Echopraxia

  “How could you let them do this?” Brüks hissed. “You’re supposed to be smarter than us, you’re post-fucking-singular, you’re supposed to be ten steps ahead of any plan we poor stupid cavemen could ever put together. How could you let them?”

  “Oh, but this is all according to plan.” Luckett patted him on the arm with one spastic, short-circuiting hand.

  “What plan?” Brüks choked back a hysterical giggle. “We’re dead already—”

  “Even God can’t plan for everything. Too many variables.” Luckett coughed again. “Not to worry, though. We planned for the things we couldn’t plan for…”

  Faintly, through the open door—drifting down the corridor, through high narrow windows; through barred gates, though glass panes looking into deserts and gardens: a whistling sound, Doppler-shifted. The muffled thud of some nearby impact.

  “Ah. The mopping-up begins.” Luckett nodded serenely. “No point being stealthy now, eh?”

  Brüks put his head in his hands.

  “Don’t worry, old chap. It’s not over yet, not for you anyway. Jim’s lair. He’s waiting for you.”

  Brüks raised his head. “Jim—but—”

  “I told you,” Luckett said. “According to plan.” Spasms rippled across his body. “Go.”

  And now Brüks heard another sound, a deeper sound, rumbling up the scale behind the hacking of the maimed and whistling shriek of inbound paralysis. He felt the vibration of great blades spinning up far down in the earth, heard the muffled hiss of steam injected into deep silos. He heard the growing drumbeat of an elemental monster straining against its chains.

  “Now that,” he said, “is more fucking like it.”

  Moore was in his bunker, but he wasn’t running the show. No controls blinked on the smart paint, no sliders or dials or virtual buttons to press. The readouts were all one-way. Somewhere else, the Bicamerals were bringing their engine online; Moore was only watching from the bleachers.

  He turned at Brüks’s approach. “They’re dug in.”

  “Doesn’t matter, though, right? We’re gonna tear them to pieces.”

  The soldier turned back to the wall and shook his head.

  “What’s the problem? They out of range?”

  “We’re not fighting.”

  “Not fighting? Have you seen what they’re doing to us?”

  “I see.”

  “Everyone’s dead or halfway there!”

  “We’re not.”

  “Right.” Nerves sang ominously in Brüks’s fingers. “And how long is that going to last?”

  “Long enough. This bug was customized for Bicamerals. We’ve got more time.” Moore frowned. “You don’t engineer something like that in the field, not overnight. They’ve been planning this a while.”

  “They didn’t even fire a warning shot, for fucksake! They didn’t even try to negotiate!”

  “They’re scared.”

  “They’re scared.”

  “They’d assume that giving us any advance warning would put them at an unacceptable disadvantage. They don’t know what we’re capable of.”

  “Then maybe it’s time we showed them.”

  Moore turned back to face the other man. “Perhaps you’re not familiar with Bicameral philosophy. It’s predominantly nonviolent.”

  “You and Luckett and all your friends can argue the philosophical subtleties of unilateral pacifism while we all turn into predominantly nonviolent corpses.” Friends. “Is Lianna—”

  “She’s fine.”

  “None of us are fine.” Brüks turned back to the stairs. Maybe he could find her before the ceiling crashed in. Maybe there was some broom closet he could hide in.

  Moore’s hand closed on his shoulder and spun him as though he were made of balsa.

  “We will not attack these people,” he said calmly. “We don’t know if they’re responsible.”

  “You just said they’d been planning this,” Brüks croaked. “They were just waiting for some kind of excuse. You watched them lock and load. For all I know you listened in on their fucking comm chatter, you heard them give the orders. You know.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Even if we were right there in their command center. Even if we could take their brains apart synapse by synapse and backtrace every neuron that went into the go-ahead. We would still not know.”

  “Fuck you. I’m not going to suck your dick just because you trot out the old no free will shtick.”

  “These people could have been used without their knowledge. They could be slaved to an implanted agenda and they’d swear they were making their own decisions the whole time. We will not kill cat’s-paws.”

