Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  Clarke rubbed her shoulder. By now it only ached when reminded to. Even the bruises on her face were fading.

  “Anomalously high levels of cellular metabolites.” Biomedical details flickered across the main display. “Depressed lactates. Your basal metabolic rate is unusually high. This isn’t immediately dangerous, but over time it can increase wear on body parts and significantly reduce life span. RNA and serotonin syn—”

  “Any diseases?” Clarke said, cutting to the chase.

  “All pathogen counts are within safe ranges. Would you like me to run further tests?”

  “Yeah.” She took the NMR helmet from its hook and fitted it over her head. “Brain scan.”

  “Are you experiencing specific symptoms?”

  “I’m having—hallucinations,” she said. “Vision only—not sound or smell or anything. Picture-in-picture, I can still see around the edges, but …”

  The booth waited. When Clarke said nothing further it began humming quietly to itself. A luminous 3-D outline of a human brain began rotating on the screen, filling piecemeal with fragments of color.

  “You have difficulty forming social bonds,” the medbooth remarked.

  “What? Why do you say that?”

  “You have a chronic oxytocin deficiency. This is a treatable disorder, however. I can prescribe—”

  “Forget it,” Clarke said. Since when did personality become a “treatable disorder”?

  “Your dopamine receptor sites are abnormally prolific. Do you, on average, use opioids or endorphin-amplifiers more than twice a week?”

  “Look, forget that stuff. Just work on the hallucinations.”

  The booth fell silent. Clarke closed her eyes. All I need. Some bloody machine counting up my masochism molecules …

  Beep.

  Clarke opened her eyes. On the display, a dusting of violet stars had been sprinkled across the floor of the cerebral hemispheres. A tiny red dot pulsed somewhere near their center.

  Anomaly flashed in one corner of the screen.

  “What? What is it?”

  “Processing. Please be patient.”

  The booth etched a line along the bottom of the display: VAC Area 19, it said.

  Another beep. Another flashing red pinpoint, farther forward.

  Another line: Brodman Area 37.

  “What are those red spots?” Clarke said.

  “Those parts of the brain are involved in vision,” the booth told her. “May I lower the helmet visor to examine your eyes?”

  “I’m wearing eyecaps.”

  “Corneal overlays will not interfere with the scan. May I proceed?”

  “Okay.”

  The visor slid drown. A grid of tiny bumps stippled its inner surface. The humming of the machine resonated deep in her skull. Clarke began counting to herself. She’d endured twenty-two seconds when the visor withdrew into its sheath.

  Just under Brodman Area 37: Ret/Mac OK.

  The humming stopped.

  “You may remove the helmet,” the booth advised. “What is your chronological age?”

  “Thirty-two.” She hung the helmet on its peg.

  “Did your visual environment change substantially between eight and sixteen weeks ago?”

  A year spent in the photoenhanced twilight of Channer Vent. A blind crawl along the floor of the Pacific. And then, suddenly, bright sky …

  “Yes. Maybe.”

  “Does your family have a history of strokes or embolisms?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “Has anyone close to you died recently?”

  “What?”

  “Has anyone close to you died recently?”

  Her jaw clenched. “Everyone close to me has died recently.”

  “Have you been exposed to changes in ambient pressure within the past two months? For example, have you spent time in an orbital facility, an unpressurized aircraft, or been free-diving below a depth of twenty meters?”

  “Yes. Diving.”

  “While diving, did you undergo decompression protocols?”

  “No.”

  “What was your maximum dive depth, and how long did you spend there?”

  Clarke smiled. “Three thousand four hundred meters. One year.”

  The booth fell silent for a moment. Then: “People cannot survive direct ascent from such depths without undergoing decompression. What was your maximum dive depth, and how long did you spend there?”

  “I didn’t have to decompress,” Clarke explained. “I didn’t breathe during the dive, everything was elect—”

  Wait a minute …

  No decompression, she’d said.

