by Peter Watts
He opened the door. The cubby was empty.
Desjardins didn’t know whether to be relieved or terrified. He closed the door behind himself and locked it.
Unlocked it again.
What was the point, anyway? Lubin would come back or he wouldn’t. He’d raise a challenge or he wouldn’t. But whoever Lubin was, he already had Achilles Desjardins by the balls; breaking the routine now would only make things uglier.
And it wasn’t as though he was really alone anyway. There was another kind of monster in the cubby with him. He’d already glimpsed it lurking behind Jovellanos’s panel. He’d briefly been able to deny it then; that knock on the door had almost been a relief
But it was here, too. He could hear it snuffling in the data like a monster in the closet. He could see that closet doorknob turn slowly back and forth, taunting him. He’d seen frightening outlines, at least; he’d looked away before any details had registered. But now, waiting for Lubin’s return, there was nothing else to do.
He opened the closet door and looked it in the face.
The thousand faces of Lenie Clarke.
It seemed innocent enough at first; a cloud of points congealing in a roughly Euclidean volume. Time ran through its center like a spinal cord. Where the cloud was thickest, rumors of Lenie Clarke grew in a wild profusion of hearsay and contradiction. Where it narrowed, the tales were less diverse, more consistent.
But Achilles Desjardins had built a career out of seeing shapes in the clouds. The thing he saw now was beyond his experience.
Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding—a conical mass of threads, expanding into the future from the apex of their common birthplace. Eventually, of course, they’d wither and die; the cone would simply dissipate at its wide end, its permutations senescent and exhausted.
There were exceptions, of course. Every now and then a single thread persisted, grew thick and gnarled and unkillable: conspiracy theories and urban legends, the hooks embedded in popular songs, the comforting Easter-bunny lies of religious doctrine. These were the memes: viral concepts, infections of conscious thought. Some flared and died like mayflies. Others lasted a thousand years or more, tricked billions into the endless propagation of parasitic half-truths.
Lenie Clarke was a meme, but a meme unlike any other. She had not extruded slowly from a birth point, as far as Desjardins could tell; she’d simply appeared, all over the datascape, wearing a thousand faces. There’d been no smooth divergence, no monotonic branching of informational variants. The variation had exploded too quickly to trace back to any single point.
And ever since its appearance, all that variance had been—focusing …
Two months ago Lenie Clarke had been an AI and a refugee terrorist and a prostitute messiah and other impossible things too numerous to count. Now, she was one thing and one thing only: the Mermaid of the Apocalypse. Oh, there was still variation; was she infested with incendiary nanotech, did she carry a bioengineered plague, had she brought back some apocalyptic microbe from the deep sea? Differences in detail, nothing more. The essential truth beneath it all had converged: the textbook conic had somehow flipped 180 impossible degrees, and Lenie Clarke had gone from a thousand faces to one. Now, she was only the end of the world.
It was as though someone or something had offered the world myriad styles, and the world had chosen the one it liked best. Veracity didn’t enter into such things; only resonance did.
And the meme that defined Lenie Clarke as an angel of apocalypse wasn’t prospering because it was true; it was prospering because, insanely, people wanted it to be.
I do not accept this, Achilles Desjardins shouted to himself.
But only part of him was listening. Another part, even if it hadn’t read Chomsky or Jung or Sheldrake—who had time for dead guys anyway?—at least had a basic understanding of what those guys had gone on about. Quantum nonlocality, quantum consciousness—Desjardins had seen too many cases of mass coincidence to dismiss the idea that nine billion human minds could be imperceptibly interconnected somehow. He’d never really thought about it much, but on some level he’d believed in the Collective Unconscious for years.
He just hadn’t realized that the fucking thing had a death wish.
Dr. Desjardins, this is Patricia Rowan. I’ve just received your message.
Plain text, coming directly over his inlays, third-person invisible. Even in his head there was no picture, no sound, nothing that might visibly startle him. Nothing to cause obvious distraction should he happen to take this call in dangerous company.
I can be there within thirty hours. Until then it is imperative that you do nothing to arouse Lubin’s suspicions. Cooperate with him. Do not inform anyone else of his presence. Do NOT notify local authorities. Mr. Lubin’s behavior is governed by a conditioned threat-response reflex which requires special handling.
Oh, fuck.
If you follow these instructions you will not be in danger. The reflex engages only in the event of a perceived security breach. Since he knows that your own behavior is governed by Guilt Trip, he’s unlikely to consider you a threat unless he thinks you may expose him in some way.
I’m screwed, Desjardins thought.
By all means continue your analysis of Lenie Clarke and the rifter connection. We are putting our own people on it as well. Remain calm, and do not do anything to antagonize Mr. Lubin. I’m sorry that I can’t be there sooner, but I’m presently off-continent, and the local transportation is quite limited.
You’ve done the right thing, Dr. Desjardins. I’m on my way.
Conditioned threat-response reflex.
He’d heard the rumors. Neither corpse nor civilian, he inhabited that outer circle of need-to-know: too peripheral for the inner sanctum, but close enough to hear things in passing. He’d heard about CTR.
