Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  -body—

  —everything that had come into contact with the source. But they didn’t know how to identify βehemoth directly, not from a distance. That was his job, and Jovellanos’s.

  And now it looked like the two of them had succeeded. Desjardins reflected on the difference between following a trail of ashes, and blazing one’s own.

  Shouldn’t matter. It’s not like you’re firing the flamethrower.

  Just aiming it.

  Guilt Trip paced in his gut like a caged animal, looking for something to tear into.

  Well? Do your job, for Christ’s sake! Tell me what to do!

  Guilt Trip didn’t work like that, of course. It was all stick and no carrot, a neurochemical censor that pounced on the slightest twinge of guilt, or conscience, or—for the mechanists in the audience—sheer amoral fear-of-getting-caughtwith-your-hand-in-the-cookie-jar. You could call it whatever you wanted; labels didn’t change the side chains and peptide bonds and carboxyl whatsits that made it work. Guilt was a neurotransmitter. Morality was a chemical. And the things that made nerves fire, muscles move, tongues wag—those were all chemicals, too. It had only been a matter of time before someone figured out how to tie them all together.

  Guilt Trip kept you from making the wrong decision, and Absolution let you live with yourself after making the right one. But you had to at least think you knew what right was, before either of them could kick in. They only reacted to gut feeling.

  He’d never lamented the Trip’s lack of direction before. He’d never needed it. Sure, it would freeze him in an instant if he tried to hack his own credit rating, but in terms of actual caseload it rarely did more than nudge him toward the blindingly obvious. Lose-lose situations were his stock-in-trade. Amputate the part or lose the whole? Nasty, but obvious. Kill ten to save a hundred? Wring your hands, bite the bullet, get stoned afterward. But never any question about what to do.

  How many people did I seal off to keep a lid on that brucellosis outbreak in Argentina? How many did I flood out in TongKing when I cut the power to their sumps?

  Necessary steps had never bothered him before. Not like this. Alice and all her snide comments about seeing the world in black-and-white. Bullshit. I saw the grays, I saw millions of grays. I just knew how to pick the lightest shade.

  Not anymore.

  He could pinpoint the moment that things had changed, almost to the second: when he’d seen a ’scaphe built for the deep sea and a cockpit built for the near sky, locked together in a desperate embrace, falling.

  It had not been a commercial lifter on a routine flight; he’d checked the records. Officially, nothing had fallen into the Pacific at the heart of the Big One, because—officially—nothing had been there to fall. It had been sent secretly to Ground Zero, and then it had been shot down.

  It made no sense that the same authority would have committed both acts.

  That implied factions in opposition. It implied profound disagreement over what constituted the greater good (or the Interests of the Overlords, which Jovellanos insisted was all the Trip really ensured). Someone in the bureaucratic stratosphere—someone who knew far more about βehemoth than did Achilles Desjardins—had tried to evacuate the rifters before the quake. Apparently they’d felt that preemptive murder was not justified in the name of containment.

  And someone else had stopped them.

  Which side was Rowan affiliated with? Who was right?

  He hadn’t told Jovellanos about the ’scaphe. He’d even done a passable job of forgetting about it himself, keeping things nice and simple, focusing on the mouse at hand until the whale on the horizon became a vague blur, almost invisible. He’d known in the back of his mind he wouldn’t be able to keep it up for long; eventually they’d come up with a reliable index, some combination of distance spec and moisture and pH that pointed the finger at the invader. But he hadn’t expected it so soon. They’d been working with old data, shipyard samples contaminated by industrial effluents, potential incursions three or four hectares large at most. Noise-tosignal problems alone should have held them back for weeks.

  But you didn’t need much rez to catch a beachhead ten kilometers long. Desjardins had kept his eyes down, and the whale on the horizon had run right into him.

  Mandelbrot stood in the doorway, stretching. Claws extruded from their sheaths like tiny scimitars.

  “You wouldn’t have any trouble at all,” Desjardins said. “You’d just go for maximum damage, right?”

