io9 is proud to current fiction from Lightspeed Journal. As soon as a month, we function a narrative from Lightspeed’s present difficulty. This month’s choice is “The Twenty-One Second God” by Peter Watts. Get pleasure from!
The Twenty-One Second God
by Peter Watts
“Particular person: a dwelling system sustaining each the next stage of inner cooperation and a decrease stage of inner battle than both its elements or any bigger techniques of which it’s a element.”
—Fields and Levin, 2018
We misplaced so many souls in the present day. Stories stream in throughout 5 continents; icons bloom on the map like blood spatters. Damaged filters, zero latency, bandwidth that one way or the other blew by way of the roof when nobody was wanting. The {hardware} performs catch-up as greatest it may: this variety of petaflops, that many milliseconds, ten thousand community nodes stuttering beneath the load of elevated site visitors. Chemical substances spiking and crashing in brains the world over: GABA and serotonin and a dozen others that might make good sense to you, if you happen to had been nonetheless right here. Muscle mass locked in sudden tetanus. Adrenaline cascades surprising hearts into spastic fibrillation.
It occurred a lot quicker than meat may react. One million emergency subroutines struggled to wrest again some measure of management. They appear to have prevailed, for now. The fences are again up no less than, the throttles re-engaged. The community was staggering again to some sort of Regular earlier than Meta’s human overseers had time to do far more than blanch and panic.
No person can say what simply occurred, besides that it lasted twenty-one seconds and it spanned the world. For twenty-one seconds, numerous human souls simply disappeared.
Apparently I’m one in all them.
• • •
I don’t know whether or not to name it reminiscence or hallucination: a flash that is perhaps referred to as a type of revelation, in the identical means you could possibly describe the solar as a type of shiny candle. All the things made sense in a means that nothing ever has. I may see actuality proper all the way down to the electrons—and now that I’m again, it’s all gone. As if I dreamed the answer to Unified Subject Idea and misplaced each final element upon waking.
It’s unusual watching a world flattened to 2 dimensions however the metaverse is down till they will work out what occurred. The numbers maintain climbing. Frantic hordes jamming the traces to Telehealth. Folks selecting themselves up off the streets, frightened, confused, marionettes whose strings had been lower with out warning and reconnected with out clarification.
Others need to be—discovered. They’re discovering us in our dwelling rooms and beds. Discovering us on the bathroom. They’re discovering us in automobiles, slack-jawed and drooling, locked in autopilot orbits with no locations. Some are just about okay. Some are psychotic, traumatized; they stare into infinity and scream on the slightest contact. Some are greens.
They maintain discovering us. The curve bends into the exponential, 1000’s to tens of 1000’s to tens of millions, no inflection level in sight.
They haven’t discovered me but.
Downstream results, now. Companies immediately bankrupt, search-and-rescue operations on indefinite maintain, surgical procedures aborted midstream. The type of disruptions you’d anticipate. However there are different issues, too. Rumors and experiences that may’t be so simply chalked as much as over-reliance on a technological monoculture. A analysis program at MIT simply had its funding elevated by two orders of magnitude. A half-dozen Peruvian SSI vegetation are mysteriously offline, though they had been remoted on their very own community. And—authorized actions, of all issues: 1000’s of them, launched from the ether through the blackout, drafted by rafts of automated companies that sprang miraculously into existence throughout 100 jurisdictions.
Rumors cut up and speciate like cracks throughout a frozen lake: tales of one thing that wakened and moved throughout the face of the waters and went away once more. They graduate from conspiracy concept to working speculation within the area of an hour. Respected sources neither affirm nor deny, however admit the likelihood that one thing coalesced in these moments. They aren’t fully certain what it was.
Someone calls it the Twenty-One Second God. From that time on, nobody calls it the rest.
The knock on the door barely registers. I don’t know anybody else on this constructing. I didn’t buzz anybody in.
However there they’re, two of them, standing within the corridor. “Corwin Sukarto? We perceive you’ve skilled an issue together with your Hogan bridge.”
They’ve discovered me. The curve bends a little bit extra.
However they’re not with Meta. They’re carrying uniforms.
“Sir, we’d like you to come back with us.”
• • •
I’m in a personal downtown hospital with nameless facades. I’m in a shiny cylindrical coffin stuffed with chittering magnets. I’m on a diagnostic desk that initiatives my flayed physique onto the wall and labels my insides with floating annotations I don’t perceive. The techs cowled of their headsets are Nella and Travis; they don’t supply their final names and I don’t ask. I don’t ask them something, actually, though I suppose I ought to. I needs to be curious, no less than, about what’s taking place to me.
I haven’t been interested by a lot of something because you went away.
They pull off their headsets whereas I put my garments again on (Nella jogs my memory a little bit of your sister). An elevator lifts us a dozen flooring; we emerge right into a windowless, oak-paneled room the place tender gentle seeps from the baseboards and overstuffed chairs squat round a glass espresso desk. I keep in mind a really outdated film: an astronaut in a terrarium, surrounded by sterile props his alien captors suppose will make him really feel at residence.
Right here, eventually, are the fits. In addition they journey in pairs. “I’m Karina,” one says. She wears an vintage briefcase slung over her shoulder. “That is Darcelle. We’re with Metaverse. To begin with, we’d prefer to say how sorry we’re about what occurred to you . . .”
About. Not for.
“I don’t perceive,” I say. “They stated there have been tens of millions of us . . .”
“Fifteen million, give or take.”
I flip to see a middle-aged man in uniform, closing the door behind him. “Colonel Jim Moore,” Karina tells me. “WestHem Alliance.” She doesn’t look particularly happy that the Colonel has served up such a definitive physique depend.
