Behemoth
Chapters (12)
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ßehemoth Peter Watts cover art by Bruce Jensen Originally published by Tor Books
Seppuku: December 2004, ISBN: 0765311720 Some Right Reserved In memory of Strange Cat, a.k.a. Carcinoma, 1984-2003 She wouldn't have cared. And in memory of Chuckwalla, 1994-2001 A victim of technology run amok. Author's Note This is the way it was meant to be. Well, not all pixellated and virtual or (at best) home-printed, but integrated , dammit, a single novel in a single package, and fuck the beancounters and their Solomonesque book-splitting travesties. We aren't in the old-school economy any more, Toto— we're giving this stuff away now, and you can judge it for better or worse as a single standalone entity. You may agree with Publisher's Weekly and call this the capstone to one of the major works of hard-sf in the new century. Or you may side with Kirkus and dismiss it as horrific porn, rife with relentlessly clinical scenes of sexual torture. (Hell, you may even decide they're both right.) But whatever you decide, at least you'll be basing that assessment, finally, on complete data. —Peter Watts, 2007 |
ß-Prelude: 'lawbreaker
ß-Prelude: 'lawbreaker
If you lost your eyes, Achilles Desjardins had been told, you got them back in your dreams.
It wasn't only the blind. Anyone, torn apart in life, dreamt the dreams of whole creatures. Quadruple amputees ran and threw footballs; the deaf heard symphonies; those who'd lost, loved again. The mind had its own inertia; grown accustomed to a certain role over so many years, it was reluctant to let go of the old paradigm.
It happened eventually, of course. The bright visions faded, the music fell silent, imaginary input scaled back to something more seemly to empty eye sockets and ravaged cochleae. But it took years, decades—and in all that time, the mind would torture itself with nightly reminders of the things it once had.
It was the same with Achilles Desjardins. In his dreams, he had a conscience.
Dreams took him to the past, to his time as a shackled god: the lives of millions in his hands, a reach that extended past geosynch and along the floor of the Mariana Trench. Once again he battled tirelessly for the greater good, plugged into a thousand simultaneous feeds, reflexes and pattern-matching skills jumped up by retro'd genes and customized neurotropes. Where chaos broke, he brought control. Where killing ten would save a hundred, he made the sacrifice. He isolated the outbreaks, cleared the logjams, defused the terrorist attacks and ecological breakdowns that snapped on all sides. He floated on radio waves and slipped through the merest threads of fiberop, haunted Peruvian sea mills one minute and Korean Comsats the next. He was CSIRA's best 'lawbreaker again: able to bend the Second Law of Thermodynamics to the breaking point, and maybe a little beyond.
He was the very ghost in the machine—and back then, the machine was everywhere.