  Of course not. Let the surface-skimming tourists breathe from their clunky tanks, risking narcosis or the bends whenever they ventured too far from the surface. Let them suffer nightmares of exploding lungs and eyes marbling into clusters of fleshy bubbles. Rifters were immune to such worries. Inside Beebe Station, Lenie Clarke had breathed at sea level; outside, she hadn’t breathed at all.

  Except once, when she’d been shot out of the sky.

  On that day Forcipiger had fallen slowly through a dark spectrum, green to blue to final lightless black, bleeding atmosphere from a thousand cuts. With each meter a little more of the ocean had forced its way in, squeezed the atmosphere into a single high-pressure pocket.

  Joel hadn’t liked the sound of her vocoder. I don’t want to spend my last few minutes listening to a machine voice, he’d said. So she’d stayed with him, breathing. They must have been at thirty atmospheres by the time he’d popped the hatch, cold and scared and sick of waiting to die.

  And she had come ashore, raging.

  It had taken days. Her ascent along the seabed would have been gradual enough to decompress naturally, the gas in her blood easing gently across the alveolar membranes—if her remaining lung had been in use at the time. It hadn’t been: so what had happened to those last high-pressure remnants of Forcipiger’s atmosphere in her bloodstream? The fact that she was still alive proved that they weren’t still within her.

  Gas exchange isn’t limited to the lungs, she remembered. The skin breathes. The GI tract breathes. Not as fast as a set of lungs would, of course. Not as efficiently.

  Maybe not quite efficiently enough …

  “What’s wrong with me?” she asked quietly.

  “You have recently suffered two small embolisms in your brain which intermittently impair your vision,” the medbooth said. “Your brain likely compensates for these gaps with stored images, although I would have to observe an episode in progress to be certain. You have also recently lost someone close to you; bereavement can be a factor in triggering visual-release hall—”

  “What do you mean, stored images? Are you saying these are memories?”

  “Yes,” the machine replied.

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “We’re sorry you feel that way.”

  “But they never happened, okay?” Shit-for-brains machine, why am I even arguing with it? “I remember my own childhood, for fuck’s sake. I couldn’t forget it if I tried. And these visions, they were someone else’s, they were—”

  —happy—

  “—they were different. Completely different.”

  “Long-term memories are frequently unreliable. They—”

  “Shut up,” she snapped. “Just fix it.”

  “This booth is not equipped for microsurgery. I can give you Ondansetron to suppress the symptoms. You should be aware, though, that patients with extensive synaptic rewiring may experience side effects such as mild dizziness—”

  She froze. Rewiring?

  “—double vision, halo effects—”

  “Stop,” she said. The booth fell silent.

  On the display, that cloud of violet stars sparkled enigmatically along the floor of her brain.

  She touched it. “What are these?”

  “A series of surgical lesions and associated infarctions,” the booth replied.

  “How ma
ny?”

  “Seven thousand four hundred eighty-three.”

  She took a breath, felt distant amazement at how steady it felt. “You’re saying someone cut into my brain 7,483 times?”

  “There’s no evidence of physical penetration. The lesions are consistent with deep-focus microwave bursts.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “You asked me to ignore subjects irrelevant to your hallucinations.”

  “And these—these lesions don’t have anything to do with that?”

  “They do not.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Most of the lesions are not located within the visual pathways. The others act to block the transmission of images, not generate them.”

  “Where are the lesions located?”

  “The lesions lie along pathways connecting the limbic system and the neocortex.”

  “What are those pathways used for?”

  “Those pathways are inactive. They have been interrupted by the surgical—”

  “What would they be used for if they were active?”

  “The activation of long-term memories,” said the booth.

  Oh God. Oh God.

  “Is there any other way we can be of service?” the booth asked after a while.

  Clarke swallowed. “How—how long ago were the lesions induced?”

