Echopraxia

DEEP IN THE Oregon desert, crazy as a prophet, Daniel Brüks opened his eyes to the usual accumulation of wreckage.

The monastery lay in ruins. The broad stone steps of the main entrance sloped away before him, cracked and fissured but still intact for the most part. Past them, to the left of some small patch of desert mysteriously slagged to glass, his tent shivered in the morning breeze. He’d salvaged it from across the valley—he must have, along with his supplies and his equipment, although he wasn’t quite sure when—but he could barely remember the last time he’d slept there. Too constraining, somehow. The sky made a better ceiling. These days he didn’t use the tent for much more than storage.

He stood and stretched, felt his joints crack as the sun peeked through a gap in the fallen stonework behind him. He turned and surveyed his domain. One end of the monastery stood reasonably intact; the other was a tumbledown pile of broken stone. The damage had been inflicted along a gradient, as though entropy were slowly devouring the structure from north to south.

Entropy had left a path, though: a small canyon through the rubble, leading back to the garden. The parts of the lawn that hadn’t been buried outright were brown and brittle and long dead, except for a small green patch struggling bravely around one of the Bicamerals’ washbasin pedestals. That pedestal, blessed with some kind of magic, was intact and unmarked by the devastation that had rained down everywhere else. The basin even held half an aliquot of stagnant water; blazing noon or frozen midnight, the level never changed. Some kind of capillary action, probably. A core of porous stone that wicked up moisture from some deep aquifer. Together with the rations left over from his sabbatical, it was enough to keep him going for now.

For what, though: that was another matter.

He still had doubts, sometimes. Wondered occasionally—after some especially fruitless dig through the ruins—what he was really accomplishing out here, day after day. Whether this whole exercise might be a waste of time. A little voice in the back of his head wondered even now, as he squinted into the rising sun.

Brüks bent over the pedestal, splashed water on his face, and drank. He washed his hands.

That always made him feel better.

He spent that day as he spent every other: as an amateur archeologist, sifting the wreckage in search of answers. He didn’t know what exactly had happened here after he’d left, why such massive physical destruction had proven necessary in the wake of their escape. Those left behind had been in no position to mount much of a defense, as far as he could tell. Maybe someone had just wanted to make an example of them. Back when he’d still been sleeping in his tent Brüks had gone to it for answers, voiced queries and search strings to the fabric and trawled through the closest hits that the clouds had to offer, but relevant insights seemed impossible to find. Perhaps humans had covered up the details. Perhaps networks, fearful of impending schizophrenia, had simply forgotten them.

It had been a long time since Brüks had used ConSensus. It didn’t really matter. Those weren’t the answers he was looking for.

He realized now that Luckett had been right; there had been a plan, and all had happened in accordance with it. It was the only model that fit the data. The idea that mere baselines had been able to vanquish the Bicamerals made about as much sense as positing that a band of lemurs could outthink Jim Moore at battlefield chess. The hive had only lost because they’d been playing to lose; Dan Brüks had only escaped because they’d wanted him to; he was only back here now, looking for answers, because they had left answers for him to find. Eventually he would find them. It was only a matter of time.

He knew this. He had faith.

A great pit gaped off the northeast corner of the ruin: walls had shattered and spilled toward it during the purge, but that loose scree had only made it halfway. Some other force had flattened the waist-high guardrail that had once ringed the pit at a safe distance. Brüks stepped over it with ease, and across the concrete apron.

He could not see the bottom, not clearly. Sometimes, when the sun was high, he caught the dim glint of great radial teeth, deep in the earth, cutting across the shaft. He would kick pebbles over the edge: water splashed, after a long time, and occasionally he would see the fitful blue spark of short-circuiting electricity. Still life down there, then, of a sort. He idly considered exploring farther—there had to be some kind of access to those depths, an air intake at least—but there was plenty of time for that.

There were other, more ambulatory hazards to contend with. Rattlesnakes seemed to be making a comeback, or at least changing their distribution; an unthinking reach into dark places while clearing debris resulted in a couple of close calls, and a welcome supplement to his freeze-dried rations. Some exotic species of locust had discovered fire while he’d been away, set a patch of dead grass alight one morning while Brüks was digging nearby. He watched it crackle and blacken and only later discovered the charred little carcasses along the edge of the burn, not quite strong enough to leap clear of their own conflagration. The coder couldn’t ID them below Family but named Chortoicetes as the closest known relative: Australian plague locust, too far from home and freshly equipped with a novel variant of chitin whose frictional coefficient proved positively incendiary during mating calls.

