Peter Watts writes good hard scifi that illustrate good ideas. But unfortunately, like just about all "good" storywriters, he writes stories that bury good ideas under heaps of obfuscation, fragmentation, recombination, misdirection, personal touches, and irrelevant asides.
And what's worse, NONE of his stories have an Abstract section, like any good scientist would do... But again, no story, EVER, has an Abstract section.
Today I write the Abstracts for him, for some of the stories available here.
I put in quotations, because sometimes Peter Watts just writes so beautifully. They can still be skipped. Think of them as turning my abstracts into extended abstracts.
Ambassador
A heavily genetically modified human is sent on a spaceship Zombie to meet an alien ship, codenamed Kali. Zombie sent some greetings to Kali, and Kali replied with a short message that promptly crashed all the quantum computers on Zombie. The pilot of Zombie started running by hyperspace jumps, but Kali kept finding it.
Eventually Zombie and Kali simultaneously jumped into the homerange of Super-Kali. Super-Kali hit Kali with a missile and that destroyed Kali. For some odd reason, Zombie was left alive. The pilot turned off all but the essentials, as if holding its breath, afraid to draw Super-Kali's attention.
Over the course of a few days, the pilot observed quietly. Turns out Super-Kali is like a space spider: it has somehow managed to turn spacetime such that hyperspace jumps often end up in its homerange (a ball of space, two or three light-days across). Super-Kali fires missiles at those preys it caught to utterly destroy them. But there are some preys that manage to escape.
The pilot contemplates about why everyone is so hostile out there. It thinks back to the human sociologists' theory:
Any intelligence capable of advanced spaceflight must also be able to understand peaceful motives; such was the wisdom of Human sociologists. Most had never left the solar system. None had actually encountered an alien. No matter. The logic seemed sound enough; any species incapable of controlling their aggression probably wouldn't survive long enough to escape their own system. The things that made me nearly didn't.
The pilot decided that this theory is wrong. Instead, life is war, and technology implies belligerence.
I've stopped trying to reconcile the wisdom of Earthbound experts with the reality I have encountered. The old paradigms are useless. I propose a new one: technology implies belligerence.
Tools exist for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treat nature as an enemy, they are by definition a rebellion against the way things are. In benign environments technology is a stunted, laughable thing, it can't thrive in cultures gripped by belief in natural harmony. What need of fusion reactors if food is already abundant, the climate comfortable? Why force change upon a world which poses no danger?
Back where I come from, some peoples barely developed stone tools. Some achieved agriculture. Others were not content until they had ended nature itself, and still others until they'd built cities in space.
All rested, eventually. Their technology climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped—and so they do not stand before you now. Now even my creators grow fat and slow. Their environment mastered, their enemies broken, they can afford more pacifist luxuries. Their machines softened the universe for them, their own contentment robs them of incentive. They forget that hostility and technology climb the cultural ladder together, they forget that it's not enough to be smart.
You also have to be mean.
You did not rest. What hellish world did you come from, that drove you to such technological heights? Somewhere near the core, perhaps: stars and black holes jammed cheek to jowl, tidal maelstroms, endless planetary bombardment by comets and asteroids. Some place where no one can pretend that life and war aren't synonyms. How far you've come
The pilot decided to initiate a trade with Super-Kali. The pilot would tell Super-Kali everything it knows about humans, hoping it would buy its life. It has no idea whether it will work, but the alternative is certain death.
The Second Coming of Jasmine Fitzgerald
What if Frank J. Tipler's The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead is true? What if consciousness really is something that underlies reality, because quantum observations require a conscious mind? What if by total control of your own observation on the world, you can mold the world to your desires?
You become a God. That's what Jasmine Fitzgerald managed to do.
She first attempted to heal her husband, sick with cancer, by removing his cancer cells. She accidentally filled his body with teratoma (such as an eyeball in the kidney) and that instantly killed him. She wept and started cutting him up with a steak-knife, to figure out what went wrong.
She was arrested and interviewed to see how crazy she was. The interviewer became more and more unnerved. He went to Jasmine's PhD advisor for help, who gave him the book by Tipler. Turns out it's true. Jasmine's power grows, until she became able to teleport. The story ends, implying she will become more and more powerful, like a God.
Bulk Food
There are two lifestyles among orcas (killer whales): the Residents and the Transients. Humans managed to communicate with orcas using human-orca translators, and turns out orcas are very intelligent. The Residents and the Transients follow different cultures and have been engaged in a centuries-long war over their cultures. The Residents are more peaceful, eats only fishes, and do not engage in slave-trading. The Transients engage in slave-trading, slave-raiding, and eats baby seals.
