Exordia

by Seth Dickinson

Congratulations on your mythically awful childhood, but it’s nothing to anyone here except a reason to dump you and tell your friends you need therapy. Keep your temper down and your credit score up, drink with the crew on Friday night and probably Saturday too, play office politics but say you don’t care.

She spent her college years writing X-Files fan theories on television forums. This has armed her to ask a lot of follow-up questions.

What you see, looking around, it’s not really the light coming into your eyes. Your eyes are shit. Little camera-obscura pinholes. But your brain’s evolved tricks to build a useful hallucination based on the trickle of data it gets. Because your environment’s mostly consistent, it’s easy to fill in what’s missing from a few stable assumptions. Much of what you’re seeing right now”—she licks Anna’s eyeball, which is really gross—“is neural postprocessing. Your sight itself is an optical illusion. Don’t you know this? Don’t they teach it in school?”

“You want the generalizations,” Ssrin says. “Since nuance and complexity are hard on your brain.” “Exactly.” Nodding vigorously. “Generalize me.” “You’re a species of gangly distance runners, adapted to sweat and throw stuff. You like watching each other fuck. A few million years ago you developed culture in the form of survival techniques, and whoever learned culture the fastest could have the most babies. Your brains started to swell and reorganize themselves for cultural learning. The development of culture and the development of large brains drove each other in a feedback loop. Your brain grew as large as it could before exhausting the mother’s supply of calories—” “I thought it got too big to fit through the hips.” “A myth, as far as I can tell. You could have much juicier hips. Don’t interrupt. You are wired for small social groups, so all human organization degenerates into power trading and gossip between a tractably sized elite, no matter the stakes. You have two sources of authority—dominance and prestige—which conflict in interesting ways. Something killed most of you, and so your survivors are very inbred. Very similar. Your meat smells the same.”

“We’re not unusually stubborn? We’re not particularly diverse? Experimental? Curious? Willing to take risks? Jacks of all trades but masters of none?” “No,” Ssrin says, crossing two of her necks in a big X of negation. “You are jacks of running and masters of being inbred.”

“So. Like this. In the beginning there was Freedom, and all things could become all things. Nothing needed anything, so nothing wanted anything, and all things were the same. “And the Architects said, let there be Inequity, the first rule, so that the sameness of all things will break apart into the field of difference which we call a universe. “And the Architects looked on their universe, and saw that it would in time give rise to self-replicating life, which would optimize itself to consume and destroy all competition and lead to a universe dominated by total assholes. So the Architects said, let there be an areteia, in which we shall enshrine the desired and objective nature of Right and Wrong. So that many lifes may flourish.” Anna says, “Holy shit.” “Right on both counts, actually. Holy, and shit. The areteia was not well designed. These gods had titanic differences about the exact design of that objective morality.”

After all that, she’s earned a spot in a story about the survival of the human race. She won’t have to pay off her loans, or figure out how to date, or go home to Kurdistan and make amends. She can just save the world instead.

There are seven passions in the universe, Ssrin tells her. Seven patterns which appear again and again, across species, across time and space. There are many ideas about why. She shares none of them. She only names the passions for Anna. Preyjest is the chasing passion, the hunting passion. (Her heads show Anna: one slithering up another’s neck, reaching for it with a forked tongue-tip. At the last instant the other slips away.) Prajna is the lonely passion. The need for truth. One star in the dark, trying to brighten. Caryatasis is the dream of all disciples. The passion that binds students to their teacher. It happens when one soul changes many, and many change toward the one. Geashade hurts in the end, and cannot be ended without the hurt. Hesper is the warmth of a need unexpectedly met. Generosity from a stranger. Love from a friend. It is associated with silence: things said without speaking. Rath is the passion which stole gravity’s strength. Like gravity it draws things together to clash, and leaves scars shaped like the enemy. Serendure is the last and greatest. It is the unbreakable bond which may be trust and may be dependence. It persists whether it is wanted or not. It is like the force which binds quarks together: stronger when it is pulled. Each passion, Ssrin says, is a relationship between souls. Souls are the letters that make these words.

Each of my heads has a different specialty. Interrogation, healing, killing”—Ssrin pokes them and they nip fondly at her fingers—“combat drugs, operant drugs, fun drugs, killing again.”

The walls brighten with lovely red-gold dawn light. Anna’s lying in a little compartment, pearly-smooth, kind of a Jony Ive minimalist look, if Apple worked in shades of oxidized bronze and the stink of blood.