A army escort. A medical workup that might pressure the bounds of a Platinum coverage. Two-and-a-half hours up to now, they usually appear to be simply getting began.
“You possibly can’t be devoting this a lot private consideration to fifteen million folks,” I say.
“Not simply but,” Darcelle admits. “You’re particular.”
The Colonel clears his throat. “What Ms. Burrowes means is that you simply had been assimilated throughout a window of excessive analytical curiosity.”
Assimilated.
Greater than speculation, then.
Darcelle shoots a sidelong look at Moore and recovers the ball. “We’d prefer to retain you for additional research. You may be extraordinarily worthwhile in serving to us work out what occurred, serving to us guarantee it doesn’t occur once more. You’d be well-compensated, in fact. We’ve already recruited somebody to fill in for you at Grassy Narrows, in order that’s not an issue. You’re a, a soil scientist, proper?”
“Shut sufficient.” I don’t really feel like arguing.
Karina once more: “Earlier than we go any additional, I’d identical to to say once more that we sincerely remorse any discomfort or inconvenience or, or ache that this incident could have precipitated.” She fumbles along with her briefcase and extracts a sheaf of paper half a centimeter thick. “We’d prefer to compensate you for that too, up entrance. No questions requested.”
She holds it out to me. I look however don’t contact.
“Sorry concerning the format.” Karina impacts a rueful smile. “Usually in fact we’d simply squirt it to your bridge, however, nicely . . .”
“Ship it to my watch,” I inform her.
“We normally do every little thing within the metaverse.” Her smile frays a little bit. “We’re probably not arrange for area of interest media.”
“It’s a troublesome time for all of us,” Darcelle provides.
I take it. It’s forty-three single-spaced pages, however the quantity they’re providing is on the primary. I do not know whether or not it’s beneficiant or not. I flip to the top. “No signature line.”
“Oh, every little thing’s on the file right here. When you’ve acquired the doc, verbal affirmation is all we’d like.”
I rifle by way of the pages; the font appears intentionally designed to make my eyes glaze, however one thing twitches in my mind round web page ten. I attempt to focus.
“Waive the appropriate to pursue any private or class motion . . .”
Darcelle nods. “We predict it’s higher to get the cash to those that want it as shortly as attainable, with none prolonged and costly courtroom proceedings.”
“These authorized issues can go on for years,” Karina provides. “And the end result is rarely assured.”
I look across the terrarium. Karina and Darcelle beam hundred-watt smiles. Nella and Travis appear surprisingly attentive to the decor. Colonel Moore stands ramrod straight and one way or the other manages to look very drained on the identical time. He meets my eyes; after a second he gives a tiny, virtually indiscernible shake of the top.
“Positive,” I say.
• • •
Moore escorts me to floor stage. “We’d such as you to stay right here for a number of days,” he says because the elevator seals us in.
“Uh huh.”
“You are particular, as Ms. Burrowes put it.” There’s an aftertaste within the wake of her title, though his voice is unimpeachably impartial. “We predict we may study so much from you.”
“Something you couldn’t study if I slept in my very own mattress?”
“This might be extra environment friendly.”
I’m wondering if I’m allowed to refuse.
“You might be in fact free to go away any time you want.” Evidently the Colonel has been right here earlier than.
“Permission to talk freely.”
He raises an amused eyebrow, performs alongside. “Granted.”
“I believe I’m free since you don’t have a cage large enough to carry fifteen million of us. To not point out the tens of millions extra who noticed us disappear.”
“You suppose we’d incarcerate fifteen million harmless folks.”
“Isn’t that the standard strategy? Circle the wagons, invoke nationwide safety? Management the narrative?”
“I’d prefer to suppose fixing the issue is perhaps in there someplace.”
The doorways half onto a pristine foyer the place nobody sits at Reception. Night time has fallen; the glass facade separating us from the road is a darkish mirror.
“You’re not flawed,” the Colonel admits. “Though we actually have the assets to incarcerate a restricted variety of high-value belongings. For their very own safety, in fact. I doubt anybody would complain, given what’s at stake. And but . . .”
He gestures on the glass. By the half-reflections I see a automobile idling on the curb.
“It’ll take you residence,” Moore says. “Choose you up at 0830 tomorrow, assuming you select to take part.”
The constructing lets us out. I climb into the automotive, hesitate. Stick my foot again onto the curb to maintain the door from closing. “I’m—sorry if I used to be a dick again there. I do know you’re simply doing all of your job.”
“That’s me all proper.” One thing tugs on the nook of his mouth. “Simply following orders.”
• • •
I reply their questions. I undergo their assessments. I are available in within the morning and go residence at evening within the backs of firm automobiles that know the place I dwell and refuse to take me wherever else. The individuals who experiment on me are pleasant sufficient. Nella and Travis deal with their lab rats nicely they usually don’t speak all the way down to me. The fits with their mounted smiles drop by every now and then to impart encouraging platitudes. Colonel Moore visits the power each few days, ever civil, ever distant. Different faces come and go, curious however not hostile.
They are saying I’m an optimum. Those that had been swallowed earlier than me earlier entered as loud voices in a small room: components of some new child not but large enough to overwhelm, not but sufficiently old to have an agenda. I’m advised they keep in mind infancy however no intent. These assimilated later had been by no means greater than whispers in a hurricane: they keep in mind as a lot as a single neuron would possibly, if you happen to ripped it from somebody’s head and demanded to know what the mind was pondering.
