by Peter Watts
“Come on!” Vive yelled. Lenie nodded. Vive led her away along the wall.
The next alcove led into a public washroom. It was jam-packed with rifter wanna-bes and trapped pedestrians desperate to wait out the party. They were still for the most part, huddled like refugees under a bridge, listening to the muted pounding coming through the walls.
Two friendlies held one of the stalls. They’d already knocked out its ceiling panels. “You Aviva?” one of them asked, blinking rapidly over fake eyecaps.
Vive nodded, turned to Clarke. “And this …”
Something indefinable passed through the room.
“shit,” said one of the friendlies, very softly. “I didn’t think she was real.”
Lenie Clarke tilted her chin in a half nod. “Join the club.”
“So it’s true then? The burnings and the Big One and you going around raping corpses—”
“Probably not.”
“But—”
“I don’t really have time to compare notes,” Clarke said.
“Oh—right, of course. Sorry. We can get you to the river.” The friendly cocked her head. “You still got a diveskin?”
Lenie reached behind her own shoulder and tapped the backpack.
“Okay,” said the other friendly. “Let’s go.” She braced on the toilet, jumped, caught some handhold in the overhead darkness and swung up out of sight.
The first friendly looked around at the assembled huddlers. “Give us fifteen minutes, you guys. The last thing we need is a whole procession banging around in the crawl space, right? Fifteen minutes, and you can make all the noise you want. Assuming you want to leave the party, that is.” She turned to Vive. “You coming?”
Vive shook her head. “I’m supposed to meet up with Jen and Linse over by the fountain.”
“Suit yourself. We’re gone.” The remaining friendly stirruped her hands, held them out to Clarke. “Want a boost?”
“No thanks,” the rifter said. “I can manage.”
Aviva Lu was a veteran of civil unrest She rode out the rest of the action against walls and in corners, the low-turbulence areas where you could keep your bearings and your balance without being trampled. Les Beus brought out the heavy artillery in record time; Vive’s last view of freedom was the sight of a botfly crop-dusting the crowd with halothane. It didn’t matter. She went to sleep smiling.
When she woke up, though, she wasn’t in Holding with everyone else. She was in a small white room, windowless and unfurnished except for the diagnostic table she awakened on. A man’s voice spoke to her through the walls; it was a nice voice, it would have been sexy under happier circumstances.
The man behind the voice knew more about Vive’s role in the riot than she’d expected. He knew that she’d met Lenie Clarke in the flesh. He knew that she’d helped trash the botfly. Vive guessed that he’d learned that from Lindsey or Jennifer; they’d probably been caught, too. But the man didn’t talk about Vive’s friends or anyone else. He didn’t even seem all that interested in what Lenie Clarke had said, which surprised Vive quite a bit; she’d been expecting a real thirddegree, with inducers and neurosplicers and the whole shot. But no.
What the man seemed really interested in was the cut over Vive’s eye. Had she got it from Clarke? How close had the contact been between the two of them? Vive trotted out the obvious comebacks with their obvious lesbian overtones, but deep down she was getting really worried. This voice wasn’t playing any of the usual intimidation games. It didn’t threaten, or gloat, or tell her how many synaptic rewires it was going to take to turn her into a good citizen. It just sounded very, very sad that Aviva Lu had been dumb enough to get involved with this whole Lenie Clarke thing.
Very sad, because—although the man never actually said it aloud—now there was really nothing he could do.
Aviva Lu sat trembling on a table in a white, white room, and pissed herself.
Crucifixion, with Spiders
This is Patricia Rowan. Ken Lubin is plugged into the kiosk just down the hall from your office. Please tell him I want to see you both. I’m in the boardroom on Admin-411.
He will not give you any trouble.
Twenty-six hours fourteen minutes.
Sure enough, Lubin was cauled at the terminal quad by the stairwell. Evidently no one had challenged his presence there.
“What are you doing?” Desjardins said behind him.
