Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  Wait a minute

  Correlation coefficient of -0.873. What was that all about?

  Temperature. Temperature went up when chlorophyll went down.

  Why the hell didn’t I see that before? Oh, there. A time lag. What the …

  What the …

  A soft chime in his ear: “Hey, Killjoy. I’ve got something really strange here.”

  “Me too,” Desjardins replied.

  Jovellanos’s office was just down the hall; it still took her a few minutes to show up at his door. The caffeine spike in her hand told him why.

  “You should get more sleep,” he remarked. “You won’t need so many chemicals.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “This from the man with half his bloodstream registered in the patent office.” Jovellanos hadn’t had her shots yet. She didn’t need them in her current position, but she was too good at her job to stay where she was much longer. Desjardins looked forward to the day when her righteous stance on the Sanctity of Free Will went head-to-head against the legal prerequisites for promotion. She’d probably take one look at the list of perks and the new salary, and cave.

  He had, anyway.

  He spun his chair back to the console and brought the correlation matrix up on the display. “Look at this. Chloroes go down, soil temperature goes up.”

  “Huge P-value,” Jovellanos said.

  “Small sample size. That’s not the point: look at the time lag.”

  She leaned forward. “Those are awfully big confidence limits.”

  “The lag’s not consistent. Sometimes it takes a couple of days for the temp to rise, sometimes a few weeks.”

  “That’s barely even a pattern, Killjoy. Anything—”

  “Take a guess at the magnitude,” he broke in.

  “Loss of plant cover, right?” Jovellanos shrugged. “Assuming it is a real effect, say half a degree? Quarter?”

  Desjardins showed her.

  “Holy shit,” she said. “This bug starts fires?”

  “Something does, anyway. I scanned the municipal archives along the coast: all local firestorms, mostly attributed to acts of terrorism or ‘industrial accidents.’ Also a couple of tree farms going down for some agro pest—budworm or something.”

  Jovellanos was at his elbow, her hands running over his console. “What about other fires in the area …”

  “Oh, lots. Even keeping strictly within the search window, I found a good eight or nine that didn’t correlate. A ties to B, but not vice versa.”

  “So maybe it’s a fluke,” she said hopefully. “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Or maybe somebody else has a better track on this bug than we do.”

  Jovellanos didn’t answer for a moment. Then: “Well, we might be able to improve our own track a bit.”

  Desjardins glanced up. “Yeah?”

  “I’ve been working up that sample they gave us. They’re not making it easy, they haven’t left a single intact organelle as far as I can tell—”

  He waved her on: “It all looks the same to a mass spec.”

  “Only if they left all the pieces behind after they mashed them.”

  “Of course they did. Otherwise, you’d never get an accurate sig.”

  “Well, I can’t find half the stuff that’s supposed to be there. No phospholipids, even. Lots of nucleotides, but I can’t get them to fit a DNA template. So your bug’s probably RNA-based.”

  “Uh-huh.” No surprises there—lots of microbes got along just fine without DNA.

  “Also I’ve managed to reconstruct some simple enzymes, but they’re a bit too stiff in the joints to work properly, you know? Oh, and this is kind of weird: I’ve found a couple of D-aminos.”

  “Ah.” Desjardins nodded sagely. “That means what, exactly?”

  “Right-handed. The asymmetric carbons stick off the wrong side of the molecule. Like your usual left-handed amino, only flipped.”

  A mirror image. “So?”

  “So that makes ‘em useless; all metabolic pathways have been geared for L-aminos and only L-aminos, for the past three billion years at least. There’s a couple of bacteria that use R-aminos because they’re useless—they stick them onto their cell walls to make ’em indigestible—but that’s not what we’re dealing with here.”

  Desjardins pushed back in his chair. “So someone built this thing completely from scratch, is that what you’re saying? We’ve got another new bug on our hands.”

  Jovellanos shook her head, disgusted. “And that corpse didn’t even tell you.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t know.”

  Jovellanos pointed at the GIS overlay. Two dozen crimson pinpoints sparkled along the coast from Hongcouver to Newport. Two dozen tiny anomalies of soil and water chemistry. Two dozen visitations from an unknown microbe, each presaging a small fiery apocalypse.

  “Somebody knows,” Jovellanos said.

  Afterburn

  On all sides Hongcouver licked its wounds.

  The city had always been a coward, hiding behind Vancouver Island and a maze of local bathymetry. That had spared it from the worst effects of the tsunami. The quake itself had been another story, of course.

  In an earlier day, before Maelstrom and telecommuting and city centers half-abandoned, the death toll in the core would have been three times as high. As it was, those who’d been spared vivisection downtown had merely died closer to home. Whole subdivisions, built on the effluvial sediment of the Fraser Delta, had shuddered into sudden quicksand and disappeared. Richmond and White Rock and Chilliwack didn’t exist anymore. Mount Rainier had awakened overnight in a bad mood; fresh lava continued to flow over most of its southern face. Mount Adams was stirring and might yet blow.

