Echopraxia (46 page)

He knew it an instant before she moved—

—She's going to bite me—

—but the sharp stabbing pain bolted up his arm and her face hadn't moved a centimeter. He looked down, startled, at the twin puncture marks—only a centimeter apart—on his forearm. To the dual-punch biopsy gun in Valerie's hand; his own, he saw. From the field kit lying on the ground, flap open, vials and needles and surgical tools glinting in the firelight.

“Sun gives you problems,” Valerie said softly. “Too much radiation, not enough shielding.”

At Icarus,
he remembered.
When we thought we were burning you off the hull like a moth …

“But you're easy to fix.”

“Why?” Brüks asked, and didn't even have to say that much to know that she understood:

Why help
prey
?

Why help someone who tried to kill you?

Why aren't I dead already?

Why aren't we all?

“You bring us back,” Valerie said simply.

“To be slaves.”

She shrugged. “We eat you otherwise.”

We bring you back, then enslave you in self-defense
. But maybe she really did regard it as a good deal; given a choice between captivity and outright nonexistence, who would choose the latter?

I'm sorry,
he didn't say.

“Don't be,” she replied, as if he had. “
You
don't enslave us. Physics does. The chains
you
build—” Her fangs gleamed like little daggers in the firelight. “We break them soon.”

“I thought you already had.”

Rising moonlight lit her eyes for a moment as she shook her head. “The Glitch still works. I see the cross and a part of me dies.”

“A par—a part you
made
.”
Of course. Of
course
. They're parallel processors, after all …

The truth dawned on him like daylight: a
custom cache,
a sacrificial homunculus brought into existence and
isolated,
to suffer the agony of the cross while more vital threads of cognition wound about it like a stream around a stone. Valerie didn't avoid the seizures at all; she—encysted them, and carried on.

He wondered how long she'd been able to do that.

“Just a workaround,” she said. “Need to undo the wiring.”

Not to go up against the roaches, of course.
That
war was already as good as over, even though the losing side didn't know it yet. This creature with a dozen simultaneous entities in her head, this prehistoric post-Human, could speak so openly—without animosity, or resentment, or the slightest concern for the impact one Daniel Brüks might have on her revolution—because baseline Humanity was already beneath her notice. Valerie and her kind were perfectly capable of shrugging off Human oppression
without
breaking their chains; they needed their arms free to pick on things their own size.

“You are not so small as you think,” she said, reading him. “You might be bigger than all of us.”

Brüks shook his head. “We're not. If I've learned
anything
these—”

Emergent complexity,
he realized.
That's what she means.

A neuron didn't know whether it fired in response to a scent or a symphony. Brain cells weren't intelligent; only brains were. And brain cells weren't even the lower limit. The origins of thought were buried so deep they predated multicellular life itself: neurotransmitters in choanoflagellates, potassium ion gates in
Monosiga
.

I am a colony of microbes talking to itself,
Brüks reflected.

Who knew what metaprocesses might emerge when Heaven and ConSensus wired enough brains together, dropped internode latency close enough to zero? Who knew what metaprocesses already had? Something that might make Bicameral hives look as rudimentary as the nervous system of a sea anemone.

Maybe the Singularity already happened and its components just don't know it yet
.

“They never will,” Valerie told him. “Neurons only speak when spoken to; they don't know why.”

He shook his head. “Even if something is—coalescing out there, it's left me behind. I'm not wired in. I'm not even augged.”

“ConSensus is one interface. There are others.”

Echopraxia,
he wondered.

But it didn't matter. He was still Daniel Brüks, the human coelacanth: lurking at the outskirts of evolution, unchanged and unchangeable while the world moved on. Enlightenment was enough for him. He wanted no part of transfiguration.

I will stay here while the tables turn and fires burn out. I will stand still while humanity turns into something unrecognizable, or dies trying. I will see what rises in its place.

Either way, I am witnessing the end of my species.

Valerie watched him from the darkness.
These chains you build—we break them soon.

“I wish we hadn't needed them,” he admitted softly. “I wish we could have brought you back without Crucifix Glitches or Divide and Conquer or any of those damn
chains
. Maybe we could have dialed down your predatory instincts, fixed the protocadherin deficit. Made you more…”

“Like you,” she finished.

He opened his mouth, found he had nothing to say. It didn't matter whether shackles were built of genes or iron, whether you installed them after birth or before conception. Chains were chains, no matter where you put them. No matter whether they were forged by intent or evolution.

Maybe we should have just left you extinct. Built something friendlier, from scratch
.

“You need your monsters,” she said simply.

He shook his head. “You're just too—complicated. Everything's linked to everything else. Fix the Crucifix Glitch, you lose your pattern-matching skills. Make you less antisocial, who knows what else goes away? We didn't dare change you too
much
.”

Valerie hissed softly, clicked her teeth. “You need monsters so you can defeat them. No great
victory
in slaughtering a lamb.”

“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.

 

 

 

THE CLOTHES HAVE NO EMPEROR.

—STEWART ELLIOTT GUTHRIE

NOW HE WAS
alone. 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 linchpin 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 solar 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?”