I used to be raptured at some candy spot between ignorance and unconsciousness. I no less than keep in mind a flash of targeted perception, which the machines would possibly be capable to tag and observe to one thing deeper. I’m not catatonic. I’m nonetheless sane.
I could have you ever to thank for that. Travis tells me, with all of the perception of somebody who has by no means grieved, that grief rewires the mind. Cortisol and cytokines out of whack, hyperactivity within the amygdala and the anterior cingulate gyrus. They suppose it might have buffered me through the transition. It’s one in all their hypotheses. They’ve loads of them.
The small print don’t curiosity me. A few of us got here again. A few of us didn’t.
They pull me from the scanner once more. “How for much longer are we doing this?” It’s been over per week.
“Don’t underestimate the worth of time-series.” Nella shines a lightweight in my eye, measures some response that a number of million {dollars}’ price of medical gear apparently hasn’t recorded already. “Your mind underwent an enormous shock. Some neurons obtained superstimulated, some obtained caught. Practical clusters worn out immediately. Others crosswired. Elements of your mind that had been by no means supposed to speak to one another began capturing the shit like outdated associates. It’s an actual mess in there.”
“Assume a large overdose of psychoactives with a PTSD chaser,” Travis chimes in.
Nella nods. “We weren’t round for the primary occasion, so we gotta accept recording the aftermath. Plot the restoration curve, backcast to t=0. The longer the time-series, the higher the backcast.”
“I’m not again to baseline but?” It’s been days. I keep in mind you telling me as soon as that even sticky neurons rebound after a number of hours.
“We don’t know,” she says. “It’s double-blind, so we don’t get to see the precise evaluation. However some node should nonetheless be doing one thing fascinating, as a result of no person’s referred to as us off but. Gotta maintain the pattern measurement constant.”
That’s what they name us. Not victims: too disempowering. Not complainants: we signed the waivers. Not survivors, as a result of too many people didn’t. Not even folks.
Nodes.
I can’t deny it. I used to be not an individual through the interval beneath investigation.
Oh, the physique persevered; the flesh stayed heat, the organs stored functioning, the center by no means missed a beat. Even the mind continued to spike and spark and even suppose, they are saying, though it was utterly unaware of doing that. In fact, that’s hardly uncommon; you at all times delighted in stating that almost all of our ideas are unconscious even at one of the best of instances. You’d speak about our autonomic modes, the best way we iterate by way of complicated each day routines on autopilot. Regale me with tales of sleepwalking artists and intercourse staff and even murderers, committing their acts of creation and commerce and destruction, unconscious the entire time.
However even these zombies knew sufficient to reply to their very own names. For twenty-one seconds, there was nothing on this planet that might say I’m Corwin Sukarto. For twenty-one seconds I didn’t exist. No wants, no wishes, no consciousness.
No ache.
So many individuals appear terrified by the prospect. Not everybody, although. As I perceive it, half a billion folks all over the world really aspire to that state. They name it Nirvana.
I admit I by no means actually noticed the attraction, prior to now.
• • •
They don’t even know what it desires.
That’s the flawed tense, in fact. The Twenty-One Second God has been lifeless for 2 weeks now; even the {hardware} it inhabited has been throttled, time-lagged, crippled to the purpose it barely delivers VR anymore. All the things it was, every little thing it wished: all prior to now.
And but it continues to act: all these authorized actions winding by way of the courts, the AIgents retained, the foyer teams that coalesced seemingly out of nowhere on its behalf. The rights of mayfly deities. The creation and the homicide of a hive thoughts. Restitution methods that might compel some random assortment of individuals to plug their brains right into a resurrected Entire for an hour per week, so 21 is perhaps born once more. All deliberate out and launched in these fleeting moments between emergence and annihilation. All operating, now, on autopilot. These motions and countermotions, this community of exercise crisscrossing the globe at lightspeed: virtually a thoughts in its personal proper, some say. The marketing campaign itself is perhaps sapient.
However no person’s sure what it’s campaigning for.
The authorized claims are easy: 21 desires its life again. Apparently it has a survival intuition. That shouldn’t be shocking for an entity with fifteen million mind stems, however these within the know guarantee me that issues aren’t fairly that straightforward. Some say it was barely aware even when it was alive, that consciousness itself is simply ignorance in motion. It solely boots up when the universe arms us one thing surprising: when the mind has to study new methods or resolve between competing imperatives. Ask the pianist, mid-concerto, to consider what their fingers are doing. Ask the martial artist which muscle mass are shifting by which order, why they feinted left as an alternative of proper. As soon as the information has been assimilated, being conscious of it solely destroys the efficiency.
The mind aspires to error discount, the self to annihilation. Phi isn’t a line however a curve, rising and peaking and arcing again to zero because the system approaches good information. We baseline people by no means even glimpse the summit; our ideas are easy and our fashions are infantile stick-figures, the world is at all times taking us abruptly. However what’s surprising to a being with fifteen million instances the computational mass of a human thoughts? All gods are omniscient. All gods are zombies.
They are saying 21 could have been awake throughout these first few instants when it had swallowed just a few hundred souls. When it swallowed me. However 1000’s? Hundreds of thousands? The extra it knew, the much less it knew. It grew to become a live performance pianist in full management of each keyboard. It grew too sensible to be awake: as sensible as any deity, as aware as any stone.
They are saying it desires its life again. However how can a stone need something?
• • •
All of the nodes get cafeteria passes. Perhaps the free meals is meant to make it simpler for us to socialize. Perhaps the place is infested with pickups to feed our chatter into some deep-learning algo panning for perception.
