Echopraxia (3 page)

—but off to the right, directly over the monastery itself, a puff of dark brown smoke roiled and drifted and dissipated in the lowering light.

The building didn't seem to be damaged, though. At least, none of the façades he could see.

What are they doing over there?

Physics, officially. Cosmology. High-energy stuff. But it was all supposed to be theoretical; as far as Brüks knew the Bicameral Order didn't perform actual experiments. Of course, hardly anyone did, these days. It was machines that scanned the heavens, machines that probed the space between atoms, machines that asked the questions and designed the experiments to answer them. All that was left for mere meat, apparently, was navel-gazing: to sit in the desert and contemplate whatever answers those machines served up. Although most still preferred to call it
analysis
.

A hive mind that spoke in tongues: that was how the Bicamerals did it, supposedly. Some kind of bioradio in their heads, a communal corpus callosum: electrons jiggling around in microtubules, some kind of quantum-entanglement thing. Completely organic to get around the ban on B2B interfaces. A spigot that poured many minds into one on command. They flowed together and called down the Rapture, rolled around the floor and drooled and ululated while their acolytes took notes, and somehow they ended up rewriting the Amplituhedron.

There was supposed to be some rational explanation to justify the mumbo jumbo. Left-hemisphere pattern-matching subroutines amped beyond recognition; the buggy wetware that made you see faces in clouds or God's wrath in thunderstorms, tweaked to walk some fine line between insight and pareidolia. Apparently there were fundamental insights to be harvested along that razor's edge, patterns that only the Bicamerals could distinguish from hallucination. That was the story, anyway. It sounded like utter bullshit to Brüks.

Still, you couldn't argue with the Nobels.

Maybe they had some kind of particle accelerator over there after all. They had to be doing
something
that sucked a lot of energy; nobody used an industrial vortex engine to run kitchen appliances.

From behind, the metallic tinkle of displaced instruments. Brüks turned.

His scasers lay in the dirt. On the bench above them the gutted snake watched him upside down from its dissecting tray, forked tongue flickering.

Nerves,
Brüks told himself.

The discarded carcass shivered on its back, as if the gash down its belly had let in the cold. Flaps of tissue rippled along either edge of that wound, a slow peristaltic wave undulating along the length of the body.

Galvanic skin response. That's all it is.

The snake's head lurched up over the edge of the tray. Glassy, unblinking eyes looked this way and that. The tongue, red-black, black-red, tasted the air.

The animal crawled from the pan.

It wasn't having an easy time of it. It kept trying to roll and crawl on its belly but it didn't
have
a belly, not anymore. The ventral scales that would have pushed it along, the muscles beneath had been sliced apart, every one. And so the creature would manage a half twist every now and then, and fail, and resort to crawling on its back: eyes wide, tongue flicking, insides emptied.

The snake reached the edge of the bench, feebly wavered a moment, dropped into the dust. Brüks's boot came down on its head. He ground it deep against the rocky soil until there was nothing left but a moist sticky clot in the dirt. The rest of the creature writhed, its muscles jumping to the beat of nerves jammed with noise and no signal. But at least there was nothing left that could possibly please-God
feel
.

Reptiles were not especially fragile creatures. More than once Brüks had found rattlesnakes on the road hours from the nearest vehicle, spines crushed, fangs shattered, heads reduced to bloody paste—still moving, still crawling for the ditch. The kill sack was supposed to prevent that kind of protracted agony. You turned the animal's own metabolism against it, let lungs and capillaries carry the poison to every cell of every tissue, bringing a quick and painless and—most of all—a
complete
death, so that it would not wake up and fucking
look
at you, and try to
escape,
an hour after you'd scraped its insides away.

Of course, there were zombies in the world now. Vampires, too, for that matter. But the twenty-first century's undead were strictly Human. There was no reason anyone would want to build a zombie snake. This had to be another contamination artifact; some accidental genetic hack that shut down the MS receptor sites, maybe triggered a rogue suite of motor commands. Had to be.

Still.

He'd really hoped the ghosts would be easier to handle out here.

*   *   *

There weren't nearly as many ghosts in the desert, for one thing. For another, none of them were human. Sometimes he wished he could feel half as much for the thousands of
people
he'd killed.

Of course, basic biology explained that particular double standard as well. He hadn't had to face any of his human victims, hadn't looked into their eyes, hadn't been there when they'd died. The gut was not a long-range organ. Its grasp of culpability degraded exponentially with distance; there'd been so many arcane degrees separating the actions of Daniel Brüks from their consequences that conscience itself entered the realm of pure theory. Besides, he'd hardly acted alone; the guilt diffused across the whole team. And their intentions, at least, had been beyond reproach.

Nobody had blamed them, not out loud, not really. Not at first. You don't pass judgment on the unwitting hammer used to bash in someone's skull. Brüks's work had been perverted by others intent on bloodshed; the guilt was theirs, not his. But those perpetrators remained uncaught and unpunished, and so many had needed closure in the meantime. And the distance between
How could they
and
How could you let them
was so much smaller than Brüks had ever imagined.

No charges had been pressed. It wasn't even enough to revoke his tenure. As it turned out, it was only enough to wear out his welcome on campus.

Nature, though. Nature always welcomed him. She passed no judgments, didn't care about right or wrong, guilt or innocence. She only cared about what worked and what didn't. She welcomed everyone with the same egalitarian indifference. You just had to play by her rules, and expect no mercy if things didn't go your way.

And so Dan Brüks had put in for sabbatical and filed his agenda, and headed into the field. He'd left behind his sampling drones and artificial insects, packed no autonomous tech to rub his nose in the obsolescence of human labor. A few had watched him go, with relief; others kept their eyes on the sky. He left them, too. His colleagues would forgive him, or they wouldn't. The aliens would return, or they wouldn't. But Nature would never turn him away. And even in a world where every last sliver of natural habitat was under siege, there was no shortage of deserts. They'd been growing like slow cancer for a hundred years or more.