Plagues and firestorms in a single package. How very apocalyptic. Some splicer somewhere had a refreshingly biblical approach to weaponized biologicals.

He had a visitor that afternoon, watched for almost an hour as it grew from speck to heat-shimmer to biped staggering across the eastern flats. Stuck with roach vision he almost didn’t identify it in time, almost started out to meet it before that peculiar stagger tipped him off and sent him scuttling for cover. The newcomer wasn’t running, but he moved fast and unencumbered: no pack, no canteen, only one sneaker on the end of a leg as dark and leathery as beef jerky. Whoever he was, he was more than dehydrated; he was almost skeletal. His left arm hung as if snapped at the humerus.

He didn’t seem to care. He kept up that jerking half-panicked stride, stumbled past the monastery without a glance, zigzagged on to the western horizon under a lethal simmering sun. Brüks hid in the ruins and watched him pass and did not get a good look at his eyes. He didn’t think they danced, though. He was not that kind of undead.

He hunkered down in the calm between the stones, and tried to remember which way the wind was blowing.

Valerie appeared after sundown. She materialized from the darkness, half visible in the bloody flickering light of his campfire, and dropped a bag of supplies at his feet: tinned food now, mostly. No more of the magic foil pouches that instantly heated your stew or froze your ice cream when you ripped them open. The pickings out there must be getting slim.

He grunted a greeting. “Haven’t seen you since—since…”

He couldn’t exactly remember. She’d brought him here, he remembered that much. Hadn’t she? He had flashes sometimes: a rain-soaked shoreline, a man who’d thought a contraption of metal and plastic was worth dying for. A disembodied eye trailing ragged shreds of nerve and tendon, almost too cloudy to unlock the retina-coded driver’s door. A pair of polarized sunglasses in her hand, terrible backlit eyes staring right through him while she clicked bared teeth and asked Do I?

He remembered saying Yes. He’d said Please, and hadn’t even tried to keep the whine from his voice. She had been merciful. She had masked herself a little, a lion’s concession to the lamb.

Tonight there was a light beyond his own: a dim orange glow on the northwestern horizon, some distant fire reflecting off the underbelly of a low-hanging cloud bank. Brüks put it in the general direction of Bend.

He pointed back over her shoulder. “Did you do that?”

She didn’t look. “You do.”

He nodded at the lizard mash sizzling on the fire, held out the half-eaten Vitabar he’d been nibbling to take the edge off. Valerie shook her head: “I eat already.”

Even now, it was a relief to hear that.

He sat back down on the corner of a shattered and empty mausoleum. “Found my room today.” More precisely, he’d uncovered his goggles—one lens gone completely, the other a spiderweb of cracks embedded in the frame—and finally recognized the remains of the cell where he’d spent his last night on Earth before escaping to the sun. He’d spent the rest of the day searching those foundations on his hands and knees. “Thought someone might have left something there, but…”

Her pupils glowed like embers in the firelight. “Doesn’t matter,” she told him, but somehow there was something under the words, an unspoken addendum. Brüks wasn’t entirely sure how he knew that; some subtle telltale in the way Valerie held herself, perhaps, some twitch of the lip that his subconscious had parsed and served up as an executive summary—

—wrong scale; look down—

—and suddenly Brüks saw the truth of it: they’d known him, these hive-minded transHumans who’d called him back home. They’d known his background, and what he’d been doing in the desert all those months before. Any answers they’d left for him would be for him alone: too subtle to show up under the ham-fisted forensics of mortal Man, too durable for bombs or bulldozers to destroy. They’d be ubiquitous, indestructible, invisible to all but their intended recipient.

He mentally kicked himself for not having seen that before.

He wasn’t exactly sure how he’d seen it now—exactly what cues he’d read in Valerie’s body language, or even whether those cues had been deliberate or inadvertent. It had been happening more often, though; as though the desert had cleared his head, washed away the electronics and the interference and the ubiquitous quantum chaos of the twenty-first century to leave his mind as sharp and pristine as an undergrad’s. His newfound clarity might have even saved his life on occasion; he’d got the strong sense that a wrong answer to some of Valerie’s campfire questions might have carried severe penalties.

Is this what augmentation feels like? he wondered, but it couldn’t be. He hadn’t even taken Cognital for weeks.

He was seeing things more clearly now, though, no doubt about it. Faces in the clouds. Patterns that made his brain itch. Rakshi would have been proud.

Even Valerie seemed to be.