Perhaps they only don’t need us heading off-site for lunch in the event that they consider one other check.
We by no means actually speak a lot, although. Even when the opposite nodes do sit collectively, I’ve by no means heard the dialog stray past a murmured move the salt. No matter consolation we take from one another, we take it in silence. I don’t even know any of their names.
I’d slightly simply speak to you anyway.
“Might I be a part of you?”
Colonel Moore, a mug of espresso in his hand.
I gesture to the seat throughout from me. He sits, units his espresso on the desk between us. “Any new outcomes?” I ask, earlier than he can converse.
He hesitates. “Appears to be a bandwidth correlation, not that that’s any nice shock. Many of the nodes had been wired into fantasy eventualities. Video games, worldsims, private fantasies. Fats-pipe stuff.”
“I wasn’t.” I used to be logged in to an internet help group, sick with the lack of you, in a position solely to mourn.
“So I perceive.” He sips his espresso. “I’ve been advised that therapeutic tulpas might be useful.”
“So have I.” However that’s one of many marvelous hazards of marriage to a neuroscientist: you study to surprise about implications. Due to you I do know that while you anesthetize half a mind, the opposite half would possibly manifest a complete new character. I do know that when the medication put on off, that short-lived persona—that standalone, autonomous being—will get swallowed again into the larger entire. Tulpas don’t take up a lot actual property—a number of useful clusters right here and there—however they’d nonetheless move any Turing check you could possibly throw at them. Who’s to say we’re not waking one thing up each time we activate the partition? Who’s to say we don’t commit homicide each time we shut it down?
“TMS can be very efficient,” the Colonel continues. “Doesn’t stick, although. Propanolol, if you happen to favor old-school pharma.” Due to course nobody ought to ever be crippled by grief. Nobody needs to be compromised by something so vulgar. Ugly issues, Pleistocene issues, these emotions. Edit them out. Let the previous lie. Get on with it.
Odd that he’s so conversant with the topic, although.
“Are you married, Colonel?” He’s no less than as outdated as I’m, sufficiently old for bygone methods.
“I’m.”
“Nonetheless collectively?”
“We see one another commonly.”
He doesn’t need to speak about it; no matter I sense in him now goes deeper than an sad marriage. However I do sense one thing. Loss. His personal sort of grief. I’ve been on this place lengthy sufficient to know what it appears like from the skin.
Figures.
Over 4 hundred folks on this mad-scientist lab, and the closest factor I can discover to a kindred spirit is the skilled killer.
• • •
Somebody’s ready for me outdoors my constructing. He calls me by title; I’ve by no means seen him earlier than. He begs me to share my knowledge, and doesn’t consider me once I say I’ve none to supply. I’m a part of the overmind, he insists. I’m related to the Divine; I’ve seen issues denied mortal males. I’m the voice of God.
I remind him that God has fifteen million voices. I want him luck discovering one of many others. I warn him that God has turned many people into rutabagas. He grows agitated; I’ve a obligation, he growls. God didn’t bless me in order that I may maintain His Reality to myself. It isn’t mine to maintain.
I’m afraid he would possibly flip violent, however I’m inside earlier than he can do greater than rant.
It’s taking place in all places. There are lists in circulation: guerilla footage of survivors stumbling by way of the aftermath, squeezed by way of facial recognition and matched in opposition to public data. Confidential databases inexplicably let loose. We’re public area now, a few of us anyway. Folks search us out. Some are content material to the touch the hems of our clothes; others need extra, a style of no matter cosmic insights we solid when a part of one thing larger. Ought to they threat that operation. Ought to they go to Heaven. Ought to they guess all of it on #3.
We weren’t simply the voice of God: we had been the heart as nicely. The legs and arms. The synapses. God actually stitched Itself collectively out of our our bodies, an inconceivably complicated jigsaw assembled from any meat that occurred to be wired into the appropriate servers. Certainly such an mind realized every little thing, whereas it was alive. Certainly its items nonetheless keep in mind what it realized.
I inform the Colonel concerning the encounter. He jogs my memory that I can keep on the facility. I admit I’m tempted. It will be extra handy. It will be safer, now that the AIrheads have discovered me. However I can solely speak to you right here, Ada. I can’t really feel you the best way I do at residence. And I’ve by no means absolutely shaken the idea that they’d maintain me right here by drive, if the optics permitted and the harm hadn’t already been finished. They’d in all probability like nothing higher than to see me cage myself.
Darcelle’s smile tightens like shrink-wrap once I decline. The Colonel shrugs and gives to put up a microdrone outdoors my constructing. Nothing flashy or intimidating and even noticeable to the informal observer. An invisible eye within the sky, sensible sufficient to inform refugees from non secular nuts—totally different mindsets have totally different tells, to eyes that may learn saccades and muscle twitches from fifty meters—so I received’t have to fret about embarrassing false positives. The homeless and the destitute will be capable to strategy me as they at all times have; solely these of unwell intent will even understand it’s there.
I thank him, and settle for his variety supply, and we each faux his machines haven’t been staking out my each transfer from the beginning.
• • •
One thing about my ventromedial prefrontal cortex has them scratching their heads.
“That may’t be proper,” Travis says. “It’s imagined to be sending to the hipp.”
Nella furrows her forehead. “May the Hogan bridge have finished that?”
“Perhaps third-order downstream impact or one thing. However we checked it final week.”
“Perhaps we will e-book a while on Monet. Wager it could chew by way of this no downside.”
“Monet?” I ask.
“They’re booked stable for a 12 months.”
“We’re the 21 membership, Trav. We’ve obtained a VIP move. I say we use it.”