“Yes. Stories are maps of cause and effect. Really effective stories recur over and over, in billions of souls. They overflow, gain the ability to exist on their own, replicate, and eventually inject themselves into the physics model.”

She realizes that her image of her own soul is not very different from the way she imagines hell. That same choice. Over and over and over and over.

“The world might be ending. The most significant thing in human history just happened. A hostile first contact. And the reason might be right there, in Tawakul. Why do we care about the history of this village? Even if there are still people alive on the ground. Shouldn’t they be willing to do whatever we need?” Oh, for fuck’s sake. Erik opens his mouth to snap a reprimand. Clayton draws breath to say something probably less ethical and probably more effective at persuading Skyler. But Anna beats them both by bursting out laughing. “Dude,” she says incredulously. “Weren’t you listening? You think the world’s ending. Someone shows up and bombs you out of nowhere, wow, that sucks, it’s like Pearl Harbor, it’s like 9/11. But if you’re a Kurd, that’s normal. And you know what else is normal? Americans showing up to help, and then fucking you over. Do you think it’ll make your job easier if these people don’t trust you? Did the past ten years of bombing useless dirt not teach that you can’t win without the locals on your side?”

(It turns out, at moments like this, that Erik is essentially an emotional tube of Pringles: everything he can produce is dry and fragile and unsatisfying, and once he starts producing this airless crisp, he can’t stop.)

You cannot just reach out into the world and alter it at your whim. Not one man: not alone. Not without oversight, and accountability, and people to say No, the cost is too high. It is intrinsically and absolutely wrong to set aside the duties of ethics because you believe that you, you alone, are smart enough to violate them. Everyone thinks that, at first. Everyone thinks they have good reason. Was Clayton better suited to choose the shape of the world than Cheney? Than Rumsfeld? Sure. He’s smarter than them, for whatever that’s worth. Obama is smarter than Bush, more careful about blowback, more appealing to the Nobel Prize set. But he’s still killing a lot of innocent people. He still authorized signature strikes in Yemen: killing people whose identities are unknown but whose behavior seems suspicious. Was that Clayton’s idea too? You have to have a code. You have to have limits. You can retaliate for harm done, yes. You can guard what grows from those who would devour it. But you can’t compute how the world should be and then kill your way toward that design. There is a very basic distinction between trying to constrain and repair the evil of others, and actually doing evil in service of some unrealized, uncertain, maybe-illusory plan.

A hard-faced woman looks up at her, hand raised to shade the sun. She’s got a big SVD rifle and a wide, hard, chiseled face. It’s the face of a woman whose mind is a cork. She’s keeping something bottled up inside, a feeling so ugly she cannot let it out, because it would rule her. Erik knows this, because all that gets past that cork is the Look. The Look that means you’ve seen true evil.

Erik knows a secret about rage. You gotta get to the middle of it. Some rage, you get to the middle and you find there’s nothing there. An asshole cuts you off in traffic? You bang your head on the corner of the cabinet right when someone’s complaining you didn’t sort the recycling properly? You get to the middle and it’s just selfish pain. You’re just hurt, you’re flaring up. But if you’ve truly been wronged, you’ll find a bar. Rage isn’t like fire. It doesn’t spread by sheer heat. You can’t convince people to become angry just by being angry at them. You’ll frighten them, or convince them to ignore you. So you don’t show them your rage. You go into the middle of it, into the black pupil of the fury, and you find that bar.

That solid bar at the center of your wrath is the reason. Not your reason. The reason. The objective, morally axiomatic reason you are furious. And if you can pull that bar back out and polish it clean of your hurt and your prejudice, you can show it to other people. You can touch them with it, like a lodestone. And then they get furious alongside you. Because they realize that in your place they’d be furious too. And they realize that, if they don’t get furious, maybe someday they will end up in your place. The reason rings out true across all of time and context. It is the fulcrum that lets the lever of your anger move the world: knowing that what happened didn’t just wrong you, it wronged everyone, everywhere, forever And if you grip that bar hard enough, nothing, not anything, can move you.

Doing the morally right thing doesn’t have to make you stupid. Morally righteous decisions are usually smart decisions, because they require you to go the extra mile, do your diligence, build trust, consider the people around you, follow the rules, rules which exist for a reason. And hope is usually smart too. Because hope allows you to look for long-odds reversals, when all the smart safe plays are just gonna slow your defeat.”

