Echopraxia (7 page)

“Ah. The Colonel's lair. North hall, first right, second door on the left.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

“Not at all.” Luckett turned away as Masashi clicked and rolled the bones. “More than enough antimatter to break orbit, anyway. Least it saves on chemical mass.”

Brüks stopped, hand on the doorknob. “What was that?”

Luckett glanced back at him. “Just drawing up plans. Nothing to worry about.”

“You guys have
antimatter
?”

“Before long.” Luckett grinned and dipped his hands into the washbasin. “God willing.”

*   *   *

Most of the tactical collage was dark, or writhing with analog static. A half-dozen windows flickered fitfully through random points of view: desert, desert, desert. No satcam imagery. Either Moore had shut down those feeds or whoever was behind the blockade had walled off the sky as well as the horizon.

Brüks tapped experimentally on an unlit patch of paint. His touch provoked a brief flicker of red, but nothing else.

The active windows kept changing, though. Some kind of motion sensor built into the feed, maybe: views would pan and pounce, flash-zooming on this flickering shadow or that distant escarpment. Sometimes Brüks couldn't see anything noteworthy at the center of attention: a falcon grooming itself on a skeletal branch, or the burrow of a desert rodent halfway to the horizon. Once or twice a little fall of rock skittering down a distant slope, scree dislodged by some unseen disturbance.

Once, partially eclipsed by leaves and scrub, a pair of glassy reflections looking back.

“Help you?”

Jim Moore reached past Brüks's shoulder and tapped the display. A new window sprang to life at his fingertip. Brüks stepped aside while the soldier stretched the window across the paint, called up a feed, zoomed on a crevice splitting a hillock to the south.

“I was trying to get online,” Brüks admitted. “See if anyone out there's picked up on this whole—
quarantine
thing.”

“Net's strictly local. I don't think the Bicamerals actually have Quinternet access.”

“What, they're afraid of getting hacked?” It was an ongoing trend, Brüks had heard: defensive self-partitioning in the face of Present Shock, and damn the legal consequences. People were starting to weigh costs against benefits, opt for a day or two outside the panopticon even in the face of the inevitable fines and detentions.

But Moore was shaking his head. “I don't think they need it. Do
you
feel especially lost without access to the telegraph network?”

“What's a telegraph?”

“Exactly.” Something caught the Colonel's eye. “Huh. That's not good.”

Brüks followed the other man's gaze to the window he'd opened, to the crevice centered there. “I don't see anything.”

Moore played a little arpeggio on the wall. The image blossomed into false color. Something glowed Euclidean yellow in all that fractal blue.

He grunted. “Aerosol delivery, looks like.”

“Your guys?”

The corner of Moore's mouth curled the slightest bit. “Can't really say.”

“What's to say? You're a soldier, right? They're soldiers, unless the government's started subcontracting to—”

“Biothermals, too. They're not trusting their bots to run things.” There was a hint of amusement in the old soldier's voice. “Probably baselines, then.”

“Why's that?”

“Fragile egos. Low self-esteem.” His fingers skipped across the darkened wall. Bright windows flared everywhere they touched.

“At least you're all on the same side, then, right?”

“Doesn't really work like that.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“The chain of command isn't what it used to be.” Moore smiled faintly. “It's more—organic, these days. Anyway.” Another finger dance; the window dwindled and slid to an empty spot along the edge of the wall. “They're still setting up. We've got time.”

“How was the meeting?” Brüks asked.

“Still going on. Not much point hanging around after the opening ceremonies, though. I'd just slow them down.”

“And let me guess: you can't tell me what's going on, and it's none of my business anyway.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Lianna said—”

“Dr. Lutterodt wasn't at the meeting,” Moore reminded him.

“Okay. So is there anything
you
can—”

“The Fireflies,” Moore said.

Brüks blinked. “What about—oh. Your common enemy.”

Moore nodded.

Memories of intercepted negotiations, scrolling past in Christmas colors: “
Theseus
. They found something out there?”

“Maybe. Nothing's certain yet, just—hints and inferences. No solid intel.”

“Still.” An alien agency capable of simultaneously dropping sixty thousand surveillance probes into the atmosphere without warning. An agency that came and went in seconds, that caught the planet with its pants down and took God knew how many compromising pictures along God knew how many wavelengths before letting the atmosphere burn its own paparazzi down to a sprinkle of untraceable iron floating through the stratosphere. An agency never seen before and never since, for all the effort put into finding it. “I guess that qualifies as a common threat,” Brüks admitted.

“I guess it does.” Moore turned back to his war wall.

“Why were they fighting in the first place? What does a vampire have against a bunch of monks?”

Moore didn't answer for a moment. Then: “It's not personal, if that's what you're thinking.”

“What, then?”

Moore took a breath. “It's—more of the same, really. Entropy, increasing. The Realists and their war on Heaven. The Nanohistomites over in Hokkaido. Islamabad on fire.”

Brüks blinked. “Islamabad's—”

“Oops. Getting ahead of myself. Give it time.” The Colonel shrugged. “I'm not trying to be coy, Dr. Brüks. You're already in the soup, so I'll tell you what I can so long as it doesn't endanger you further. But you're going to have to take a lot on—well, on faith.”

Brüks stifled a laugh. Moore looked at him.

“Sorry,” Brüks said. “It's just, you hear so much about the Bicamerals and their scientific breakthroughs and their quest for Truth. And I finally get inside this grand edifice and all I hear is
Trust
and
God willing
and
Take it on faith
. I mean, the whole order's supposed to be founded on the search for knowledge, and Rule Number One is
Don't ask questions
?”

