A Cosmic Tech Thriller Leads to Literal Misplaced Souls in This Sci-Fi Brief Story

io9 is proud to current fiction from Lightspeed Journal. As soon as a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s choice is “The Twenty-One Second God” by Peter Watts. Take pleasure in!

The Twenty-One Second God

by Peter Watts

“Particular person: a dwelling system sustaining each a better stage of inside cooperation and a decrease stage of inside battle than both its elements or any bigger programs of which it’s a element.”

—Fields and Levin, 2018

We misplaced so many souls at this time. Studies stream in throughout 5 continents; icons bloom on the map like blood spatters. Damaged filters, zero latency, bandwidth that in some way blew by the roof when nobody was wanting. The {hardware} performs catch-up as finest it could possibly: this variety of petaflops, that many milliseconds, ten thousand community nodes stuttering below the burden of elevated visitors. Chemical substances spiking and crashing in brains the world over: GABA and serotonin and a dozen others that might make excellent sense to you, when you have been nonetheless right here. Muscle mass locked in sudden tetanus. Adrenaline cascades surprising hearts into spastic fibrillation.

It occurred a lot sooner 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 at the least, the throttles re-engaged. The community was staggering again to some sort of Regular earlier than Meta’s human overseers had time to do way 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 form of revelation, in the identical means you might describe the solar as a form of vibrant candle. Every little thing made sense in a means that nothing ever has. I may see actuality proper right down to the electrons—and now that I’m again, it’s all gone. As if I dreamed the answer to Unified Area Concept 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 preserve climbing. Frantic hordes jamming the strains to Telehealth. Folks choosing themselves up off the streets, frightened, confused, marionettes whose strings have been minimize with out warning and reconnected with out clarification.

Others must be—discovered. They’re discovering us in our dwelling rooms and beds. Discovering us on the bathroom. They’re discovering us in vehicles, 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 preserve discovering us. The curve bends into the exponential, 1000’s to tens of 1000’s to hundreds of thousands, 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 form of disruptions you’d count on. However there are different issues, too. Rumors and stories 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 have been remoted on their very own community. And—authorized actions, of all issues: 1000’s of them, launched from the ether throughout the blackout, drafted by rafts of computerized 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 awoke and moved throughout the face of the waters and went away once more. They graduate from conspiracy idea to working speculation within the house of an hour. Respected sources neither affirm nor deny, however admit the chance that one thing coalesced in these moments. They aren’t fully positive what it was.

Any individual calls it the Twenty-One Second God. From that time on, nobody calls it anything.

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 along 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 want you to come back with us.”

• • •

I’m in a non-public downtown hospital with nameless facades. I’m in a vibrant cylindrical coffin filled with chittering magnets. I’m on a diagnostic desk that tasks 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, at the least, 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 comfortable gentle seeps from the baseboards and overstuffed chairs squat round a glass espresso desk. I keep in mind a really previous film: an astronaut in a terrarium, surrounded by sterile props his alien captors suppose will make him really feel at house.

Right here, ultimately, 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. Initially, we’d prefer to say how sorry we’re about what occurred to you . . .”

About. Not for.

“I don’t perceive,” I say. “They mentioned there have been hundreds of thousands 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 navy escort. A medical workup that might pressure the bounds of a Platinum coverage. Two-and-a-half hours to date, and so they appear to be simply getting began.

“You may’t be devoting this a lot private consideration to fifteen million individuals,” I say.

“Not simply but,” Darcelle admits. “You’re particular.”

The Colonel clears his throat. “What Ms. Burrowes means is that you just have 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 can be extraordinarily useful in serving to us work out what occurred, serving to us guarantee it doesn’t occur once more. You’d be well-compensated, after all. 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 might have brought about.” 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 in regards to the format.” Karina impacts a rueful smile. “Usually after all we’d simply squirt it to your bridge, however, nicely . . .”

“Ship it to my watch,” I inform her.

“We often do every part within the metaverse.” Her smile frays a little bit. “We’re not likely 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 part’s on the report right here. When you’ve acquired the doc, verbal affirmation is all we want.”

I rifle by 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 fitting to pursue any private or class motion . . .”

Darcelle nods. “We expect 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 result is rarely assured.”

I look across the terrarium. Karina and Darcelle beam hundred-watt smiles. Nella and Travis appear unusually attentive to the decor. Colonel Moore stands ramrod straight and in some way manages to look very drained on the identical time. He meets my eyes; after a second he presents a tiny, virtually indiscernible shake of the top.