“People dropping bombs always have some higher reason. Stopping communism. Securing Asian co-prosperity. Defeating Japan. Destroying Kurdish terrorists. But the bombs never seem to hit that reason. They just hit a bunch of mothers and kids.”

you know that the raw image captured by your eyes is just a little upside-down smear? A hundred and thirty million sensors in your dainty little retina, but only enough nerve bandwidth to sample ten percent at a time. And of that ten percent, most of it is rejected by your subconscious as irrelevant. The blood vessels that feed the retina are for obscure reasons in front of the retina, blocking the view. So your eye has evolved to screen out stationary objects, like the spiderweb of veins in the way … but this would make walls and floors and trees fade out of view too. So your eyeballs must be constantly jiggled. Ah, Davoud, the comedy of your sight! Two eyes in one head give you a hundred and sixty degrees of vision, not even half a circle. Wiggling frantically, so they can keep seeing things that don’t move.

“Western corporate feminism is a failed ideology,” Anna’s mother insists. “It challenges only one of the three oppressions of patriarchy, capitalism, and nationalism. Jineology isn’t about having the freedom to look nice and buy products. It’s about destroying the masculine fascist world-killing ideology of capitalism, and replacing it with a green democratic confederalism that centers women as the historical subject.

“Because if star travel is so easy that it can be achieved in three days—or less, depending how long it took them to detect Blackbird’s appearance—then the galaxy is full, and species must compete over limited space and resources. The material conditions dictate it. We must assume that subjugation or extermination are the normal result of first contact.”

This is a dark f**king forest Seth

Contact might be brutal, but to assume that disinterested aliens with a whole galaxy to fight over would be more particularly vicious to Earth than Earth’s people are to one another … she thinks that’s naive. Aliens won’t care about religion, or regional self-determination, or any of the other reasons humans invent to kill each other. Destroying the world probably won’t even create shareholder value for aliens. As long as there’s all that space out there, nobody’s going to have as much stake in destroying Earth as Earthlings do.

awareness that connects it to Zhenya’s mind. It passes through the rifle scope, into his eye, into his soul. Like a stent, it inflates. Whatever was in him pops out. He drops the telescopic sight. He spasms. His mind, severed from the kernel of dualist power that has accompanied and cajoled it all his life, reflexes into something merely real. There is a condition called apophenia. It is universal to the human mind, but it is particularly acute in conditions like paranoia. It is the tendency to see connections between unrelated things, to perceive meaning in nothing. Apophenia is a delusion. Zhenya experiences the precise opposite. Call it exophenia: the movement outside meaning. He suddenly perceives the lack of connections between things. He is suddenly relieved of an irrational conspiracy that had preoccupied his mind since birth. He is not deluded. He has been reluded. He is supersane. He is surrounded by monsters.

This is hell, Ustinov thinks. I’m in hell. “Oh, no,” says the dedy whipping him. “This is just torture. You suffered through this because you wanted to be a real soldier, didn’t you? A real soldier like the one who did this to you. Real soldiers are men who torture dukh boys. Soon this part will be over, and you will graduate. You will travel forward across the terrain of yourself to the place you have prepared. “Hell begins when you’re the one holding the pool cue.”

“Clayton, my man. With Ssrin in hiding I am as bored as someone at a public function whose neural rewards have been artificially dissociated from the evolutionary imperatives which once drove his social behavior. Did that translate correctly? Well, never mind.”

Who are the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse, anyway? Chiron, Genghis Khan, Hoof and Mouth, and … Misty of Chincoteague?”

“There are seven great passions in the universe. Seven stories all of us share. They are known among the belunari and the eana, the shorinor and the iridine, the skylords and the coagula, and though all these peoples have evolved on scattered distant stars, they still know the same seven passions. Even the khai know them. Perhaps the khai most of all. “Preyjest is the story of the suit and the chase, as strong as the space between hunter and prey, between lover and beloved. The pursuing passion. “Prajna gleams alone, a solitary star. The passion of knowing for no sake. “Serendure is unconditional loyalty, trust that is abuse. The unbreakable passion. “Caryatasis grows when many change to follow one who doesn’t. The disciple’s passion. “Geashade is the falling knife, the love doomed to die, powerful in proportion to its pain. “Hesper is simple and it makes us warm. The comfort passion: like meeting a stranger, sharing one night, and going on stronger. “And rath, dear Clayton. Rath the clashing passion. Two stones beat against each other, chipping and cracking, hardening and sharpening. Maybe until one breaks. Maybe forever.”

