A Cosmic Tech Mystery Results in Literal Lost Souls in This Sci-Fi Short Story

io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a storyfrom Lightspeed’scurrent issue. This month’s selection is “The Twenty-One Second God” by Peter Watts. Enjoy!

The Twenty-One Second God

by Peter Watts

“Individual: a living system maintaining both a higher level of internal cooperation and a lower level of internal conflict than either its components or any larger systems of which it is a component.”

—Fields and Levin, 2018

We lost so many souls today. Reports stream in across five continents; icons bloom on the map like blood spatters. Broken filters, zero latency, bandwidth that somehow blew through the roof when no one was looking. The hardware plays catch-up as best it can: this number of petaflops, that many milliseconds, ten thousand network nodes stuttering under the weight of increased traffic. Chemicals spiking and crashing in brains the world over: GABA and serotonin and a dozen others that would make perfect sense to you, if you were still here. Muscles locked in sudden tetanus. Adrenaline cascades shocking hearts into spastic fibrillation.

It happened so much faster than meat could react. A million emergency subroutines struggled to wrest back some measure of control. They seem to have prevailed, for now. The fences are back up at least, the throttles re-engaged. The network was staggering back to some kind of Normal before Meta’s human overseers had time to do much more than blanch and panic.

Nobody can say what just happened, except that it lasted twenty-one seconds and it spanned the world. For twenty-one seconds, countless human souls just disappeared.

Apparently I’m one of them.

• • •

I don’t know whether to call it memory or hallucination: a flash that might be called a sort of revelation, in the same way you could describe the sun as a sort of bright candle. Everything made sense in a way that nothing ever has. I could see reality right down to the electrons—and now that I’m back, it’s all gone. As though I dreamed the solution to Unified Field Theory and lost every last detail upon waking.

It’s strange watching a world flattened to two dimensions but the metaverse is down until they can figure out what happened. The numbers keep climbing. Frantic hordes jamming the lines to Telehealth. People picking themselves up off the streets, frightened, confused, marionettes whose strings were cut without warning and reconnected without explanation.

Others have to be—found. They’re finding us in our living rooms and beds. Finding us on the toilet. They’re finding us in cars, slack-jawed and drooling, locked in autopilot orbits with no destinations. Some are pretty much okay. Some are psychotic, traumatized; they stare into infinity and scream at the slightest touch. Some are vegetables.

They keep finding us. The curve bends into the exponential, thousands to tens of thousands to millions, no inflection point in sight.

They haven’t found me yet.

Downstream effects, now. Businesses instantly bankrupt, search-and-rescue operations on indefinite hold, surgeries aborted midstream. The sort of disruptions you’d expect. But there are other things, too. Rumors and reports that can’t be so easily chalked up to over-reliance on a technological monoculture. A research program at MIT just had its funding increased by two orders of magnitude. A half-dozen Peruvian SSI plants are mysteriously offline, although they were isolated on their own network. And—legal actions, of all things: thousands of them, launched from the ether during the blackout, drafted by rafts of automatic corporations that sprang miraculously into existence across a hundred jurisdictions.

Rumors split and speciate like cracks across a frozen lake: stories of something that woke up and moved across the face of the waters and went away again. They graduate from conspiracy theory to working hypothesis in the space of an hour. Reputable sources neither confirm nor deny, but admit the possibility that something coalesced in those moments. They aren’t entirely sure what it was.

Somebody calls it the Twenty-One Second God. From that point on, no one calls it anything else.

The knock on the door barely registers. I don’t know anyone else in this building. I didn’t buzz anyone in.

But there they are, two of them, standing in the hall. “Corwin Sukarto? We understand you’ve experienced a problem with your Hogan bridge.”

They’ve found me. The curve bends a little more.

But they’re not with Meta. They’re wearing uniforms.

“Sir, we need you to come with us.”

• • •

I’m in a private downtown hospital with anonymous facades. I’m in a bright cylindrical coffin full of chittering magnets. I’m on a diagnostic table that projects my flayed body onto the wall and labels my insides with floating annotations I don’t understand. The techs cowled in their headsets are Nella and Travis; they don’t offer their last names and I don’t ask. I don’t ask them anything, really, although I suppose I should. I should be curious, at least, about what’s happening to me.

I haven’t been curious about much of anything since you went away.

They pull off their headsets while I put my clothes back on (Nella reminds me a little of your sister). An elevator lifts us a dozen floors; we emerge into a windowless, oak-paneled room where soft light seeps from the baseboards and overstuffed chairs squat around a glass coffee table. I remember a very old movie: an astronaut in a terrarium, surrounded by sterile props his alien captors think will make him feel at home.

Here, at last, are the suits. They also travel in pairs. “I’m Karina,” one says. She wears an antique briefcase slung over her shoulder. “This is Darcelle. We’re with Metaverse. First of all, we’d like to say how sorry we are about what happened to you . . .”

About. Not for.

“I don’t understand,” I say. “They said there were millions of us . . .”

“Fifteen million, give or take.”