  In the Hongcouver core, damage was more heterogeneous. Streets stretched for blocks without so much as a broken window. Then, across some arbitrary intersection, the world became a place of shattered buildings and upended asphalt. Bright yellow barriers, erected after the fact, drew boundaries around the injured areas. Lifters hung above the dark zones like white blood cells on a tumor. Fresh girders and paneling descended from on high, reconstructive grafts of metropolitan skin and bone. Heavy machinery grumbled in the canyons where they touched down.

  In between, patches of cityscape hummed at half power, emergency Ballard stacks jumpered into convenient substations. Those streets that hadn’t upended, those buildings that hadn’t been shrugged into False Creek, had been swept clean and reactivated. Field crematoria belched ash from the corner of Georgia and Denman, keeping—so far—one step ahead of the cholera bug. More barriers than buildings, these days. Not that there was anywhere else to go; CSIRA had sealed the border at Hell’s Gate.

  Benrai Dutton had survived it all.

  He’d been lucky; his splitfit condo was halfway up Point Gray, an island of granite in a sea of sand. While neighborhoods on all sides had vanished, the Point had merely slipped a little.

  Even here there was damage, of course. Most of the houses on the lower face had collapsed; the few still standing listed drunkenly to the east. No lights shone from them or the lampposts lining the street, even though night was falling. A jury-rigged line of portable floods shone from poles separating wrecked homes from standing ones, but they had a defensive air about them. They existed, not to bring light to the ruins, but as a perimeter against them.

  They existed to blind Benrai Dutton when a crazy woman leapt at his throat from the shadows.

  Suddenly he was transfixed: cold bright eyes without pupils, glaciers embedded in flesh. A disembodied face, almost as pale as the eyes it contained. Invisible hands, one around his neck, one at his chest—

  —no not invisible she’s in black she’s all in black—

  “What happened?”

  “What—what—”

  “I am not going to give up!” She hissed, slamming him against a chain-link fence. Her breath swirled between them like backlit fog. “He took his shots, he took a thousand fucking shots, and I am not goin
g to let him just walk away!”

  “Who—what are you—”

  She stopped, suddenly. She cocked her head as though seeing him for the first time.

  “Where the fuck did you come from?” she said, absurdly.

  She was a good fifteen centimeters shorter than he was. For some reason it did not occur to him to fight back.

  “I don’t, I—I was just going home …” Dutton managed.

  “That place,” the woman said. Her eyes—nightshades of some kind?—drilled his own.

  “What place?”

  She slammed him back against the chain link. “That place!”—jerking her chin at something over his left shoulder. Dutton turned his head; another splitfit, intact but empty and dark all the same.

  “That place? I don’t—”

  “Yes, that place! Yves Scanlon’s fucking place. You know him?”

  “No, I—I mean, I don’t really know anyone here, we kind of keep to—”

  “Where did he go?” she hissed.

  “Go?” he said weakly.

  “The place is absolutely empty! No furniture, no clothing, not so much as fucking lightbulb!”

  “Maybe—maybe he left—the quake—”

  She knotted her fists more tightly into his clothing, leaned in until they were almost kissing. “His place doesn’t have a fucking scratch on it. Why would he leave? How could he? He’s nobody, he’s a fucking pissant, you think he could just pick up and walk past the quarantine?”

  Dutton shook his head frantically. “I don’t know—really, I don’t—”

  She stared into him for a few moments. Her hair was wet; it hadn’t rained all day. “I don’t—I don’t know you …” she murmured, almost to herself. Slowly her fists unclenched. Dutton sagged back against the fence.

  She stepped back, giving him room to move.

  It was what he’d been waiting for. One hand swept briefly beneath his jacket. The taser jabbed her in the rib cage, just below a strange metallic disk sewn into her uniform. It should have dropped her in an instant.

  Within that instant:

  She blinked—

  Her right knee came up, hard. Naturally he wore a cup. It hurt like hell anyway—

  Her right hand slipped forward, against her upraised calf Something sprang into it—

  The crazy woman stepped back, arm extended. Two centimeters from his face, an ebony wand with a tiny spike at its tip stared at Dutton like a one-toothed mamba.

  Over the pain in his crotch, sudden wet warmth.

  She smiled a small, terrifying smile. “Use a microwave, little man?”

  “Wh—what—?”

  “Kitchen appliances? Sensorium? Keep your house warm in winter?”

  He bobbed his head. “Yes. Yes, of course I—”

  “Huh.” The mamba wiggled over his left eye. “Then I was wrong. I know you after all.”

  “No,” he stammered. “We’ve never—”

  “I know you,” she repeated. “And you owe me.”

