Read Online Echopraxia by Peter Watts - Free Book Online

faintly. “That they do.”
    *   *   *
    He found Lianna back on the front steps, supper balanced on her knees, watching the sun go down. She looked back over her shoulder as he pushed through the door.
    â€œI asked about your brain-boosters,” she said. “No luck. The assembly line’s booked or something.”
    â€œThanks for trying,” he said.
    â€œJim might still be holding. If you haven’t asked him already.”
    He shifted his tray to one hand, used the other to rub away the vague pain behind his eyes. “Mind if I join you?”
    She spared one hand to take in the staircase, as broad and excessive as a cathedral’s.
    He sat beside her, picked at his own plate. “About this morning, I, uh…”
    She stared at the horizon. The sun stared back, highlighting her cheekbones.
    â€œâ€¦ sorry,” he finished.
    â€œForget it. Nobody likes being in a cage.”
    â€œStill. I shouldn’t have shot the messenger.” A sudden chilly breeze crawled across his shoulders.
    Lianna shrugged. “You ask me, nobody should shoot anybody.”
    He raised his eyes. Venus twinkled back at them. He wondered briefly if those photons had followed a straight line to his eyes, or if they’d been shunted around some invisible spillway of curves and angles at the last nanosecond. He looked around at the cracked desert floor, lifted his gaze to the more jagged topography in the distance. Wondered how many unseen agents were looking back.
    â€œYou always eat out here?”
    â€œWhen I can.” The lowering sun stretched her shadow along the ramparts behind them, a giantess silhouetted in orange. “It’s—stark, you know?”
    Ribbed clouds, a million shades of salmon, scudding against an orange and purple sky.
    â€œHow long does this go on?” he wondered.
    â€œThis?”
    â€œThey lurk out there, we wait in here. When does somebody actually make a move?”
    â€œOldschool, you gotta relax .” She shook her head, smiled a twilit smile. “You could obsess and second-guess for a solid month and I guarantee you wouldn’t be able to think of anything our hosts haven’t already factored five ways to Sunday. They’ve been making moves all day.”
    â€œSuch as?”
    â€œDon’t ask me.” She shrugged. “I probably wouldn’t understand even if they told me. They’re wired up way differently.”
    Hive mind, he reminded himself. Synesthetes, too, if he wasn’t mistaken.
    â€œYou do understand them, though,” he said. “That’s your job.”
    â€œNot the way you think. And not without a fair bit of modding on my own.”
    â€œHow , then?”
    â€œI’m not sure,” she admitted.
    â€œCome on.”
    â€œNo, really. It’s a kind of Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven. The moment you start to think about what you’re doing, you screw up. You just have to get into the zone.”
    â€œThey must have trained you at some point,” Brüks insisted. “There must have been some kind of conscious learning curve.”
    â€œYou’d think so, wouldn’t you?” She squinted up at some invisible behemoth he still couldn’t see. “But they kind of—bypassed that. Zapped my fornix with just the right burst of ultrasound and next thing I know it’s four days later and I have all these reflexes. Not so much that I understand them as my fingers do, you know? Phonemes, rhythms, gestures—eye movements, sometimes—” She frowned. “I take in all these cues, and equations just—come to me, piece by piece. I copy them down and I send ’em off. And the next day they show up in the latest issue of Science .”
    â€œYou never examined these reflexes afterward? Played the piano really slowly, taken the time to watch what your fingers were doing?”
    â€œDan,