“You wanted to know if people closer to the mice got transformed more dramatically,” Clayton says with even greater respect. Chaya is annoyed that he’s clearly raising his opinion of her. Men tend to do this: treat her like a Strong Woman, because she’s tall and fit and works with her hands, but then express some silent surprise when it turns out she really does possess initiative and insight and perseverance and all that other stuff. In her experiences, men are disappointed by one another’s failures, but surprised by women’s success.

Clayton shakes his head, begins to speak, thinks of something else, and ends up blurting: “God, you are so fucking hot.” “Yes,” she says impatiently. “I know you think so.” Men tell her this an exhausting amount. Putangina, she is wearing a full-body space suit and still they are saying it. “Please don’t inflict your sexual responses on my competence.”

Tomcats don’t have a cockpit voice, but this one does. The voice of an angel. Like Googoosh. “Hello. Are you the pilot?” Davoud caresses the trim hat, targeting hat, the pickle switch that drops the bombs. Blackbird speaks excellent Farsi. He hopes she knows English too, not only because English is the language of aviation, but so they can watch English movies together, projected on the HUD. They will be alone together, safe, forever.

The crown of black shapes over Ssrin’s heads turns. The world cuts open there. For an instant Anna stares into the burst viscera of reality. Something older than suns rots down there.

“Nonsense. Of course she likes you. Is she strong? Can she reach the top shelves?

I always told my girlfriend, black hole polar jets are proof of God.” “How so?” Khaje asks. “Because the black hole makes the polar jet. One can’t exist without the other.” “So?” “So, if you look up at the night sky, at the center of galaxies where anything with eyes will want to look, you’ll find a terrible sign. You’ll find that at the heart of that whole galaxy and all the stars in it the devil used a million suns to build the biggest darkest most seductive most hopeless crushing prison he possibly could.” Chaya swallows. Her voice stays brave. “And then God saw that prison, and said: thank you, Satan Lightbringer. Thank you for the ultimate final prison from which not even light escapes. Thank you for your black hole. This will make the perfect engine for the biggest, brightest, most beautiful rocket you ever saw. “And out of that darkness, there was light.”

Ssrin sees beauty in Anna, the beauty which means something at the extremes of its experience.

That’s the problem with utilitarians. You abandon inviolable moral principles like the sanctity of life, you make the numbers big enough, and suddenly they’re eager to turn themselves into mass murderers. You don’t even have to give them a push. Ask them if they’d torture a child in order to increase the global development index by one percent and they will shout “YES” before you even get past “child.” They want to be self-consistent more than they want to be good. What Erik knows, what Clayton doesn’t grasp, is that morality isn’t fungible. It’s not like money. It’s not an account with balances. You can’t kill ten people to save a hundred and say you came out ahead by ninety. You are responsible for your own actions. If other people or outside circumstances create evil, well, the evil is theirs. To condition your own morality on their evil would itself be evil. You cannot say, well, they’ve set things up so I can kill ten people to save a hundred, so now it’s okay for me to kill ten people. What you do instead is kill no one, and try to save a hundred and ten. And if you fail, and they all die, that fucking sucks, but at least you denied yourself the cheap out of “the greater good.” You chose the greatest good: rejecting the arrogance of prognostication, accepting your own ignorance and the unpredictability of the future. Working to save everyone because anything less is surrender to coercion.

Imagine your life without the best person you’ve ever known. Savor for a moment the fear that you are already living that life: that you have missed the people who were supposed to be your everything, and now you are walking forward into gray wastelands, far off the map you were born to follow. That is the end of the world. Everyone will fail to meet their people. Forever.

and some smartass with a British accent and no call sign says “At any moment now Obama’s going to turn off HAARP and get up on that White House podium and we’ll say ‘What do you call a stunt like that’ and he’ll say” and four or five overlapping voices crash over one another trying to get to “the aristocrats” first and they all laugh, mics hot, howling through the static, except 1Z1RT, who says “Sorry, I don’t get it! Over” and they all laugh harder.

“The universe is infinite, and so were the gods. Their corpses are infinitely many too: reified as flaws out of the cooling cosmos. This is one of two in our galaxy, and the only one easily reached by ship. It has become a shrine. And a kind of slum.” Ssrin yearns to be there. On the Winking she will see old friends again, and old foes who deserve to know she kept the faith they doubted. And she can finally eat some real meat without slow-cooking it in her scout stomach.