Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  “Yes.”

  You know Lenie Clarke.

  “I—saw her, once.”

  Good enough.

  An invisible fist closed around Sou-Hon Perreault and threw her halfway around the world.

  Pacific coastlines and tactical overlays, gone in an instant; a cul-de-sac of brick and machinery suddenly in their place. Gusts of sleet, slashing an atmosphere colder than the Strip had ever seen. It rattled off glass and metal to either side. The stylized grayhounds etched into those surfaces didn’t stir.

  Not all the flesh had disappeared, Perreault saw. A woman stood directly ahead, her back to a brick wall the color of raw meat. The buses on either side were plugged into sockets extending from that wall, cutting off lateral escape. If there was any way out it was straight ahead, through the center of Perreault’s perceptual sphere. But that sphere showed a target framed within luminous crosshairs. Unfamiliar icons flashed to each side, options like ARM and STUN and LTHL.

  Perreault was riding some kind of arsenal, and she was aiming it right at Lenie Clarke.

  The rifter had gone native. Civilian clothes covered the body, a visor hid that glacial stare, and Perreault would never have recognized her if she’d had to rely on merely human eyes. But botflies looked out across a wider spectrum. This one saw a garish and distracting place, emissions bleeding from a dozen EM sources—but Clarke was close range and line of sight, and there was no wiring in the wall directly behind her. Against that relative shadow, her thorax flickered like a riot of dim fireflies.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Perreault said. Weapons icons flashed accusingly at the corner of her eye; she found a dimmer one that whispered DSRM, and hit it. The arsenal stood down.

  Clarke didn’t move, didn’t speak.

  “I’m not—my name’s Sou-Hon. I’m not with the police, I’m—I think—” She spared a glance at GPS: Calgary. The Glenmore intercity shuttle nexus.

  Something had just thrown her thirteen hundred kilometers to the northeast.

  “I was sent,” she finished. “I don’t know, I think—to help …” She heard the absurdity in every word.

  “Help.” A flat voice, betraying nothing.

  “Hang on a moment …” Perreault lifted the ’fly above the Greyhounds, did a quick 360. She was floating over a docking bay where buses slept and suckled in rows. The main terminal loomed forty meters away, elevated loading platforms extending from its sides. Two buses were presently onloading; the animated grayhounds on their sides raced nowhere, as if running on invisible treadmills.

  And there, by the decontamination stalls: a small seething knot of confusion. An aftermath. Perreault accessed the ’fly’s black box, quick-scanned the previous few minutes. Suddenly, in comical fast-forward, she was closing on a younger disturbance. Even at this stage the show had been winding down, people turning away. But there was Lenie Clarke, holding an ebony shockprod. There was a man with his arms raised against her, a wide-eyed little girl hiding behind his legs.

  Perreault slowed the flow. The man took a step back in realtime.

  “Lady, I’ve never even seen you before …”

  Clarke stepped forward, but some former aggression was draining from her stance. Uncertainty took its place. “I—I thought you—”

  “Seriously, lady. You are one fucked-up little chimera …”

  “You all right, kid?” The wand in one hand wavered. The other hand extended, tentatively. “I didn’t meant to sc—”

  “Go away!” the child howled.

  The father glanced up, distracted by overhead motion. “You want to pick a fight?” he snarled at the mermaid. “Pick on that!”—pointing straight at the approaching ’fly.

  She had run. The drone had followed, armed and hungry.

  And now—somehow—Sou-Hon Perreault had been placed in possession.

  Perreault dropped back down between the buses. “You’re safe for the moment. You—”

  The cul-de-sac was empty.

  She 180ed the ’fly; something flickered out of sight around a corner.

  “Wait! You don’t understand—”

  Perreault cranked the throttle. For a moment nothing happened. Then her whole perceptual field lurched, right down to the semicircular canals. A readout flickered upper right, then held steady: RECONNECT.

  Weapons icons bloomed like pulsing tumors. Somewhere in the distant realm of her own flesh, Perreault hammered frantic arpeggios against remote controls. Nothing worked.