  Mandelbrot purred.

  Desjardins buried his face in his hands. So what do I do now? Figure things out for myself?

  He realized, with some surprise, that the prospect wouldn’t have always seemed so absurd.

  Drugstore

  “Amitav.”

  He startled awake: a blanketed skeleton on the sand. Gray and dim in the visible predawn gloom, hot and luminous in infrared. Sunken eyes, exuding hatred on all wavelengths from the moment they opened.

  Sou-Hon Perreault stared down at him from three meters up. Well-fed refugees, freshly awakened on all sides, edged away and left Amitav in the center of an open circle.

  Several others—teenagers, mostly, a little less robust than most—stayed nearby, looking up at the ’fly with undisguised suspicion. Perreault blinked within her headset; she’d never seen so many hostile faces on the Strip before.

  “How pleasant,” Amitav said in a low voice. “To wake with a big round hammer hanging over my head.”

  “Sorry.” She moved the ’fly off to one side, wobbling its trim tabs to effect a bobbing mechanical salute (then wondered if he could even see it with his merely human eyes). “It’s Sou-Hon,” she said.

  “Who else,” the stickman said dryly, rising.

  “I—”

  “She is not here. I have not seen her in some time.”

  “I know. I wanted to talk to you.”

  “Ah. About what?” The stickman began walking down the shore. His—

  Friends? Disciples? Bodyguards?

  —began to follow. Amitav waved them off. Perreault set the botfly to heel at his side; the entourage dwindled slowly to stern. On either side, anonymous bundles—curled on thermafoam, wrapped in heat-conserving fabric—stirred and grunted irritably in the gray half-light.

  “A cycler was vandalized last night,” Perreault said. “A few kilometers north of here. We’ll have to fly out a replacement.”

  “Ah.”

  “It’s the first time something like this has happened in years.”

  “And we both know why that is, do we not?”

  “People rely on those machines. You took food from their mouths.”

  “I? I did this?”

  “There were lots of witnesses, Amitav.”

  “Then they will tell you I had nothing to do with it.”

  “They told me it was a couple of teenagers. And they told me who put them up to it.”

  The stickman stopped and turned to face the machine at his side. “And all these witnesses you speak of. All these poor people that I have robbed of food. None of them did anything to stop the vandals? All those people, and they could not stop two boys from stealing the food from their mouths?”

  Sheathed in her interface, Perreault sighed. Over a thousand klicks away the botfly snorted reverb. “What do you have against the cyclers, anyway?”

  “I am not a fool.” Amitav continued down the shore. “It is not all proteins and carbohydrates you are feeding us. I would rather starve than eat poison.”

  “Antidepressants aren’t poison! The dosages are very mild.”

  “And so much more convenient than dealing with the anger of real people, yes?”

  “Anger? Why should you be angry?”

  “We should be grateful, do you think? To you?” The skeleton spat. “It was our machinery that tore everything apart? We caused the droughts and the floods and put our own homes underwater? And afterward, when we came here across a whole ocean—if we did not starve first or cook
in the sun or die with our bodies stuffed with worms and things that your drugs have made unkillable—when we ended here we are supposed to be grateful that you let us sleep on this little patch of mud, we are supposed to thank you because so far it is cheaper to drug us than mow us down?”

  They were at the waterline. Surf pounded invisibly in the dark distance. Amitav lifted one bony arm and pointed. “Sometimes when people go in there the sharks come for them.” His voice was suddenly calm. “And onshore, the rest continue to sex and shit and feed at your wonderful machines.”

  “That’s—that’s just human nature, Amitav. People don’t want to get involved.”

  “So these drugs are good for us?”

  “They’re not the slightest bit harmful.”

  “Then you put them in your food, too.”

  “Well no, but I’m not—”

  —part of an imprisoned destitute mob forty million strong …

  “You liar,” the stickman said quietly. “You hypocrite.”

  “You’re starving, Amitav. You’ll die.”

  “I know what I do.”

  “Do you?”