“Nice,” I say.

• • •

Moore escorts me to floor stage. “We’d such as you to stay right here for a couple 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 identify, though his voice is unimpeachably impartial. “We expect we may study so much from you.”

“Something you couldn’t study if I slept in my very own mattress?”

“This could be extra environment friendly.”

I ponder if I’m allowed to refuse.

“You might be after all free to depart 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 hundreds of thousands extra who noticed us disappear.”

“You suppose we’d incarcerate fifteen million harmless individuals.”

“Isn’t that the normal method? 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. Evening has fallen; the glass facade separating us from the road is a darkish mirror.

“You’re not fallacious,” the Colonel admits. “Though we actually have the sources to incarcerate a restricted variety of high-value belongings. For their very own safety, after all. I doubt anybody would complain, given what’s at stake. And but . . .”

He gestures on the glass. By means of the half-reflections I see a automobile idling on the curb.

“It’ll take you house,” 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 exams. I are available in within the morning and go house at night time within the backs of firm vehicles that know the place I reside 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 and so they don’t speak right down to me. The fits with their mounted smiles drop by every now and then to impart encouraging platitudes. Colonel Moore visits the ability 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 have been swallowed earlier than me earlier entered as loud voices in a small room: elements 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 have been by no means greater than whispers in a hurricane: they keep in mind as a lot as a single neuron would possibly, when you 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 at the least keep in mind a flash of targeted perception, which the machines would possibly have the ability to tag and monitor 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 throughout the transition. It’s one in all their hypotheses. They’ve lots of them.

The main points 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 every week.

“Don’t underestimate the worth of time-series.” Nella shines a light-weight in my eye, measures some response that a couple of million {dollars}’ value of medical gear apparently hasn’t recorded already. “Your mind underwent an enormous shock. Some neurons acquired superstimulated, some acquired caught. Purposeful clusters worn out instantly. Others crosswired. Elements of your mind that have been by no means supposed to speak to one another began taking pictures the shit like previous mates. It’s an actual mess in there.”

“Suppose a large overdose of psychoactives with a PTSD chaser,” Travis chimes in.

Nella nods. “We weren’t round for the principle 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 couple 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 attention-grabbing, as a result of no one’s referred to as us off but. Gotta preserve the pattern dimension 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 individuals.

Nodes.

I can’t deny it. I used to be not an individual throughout the interval below investigation.

Oh, the physique persevered; the flesh stayed heat, the organs saved 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 fully unaware of doing that. After all, that’s hardly uncommon; you all the time delighted in mentioning that almost all of our ideas are unconscious even at one of the best of occasions. You’d speak about our autonomic modes, the way in which we iterate by complicated day by day routines on autopilot. Regale me with tales of sleepwalking artists and intercourse employees 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 individuals 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 fallacious tense, after all. The Twenty-One Second God has been useless for 2 weeks now; even the {hardware} it inhabited has been throttled, time-lagged, crippled to the purpose it barely delivers VR anymore. Every little thing it was, every part it wished: all up to now.

And but it continues to act: all these authorized actions winding by 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 Complete for an hour every 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 one’s sure what it’s campaigning for.

The authorized claims are simple: 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 easy. Some say it was barely acutely aware even when it was alive, that consciousness itself is simply ignorance in motion. It solely boots up when the universe palms us one thing sudden: 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 through which order, why they feinted left as a substitute of proper. As soon as the data 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 excellent data. We baseline people by no means even glimpse the summit; our ideas are easy and our fashions are infantile stick-figures, the world is all the time taking us unexpectedly. However what’s sudden to a being with fifteen million occasions the computational mass of a human thoughts? All gods are omniscient. All gods are zombies.

They are saying 21 might have been awake throughout these first few instants when it had swallowed just a few hundred souls. When it swallowed me. However 1000’s? Tens of millions? 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 good as any deity, as acutely 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 simply 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 moderately 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 communicate.

He hesitates. “Appears to be a bandwidth correlation, not that that’s any nice shock. A lot of the nodes have been wired into fantasy situations. Video games, worldsims, private fantasies. Fats-pipe stuff.”

“I wasn’t.” I used to be logged in to an internet assist 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 may be useful.”