The other man shook his head. “Trying to call someone. No answer.” He stripped off the headset.
“Rowan’s here,” Desjardins said. “She—she wants to see us.”
“Yeah.” Lubin sighed and got to his feet. His face remained impassive, but there was resignation in his voice.
“Took her long enough,” he said.
Two prefab surgeries, wire-frame cubes cast into bright relief by overhead spotlights. Their walls swirled with faint soap-bubble iridescence if you caught them at the right angle. Otherwise, the things inside—the restraints, the operating boards, the multiarmed machinery poised above them—seemed completely open to the air of the room. The vertices of each cube seemed as arbitrary and pointless as political boundaries.
But the very walls of the boardroom glistened in the same subtle way, Desjardins noted. The whole place had been sprayed down with isolation membrane.
Patricia Rowan, backlit, stood between the door and the modules. “Ken. Good to see you again.”
Lubin closed the door. “How did you find me?”
“Dr. Desjardins sold you out, of course. But surely that doesn’t surprise you.” Her contacts flickered with phosphorescent intel. “Given your little problem, I rather suspect you nudged him in that direction yourself.”
Lubin stepped forward.
“More things in heaven and earth, Horatio,” Rowan said.
Something in Lubin’s posture changed; a brief moment of tetanus, barely noticeable. Then he relaxed.
Trigger phrase, Desjardins realized. Some subroutine had just been activated deep in Lubin’s cortex. In the space of a single breath, his agenda had changed from—
Mr. Lubin’s behavior is governed by a conditioned threat-response reflex, he remembered. He’s unlikely to consider you a threat unless …
Oh Jesus. Desjardins swallowed with a mouth gone suddenly dry. She didn’t start him up just now. She shut him down …
And he was coming for me …
“—would have only been a matter of time anyway,” Rowan was saying. “There were a couple of outbreaks down in California that didn’t fit the plots. I’m guessing you spent some time on an island off Mendocino … ?”
Lubin nodded.
“We had to burn the whole thing out,” the corpse went on. “It was a shame—not many places left with real wildlife anymore. We can ill afford to lose any of them. Still. It’s not as though you left us a choice.”
“Wait a minute,” Desjardins said. “He’s infected?”
“Of course.”
“Then I should be dead,” Lubin said. “Unless I’m immune somehow …”
“You’re not. But you’re resistant.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re not entirely human, Ken. It gives you an edge.”
“But—” Desjardins stopped. There was no membrane isolating Patrician Rowan. For all the available precautions, they were all breathing the same air.
“You’re immune,” he finished.
She inclined her head. “Because I’m even less human than Ken.”
Experimentally, Lubin put his hand through the face of one cube. The soap-bubble membrane split around his flesh, snugly collared his forearm. It iridesced conspicuously around the seal, faded when Lubin kept his hand completely immobile. He grunted.
“The sooner we begin, the sooner we finish,” Rowan said.
Lubin stepped through. For an instant the entire face of the cube writhed with oily rainbows; then he was inside and the membrane cleared, its integrity restored.
Rowan glanced at Desj
ardins. “A lot of our proteins—enzymes, particularly—don’t work well in the deep sea. I’m told the pressure squeezes them into suboptimal shapes.”
Lubin’s cube darkened slightly as the sterile field went on, almost as if its skin had thickened. It hadn’t, of course; the membrane was still only a molecule deep. Its surface tension had been cranked, though. Lubin could throw his whole considerable mass against that barrier now and it wouldn’t open. It would yield—it would stretch, and distort, and sheer momentum could drag it halfway across the room like a rubber sock with a weight in the toe. But it wouldn’t break, and after a few seconds it would tighten and retract back down to two dimensions. And Lubin would still be inside.
Desjardins found that vaguely comforting.
Rowan raised her voice a fraction: “Undress please, Ken. Just leave your clothes on the floor. Oh, and there’s a headset hanging off the teleop. Perhaps you could view that during the procedure.”
