Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  Boyczuk took his duties a bit more seriously. There was a definite need for segregation, nobody questioned that. Everything from Nipah to Hydrilla would sneak past the borders given half a chance, even at the best of times; now, with half the coast gone and the other half fighting off the usual gamut of rot bugs, the last thing anyone needed was all that chaos spreading farther inland.

  Inland had its own problems. There were more than enough borders to go around no matter which way you looked. Sometimes it seemed as if an invisible spiderweb was spreading across the world, some creeping fractured network carving the whole planet into splinters. Boyczuk’s job was to sit on one of those edges and keep anything from crossing over until the state of emergency had passed. Assuming it did, of course; some places down in South America—even in N’Am, for that matter—had been under “temporary quarantine” for eight or nine years.

  Mostly people just put up with it. Boyczuk’s job was an easy one.

  “Hey,” Bridson said. “Check this out.”

  She rerouted her headset feed to an inboard screen. Not a VR game after all. She’d been riding the botflies.

  On the screen, a woman crouched on cracked asphalt. Boyczuk checked the location: a couple of hundred meters down the highway, hidden from the blockade behind the curve of the western precipice. One of the ’flies out over the dam had caught her around the corner.

  Backpack. Loose-fitting clothes, hiker’s clothes. Upper part of the face covered by an eyephone visor. Black gloves, short black hair—no, a black hood of some kind, maybe part of the visor. As a fashion statement, it didn’t work. In Boyczuk’s humble opinion, of course.

  “What’s she doing?” Boyczuk asked. “How’d she even get here?” No sign of a vehicle, although one could have been parked farther down the road.

  “No,” Bridson said. “She’s not serious.”

  The woman had braced herself in a sprinter’s crouch.

  “That’s really bad form,” Bridson remarked. “She could sprain an ankle.”

  Like a stone from a slingshot, the intruder launched herself forward.

  “Oh, right,” Bridson said.

  The intruder was running straight down the middle of the highway, eyes on the asphalt, dodging or leaping over cracks big enough to grab human feet. If nothing stopped her, she’d run smack into the barrier in about a minute.

  Of course, something was going to stop her.

  Beeping from the botfly feeds; the intruder had just entered their defensive radius. Boyczuk panned one of the barrier cams skyward. The ’fly closest to the target was breaking ranks, moving to intercept. Programmed flocking behavior dragged the adjacent ’flies forward as well, as though all were strung on an invisible thread. A connect-the-dots pseudopod, reaching for prey.

  The runner veered toward the edge of the road, glanced down. Ten meters beneath her, brown boiling water gnawed ravenously at the canyon wall.

  “You are approaching a restricted area,” the lead botfly scolded. “Please turn back.” Red light began pulsing from its belly.

  The intruder ran faster. Another glance down at the river.

  “What the fuck?” Boyczuk said.

  A little patch of pavement exploded in front of the runner: warning shot. She staggered, barely keeping her balance.

  “We are authorized to use force,” the lead botfly warned. “Please turn back.” The two ’flies behind it began flashing.

  The runner dodged and zigzagged, keeping to the west side of the road. She kept looking down …

  Boyczuk leaned forward. Wait a second …

  Behind the runner, water raged against a brutal jumble of sharp-edged boulders large as houses. Anyone falling in there would be teeth and pulp in about two seconds. Closer to the dam, though—in the lee of its near, unbroken end—the water might almost be calm enough to—

  “Shit.” Boyczuk slapped the ignition. “She’s gonna jump. She’s gonna jump …”

  Turbines behind, whining up to speed. “What are you talking about?” Bridson said.

  “She’s gonna—ah, shit …”

  She stumbled, swerved. Her feet came down on loose gravel. Boyczuk pulled back on the stick. The chopper whup-whup-whupped slowly off the ground, ten measly seconds start-up to liftoff, the envy of fast-response vehicles everywhere and still just barely fast enough to clear the barrier as the woman with the backpack skidded, flailed, launched herself into space, not where she was aiming, not the way she wanted, but no other options left except brief, spectacular flight …

  The botflies fired after her as she fell. The river swallowed her like a liquid avalanche.

  “Jesus,” Bridson breathed.

  “Infra,” Boyczuk snapped. “Anything comes up even half a degree above ambient I want to see it.”

  The Fraser raged endlessly beneath them.

  “Come on, boss. She’s not coming up. She’s a klick downstream by now, or parts of her anyway.”

  Boyczuk glared. “Just do it, okay?”

  Bridson tapped controls. False-color mosaics bloomed from the chopper’s ventral cam.

  “Want me to bring the botflies along?” Bridson asked.

  Boyczuk shook his head. “Can’t leave the border unguarded.” He wheeled the vehicle, began a westward drift down the canyon.

  “Hey, boss?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What just happened?”

  Boyczuk shook his head. “I don’t know. I think she was trying to make that backwater, just in front of the dam.”

  “What for? So she’d have a few seconds to drown or freeze before the current got her?”