  Her thumb moved against something on the wand’s handgrip. Dutton heard a small click.

  “Please …” he prayed.

  And amazingly, something answered him.

  Hongcouver was still a disaster zone, of course; the police had more pressing concerns than an unlikely apparition reported by some panicky dickwad. Still, the server took Dutton’s report when he called it in. The server wasn’t human, but it was smart enough to ask follow-up questions—like, had he noticed anything, anything at all, that might have caused his assailant to suddenly break off the assault?

  No.

  Could he think of any reason why she would be suddenly start babbling about dad like that? Did the reference to monsters make any sense, in context?

  Maybe she was just crazy, Dutton replied, although as the server noted he was not qualified to make medical diagnoses.

  Had he seen where she had gone, exactly?

  Just downhill. Into the wreckage, toward the water.

  And he sure as shit hadn’t been going to follow her down there.

  Stockpile

  Vancity CU/N’AmPac Transaction Server

  Personal Accounts, Broadway ATM-45, 50/10/05/0551

  Transaction Begins:

  Welcome to VanCity. Are you a member?

  “I couldn’t link, before. Using my watch.”

  Remote access curfew is in effect until 10:00 am. At present this terminal can only process on-site transactions. We apologize for any inconvenience. Are you a member?

  “Lenie Clarke.”

  Welcome, Ms. Clarke. Please remove your corneal overlays.

  “what?”

  We cannot open your account without eyeprint confirmation. Please remove your corneal overlays.

  Thank you. Scanning.

  Complete. Thank you, Ms. Clarke. You may proceed.

  “What’s my total balance?”

  $Q42,329.15

  “I want to download it all.”

  Has Vancity’s service been satisfactory?

  “It’s been fine.”

  We can see your wristwatch, and a subcutaneous moneychip in your left thigh. How would you like the funds distributed?

  “Forty thousand sub-q, the rest to the watch. Automatic transfer of all funds sub-q if I’m attacked.”

  That condition can’t be evaluated. Your watch is not equipped with a biotelemetry plug-in.

  “Automatic transfer on voice-linked password, then.”

  What password?

  “Sh—shadow …”

  Please repeat the password.

  Please repeat the password.

  Please—

  “I said, shadow.”

  Done. Would you like another transaction?

  (inaudible)

  Vancity thanks you for your business.

  Transaction ends

  Sears Medbooth 199/Granville Island/Hongcouver

  Transaction record, vocal, 50/10/05/0923

  (Test results filed separately.)

  Session begins:

  Welcome to Sears Medical Services. Please open your account.

  Thank you. Do you wish to limit your charges?

  “No.”

  What can we do for you today?

  “My right shoulder. Sprained or broken or something. And a blood scan. Paths especially.”

  Please provide blood sample.

  Thank you. Please provide your medical history or your WestHemID#.

  “Forget it.”

  Access to your medical records will help us provide better service. All information will be kept strictly confidential except in the event of a public health or marketing priority, and in such cases we may be legally required to sequence-ID your sample anyway.

  “I’ll take my chances. No thanks.”

  Your shoulder has been recently dislocated, but is presently reseated. You will continue to experience pain and stiffness for approximately two months without treatment. You will experience reduced mobility for at least a year without treatment. Would you like treatment for the pain?

  “Yeah.”

  We’re sorry, but recent heavy user demand has depleted our stock of painkillers. Anabolic accelerants can reduce the healing period to three to five days. Shall I administer anabolic accelerants?

  “Sure.”

  We’re sorry, but recent heavy user demand has depleted our stock of accelerants. Your blood shows minor deficiencies in calcium and trace-sulfur. You have elevated levels of the hormones serotonin, oxytocin, and cortisol; elevated platelet and antibody counts consistent with moderate physical injury within the past three weeks. None of these findings should cause you serious concern, although the mineral deficiencies may reflect poor dietary habits. Would you like dietary mineral supplements?

  “You actually have any?”

  Sears medbooths are regularly maintained and resupplied to ensure that you have reliable access to the best in quality medical care. Would you like dietary supplements?

  “No.”

 
Cellular metabolites are high. Your blood lactate is low. Blood gases and amine count—

  “What about diseases?”

  All pathogen counts are within documented safe ranges.

  “You sure?”

  The standard blood panel tests for over eight hundred known pathogens and parasites. More extensive analysis is available for a small additional charge, but the analysis would take up to six hours. Would you like—

  “No, I—but that can’t be it, I mean—is that it?”

  Is there some specific symptom that concerns you?

  “Aren’t there some kinds of infections that cause hallucinations?”

  Can you describe these hallucinations?

  “Visions only. No sound or smell or anything. I’ve been having them for a few weeks now, on and off. Once every few days, maybe. They go away by themselves, after a minute or two.”