I turn 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 especially pleased that the Colonel has served up such a definitive body count.

A military escort. A medical workup that would strain the limits of a Platinum policy. Two-and-a-half hours so far, and they seem to be just getting started.

“You can’t be devoting this much personal attention to fifteen million people,” I say.

“Not just yet,” Darcelle admits. “You’re special.”

The Colonel clears his throat. “What Ms. Burrowes means is that you were assimilated during a window of high analytical interest.”

Assimilated.

More than hypothesis, then.

Darcelle shoots a sidelong glance at Moore and recovers the ball. “We’d like to retain you for further studies. You could be extremely valuable in helping us figure out what happened, helping us ensure it doesn’t happen again. You’d be well-compensated, of course. We’ve already recruited someone to fill in for you at Grassy Narrows, so that’s not a problem. You’re a, a soil scientist, right?”

“Close enough.” I don’t feel like arguing.

Karina again: “Before we go any further, I’d just like to say again that we sincerely regret any discomfort or inconvenience or, or pain that this incident may have caused.” She fumbles with her briefcase and extracts a sheaf of paper half a centimeter thick. “We’d like to compensate you for that too, up front. No questions asked.”

She holds it out to me. I look but don’t touch.

“Sorry about the format.” Karina affects a rueful smile. “Normally of course we’d just squirt it to your bridge, but, well . . .”

“Send it to my watch,” I tell her.

“We usually do everything in the metaverse.” Her smile frays a little. “We’re not really set up for niche media.”

“It’s a difficult time for all of us,” Darcelle adds.

I take it. It’s forty-three single-spaced pages, but the amount they’re offering is on the first. I have no idea whether it’s generous or not. I flip to the end. “No signature line.”

“Oh, everything’s on the record here. Once you’ve received the document, verbal confirmation is all we need.”

I rifle through the pages; the font seems deliberately designed to make my eyes glaze, but something twitches in my brain around page ten. I try to focus.

“Waive the right to pursue any personal or class action . . .”

Darcelle nods. “We think it’s better to get the money to those who need it as quickly as possible, without any lengthy and expensive court proceedings.”

“These legal things can go on for years,” Karina adds. “And the outcome is never guaranteed.”

I glance around the terrarium. Karina and Darcelle beam hundred-watt smiles. Nella and Travis seem strangely attentive to the decor. Colonel Moore stands ramrod straight and somehow manages to look very tired at the same time. He meets my eyes; after a moment he offers a tiny, almost indiscernible shake of the head.

“Fine,” I say.

• • •

Moore escorts me to ground level. “We’d like you to remain here for a few days,” he says as the elevator seals us in.

“Uh huh.”

“You are special, as Ms. Burrowes put it.” There’s an aftertaste in the wake of her name, although his voice is unimpeachably neutral. “We think we could learn a lot from you.”

“Anything you couldn’t learn if I slept in my own bed?”

“This would be more efficient.”

I wonder if I’m allowed to refuse.

“You are of course free to leave any time you like.” Evidently the Colonel has been here before.

“Permission to speak freely.”

He raises an amused eyebrow, plays along. “Granted.”

“I think I’m free because you don’t have a cage big enough to hold fifteen million of us. Not to mention the millions more who saw us disappear.”

“You think we’d incarcerate fifteen million innocent people.”

“Isn’t that the traditional approach? Circle the wagons, invoke national security? Control the narrative?”

“I’d like to think fixing the problem might be in there somewhere.”

The doors part onto a pristine lobby where no one sits at Reception. Night has fallen; the glass facade separating us from the street is a dark mirror.

“You’re not wrong,” the Colonel admits. “Although we certainly have the resources to incarcerate a limited number of high-value assets. For their own protection, of course. I doubt anyone would complain, given what’s at stake. And yet . . .”

He gestures at the glass. Through the half-reflections I see a vehicle idling at the curb.

“It’ll take you home,” Moore says. “Pick you up at 0830 tomorrow, assuming you choose to participate.”

The building lets us out. I climb into the car, hesitate. Stick my foot back onto the curb to keep the door from closing. “I’m—sorry if I was a dick back there. I know you’re just doing your job.”

“That’s me all right.” Something tugs at the corner of his mouth. “Just following orders.”

• • •

I answer their questions. I submit to their tests. I come in in the morning and go home at night in the backs of company cars that know where I live and refuse to take me anywhere else. The people who experiment on me are friendly enough. Nella and Travis treat their lab rats well and they don’t talk down to me. The suits with their fastened smiles drop by now and then to impart encouraging platitudes. Colonel Moore visits the facility every few days, ever civil, ever distant. Other faces come and go, curious but not hostile.

They say I’m an optimum. Those who were swallowed before me earlier entered as loud voices in a small room: parts of some newborn not yet big enough to overwhelm, not yet old enough to have an agenda. I’m told they remember infancy but no intent. Those assimilated later were never more than whispers in a hurricane: they remember as much as a single neuron might, if you ripped it from someone’s head and demanded to know what the brain was thinking.