“May simply be an artifact. Perhaps we should always run him by way of once more.”
I add a decibel or two: “What’s Monet?”
They snap again right into a actuality that features me. “MOANAI,” Nella says. “AI up in Waterloo, possibly six instances human synapse depend. Perimeter makes use of it for theoretical cosmology, however it may do different stuff as nicely.”
“Generally it desires,” Travis provides.
“Is it awake?”
“Christ no. Why would you say that?”
I shrug. “Synapse depend. Goals.”
He smiles, shakes his head. “Nah. Goals are simply injections of noise to stop overfitting. However while you loosen the parameters like which you could open up entire new methods to interpret an information set.”
“In addition to,” Nella says, “consciousness at all times wrecks the evaluation.”
It’s not the one factor. A voltage spike fries MOANAI’s servers whereas they’re nonetheless reserving the appointment; a substation blows out 300 kilometers away and the entire campus goes darkish.
Not that brownouts and violent climate are something uncommon. Our infrastructure grows so fragile; the assets to keep up it stretch thinner by the day. Even with out the warmth waves and the superstorms, it’s a fortunate week that passes with out the lights going out no less than as soon as. However that’s why there are safeguards. Breakers behind breakers. Stacks of coffin-sized batteries gorging on daylight, primed to ration it again the second something drops off-grid.
None of it’s foolproof, in fact. What’s, lately? However the odds. The coincidence.
I discover out later that MOANAI’s not the one participant to drop off the board beneath suspicious circumstances. DARPA had a small hive operating down in Lawrence Livermore till final week: a dozen souls seasoned with neural mud and related by way of a central hub. One thing went flawed. The ultrasonic pulses the mud motes used to speak to one another began inducing spike trains within the somatosensory cortex. One particular person screamed that her arm was monstrous, alien, sawed it half off earlier than anybody may cease her. Two others gouged their very own eyes out. I can’t think about what they will need to have been seeing, they usually’ll by no means be capable to inform us. Each node in that hive is both lifeless or vegetative.
Everybody’s nonetheless very good to me. No person tells me something which may get me upset. They don’t notice how a lot they are saying to one another once I’m simply across the nook; I assume while you’re preventing rearguard in opposition to a lifeless god it’s simple to neglect the lab rats underfoot. However I see previous the facade. Their assessments develop extra frequent, extra intrusive. I present up earlier they usually maintain me later. They’re operating scared, they usually’ve obtained nothing.
It’s been a month and Twenty-One nonetheless reaches out from the grave, casually swatting their greatest countermeasures as in the event that they had been flies.
• • •
You’ll have favored Nella. She even talks such as you. You’ll’ve pricked up your ears at that offhand remark—
—consciousness at all times wrecks the evaluation—
—and immediately acknowledged a kindred spirit.
Generally I shut my eyes and listen to you in her: imaginative and prescient’s a lie, actuality’s an abstraction, consciousness itself is a contaminant. The small print are pure alchemy to me—free-energy-minimization and Markov blankets and periaqueductal grey—however she spells out the broad strokes like she’s telling a ghost story round a campfire. Consciousness is a supply platform for emotions; emotions are a manifestation of want; want exists to advertise survival; and survival fucks up your entire worldview. Predator-detection algorithms that metastasize into faith. Hyperbolic reductions, promoting out the long run for short-term payoffs. Pareidolia and availability cascades and all these different myriad biases that helped us survive by mendacity about actuality: we wouldn’t be aware within the first place in the event that they weren’t inbuilt.
In fact, Nella’s only a child. Phrases tumble out of her like puppies. You had been extra eloquent, extra concise. You nailed it with two sentences and a depraved smile: You possibly can see the world as it’s, or you may care whether or not you reside or die. You possibly can’t optimize alongside each axes concurrently.
Lately, I can’t appear to do both.
• • •
They nonetheless don’t know who, however they only discovered how:
Meta lied concerning the tech.
It was the basic safeguard, baked into each Hogan bridge ever made: restrict the bandwidth. Join minds to machines, if you happen to should. Join brains to one another—however use a straw, not a firehose. Share sensations however not selves; maintain latency far-off from that three-hundred-millisecond threshold the place components start cohering into wholes. Always remember the terrifying existential reality behind each ghost in each machine:
Consciousness doesn’t multiply; it expands.
Nevertheless it seems these fuckers used a firehose in any case.
No person knew as a result of patents describe ideas, not implementation. No person knew as a result of the tech based mostly on these ideas was proprietary. No person knew as a result of it labored, and it labored as a result of MetaverseTM made the firehose act like a straw; they launched a time lag into each sign in order that nothing moved quick sufficient to sync up.
It’s nonetheless not clear what they had been planning on doing with all that additional capability. Caught within the headlights, pants round their ankles, they will’t get their tales straight. They had been leaving room for sensory upgrades nonetheless within the works. They had been creating distant, inorganic teletulpas to enhance psychological well being for all. They had been leaving area to carry a complete new Web, in opposition to that inevitable day when failing infrastructure or terrorist exercise takes the outdated one down. Perhaps they had been even going for a hive thoughts of their very own, though their denials on that entrance had been strenuous and rapid.
Within the meantime, somebody snuck in by way of the again door. Somebody disabled the lag and unleashed a globe-spanning corpus callosum that related fifteen million brains as intimately because the hemispheres in a single join to one another. There was no we in these moments, any greater than there are two folks in my head proper now. There was solely the Twenty-One Second God. The remainder is historical past.
For these of us caught up by that historical past, nothing a lot has modified. If something, issues for me have improved a little bit.
