Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  “When we had our session,” the stranger said. (Desjardins glanced in the mirror, but the man’s face was tilted down, intent on his task.) “I assume someone in your position knows about Ganzfeld techniques?”

  “I’ve heard of them,” Desjardins said.

  “Then you know you have to minimize extraneous signal. Nerve blocks on all the main sensory cables, everything. I was just as disconnected as you.”

  “But you were talking—”

  The intruder nudged a small beige fanny pack on the floor with his foot. “That was talking. I just set up the dialogue tree. Anyway”—he straightened, his back still to the door—“your stupid cat pissed on my leg when I was laid out.”

  Good for my stupid cat, Desjardins didn’t say.

  “I thought only dogs were supposed to do that.”

  Desjardins shrugged. “Mandelbrot’s kind of a mutant.”

  The intruder grunted, and turned.

  He wasn’t exactly ugly. More like what would result if someone with limited artisan skills carved a human face in a totem pole; it might not run to your taste, but there was no denying a certain crude aesthetic. More tiny scars on the face. Still; not quite ugly.

  Scary, though. That fit. Desjardins didn’t know exactly what it was that made him think that.

  “You’re immune to Guilt Trip,” the intruder told him. “Want to guess how that happened?”

  The Algebra of Guilt

  The naked ’lawbreaker was watching him with wary curiosity. Not much actual fear, Lubin noted. When you routinely juggled thousands of lives for a living, you probably figured that other people were the ones with cause to worry. Sudbury was a safe, law-abiding place. Wielding his godlike control over the real world, Desjardins had probably forgotten what it was like to actually live in it.

  “Who are you?” Desjardins asked.

  “Name’s Colin,” Lubin said.

  “Uh-huh. And why does Rowan have such a hard-on for testing my loyalty?”

  “Maybe you didn’t hear me,” Lubin said. “You’re immune to Guilt Trip.”

  “I heard you. I just think you’re full of shit.”

  “Really.” Lubin laid the slightest emphasis on the word.

  “Nice try, Colin, but I kind of keep up on that stuff.”

  “I see.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s indestructible. I can think of a few commercial enzymes that break it down just off the top of my head. The right kind of reuptake inhibitor blockers could do the job too, I’m told. That’s why they have these tests, you see? That’s why I can barely go two days without some bloodhound sniffing my crotch. Believe me, if I was immune to Guilt Trip I’d already know it, and so would every security database up to geosynch. And you know, the really odd thing about this is that Rowan must know that alread—”

  He never had a chance to move. Lubin was behind him in the space of a syllable, had one arm locked around his throat in two. The long curved needle in his other hand tickled Desjardins’s eardrum suggestively.

  “You have three seconds to tell me what it’s called,” Lubin whispered, relaxing his grip just enough to permit some semblance of speech.

  “βehemoth,” Desjardins gasped.

  Lubin tightened his grip again. “Place of origin. Two seconds.” Relaxed it.

  “Deep sea! Juan de Fuca, Channer Vent I thin—”

  “Worst-case scenario. One.”

  “Everything dies, for fuck’s sake! Everything just fades away …”

  Lubin let him go.

  Desjardins staggered forward against the sink, gulping air. Lubin could see his face reflected in the mirror: panic subsiding, the higher brain kicking in, reassessment of threat potential, dawning awareness of—

  Three breaches he’d just committed. Three violations when Guilt Trip should have risen from within and throttled him even more tightly than Lubin just had …

  Achilles Desjardins turned and faced Lubin with horror and fear spreading across his face.

  “Maudite marde …”

  “I told you,” Lubin said. “You’re a free agent. Vive le gardien libre.”

  “How’d you do it?” Desjardins slumped morosely on the couch next to his clothes. “More to the point, why? The next time I show up for work I’m screwed. Rowan knows that. What’s she trying to prove?”

  “I’m not here for Rowan,” Lubin said. “Rowan’s the problem, in fact. I’m here on behalf of her superiors.”

  “Yeah?” Desjardins actually seemed to approve of that. Not surprising. Patricia Rowan had never exactly endeared herself to the lower ranks.