I was raptured at some sweet spot between ignorance and unconsciousness. I at least remember a flash of focused insight, which the machines might be able to tag and track to something deeper. I’m not catatonic. I’m still sane.

I may have you to thank for that. Travis tells me, with all the insight of someone who has never grieved, that grief rewires the brain. Cortisol and cytokines out of whack, hyperactivity in the amygdala and the anterior cingulate gyrus. They think it may have buffered me during the transition. It’s one of their hypotheses. They have a lot of them.

The details don’t interest me. Some of us came back. Some of us didn’t.

They pull me from the scanner again. “How much longer are we doing this?” It’s been over a week.

“Don’t underestimate the value of time-series.” Nella shines a light in my eye, measures some response that a few million dollars’ worth of medical equipment apparently hasn’t recorded already. “Your brain underwent a huge shock. Some neurons got superstimulated, some got stuck. Functional clusters wiped out in an instant. Others crosswired. Parts of your brain that were never supposed to talk to each other started shooting the shit like old friends. It’s a real mess in there.”

“Think a massive overdose of psychoactives with a PTSD chaser,” Travis chimes in.

Nella nods. “We weren’t around for the main event, so we gotta settle for recording the aftermath. Plot the recovery curve, backcast to t=0. The longer the time-series, the better the backcast.”

“I’m not back to baseline yet?” It’s been days. I remember you telling me once that even sticky neurons rebound after a few hours.

“We don’t know,” she says. “It’s double-blind, so we don’t get to see the actual analysis. But some node must still be doing something interesting, because nobody’s called us off yet. Gotta keep the sample size consistent.”

That’s what they call us. Not victims: too disempowering. Not complainants: we signed the waivers. Not survivors, because too many of us didn’t. Not even people.

Nodes.

I can’t deny it. I was not a person during the period under investigation.

Oh, the body persisted; the flesh stayed warm, the organs kept functioning, the heart never missed a beat. Even the brain continued to spike and spark and even think, they say, although it was completely unaware of doing that. Of course, that’s hardly unusual; you always delighted in pointing out that most of our thoughts are unconscious even at the best of times. You’d talk about our autonomic modes, the way we iterate through complex daily routines on autopilot. Regale me with tales of sleepwalking artists and sex workers and even murderers, committing their acts of creation and commerce and destruction, unconscious the whole time.

But even those zombies knew enough to answer to their own names. For twenty-one seconds, there was nothing in the world that could say I am Corwin Sukarto. For twenty-one seconds I did not exist. No needs, no desires, no consciousness.

No pain.

So many people seem terrified by the prospect. Not everyone, though. As I understand it, half a billion people around the world actually aspire to that state. They call it Nirvana.

I admit I never really saw the appeal, before now.

• • •

They don’t even know what it wants.

That’s the wrong tense, of course. The Twenty-One Second God has been dead for two weeks now; even the hardware it inhabited has been throttled, time-lagged, crippled to the point it barely delivers VR anymore. Everything it was, everything it wanted: all in the past.

And yet it continues to act: all those legal actions winding through the courts, the AIgents retained, the lobby groups that coalesced seemingly out of nowhere on its behalf. The rights of mayfly deities. The creation and the murder of a hive mind. Restitution strategies that would compel some random assortment of people to plug their brains into a resurrected Whole for an hour a week, so 21 might be born again. All planned out and launched in those fleeting moments between emergence and annihilation. All running, now, on autopilot. These motions and countermotions, this network of activity crisscrossing the globe at lightspeed: almost a mind in its own right, some say. The campaign itself might be sapient.

But nobody’s certain what it’s campaigning for.

The legal claims are straightforward: 21 wants its life back. Apparently it has a survival instinct. That shouldn’t be surprising for an entity with fifteen million brain stems, but those in the know assure me that things aren’t quite that simple. Some say it was barely conscious even when it was alive, that consciousness itself is just ignorance in action. It only boots up when the universe hands us something unexpected: when the brain has to learn new tricks or decide between competing imperatives. Ask the pianist, mid-concerto, to think about what their fingers are doing. Ask the martial artist which muscles are moving in which order, why they feinted left instead of right. Once the knowledge has been assimilated, being aware of it only destroys the performance.

The brain aspires to error reduction, the self to annihilation. Phi isn’t a line but a curve, rising and peaking and arcing back to zero as the system approaches perfect knowledge. We baseline humans never even glimpse the summit; our thoughts are simple and our models are childish stick-figures, the world is always taking us by surprise. But what’s unexpected to a being with fifteen million times the computational mass of a human mind? All gods are omniscient. All gods are zombies.

They say 21 may have been awake during those first few instants when it had swallowed only a few hundred souls. When it swallowed me. But thousands? Millions? The more it knew, the less it knew. It became a concert pianist in complete control of every keyboard. It grew too smart to be awake: as brilliant as any deity, as conscious as any stone.

They say it wants its life back. But how can a stone want anything?

• • •

All the nodes get cafeteria passes. Maybe the free food is supposed to make it easier for us to socialise. Maybe the place is infested with pickups to feed our chatter into some deep-learning algo panning for insight.

