Free Echopraxia by Peter Watts

precious REM with dreamed apologies. He tweaked the script, started again.
    â€œYou wouldn’t believe what’s happening,” he said.
    â€œTell me.”
    â€œI’ve got caught up in some kind of war, I’m trapped behind enemy lines with a bunch of—really. You wouldn’t believe me.”
    â€œMonks and zombies,” she said. “And a vampire.”
    Of course she knew.
    â€œI don’t even know how I can be here. You’d think with all this stuff happening I’d be too wired to even sit down, but—”
    â€œYou’ve been going straight for twenty-four hours.” She laid her hand on his. “Of course you’re going to crash.”
    â€œThese people don’t,” he grumbled. “I don’t think they even sleep, not all at once, anyway. Different parts of their brains take—shifts, or something. Like a bunch of dolphins.”
    â€œYou’re not a dolphin, and you’re not some augmented wannabe, either. You’re natural . Just the way I like it. And you know what?”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYou’re going to keep up with them. You always do.”
    Not always, he thought.
    â€œYou should come back,” he said suddenly. Somewhere far away, his fingers and toes tingled faintly.
    She shook her head. “We’ve been over this.”
    â€œNobody’s saying you have to go back to the job. There are a million other options.”
    â€œIn here,” she told him, “there are a billion.”
    He looked at her chain. He had never consciously forged those links. He’d simply found her like this. He could have changed her circumstance with a thought, of course, as he could change anything in this world—but there were always risks.
    He’d learned not to push it.
    â€œYou can’t like it here,” he said quietly.
    She laughed. “Why not? I didn’t put that thing on.”
    â€œBut—” His temples throbbed. He willed them to stop.
    â€œDan,” she said gently, “ You can keep up out there. I can’t.”
    The tingling intensified in his extremities. Rho’s face wavered before him, fading to black. He couldn’t keep her together much longer. All this careful conservatism, these shackled environments that barely edged beyond the laws of physics—they only guarded against the Inner Heckler, not these unwelcome sensations intruding from outside . Headaches. Pins and needles. They distracted from his own contrivance; suddenly the whole façade was falling apart around him. “Come back soon,” his wife called through the rising static. “I’ll be waiting…”
    She was gone before he could answer. He tried to construct something spectacular—the implosion of Heaven itself, a fiery inward collapse toward some ravenous singularity deep below the Canadian Shield—but he was rising too fast toward the light.
    There’d been a time when he’d derided his own lack of imagination, cursed his inability to slip his shackles and just dream like everyone else, with glorious hallucinogenic abandon. Even now, sometimes, he had to remind himself: it wasn’t a failing at all. It was a strength.
    Even in sleep, Dan Brüks didn’t take anything on faith.
    Â 
    Â 
    Â 
    TO HIMSELF EVERYONE IS IMMORTAL; HE MAY KNOW THAT HE IS GOING TO DIE, BUT HE CAN NEVER KNOW THAT HE IS DEAD.
    â€”SAMUEL BUTLER
    SUNSHINE STABBED HIS eyes through the cell’s slotted window. His mouth was dry, his head athrob. His fingers pulsed with dull electricity. Slept on my hands, he thought, and tried to imagine how he might have actually done that as he swung his legs over the edge of the bed.
    The same pins and needles flooded the soles of his feet when he planted them on the floor.
    Great.
    He found his way to the lav that Luckett had shown him the night before, emptied his bladder while every extremity tingled and burned. The discomfort was