Echopraxia (Firefall, #2)

by Peter Watts

and utterly meaningless. Nothing up there tonight but entropy, and the same imaginary shapes that people had been imposing on nature since they’d first thought to wonder at the heavens.

people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy.

All hanging together in a giant cobwebbed uterus, waiting for some unseen army to squash them flat.

Venter Biomorphics—the last of the old-time corporations—had finally lost the fight against entropy and been swept away.

What soldier in combat, no matter how benign, ever gave a thought to the vermin underfoot?

Dogs are always going to come up short if you insist on defining them as a weird kind of cat.

IF YOU ARE GIVEN A CHOICE, YOU BELIEVE YOU HAVE ACTED FREELY. —RAYMOND TELLER

You know how powerful science can be. A thousand years to climb from ghosts and magic to technology; a day and a half from technology back up to ghosts and magic.”

rationality itself—the exalted Human ability to reason—hadn’t evolved in the pursuit of truth but simply to win arguments, to gain control: to bend others, by means logical or sophistic, to your will.

THE INTUITIVE MIND IS A SACRED GIFT AND THE RATIONAL MIND IS A FAITHFUL SERVANT. WE HAVE CREATED A SOCIETY THAT HONORS THE SERVANT AND HAS FORGOTTEN THE GIFT. —ALBERT EINSTEIN (APOCRYPHAL)

And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid.

And it came to pass that certain people figured out how to use that. They painted their faces or they wore funny hats, they shook their rattles and waved their crosses and they said, Yes, there are tigers in the grass, there are faces in the sky, and they will be very angry if you do not obey their commandments. You must make offerings to appease them, you must bring grain and gold and altar boys for our delectation or they will strike you down and send you to the Awful Place. And people believed them by the billions, because after all, they could see the invisible tigers.

Atoms would lie down, forget about Brown and entropy, take a message from the second law of thermodynamics and promise to get back to it later.

“Wait a second.” Brüks frowned. “If the laws of physics are part of some universal operating system and God, by definition, breaks them … you’re basically saying…” “Don’t stop now roach you’re almost there.” “You’re basically saying God’s a virus.”

For fifteen billion years, the universe had been shooting for maximum entropy. Life didn’t throw entropy into reverse—nothing did—but it put on the brakes, even as it spewed chaos out the other end. The gradient of Life was the first scale any aspiring biologist learned to sing: the further you kept yourself from thermodynamic equilibrium, the more alive you were.

The Quinternet was falling apart; everything was. But it had deep roots, old roots reaching back over a century: a design both completely uncephalized and massively redundant. Functionality in the face of overwhelming entropy had been built into its DNA from the start.

The damage had been inflicted along a gradient, as though entropy were slowly devouring the structure from north to south. Entropy had left a path, though: a small canyon through the rubble, leading back to the garden.

THE CLOTHES HAVE NO EMPEROR. —STEWART ELLIOTT GUTHRIE

From these beginnings Humanity could resonate out across time and space, a deterministic cascade designed to undo what the viral God had wrought. Debug the local ordinances. Undo the anthropic principle.