She turned back to Desjardins. “At any rate, we had to tweak our people before we could send them to the rift. Retroed in some genes from deep-water fish.”
“Alice said deep-sea proteins were—stiff,” Desjardins remembered.
“More difficult to break apart, yes. And since the body’s sulfur’s locked up in the proteins, βehemoth has a tougher time stealing it from a rifter. But we only backed up the most pressure-sensitive molecules; βehemoth can still get at the others. It just takes longer to compromise the cellular machinery.”
“Unless you back up everything.”
“The small stuff, anyway. Anything under fifty or sixty aminos is vulnerable. Something about the disulfide bridges, apparently. There’s individual variation, of course, vectors can stay asymptomatic for a month or more sometimes, but the only way to really …” She shrugged. “At any rate, I became half-fish.”
“A mermaid.” The image was absurd.
Rowan rewarded him with a brief smile. “You know the drill, Ken. Face down, please.”
The operating board was inclined at a twenty-degree angle. Ken Lubin, naked, face masked by the headset, braced over it as though doing push-ups and eased himself down.
The air shimmered and hummed. Lubin went utterly limp. And the insectile machine above him spread nightmare arms with too many joints, and descended to feed.
“Holy shit,” Desjardins said.
Lubin had been stabbed in a dozen places. Mercury filaments snaked into his wrists and plunged through his back. A catheter had slid autonomously up his ass, another seemed to have kabobbed his penis. Something copper slithered into mouth and nose. Wires crawled along his face, wormed beneath his headset. The table itself was suddenly stippled with fine needles: Lubin was fixed in place like an insect pushed onto the bristles of a wire brush.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Rowan remarked. “The neuroinduction field blocks most of the pain.”
“Fuck.” The second cube, empty and waiting, shone like a threat of inquisition. “Am I—”
Rowan pursed her lips. “I doubt that will be necessary. Unless you’ve been infected, which seems unlikely.”
“I’ve been exposed for two days, going on three.”
“It’s not smallpox, Doctor. Unless you exchanged body fluids with the man, or used his feces as compost, chances are you’re clean. The sweep on your apartment didn’t turn up anything … although you might want to know that your cat has a tapeworm.”
They swept my apartment. Desjardins tried to summon some sense of outrage. Relief was all that answered: I’m clean. I’m clean …
“You’ll have to undergo the gene therapy, though,” Rowan said. “So you can stay clean. It’s quite extensive, unfortunately.”
“How extensive?”
She knew exactly what he was asking.
“Too extensive to immunize nine billion human beings. At least, not in time; the vast majority of the world’s population has never even been sequenced. And even if we could, there are still—other species. We can’t reverse-engineer the whole biosphere.”
He’d expected it, of course. He still felt it like a blow.
“So containment’s our only option,” she said quietly. “And as you may know, someone’s trying very hard to prevent that.”
“Yeah.” Desjardins looked at her. “Why is that, exactly?”
“We want you to find out.”
“Me?”
“We’ve already got our own people on it, of course. We’ll link you up. But you’ve been exceeding our performance projections right across the board, and you were the one who made the connection after all.”
“I didn’t make it so much as trip over it. I mean, you’d have to be blind not to see it, once you knew what to look for.”
“Well that’s the problem, isn’t it? We weren’t looking. Why would we? Why would anyone trawl Maelstrom for the names of dead rifters? And now it turns out that everyone knows about Lenie Clarke except us. We’ve got the world’s best intelligence-gathering machinery, and any kid with a stolen wristwatch knows more than we do.” The corpse took a deep breath, as if adjusting some great weight on her back. “How did that happen, do you suppose?”
“Ask the kid with the wristwatch,” Desjardins said. He jerked his head at Lubin, twitching in his bubble. “If you’ve got any more like that one, you’ll know everything in about two seconds.”
“Everything the kid knows, maybe. Which is next to nothing.”
