Echopraxia (21 page)

Even after fourteen years,
Theseus
was all over it.

The shock, the disbelief in the wake of Firefall. Riots in every color of the rainbow: terrified hordes fleeing the coming apocalypse, not knowing which way to run; demonstrations against movers and shakers who'd always known more than they let on; looters with short attention spans, thinking only of all that swag left undefended while panicked populations hid under their beds or lashed back against uniforms whose guns and drones and area-denial weaponry were finally, after uncounted decades of casual and brutal unaccountability, just not up to the challenge. Tens of thousands returning from Heaven, fearful of new threats from the real world. Millions more fleeing
into
it, for pretty much the same reason.

And then,
Theseus
: the Mother Of All Megaprojects. A mission, a metaphor, a symbol of a shattered world reunited against the common threat. The brave souls who manned her, that small select force standing for Humanity against the cosmos. Amanda Bates, champion of countless WestHem campaigns: her skills so broad, her talents so highly classified that no one had even heard of her before her ascension to the Dream Team. Lisa Takamatsu, Nobel laureate, linguist, and den mother to a half-dozen separate personalities living in her own head. Jukka Sarasti, the noble vampire, the lion who'd lain down with lambs and was ready to give his life on their behalf. Siri Keeton, synthesist, ambassador to ambassadors, bridge between—

Wait a second—
Siri?

He'd heard that name before. He sifted through dusty old memories laid down before the upgrade. Bulletins and biography washed over them in the meantime: Siri Keeton, synthesist, top of a field consisting exclusively of people at the top of their field. Possessed by demons at the age of six, some convulsive virus straight out of the Middle Ages that lit up his brain with electrical storms. It would have killed him outright if radical surgery hadn't snatched him back from the brink, patched him up, left him scarred and scared and possessed of something altogether new: a fierce never-say-die dedication to beating the odds, the world, to beating his own mutinous brain into submission and
getting the job done,
all the way out to the very edge of the solar system and beyond.

(
Siri's not exactly baseline himself, actually…)

Almost nothing about his home life. No home vids, no leaked grade-school psych work-ups. An only child, apparently. Mother not mentioned at all, father left unnamed, a shadowy background figure that refused to come into focus except for one passing reference in
TimeSpace
:

… owes his single-minded pursuit of personal goals as much to his childhood battle with epilepsy as to his upbringing as a soldier's son …

Brüks turned the words over in his head, searching for coincidence.

“Yah Colonel Carnage had to go out and get his baby almost killed don'tcha know. Before he was even born.”

The low gravity was no friend; Brüks jumped so high he cracked his head on the ceiling.

“
Je-
sus!” He pulled back the hood. Sengupta appeared between the interface dissolving in his head and the backup resurrecting on the bulkhead behind her.
I have got to figure out the privacy settings on this thing,
Brüks told himself. Not that they'd keep her from looking over his shoulder if she really wanted to, he supposed.

“Where did
you
come from?”

“I've been here all along five minutes at least.”

“Well
say
something next time. Announce yourself.” He rubbed the sore spot on his head. “What are you doing here anyway?”

Sengupta smacked her lips and cast sidelong eyes at her tent. “Hunting a dead man.”

I am the only meat sack on this whole damn ship who isn't some kind of predator.
“Hunting what?” One of the zombies?

“Not
on board
I mean like you”—snapping her fingers at the ConSensus display—“hunting
him
.”

Brüks looked back at the wall: a factoid collage, a palimpsest of puff pieces. It didn't come anywhere close to biography.

“Jim nearly got him killed?”

“Yah I said that.”
Snap snap
.

“Says here he had some kind of viral epilepsy.”

Sengupta snorted. “They had to cut out half his brain for
viral epilepsy
right. Like anyone on Carnage's salary has to settle for leeches and laudanum when his brat gets sick.”

“So what was it, then?”

“Viral
something,
” Sengupta crowed. “Viral
zombieism
.”

Ventilator sounds filled the sudden silence.

“Bullshit,” Brüks said softly.

“Oh he didn't do it
deliberately
the larva was just collateral. Some evildoer cooked up a basement bug but he got the fine-tuning wrong. Virus likes fetus brains way better than grown-up brains right? All that growth metabolism all that neural pruning everything moves faster so they give it to Mommy and she gives it to Daddy but it
really
takes off when it gets past that old-time placenta in the third tri. Goes through baby's brain faster'n flesh-eating. Wake up next morning the little fucker's already seizing in the womb and it's lucky for them it's their canary in the coal mine, they go down to Emerg and shoot up on antizombals, get cleaned out just in time. But too late for little Siri Keeton. He comes into the world and he's already damaged goods and they deal with it best they can they try all the best drugs and all the best lattices but it's downhill all the way and after a few years the seizures start up and that's all they wrote on Siri Keeton's left hemisphere right? Had to scrape it out like a rotten coconut.”

“
Jesus,
” Brüks whispered, and glanced around despite himself.

“Oh you don't have to worry about
him
he's way down deep in his precious
Theseus
signals.” An odd, single-shouldered shrug. “Anyway it all turned out okay though better'n before like I say. Storm troopers have really good medical plans. Replacement hemisphere's a big improvement. Made him the man for the mission.”

“What a horrible thing to do to a kid.”

“If you can't grow the code stay out of the incubator. Fucker probably did it himself to God knows how many others, that's what they
do
.”

Brüks had seen the footage, of course: civilian hordes reduced to walking brain stems by a few kilobytes of weaponized code drawn to the telltale biochemistry of conscious thought. It wasn't the precise surgical excision of cognitive inefficiency, not the military's reversible supersoldiers or Valerie's programmed bodyguards. It was consciousness and intellect just
chewed away
from cortex to hypothalamus, Humanity reduced to fight/flight/fuck. It was people turned back into reptiles.