Orcas live in pods (orca tribes) led by matriarchs. Some Transient pod matriarchs cut a deal with humans: They would sell some young orcas to human aquariums, in exchange for something unspecified.
Those aquariums would get the young orcas, train them a bit, and put on a big show with several steps:
- Just swim around and do orca things while the host explains orca culture.
- The orca hides beneath some rocks.
- A baby seal is released.
- The orca bursts out and eats the baby seal in one gory bite, sending intestines out like party pop.
- The orca holds still.
- A paying human customer (it costs $10000) would mount a harpoon station, and aim carefully at the orca.
- The customer fires the harpoon. If it's an instant kill, the customer gets the orca meat. Else, the aquarium gets the orca meat and sells it in the gift shop.
Meanwhile, the animal rights activists decided that instead of protecting all orcas, they should instead campaign for reinforcing the Residents and exterminating the Transients. The environmentalists finally realized how painful nature is, and instead of protecting nature as it is, they decided that nature must be reformed.
Flesh Made Word
A neuroscientist studying dying brains long after his wife’s death, concludes that every creature with a limbic system (such as humans) dies extremely afraid. Based on the triune theory of the brain.
I never liked it down there, it's all just...raw instinct, at the center. Left over from way back when the limbic system was the brain. Only now it's just unskilled labour, right? Just one small part of the whole, to do all that petty autonomic shit the upstart neocortex can't be bothered with. I never even considered that it might still be somehow...alive...
You die from the outside in, did you know that?... And then, just for a moment, the center is all you are again... the old reptilian part sleeping inside, the part that doesn't calculate ethics or quality of life or burdens on the next of kin, it just wants to live, that's all it's programmed for, you know? And at the very end, when we aren't around to keep it in line any more, it comes up and looks around and at that last moment it knows it's been betrayed, and it ... screams ...
Something waking up after a hundred million years, scared to death...
Mayfly
For some reason, in the future, there is severe birth control. People are only allowed to have children if they win a birth lottery from the omnipresent organization "Terracon". Kim Goravec and Andrew Goravec won the birth lottery, but their child has a genetic defect that caused its brain to develop into mush.
For some bizarre bureaucratic reasons, the Goravec couple were not allowed to have another child. Instead, Terracon offered to take the child's DNA, simulate the development in a computer, and essentially, gestate their daughter in virtual space. This person is called Jean Goravec.
This project is overseen by Dr Stavros, who decided to let Jean run wild in her virtual world.
It hadn’t started that way, of course. The system had booted up with years of mundane, real-world environments on file, each lovingly rendered down to the dust motes. But they’d been flexible, responsive to the needs of any developing intellect. In hindsight, maybe too flexible. Jean Goravec had edited her personal reality so radically that even Stavros’ mechanical intermediaries could barely parse it. This little girl could turn a forest glade into a bloody Roman coliseum with a thought. Unleashed, Jean lived in a world where all bets were off
A thought-experiment in child abuse: place a newborn into an environment devoid of vertical lines. Keep her there until the brain settles, until the wiring has congealed. Whole assemblies of pattern-matching retinal cells, aborted for lack of demand, will be forever beyond recall. Telephone poles, the trunks of trees, the vertical aspects of skyscrapers — your victim will be neurologically blind to such things for life.
So what happens to a child raised in a world where vertical lines dissolve, at a whim, into circles or fractals or a favorite toy?
We’re the impoverished ones, Stavros thought. Next to Jean, we’re blind.
This results in a superintelligent human mind. Jean, despite being so much more intelligent, still treats Stavros like a father.
Like a typical idiotic bureaucracy, Terracon doesn't recognize the power of a superintelligence that cares for a human. Instead, Jean has to be linked to a meat-body and play the role of a daughter for the Goravec couple. Jean is too smart for this job, so every time before being called into meatspace, she would go to sleep, and simplified massively so that she could "fit in" the tiny body. It's traumatic.
“I remember it, Stav. Sort of. Hard to remember much of anything when someone strips away ninety-nine percent of who and what you are. You’re reduced to this bleeding little lump, barely even an animal, and that’s the thing that remembers. What remembers is on the wrong end of a cable somewhere. I don’t belong in that body at all. I’m just — sentenced to it, on and off. On and off.”
For some reason, Jean's excursions into meat-space is experienced as nightmares. A massive plothole if you ask me. Why couldn't Dr Stavros just excise those nightmares? Why let Jean experience those meat-space memories? Whatever.
Eventually, during another meat-space excursion, the massively dumbed-down Jean successfully killed itself.