“So have I.” However that’s one of many marvelous hazards of marriage to a neuroscientist: you study to marvel about implications. Because of you I do know that whenever you anesthetize half a mind, the opposite half would possibly manifest a complete new character. I do know that when the medicine put on off, that short-lived persona—that standalone, autonomous being—will get swallowed again into the better complete. Tulpas don’t take up a lot actual property—a couple of practical clusters right here and there—however they’d nonetheless move any Turing check you might 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 also be very efficient,” the Colonel continues. “Doesn’t stick, although. Propanolol, when you want 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 at the least as previous as I’m, sufficiently old for bygone methods.

“I’m.”

“Nonetheless collectively?”

“We see one another usually.”

He doesn’t wish 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 seems like from the surface.

Figures.

Over 4 hundred individuals 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 exterior my constructing. He calls me by identify; I’ve by no means seen him earlier than. He begs me to share my knowledge, and doesn’t imagine me after 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 responsibility, he growls. God didn’t bless me in order that I may preserve 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 all over the place. There are lists in circulation: guerilla footage of survivors stumbling by the aftermath, squeezed by 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 cast when a part of one thing better. 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 have been the center 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 fitting servers. Certainly such an mind discovered every part, whereas it was alive. Certainly its items nonetheless keep in mind what it discovered.

I inform the Colonel in regards to the encounter. He jogs my memory that I can keep on the facility. I admit I’m tempted. It might be extra handy. It might 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 way in which I do at house. And I’ve by no means absolutely shaken the assumption that they’d preserve me right here by drive, if the optics permitted and the harm hadn’t already been carried out. They’d in all probability like nothing higher than to see me cage myself.

Darcelle’s smile tightens like shrink-wrap after I decline. The Colonel shrugs and presents to publish a microdrone exterior 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 spiritual nuts—completely different mindsets have completely different tells, to eyes that may learn saccades and muscle twitches from fifty meters—so I gained’t have to fret about embarrassing false positives. The homeless and the destitute will have the ability to method me as they all the time have; solely these of in poor health intent will even understand it’s there.

I thank him, and settle for his form 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 presupposed to be sending to the hipp.”

Nella furrows her forehead. “May the Hogan bridge have carried out that?”

“Perhaps third-order downstream impact or one thing. However we checked it final week.”

“Perhaps we are able to guide a while on Monet. Guess it might chew by this no downside.”

“Monet?” I ask.

“They’re booked stable for a 12 months.”

“We’re the 21 membership, Trav. We’ve acquired a VIP move. I say we use it.”

“May simply be an artifact. Perhaps we should always run him by 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 occasions human synapse depend. Perimeter makes use of it for theoretical cosmology, however it could possibly 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 forestall overfitting. However whenever you loosen the parameters like which you can open up complete new methods to interpret a knowledge set.”

“Apart from,” Nella says, “consciousness all the time 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 sources to take care of 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 at the least 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, after all. What’s, today? However the odds. The coincidence.

I discover out later that MOANAI’s not the one participant to drop off the board below 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 a central hub. One thing went fallacious. The ultrasonic pulses the mud motes used to speak to one another began inducing spike trains within the somatosensory cortex. One individual 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 should have been seeing, and so they’ll by no means have the ability to inform us. Each node in that hive is both useless or vegetative.

Everybody’s nonetheless very good to me. No person tells me something which may get me upset. They don’t understand how a lot they are saying to one another after I’m simply across the nook; I assume whenever you’re preventing rearguard in opposition to a useless god it’s straightforward to overlook the lab rats underfoot. However I see previous the facade. Their exams develop extra frequent, extra intrusive. I present up earlier and so they preserve me later. They’re operating scared, and so they’ve acquired nothing.

It’s been a month and Twenty-One nonetheless reaches out from the grave, casually swatting their finest countermeasures as in the event that they have been flies.

• • •

You’ll have preferred Nella. She even talks such as you. You’ll’ve pricked up your ears at that offhand remark—

—consciousness all the time 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 main points 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 complete 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 acutely aware within the first place in the event that they weren’t in-built.

After all, Nella’s only a child. Phrases tumble out of her like puppies. You have been extra eloquent, extra concise. You nailed it with two sentences and a depraved smile: You may see the world as it’s, or you possibly can care whether or not you reside or die. You may’t optimize alongside each axes concurrently.

Today, I can’t appear to do both.

• • •

They nonetheless don’t know who, however they simply came upon how:

Meta lied in regards to the tech.

It was the basic safeguard, baked into each Hogan bridge ever made: restrict the bandwidth. Join minds to machines, when you should. Join brains to one another—however use a straw, not a firehose. Share sensations however not selves; preserve latency distant from that three-hundred-millisecond threshold the place elements start cohering into wholes. Always remember the terrifying existential reality behind each ghost in each machine:

Consciousness doesn’t multiply; it expands.

