Echopraxia (28 page)

“Thanks.” He took the offering (try as he might, he couldn't keep from smiling), and set it on the table next to dessert.

“They thought you'd like to take a shot at, you know. Seeing what makes it tick.”

Brüks glanced at a bulkhead window where three Bicamerals floated at the compiler, their gazes divergent as was their wont. (Not any Senguptoid aversion to eye contact, he'd come to realize; just the default preference for a 360-degree visual field, adopted by a collective with eyes to share.) “Are they throwing me a bone, or do they just want someone expendable doing the dissections?”

“A bone, maybe. But you know, this thing does have certain biological properties. And you are the only biologist on board.”

“Roach biologist. And that slime mold's got to be
post
biological if it's anything at all. And you know as well as I do that I've got better odds of getting a blow job from Valerie than—”

He caught himself, too late.
Idiot. Stupid, insensitive—

“Maybe not,” Lianna said after a pause so brief it might have been imaginary. “But you're the only one in the neighborhood with a biologist's perspective.”

“You—you think that makes a difference?”

“Sure. More to the point, I think they do, too.”

Brüks thought about that. “I'll try not to let them down, then.” And then: “Lee—”

“So what you doing here, anyway?” She leaned in for a closer look at his display. “You're running mo-cap.”

He nodded, wary of speech.

“What for? Slimey hasn't moved since we got here.”

“I'm, uh…” He shrugged and confessed. “I'm watching the Bicams.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“I've been trying to figure out their methodology,” he confessed. “Everyone's got to have one, right? Scientific or superstitious or just some weird gut instinct, there's at least got to be some kind of
pattern
…”

“You're not finding one?”

“Sure I am. They're
rituals
. Eulali and Ofoegbu raise their hands just
so,
Chodorowska howls at the moon for precisely three-point-five seconds, the whole lot of them throw their heads back and
gargle,
for fucksake. The behaviors are so stereotyped you'd call them neurotic if you saw them in one of those old labs with the real animals in cages. But I can't correlate them to anything
else
that happens. You'd think there'd be some kind of sequence, right? Try something, if that doesn't work try something else. Or just follow some prescribed set of steps to chase away the evil spirits.”

Lianna nodded and said nothing.

“I don't even know why they bother to
make
sounds,” he grumbled. “That quantum callosum or whatever they have has
got
to be faster than any kind of acoustic—”

“Don't spend too much effort on that,” Lianna told him. “Half those phonemes are just a side effect of booting up the hyperparietals.”

Brüks nodded. “Plus I think the hive—fragments sometimes, you know? Sometimes I think I'm looking at one network, sometimes two or three. They drop in and out of sync all the time. I'm correcting for that—trying to, anyway—but I still can't get any correlations that make sense.” He sighed. “At least with the Catholics, you know that when someone hands you a cracker there's gonna be wine in the mix at some point.”

Lianna shrugged, unconcerned. “You gotta have faith. You'll figure it out, if it's God's will.”

He couldn't help himself. “Jesus
Christ,
Lee, how can you keep
saying
that? You know there's not the slightest shred of evidence—”

“
Really
.” In an instant her body language had changed; suddenly there was fire in her eyes. “And what kind of
evidence
would be good enough for you, Dan?”

“I—”

“Voices in the clouds? Fiery letters in the sky proclaiming
I Am the Lord thy God, you insignificant weasel
?
Then
would you believe?”

He held up his hands, reeling in the face of her anger. “Lee, I didn't mean—”

“Oh, don't back down
now
. You've been shitting on my beliefs since the day we met. The least you can do is answer the goddamn question.”

“I—well…” Probably not, he had to admit. The first thought that fiery skywriting would bring to his mind would be
hoax,
or
hallucination
. God was such an absurd proposition at its heart that Brüks couldn't think of any physical evidence for which it would be the most parsimonious explanation.

“Hey,
you're
the one who keeps talking about the unreliability of human senses.” It sounded feeble even to himself.

“So no evidence could ever change your mind. Tell me how that doesn't make you a fundamentalist.”

“The difference,” he said slowly, feeling his way, “is that
brain hack
is an alternate hypothesis entirely consistent with the observed data. And Occam likes it a lot more than
omnipotent sky wizard
.”

“Yeah. Well, the people you're putting under your nanoscope know a thing or two about
observed data
, too, and I'm pretty sure their publication record kicks yours all over the innersys. Maybe you don't know everything. I gotta go.”

She turned to the ladder, gripped the rails so hard her knuckles whitened.

Stopped. Unclenched, a little.

Turned back.

“Sorry. I just…”

“S'okay,” he told her. “I didn't mean to, well…” Except he had, of course. They both had. They'd been doing this dance the whole trip downhill.

It just hadn't seemed so
personal
before.

“I don't know what got into me,” Lianna said.

He didn't call her on it. “It's okay. I can be kind of a brain stem sometimes.”

She tried on a smile.

“Anyhow, I
do
have to go. We're good?”

“We're good.”

She climbed away, smile still fastened to her face, bent just slightly to the left. Favoring ribs that medical technology had long since completely healed.

*   *   *

He wasn't a scientist, not to these creatures. He was a baby in a playpen, an unwelcome distraction to be kept busy with beads and rattles while the grown-ups convened on more adult matters. This gift Lianna had brought him wasn't a sample; it was a pacifier.

But by all the laws of thermodynamics, it did its job. Brüks was hooked at first sight.