The transition was automatic, executed by a series of macros he’d slipped into the system after she’d been born. The body, awakening, pared the mind down to fit. The room monitors caught it all with dispassionate clarity: Jeannie Goravec, troubled childmonster, awakening into hell. Jeannie Goravec, opening eyes that seethed with anger and hatred and despair, eyes that glimmered with a bare fraction of the intelligence she’d had five seconds before.
After Jean's meat-space body died, the bureaucratic procedure would kill Jean, because she is no longer legally required to exist. Stavros intentionally filled the report form wrong, to delay the bureaucracy for as long as possible, to allow Jean live out its natural lifespan of 150 virtual-years -- about 1.5 real-months.
The Goravecs had just lost their child. Even if they’d wanted the body repaired, the mind reconnected, they wouldn’t get their way. Terracon had made good on all legal obligations, and hell — even normal children commit suicide now and then.
Just as well, really. The Goravecs weren’t fit to raise a hamster, let alone a beautiful girl with a four-digit IQ. But Jean — the real Jean, not that bloody broken pile of flesh and bone — she wasn’t easy or cheap to keep alive, and there would be pressure to free up the processor space once the word got out.
With Jeans' superintelligence, perhaps she could think her way to freedom during the 1.5 months and significantly change the world, but the story does not touch on the subject of how superintelligence can change the world.
Jean’s mind reflected precise simulations of real-world chromosomes, codes none-the-less real for having been built from electrons instead of carbon. She had her own kind of telomeres, which frayed. She had her own kind of synapses, which would wear out. Jean had been built to replace a human child, after all. And human children, eventually, age. They become adults, and then comes a day when they die.
Freed from her body, and with a healthy increase in her clockcycle priority, Jean could live a hundred-fifty subjective years in a month or two of real time. And in that whole century and a half, she’d never have to experience another nightmare.
Stavros smiled. It was time to see just what this baby could do, with her throttle wide open on the straightaway
Malak (the angel of death)
- the operators caused death of over 6 neutral objects
- any friendly or neutral object that causes death of over 6 neutral objects becomes hostile
- therefore, the operators are hostile
Nimbus
"I don't think they can see," Jess says absently. "They just sense big things like cities and smokestacks, hot spots or things that...itch. That's all."
The wind breathes, deceptively gentle, in her hair. Above us a finger of grey vapour crawls between two towering masses of cumulo-nimbus. What's happening up there? A random conjunction of water droplets? A 25000-baud data dump between processing nodes? Even after all this time it sounds absurd.
So many eloquent theories, so many explanations for our downfall. Everyone's talking about order from chaos: fluid geometry, bioelectric microbes that live in the clouds, complex behaviours emerging from some insane alliance of mist and electrochemistry.
Humans are trying to appease Gaia:
"The gods have come back," she said at last.
"Gods?" Anne was usually so bloody empirical.
"The old ones," she said. "The Old Testament gods. The Greek pantheon. Thunderbolts and fire and brimstone. We thought we'd outgrown them, you know? We thought..."
I felt a deep, trembling breath.
"I thought," she continued. "I thought we didn't need them any more. But we did. We fucked up so horribly on our own. There was nobody to keep us in line, and we trampled everything..."
I stroked her back. "Old news, Annie. You know we've cleaned things up. Hardly any cities allow gasoline any more, extinctions have levelled off. I even heard the other day that rainforest biomass increased last year."
Gaia would take a long time to recognize this though.
The experts tell us now that our supplications are on indefinite hold. We're praying to something that shrouds the whole planet, after all. It takes time for such a huge system to assimilate new information, more time to react. The clouds don't live by human clocks. We swarm like bacteria to them, doubling our numbers in an instant. How fast the response, from our microbial perspective? How long before the knee jerks? The experts mumble jargon among themselves and guess: decades. Maybe fifty years. This monster advancing on us now is answering a summons from the last century.
The sky screams down to fight with ghosts. It doesn't see me. If it sees anything at all, it is only the afterimage of some insulting sore, decades old, that needs to be disinfected. I lean against the wind. Murky chaos sweeps across something I used to call property.
Bethelem
Repeating the past
So here we are. You huddle in the corner, your eyes black begging holes that can’t stop moving, that see horrors in every shadow. Your fists bleed, nails gouging the palms. I remember, when I was your age. I cut myself to feel alive. Sometimes I still do.
It never really stops. Some day, your mother says, her machines will exorcise my demons. Doesn’t she understand what a terrible mistake that would be? Doesn’t history, once forgotten, repeat? Didn’t even the worst president in history admit that memories belong to everyone? I say nothing to you. We know each other now, so much deeper than words. I have made you wise, grandson. I have shown you the world. Now I will help you to live with it.