  He looked up at the ’fly again, and this time he almost seemed amused. “What do you think I was, before?”

  “What?”

  “Before I was—here. Or did you think that environmental refugee was my first choice of vocation?”

  “Well, I—”

  “I was a pharmaceutical engineer,” Amitav said. He tapped his temple. “They even changed me up here, so I was very good at it. I am not completely foolish about dietary matters. There appears to be a—a minimum effective dosage, yes? If I eat very little, your poisons have no effect.” He paused. “So now you will try and force-feed me, for my own good?”

  Perreault ignored the jibe. “And you think you’re getting enough to live on, under your minimum dosage?”

  “Perhaps not quite. But I am starving very, very slowly.”

  “Is that how you motivated those kids to trash the cycler? Are they fasting too?” There could be serious trouble on the Strip if that caught on.

  “Me, still? I have somehow tricked all these people into starving themselves?”

  “Who else?”

  “Such faith you have in your machines. You have never thought that perhaps they are not working as well as you think?” He shook his head and spat. “Of course not. You were not told to.”

  “The cyclers work fine until your followers smash them.”

  “My followers? They never fasted for me. They suck at your tits as they always have. It is only after they begin starving that they see your cyclers for what they—”

  Crack!

  An impact on polymer, the sound of a whip snapping just behind her ear. She spun the ’fly, caught a glimpse of the rock as it bounced along the substrate. Ten meters down the shore, a girl ran away with another rock clenched in her hand.

  Perreault turned back to face Amitav. “You—”

  “Do not try to blame me. I am the cause of nothing. I am only the result.”

  “This can’t go on, Amitav.”

  “You cannot stop it.”

  “I won’t have to. If you keep this up it won’t be me you’re dealing with, it’ll be—”

  “Why do you care?” Amitav cut in.

  “I’m just trying to—”

  “You are trying to ease feelings of guilt. Use someone else.”

  “You can’t win.”

  “That depends upon what I am trying to do.”

  “You’re all alone.”

  Amitav laughed, waved his arms back across the shore. “How can I be? You have so thoughtfully provided all these sheep, and all this death, and even an ic—”

  He stopped himself. Perreault filled in the gap: an icon to inspire them.

  “She’s not here anymore,” she said after a moment.

  Amitav glanced back upshore; the eastern sky was beginning to lighten. A knot of curious humans stood halfway up the shore, watching from the center of a sleeping flock. Here at the water’s edge, there was no one else within earshot.

  The girl who’d thrown the rock was nowhere to be seen.

  “Perhaps that is better,” the stickman remarked. “Lenie Clarke was very—not even your antidepressants seemed to work on her.”

  “Lenie? That’s her first name?”

  “I believe so. At least, that was the name she used during one of her—visions.” He glanced sideways at Perreault’s floating surrogate. “Where did she go?”

  “I don’t know. I just haven’t been able to confirm any recent sightings. Just rumors.” But of course, you’d know all about those … “Maybe she’s dead.”

  The stickman shook his head.

  “It’s a big ocean, Amitav. The sharks. And if she was having—fits of some kind—”

  “She is not dead. I think perhaps there was a time when she wanted to be, once. Now …”

  He stared inland. On the eastern horizon, past the people and the trampled scrub and the towers, the sky was turning red.

  “Now, you are not so lucky,” Amitav said.

  Source Code

  He’d left the map smoldering on his board the night before. Alice Jovellanos was waiting beside it, ready to pounce.

  “Why didn’t you say something?” On the display, a luminous bloodstain ran down the coast from Westport to Copalis Beach.

  “Alice—”

  “You’ve got a hot zone the size of a city here! How long have you known?”

  “Just last night. I tightened some of the correlations and ran it against yesterday’s snaps and—”

  She cut him off: “You let this sit all night? Jesus Christ, Killjoy, what’s wrong with you? We’ve got to call in the troops, and I mean now.”

  He stared at her. “Since when did you join the fire brigade? You know what’ll happen the moment we pass this up the line. We don’t even know what βehemoth does y—”

  Her expression stopped him cold.