However it seems these fuckers used a firehose in spite of everything.

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 have 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 have been leaving room for sensory upgrades nonetheless within the works. They have been creating distant, inorganic teletulpas to enhance psychological well being for all. They have been leaving house to carry a complete new Web, in opposition to that inevitable day when failing infrastructure or terrorist exercise takes the previous one down. Perhaps they have been even going for a hive thoughts of their very own, though their denials on that entrance have been strenuous and fast.

Within the meantime, somebody snuck in by 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 individuals 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.

At the least I don’t must cope with Karina and Darcelle anymore.

• • •

He finds me within the cafeteria once more and asks—politely, as all the time—for the pleasure of my firm. He sits, relocates a espresso and a plate of kruggets to the desk, slides his tray to at least one aspect. He focuses on these exact, robotic actions, eyes on the desk, on his lunch. He sits quietly, accumulating his ideas.

“I’ve been going over our findings. Making an attempt to make some sort of sense of them.” He grunts a comfortable snigger. “Not that there’s a lot hope of that, after all. 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 usually sufficient.

I strive once more. “You understand how, whenever you shut your eyes, you continue to know the place all of your elements are? You simply know, with out wanting, the place you finish and every part else begins?”

He nods.

“Think about that you just knew, in the very same means, that you just went on ceaselessly. That every part 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 report a dozen occasions.

I attempt to give him a little bit extra. “There have been—insights, I suppose you might 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 have been.”

After which, after all, I knew nothing in any respect. This dazzling burst of enlightenment everybody’s so excited by—it solely lasted a second earlier than I drowned in an ocean of souls.

However I’ve mentioned all that earlier than, too. It nonetheless isn’t what he’s in search of.

“I’ve seen the interviews,” he says ultimately. “I’m accustomed to spiritual 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 understand 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 may need slipped previous the equipment.

He’s determined as a result of they’re dropping.

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 report, today.” After which, since you’re presupposed 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 occasions in 20 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 dropping an arm and dropping a liked one. The identical circuits gentle up whether or not the ache’s bodily or emotional. I all the time 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 you need 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 preserve going. “I ponder what a part of the mind parses that sort of damage.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have requested.”

“You wished to know the way it made me really feel. You need to know this earlier than you possibly can know that. As a result of as soon as the arm is gone, every part 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 understand, 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 complete and snuffs you out and once more—nothing issues, nothing can matter since you don’t exist. However you then 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. Every little thing is again to regular.

“Perhaps that’s why I’m your optimum knowledge 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 knowledge or merely corroborated the previous. 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 must go in tomorrow. None of us do.

Nella and Travis are relocating. They’ve acquired the info 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 imagine them.

I keep in mind the sunshine in your eyes whenever you have been closing on an answer. Your pleasure was virtually predatory, you didn’t cease shifting. Each time one thing referred to as you away—at any time when I did—you couldn’t wait to get again to it. You glowed. You vibrated.

There’s none of that in these individuals. There’s one thing of their eyes, however it’s not that.

Haunted. Perhaps that’s the phrase.

Perhaps they’ll conduct their evaluation in some secret bunker. Perhaps there is no such thing as a 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 depart the sport earlier than the targets on their chests get any greater.

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 house. I’ve wiped my biometrics, mentioned my goodbyes.

Besides to the Colonel, who didn’t are available in at this time.

• • •

A brand new hive awoke at this time in Indore. The video’s on each feed: 2 hundred souls wired collectively, stacked in hexagonal pods like honeycomb, tended by machines that seem like chrome grasshoppers. Pallets writhe in gradual peristalsis, rocking their occupants round an eccentric orbit optimized to forestall bedsores. Tubes carry waste and vitamins; limbs twitch to milliamp currents that preserve 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 publish.

Not an accident, this time. Not a malfunction or a hijacking. These individuals volunteered.

It’s been within the works for years now; it wasn’t presupposed to go up for years but. However 21—accelerated issues. Wars all the time push expertise into fast-forward, even the quiet ones. They are saying we’re ten years forward of the place we have been a 12 months in the past.

The Indian Institute of Expertise 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, however it’s solely been a day. Even Yahweh took six to seek out his ft.

There’s a ready listing. A second set up is ready 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 legal professionals, no swarm of AIgents may probably win a battle in opposition to a coherent self with fifteen million occasions the synapse depend of a human thoughts, regardless of how lengthy it’s been useless. Oh, we win the occasional battle—however some counsel that even 21’s uncommon authorized defeats are deliberate, a part of some farsighted technique to delay final victory till very 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, making an attempt ceaselessly to outbreed one another.