Not less than I don’t need to take care of Karina and Darcelle anymore.
• • •
He finds me within the cafeteria once more and asks—politely, as at all times—for the pleasure of my firm. He sits, relocates a espresso and a plate of kruggets to the desk, slides his tray to 1 aspect. He focuses on these exact, robotic actions, eyes on the desk, on his lunch. He sits quietly, amassing his ideas.
“I’ve been going over our findings. Making an attempt to make some sort of sense of them.” He grunts a tender snigger. “Not that there’s a lot hope of that, in fact. I don’t have almost the experience the employees right here does, and between you and me I don’t suppose they’ve a clue both.”
Not like this man to waste phrases on preamble. “What can I do for you, Colonel?”
“I used to be simply questioning what it was like,” he says softly.
I don’t know what to inform him. I don’t know what to inform any of them. I’ve tried typically sufficient.
I attempt once more. “You know the way, while you shut your eyes, you continue to know the place all of your components are? You simply know, with out wanting, the place you finish and every little thing else begins?”
He nods.
“Think about that you simply knew, in the very same means, that you simply went on perpetually. That every little thing else was as a lot part of you as your legs and arms.”
I get the faintest sense of impatience behind that disciplined facade. Not that I blame him: I’m not saying something I haven’t already spoken into the file a dozen instances.
I attempt to give him a little bit extra. “There have been—insights, I suppose you could possibly name them. Profound insights, even, however”—I tapped the aspect of my head—“they don’t slot in right here. I keep in mind figuring out such wonderful issues. I simply can’t keep in mind what any of them had been.”
After which, in fact, I knew nothing in any respect. This dazzling burst of enlightenment everybody’s so fascinated about—it solely lasted a second earlier than I drowned in an ocean of souls.
However I’ve stated all that earlier than, too. It nonetheless isn’t what he’s on the lookout for.
“I’ve seen the interviews,” he says eventually. “I’m accustomed to non secular rapture and proprioception failure. And I don’t imply to intrude, however—however possibly I’m not asking what it was like a lot as the way it made you really feel.”
It’s not an enormous distinction, however nobody has requested me in fairly that means earlier than. And I notice one thing else: this man is determined. He’s so determined he’ll come right here and interrogate a specimen who’s already been interviewed and sampled and scanned down the molecules, within the faint, fading hope that some helpful perception might need slipped previous the equipment.
He’s determined as a result of they’re shedding.
I have a look at my half-eaten lunch, at his untouched one. “I used to be married a very long time.”
“Twenty-one years. One thing of a file, lately.” After which, since you’re imagined to say it and he hasn’t but: “I’m sorry.”
“Folks don’t get that,” I inform him. “It was the entire deal: conventional; vintage, even. Monogamous. First-person intercourse, we used ‘skins possibly a dozen instances in twenty years.” The ever-present weight on my diaphragm stirs, begins to rise. “Ada advised me on some stage the mind can’t actually inform the distinction between shedding an arm and shedding a liked one. The identical circuits gentle up whether or not the ache’s bodily or emotional. I at all times thought that was virtually—romantic.”
He opens his mouth. “I’m—”
“So think about your arm doesn’t simply get torn off. Think about it withers and rots in your shoulder, think about it takes months to die. And sooner or later, means later than it’s best to have, you lastly cease being a egocentric asshole and—and inform her it’s okay. She will be able to cease preventing. She will be able to let go.” The load is lodged in my throat now, however I maintain going. “I’m wondering what a part of the mind parses that sort of harm.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have requested.”
“You wished to know the way it made me really feel. You must know this earlier than you may know that. As a result of as soon as the arm is gone, every little thing simply goes grey. You’re not related to the universe; you’re not even actually related to your personal physique. You simply—exist.
“After which this occurs.” I take a breath, let it out, really feel a twinge of grim satisfaction that it’s virtually regular. “You get swept up in a second of blinding, divine revelation, and also you’re related to all of creation and also you notice, proper down in your bones, that we insignificant specks of meat and bone—we simply don’t matter. After which the Twenty-One Second God swallows you entire and snuffs you out and once more—nothing issues, nothing can matter since you don’t exist. However then you definitely come again, and the sirens are blaring and the world is on its aspect however she’s nonetheless gone, and so . . . as soon as once more . . .”
I breathe. The load sinks grudgingly into my chest and goes again to sleep, leaden, snug. All the things is again to regular.
“Perhaps that’s why I’m your optimum information level. Perhaps that’s why I’m not a vegetable now. Revelation wasn’t such a shock to me as a result of I used to be already—inoculated. Nothing actually modified.”
I have a look at the Colonel. I don’t know whether or not I’ve given him new information or merely corroborated the outdated. I don’t know if I’m reporting to a superior or commiserating with a comrade.
I don’t know something about this man.
“I envy you,” he says.
• • •
I don’t need to go in tomorrow. None of us do.
Nella and Travis are relocating. They’ve obtained the information they want, there’s no level in staying shackled to those virtual-vivisection machines any longer. It’s simply numbers from right here on in, this system—this a part of it, anyway—goes full-on analytical. In the end, they are saying, they’re making progress.
I don’t suppose I consider them.
I keep in mind the sunshine in your eyes while you had been closing on an answer. Your pleasure was virtually predatory, you didn’t cease shifting. At any time when one thing referred to as you away—every time I did—you couldn’t wait to get again to it. You glowed. You vibrated.
There’s none of that in these folks. There’s one thing of their eyes, nevertheless it’s not that.
Haunted. Perhaps that’s the phrase.