Maybe they just don’t want us heading off-site for lunch if they think of another test.

We never really talk much, though. Even when the other nodes do sit together, I’ve never heard the conversation stray beyond a murmured pass the salt. Whatever comfort we take from each other, we take it in silence. I don’t even know any of their names.

I’d rather just talk to you anyway.

“May I join you?”

Colonel Moore, a mug of coffee in his hand.

I gesture to the seat across from me. He sits, sets his coffee on the table between us. “Any new results?” I ask, before he can speak.

He hesitates. “Seems to be a bandwidth correlation, not that that’s any great surprise. Most of the nodes were wired into fantasy scenarios. Games, worldsims, personal fantasies. Fat-pipe stuff.”

“I wasn’t.” I was logged in to an online support group, sick with the loss of you, able only to mourn.

“So I understand.” He sips his coffee. “I’ve been told that therapeutic tulpas can be helpful.”

“So have I.” But that’s one of the marvelous hazards of marriage to a neuroscientist: you learn to wonder about implications. Thanks to you I know that when you anesthetize half a brain, the other half might manifest a whole new personality. I know that when the drugs wear off, that short-lived persona—that standalone, autonomous being—gets swallowed back into the greater whole. Tulpas don’t take up much real estate—a few functional clusters here and there—but they’d still pass any Turing test you could throw at them. Who’s to say we’re not waking something up every time we activate the partition? Who’s to say we don’t commit murder every time we shut it down?

“TMS is also very effective,” the Colonel continues. “Doesn’t stick, though. Propanolol, if you prefer old-school pharma.” Because of course no one should ever be crippled by grief. No one should be compromised by anything so vulgar. Ugly things, Pleistocene things, these feelings. Edit them out. Let the past lie. Get on with it.

Odd that he’s so conversant with the subject, though.

“Are you married, Colonel?” He’s at least as old as I am, old enough for bygone ways.

“I am.”

“Still together?”

“We see each other regularly.”

He doesn’t want to talk about it; whatever I sense in him now goes deeper than an unhappy marriage. But I do sense something. Loss. His own kind of grief. I’ve been in this place long enough to know what it looks like from the outside.

Figures.

Over four hundred people in this mad-scientist lab, and the closest thing I can find to a kindred spirit is the professional killer.

• • •

Someone’s waiting for me outside my building. He calls me by name; I’ve never seen him before. He begs me to share my wisdom, and does not believe me when I say I have none to offer. I am part of the overmind, he insists. I am connected to the Divine; I have seen things denied mortal men. I am the voice of God.

I remind him that God has fifteen million voices. I wish him luck finding one of the others. I warn him that God has turned many of us into rutabagas. He grows agitated; I have a duty, he growls. God did not bless me so that I could keep His Truth to myself. It is not mine to keep.

I’m afraid he might turn violent, but I’m inside before he can do more than rant.

It’s happening everywhere. There are lists in circulation: guerilla footage of survivors stumbling through the aftermath, squeezed through facial recognition and matched against public records. Confidential databases inexplicably set free. We’re public domain now, some of us anyway. People seek us out. Some are content to touch the hems of our garments; others want more, a taste of whatever cosmic insights we forged when part of something greater. Should they risk that operation. Should they go to Heaven. Should they bet it all on #3.

We weren’t just the voice of God: we were the guts as well. The arms and legs. The synapses. God literally stitched Itself together out of our bodies, an inconceivably complex jigsaw assembled from any meat that happened to be wired into the right servers. Surely such an intellect learned everything, while it was alive. Surely its pieces still remember what it learned.

I tell the Colonel about the encounter. He reminds me that I can stay at the facility. I admit I’m tempted. It would be more convenient. It would be safer, now that the AIrheads have found me. But I can only talk to you here, Ada. I can’t feel you the way I do at home. And I’ve never fully shaken the belief that they’d keep me here by force, if the optics permitted and the damage hadn’t already been done. They’d probably like nothing better than to see me cage myself.

Darcelle’s smile tightens like shrink-wrap when I decline. The Colonel shrugs and offers to post a microdrone outside my building. Nothing flashy or intimidating or even noticeable to the casual observer. An invisible eye in the sky, smart enough to tell refugees from religious nuts—different mindsets have different tells, to eyes that can read saccades and muscle twitches from fifty meters—so I won’t have to worry about embarrassing false positives. The homeless and the destitute will be able to approach me as they always have; only those of ill intent will even know it’s there.

I thank him, and accept his kind offer, and we both pretend his machines haven’t been staking out my every move from the start.

• • •

Something about my ventromedial prefrontal cortex has them scratching their heads.

“That can’t be right,” Travis says. “It’s supposed to be sending to the hipp.”

Nella furrows her brow. “Could the Hogan bridge have done that?”

“Maybe third-order downstream effect or something. But we checked it last week.”

“Maybe we can book some time on Monet. Bet it would chew through this no problem.”

“Monet?” I ask.

“They’re booked solid for a year.”