  “Between ten and thirty-six months, depending on your mean metabolic rate since the procedure. This is an approximation based upon subsequent scarring and capillary growth.”

  “Could such an operation take place without the patient’s knowledge?”

  A pause. “I don’t know how to answer that question.”

  “Could it take place without anesthetic?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could it take place while the patient was asleep?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would the patient feel the lesions forming?”

  “No.”

  “Could the equipment for such a procedure be housed within, say, an NMR helmet?”

  “I don’t know,” the booth admitted.

  Beebe’s medical cubby had had an NMR. She’d used it occasionally, when she’d cracked her head during combat with Channer’s wildlife. No lesions had appeared on her printout then. Maybe they didn’t show up on the default settings she’d used, maybe you had to dial up a specific test or something first.

  Maybe someone had programmed Beebe’s scanner to lie.

  When did it happen? What happened? What can’t I remember?

  She was dimly aware of muffled sounds, distant and angry, rising from somewhere outside. They were irrelevant, they made no sense. Nothing made any sense. Her mind, luminous and transparent, rotated before her. Purple stars erupted from the medulla like a freeze-framed fountain, bright perfect droplets thrown high into the cortex and frozen at apogee. Bright thoughts. Memories, amputated and cauterized. They almost looked like some kind of free-form sculpture.

  Lies could be so beautiful in the telling.

  Decoys

  The way Aviva Lu saw it, whoever died last was the winner.

  It didn’t matter what you actually did with your life. Da Vinci and Plasmid and Ian Anderson had all done mags more than Vive or any of her friends ever would. She’d never explore Mars or write a symphony or even build an animal, at least not from scratch. But the thing was, all those people were dead already. Fame hadn’t kept Olivia M’Benga’s faceplate from shattering. Andrew Simon’s charge against Hydro,Q hadn’t added one rotting day to his life span. Passion Play might have been immortal, but its composer had been dust for decades.

  Aviva Lu knew more about the story so far than all of those guys had.

  It was all just one big, sprawling interactive storybook. It had a beginning and a middle and an end. If you came in halfway through, you could always pick up the stuff you’d missed—that’s what tutorials and encyclopedias and Maelstrom itself were for. You could get a thumbnail History of Life right back to the time Martian Mike dropped out of the sky and started the whole thing off. Once you were dead, though, that was it. You’d never know what came next. The real winners, Vive figured, were the ones who saw how the story finally ended.

  That said, it kind of pissed her off to realize that she’d probably made it to the finals.

  That much had been obvious even before this firewitch thing had started burning its way across the continent. There’d been a time, she’d heard, you could just pick up and go places; none of these wackamole barriers going up and down all the time, like you had to shoot some kind of lottery every time you wanted to cross the street. There’d been a time when you could fight off plagues and parasites yourself, just using your own body systems, without having to buy a fix from some pharm who’d probably tweaked the disease in the first place so you had to buy their crummy genes. According to Vive’s pater, there’d even been a time when the police themselves had been under control.

  Of course, parents weren’t exactly paragons of reliability. That whole generation was too busy shooting itself up with crocodilian and plant organelles to worry about getting their facts right. Not that Vive had any objections to good health—she’d been taking croc supplements herself for years. She even took proglottids and Ascaris eggs every now and then—she hated the idea of all those worms hatching out in her gut, but these days your immune system needed every workout it could get.

  And besides, that was a long way from polluting your genotype with lizard DNA, even if Pfizer did have a discount this month and wouldn’t it be great to not be so dependent on outside drugs all the time, sweetie?

  Sometimes Vive wondered if her parents even really knew what a species was anymore. In fact, that was the whole problem: rather than clean the shit out of the world, people just turned themselves into coprovores. In a couple of years the human race was going to be half cockroach. If everything hadn’t already melted down by then.

  Meltdown, actually, was preferable. Better to tear everything down and just start over. Put everyone on the same footing for a change.

  That’s why Aviva Lu was here now, waiting for Lenie Clarke to show up.