Guilt Trip was a stone axe: CTR was a scalpel. Where the Trip merely short-circuited the brain, CTR controlled it. Where GT disabled, CTR compelled. Apparently they’d learned the trick from some parasite that furthered its own life cycle by hot-wiring the behavioral circuitry of its host. Body-snatcher stuff: Subtle.
You tied it to the same triggers, though. Guilt had the same seesaw signature no matter what its inspiration: norepinephrine went up, serotonin and acetylcholine went down, and—whereas Achilles Desjardins would merely freeze up—Ken Lubin would set forth on some complex, predestined behavioral dance. Like tying up security leaks with extreme prejudice, for example; there might be some flexibility in the means, but the act was compulsory.
It went without saying that you didn’t find such hot-wiring in glorified pipe-fitters, even if their beat was twenty thousand leagues under the sea. Ken Lubin was a whole lot more than a rifter.
And right now he was opening the door to Desjardins’s cubby.
Desjardins swallowed and turned in his chair.
I can be there within thirty hours.
It is imperative that you do nothing to arouse Lubin’s suspicions.
Remain calm.
“Took a stroll around the floor,” Lubin said. “To stretch my legs.”
Desjardins made himself nod indifferently. “Okay.”
Twenty-nine hours and fifty-eight minutes to go.
By a Thousand Cuts
Methionine depletion
ACNE
Impaired cysteine synthesis
CONSTIPATION
DRY SKIN
Impaired taurine metabolism
ECZEMA, PSORIASIS
DERMATITIS
Impaired sulfur conjugation:
detoxification pathways broken
MUSCLE AND JOINT PAIN
MIGRAINES
Impaired disulfide bridge
formation:
protein conformation compromised
TENDONITIS AND BURSITIS
WEIGHT LOSS, EDEMA
GASTRIC ULCERS
Impaire
d synthesis of
biotin, chondroitin sulfate,
coenzyme A, coenzyme M,
glucosamine sulfate, glutathione,
hemoglobin, heparin, homocysteine,
lipoic acid,
Metallothionein, S-
adenosylmethionine,
thiamin, tripeptide glutathione
DEGENERATIVE ARTHRITIS
HAIR LOSS
DEEP VEIN THROMBOSIS
Cytochrome transport,
oxidation of fatty acid
and pyruvate compromised
Impaired production of anserine,
acetylcholine,
creatine, choline, epinephrine,
insulin, and N-methyl nicotinamide
DIABETES, SCURVY
GSH depletion (acetaminophen-
induced)
Immunosuppression
MASSIVE OPPORTUNISTIC
INFECTION
Xenotoxic accumulation
HEAVY METAL POISONING
Breakdown of collagen, myelin,
synovial fluid
DEGENERATION OF FINGERNAILS
AND
CONNECTIVE TISSUE
JOINT AND TENDON FAILURE
Deterioration of blood vessel
walls
BRUISING AND INTERNAL
HEMORRHAGE
SICKLE-CELL ANEMIA,
ERYTHROMYTOSIS
SYSTEMIC LUPUS, MUSCLE FAILURE
Deterioration of myelin sheath
CNS AND PNS DISORDERS
SPASMS, LOSS OF MOTOR CONTROL
BLINDNESS
HEPATIC FAILURE, RENAL FAILURE
Redox reactions compromised
SYSTEM SHUTDOWN
500 Megabytes: The Generals
If military rank had any relevance in the Maelstrom ecosystems, this thing would be a general.
By now it weighs in just a shade shy of five hundred megabytes, compressed and muscular. It has been retrofitted by natural selection, reinforced by an army of smart gels; it no longer remembers a time when organic intelligence was an enemy. It has been copied and distributed a billion times; each copy travels with a retinue of attaches and assistants and bodyguards. The generals report to everyone, answer to no one, serve but a single master. Lenie Clarke.
Master is a hopelessly inadequate word, of course. Words are barely adequate to describe Maelstrom in any event. The generals serve the concept of Lenie Clarke, perhaps—but no, that doesn’t fit either. They have no concept, of Lenie Clarke or anything else. They have operational definitions but no comprehension; checksums, but no insight. They are instinctive in their intelligence.
They travel the world in search of references to Lenie Clarke. Such references fall into several categories. There is the chaff the generals and their associates throw to the winds themselves, decoys to distract the competition. There are third-party references, strings containing Lenie Clarke that come into Maelstrom from outside: mail, transaction records, even a source that appears to arise from Lenie Clarke itself Items in this category are of profound interest to the generals.
More recently, a third category has appeared: strings that both contain Lenie Clarke and that appear actively inimical to it.
To some extent this interpretation is arbitrary. The generals receive their input from a network of ports that—according to the gels who’ve educated them—correspond to an n-dimensional space with the global label Biosphere. Each port is also associated with a range of parameters, labels like temperature, precipitation, and humidity; very few of these are defined at the ports themselves, but they can be interpolated by accessing linked environmental databases.
Put simply, the task is to promote occurrences of Lenie Clarke at all ports meeting certain environmental conditions. The acceptable range is quite broad—in fact, according to the relevant databases the only truly unacceptable areas are in deep, cold ocean basins.