Daniel Brüks would go into the welcoming desert, and kill whatever he found there.

*   *   *

He opened his eyes to the soft red glow of panicking machinery. A third of the network had just died in his sleep. Five more traps went down as he watched: a booster station, suddenly offlined. Twenty-two beeped plaintively a moment later—proximate heat trace, big, man-size even—and dropped off the map.

Instantly awake, Brüks played the logs. The network was going down from west to east, each dead node another footfall in a growing trail of dark ragged footprints stomping across the valley.

Heading directly for him.

He pulled up the satcam thermals. The remains of the old 380 ran like a thin vein along the northern perimeter, yesterday's stale sunshine seeping from cracked asphalt. Diaphanous thermals and microclimatic hot spots, dying since nightfall, flickered at the threshold of visibility. Nothing else but the yellow nimbus of his own tent at center stage.

Twenty-one reported sudden warmth, and disappeared.

Cameras lurked here and there along the traplines. Brüks had never found much use for them but they'd come bundled as part of the package. One sat on a booster that happened to be line of sight to number nineteen. He brought it up: StarlAmp painted the nighttime desert in blues and whites, a surrealistic moonscape full of contrast. Brüks panned the view—

—and almost missed it: a slither of motion from stage right, an amplified blur. Something that moved faster than anything Human had any right to. The camera was dead before Nineteen even felt the heat.

The booster went down. Another dozen feeds died in an instant. Brüks barely noticed. He was staring at that last frozen frame, feeling his gut clench and his bowels turn to ice.

Faster than a man, and so much less. And just a little bit
colder
inside.

The field sensors weren't sensitive enough to register that difference, of course. To see the truth from heat signatures alone you'd need to look inside the very head of your target, to squint until you could see deltas of maybe a tenth of a degree. You'd look at the hippocampus, and see that it was dark. You'd listen to the prefrontal cortex, and hear that it was silent. And then maybe you'd notice all that extra wiring, the force-grown neural lattices connecting midbrain to motor strip, the high-speed expressways bypassing the anterior cingulate gyrus—and those extra ganglia clinging like tumors to the visual pathways, fishing endlessly for the telltale neural signatures of
seek
and
destroy
.

It would be a lot easier to spot those differences in visible light: Just look into the eyes, and see nothing at all looking back. Of course, if it ever got that close you'd be dead already. It wouldn't leave you time to beg. It wouldn't even understand your pleas. It would simply kill you, if that's what it had been told to do, more efficiently than any conscious being because there was nothing left to get in the way: no second thoughts, no pulled punches, not even the basic glucose-sucking awareness of its own existence. It was stripped down to pure reptile, and it was
dedicated
.

Less than a kilometer away now.

Something inside Daniel Brüks split down the middle. One half clamped its hands over its ears and denied everything—
what the fuck why would anyone must be some kind of mistake—
but the other remembered the universal human fondness for scapegoats, the thousands who'd died thanks to dumb ol' Backdoor Brüks, the odds that at least one of those victims might have been survived by next of kin with the resources to set a military-grade zombie on his trail.

How could they.

How could you
let
them …

The ATB hissed beneath him as its tires inhaled. The charge cord pulled him briefly off balance before tearing free. He plunged through a gap in the trees and down the scree, skidding sideways: hit the base of the slope and the desert spun around him, slimy and frictionless. The stream nearly took him out right there. Brüks fought for control as the bike one-eightied, but those marvelous marshmallow tires kept him miraculously upright. Then he was racing east across the fractured valley floor.

Sagebrush tore at him as he passed. He cursed his own blindness; these days, no self-respecting grad student would be caught dead in the field without rattlesnake receptors in their eyes. But Brüks was an old man, baseline, night-blind. He didn't even dare use the headlamp. So he hurtled through the night, smashing through petrified shrubs, bucking over unseen outcroppings of bedrock. He fumbled one-handed through the bike's saddlebags, came up with the gogs, slapped them over his eyes. The desert sprang into view, green and grainy.

0247
, the goggles told him from the corner of his eye. Three hours to sunrise. He tried pinging his network but if any part of it remained alive, it was out of range. He wondered if the zombie had made it to camp yet. He wondered how close it had come to catching him.

Doesn't matter. Can't catch me now, motherfucker. Not on foot. Not even undead. You can kiss my ass good-bye.

Then he checked the charge gauge and his stomach dropped away all over again.

Cloudy skies. An old battery, a year past its best-before. A charging blanket that hadn't been cleaned in a month.

The ATB had ten kilometers in it. Fifteen, tops.

He braked and brought it around in a spray of dirt. His own trail extended behind him, an unmistakable line of intermittent carnage wrought upon the desert floor: broken plants, sun-cracked tiles of ancient lakebed crushed in passing. He was running but he wasn't hiding. As long as he stayed on the valley floor, they'd be able to track him.

Who, exactly?

He switched from StarlAmp to infrared, zoomed the view.

That
.

A hot tiny spark leapt against a distant slope, right about where his camp would be.

Closer, though. And closing fast. That thing could
run
.

Brüks swung the bike around and kicked it back into gear. He almost didn't notice the second spark sweeping across his field of vision, it was so faint.

He saw the third clearly enough, though. And the fourth. Too distant to make out shapes on thermal, but all hot as humans. All closing.

Five, six, seven …

Shit
.

They were fanned out along the valley as far as he could see.

What did I
do
, what did I
do
, don't they know it was an
accident
? It wasn't even
me
, for chrissakes, I didn't kill
anyone
, I just—left the door open …

Ten kilometers. Then they'd be on him like ravenous wolves.