He pulled the gimp hood over his head, linked into the lab's ConSensus channel, and time just—stopped. It stopped, then shot ahead in an instant. He threw himself down through orders of magnitude, watched molecules in motion, built stick-figure caricatures and tried to coax them into moving the same way. He felt distant surprise at his own proficiency, marveled at how much he'd accomplished in just a few minutes; wondered vaguely why his throat felt so dry and somehow eighteen hours had passed.

What are you?
he thought in amazement.

Not computronium, anyway. Not organic. More like a Tystovich plasma helix than anything built out of protein. Things that looked like synaptic gates were ticking away in there to the beat of ions; some carried pigment as well as electricity, like chromatophores moonlighting as associative neurons. Trace amounts of magnetite, too; this thing could change color if it ran the right kind of computations.

Not much more computational density than your garden-variety mammalian brain, though. That was surprising.

And yet … the way it was
arranged
 …

He resented his own body for needing water, ignored the increasing need to take a piss until his bladder threatened to burst. He built tabletop vistas of alien technology and shrank himself down into their centers, wandered thunderstruck through streets and cityscapes and endlessly shifting lattices of intelligent crystal. He stood humbled by the sheer impossibility held in that little fleck of alien matter, and by the sheer mind-boggling simplicity of its execution.

It was as though someone had taught an abacus to play chess. It was as though someone had taught a spider to argue philosophy.

“You're
thinking,
” he murmured, and couldn't keep an amazed smile off his face.

It actually did remind him of a spider, in fact. One particular genus that had become legendary among invertebrate zoologists and computational physicists alike: a problem-solver that improvised and drew up plans far beyond anything that should have been able to fit into such a pinheaded pair of ganglia.
Portia
. The eight-legged cat, some had called it. The spider that thought like a mammal.

It took its time, mind you. Sat on its leaf for hours, figuring out the angles without ever making a move, and then
zap
: closed on its prey along some roundabout route that broke line of sight for minutes at a time. Somehow it hit every waypoint, never lost track of the target. Somehow it just
remembered
all those three-dimensional puzzle pieces with a brain barely big enough to register light and motion.

As far as anyone could tell,
Portia
had learned to partition its cognitive processes: almost as if it were emulating a larger brain piece by piece, saving the results of one module to feed into the next. Slices of intellect, built and demolished one after another. No one would ever know for sure—a rogue synthophage had taken out the world's Salticids before anyone had gotten around to taking a closer look—but the Icarus slime mold seemed to have taken the same basic idea and run with it. There'd be some upper limit, of course—some point at which scratchpads and global variables took up so much room there'd be none left over for actual cognition—but this was just a
fleck,
this was barely the size of a ladybug. The condenser chamber was
awash
in the stuff.

What had Lianna called it? God. The Face of God.

Maybe,
Brüks thought.
Give it time.

“Scale-invariant shit it
time-shares
!”

He'd almost gotten used to it by now. Barely even jumped at the sound of Rakshi Sengupta exclaiming unexpectedly at his side. He peeled the hood back and there she was, a meter to his left: eavesdropping on his models through an ancillary bulkhead feed.

He sighed and nodded. “Emulates larger networks a piece at a time. That one little piece of
Portia
could—”

“
Portia
.” Sengupta stabbed the air, stabbed ConSensus. “After the spider right?”

“Yeah. That one little piece could probably model a human brain if it had to.” He pursed his lips. “I wonder if it's conscious.”

“No chance it'd take
days
just to chug through a half-second brain slice and networks only wake up—”

“Right.” He nodded. “Of course.”

Her eyes jiggled and another window sprouted off to one side:
AUX/RECOMP
, and the postbiological wonder painted on its guts. “Bet
that
could be though. What else you got?”

“I think it was designed specifically for this kind of environment,” Brüks said after a moment.

“What space stations?”

“
Empty
space stations. Smart mass isn't anything special. But something
this
small, running cognition-level computations—there's a reason you don't run into that a lot on Earth.”

Sengupta frowned. “'Cause being a thousand times smarter than the thing that's trying to eat you isn't much help if it takes you a month to
be
a thousand times smarter.”

“Pretty much. Glacial smarts only pay off if your environment doesn't change for a long time. 'Course, it's not such a bottleneck at higher masses, but—well, I think this was designed to work no matter how much or how little managed to sneak through. Which implies that it's optimized for telematter dispersal—although if it isn't using our native protocols, how it hijacks the stream in the first place is beyond me.”

“Oh they figured that out couple days ago,” Sengupta told him.

“Really?”
Fuckers.

“Know how when you pack a layer of ball bearings into the bottom of a crate and the second layer fits into the bumps and valleys laid down by the first and the third fits onto the second so it all comes down to the first layer, first layer determines all the turtles all the way up, right?”

Brüks nodded.

“Like that. 'Cept the ball bearings are atoms.”

“You're shitting me.”

“Yah because I got nothing better to do than play tricks on roaches.”

“But—that's like laying down a set of wheels and expecting it to act as a template for a car.”

“More like laying down a set of
tread marks
and expecting it to act as a template for a car.”

“Come on. Something has to tell the nozzles where to squirt that first layer. Something has to tell the second layer of atoms when to come though so that they
can
line up with the first. Might as well call it magic and be done with it.”

“You call it magic. Hive calls it the Face of God.”

“Yeah. Well, the tech may be way beyond us, but superstitious labels aren't bringing it any closer.”

“Oh that's rich you think God's a
thing
God's not a
thing
.”

“I've
never
thought God was a thing,” Brüks said.

“Good 'cause it's not. It's water into wine it's life from clay it's waking meat.”

Sweet smoking Jesus. Not you, too.