  “They’re not zombies, Moore.”

  “Whole different species.”

  “They’re killing us.”

  “You’re just going to have to trust me on this. Or”—Moore cocked his head, evidently amused—“we could leave you behind to hash it out with them personally.”

  “Leave me—?”

  “We’re getting out of here. Why do you think they’re warming up the engine?”

  Someone had rolled a giant soccer ball into the compound. A dozen fallen monks twitched wide-eyed and tetanic around a geodesic sphere of interlocking padded pentagons, maybe four meters across at the equator. A door-size polygon bent back from that surface like a snapped fingernail.

  Some kind of escape pod. No obvious means of propulsion. No onboard propulsion, anyway; but rising high above the walls of the enclosure, the funnel spun and roared like an angry jet engine. Brüks craned his neck in search of the top of the thing, and swallowed, and—

  And looked again. Something was scratching an arc across the sky.

  “Get in,” Moore said at his elbow. “We don’t have much time.”

  Of course they know. They’ve got satellites, they’ve got microdrones, they can look right past these walls and see what we’re doing and just blow it all to shit …

  “Missile…,” he croaked.

  The sky shattered where he was pointing.

  The contrail just stopped high overhead, its descending arc amputated halfway to the jet stream; a new sun bloomed at its terminus, a blinding pinpoint, impossibly small and impossibly bright. Brüks wasn’t sure what he really saw in the flash-blinded split-second that followed. A great flickering hole opening in the morning sky, a massive piece of that dome peeled back as though God Itself had popped the lid off Its terrarium. The sky crinkled: wisps of high-flying cirrus cracking into myriad shards; expanses of deep and endless blue collapsing into sharp-edged facets; half of heaven folded into lunatic origami. The sky imploded and left another sky behind, serene and unscarred.

  A thunderclap split Brüks’s skull like an icepick. The force of it lifted him off his feet, dangled him for an endless moment before dropping him back onto the grass. Something pushed him from behind. He turned; Moore’s mouth was moving, but the only sound Brüks could hear was a high-pitched ringing that filled the world. Past Moore’s shoulder, above the ramparts of the monastery, dark smoldering wreckage fell from the sky like the charred bones of some giant stick man. Its empty skin fled sideways across the sky in ragged pieces, great streamers of tinsel drawn toward the shackled tornado. The vortex engine seemed to draw strength from the meal: it grew thicker, somehow. Faster. Darker.

  Valerie’s invisible airship. He’d forgotten. A hundred thousand cubic meters of hard vacuum directly in the path of the incoming missile: broken on impact, sucking cascades of desert air into the void.

  Moore pushed him toward the sphere. Brüks climbed unsteadily into darkness and the web of some monstrous spider. It was already full of victims, tangled half-seen silhouettes. All hung cocooned in a mesh of broad flat fibers stretching chaotically across the structure’s interior.

  “Move.” A tiny, tinny voice growling through a chorus of tuning forks. Brüks grabbed a convenient band of webbing, gripped as tightly as the sparks in his hand would allow, pulled himself up. Something bumped the side o
f his head. He turned and recoiled at the face of one of Valerie’s zombies, upside-down, eyes jittering, hanging in the mesh like an entangled bat. Brüks yanked back his hand; the webbing stuck as though he were a gecko. He pulled free, clambered up and away from those frantic eyes, that lifeless face.

  Another face, not so dead, hung in the gloom behind its bodyguard. Brüks—irises still clenched against the morning sun—couldn’t make out details. But he could feel it watching him, could feel the predator grin behind the eyes. He kept moving. Sticky bands embraced at his touch, peeled gently free as he pulled away.

  “Any empty spot,” Moore said, climbing up in his wake. The ringing in Brüks’s ears was fading at last, as if somehow absorbed by this obscene womb and its litter of freaks and monsters. “Try to keep away from the walls; they’re padded, but it’s going to be a rough ride.”