  “There are concerns that some of the information we’ve received from her office has been tainted,” Lubin continued. “I’m here to cut out the middleman and get the unadulterated truth. You’re going to help me.”

  “And I’m not much good to you if my brain seizes up every time you ask a touchy question.”

  “Yes.”

  Desjardins began getting dressed. “Why not just go through channels? GT won’t raise a peep if I know the orders are coming from higher up the food chain.”

  “Rowan would peep.”

  “Oh. Right.” Desjardins pulled his shirt on over his head. “So tell me if I’ve got this down: you ask me a bunch of questions, and if I don’t answer them to the best of my ability, you stick a needle in my ear. If I do, you let me go and the next time I go to work I set off more sirens than I can count. They take me apart piece by piece to find out what went wrong, and if I’m very very lucky, they’ll just throw me into the street as a security risk. Is that about right?”

  “Not exactly,” Lubin said.

  “What, then?”

  “I’m not the snuff fairy,” Lubin said. In fact, that was exactly what someone had called him, nearly two years before. “I don’t leap gaily from door to door killing people for no good reason. And you’re going to do more than answer a few questions for me. You’re going to take me to work and show me your files.”

  “Not after—”

  Lubin held up a derm between thumb and forefinger. “Trip analog, Short-lived and fairly inert, but it looks pretty much the same to a bloodhound. Stick it under your tongue fifteen minutes before getting to work and you’ll pass the tests. If you cooperate, no one will know the difference.”

  “Until you bugger off and take your analog with you.”

  “You’re forgetting how Guilt Trip works, Desjardins. Your own cells are producing the stuff I haven’t stopped that. I’ve just dosed you with something to break down the finished product before it hits your motor nerves. Eventually it’ll get used up and you’ll be a happy little slave again.”

  “How long?”

  “Week or ten days. Depends on individual metabolism. Even if I do bugger off, you could always just call in sick until it wears off.”

  “I can’t, and you know it. I got my immunes boosted when I joined the Patrol. I’m even immune to Supercol.”

  Lubin shrugged. “Then you’ll just have to trust me.”

  It fact, it had been lies from the word go.

  Lubin had not freed Achilles Desjardins. He’d merely stumbled on the discovery as they both lay on the floor, disconnected from themselves and strangely linked to each other through a mechanical interrogator. The derm he’d presented had been an acetylcholine booster, a memory aid one step removed from candy. His words had been spun on the fly, woven around the ’lawbreaker’s reactions in the Ganzfeld: Rowan, yes. Strong reaction there. No reaction to rifter names, but horror and recognition at the thought of earthquakes and tidal waves and mysterious fires.

  Desjardins had pursued the truth, and recoiled from it. He had not set any of the larger wheels in motion. As far as Lubin could tell, he didn’t even know how many wheels there were.

  He hadn’t known that he was immune to Guilt Trip, either. That was especially interesting. Desjardins had been right—it would be impossible to avoid one of CSIRA’s spot checks for more than a day or two. So barrin
g the unlikely possibility that Desjardins had acquired his immunity within the past few hours, his body had done a lot more than throw off GT; it had managed to hide that fact from the bloodhounds.

  Lubin had not realized that freedom from Guilt Trip was possible. It raised certain prospects he had not previously considered.

  Starfucker

  Marq Quammen was primed and ready.

  Tornado season was just winding down in the Dust Belt; three solid months of flywheel repairs had fed the chip in his thigh until it was six digits fat, and he had a month until spring runoff started clogging the dams up north. Options were tempting and plentiful in the meantime. He could boost his chloroplasts to UV-shield levels and bugger off to the Carolinas. He could check out the underwater Club Med over in Hatteras—he’d heard they’d walled off a whole bay with this big semipermeable membrane, let the ocean in but kept out all those nasty synthetic macromolecules and heavy metals. Their cultured coral had finally taken off; it might even be open to the tourists by now. That would be something to see. There hadn’t been wild coral anywhere in N’Am since Key West had packed it in.

