by Peter Watts
“You’re not going to find a ride on this road anytime soon,” Perreault remarked. “You should’ve stuck with the main drag.”
“I like walking alone. Avoids pointless small talk.”
Perreault took the hint.
She accessed the botfly’s flight recorder, fearful of just how much incriminating information the device had stored. But its entire memory had been purged—an act of sabotage well beyond Perreault’s capabilities. Even now, the black box somehow failed to retain the routine data stream the ’fly’s sensors were sending it.
She was relieved, but not particularly surprised.
“Still there?” Clarke said.
“Uh-huh. Link’s still up.”
“They’re getting better with practice.”
Perreault remembered Clarke’s reflexive glance at her bare wrist, back in the dome. “What happened to your watch?”
“Smashed it.”
“Why?”
“Your friends figured out how to override the off switch.”
“They’re not—” Not friends. Not even contacts. She didn’t know what they were.
“And now you’re getting in through my visor. If I had any brains I’d lose that, too.”
“So others have made contact?” Of course they had—why would Sou-Hon Perreault be the only person in the world to be given an audience with the Meltdown Madonna?
“Oh, right. I forgot,” the mermaid said wryly. “You don’t know anything.”
“Have they? Others like me?”
“Worse,” Clarke said, and kept walking.
Don’t push it.
A stand of skeletal birch separated them for a few minutes. The port camera caught Lenie Clarke in fragments, through a vertical jumble of white slashes.
“I went into Maelstrom,” she said. “People are—talking about me.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Do you believe it? The stuff they’re saying?”
Perreault tried for a light touch, not believing it herself “So you’re not carrying the end of the world around inside you?”
“If I am,” Clarke said, “it doesn’t show up on a blood panel.”
“You can’t believe most of the stuff you read in Maelstrom anyway,” Perreault said. “Half of it contradicts the other half.”
“It’s all just crazy. I don’t know how it got started.” A few seconds of silence. Then: “I saw someone that looked like me the other day.”
“I told you. You’ve got friends.”
“No. It’s not me you want. It’s something in the wires. It just … stole my name for some reason.”
Beep.
A sudden luminous rectangle, framing a flicker of motion. The stern camera zoomed reflexively.
“Hold on,” Perreault said. “I’ve got a—Lenie.”
“What?”
“You might want to get off the road. I think it’s that psycho from the shelter.”
It was. Hunched over the handlebars of an ancient mountain bike, he resolved in the zoom window like a grainy nightmare. He pumped, straining, all his weight on the pedals. The vehicle had no seat. It didn’t have any tires, either; it rattled along the road on bare rims. It was a skeleton ridden by a monster. The monster’s jacket was dark and wet, and missing one sleeve; it was not the one he’d been wearing before.
He kept his eyes on the road; only once did he spare a glance back over his shoulder. Eventually he faded in the murk.
“Lenie?”
“Here.” She rose from a drainage ditch.
“He’s gone,” Perreault said. “The things you see when you don’t have your gun. Asshole.”
“No worse than anyone else back there.” Clarke climbed back onto the road.
“Except for the fact that he beat someone to death.”
“And a hundred people stood around and watched. Or didn’t you notice?”
“Well—”
“People do that, you know. Just stand around and do nothing. They’re fucking complicit, they’re no better than—they’re worse. At least he took a little initiative.”
“I didn’t notice you standing up to him,” Perreault snapped, and instantly regretted her own defensiveness.
Clarke turned to face the botfly and said nothing. After a moment she resumed walking.
“They’re not all—complicit, Lenie,” Perreault said, more gently. “People want to act, they’re just—afraid. And sometimes, experience teaches you that the only way to cope is to just—shut down …”
“Oh yeah, we’re all just victims of our past. Don’t you dare trot out that subroutine.”
“What subroutine?”
“The poor little abuse victim. You know what abuse is, really? It’s an excuse.”
“Lenie, I’m not—”
“So some asshole grabs your cunt in daycare. So someone rams his cock up your ass. So what? Bruises, maybe. A bit of bleeding. You suffer more injury if you fall off the swings and break your arm, so how come you don’t hear anyone wailing about abuse then?”
A thousand kilometers away, Perreault reeled in the surge of Clarke’s vehemence. “I didn’t say—and anyway, the physical injury’s only part of it The emotional damage—”
“Crap. You think we aren’t built to withstand a little childhood trauma? You know how many of the higher mammals eat their own young? We wouldn’t have lasted ten generations if a couple of childhood shit-kickings was enough to take us out for the count.”
“Lenie—”
“You think all those armies and gangs and cops would be so keen on rape if we just didn’t make such a big deal about it? If we didn’t get all weak-kneed and trembly at the thought of being violated? Fuck that. I’ve been attacked by things straight out of nightmares. I’ve nearly been boiled and buried alive more times than I can count. I know all about the ways you can push a body to the breaking point, and sexual abuse doesn’t even make the top ten.”
She stopped and glared across at Perreault’s distant teleop. Perreault zoomed: the rifter was shaking.
“Or do you have some basis for disagreement? Some personal experience to back up all your trendy platitudes?”