  The hatch swung into place like the last piece of a jigsaw, sealed them in and cut off the meager light filtering from outside; instantly the air grew dense and close, a small stagnant bubble at the bottom of the sea. Brüks swallowed. The darkness breathed around him with unseen mouths, a quiet claustrophobic chorus muffled by air heavy as cement.

  Vision and ventilation returned within a breath of each other: a stale breeze across his cheek, a dim red glow from the padded facets of the wall itself. Bicamerals blocked the light on all sides: some spread-eagled, some balled up, a couple of pretzel silhouettes that spoke either of superhuman flexibility or broken bones. Maybe a dozen all told.

  A dozen monks. A prehistoric psychopath with an entourage of brain-dead killing machines. Two baseline humans. All hanging together in a giant cobwebbed uterus, waiting for some unseen army to squash them flat.

  All part of the plan.

  Brüks tried to move, found that the webbing had tightened around him once he’d stopped climbing. He could wriggle like a hooked fish, bring his hand up far enough to scratch his nose. Beyond that he wasn’t going anywhere.

  His eyes were adapting to the longwave, at least. A face overhead resolved into welcome familiarity: “Lianna? Lianna, are you…”

  Only her body was here. Its fingers tapped the side of its head with the telltale rhythm of someone tuned to a more distant reality.

  “It’s okay.” Moore spoke quietly from somewhere nearby. “She’s talking to our ride.”

  “This is it? Twenty people?” He gulped air, still strangely stale for all the efforts of the local life-support system.

  “It’s enough.”

  Brüks could barely catch his breath. The whole compartment hissed with the sound of forced ventilation, air washed across his face and still he couldn’t seem to fill his lungs.

  He fought rising panic. “I think—there’s something wrong with the air conditioner…”

  “The air’s fine. Relax.”

  “No, it—”

  Something kicked them, hard in the side. Suddenly up was sideways; suddenly, sideways was down. Blood rushed to Brüks’s head. A giant stood on his chest. The air, already unbearably close, got closer: the stench of rotten eggs flooded Brüks’s sinuses like a tsunami.

  Jesus Christ, he thought. He couldn’t imagine a worse time or place for a fart. Under other circumstances it might have been funny. Now it only made him gag, stole whatever meager oxygen had remained.

  “Here we go,” Moore murmured from behind. From below. From overhead.

  He sounded almost sleepy.

  The web slewed. Bodies jerked in unison one way, slung like pendulums back the other, flipped around some arbitrary unknowable center of gravity. They seemed to be accelerating in ten directions at once. Niagara roared in Brüks’s head.

  “Can’t—breathe…”

  “You’re not supposed to. Go with it.”

  “What—”

  “Isoflurane. Hydrogen sulfide.”

  Whirling static engulfed the world from the outside in. Twenty bodies—barely visible through the maelstrom—threw themselves as one toward some unremarkable point on the far side of the compartment. They strained toward that point like iron filings drawn to a cyclotron, their elastic shackles strained almost to the breaking point.

  So, Brüks mused as his vision failed. This is it. The final conscious experience.

  Enjoy it while it lasts.

  PARASITE

  The essential wickedness of this approach is perhaps best exemplified by the so-called Moksha Mind engineered by the Eastern Dharmic Alliance. Their attempts to “modernize” their faith—through the embrace of technology that has been (rightly) banned in the West—resulted in a literally soul-destroying hive that has plunged millions into what we can only assume to be a state of deep catatonia. (The fact that this is exactly what the Dharmic faiths have aspired to for millennia does not render their fate any less tragic.) The misguided use of brain interface technology to “commune” with the minds of such alien creatures as cats and octopi—a practice by no means limited to the East—has also resulted in untold psychological damage.

  At the opposite extreme, in the face of modern challenges we may find ourselves tempted to simply turn our backs on the wider world. Such a retreat would not only go against the Scriptural admonition to “go and make disciples of all nations,” but also risks dire consequence in its own right. The Redeemer Gyland offers a stark case in point. It has been almost a year since the alliance between the Southern and Central Baptists broke down, and three months since we have been able to establish contact with anyone from either side of that conflict. (It is no longer practical to board the gyland directly—any craft approaching within two kilometers is fired upon—but remote surveillance has yielded no evidence of human activity since March 28. The UN believes that the weapons fire is automated, and has declared Redeemer off-limits until those defenses exhaust their ammunition.)