  Of course, these days there were all sorts of nasty things waiting to jump on you when you ventured outside. That new bug the left-coast refugees had brought over, for instance—the all-purpose number that killed you a dozen different ways. Maybe it’d be better just to stay in this dark, cozy little booth in this dark, cozy little drink’n’drug at the edge of the Belt, and let Breakthroughs in BrainChem provide him a richness of experience he could never get in the real world. That was pretty tempting, too. Plus he could start immediately.

  Already had started, in fact. Quammen stretched and settled deeper into his cushioned alcove and watched the local butterflies sparkling at each other. Upstairs the world was a salt-baked oven; if you were an unprotected eyeball out there, the only question was whether you’d go saltblind before the wind sandblasted you down to pitted gelatin. In here, though, it was always dark, and the air barely moved. He felt like a cat in a nook in a dark green cave, surveying a subterranean domain.

  There was a little blond K-selector sitting alone at the bar. Quammen absently stuck a derm behind his ear and aimed his watch at her. Passive infrared and a few ultrasonic squeaks, barely audible even to bats, bounced back and forth.

  She turned and looked at him. Her eyes were a flat and startling ivory.

  She started toward him.

  He didn’t know her. Quammen’s watch flashed him an executive summary: she wasn’t horny either.

  He couldn’t think of any other reason she’d approach him, though.

  She stopped just outside the alcove, a hint of a smile beneath those strange blank eyes.

  “Nice effect,” Quammen said, seizing the initiative. “You see in X ray with those things?”

  “So what was that?”

  “What was what?”

  “You zapped me with something.”

  “Oh.” Quammen raised his hand, let her see the whisperthin filament extending from his watch. “You got some kind of sensor on you?”

  She shook her head. Thin lips, small tits, great hips. Sharp edges, just slightly smoothed. Like a perfect little ice sculpture, left a minute too long in the sun.

  “So how’d you know?” Quammen asked.

  “I felt it.”

  “Bullshit. The IR’s passive, the sonar’s real weak.”

  “I’ve got an implant,” said the K. “Hard stuff. You can feel it when the sound hits.”

  “Implant?” This could be interesting.

  “Yeah. So, what are you doing here?”

  Quammen sneaked another peek at his watch; no, she wasn’t on the prowl. Hadn’t been a minute ago, anyway. Maybe that was open to negotiation. Maybe it had already changed. He wanted to scope her out again, but he didn’t want to give himself away. Shit. Why’d she have to be sensitive to probes?

  “I said—”

  “Just coming off a nice fat contract,” he told her. “Riding flywheels. Figuring out my next move.”

  She slid in beside him, grabbed a derm from the table dispenser. “Tell me about it.”

  She was fucking cryptic, was what she was.

  Or maybe just old-fashioned. She hadn’t propositioned him outright, which was a drag; it wasted time. Quammen would’ve propositioned her in an instant, but unless his plug-in was wrecked she hadn’t been receptive at first, and that probably meant he was going to have to work at it. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had to rely on instinct of all things to know whether a woman was interested or not, and this Lenie wasn’t making things any easier. A couple of times he’d put a hand here or there, and she’d literally flinched. But then she’d run a finger down his arm, or tap the back of his hand, and just generally come on wet as a hagfish.

  If she wasn’t interested, why was she wasting his time? Was she really here for the conversation?

  By the third derm it didn’t seem to matter so much.

  “You know what I am?” Quammen demanded. An influx of exogenous transmitters had made him suddenly eloquent. “I’m a fucking crusader, is what I am! It is my personal mission to save the world from the Quebecois!”

  She blinked lazily over her alien eyes. “Too late,” she said.

  “You know, only fifty years ago, people paid less than a third of their disposable income on energy? Less than a third?”

  “I did not know that,” Lenie answered.

  “And the world’s ending. It’s ending right now.”

  “That,” Lenie said, “I did know.”

  “Do you know when? Do you know when the end began?”

  “Last August.”