Not that taking place the Metazoan highway 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 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 part, today. Moore is aware of extra.

“Come to say goodbye?”

He shakes his head. “To ask you to rethink.”

“I’ve thought-about a thousand occasions, Colonel. You don’t spend three years’ carbon allowance on a whim.”

“That doesn’t imply you’re doing it for the fitting causes.”

“I simply wish to go house.”

“You have 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 after 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 may’t simply quit,” he says ultimately.

“Is that what I’m doing?”

“It’s suicide, Corwin. You of all individuals should know that. Plug into that factor and also you deprecate from soul right down to subroutine.”

“Perhaps a subroutine doing one thing helpful. Perhaps a subroutine determining methods to undo all of the harm we’ve carried out.”

“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 when you’re simply—firing, with no function in any respect. You can 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, spend money on all that {hardware}, recruit all these individuals—for static?”

“I believe experiments fail generally. I believe the grander the experiment, the better the chance. That hive hasn’t carried out 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 imagine 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 price it’ll be greater 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 must be. It may roll over in its sleep and crush us like an insect.”

Hives are now not authorized right here. I ponder in passing if WestHem is planning to preempt, however I believe that ship has sailed; to take out Moksha now they’d must bomb a string of cities from India to Japan, declare battle on a dozen nations. Not straightforward to justify when your enemy hasn’t really carried out something.

“I respect your efforts, Colonel. Actually. However—”

“You already know, you’re a really attention-grabbing individual.” Instantly his expression is unreadable.

I shake my head. “I’m a glorified gardener.”

“But contemplate your circumstance. Ringside for every part. Buffered by your personal grief in opposition to the worst results of the rapture. Useless heart of our high-value demographic, however in some way we’ve discovered little or no from you we are able to use. Because of 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 might be, reporting again to the Hive. One way or the other you even managed to leap the queue.”

“A totally completely different Hive,” I remind him.

“Maybe. However possibly we now have all of it fallacious. We assume 21’s making an attempt to resurrect itself, however 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 below our noses over in Oregon, some new natural expertise 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} below the Interface Act. And that’s solely the tip of the iceberg. We expect there are others, extra—clandestine.”

“So that you suppose it was, what? Some sort of reproductive technique?”

“Spawning cycle. Area check. How can we all know? We’re earthworms, making an attempt to divine the ideas of astronauts.”

A present for metaphor. This man is rarely what I count on.

“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. At the least a couple of of them should 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 have been doing precisely—”

“You can cease me,” I level out.

“What makes you suppose we haven’t tried?”

Huh. After all they’d.

“Then once more,” he provides, “if we may cease you, we wouldn’t must.”

“Then why are you right here?”

“I’m hoping possibly you possibly can 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. “Should you’re on the opposite aspect.”

“Then there gained’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 buddy. Perhaps I’m solely an asset he’s didn’t preserve out of enemy palms. Perhaps the ghost of the Twenty-One Second God is invisibly at work throughout us, iterating by the partitions and the wires: operating interference so the shutdown sign by no means reaches my journey, so the chief order to cancel the flight by no means makes it by, so any try to make use of drive would entice 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 might be, too.

Perhaps, if you wish to see the world by clear eyes, you possibly can’t care whether or not you reside or die.

In regards to the Writer

Peter Watts is a former marine biologist, flesh-eating-disease survivor, and convicted felon (lengthy story) whose novels—regardless of an unhealthy deal with house vampires—have change into required texts for college programs starting from Philosophy to Neuropsychology. His work is offered in 24 languages, has appeared in 36 best-of-year anthologies, and been nominated for 61 awards. His (considerably shorter) listing of 23 precise wins contains the Hugo, the Shirley Jackson, and the Seiun. He appears to be particularly well-liked in nations 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 robust raccoons who shake them down for kibble on the porch each summer time.

Please go to Lightspeed Magazine to learn extra nice science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared within the June 2025 challenge, which additionally options quick fiction by Will McMahon, Vanessa Fogg, Reyes Ramirez, Lowry Poletti, Carrie Vaughn, Benjamin Blattberg, Marissa Lingen, and extra. You may look forward to this month’s contents to be serialized on-line, or you should buy the entire challenge proper now in handy e-book format for simply $4.99, or subscribe to the e-book version here.

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