  —An Enemy Within: The Bicameral Threat to Institutional Religion in the Twenty-First Century (An Internal Report to the Holy See by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, 2093)

  I COULD BE BOUNDED IN A NUTSHELL, AND COUNT MYSELF A KING OF INFINITE SPACE—WERE IT NOT THAT I HAVE BAD DREAMS.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  HE AWOKE TO screams and gray blurry light, a kick in the side, a bolt of pain spiking up his left leg like an electric javelin. He cried out but his voice was lost in some greater cacophony: the sound of torquing metal, vast alloy bones shearing across unaccustomed stress lines. Gravity was all wrong. He was on his back but it tugged him sideways, pulled him feetfirst through some translucent rubbery amnion that enveloped his body. Vague shapes loomed and shifted beyond. Down near the subsonic the world groaned like a humpback whale, wounded, spiraling toward a distant seabed. Alarms shrieked on higher frequencies.

  I’m in a body bag, he thought, panicking. They think I’m dead …

  Maybe I am …

  The pain settled excruciatingly in his ankle. Brüks brought up his hands; weak elastic forces resisted the motion. His veins and arteries were all on the outside, clinging to his skin. No, not arteries. Myoelectric tensors—

  The world jerked down and sideways. Exhausted metal fell silent; the alarm seemed to bleat all the louder in the absence of competition. Something stabbed Brüks through the body bag, just below the knee. The pain vanished.

  A blurry shadow leaned down. “Easy, soldier. I’ve got you.”

  Moore.

  The membrane split like an opening eye. The Colonel stood over him, leaning thirty degrees off true in a world sliding downhill. The world itself was tiny, a cylindrical bubble five meters across and maybe half that high, floor and walls and roof crazily askew. Something ran through its center like a wireframe spinal cord (Access ladder, Brüks realized dimly: this world had an attic, a basement). Towers of plastic cubes, a meter on a side—some white, some gunmetal, some darkly transparent (the blurry things inside glistened like internal organs) loomed on all sides like standing stones, geckoed one to another. A few had come loose and settled in an uneven pile at the downhill end of the chamber. Gravity
urged Brüks to join them there; if his bag hadn’t been fastened to its pallet he would have slid right off the end.

  Moore reached out and touched some control past Brüks’s line-of-sight; the alarms fell mercifully silent. “How you holding up?” the soldier asked.

  “I’m—” Brüks shook his head, tried to clear it. “What’s happening?”

  “Spoke must have torqued.” Moore reached down/across and peeled something off Brüks’s head: a second membranous scalp, a skullcap studded with a grid of tiny nubs. “Loose cube got you. Your ankle’s broken. Nothing we can’t fix once we get you out of here.”

  There was grass on the walls—meter-wide strips of blue-green grass running from floor to ceiling, alternating with the pipes and grills and concave service panels that disfigured the rest of the bulkhead. (Amped phycocyanin, he remembered from somewhere.) Smart paint glowed serenely from any surface that wasn’t given over to photosynthesis. His pallet folded down from an indentation in the wall; a little stack of time-series graphs flickered there, reporting on the state of his insides.

  “We’re in orbit,” he realized.

  Moore nodded.

  “We’re—they hit us—”

  Moore smiled faintly. “Who, exactly?”

  “We were under attack…”

  “That was a while ago. On the ground.”

  “Then—” Brüks swallowed. His ears popped. He’d never been to space before, but he recognized the layout: off-the-shelf hab module, two levels, common as dead satellites from LEO to geosync. You’d sling them around a centrifugal hub to fake gravity. Which would normally be vectored perpendicular to the deck, not—

  He tried to keep his voice steady. “What’s going on?”

  “Meteorite strike, maybe. Bad structural component.” Moore shrugged. “Alien abduction, for all I know. Anything’s possible when you don’t have any hard intel to go on.”