Status Updates From Firefall (Firefall, #1-2)

...oh, and have you heard about that new weaponized echopraxia that’s going around? Jitterbug, they call it. Used to be pure monkey-see-monkey-do, but they say it’s mutating. Now you get to die dancing, bring a friend along for the ride.

Plagues and firestorms in a single package. How very apocalyptic. Some splicer somewhere had a refreshingly biblical approach to weaponized biologicals.

“Echopraxia echofuckingpraxia,” Sengupta hissed at his shoulder.

“There’s no fucking justice anywhere, unless you make your own.”

Okay, that's Darwinian. Or Trumpian.

Brüks thought about it. “I don’t—think so. Not if she hacked us all the same way, anyway. Basic things, sure. Fear. Lust. Stuff that’s universal.” He smiled, a bit grimly, at the thought of the Crown’s surviving denizens sprouting preprogrammed hard-ons and spiked nipples. And that is really not a picture I need in my head right now.

The sexy bleeding edge, you know. First explorers on the post-Human frontier.

The thought of dying is just too damn scary. So we invent some Fairyland Heaven to take us in after we pass on, or we look to your friends and their friends to give us immortality on a chip or—if we’re hard-core realists—we just pay lip service to death and decay and keep right on feeling immortal anyway.

Was the universe a hologram or a simulation? Was its boundary a program or merely an interface—and if the latter, what sat on the other side, watching it run?

Matter took on strange forms inside that chamber. 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.

Pre-Socratic Greeks intuited atomic theory in 200 BC. Buddhists were saying centuries ago that we can’t trust our senses, that sensation itself is an act of faith. Hinduism’s predicated on the Self as illusion...

Hell, 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. Truth had never been a priority. If believing a lie kept the genes proliferating, the system would believe that lie with all its heart.

Three trillion nodes and a ten-thousand-link search radius was a pretty impoverished echo of the actual Quinternet, but you could still dig for a thousand lifetimes and never reach its edge. Instant expertise in a million disciplines. Interactive novels you didn’t even have to play, first-person eidetic memories that planted themselves directly into your head if you had the interface...

A tapeworm may not be as smart as its host but that doesn’t stop it from scamming shelter and nourishment and a place to breed. Good parasites are invisible; the best are indispensable. Gut bacteria, chloroplasts, mitochondria: all parasites, once. All invisible in the shadow of vaster beings. Now their hosts can’t live without them.

“That is easily the most unenlightening briefing I have ever attended,” Brüks grumbled, pulling himself back into the southern hemisphere. “And given the number of departmental committees I sit on, that’s saying something.”

The misguided use of brain interface technology to “commune” with the minds of such alien creatures as cats and octopi—a practice by no means limited to the East—has also resulted in untold psychological damage.

He could fly, into orbit and beyond and back if he wanted to. He could fly all the way to Heaven. That was where he was going now: the northern lights swirled in the sky directly ahead, a blue-green curtain shimmering above his destination like a star of Bethlehem for the Holographic Age.

“Then I’ve got some bad news for you. Reality went out the window the moment we started mediating sensory input through a nervous system. You want to actually perceive the universe directly, without any stupid scribbles or model-building? Become a protozoan.”

“A.S.,” Brüks repeated. “What’s it stand for?”
“Artificial Stupidity. Grabs local surveillance archives to blend in. Chameleon response.”

Heaven — calfunctioned, apparently. Or was sabotaged. Maybe the Realists finally pulled it off.

Genocide's impossible to deny when you're buried up to your neck in dismembered bodies.

You can't kill the thing under the bed. You can only keep it outside the covers.

"So sentience has gotta be good for something, then. Because it's expensive, and if it sucks up energy without doing anything useful then evolution's gonna weed it out just like that."

"You have a naïve understanding of evolutionary processes. There's no such thing as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternatives."

That's politics in a nutshell.

You invest so much in it, don't you? It's what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it's what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this consciousness you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what it's for?

"Scrambler," James suggested.
Cunningham rolled his tongue around it. "Very well. That scrambler is an absolute miracle of evolutionary engineering. It's also dumb as a stick."

Faith that Rorschach's internal architecture even had unifying principles. Earlier generations had worshipped malign and capricious spirits. Ours put its faith in an ordered universe. Here in the Devil's Baklava, it was easy to wonder if our ancestors hadn't been closer to the mark.