“We’re the 21 club, Trav. We’ve got a VIP pass. I say we use it.”

“Could just be an artifact. Maybe we should run him through again.”

I add a decibel or two: “What’s Monet?”

They snap back into a reality that includes me. “MOANAI,” Nella says. “AI up in Waterloo, maybe six times human synapse count. Perimeter uses it for theoretical cosmology, but it can do other stuff as well.”

“Sometimes it dreams,” Travis adds.

“Is it awake?”

“Christ no. Why would you say that?”

I shrug. “Synapse count. Dreams.”

He smiles, shakes his head. “Nah. Dreams are just injections of noise to prevent overfitting. But when you loosen the parameters like that you can open up whole new ways to interpret a data set.”

“Besides,” Nella says, “consciousness always wrecks the analysis.”

It’s not the only thing. A voltage spike fries MOANAI’s servers while they’re still booking the appointment; a substation blows out three hundred kilometers away and the whole campus goes dark.

Not that brownouts and violent weather are anything unusual. Our infrastructure grows so fragile; the resources to maintain it stretch thinner by the day. Even without the heat waves and the superstorms, it’s a lucky week that passes without the lights going out at least once. But that’s why there are safeguards. Breakers behind breakers. Stacks of coffin-sized batteries gorging on sunlight, primed to ration it back the moment anything drops off-grid.

None of it’s foolproof, of course. What is, these days? But the odds. The coincidence.

I find out later that MOANAI’s not the only player to drop off the board under suspicious circumstances. DARPA had a small hive running down in Lawrence Livermore until last week: a dozen souls seasoned with neural dust and connected through a central hub. Something went wrong. The ultrasonic pulses the dust motes used to talk to each other started inducing spike trains in the somatosensory cortex. One person screamed that her arm was monstrous, alien, sawed it half off before anyone could stop her. Two others gouged their own eyes out. I can’t imagine what they must have been seeing, and they’ll never be able to tell us. Every node in that hive is either dead or vegetative.

Everyone’s still very nice to me. Nobody tells me anything that might get me upset. They don’t realize how much they say to each other when I’m just around the corner; I guess when you’re fighting rearguard against a dead god it’s easy to forget the lab rats underfoot. But I see past the facade. Their tests grow more frequent, more intrusive. I show up earlier and they keep me later. They’re running scared, and they’ve got nothing.

It’s been a month and Twenty-One still reaches out from the grave, casually swatting their best countermeasures as if they were flies.

• • •

You would have liked Nella. She even talks like you. You would’ve pricked up your ears at that offhand comment—

—consciousness always wrecks the analysis—

—and instantly recognized a kindred spirit.

Sometimes I close my eyes and hear you in her: vision’s a lie, reality’s an abstraction, consciousness itself is a contaminant. The details are pure alchemy to me—free-energy-minimization and Markov blankets and periaqueductal gray—but she spells out the broad strokes like she’s telling a ghost story around a campfire. Consciousness is a delivery platform for feelings; feelings are a manifestation of need; need exists to promote survival; and survival fucks up your whole worldview. Predator-detection algorithms that metastasize into religion. Hyperbolic discounts, selling out the future for short-term payoffs. Pareidolia and availability cascades and all those other myriad biases that helped us survive by lying about reality: we wouldn’t be conscious in the first place if they weren’t built in.

Of course, Nella’s just a kid. Words tumble out of her like puppies. You were more eloquent, more concise. You nailed it with two sentences and a wicked smile: You can see the world as it is, or you can care whether you live or die. You can’t optimize along both axes simultaneously.

These days, I can’t seem to do either.

• • •

They still don’t know who, but they just found out how:

Meta lied about the tech.

It was the fundamental safeguard, baked into every Hogan bridge ever made: limit the bandwidth. Connect minds to machines, if you must. Connect brains to each other—but use a straw, not a firehose. Share sensations but not selves; keep latency far away from that three-hundred-millisecond threshold where parts begin cohering into wholes. Never forget the terrifying existential truth behind every ghost in every machine:

Consciousness does not multiply; it expands.

But it turns out those fuckers used a firehose after all.

Nobody knew because patents describe concepts, not implementation. Nobody knew because the tech based on those concepts was proprietary. Nobody knew because it worked, and it worked because MetaverseTM made the firehose act like a straw; they introduced a time lag into every signal so that nothing moved fast enough to sync up.

It’s still not clear what they were planning to do with all that extra capacity. Caught in the headlights, pants around their ankles, they can’t get their stories straight. They were leaving room for sensory upgrades still in the works. They were developing remote, inorganic teletulpas to improve mental health for all. They were leaving space to hold a whole new Internet, against that inevitable day when failing infrastructure or terrorist activity takes the old one down. Maybe they were even going for a hive mind of their own, although their denials on that front were strenuous and immediate.

In the meantime, someone snuck in through the back door. Someone disabled the lag and unleashed a globe-spanning corpus callosum that connected fifteen million brains as intimately as the hemispheres in one connect to each other. There was no we in those moments, any more than there are two people in my head right now. There was only the Twenty-One Second God. The rest is history.