  He slumped into his chair. The display bled crimson light all over him. “Is it that bad?”

  “It’s worse,” she said.

  A lumpy rainbow, a string of clustered beads folded around itself: purines or pyrimidines or nucleics or whatever the fuck they were.

  βehemoth’s source code. Part of it, anyway.

  “It’s not even a helix,” he said at last.

  “Actually, it’s got a weak left-handed twist. That’s not the point.”

  “What is?”

  “Pyranosal RNA. Much stronger Watson-Crick pairs than your garden-variety RNA, and a lot more selective in terms of pairing modes. Guanine-rich sequences won’t self-pair, for one thing. Six-sided ring.”

  “English, Alice. So what?”

  “It’ll replicate faster than the stuff in your genes, and it won’t make as many errors when it does.”

  “But what does it do?”

  “It just lives, Killjoy. It lives, and it eats, and I think it does that better than anything else on the planet, so we either stamp it out or kiss the whole biosphere good-bye.”

  He couldn’t believe it. “One bug? How is that even possible?”

  “Nothing eats it, for one thing. The cell wall’s barely even organic, mostly it’s just a bunch of sulfur compounds. You know how I told you some bacteria use inverted aminos to make themselves indigestible? This is ten times worse—most anything that might eat this fucker wouldn’t even recognize it as food through all the minerals.”

  Desjardins bit his lower lip.

  “It gets better,” Jovellanos went on. “This thing’s a veritable black hole of sulfur assimilation. I don’t know where it learned this trick but it can snatch the stuff right out of our cells. Some kind of lysteriolysin analog, keeps it from getting lysed. That gums up glucose transport, protein synthesis, lipid and carb metabolism—shit, it gums up everything.”

  “There’s no shortage of sulfur, Alice.”

  “Oh, there’s lots to go around now. We fart the stuff out, nobody
’s even bothered to come up with a recommended daily dosage. But this, this βehemoth, it needs sulfur even more than we do. And it breeds faster and it chews faster and believe me, Killjoy, in a few years there is not going to be enough to go around and this little fucker’s gonna have the market cornered.”

  “That’s just—” A straw floated to the front of his mind. He grasped it. “How can you be so sure? You didn’t even think you had all the pieces to work with.”

  “I was wrong.”

  “But—you said no phospholipids, no—”

  “It doesn’t have those things. It never did.”

  “What?”

  “It’s simple, it’s so simple it’s bloody well indestructible. No bilayer membranes, no—” She spread her hands, as if in surrender. “Yeah, I did think maybe they scrambled the sample to keep me from stealing trade secrets. Maybe even filtered some stuff right out, stupid as that might seem. Corpses have done dumber things. But I was wrong.” She ran one hand nervously over her scalp. “It was all there. All the pieces. And you know why I think they scrambled them up the way they did? I think they were afraid of what this thing could do if they left it in one piece.”

  “Shit.” Desjardins eyed the beads rotating on the display. “So we either stop it or we get used to eating from Calvin cyclers for the rest of our lives.”

  Jovellanos’s eyes were bright as quartz. “You don’t get it.”

  “Well, what else could we do? If it cuts the whole biosphere off at the ankles, if—”

  “You think this is about protecting the biosphere?” she cried. “You think they’d give a shit about environmental apocalypse if we could just synthesize our way out of the hole? You think they’re launching all these cleansing strikes to protect the frigging rainforest?”

  He stared at her.

  Jovellanos shook her head. “Killjoy, it can get right inside our cells. Calvin cyclers don’t matter. Sulfur supplements don’t matter. Nothing we take in does us any good until our cells metabolize it—and whatever we take in, as soon as it gets past the cell membrane … there’s βehemoth, pushing to the front of the line. We’ve already been way luckier than we deserve. Sure, it’s not as efficient up here as it is in a hyperbaric environment, but that only means the locals can beat it back ninety-nine times out of a hundred. And …”