  “I don’t know,” he said again.

  “Lots of easier ways to commit suicide.”

  Boyczuk shrugged. “Maybe she was just crazy.”

  It was 1334 Mountain Standard Time.

  The upstream face of the Hell’s Gate Dam had never been intended for public display; until recently, most of it had been buried beneath the trapped waters of the Fraser River. Now it was exposed, a fractured and scabrous bone gray wall, rising from a plain of mud. Just above this substrate, gravity feeds dotted the barrier like a line of gaping mouths. Grills of bolted rebar kept them from ingesting anything big enough to choke a hydroelectric turbine.

  As it happened, human beings fell a little shy of that threshold.

  The turbines were cold and dead anyway, of course. They certainly couldn’t have given rise to the sudden heatprint emanating from the easternmost intake. One of the Hell’s Gate botflies registered the signature at 1353 Mountain Standard: an object radiating 10°C above ambient, emerging from the interior of the dam and sliding down into the mud. The botfly moved slightly off station to get a better view.

  The signature’s surface temperature was too low for human norms. The botfly was no genius, but it knew wheat from chaff; even when wearing insulated clothing, humans had faces that were hot giveaways. The insulation on the present target was far more uniform, the isotherms less heterogeneous. The phrase “furred mammal” would have been utter gibberish to the botfly, of course. Still, it understood the concept in its own limited way. This was not something worth wasting time on.

  The botfly returned to its post and redirected its attention westward, from whence the real threats would come. Right now there was only something big and black and insectile coming back to roost, friendly reassurance cooing from its transponder. The ’fly moved aside to let it pass, floated back into position while the chopper settled down behind the barrier. Humans and machinery stood shoulder to shoulder, on guard for all mankind.

  Facing the wrong way. Lenie Clarke had left the Strip.

  The Next Best Thing

  Registry Assistance.

  “Clarke, Indira. Clarke with an ‘e.’ Apartment 133, CitiCorp 421, Coulson Avenue, Sault Sainte Marie.”

  Clarke, Indira

  Apartment 133, CitiCorp 421, Coulson Ave.

  Sault Sainte Marie, On

  Correct?

  “Yes.”


  Failed to match. Do you know Indira Clarke’s WestHem ID#?

  “Uh, no. The address might not be current, it was fifteen, sixteen years ago.”

  Current archives are three years deep. Do you know Indira Clarke’s middle name?

  “No. She fished Maelstrom, though. Freelance, I think.”

  Failed to match.

  “How many Indira Clarkes in Sault Sainte Marie?”

  5

  “How many with an only child, female, born—born in February, uh—”

  Failed to match.

  “Wait, February—sometime in February, 2018 …”

  Failed to match.

  “ …”

  Do you have another request?

  “How many in all of N’Am, professional affiliation with the Maelstrom fishery, with an only female child born February 2018, named Lenie?”

  Failed to match.

  “How many in the whole world, then?”

  Failed to match.

  “That’s not possible.”

  There are several possible reasons why your search has failed. The person you’re seeking may be unlisted or deceased. You may have provided incorrect information. Registry archive data may have been corrupted, despite our ongoing efforts to maintain a complete and accurate database.

  “That’s not fucking pos—”

  Disconnect.

  Beachhead

  Either/or accused him from the main display. Desjardins stared back for as long as he dared, feeling his stomach drop away inside him. Then he broke and ran.

  The elevator disgorged him through the lobby into the real world. Canyons of glass and metal leaned overhead on all sides, keeping street level in twilight; this deep in the bowels of metro-Sud, the sun only touched down for an hour a day.

  He descended into Pickering’s Pile, looking for familiar faces and finding none. Gwen had left an invitation for him in the Pile’s bulletin board, and he almost tripped it—

  Hey fellow mammal, I know this isn’t exactly what you had in mind but I just need to talk, you know? I found a spot they haven’t torched yet, they don’t even know it exists but they will, it’s big, it’s way bigger than it has any right to be, and the moment I tell them a few hundred thousand people get turned into ash-

  —but Guilt Trip rose in his throat like bile at the mere thought of such a breach. It tingled in his fingertips, ready to seize up motor nerves the moment he reached for the keypad. He’d tried racing it before, idle experimentation with no serious intent to subvert, but even then the Trip had been too fast for him. Volition’s subconscious; the command is halfway down the arm before the little man behind your eyes even decides to move. Executive summaries, after the fact, Desjardins thought. That’s all we get. That’s free will for you.

  He rose out of the Pile and headed for the nearest rapitrans station. And once there, kept walking. His rewired gray matter, stuck in frenetic overdrive, served up every irrelevant background detail in a relentless mesh of correlations: time of day vs. cloud cover vs. prevailing vehicular flow vs. out-of-stock warnings in streetside vending machines …

  How in God’s name could this happen? The locals have had millions of years to fine-tune themselves to the neighborhood. How can they possibly get run over by something that evolved on the bottom of the goddamned ocean?