It was also a hell of an effective strategy for anyone on a budget: cheap, contagious, terrifyingly effective. If you were caught in some panicking crowd you could never be sure whether the person pushing from behind was trying to rape you, or bash in your skull, or just get the fuck out of the zone. If you were
above
the crowd all your state-of-the-art telemetry would never tell the undead from the merely undone; not even Tran tech could pick out the fractional chill of a zombie brain inside its skull, not from a distance, not through a wall or a roof, not in the middle of a riot. All you could do was seal off the area and try to keep upwind until the flamethrowers showed up.

They had special squads for that in India, Brüks had heard. People with off switches in their heads, fighting fire with fire. They were really good at their jobs.

“Had it coming you ask me,” Sengupta hissed.

“Jesus, Rakshi.” Brüks shook his head. “What do you have
against
that guy?”

“Nothing I don't have against any jackboot who fucks people over and then's all
just following orders
.” She poked at some unseen irritant with the toe of her boot. “Look I know you two are dating or whatever okay? Fine with me tell him whatever you want just don't be surprised when he fucks you over. He'll feed you into the meat grinder the moment he thinks it serves his
greater good
. Feed himself in too for that matter. I swear sometimes I don't know which is worse.”

Neither spoke for a few moments.

“Why are you telling me this?” Brüks asked at last.

“Why not?”

“You're not afraid I'll pass it on?”

Sengupta barked. “Like you
would
. Besides he can't blame me if he stomps his muddy footprints all over the 'base for anyone to see.
You
coulda seen 'em even.”

Why do I put up with her?
Brüks asked himself for the tenth time. And then, for the first:
Why does she put up with
me
?

But he thought he knew that answer already. He'd suspected it at least since she'd moved in next door: Sengupta
liked
him, in a weird twisted way. Not sexually. Not as a colleague or a peer, not even as a friend. Sengupta liked Daniel Brüks because he was easy to impress. She didn't think of him as a person at all; she thought of him as a kind of pet.

Shitty social skills. Rakshi Sengupta was too contemptuous of etiquette to be bothered. But the fact that she didn't abide by social cues didn't mean she couldn't read them. She'd read
him
well enough, at least; there was no way he'd ever tell Jim Moore what Sengupta had learned about his son. Not Dan Brüks.

He was a
good
boy.

*   *   *

The next time he saw Lianna, he didn't.

He heard her voice—“Whoa,
watch that
”—just a second before the hab tilted crazily askew and pain shot up from—in from …

Actually, he didn't know
where
the pain was coming from. It just
hurt
.

“Holy Heyzeus, Dan, you didn't
see
that?” Lianna popped magically into existence beside the Commons coffee table as he blinked up from the deck.

The table,
he realized.
I ran into the table
 …

He shook his head to clear it. Lianna vanished again—

“Hey—”

—and reappeared.

Brüks hauled himself to his feet, pulled the gimp mask off his face as the pain settled in his left shin. “There's something wrong with this thing. It's screwing with my eyes.”

She reached out and took it. “Looks okay. What were you doing?”

“Just trawling the cache. Thought I'd bookmarked an article but I can't find the damn thing.”

“You encrypt the search?”

Brüks shook his head. Lianna far-focused into ConSensus. “Szpindel et al? ‘Gamma-protocadherin and the role of the PCDH11Y ortholog'?”

“That's the one.”

“It's right here.” She frowned, handed back the gimp hood. “Try again.”

He pulled it back on over his head. Search results reappeared in the air before him, but Szpindel wasn't among them. “Still nothing.”

“Hmm,” Lianna said, and vanished.

“Where are you? You just dis—”

She leaned back into view from nowhere in particular.

“—appeared.”

“There's the problem,” she said, and peeled the gimp hood back off his scalp. “Induced hemineglect. Probably a bad superconductor.”

“Hemineglect?”

“See why you should get augged? You could just pull up a subtitle, know exactly what I'm talking about.”

“See why I don't?” Brüks conjured up a definition out of smart paint. “Nobody has to cut my head open to replace a bad superconductor.”

Broken brains that split the body down the middle and threw half of it away: an inability to perceive anything to the left of the body's midline, to even
conceive
of anything there. People who only combed their hair on the right side with their right hands, who only saw food on the right side of their plates. People who just
forgot
about half the universe.

“That is fucked,” Brüks said, quietly awed.

Lianna shrugged. “Like I said, a bad superconductor. We got spares, though; faster'n fabbing a replacement.”

He followed her through the ceiling. “So you never told me why you
were
so old school,” she said over her shoulder.

“Fear of vivisection. When superconductors go bad. We covered this.”

“The reason that stuff
goes
bad is because it's crappy old tech. Internal augs are less failure-prone than your own brain.”

“So they'll work flawlessly when some spambot hacks in and leaves me with an irresistible urge to buy a year's supply of bubble bath for cats.”

“Hey, at least the augs are firewalled. It's
way
easier to hack a raw brain, if that's what you're worried about.

“Then again,” she added, “I don't think it is.”

He sighed. “No. I guess it isn't.”

“What, then?”

They emerged into the southern hemisphere. Their reflections, thin as eels, slid across the mirrorball as they passed.

“Know what a funnel-web spider is?” Brüks asked at last.

After the barest hesitation: “I do now.” And a moment later, “Oh. The neurotoxins.”

“Not just any neurotoxins. This one was special. Pharm refugee maybe, or just some open-source hobby that got loose. Might have even been beneficial under other circumstances, for all I know. The little fucker got away. But I felt a
nip,
right about here”—he spread the fingers of one hand, tapped the webbing between thumb and forefinger with the other—“and I was flat on my back ten seconds later.” He snorted softly. “Taught me not to go sampling without gloves, anyway.”