Hillcrest v. Velikovsky
Legal arguments about the placebo effect.
A woman with cancer survived for 5 years due to her faith in a protective amulet. After visiting a museum of quackeries and getting educated about the placebo effect, she died in a month. Her relatives sued the museum owner for homicide. The case was eventually dismissed.
Incorruptible
Computational psychiatrist Malika Rydman was on a plane that flew into a wormhole in 2017 and ended up in 2037. In the future, every American has neural dust and is plugged into the Internet.
"There's no cutting. You inject it. It gets into the brain on its own, distributes itself optimally, boots itself up. There aren't even any wires; passive ultrasound network. Very noninvasive."
However, the economy is still not sustainable, and will face ecological collapse soon.
Florida's pretty much gone from the Keys up to West Palm Beach. We've got fifty million climate refugees piling up along the Oregon strip. The post-TExit south is barely holding together. On any given week we've got rolling pandemics in half-a-dozen urban centers. The Arctic's a free-for-all ever since the ice cap melted; Russia shoots anything that comes within fifty klicks of Lomonosov and Exxon's pumping whatever they can out of the Chukchi Shelf before renewables finally put them out of business for good. Out across the Pond we've got Dengue Fever in the Baltic, and the Middle East is one parched raging water war from Syria to—
Some American departments, such as the US Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, and other infrastructure departments, went a bit rogue and started their own secret service. They captured Malika and asked him to become the dictator of America.
[It's kind of idiotic that they would rather capture an American from the past, rather than a wise man from the East, but I guess the author just want to squeeze in a time travel story.]
The deal: Malika will have his brain modified so that he would become a benevolent dictator that only looks out for the long-term interests of humanity.
Kin selection: repaired. Morality: eaten away as if by acid, ethics and algebra installed in its stead. The cingulate gyrus stirs and twitches. An ecstatic superhighway erupts from the nucleus accumbens and tunnels up to the prefrontal cortex: suddenly Malika no longer feels that hardwired heartfelt empathy for the lone six-year-old in need of a new liver. She no longer shrugs at news of another million starving refugees. Suddenly, those two feelings have switched places.
He would be cybernetically connected to MAGI [Malika's Artificial General Intelligence] and control the big policies.
Windows open and close in Malika's head: a palimpsest of insights and inventories projected across her visual cortex by the (purely external) VR rig wrapped around her skull. She can bring any of them front-and-center with a glance, dismiss them just as easily. It's too much for even an augmented person to sift through in a dozen lifetimes but MAGI high-grades in the background, tracks Malika's search patterns, serves up relevant results before she even knows she wants them. Species extinction trajectories. Monetary exchange rates. Effects of HFT algos on per-capita carbon footprints, cross-sorted by political jurisdiction. It comes and it goes, and somehow Malika Rydman— or at least, the thing that speaks with her voice— understands it all.
The brain-modification "Teresa Tweak" is injectable, based on retroviral gene drives, and is incompatible with neural dust, which explains why the officers sought Malika.
Malika became like Teresa, went deep underground into the control center of America, and got to work fixing the environment. After extensive discussions with MAGI, he executed the plan:
- Search the medical database for suicidal brains ("reduced expression of Trk B and NGF, hyperactivity along the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. Abnormalities in GABA and glutamate metabolism. Deficits of serotonin and BDNF.")
- Distill the essential neural message from these brains, that self-destruct message.
- Release the Teresa Tweak by putting it into an insect-borne virus like Zika on mosquitoes.
- Broadcast the self-destruct signal to every brain on the internet, to kill them all off, to immediately stop their over consumption.
- Let the Teresa-Tweaked human survivors continue living on earth.
Malika was extremely happy.
ZeroS
The blindness isn’t total. He still sees light, vague shapes in constant motion. It’s like watching the world through wax paper. The eyes jiggle when you’re a Passenger. Of course the eyes always jiggle, endlessly hopping from one momentary focus to the next— saccades, they’re called— but your brain usually edits out those motions, splices the clear bits together in post to serve up an illusion of continuity.
Not up here, though. Up here the sacc rate goes through the roof and nothing gets lost. Total data acquisition. To Asante it’s all blizzard and blur, but that’s okay. There’s something in here with him that can see just fine: his arms and legs are moving, after all, and Kodjo Asante isn’t moving them.
His other senses work fine; he feels the roughness of the rope against his palms as he climbs the wall, smells the earth and pine needles bedding the trail. Still tastes a faint hint of copper from that bite on the inside of his cheek a couple klicks back. He hears with utmost clarity the voice on his audio link. His inner zombie sucks all that back too, but eardrums don’t saccade. Tactile nerves don’t hop around under the flesh. Just the eyes: that’s how you tell. That and the fact that your whole body’s been possessed by Alien Hand Syndrome.