Her visits, once rare, had become more frequent. The first time she’d been a shadow with a face, there and gone so quickly that Brüks had written her off as a posttraumatic flashback. But she’d returned six nights later, and two nights after that—and then she had stayed, lurking just beyond the campfire, twin spots of eyeshine hovering in the darkness.

At first he’d thought she was toying with him again, getting her usual sadistic kicks out of scaring prey. But then he remembered that she wasn’t like that after all, and she obviously didn’t want him dead; the fact that he was alive was all the proof he needed. One night he’d shouted a challenge into the darkness—“Hey! Don’t you ever get bored playing the Monster Card?”—and she’d stepped into the light: hands spreads, lips sealed, watching him watching her. She’d left a few minutes later but by then he’d realized what she was doing. She was an anthropologist, incrementally acclimating some primitive tribesman to her presence. She was a primatologist of days past, easing her way into a doomed colony of bonobos: one last behavioral study before the species checked out for good.

Sometimes now she sat across the fire and asked him riddles, like some demonic inquisitor assessing his fitness to survive another night: questions about traveling salesmen or Hamiltonian circuits. He’d been terrified at first: afraid to answer, afraid not to, convinced somehow that whatever Valerie’s interest in keeping him alive, it could end in an instant with the wrong response. He had done his best, and knew that it wasn’t good enough—what did he know about bin packing or polynomial time, how could any mortal keep up with a vampire?—but she hadn’t killed him yet. She had not turned him back to stone with a few words. She no longer drummed out strange tattoos with her fingertips or left mind-altering hieroglyphics scratched into the sand. They were beyond that now.

Besides. He didn’t quite know how, but he was starting to guess some of the right answers.

He began again with the most obvious signpost: the magic washbasin, the defiant patch of grass that circled it like a green pupil. He sampled the water, scraped flecks from the stone, pulled leaves from the ground and ran them through his barcoder. He found a thousand common bacteria, a few purebred, most rotten with lateral transfer.

He only found one that glowed in the dark.

It wasn’t obvious, of course: it wouldn’t have lit up the night to any naked eye, not in the miniscule densities the machines reported. The only way he could tell it fluoresced was from the gene sequence itself: 576 nucleotides that shouldn’t have been there, an assembly line for a protein that glowed red in the presence of oxygen. A marker of some kind. A beacon.

He couldn’t read it at first. He had seen the light, but the genes to either side seemed unremarkable. It was a road sign in the desert, with no roads in sight.

He let his hands and feet guide him. The answer would come.

He explored corridors and wood-paneled chambers at the south end of the complex, more than merely intact: pristine, stripped bare, light rectangles punctuating the faded dumb paint where pictures had once hung. He found a pair of Masaso’s mahogany knuckles hiding in the corner behind a smashed door. He found what was left of his bike: a pair of mangled handlebars, an axle fork, a distended bladder of tire bulging from beneath a fallen wall like a hyperinflated football.

But it wasn’t until the dead of night that he found the body.

He hadn’t found any others. Most likely the authorities had disposed of them—or perhaps, against all the evidence of his own eyes, they had escaped somehow. Stranger things had happened.

But he woke in the night to the echo of rock falling nearby, and his memory was somehow able to pick a path through the ruins when mere starlight failed. His feet found their way through the wreckage without a missed step; his ears tracked the soft rattle of gravel flowing down new slopes in the darkness ahead. Eventually he came to a jagged shadow where none had been before, a fresh cave-in gaping through the shattered tiles. Brüks stood shivering at its edge and waited for the sky to lighten.

The corpse resolved in shades of gray at the bottom of the pit: a dim shapeless blob against darkness, a shadow extruded from jumbled debris, a bundle of dark sticks wrapped in a tunic on the basement floor. It lay on its back, buried to its waist by the cave-in. The body had mummified in the desert air, shriveled down to bones and brown leather. The eyes through which it stared at the sky had long since collapsed into empty sockets. Perhaps, once, the arms had been folded peacefully across the chest; now they were hooked and twisted as if bent by some disfiguring disease, wrists torqued inward, fingers clawing at the sternum.

It’s pointing at itself, he realized. At itself… And with the sparkling clarity of his newfound faith, Daniel Brüks finally saw the body for what it was.

It was a sign.

“It was a marker,” he told Valerie the next time she appeared (two nights later? Three?). “It was pointing at itself.”

So obvious, in the hindsight of revelation: the same sequence that coded for fluorescence contained other information as well, the same tangled thread of amino acids both serving a mundane biological function and spelling out a more esoteric message to anyone who knew the right alphabet.