  Lenie Clarke was the Meltdown Madonna.

  Actually, Aviva Lu wasn’t exactly sure what Lenie Clarke was. She seemed to be an army of one. She had died, and risen again. She’d kick-started the Big One out of sheer impatience, tired of waiting for some long-overdue apocalypse that had always threatened and never delivered. She’d single-handedly broken open the Strip, led a refugee revolt whose existence N’AmPac still wouldn’t admit to. Fire followed in her wake; anyone who opposed her was ash inside a week.

  What Lenie Clarke really was, Vive had always figured, was bullshit.

  There were a lot of people who thought otherwise, of course. People who swore up and down that Lenie Clarke was a real person, not just some marketing icon trying to electroshock rifter chic back off the slab. They said that the Meltdown Madonna actually was a rifter, one of N’AmPac’s trained deep-seals—but that something had happened on the bottom of the ocean, something mythic. The Big One had only been a symptom, they said, of what had changed her. Now Lenie Clarke was a sorceress, able to transmute organic matter into lead or something. Now she wandered the world spreading apocalypse in her wake, and the masters she’d once served would stop at nothing to bring her down.

  It made a good story—hey, any apocalypse that threatened the corpses was long overdue as far as Vive was concerned—but she’d heard too many others. Lenie Clarke was the Next Big Sensorium Personality. Lenie Clarke was a quantum AI, built in defiance of the Carnegie Protocols. Lenie Clarke was an invention of the corpses themselves, a bogeyman to scare restless civilians into obedience. For a couple of days Lenie Clarke had even been some kind of escaped microbe from Lake Vostok.

  These days the stories were a lot more consistent; Lenie Clarke hadn’t been anything but the Meltdown Madonna for weeks now, as far as Vive could tell. Probably the test marketers had settled on the line that wo
uld sell the most faux diveskins, or something. And why not? The look was in, the eyes were killer, and Vive was a much a fashion hound as anyone.

  At least, that was what she’d thought until all of bloody Maelstrom started talking in one voice.

  Now that had been wild. Half of Maelstrom might have been wildlife, but the other half was spam filters; there was just no way that anyone could have pulled that off, even the corpses. But she’d seen it herself, on her own (only slightly illegal) wristwatch: everyone she knew had seen it on theirs, or heard it from some matchmaker, or even seen it printed across personal visors that should have been hawking drugs or Levi’s: Lenie Clarke is closing on Yankton. Lenie Clarke is in trouble. Lenie Clarke needs your help.

  Now. Cedar and West Second.

  Whatever Lenie Clarke was, she had very powerful friends to pull off something like that. All of a sudden Vive found herself taking rifter chic very seriously indeed. Lindsey’d said they were all being used—someone with really long arms must be building a bandwagon as cover for something else, Carnegie knew what exactly—and Lindsey was probably right. So what? They were decoys for something, but that something was headed here, and whatever it was, Vive was going to be part of it.

  It was gonna be a great ride.

  Les beus knew it, too.

  There were two kinds of uniforms swarming across the concourse: police and rifters. Les beus bristled with shockprods and botflies and armored exoskels. The rifters had their fake diveskins and their cheap white contacts. Everything else, Vive knew, was bravado. Maelstrom had called out, and they’d come on faith and adrenaline. By now it was pretty obvious that faith wasn’t all that necessary; the enforcer presence was more than enough evidence that something big was in town.

  So far, nothing had exploded. Both sides were still jockeying for position, maybe pretending—to those scattered pedestrians who still hadn’t grabbed the bone and vanished—that there was really nothing to worry about. The police had cordoned off whole sections of the concourse, not herding yet but well into corral mode. For their part, the rifters were testing the perimeter; milling along halls and slidewalks, dodging back and forth across the exoskel lines, always stopping just short of anything the antibodies could cite afterward as provocation. Botflies swarmed overhead like big black eggs, taking pregame footage of everything.