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The poem Brüks discovers in the desert as his mind is coming apart is not, contrary to what you might think, a hallucination. It is real. It is the warped brainchild of Canadian poet Christian Bök,[124] who has spent the past decade figuring out how to build a gene that not only spells a poem, but that functionally codes for a fluorescing protein whose amino acid sequence decodes into a response to that poem.[125] The last time we hung out he’d managed to insert it into E. coli, but his ultimate goal is to stick it into Deinococcus radiodurans, aka “Conan the Bacterium,”[126] aka the toughest microbial motherfucker that ever laughed at the inside of a nuclear reactor. If Christian’s project comes through, his words could be iterating across the face of this planet right up until the day the sun blows up. Who knew poetry could ever get that kind of a print run?

Finally: free will. Although free will (rather, its lack) is one of Echopraxia’s central themes (the neurological condition of echopraxia is to autonomy as blindsight is to consciousness), I don’t have much to say about it because the arguments seem so clear-cut as to be almost uninteresting. Neurons do not fire spontaneously, only in response to external stimuli; therefore brains cannot act spontaneously, only in response to external stimuli.[127] No need to wade through all those studies that show the brain acting before the conscious mind “decides” to.[128]^, [129] Forget the revisionist interpretations that downgrade the definition from free will to will that’s merely unpredictable enough to confuse predators.[130]^, [131] It’s simpler than that: the switch cannot flip itself. QED. If you insist on clinging to this free will farce I’m not going to waste much time arguing here: plenty of others have made the case far more persuasively than I ever could.[132]^, [133]^, [134]^, [135]

But given this current state of the art, one of the more indigestible nuggets Echopraxia asks you to swallow is that eight decades from now, people will still buy into such an incoherent premise—that as we close on the twenty-second century, we will continue to act as though we have free will.

In fact, we might behave that way. It’s not that you can’t convince people that they’re automatons; that’s easy enough to pull off, intellectually at least. Folks will even change their attitudes and behavior in the wake of those insights[136]—be more likely to cheat or less likely to hold people responsible for unlawful acts, for example.[137]^, [138] But eventually our attitudes drift back to pre-enlightenment baselines; even most of those who accept determinism somehow manage to believe in personal culpability.[139]^, [140] Over tens of thousands of years we just got used to cruising at one-twenty; without constant conscious intervention, we tend to ease back on the pedal to that place we feel most comfortable.

Echopraxia makes the same token concessions that society is likely to. You may have noticed the occasional reference to the concept of personal culpability having been weeded out of justice systems the world over, that those dark-ages throwbacks still adhering to the notion are subject to human rights sanctions by the rest of the civilized world. Brüks and Moore squabble over “the old no-free-will shtick” back at the monastery. Adherents to those Eastern religions who never really took free will all that seriously anyway have buggered off into a hive-minded state of (as far as anyone can tell) deep catatonia. The rest of us continue to act pretty much the way we always have.

Turns out we don’t have much choice in the matter.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PETER WATTS is a science fiction writer and a reformed marine-mammal biologist. He is the author of the Rifters trilogy, a winner of the Aurora, Hugo and Shirley Jackson awards and a Locus, Sturgeon and Campbell award nominee. Watts lives in Toronto.

Find out more at: www.rifters.com

ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

The Rifters Trilogy

Starfish

Maelstrom

Behemoth published as two novels:

Behemoth: ß-Max / Behemoth: Seppuku

Other

Crysis: Legion

Blindsight

Echopraxia

Collections

Ten Monkeys, Ten Minutes

The Island and Other Stories

Beyond the Rift

REVIEWS

‘It puts the whole of the rest of the genre in the shade… If you read one SF novel this year, make it this one’

Richard Morgan

‘A tour de force, redefining the First Contact story for good.’

Charles Stross

‘State-of-the-art. Grabs you by the throat from page one.’

Neal Asher

A LETTER FROM THE PUBLISHER

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The story starts here.

Blindsight first published in the USA in 2006 by Tor, an imprint of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Echopraxia first published in the USA in 2014 by Tor, an imprint of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

This combined edition Firefall, containing the works Blindsight and Echopraxia, first published in hardback in the UK in 2014 by Head of Zeus Ltd.