Sure I had experience. I watched. For years I watched, and felt nothing.
It was my job …
But of course she couldn’t say that. “I—no. Not really.”
“Course not. You’re just a fucking tourist, aren’t you? You’re safe and comfy in some glass tower somewhere, and you stick a periscope into the real world every now and then and tell yourself you’re experiencing life or some such shit. You’re pathetic.”
“Lenie—”
“Stop feeding off me.”
She wouldn’t say anything more. She stalked silently along that road in the dirty rain, refusing entreaty or apology. Brown sky faded to black. Visible light failed, infra kicked in. Lenie Clarke was a white-hot speck of anger at fixed range, endlessly moving.
In all that time she only spoke once. The words were barely more than a growl, and Sou-Hon Perreault did not believe they were intended for her ears. But the sonal fly’s enhanced senses had little regard for range and none for privacy: filter and gain turned Clarke’s words from distant static to ugly, unmistakable truth:
“Everybody pays.”
Vision Quest
There were two reasons Achilles Desjardins didn’t indulge in sex with real partners. The second was, simulations gave him much more latitude.
His system was more than enough to handle the range. His skin came equipped with the latest Lorenz-levitation haptics, their formless magnetic fingers both sensing his movements and responding to them. The ad specs boasted you could feel a virtual ant crawling up your back. They weren’t lying. The only way you’d get a better ride was to go with a direct neural interface, but Desjardins wasn’t about to go that far; it wasn’t widely known, but there were creatures in Maelstrom that were learning to penetrate wetware. The last thing he needed was some sourced shark hijacking his spinal cord.
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sp; And there were other dangers if you went with a wet link, dangers especially relevant to those with Desjardins’s tastes. There were still people out there who refused to recognize the difference between reality and simulation, between fantasy and assault. Some of them were savvy enough to hack the things they found politically objectionable.
Take the present scenario. It was a pretty sweet setup, all told. He had two girls strapped facedown on the table in front of him. One of them was hooked up to a DC power supply by alligator clips on her nipples and clit. The other had to be content with lower-tech forms of punishment, which Desjardins was currently administering with an unfinished broom handle. Three others hung inverted against the far wall, passing time until their own numbers came up.
It was exactly this sort of environment that certain disagreeable types took pleasure in messing with. Desjardins knew of more than one occasion in which the victims of similar scenarios had miraculously freed themselves from their restraints, coming after the user with steak knives and hedge clippers. Incompetent but enthusiastic neutering generally followed; in at least one case the emergency interrupt had been overridden, keeping the player on the board right up to the final curtain call. Such things were more than enough of a damper in a feedback skin. If you got nailed through a neural link, you could end up impotent for life.
Which was, of course, the whole idea.
Achilles Desjardins was more cognizant of the risks than most. He took, therefore, more precautions than most. His sensorium was strictly stand-alone, with no physical connection to any kind of network. He’d lobotomized the graphics circuitry to reduce its vulnerability to wildlife; it could only present chunky, low-rez images that would drive any normal connoisseur crazy, but Desjardins’s own wetware more than made up the difference. (The pattern-matching enhancements in his visual cortex interpolated those crude pixels into a subjective panorama crisp enough to leave the most jaded wirehead drooling.) The scenarios themselves were scrubbed and disinfected right down to the texture maps. Desjardins carried way more than his weight in this cesspool of a world; no way was some TwenCen puritan going to mess up any of his well-deserved moments with Mr. Bone.
Which made the sudden and complete failure of his system extremely disquieting. There was a brief sharp prick in his neck and the whole environment just disappeared.
He floated there a moment, a stunned and disembodied being in an imperceptible void. No sounds, no smells or tactile feedback, no vision—not even blackness, really. Not like a window gone dark, not like closing your eyes. More like not having any eyes to begin with. You don’t see blackness out of the back of your skull, after all, you don’t—
Fuck, he thought. They got in. Any second now everything’s going to come back on-line and they’ll be spit-roasting me on a pole or something.
He tried to flex his fingers around the interrupt. He didn’t seem to have any fingers. All his senses remained off-line. For a moment, he thought he might get off easy; maybe they hadn’t infected his program, maybe they’d just crashed it. It made sense—it was always easier to kill a system than subvert it.
Bit they shouldn’t have been able to do either, for fuck’s sake … and why can’t I feel anything … ?
“Hello? Hello? Is this thing on?”
What—
“Sorry. Small attempt at humor. I’m going to ask you a few questions, Achilles. I want you to think long and hard about the answers.”
The voice hung there in the void with him, sexless and innocent of ambience; no reverb, no quiet hum of nearby appliances, no background noise at all. It was almost like a Haven voice, but even that seemed wrong.
“I want you to think about the ocean. The very deep ocean. Think about some of the things that live down there. The microbes, especially. Think about them.”
He tried to speak. No vocal cords.
“Good. Now I want you to listen to some names. You may recognize some of them. Abigail McHugh.”
He’d never heard of her.
“Donald Lertzman.”
Lertzman? How’s he involved?
“Wolfgang Schmidt. Judy Caraco.”
