Echopraxia by Peter Watts Page A

other man. “Perhaps you’re not familiar with Bicameral philosophy. It’s predominantly nonviolent.”
    â€œYou and Luckett and all your friends can argue the philosophical subtleties of unilateral pacifism while we all turn into predominantly nonviolent corpses.” Friends. “Is Lianna—”
    â€œShe’s fine.”
    â€œNone of us are fine .” Brüks turned back to the stairs. Maybe he could find her before the ceiling crashed in. Maybe there was some broom closet he could hide in.
    Moore’s hand closed on his shoulder and spun him as though he were made of balsa.
    â€œWe will not attack these people,” he said calmly. “We don’t know if they’re responsible.”
    â€œYou just said they’d been planning this,” Brüks croaked. “They were just waiting for some kind of excuse. You watched them lock and load. For all I know you listened in on their fucking comm chatter, you heard them give the orders. You know .”
    â€œDoesn’t matter. Even if we were right there in their command center. Even if we could take their brains apart synapse by synapse and backtrace every neuron that went into the go-ahead. We would still not know.”
    â€œFuck you. I’m not going to suck your dick just because you trot out the old no free will shtick.”
    â€œThese people could have been used without their knowledge. They could be slaved to an implanted agenda and they’d swear they were making their own decisions the whole time. We will not kill cat’s-paws.”
    â€œThey’re not zombies, Moore.”
    â€œWhole different species.”
    â€œ They’re killing us .”
    â€œYou’re just going to have to trust me on this. Or”—Moore cocked his head, evidently amused—“we could leave you behind to hash it out with them personally.”
    â€œLeave me—?”
    â€œWe’re getting out of here. Why do you think they’re warming up the engine?”
    *   *   *
    Someone had rolled a giant soccer ball into the compound. A dozen fallen monks twitched wide-eyed and tetanic around a geodesic sphere of interlocking padded pentagons, maybe four meters across at the equator. A door-size polygon bent back from that surface like a snapped fingernail.
    Some kind of escape pod. No obvious means of propulsion. No onboard propulsion, anyway; but rising high above the walls of the enclosure, the funnel spun and roared like an angry jet engine. Brüks craned his neck in search of the top of the thing, and swallowed, and—
    And looked again. Something was scratching an arc across the sky.
    â€œGet in,” Moore said at his elbow. “We don’t have much time.”
    Of course they know. They’ve got satellites, they’ve got microdrones, they can look right past these walls and see what we’re doing and just blow it all to shit …
    â€œ Missile…, ” he croaked.
    The sky shattered where he was pointing.
    The contrail just stopped high overhead, its descending arc amputated halfway to the jet stream; a new sun bloomed at its terminus, a blinding pinpoint, impossibly small and impossibly bright. Brüks wasn’t sure what he really saw in the flash-blinded split second that followed. A great flickering hole opening in the morning sky, a massive piece of that dome peeled back as though God Itself had popped the lid off Its terrarium. The sky crinkled : wisps of high-flying cirrus cracking into myriad shards; expanses of deep and endless blue collapsing into sharp-edged facets; half of heaven folded into lunatic origami. The sky imploded and left another sky behind, serene and unscarred.
    A thunderclap split Brüks’s skull like an ice pick. The force of it lifted him off his feet, dangled him for an endless moment before dropping him back onto the grass. Something pushed him from behind. He turned; Moore’s mouth was moving,