eye.

How did they do it? How did they survive the angles?

Someone else might have enjoyed the irony; she hid in a refuge for monsters, one of the few places in the whole damn building where they could open their eyes without risking a death sentence. Right angles were
verboten
here. This was where Achilles' heels were put to the test, a cross-free zone where geometry was precisely controlled and neurological leashes optimized. Elsewhere, civilized geometry threatened on all sides: tabletops, windowpanes, a million intersections of appliance and architecture just waiting for the right viewpoint to send vampires into convulsions. Those monsters wouldn't—

—
shouldn't
—

—last an hour out there without the antiEuclideans that suppressed the Crucifix Glitch. Only here, in the white womb—where poor, stupid Sachita Bhar had run when the lights went out—could they dare to open unprotected eyes.

And now one of them was in here with her.

She couldn't see it. Her own eyes were shut, squeezed tight against the butchery flash-burned into her head. She heard no sound but the endless animal keening in her own throat. But something drank a little of the light falling on her face. The swirling red darkness inside her eyelids dimmed some infinitesimal, telltale fraction, and she
knew
.

“Hello,” it said.

She opened her eyes. It was one of the females: Valerie, they'd named her, after some departmental chairman who'd retired the year before. Valerie the Vampire.

Valerie's eyes red-shifted the light and threw it back at her, blood-orange stars in a face flushed with aftermath. She towered over Sachie like an insectile statue, motionless, even her breathing imperceptible. Moments from death and with nothing better to do, some subroutine in Sachie's head ticked off the morphometrics: such inhumanly long limbs, the attenuate heat-dissipating allometry of a metabolic engine running
hot
. Subtly jutting mandible, lupine as a hominid's could be, to hold all those teeth. Stupid turquoise smock, smart-paper/telemetry composite weave: Valerie must have been scheduled for physio work today. Ruddy complexion, the bloody flash-flood vasodilation of the predator in hunting mode. And the
eyes,
those terrifying luminous pinpoints—

Finally it registered:
Contracted pupils.

She's not on Auntie U …

Suddenly Sachie's cross was out, last-ditch kill switch, the talisman everyone got on day one along with their ID: empirically tested, proven in the crunch, redeemed by science after uncounted centuries spent slumming as a religious fetish. Sachie held it up with sudden desperate bravado, thumbed the stud. Spring-loaded extensions shot from each tip and her little pocket totem was suddenly a meter on a side.

Thirty degrees of visual arc, Sachie. Maybe forty for the tough ones. Make sure it's perpendicular to line of sight, the angles only work when they're close to ninety degrees, but once this little baby covers enough arc the visual cortex fries like a circuit in a shitstorm …

Greg's words.

Valerie cocked her head and studied the artifact. Any second now, Sachie knew, this nightmare creature would collapse in a twitching mass of tetany and shorting synapses. That wasn't faith; it was
neurology
.

The monster leaned close, and didn't even shiver. Sachita Bhar pissed herself.

“
Please,
” she sobbed. The vampire said nothing.

Words flooded out: “I'm
sorry,
I was never really part of it, you know, I'm just a research associate, I'm just doing it for my degree, that's all, I know it's wrong, I know it's like, like
slavery
almost, I know that and it's a shitty system, it's a
shitty
thing we did to you but it wasn't really
me,
do you understand? I didn't make
any
of those decisions, I just came in afterward, I'm barely involved, it was just for my
degree
. And I—I can understand how you must feel, I can understand why you'd hate us, I would too probably but please, oh
please,
I'm just … I'm just a
student
…”

After a while, still alive, she dared to look up again. Valerie was staring at some point just to the left and a thousand light-years away. She seemed distracted. But then they always seemed distracted, their minds running a dozen parallel threads simultaneously, a dozen perceptual realities, each every bit as
real
as the one mere humans occupied.

Valerie cocked her head as if listening to faint music. She almost smiled.

“Please…,” Sachie whispered.

“Not angry,” Valerie said. “Don't want revenge. You don't matter.”

“You don't—but…” Bodies. Blood. A building full of corpses and the monsters who'd made them. “What
do
you want, then? Anything, please, I'll—”

“Want you to imagine something: Christ on the Cross.”

And of course, once the image had been incanted it was impossible
not
to imagine. Sachita Bhar had a few moments to wonder at the sudden spasms seizing her limbs, at the way her jaw locked into startling dislocation, at the feel of a thousand blood-hot strokes exploding like pinpricks across the back of her skull. She tried to close her eyes but it doesn't matter what kind of light falls on the retina, that's not
vision
. The mind generates its own images, much farther upstream, and there's no way to shut those out.