Echopraxia (47 page)

You know she wasn't talking about you
.

He knew.

He found himself on the edge of a cliff, high above the desert. The ruined monastery shimmered in the heat but he felt nothing. He seemed a million miles away, as though watching the world unfold through distant cameras.
You have to crank the amplitude,
his tormentor said.
It's the only way you'll feel anything. You have to increase the gain.

But Brüks was onto 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.

 

POSTSCRIPT

An End to Loneliness

THE NEW TESTAMENT'S CLEAR WITNESS IS TO THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY, NOT THE MIGRATION OF THE SOUL.

—N. T. WRIGHT

THERE'S NOT MUCH
to 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 is 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.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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 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 a 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, Danielle MacDonald, Dr. Matt McCormick, 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 techno-thriller 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.

Ironically, my next novel is most likely going to be a near-future techno-thriller about a marine biologist.

 

NOTES AND REFERENCES

I am naked as I type this.

I was naked writing the whole damn book.

I aspire to a certain degree of discomfort in my writing, on the principle that if you never risk a face-plant you never go anywhere new. And if there's one surefire way to get me out of my comfort zone, it's the challenge of taking invisible omnipotent sky fairies seriously enough to incorporate into a hard SF novel. The phrase “faith-based hard SF” may, in fact, be the ultimate oxymoron—Clarke's Third notwithstanding—which means that
Echopraxia
could be my biggest face-plant since
β
ehemoth
(especially in the wake of
Blindsight,
which continues to surprise with all the love it's garnered over the years). And thanks to a lack of empirical evidence (as of this writing, anyway) for the existence of deities, I can't even fall back on my usual strategy of shielding my central claims behind papers from
Nature
.

I can try to shield everything else there, though. Perhaps that will do.

PSY-OPS AND THE CONSCIOUSNESS GLITCH

I'm not dwelling too much on consciousness this time around—I pretty much shot my load on that subject with
Blindsight
—except to note in passing that the then-radical notion of consciousness-as-nonadaptive-side-effect has started appearing in the literature,
1
and that more and more “conscious” activities (including math!
2
) are turning out to be nonconscious after all
3
,
4
,
5
(though holdouts remain
6
).

One fascinating exception informs Keith Honeyborne's report on “Prismatics,” who nearly drown themselves to achieve a heightened state of awareness. The premise of Ezequiel Morsella's PRISM model
7
,
8
is that consciousness originally evolved for the delightfully mundane purpose of mediating conflicting motor commands to the skeletal muscles. (I have to point out that exactly the same sort of conflict—the impulse to withdraw one's hand from a painful stimulus, versus the knowledge that you'll die if you act on that impulse—was exactly how the Bene Gesserit assessed whether Paul Atreides qualified as “Human” during their
gom jabbar
test in Frank Herbert's
Dune.
)

Everything else comes down to tricks and glitches. The subliminal “gang signs” Valerie programmed onto the
Crown
's bulkheads seem a logical (if elaborate) extension of the newborn field of optogenetics.
9
The “sensed presence” Dan Brüks and Lianna Lutterodt experienced in the attic results from a hack on the temporoparietal junction that screws up the brain's body map
10
,
11
(basically, the part of your brain that keeps track of your body parts gets kicked in the side and registers a duplicate set of body parts off-center). Sengupta's induced misiphonia is a condition in which relatively innocuous sounds—a slurp, a hiccup—are enough to provoke violent rage.
12
All of this
was
inflicted in the service of education, though: as Brüks points out, fear promotes memory formation.
13
,
14

Fear and belief can also kill you,
15
a trick used to good effect in certain religious practices.
16
And in case you were wondering what was up with the fusiform gyrus there at the end (a couple of my beta readers did), it's the structure containing the face-recognition circuitry
17
we tweaked to amp up the mutual-agonism response in vampires. It's part of the same circuitry that evolved to let us see faces in the clouds, involved—once again—in the evolution of our religious impulse (see below).

The brain's habit of literalizing metaphors—the tendency to regard people as having “warmer” personalities when you happen to be holding a mug of coffee, the Bicamerals' use of hand-washing to mitigate feelings of guilt and uncertainty—is also an established neurological fact.
18

I pulled “induced thanoparorasis” out of my ass. It's a cool idea, though, huh?

UNDEAD UPDATE

Back in
Blindsight
I laid out a fair bit of groundwork on the biology and evolution of vampires. I'm not going to revisit that here (you can check out FizerPharm's stockholder presentation
19
if you need a refresher), except for the citation in
Blindsight
implying that female vampires were impossible (the gene responsible for their obligate primatovory being located on the Y chromosome
20
). More recent work by Cheberda et al have established a more general protocadherin dysfunction on both X and Y chromosomes,
21
resolving this inadvertent paradox.

At any rate, zombies are more relevant to the current tale. Both surgical and viral varieties appear in
Echopraxia
; the surgically induced military model is essentially the “p-zombie” favored by philosophers
22
; it already got a workout back in
Blindsight
. Examples of the viral model would include victims of the Pakistan pandemic: “civilian hordes reduced to walking brain stems by a few kilobytes of weaponized code drawn to the telltale biochemistry of conscious thought.”