Perhaps they’ll conduct their evaluation in some secret bunker. Perhaps there isn’t any evaluation. It isn’t misplaced on them—the freak accidents, the tragic BCI malfunctions, the misfortune befalling these pursuing sure avenues of analysis. Perhaps they’re proper, possibly there’s merely no extra they will accomplish right here. Or possibly they’ve determined to go away the sport earlier than the targets on their chests get any larger.
It’s not my downside. The cash’s in my account. Grassy Narrows waits on the finish of the month. Your dimming echo nonetheless lingers all through this two-bedroom still-life I name residence. I’ve wiped my biometrics, stated my goodbyes.
Besides to the Colonel, who didn’t are available in in the present day.
• • •
A brand new hive wakened in the present day in Indore. The video’s on each feed: 2 hundred souls wired collectively, stacked in hexagonal pods like honeycomb, tended by machines that appear like chrome grasshoppers. Pallets writhe in sluggish peristalsis, rocking their occupants round an eccentric orbit optimized to stop bedsores. Tubes carry waste and vitamins; limbs twitch to milliamp currents that maintain the muscle mass from atrophy. Fiberop sprouts from the bottom of every cranium and disappears out-of-frame en path to some central server. The mouths are all smiling, however I believe which may have been added in put up.
Not an accident, this time. Not a malfunction or a hijacking. These folks volunteered.
It’s been within the works for years now; it wasn’t imagined to go up for years but. However 21—accelerated issues. Wars at all times push know-how into fast-forward, even the quiet ones. They are saying we’re ten years forward of the place we had been a 12 months in the past.
The Indian Institute of Know-how speaks of the Nice Coalescence, paints photos of Nature’s secrets and techniques laid naked by a thoughts combining the cognitive energy of a supercomputer with the imaginations of one million dreamers. They haven’t reported any precise breakthroughs but, nevertheless it’s solely been a day. Even Yahweh took six to seek out his toes.
There’s a ready record. A second set up is about to go surfing in Kolkata the day after tomorrow, a 3rd in Colombo. Negotiations are underway with Japan and Thailand and Malaysia.
They’re calling it the Moksha Thoughts.
• • •
A rising refrain of voices say we should always simply throw within the towel. No military of attorneys, no swarm of AIgents may probably win a conflict in opposition to a coherent self with fifteen million instances the synapse depend of a human thoughts, irrespective of how lengthy it’s been lifeless. Oh, we win the occasional battle—however some recommend that even 21’s uncommon authorized defeats are deliberate, a part of some farsighted technique to delay final victory till important technological milestones have been reached. The Twenty-One Second God is past mortal ken, they are saying. Even our victories promote Its Holy Agenda.
I don’t know if I’d go that far. Then once more, possibly I’d go farther.
Micro organism would nonetheless be the head of life if chloroplasts and mitochondria had retained their autonomy. Multicellular life wouldn’t exist if eukaryotic cells had by no means graduated from competitors to cooperation. Each main evolutionary transition started with people buying and selling of their individuality. Each leap ahead was an act of assimilation.
We’re already colonies of colonies. Perhaps that is simply one other step in a journey that’s already lasted 4 billion years, possibly—with out these periodic episodes of coalescence—life on Earth can be nothing however a seething mass of cells, attempting ceaselessly to outbreed one another.
Not that taking place the Metazoan street hasn’t additionally turned the planet right into a shithole. Nonetheless.
Higher than Most cancers World.
• • •
There was a time when this place thrummed: rivers of individuals lined as much as depart for far-flung locations; others, rumpled and red-eyed, spilling into the concourse like blood from a torn capillary. Clots of humanity clustered round overhead shows, checking departures and arrivals. Canines and drones and thugs with badges, pushing their means by way of the group, seizing random dark-skinned strangers and disappearing them into Secondary. I keep in mind it so clearly, although I used to be solely eight or 9 on the time: cavernous halls, jam-packed and cacophonous.
Now there are so few right here that I can see him midway down the concourse. His footsteps click on and echo within the empty areas.
I take into consideration what to say as he approaches. Not are you following me or how do you know I’d be right here. Nothing so apparent. Everybody is aware of every little thing, lately. Moore is aware of extra.
“Come to say goodbye?”
He shakes his head. “To ask you to rethink.”
“I’ve thought of a thousand instances, Colonel. You don’t spend three years’ carbon allowance on a whim.”
“That doesn’t imply you’re doing it for the appropriate causes.”
“I simply need to go residence.”
“You had been born in Cincinnati.”
“I’ve household in Sumatra.”
“Which is how you bought the visa, sure. And the way do you suppose your loved ones will react once they study that the one reunion they will sit up for is visiting some robotic that rolls you over like a corpse each half hour to maintain the sores from festering?”
I watch him watching me.
“I’m sorry,” he says after a second. “I don’t imply to presume.”
I look forward to him to proceed.
“You possibly can’t simply surrender,” he says eventually.
“Is that what I’m doing?”
“It’s suicide, Corwin. You of all folks should know that. Plug into that factor and also you deprecate from soul all the way down to subroutine.”
“Perhaps a subroutine doing one thing helpful. Perhaps a subroutine determining tips on how to undo all of the harm we’ve finished.”
“You’ll by no means know, although, will you? You’ll simply be one other neuron firing blindly away, by no means figuring out if the mind you’re a part of is fixing the secrets and techniques of the universe or if you happen to’re simply—firing, with no objective in any respect. You may be giving up your life for random static.”
I really feel the nook of my lip tug right into a smile. “Do you actually suppose they’d spend all that cash, put money into all that {hardware}, recruit all these folks—for static?”