  “Run!” she cried as the link went down.

  But she was back in Montana, and her voice didn’t carry.

  400 Megabytes: Punctuated Equilibrium

  400Megs hovers on a knife-edge of complacency.

  For thousands of generations it has known the secret of success in Maelstrom. Predators have pursued it with powerful legs and gnashing teeth; competitors have raced it to each new refuge, each new patch of forage; diseases have striven to eat it from the inside. And yet 128 begat 142, and 142 begat 137 (a bit of pruning there, getting rid of redundant code), and 137 begat 150, and so on, and so on, up unto the present crisis-laden instant. All because of a very special secret encoded in the genes:

  You want to get around fast in Maelstrom, the name you drop is Lenie Clarke.

  400 doesn’t know why this should be. That’s not really the point. What it does know is, that particular string of characters gets you in anywhere. You can leap from node to node as though disinfectants and firewalls and shark repellants did not exist. You can pass undamaged through the vicious fleshy meatgrinder that is a head cheese, a passage guaranteed to reduce you to instant static without the protective amulet of Lenie Clarke in your pocket. Even Haren—mythic, inaccessible Haven, a vast smorgasbord virtually untouched by the appetites of the living—may someday be within reach.

  Problem is, too many others are getting into the act.

  It’s not an uncommon development in Maelstrom; evolution happens so quickly, in so many different directions, that you can’t go half a second without a bunch of wannabes rediscovering the wheel you thought you had all to yourself By now the free rides to open fields are growing crowded. Binary beasts of burden each labor under the weight of dozens of hitchhikers, each grabbing up its own little aliquot of memory, each slowing the procession a tiny bit farther. Now the carrier files themselves are attracting attention—from checksum monitors who just know in their gut that no casual e-mail should weigh in at a hundred gigs, to sharks hungry for prey grown almost too fat to move.

  Want to spread your seed through Maelstrom? Hitch your wagon to Lenie Clarke. Want to be shark food? Do the same thing.

  It’s not everybody’s problem, though. Some creatures leap around as fast as they ever did. Faster, even. Something they know, maybe. Or someone. 400Megs has never been able to figure out the secret.

  It’s about to, though.

  400Megs is currently inbreeding with a middling sib whose lineage only diverged a few hundred generations ago. Almost all the genes are the same, which doesn’t promote a lot of diversity but at least reinforces the tried-and-true. Both parties have a few dozen copies of Lenie Clarke, for instance, which they exchange with mindless redundancy.

  But no gene is an island, even in Maelstrom. There’s no such thing as an independent locus. Each travels linked to others, little constellations of related traits, junk code, happenstance association. And as 400Megs is about to find out, it isn’t just Lenie Clarke that matters. It’s also the company she keeps.

  All the bits are lining up to be counted. Replication subroutines march down the line like messenger RNA, ready to cut and paste. Chance shuffles the cards, orgasm squirts them hence, and 400Megs injects Lenie Clarke into its cousin. Strings like vampire and Beebe and βehemoth go along for the ride.

  And in return, following the usual hermaphrodite credo of tit for tat, 400Megs gets Lenie Clarke with a whole different circle of friends. Like doomsday. Like meltdown. Like bestservedcold.

  By all appearances, jus
t another unremarkable fuck. But afterward, things start to change for 400Megs.

  Suddenly its replication rate is going through the roof. And where before its progeny languished and withered in backwater caches, now Maelstrom itself scoops them up and copies them a thousand times over. One fine cycle a N’AmPac security sieve finds several such prodgies drifting north off the coast of the GA. Recognizing them as high-priority communications, it shunts them directly to the nearest smart gel. The gel scans the relevant embedded bits and sends copies into Haven for secure storage.

  All of a sudden, the most powerful forces in Maelstrom want to give members of The 400 Club anything they want. The Club doesn’t question their good fortune; they merely exploit it.

  They are no longer 400Megs, hitchhiker.

  What they are is John the fucking Baptist.