Is this some kind of corpse loyalty te—oh Jesus. That Haven contact. Pickering’s Pile. It said it could find me …
“André Breault. Patricia Rowan. Lenie Clarke.”
Rowan! She behind this?
“Ken Lubin. Leo Hin Tan the Third. Mark Showell. Michael Brander.”
Yeah. Rowan. Maybe Alice isn’t so paranoid after all.
“Good. Now I want you to think about biochemistry. Proteins. Sulfur-containing amino acids.”
??!?!? …
“I can tell you’re confused. Let’s narrow it down some. Cysteine. Methionine. Think about those when you hear the following words …”
It’s a mind-reading trick of some kind, Desjardins thought.
“Retrovirus. Stereoisomer. Sarcomere.”
A quantum computer?
They didn’t exist. Of course, that was the official story on most banned technology, but in this case Desjardins was inclined to believe it. Nobody in their right mind would be caught dead around a telepathic AI. That had been one side effect the Q-boosters hadn’t seen coming: the whole quantum-consciousness debate had been resolved overnight. Who’d ever choose to build something that could sift through their minds like a chess grandmaster noodling around in a game of X’s and O’s?
Nobody, as far as Desjardins had been able to tell.
“Ion pump. Thermophile.”
But if not a quantum computer, then—
“Archaea. Phenylindole.”
Ganzfeld.
Not a computer, except for the interrogation interface. Not telepathy either; not quite. Cruder. The faint quantum signals of human consciousness, cut away from the noise and sensory static that usually swamped them. Properly insulated from such interference, you had a better-than-average chance of guessing what your subject was looking at, or listening to. You could feel the vicarious echo of distant emotions. With the right insulation, and the right stimuli, you could learn a lot.
So Desjardins had been told. He’d never actually experienced it before.
“Good. Now, think about the assignments you’ve had at CSIRA over the past month.”
Mange de la marde. Just because some disembodied voice told him to think about something, didn’t mean he had to leap up and—
“Ah. There’s a familiar pattern. Here’s an exercise for you, Achilles: whatever you do, do not think of a red-eyed baboon with hemorrhoids.”
Oh, shit.
“You see? Nothing’s more doomed to failure than trying really hard not to think about something. Shall we continue? Think about your CSIRA assignments for the past six months.”
A red-eyed baboon with—
“Think of earthquakes and tidal waves. Think of any possible connections.”
Isn’t this a security breach? Shouldn’t Guilt Trip be doing something?
Earthquakes. Tidal waves. He couldn’t keep them out.
Maybe it is. Maybe Trip’s seized up my whole body. If I even still have a body. How would I know?
Fires.
Oh Jesus. I’ll give everything away …
Threads of emerald light, lancing through the fog.
“Think of containment protocols. Think of collateral damage.”
Stop it, stop it …
“Did you plan it?”
No! No, I—
“Did you know in advance?”
How could I, they don’t tell me any—
“Did you find out afterward?”
If Trip’s working, my body’s already dead. Oh motherfucking blood-spewing sickle-celled savior …
“Did you approve?”
What kind of stupid question is that?
Nothing, for a very long time.
I feel awful, Desjardins thought. Then: Hey—
Despair, guilt, fear—chemicals, all. Hormones and neurotransmitters, a medley brewed not just in the brain, but in glan
ds throughout the body. The physical body.
I’m still alive. I’ve still got a body even if I can’t feel it.
“Let’s talk about you,” said the voice at last “How have you been lately, healthwise? Have you had any cuts or injuries? Anything to break the skin?”
I’m feeling a bit better, thank you.
“Any symptoms of illness?
“Any inoculations within the past two weeks?
“Blood tests? Unusual reactions to recreational transderms?
“Real sexual experiences?”
Never. I’d never inflict that on a person …
Silence.
Hey. You there?
With a blinding flash and a roar like an angry ocean, the real world crashed in from all sides.
After a while everything desaturated to normal intensity. He stared up at his living room ceiling and waited while a cacophony of ambient sounds faded down to a single, rhythmic scrubbing.
Someone’s in here.
He tried to rise; a sharp pain in his neck kept him from any sudden moves, but he managed to get erect and stay that way. In only the most innocent sense, unfortunately; his feedback skin was folded neatly to one side. He was completely naked.
The scrubbing sound was coming from the bathroom.
He didn’t have any weapons. At this point he didn’t think he needed any; if the intruder had meant to kill him, he’d be dead already. Desjardins stepped tentatively toward the hallway and nearly took a header into the wall; Mandelbrot, true to form, had got in his way and tried the classic feline figureeight-around-the-legs takedown.
Desjardins spared a silent curse and crept toward the bathroom.
Someone was standing at the sink without any pants on.
Seen from the back: medium height, but built like a Ballard stack. Dark hair, flecked with gray; navy cable-knit sweater; black underwear; little scars all over the backs of the legs. Bare feet. His pants were draped along the counter; he was scrubbing at one leg in the sink.
“Your cat pissed on me,” he said without turning.
Desjardins shook his head; his neck reminded him of the stupidity of that gesture. “What?”