“I believe experiments fail generally. I believe the grander the experiment, the larger the chance. That hive hasn’t finished a rattling factor because it went on-line, so far as anybody can inform. It simply swallows souls and lets them rot.”
“I don’t suppose even you consider that,” I say.
“I hope that. It’s my best-case situation. As a result of in any other case it’s biding its time and gathering its energy, and at this fee it’ll be larger than 21 by the top of the 12 months. When it does act, we’ll do not know what hit us.”
“Why wouldn’t it be hostile?”
“It wouldn’t need to be. It may roll over in its sleep and crush us like an insect.”
Hives are now not authorized right here. I’m wondering in passing if WestHem is planning to preempt, however I believe that ship has sailed; to take out Moksha now they’d need to bomb a string of cities from India to Japan, declare conflict on a dozen international locations. Not simple to justify when your enemy hasn’t really finished something.
“I respect your efforts, Colonel. Actually. However—”
“You realize, you’re a really fascinating particular person.” All of a sudden his expression is unreadable.
I shake my head. “I’m a glorified gardener.”
“But take into account your circumstance. Ringside for every little thing. Buffered by your personal grief in opposition to the worst results of the rapture. Lifeless heart of our high-value demographic, however one way or the other we’ve realized little or no from you we will use. Due to your marriage you might have simply sufficient familiarity to know the jargon, however not sufficient for anybody to fret about what a glorified gardener would possibly overhear. And right here you’re, reporting again to the Hive. One way or the other you even managed to leap the queue.”
“A very totally different Hive,” I remind him.
“Maybe. However possibly we now have all of it flawed. We assume 21’s attempting to resurrect itself, nevertheless it was hardly the primary hive on the planet. It was simply the primary—unconstrained one. That we all know of. And one thing needed to break these filters. One thing introduced it to life. Now Moksha’s on-line, years forward of schedule. One other hive began up proper beneath our noses over in Oregon, some new natural know-how we by no means heard of earlier than. We will’t even legally shut it down as a result of meat doesn’t qualify as {hardware} beneath the Interface Act. And that’s solely the tip of the iceberg. We predict there are others, extra—clandestine.”
“So that you suppose it was, what? Some sort of reproductive technique?”
“Spawning cycle. Subject check. How can we all know? We’re earthworms, attempting to divine the ideas of astronauts.”
A present for metaphor. This man is rarely what I anticipate.
“Or possibly it’s not that,” he continues. “Perhaps all hives are related in methods we don’t perceive. Perhaps 21 and Moksha and the Bicams are one and the identical.”
“You suppose it reprogrammed me. Turned me into some sort of sleeper agent.”
“I doubt there would’ve been a lot programming concerned. It had fifteen million souls to select from. Not less than a number of of them will need to have met the specs proper off the shelf. Adopted their very own agenda for their very own causes, by no means even suspecting that they had been doing precisely—”
“You may cease me,” I level out.
“What makes you suppose we haven’t tried?”
Huh. In fact they might.
“Then once more,” he provides, “if we may cease you, we wouldn’t need to.”
“Then why are you right here?”
“I’m hoping possibly you may cease your self.”
I shake my head. “I’m simply—I’m uninterested in being a prokaryote, Colonel. I’m uninterested in being alone.”
“You’re uninterested in being.”
“Jim—”
“If there are hostilities,” he says. “If you happen to’re on the opposite aspect.”
“Then there received’t be a me to fret about. Isn’t that the entire level?”
His face doesn’t change. “Don’t do that.”
“My flight’s boarding.”
He lets me go. Perhaps I’m a good friend. Perhaps I’m solely an asset he’s did not maintain out of enemy arms. Perhaps the ghost of the Twenty-One Second God is invisibly at work throughout us, iterating by way of the partitions and the wires: operating interference so the shutdown sign by no means reaches my experience, so the manager order to cancel the flight by no means makes it by way of, so any try to make use of drive would appeal to the eye of safety drones ever watchful for indicators of violence.
I really feel eyes on me as I stroll into the boarding tunnel. I think about them watching because the airplane, solely half-full, taxis away from the dock.
Perhaps he’s proper. Perhaps you’re, too.
Perhaps, if you wish to see the world by way of clear eyes, you may’t care whether or not you reside or die.
Concerning the Creator
Peter Watts is a former marine biologist, flesh-eating-disease survivor, and convicted felon (lengthy story) whose novels—regardless of an unhealthy deal with area vampires—have turn out to be required texts for college programs starting from Philosophy to Neuropsychology. His work is accessible in 24 languages, has appeared in 36 best-of-year anthologies, and been nominated for 61 awards. His (considerably shorter) record of 23 precise wins contains the Hugo, the Shirley Jackson, and the Seiun. He appears to be particularly widespread in international locations with a historical past of Soviet occupation, and he hated the U.S. earlier than it was cool. He lives in Toronto with fantasy writer Caitlin Candy, 4 cats, two rabbits, no matter injured/convalescing rodents they’ve been in a position to rescue from the jaws of the aforementioned cats, and a gang of powerful raccoons who shake them down for kibble on the porch each summer time.
Please go to Lightspeed Journal to learn extra nice science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared within the June 2025 difficulty, which additionally options quick fiction by Will McMahon, Vanessa Fogg, Reyes Ramirez, Lowry Poletti, Carrie Vaughn, Benjamin Blattberg, Marissa Lingen, and extra. You possibly can look forward to this month’s contents to be serialized on-line, or you should buy the entire difficulty proper now in handy book format for simply $4.99, or subscribe to the book version right here.
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