For those of us caught up by that history, nothing much has changed. If anything, things for me have improved a little.

At least I don’t have to deal with Karina and Darcelle anymore.

• • •

He finds me in the cafeteria again and asks—politely, as always—for the pleasure of my company. He sits, relocates a coffee and a plate of kruggets to the table, slides his tray to one side. He focuses on these precise, robotic movements, eyes on the table, on his lunch. He sits quietly, collecting his thoughts.

“I’ve been going over our findings. Trying to make some kind of sense of them.” He grunts a soft laugh. “Not that there’s much hope of that, of course. I don’t have nearly the expertise the staff here does, and between you and me I don’t think they have a clue either.”

Not like this man to waste words on preamble. “What can I do for you, Colonel?”

“I was just wondering what it was like,” he says softly.

I don’t know what to tell him. I don’t know what to tell any of them. I’ve tried often enough.

I try again. “You know how, when you close your eyes, you still know where all your parts are? You just know, without looking, where you end and everything else begins?”

He nods.

“Imagine that you knew, in the exact same way, that you went on forever. That everything else was as much a part of you as your arms and legs.”

I get the faintest sense of impatience behind that disciplined facade. Not that I blame him: I’m not saying anything I haven’t already spoken into the record a dozen times.

I try to give him a little more. “There were—insights, I suppose you could call them. Profound insights, even, but”—I tapped the side of my head—“they don’t fit in here. I remember knowing such amazing things. I just can’t remember what any of them were.”

And then, of course, I knew nothing at all. This dazzling burst of enlightenment everyone’s so interested in—it only lasted a moment before I drowned in an ocean of souls.

But I’ve said all that before, too. It still isn’t what he’s looking for.

“I’ve seen the interviews,” he says at last. “I’m familiar with religious rapture and proprioception failure. And I don’t mean to intrude, but—but maybe I’m not asking what it was like so much as how it made you feel.”

It’s not a huge difference, but no one has asked me in quite that way before. And I realize something else: this man is desperate. He’s so desperate he’ll come here and interrogate a specimen who’s already been interviewed and sampled and scanned down the molecules, in the faint, fading hope that some useful insight might have slipped past the machinery.

He’s desperate because they’re losing.

I look at my half-eaten lunch, at his untouched one. “I was married a long time.”

“Twenty-one years. Something of a record, these days.” And then, because you’re supposed to say it and he hasn’t yet: “I’m sorry.”

“People don’t get that,” I tell him. “It was the whole deal: traditional; antique, even. Monogamous. First-person sex, we used ‘skins maybe a dozen times in two decades.” The ever-present weight on my diaphragm stirs, begins to rise. “Ada told me on some level the brain can’t really tell the difference between losing an arm and losing a loved one. The same circuits light up whether the pain’s physical or emotional. I always thought that was almost—romantic.”

He opens his mouth. “I’m—”

“So imagine your arm doesn’t just get torn off. Imagine it withers and rots on your shoulder, imagine it takes months to die. And at some point, way later than you should have, you finally stop being a selfish asshole and—and tell her it’s okay. She can stop fighting. She can let go.” The weight is lodged in my throat now, but I keep going. “I wonder what part of the brain parses that kind of injury.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“You wanted to know how it made me feel. You have to know this before you can know that. Because once the arm is gone, everything just goes gray. You’re not connected to the universe; you’re not even really connected to your own body. You just—exist.

“And then this happens.” I take a breath, let it out, feel a twinge of grim satisfaction that it’s almost steady. “You get swept up in a moment of blinding, divine revelation, and you’re connected to all of creation and you realize, right down in your bones, that we insignificant specks of meat and bone—we just don’t matter. And then the Twenty-One Second God swallows you whole and snuffs you out and again—nothing matters, nothing can matter because you don’t exist. But then you come back, and the sirens are blaring and the world is on its side but she’s still gone, and so . . . once again . . .”

I breathe. The weight sinks grudgingly into my chest and goes back to sleep, leaden, comfortable. Everything is back to normal.

“Maybe that’s why I’m your optimum data point. Maybe that’s why I’m not a vegetable now. Revelation wasn’t such a shock to me because I was already—inoculated. Nothing really changed.”

I look at the Colonel. I don’t know whether I’ve given him new data or merely corroborated the old. I don’t know if I’m reporting to a superior or commiserating with a comrade.

I don’t know anything about this man.

“I envy you,” he says.

• • •

I don’t have to go in tomorrow. None of us do.

Nella and Travis are relocating. They’ve got the data they need, there’s no point in staying shackled to these virtual-vivisection machines any longer. It’s just numbers from here on in, the program—this part of it, anyway—is going full-on analytical. At long last, they say, they’re making progress.

I don’t think I believe them.

I remember the light in your eyes when you were closing on a solution. Your excitement was almost predatory, you didn’t stop moving. Whenever something called you away—whenever I did—you couldn’t wait to get back to it. You glowed. You vibrated.