  He knew the standard answer. Everyone did. The previous five centuries had been a accelerating litany of invasions, whole ecosystems squashed and replaced by exotics with more than enough attitude to make up for their lack of seniority. There were over seventy thousand usurper species at large in N’Am alone, and N’Am was better off than most. You’d be more likely to see space aliens than any of Australia’s has-been marsupials, outside of a gene bank.

  But this was different. Cane toads and starlings and zebra mussels might have filled the world with their weedy progeny, but even they had limits. You’d never find Hydrilla on top of Everest. Fire ants weren’t ever going to set up shop on the Juan de Fuca Ridge. Chemistry, pressure, temperature—too many barriers, too many physical extremes that would tear the very cells of a complex invader into fragments.

  A petroleum silhouette blocked his way: a human shadow with featureless white eyes. Desjardins started, stared into that vacant façade for a moment that slowed to treacle. Unbidden, his wetware reduced the vision to a point in a data cloud he hadn’t even known he was collecting: half-registered sightings during his daily commute; black shapes caught in the backgrounds of N’Am Wire crowd shots; fashion banners advertising the latest styles in wet midnight.

  Rifter chic, she said. Solidarity through fashion. It’s on the rise.

  All in a split second. The apparition ducked around him and continued on its way.

  Sudbury’s metropolitan canyons had subsided about him while he’d been walking. Endless sheets of kudzu4 draped closer to street level from the rooftops, framing windows and vents with viridian foliage. The new and improved part of him started to ballpark a carbon-consumption estimate under current cloud cover; he managed, with effort, to shut it up. He’d always wondered if the vines would be as easy to kill off as everyone expected, once they’d finished sucking up the previous century’s excesses. Kudzu had been a tough mother to begin with, even before all the tinkering that had turned it into God’s own carbon sink. And there was all sorts of outbreeding and lateral gene transfer going on these days, uncontrolled, unstoppable. Give the weed another ten years and it’d be immune to anything short of a flamethrower.

  Now, for the first time, that didn’t seem to matter. In ten years kudzun might be the least of anyone’s problems.

  It sure as hell wouldn’t matter much to those poor bastards on the Strip.

  They’d built this model.

  It wasn’t a real model, of course. They didn’t know enough about how βehemoth worked for that. There was no clockwork inside, nothing that led logically from cause to effect. It was just a nest of correlations, really. An n-dimensional cloud with a least-squares trajectory weaving through its heart. It guzzled data at one end: at the other it shat out a prediction. Soil moisture’s 13 percent, weather’s been clear for five days straight, porphyrins are down and micromethane’s up over half a hectare of dirt in a Tillamook shipyard? That’s βehemoth country, my friend—and tomorrow, if it doesn’t rain, there’s an 80 percent chance that it’ll shrink to half its present size.

  Why? Anyone’s guess. But that’s pretty much what’s happened before under similar conditions.

  Rowan’s field data had started them down the right path, but it was the fires that had given them an edge: each of those magnesium telltales shouted Hey! Over here! all the way up to geosynch. Then it was just a matter of calling up the Landsat archives for those locations, scrolling back five, six months from ignition. Sometimes you wouldn’t find anything—none of the residential blazes had yielded anything useful. Sometimes the data had been lost, purged or corrupted by the usual forces of entropy. Sometimes, though—along coastlines, or in undeveloped industrial lots where heavy machinery loitered between assignments—the spec lines would change over time, photoabsorption creeping down the 680nm band, soil O2 fading just a touch, a whiff of acid showing up on distance pH. If you waited long enough you could even see the change in visible light. Weeds and grasses, so tough that the usual oils and effluents had long since given up trying to kill them, would slowly wilt and turn brown.

  With those signatures in hand, Desjardins had begun to wean himself from blatant incendiary cues and search farther afield. It was a pretty flimsy construct, but it would’ve done until Jovellanos came up with a better angle. In the meantime it had been a lot better than nothing.

  Until now. Now it was a lot worse. Now it was saying that βehemoth owned a ten-kilometer stretch of the Oregon coast.

  Sudbury was dressed up for the night by the time he got back to his apartment: a jumble of neon and sodium and laser spilled through his windows, appreciably dimmer now that the latest restrictions had kicked in. Mandelbrot t
ripped him up as he crossed the threshold, then stalked into the kitchen and yowled at the kibble dispenser. The dispenser, programmed for preset feeding times, refused to dignify the cat with an answer.

  Desjardins dropped onto the sofa and stared unseeing at the cityscape.

  You should have known, he told himself.

  He had known. Maybe he just hadn’t quite believed it. And it hadn’t been his doing, those other times. He’d just been following the trail, seeing where others had taken the necessary steps, feeding all those data through his models and filters for the greater good. Always for the greater good.

  This time, though, there’d been no fire. The forces of containment hadn’t found out about the Strip yet. So far they’d just been covering their own tracks, sterilizing every—