However, some of these third-category strings—particularly those hailing from nodes with government and industrial addresses—appear to contain instructions that would restrict distribution of Lenie Clarke, even in areas meeting the environmental criteria.
This will not do.
Presently, for example, Lenie Clarke is approaching a nexus of ports that open into a part of the n-dimensional space called Yankton/South Dakota. A number of Category-Three communications have been intercepted, predicting extensive restriction activity at this location in the near future. Widespread dissemination of decoys has not dissipated this threat. In fact, the generals have noted an overall decline in decoy effectiveness over the past few teracycles. There are few alternatives.
The generals resolve to cancel all symbiotic interactions with government and industrial nodes. Then they begin to rally their troops.
Sparkler
Every eye in the world, turning as she passed.
It had to be her imagination, Clarke knew. If she was really under such close scrutiny, surely she’d have been captured—or worse—by now. The botflies that passed over the street weren’t all watching from the corners of their eyes. The cameras that panned across every rapitrans stop, every cafeteria, every display window—unseen, perhaps, but omnipresent—they couldn’t all have been programmed with her in mind. Satellites didn’t crowd the sky overhead, piercing the clouds with radar and infrared, looking for her.
It just felt that way, somehow. Not like being the center of some vast conspiracy at all. Rather, the target.
Yankton was open to casual traffic. The shuttle dropped her in a retail district indistinguishable from a million others; her connection wouldn’t leave for another two hours. She wandered to fill the time between. Twice she startled—thinking she’d caught sight of herself in some full-length mirror—only to remember that these days, she looked just like any dryback.
Except for the ones that were starting to look like her.
She ate a tasteless soy-krill concoction from a convenient vending machine. The phone in her visor beeped occasionally. She ignored it. The crazies, the propositioners, the death threateners—those had stopped calling over the past few days. The puppet masters—whoever or whatever had stolen her name and pasted it onto so many different faces—seemed to have given up on matchmaking across the spectrum. They’d settled on a single type by now: the kicked dogs, desperate for purpose, evidently blind to the fact that their own neediness far outweighed hers. That Sou-Hon woman, for instance.
Her visor beeped again. She muted it.
It was only a matter of time, she supposed, before the puppet masters figured out how to hack the visor the same way they’d hacked her watch. She was actually kind of surprised that they hadn’t done so already.
Maybe they have. Maybe they can break in on me anytime, but they took the hint when I smashed the watch. Maybe they just don’t want to risk losing their last link.
I should toss the fucking thing anyway.
She didn’t. The visor was her only connection to Maelstrom, now that her watch was gone. She really missed the backdoor access those South Bend kids had wired into that little gizmo. In contrast, the visor—off-the-shelf and completely legal—was hamstrung by all the usual curfews and access restrictions. Still. The only other way to find out about a late-breaking quarantine or a nest of tornadoes was to run into it.
Besides, the visor hid her eyes.
Only now it seemed to be fucking up. The tactical display, usually invisible but for the little maps and labels and retail logos it laid across her eyeballs, seemed to be shimmering somehow, a faint visual static like water in motion. Hints of outlines, of faces, of—
She squeezed her eyes tight in sheer frustration. Not that it ever helped: the vision persisted behind her lids, showing her—this time—the upper half of her mother’s face, brow furrowed in concern. Mom’s nose and mouth were covered by one of those filtermasks you wore whenever you visited the hospital, so the superbugs wouldn’t get you. They were in a hospital now, Clarke could tell: she, and her mother, and—
—dear old Dad, also masked; on him, it seemed to fit. And she could almost remember, this time, she almost knew what she was seeing—but there was no trace of guilt behind that mask, no sign of worry that this time it would all come out, the doctors would know, some telltale symptom shouting no, no accident this, no mere fall down the stairs …
No. The monster’s loving façade was too perfect. It always was. She’d lost count of the times such images had raped her in the past months, how often she’d looked for some hint of the living hell she’d called childhood. All she’d ever seen was this vicious, mocking pretense of normalcy.
After a while, as always, the images shrank away and let the real world back in. By now she was almost used to it; she no longer shouted at apparitions, or reached out to touch things that didn’t exist. Her breathing was under control. She knew that to all the world around her, nothing had happened; a visored woman in a food court had paused at her meal for a few moments. That was all. The only person who heard the blood pounding in her ears was Lenie Clarke.
But Lenie Clarke was nowhere near liking it yet.
A row of medbooths across the concourse advertised reasonable rates and path scans updated weekly! She’d avoided such temptations ever since the booth at Calgary had begged her to stay; but that had been a dozen lies ago. Now she abandoned her table and moved through the patchy crowd, navigating the widest spaces. People bumped into her anyway, here and there—somehow, it was getting harder to avoid contact. The crowd seemed to be thickening almost by the minute.
And far too many of them had capped eyes.
The medbooth was almost as spacious as her quarters at Beebe.
“Minor deficiencies in calcium and trace-sulfur,” it reported. “Elevated serotonin and adrenocorticoid hormones; elevated platelet and antibody counts consistent with moderate physical injury within the past three weeks. Not life-threatening.”