There’s none of that in these people. There’s something in their eyes, but it’s not that.

Haunted. Maybe that’s the word.

Maybe they’ll conduct their analysis in some secret bunker. Maybe there is no analysis. It isn’t lost on them—the freak accidents, the tragic BCI malfunctions, the misfortune befalling those pursuing certain avenues of research. Maybe they’re right, maybe there’s simply no more they can accomplish here. Or maybe they’ve decided to leave the game before the targets on their chests get any bigger.

It’s not my problem. The money’s in my account. Grassy Narrows waits at the end of the month. Your dimming echo still lingers throughout this two-bedroom still-life I call home. I’ve wiped my biometrics, said my goodbyes.

Except to the Colonel, who didn’t come in today.

• • •

A new hive woke up today in Indore. The video’s on every feed: two hundred souls wired together, stacked in hexagonal pods like honeycomb, tended by machines that look like chrome grasshoppers. Pallets writhe in slow peristalsis, rocking their occupants around an eccentric orbit optimized to prevent bedsores. Tubes carry waste and nutrients; limbs twitch to milliamp currents that keep the muscles from atrophy. Fiberop sprouts from the base of each skull and disappears out-of-frame en route to some central server. The mouths are all smiling, but I think that might have been added in post.

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

It’s been in the works for years now; it wasn’t supposed to go up for years yet. But 21—accelerated things. Wars always push technology into fast-forward, even the quiet ones. They say we’re ten years ahead of where we were a year ago.

The Indian Institute of Technology speaks of the Great Coalescence, paints pictures of Nature’s secrets laid bare by a mind combining the cognitive power of a supercomputer with the imaginations of a million dreamers. They haven’t reported any actual breakthroughs yet, but it’s only been a day. Even Yahweh took six to find his feet.

There’s a waiting list. A second installation is set to go online in Kolkata the day after tomorrow, a third in Colombo. Negotiations are underway with Japan and Thailand and Malaysia.

They’re calling it the Moksha Mind.

• • •

A growing chorus of voices say we should just throw in the towel. No army of lawyers, no swarm of AIgents could possibly win a war against a coherent self with fifteen million times the synapse count of a human mind, no matter how long it’s been dead. Oh, we win the occasional battle—but some suggest that even 21’s rare legal defeats are deliberate, part of some farsighted strategy to delay ultimate victory until vital technological milestones have been reached. The Twenty-One Second God is beyond mortal ken, they say. Even our victories promote Its Holy Agenda.

I don’t know if I’d go that far. Then again, maybe I’d go farther.

Bacteria would still be the pinnacle of life if chloroplasts and mitochondria had retained their autonomy. Multicellular life wouldn’t exist if eukaryotic cells had never graduated from competition to cooperation. Every major evolutionary transition began with individuals trading in their individuality. Every leap forward was an act of assimilation.

We’re already colonies of colonies. Maybe this is just another step in a journey that’s already lasted four billion years, maybe—without these periodic episodes of coalescence—life on Earth would be nothing but a seething mass of cells, trying ceaselessly to outbreed each other.

Not that going down the Metazoan road hasn’t also turned the planet into a shithole. Still.

Better than Cancer World.

• • •

There was a time when this place thrummed: rivers of people lined up to depart for far-flung destinations; others, rumpled and red-eyed, spilling into the concourse like blood from a torn capillary. Clots of humanity clustered around overhead displays, checking departures and arrivals. Dogs and drones and thugs with badges, pushing their way through the crowd, seizing random dark-skinned strangers and disappearing them into Secondary. I remember it so clearly, though I was only eight or nine at the time: cavernous halls, jam-packed and cacophonous.

Now there are so few here that I can see him halfway down the concourse. His footsteps click and echo in the empty spaces.

I think about what to say as he approaches. Not are you following me or how did you know I’d be here. Nothing so obvious. Everyone knows everything, these days. Moore knows more.

“Come to say goodbye?”

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

“I’ve considered a thousand times, Colonel. You don’t spend three years’ carbon allowance on a whim.”

“That doesn’t mean you’re doing it for the right reasons.”

“I just want to go home.”

“You were born in Cincinnati.”

“I have family in Sumatra.”

“Which is how you got the visa, yes. And how do you think your family will react when they learn that the only reunion they can look forward to is visiting some robot that rolls you over like a corpse every half hour to keep the sores from festering?”

I watch him watching me.

“I’m sorry,” he says after a moment. “I don’t mean to presume.”

I wait for him to continue.

“You can’t just give up,” he says at last.

“Is that what I’m doing?”

“It’s suicide, Corwin. You of all people must know that. Plug into that thing and you deprecate from soul down to subroutine.”

“Maybe a subroutine doing something useful. Maybe a subroutine figuring out how to undo all the damage we’ve done.”

“You’ll never know, though, will you? You’ll just be another neuron firing blindly away, never knowing if the brain you’re part of is solving the secrets of the universe or if you’re just—firing, with no purpose at all. You could be giving up your life for random static.”