  Microstar

  He’d been out of circulation too long. He was losing his edge. How else to explain an ambush at the hands of three glassyeyed children on the back streets of Santa Cruz?

  Of course, Lubin had had a lot on his mind. He was coming to terms with some very disturbing test results, for one thing. He’d been pursuing them for days, rejecting each new clean bill of health, running increasingly specific tests for increasingly implausible maladies—and now, finally, there it was. Something in his blood that neither nature nor N’AmPac had put there.

  Something strangely backward.

  More than sufficient to distract any normal man, perhaps. No excuse for someone who’d once transplanted a micronuke from his own gut to the heart of the Trois-Rivières switching station, without benefit of anesthesia. No excuse for Ken Lubin.

  It was inexcusable. His assailants barely even qualified as punks; ranging in age from perhaps sixteen to twenty, pumped on some sort of neurotrope, evidently convinced that their transderm steroids and corneal caps and shockprods made them invulnerable. Sometime during Lubin’s Pacific tour, the rifter template had become fashionable among drybacks. It was probably the eyes more than anything. Back on the seabed, eyecaps had hidden a multitude of sins, kept fear and weakness and hatred safely concealed behind masks of blank indifference. Down there the caps had provided cover, imposed enough protective distance for weak people to become strong, given time.

  Up here, though, they only seemed to make weak people stupid.

  They wanted money, or something. He wasn’t really paying attention. He didn’t even bother warning them off. They didn’t seem in the mood to listen.

  Five seconds later they weren’t in the mood to do anything but run. Lubin—having foreseen this on some level long since relegated to subconsciousness—had deprived them of the use of their legs. He felt a token, distracted reluctance at the necessary next step; they had, after all, seen more of his abilities than good security would dictate. It had been his own damn fault—if he hadn’t been so careless, he’d have avoided the situation altogether—but the damage was done. Loose ends were fraying, and had to be cut.

  There were no witnesses. The children had chosen wisely in that regard at least. There were no screams, only quiet gasps and the soft pop of dislocating vertebrae. No ineffective pleas for mercy. Only one of them even tried to speak, perhaps emboldened by the realization that somehow—incredibly, in the space of barely a minute—she had reached the point of having nothing left to lose.

  “Mange de la marde, enculé,” she croaked as Lubin reached down. “Who the fuck died and made you Lenie Clarke?”

  Lubin blinked. “What?”

  The child spat blood in his face and stared defiantly back with featureless white eyes.

  Well, Lubin thought, maybe there would’ve been hope for you after all. And twisted.

  It was a bit disturbing, of course. He’d had no idea that Lenie Clarke was famous.

  He asked the matchmakers for references to Lenie Clarke. Maelstrom hiccoughed and advised him to narrow his search criteria: there were over fifty million hits.

  He started exploring.

  Lenie Clarke was an anarchist. Lenie Clarke was a liberator. Lenie Clarke was a fashion symbol. Lenie Clarke was an avenging angel, resurrected from the ocean depths to tear down the system that had abused and victimized her. Lenie Clarke had followers; mostly in N’AmPac so far, but the word was spreading. Hordes of disaffected, powerless people had found someone to relate to, a fellow victim with impervious eyes who had learned to fight back. Against what, exactly, there was no consensus. With whose army, not a whisper. Lenie Clarke was a mermaid. Lenie Clarke was a myth.

  Lenie Clarke is dead, Lubin reminded himself. None of the references he could find would confirm that fact.

  Perhaps she’d made it after all. The GA had promised a shuttle to evacuate Beebe. Lubin had assumed—along with everyone else—that they’d been lying. Clarke had been the only one to stay behind and find out.

  Maybe all of them made it. Maybe something happened, after I got separated … .

  He entered separate queries: Alice Nakata, Michael Brander—Judy Caraco, just to be thorough. Maelstrom knew of many by those names, but none seemed to have the cachet of Lenie Clarke. He fed the same list through Haven; the results were smoother, the data much higher in quality, but the bottom line remained unchanged.