  “Twenty thirty-five. The onset of adaptive shatter. When damage control started accounting for more of the GGP than the production of new goods.”

  “Damage control?”

  “Damage control.” He pounded the table for emphasis. “My whole life is damage control. I fix the things that entropy breaks. Things fall apart, Lenie my lass. The only way you can stop the slide is throw energy at it. That’s the only way we got from primordial slime to human slime. Evolution’d be sockeye without the sun to lean on.”

  “Oh, there are places where evolution didn’t need the sun—”

  “Yeah, yeah, but you get my point. The more complicated a system gets, the more fragile it is. All that ecobabble about diversity promotes stability, that’s pure bullshit. You take your coral reef or your tropical rain forest, those things were starved for energy. You’ve got so many species, so many energy pathways using up resources that there’s hardly a spare erg left over. Drive through a rain forest with a bulldozer or two and tell me how stable that system ends up being.”

  “Oops,” Lenie said. “Too late.”

  Quammen barely heard her. “Now what we’ve got here’s a system that’s so complicated, it makes a tropical rain forest look like a fucking monoculture. Everything gets way too complicated for mere mortals, so we set up webs and networks and AIs to keep track of things, except they end up exploding into these huge cancers of complexity too—so that only makes the problem worse—and of course now all the underlying infrastructure is breaking down, the weather and the biosphere are all fucked up, so not only do we need oodles more energy to keep this huge wobbling gyro from crashing over on its side, but those same factors keep knocking out the systems we put in place to produce all that extra energy, you see what I’m sayin’? You know what apocalypse is? It’s a positive feedback loop!”

  “So why blame Québec for all this? They’re the only ones who got their asses in gear fast enough to save anything. It was the Hydro Wars that—”

  “Here it comes. Québec was gonna save the world, and if only we hadn’t ganged up on the frogs, we’d all be sipping neurococktails on a beach somewhere and Maelstrom would be nice and clean and bug-free, and—ah, don’t get me started.”

  “Too late for that, too.”

  “Hey, I’m not saying the war didn’t kick Maelstrom past c
ritical mass. Maybe it did. But it would’ve happened anyway. Five years, tops. And do you really think the frogs had anymore foresight than the rest of us? They just lucked out with their geography. Anyone could make the world’s biggest hydro facility if they had all of Hudson Bay to dam up. And who was going to stop them? The Cree tried, did you know that? Remember the Cree? A few thousand malcontents up around James Bay, just before that nasty and unfortunate plague that only killed abos. And after that went down, Nunavut just rolled over and did what they were told, and the rest of fucking Canada was still so busy trying to lure the frogs back into bed they were willing to look the other way over pretty much anything. And now it’s too late, and the rest of us run around playing catchup with our wind farms and our photosynthesis arrays and our deep-sea geothermal—”

  Lenie’s eyes floated in front of him. Something clicked in Quammen’s head.

  “Hey,” he said after a moment, “are you a—”

  She grabbed his wrist and pulled him out of the alcove. “Enough of this bullshit. Let’s fuck.”

  She was something else.

  She had seams in her chest, and a perforated metal disk poking out between her ribs. She told him, around mouthfuls of cock, that a childhood injury had left her with a prosthetic lung. It was an obvious lie, but he didn’t call her on it. Everything was making sense now, right down to the way she kept freezing up and trying to hide it, the way she acted hot to cover how cold she was.

  She was a rifter. Quammen had heard about them—hell, they were the competition. N’AmPac had sent them down to hydrothermal vents all over the eastern Pacific, until word got out that they were all completely fucked in the head. Something about abuse survivors being best suited for risky deep-sea work, some reductomechanist shit like that. It was no wonder Lenie wasn’t keen on sharing her life story. Quammen wasn’t going to push her on it.

  Besides, the sex was pretty good. The occasional flinch notwithstanding, she seemed to know exactly what to do. Quammen had heard the usual rumors—the Wisdom of the Old Ones, he liked to call them. If you want good sex, find an abuse victim. Didn’t seem quite right to put something like that to the test, but after all, she’d been the one to take the lead.