I feel the corner of my lip tug into a smile. “Do you really think they’d spend all that money, invest in all that hardware, recruit all those people—for static?”

“I think experiments fail sometimes. I think the grander the experiment, the greater the risk. That hive hasn’t done a damn thing since it went online, as far as anyone can tell. It just swallows souls and lets them rot.”

“I don’t think even you believe that,” I say.

“I hope that. It’s my best-case scenario. Because otherwise it’s biding its time and gathering its strength, and at this rate it’ll be bigger than 21 by the end of the year. When it does act, we’ll have no idea what hit us.”

“Why would it be hostile?”

“It wouldn’t have to be. It could roll over in its sleep and crush us like an insect.”

Hives are no longer legal here. I wonder in passing if WestHem is planning to preempt, but I suspect that ship has sailed; to take out Moksha now they’d have to bomb a string of cities from India to Japan, declare war on a dozen countries. Not easy to justify when your enemy hasn’t actually done anything.

“I appreciate your efforts, Colonel. Honestly. But—”

“You know, you’re a very interesting person.” Suddenly his expression is unreadable.

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

“Yet consider your circumstance. Ringside for everything. Buffered by your own grief against the worst effects of the rapture. Dead center of our high-value demographic, but somehow we’ve learned very little from you we can use. Thanks to your marriage you have just enough familiarity to understand the jargon, but not enough for anyone to worry about what a glorified gardener might overhear. And here you are, reporting back to the Hive. Somehow you even managed to jump the queue.”

“A completely different Hive,” I remind him.

“Perhaps. But maybe we have it all wrong. We assume 21’s trying to resurrect itself, but it was hardly the first hive on the planet. It was just the first—unconstrained one. That we know of. And something had to break those filters. Something brought it to life. Now Moksha’s online, years ahead of schedule. Another hive started up right under our noses over in Oregon, some new organic technology we never heard of before. We can’t even legally shut it down because meat doesn’t qualify as hardware under the Interface Act. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. We think there are others, more—clandestine.”

“So you think it was, what? Some kind of reproductive strategy?”

“Spawning cycle. Field test. How can we know? We’re earthworms, trying to divine the thoughts of astronauts.”

A gift for metaphor. This man is never what I expect.

“Or maybe it’s not that,” he continues. “Maybe all hives are connected in ways we don’t understand. Maybe 21 and Moksha and the Bicams are one and the same.”

“You think it reprogrammed me. Turned me into some kind of sleeper agent.”

“I doubt there would’ve been much programming involved. It had fifteen million souls to choose from. At least a few of them must have met the specs right off the shelf. Followed their own agenda for their own reasons, never even suspecting that they were doing exactly—”

“You could stop me,” I point out.

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

Huh. Of course they would.

“Then again,” he adds, “if we could stop you, we wouldn’t have to.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I’m hoping maybe you can stop yourself.”

I shake my head. “I’m just—I’m tired of being a prokaryote, Colonel. I’m tired of being alone.”

“You’re tired of being.”

“Jim—”

“If there are hostilities,” he says. “If you’re on the other side.”

“Then there won’t be a me to worry about. Isn’t that the whole point?”

His face doesn’t change. “Don’t do this.”

“My flight’s boarding.”

He lets me go. Maybe I’m a friend. Maybe I’m only an asset he’s failed to keep out of enemy hands. Maybe the ghost of the Twenty-One Second God is invisibly at work all around us, iterating through the walls and the wires: running interference so the shutdown signal never reaches my ride, so the executive order to cancel the flight never makes it through, so any attempt to use force would attract the attention of security drones ever watchful for signs of violence.

I feel eyes on me as I walk into the boarding tunnel. I imagine them watching as the airplane, only half-full, taxis away from the dock.

Maybe he’s right. Maybe you are, too.

Maybe, if you want to see the world through clear eyes, you can’t care whether you live or die.

---

About the Author

Peter Watts is a former marine biologist, flesh-eating-disease survivor, and convicted felon (long story) whose novels—despite an unhealthy focus on space vampires—have become required texts for university courses ranging from Philosophy to Neuropsychology. His work is available in 24 languages, has appeared in 36 best-of-year anthologies, and been nominated for 61 awards. His (somewhat shorter) list of 23 actual wins includes the Hugo, the Shirley Jackson, and the Seiun. He seems to be especially popular in countries with a history of Soviet occupation, and he hated the U.S. before it was cool. He lives in Toronto with fantasy author Caitlin Sweet, four cats, two rabbits, whatever injured/convalescing rodents they’ve been able to rescue from the jaws of the aforementioned cats, and a gang of tough raccoons who shake them down for kibble on the porch every summer.

Please visit Lightspeed Magazine to read more great science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared in the June 2025 issue, which also features short fiction by Will McMahon, Vanessa Fogg, Reyes Ramirez, Lowry Poletti, Carrie Vaughn, Benjamin Blattberg, Marissa Lingen, and more. You can wait for this month’s contents to be serialized online, or you can buy the whole issue right now in convenient ebook format for just $4.99, or subscribe to the ebook edition here.

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