Not just a marker, not just a message. It was a dialogue: gene and protein, talking to each other. It was a straight transposition of amino into alphabet: valine, threonine, alanine into t-h-e, phenylalanine-glutamine-valine-alanine into f-a-t-e, serine press-ganged into hard-space or hard-return depending on the iteration. The fluorescent protein spelled out a message—

the faery is rosy

of glow

in fate

we rely…

And the complementary codons directing its construction spelled out another, in a different alphabet:

any style of life

is prim

oh stay

my lyre…

A free-verse call-and-response packed down into a measly 140 codons. It was a marvel of cryptographic efficiency, and it was obvious once Brüks had seen the light.

“The sequence spells a message and codes for a protein. The protein fluoresces and contains a response. It’s not contamination or lateral transfer. It’s a poem.”

“Not for you,” Valerie said. “You’re looking for something else.”

No, he thought. You are.

“This is not a kink,” he said after a while, and ignited the campfire.

“You mean I don’t get off on keeping retarded pets.” Her eyes flared red orange. “I’m not Rakshi Sengupta.”

“And I’m pretty sure you’re not here for the sheer enjoyment of my company.” She did not cry out in disagreement. “So what is this?”

Valerie’s face was unreadable. “What do you think?”

“I figure I’m cheap labor. The odds of finding something useful here are too high to ignore and too low to waste much effort on. You’ve got a lot of irons in the fire. So now and then you wait until the sun goes down, and drop by to see what I’ve dug up.”

She eyed him for a moment. Brüks looked back at that vaguely lupine face alive with dancing shadows, and wondered when he had stopped finding it so terrifying.

“Daniel,” she said at last. “How you underestimate yourself.”

The truth was, though, Valerie did seem to enjoy his company. The tone of their conversations had changed; no longer an inquisition, their forays into philosophy and viral theology were turning into something almost conversational. She no longer thought rings around him; occasionally, now, he even seemed able to challenge her. He still wasn’t sure where this newfound facility was coming from. His subconscious simply served up the right responses without bothering to show its work. It frightened him, at first—the way new thoughts spilled from his mouth before he could check them for veracity, before he could even parse their meaning. He bit down, to no avail, grew queasy—almost terrified—by his own insights, while Valerie cocked her head and watched from some prehistoric remove.

It was those same insights that eventually calmed him. After all, wasn’t this the way the human brain had always behaved? The bolt from the blue, the classic fully formed eureka moment? Hadn’t the structure of benzene come to Kekulé in a dream?

He began to have his own dreams. He heard voices in them, insistent whispers: She’s behind it all. She set it all up, can’t you see that? Broke out of jail, snuck through the nets and the ether, got past the best firewalls baselines could build. Flashed false ID to False Intelligences, snuck a carousel out of the garage with a whole squad of zombies on board and didn’t wake anyone up on her way out. She bluffed her way onto the Crown of Thorns. Conveniently made it back from Icarus when everyone else burned.

You think it was a bunch of monks that locked you up with the woman who’d sworn to kill you, a diversion-on-demand tripwired to go off like a flash grenade? It was the vampire. It was the vampire, and everyone else is dead, and the only reason you’re not is because she wants to know God’s plan for Daniel Brüks. She’ll get what she wants and then she’ll kill you, too.

On waking, he only remembered the voices. He couldn’t quite remember what they’d said.

Valerie kissed him two nights later.

He didn’t even know she was there until her hand snapped closed around the back of his neck, spun him around faster than even his brain stem could react. By the time his heart had jumped through the roof of his mouth and his body remembered fight/flight and his cache had a chance to think This is it she’s done with me I’m dead I’m dead I’m dead her tongue was already halfway down his throat and her other hand—the one not crushing his cervical vertebrae—had pincered his cheeks, forcing his teeth apart. He could not close his jaws.

He hung paralyzed in her grip while she tasted him from the inside. He felt something through her flesh that might almost have been a heartbeat if it weren’t so slow. Finally she released him. He collapsed on the ground, scuttled sideways like a frantic crab caught in the open with nowhere to run.

“What the fuck—” he gasped.

“Ketones.” She looked down through him, silhouetted by purpling twilight. “Lactate.”

“You can taste cancer,” he realized after a moment.

“Better than your machines.” She leaned in close, grinning. “Maybe not so precise.”

Even eye to eye, she didn’t seem to be looking at him.

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 & 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.

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 lynchpin 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 spolar 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?”

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 on to 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.