“It's not that they don't have answers,” Moore said after a moment. “It's just that we can't understand them for the most part. You could resort to analogies, I suppose. Force transhuman insights into human cookie-cutter shapes. But most of the time that would just get you a bleeding metaphor with all its bones broken.” He held up a hand, warding off Brüks's rejoinder. “I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke's liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one's looking.”

“And yet.” Brüks glanced at the wall, where
AEROSOL DELIVERY
glowed in shades of yellow and orange. Where a murderous tornado had rampaged the night before. “They seem to solve their conflicts pretty much the same way as us retarded ol' baselines.”

Moore smiled faintly. “That they do.”

*   *   *

He found Lianna back on the front steps, supper balanced on her knees, watching the sun go down. She looked back over her shoulder as he pushed through the door.

“I asked about your brain-boosters,” she said. “No luck. The assembly line's booked or something.”

“Thanks for trying,” he said.

“Jim might still be holding. If you haven't asked him already.”

He shifted his tray to one hand, used the other to rub away the vague pain behind his eyes. “Mind if I join you?”

She spared one hand to take in the staircase, as broad and excessive as a cathedral's.

He sat beside her, picked at his own plate. “About this morning, I, uh…”

She stared at the horizon. The sun stared back, highlighting her cheekbones.

“… sorry,” he finished.

“Forget it. Nobody likes being in a cage.”

“Still. I shouldn't have shot the messenger.” A sudden chilly breeze crawled across his shoulders.

Lianna shrugged. “You ask me, nobody should shoot anybody.”

He raised his eyes. Venus twinkled back at them. He wondered briefly if those photons had followed a straight line to his eyes, or if they'd been shunted around some invisible spillway of curves and angles at the last nanosecond. He looked around at the cracked desert floor, lifted his gaze to the more jagged topography in the distance. Wondered how many unseen agents were looking back.

“You always eat out here?”

“When I can.” The lowering sun stretched her shadow along the ramparts behind them, a giantess silhouetted in orange. “It's—stark, you know?”

Ribbed clouds, a million shades of salmon, scudding against an orange and purple sky.

“How long does this go on?” he wondered.

“This?”

“They lurk out there, we wait in here. When does somebody actually make a move?”

“Oldschool, you gotta
relax
.” She shook her head, smiled a twilit smile. “You could obsess and second-guess for a solid month and I guarantee you wouldn't be able to think of anything our hosts haven't already factored five ways to Sunday. They've been making moves all day.”

“Such as?”

“Don't ask me.” She shrugged. “I probably wouldn't understand even if they told me. They're wired up way differently.”

Hive mind, he reminded himself. Synesthetes, too, if he wasn't mistaken.

“You
do
understand them, though,” he said. “That's your job.”

“Not the way you think. And not without a fair bit of modding on my own.”

“How
,
then?”

“I'm not sure,” she admitted.

“Come on.”

“No, really. It's a kind of Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven. The moment you start to think about what you're doing, you screw up. You just have to get into the zone.”

“They must have trained you at some point,” Brüks insisted. “There must have been some kind of conscious learning curve.”

“You'd think so, wouldn't you?” She squinted up at some invisible behemoth he still couldn't see. “But they kind of—bypassed that. Zapped my fornix with just the right burst of ultrasound and next thing I know it's four days later and I have all these reflexes. Not so much that I understand them as my
fingers
do, you know? Phonemes, rhythms, gestures—eye movements, sometimes—” She frowned. “I take in all these cues, and equations just—come to me, piece by piece. I copy them down and I send 'em off. And the next day they show up in the latest issue of
Science
.”

“You never examined these
reflexes
afterward? Played the piano really slowly, taken the time to watch what your fingers were doing?”

“Dan, they
won't fit
. Consciousness is a scratchpad. You can store a grocery list, jot down a couple of phone numbers—but were you even aware of finishing your supper?”

Brüks looked down at his plate. It was empty.

“And that's just a couple of swallows half a minute in the past. You ever try holding, say, even a single chapter of a novel in your head? Consciously? All at once?” Her dreads swept back and forth in the gloom. “Whatever I'm doing, it's got too many variables. Won't fit in the global workspace.” She flashed him a small, apologetic smile.

They program us like clockwork dolls,
he thought. Way off to the west, the sun touched gently down on a distant ridge.

He looked at her. “Why are we still in charge?”

She grinned. “Who's
we,
white boy?”

He didn't. “These people you—work for. They're supposed to be
helpless,
that's what everyone says. You can optimize a brain for
down there
or
up here,
not both. Anyone comfortable thinking at Planck scales, they can barely cross the street unassisted up in the real world. That's why they set up in the desert. That's why they have people like you. That's what they tell us.”

“All true, more or less,” Lianna said.

He shook his head. “They
micromanage tornadoes,
Lee. They turn people into puppets with a wink and a wave, they own half the patent office. They're about as helpless as a T. rex in a daycare center. So why haven't they been running things for years?”

“That's like a chimp asking why those hairless apes aren't slinging bigger feces than everyone else, if they're so damned clever.”

He tried not to smile, and failed. “That's not really an answer.”

“Sure it is. Everybody goes on about
hive mind this
and
synesthesia that
like they were some kind of superpowers.”

“After last night, you're going to tell me they're
not
?”

“It goes so much deeper than that. It's
perceptual
. We're so—impoverished, you know? We don't look out at reality at all, we look
in
at this model, this caricature our brains cobble together out of wavelengths and pressure points. We squint down over handwritten notes that say
two blocks east, turn left at the bridge
and we think that reading those stupid scribbles is the same as seeing the universe passing by on the other side of the windshield.” She glanced over her shoulder, to the edifice at their backs.