... how wonderful it is to be so strong. He feels like this body could take on a whole platoon single-handed.
Just for a millisecond, a small clear break in a sea of fog: a Lockheed Pit Bull cresting the granite outcropping to his left, legs spread, muzzle spinning to bear. In the next instant Asante’s blind again, recoil vibrating along his arm like a small earthquake. His body hasn’t even broken stride.
“Ah. Target acquisition,” the instructor remarks. “Enjoy the view.” It takes this opportunity to summarize the basics— target lock’s the only time when the eyes focus on a single point long enough for passengers to look out— before segueing into a spiel on line-of-sight networking.
Some cool jargon about how the neurosurgery was done:
That’s the retrosplenial bypass they burned into his neocortex a month ago, a little dropgate to decouple mind from self. Just one of the mods they’ve etched into him with neural lace and nanotube mesh and good old-fashioned zap’n’tap. Midbrain tweaks to customize ancient prey-stalking routines. An orbitofrontal damper to ensure behavioral compliance...
They never really appreciated that the subconscious mind thinks as well as reacts. It analyzes. I was telling them that years ago but they never really got it until now... Here, though, we have a perfect example of the tactical genius of the zombie mind...
There’s a kind of beauty to it; the movement of nodes, the intermittent web of laser light flickering between them, the smooth coalescence of signal from noise. It’s more than a dance, more than teamwork. It’s more like a— a distributed organism. Like the digits of a hand, moving together.
The missions became more and more difficult. Then Asante became seriously in doubt during another mission. They fought some refugees and children on a floating farm, and killed them all. This made Asante want to stop being a zombie soldier.
In the next mission, they went into the Arctic circle to raid an abandoned nuclear waste garbage dump, where some humans went in mysteriously. Turns out there were some children and a giant pizzly bear there, and they fought so well that the entire team was killed, except Asante.
Asante used the failsafe switch to force himself out of zombie-mode, because he thought they were killing unarmed children. Turned out they were being killed by superwarrior children.
In time to see the little freckled boy, dressed in ragged furs, sitting on Riley Garin’s shoulders and dragging a jagged piece of glass across his throat. In time to see him leap free of the body and snatch Garin’s gun, toss it effortlessly across this dimly-lit cave to an Asian girl clad only in a filthy loincloth, who’s sailing through the air toward a bloodied Jim Moore. In time to see that girl reach behind her and catch the gun in midair without so much as a backward glance.
More than a dance, more than teamwork. Like digits on the same hand, moving together.
We’re talking about a single distributed organism with God-know-how-many times the computational mass of a normal human brain. I’d be very surprised if it couldn’t anticipate and counter anything we planned. Still. We do what we can.
We don’t know who we’re up against. We don’t know how many hives are out there, what stage of gestation any of them have reached, how many may have already— matured. All we know is that a handful of unarmed children can slaughter our most elite forces at will, and we are so very unready for the world to know that.
Well, here’s another: it surrendered. Moore got you out, after all, which was statistically unlikely the way things were going. Maybe dropping out was a white flag, and the hive took pity and let you go so you could— I don’t know, spread the word: don’t fuck with us.
“Or maybe it decided the hive deserved to win, and switched sides. Maybe it was— conscientiously objecting. Maybe it decided it never enlisted in the first place.”
A Word for Heathens
Contrary to what you may have heard, God isn't everywhere. The only place He reliably hangs out is in the temporal lobes—at least, that's where Vilayanur Ramashandran found Him when he went looking in the brains of hyper-religious epileptics at UC-San Diego. You'll never find the Almighty slumming in the parietal cortex, judging by radioisotopes Andrew Newberg tracked through the heads of a meditating Buddhist monk at the University of Pennsylvania. Most spectacularly—and controversially—Michael Persinger of Laurentian University claims to be able to induce religious experiences using a helmet which bathes the brain in precisely-controlled electromagnetic fields.
We begin to understand the mechanism: Rapture is as purely neurological as any other human experience... It seems likely that these new insights will be used not to free us from the rapture, but to tweak it to maximum effect—to make us even more docile, even more obedient, even less skeptical of our masters than we are now.
Note that Peter Watts has a rather naive view of religion. He essentially views all religion as the Catholic type: with a big God and a rigid hierarchy of human servants. It's not hard to imagine a neurotechnology that induces strong belief in a wildly anarchic and animist religion, like Shintoism, with its eight million gods.
Whether such an anti-hierarchical rapture would amuse Peter Watts is unclear.
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