  Just Lenie Clarke. Something with that name was infecting the world.

  “Lenie Clarke is alive,” said a voice in his ear.

  He recognized it: one of the generic disembodied matchmakers that came out of Haven in answer to user questions. Lubin glanced across his display, puzzled. He hadn’t entered any queries.

  “It is almost certain,” the voice continued, distant and inflectionless. Almost as though it were talking to itself. “Lenie Clarke lives. Temperature and salinity are well within acceptable ranges.”

  It paused.

  “You are Kenneth Lubin. You are alive as well.”

  He disconnected.

  Anonymity. That was the whole point of the exercise.

  Lubin knew the specs on Ridley, and on similar facilities distributed invisibly throughout the world. They didn’t scan eyes or faces. They only cared that entrants could do no harm. Everyone was equal within the frosted glass tubes of the fourteenth floor. Everyone was no one. Yet someone in Haven had called him by name.

  He left Santa Cruz.

  There was another secure gateway at the Packard Tower, in Monterey. This time Lubin wasn’t taking any chances: he linked to his terminal through three separate watches connected in series, each scrambled on a different seed. He restarted a search on Lenie Clarke, carefully following different query trees than he had the first time.

  “Lenie Clarke is on the move,” a far-off voice mused.

  Lubin started a trace.

  “Kenneth Lubin has been sighted in Sevastopol,” the voice remarked. “Recent reports have also placed it in Whitehorse and Philadelphia sometime within the past eighty-four hours. Lenie and Lubin are on the comeback trail. Are you a fan of alliteration?”

  This is very strange, he thought.

  “We looking out for Kenny and Lenie,” the voice continued. “We intend on translocating and disseminating both parties into novel environments with acceptable salinity range varies directly with temperature, within the environments considered. Do you relate to rhyme?”

  It’s a neural net, he realized. A Turing app. Maybe a gel. Whatever was talking to him, it wasn’t programmed: it had learned to speak through trial and error, had worked out its own rules of grammar and syntax. Lubin had seen such devices—or organisms, or whatever they were—demonstrated. They picked up the rules easily enough, but they always seemed to throw in a few stylistic quirks of their own. It was hard to track down exactly how that happened. The logic evolved, synapse by synapse. It was opaque to conventional analysis.

  “No,” he said, experimentally. “For one, I don’t relate to rhyme. Although that’s not true all the time.”

  A brief silence. Then: “Excellent. I would’ve paid, you know?”

  “Mediocre at best.
What are you?”

  “I am telling you about Lenie and Kenny. You don’t want to fuck with them, friend. You wanna know what side you’re on, right?”

  “Tell me, then.”

  Nothing.

  “Hello?”

  Nothing. To make things worse, his trace failed—return address blocked at source.

  He waited for a good five minutes in case the voice started talking again. It didn’t. Lubin disconnected from his terminal, logged in on a different one farther along the row. This time he left Lenie Clarke and Ken Lubin strictly alone. Instead he stored the results of his worrisome blood tests in an open file, tagged to certain keywords that would hopefully attract attention from the right sources. Someone out there was paralleling his investigation; it was time to lure them in.

  He logged off, distracted by an obvious and uncomfortable coincidence:

  A smart gel had been running the nuke that vaporized Beebe Station.

  Matchmaker

  Prions: OK

  Viruses: Adeno OK

  Arbo OK

  Arena OK

  Filo ben

  Morbilli chron/asymp

  Orbi OK

  Paramy chron/asymp

  Parvo OK

  Picorna OK

  Hanta resid

  Retro resid

  Rota light

  Bacteria: Bacillus heavy/norm

  Coccus norm

  Myco/Spiro STD mod

  Chlam OK

  Fungi not crit

  Protozoa not crit

  Nematode OK

  Platyhelminth OK

  Cestode OK

  Arthropod OK

  Cleared for Travel.

  “Are you sure? No—no ergots, or psychoactives?”

  Cleared for travel. Please proceed to check-in.

  “Are you equipped for NMR?”