“You just said—”
“We almost got her, did you know that?” Rowan said. “Just yesterday. Once you gave us the heads-up we filtered through the chaff, and we located her in South Dakota. We closed in and found that half the city was running interference for her. She got away.”
“You interrogated the fans, though.”
“Summoned by a voice in the Maelstrom. Someone out there rallying the troops.”
“Who? Why?”
“Nobody knew. Apparently it just jumps into likely conversations and starts cheerleading. We left all kinds of bait when we found that out, but so far it isn’t talking to us.”
“Wow,” Desjardins said.
“You know what’s really ironic? We thought something like this might happen. We took precautions against it.”
“You were expecting this?”
“Not specifically, of course. The whole rifter thing just came out of left field.” Rowan sighed, her face full of shadow. “Still, things—go wrong. You’d think a guy with a name like Murphy would realize that, but no. As far as ChemCog was concerned, it was just some junk meme the gels were spreading.”
“The gels are behind this?”
She shook her head. “As I said, we took precautions. We tracked down every tainted node, we partitioned them and replaced them, we made damn sure that there was no trace of the meme left. Just to be absolutely sure. But here it is, somehow. Metastasized and mutated and born again. And all we know is that this time, the gels aren’t behind it.”
“But they were before, is that what you’re saying? They—they started the ball rolling?”
“Maybe. Once upon a time.”
“Why, for God’s sake?”
“Well, that’s the funny thing,” Rowan admitted. “We told them to.”
Rowan fed it all directly to his inlays. There was too much for even an optimized ’lawbreaker to take in on the spot, but the executive summary thumbnailed it in fifteen seconds: the growing threat, the rabid mutual distrust, the final reluctant surrender of control to an alien intelligence with its own unsuspected take on the virtues of parsimony.
“Jesus,” Desjardins said.
“I know,” Rowan agreed.
“And how the Christ did Lenie Clarke take control?”
“She didn’t. That’s what’s so crazy. As far as we can tell, she didn’t think anyone even knew about her until Yankton.”
“Huh.” Desjardins pursed his lips. “Still. Whatever’s out there, it’s taking its lead from her.”
“I know,” she said softly. She glan
ced at Lubin. “That’s where he comes in.”
Lubin twitched and jerked under the ongoing assault. His face—the part of it not covered by the headset, anyway—was expressionless.
“What’s he watching in there?” Desjardins wondered.
“Briefing stats. For his next mission.”
He watched a little longer. “Would he have killed me?”
“I doubt it.”
“Who is—”
“He’s not someone you have to worry about anymore.”
“No.” Desjardins shook his head. “That’s not good enough. He tracked me down across a whole continent, he broke into my home, he—” cut Guilt Trip right out from under me but of course he wasn’t going to admit that to Rowan, not now for Chrissakes—“I gather he’s got some kind of kill-switch hardwired into him, and he answers to you, Ms. Rowan. Who is he?”
He could see her bristling. For a moment he thought he’d gone too far. No peon truly in Guilt Trip’s grasp would ever mouth off to a superior that way, Rowan would know, the alarms would start sounding any second—
“Mr. Lubin has—you might call it an impulse-control problem,” she said. “He enjoys certain acts that most would find unpleasant. He never behaves—gratuitously is the word, I guess—but sometimes he tends to set up situations that provoke a particular response. Do you see what I’m saying?”
He kills people, Desjardins thought numbly. He sets up breaches so he’ll have an excuse to kill people … .
“We’re helping him deal with his problem,” Rowan said. “And we’ve got him under control.”
Desjardins bit his lip.
She shook her head, a trace of disapproval on those pale features. “βehemoth, Dr. Desjardins. Lenie Clarke: Lose sleep over those, if you must. Believe me, Ken Lubin’s part of the solution.” Her voice went up a touch: “Aren’t you, Ken?”
“I don’t know her,” Lubin said. “Not well.”