Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  Lubin glanced at the nav console on his wrist. A tiny 2-D representation of local space sparkled there—starring, as Ken Lubin, a convergence of sharp green lines at center stage. Occasional yellow pinpoints drifted in and out of range: Kinsman’s dolphins, patrolling the perimeter. Another pinpoint, much closer, wasn’t moving at all. Lubin aimed his squid and squeezed the throttle.

  Gandhi was a mess. Clarke’s billy had discharged against the right side of his head; the front of the animal had been blown apart in an instant. Behind the dorsal fin, the carcass was pretty much intact. Farther forward a fleshy wreckage of ribs and skull remained on the left side, that maniacal idiot dolphin grin persisting even past death. The right side was gone entirely.

  Gandhi was impaled on a sunken tangle of rebar. The current here moved offshore; the dolphin must have met his fate closer to the seawall. Lubin swung the squid around and started upstream.

  “ … eive … Lu … ical?”

  The word fragments buzzed along his lower jaw, all but lost in the ambient thunder. Lubin, struck by sudden realization, cranked up the gain on his vocoder: “Keep this channel clear. Cl—”

  His words, transmuted by the vocoder into a harsh metallic buzz, caught him off guard. It had been months since the implants had mutilated his voice that way. The sound almost evoked a kind of nostalgia.

  “No contact,” he continued. “Clarke’s got L-FAM implants. She could be listening in.”

  “ … ain? …”

  In fact, even if Clarke was tuned to the right channel, it was doubtful that she’d make any more sense of the signal than Lubin had. Acoustic modems had not been built with white water in mind.

  And why would she be listening anyway? How would she know I’m even here?

  It wasn’t a chance he was willing to take. He kept as silent as his quarry, wherever she was. The lake raged around them both.

  Intuition is not clairvoyance. It’s not guesswork either. Intuition is executive summary, that 90 percent of the higher brain that functions subconsciously—but no less rigorously—than the self-aware subroutine that thinks of itself as the person. Lubin glided through murk so thick he could barely see the squid that drew him forward; he set the machine to heel and crawled through dead, twisted warrens of wreckage and dereliction, spikes and jagged edges rampant under layers of slime that softened only their appearance. He let the current push him offshore, then grab him and hurl him against the base of the seawall itself. He clambered sideways like a crab on gray scoured surfaces, pressed himself flat while the water tried to peel him off and flick him away like an old decal. He let those intuitive subroutines guide him; weighing scenarios, sifting memories, remembering happier times when Lenie Clarke had revealed this motive, that preference. He explored some potential refugia, ignored others, and would not have been able to say exactly why. But all parts of Ken Lubin had been well and thoroughly trained: the brain stem and the analytical subroutines and the little homunculus that sat self-consciously behind his eyes. Each knew what to do, and what to leave to the others.

  And so it was not entirely unexpected that he should come upon Lenie Clarke, hiding in the shadow of one of Chicago’s absurd waterfalls, wedged in a canyon of wreckage from the previous century.

  She was in bad shape. Her body was twisted in a way that suggested Gandhi’s blows had done their job. Her diveskin had been torn along the rib cage, either from the dolphin’s attack or from the jagged geometry of the lake bed. She favored her left arm. But she’d chosen her refuge well; too much noise for sonar, too much metal for EM signatures, too much shit in the water for anyone without the eyes and the instincts of a rifter to ever track her down. Burton would have passed within a meter and not picked up the scent.

  Good girl, he thought.

  She looked up from her hiding place, her featureless white eyes meeting his through two meters of milky chaos, and he knew instantly that she recognized him.

  He had hoped, against all reason, that she wouldn’t.

  I’m sorry, he thought. I really don’t have any choice.

  Of course, she still had the billy. Of course, she kept it concealed until the last moment, then yanked it into play with desperate swiftness. Of course she tried to use it on herself; doomed anyway, what better act of final revenge than to set βehemoth free in one final, suicidal catharsis?

  Lubin saw all of it coming, and disarmed her with barely a thought. But the billy, when he checked, was empty. Gandhi had taken its final charge. Lubin dropped it onto the muddy junkscape.

  I’m sorry. The sexual anticipation of imminent murder began stirring in him. I liked you. You were the only—you really deserved to win … .

  She stared back. She didn’t trip her vocoder. She didn’t try to speak.

  Any second now Guilt Trip would kick in. Once again, Lubin felt almost sick with gratitude: that an engineered neurochemical could so easily shoulder all responsibility for his acts. That he was about to kill his only friend, and remain blameless of any wrongdoing. That—

  It was impossible to close one’s eyes while wearing a diveskin. The material bonded to the eyecaps, pinned the lids back in an unblinking stare. Lenie Clarke looked at Ken Lubin. Ken Lubin looked away.

  Guilt Trip had never taken this long before.

  It’s not working. Something’s wrong.

  He waited for his gut to force him into action. He waited for orders and absolution. He went down into himself as deep as he dared, looking for some master to take the blame.

  No. No. Something’s wrong.

  Do I have to kill her myself?

  By the time he realized he wasn’t going to get an answer, it was too late. He looked back into Lenie Clarke’s final refuge, steeling himself for damnation.

  And saw that it was empty.

  Terrarium

  An icon flashed at the corner of Desjardins’s board. He ignored it.

  The new feed had just gone on-line: a thread of fiberop snaking in all its messy physicality under the door and down the hallway. There hadn’t been any other way; CSIRA was far too security-conscious to allow civilian nodes inside its perimeter, and The General—or Anemone, or whatever it was called today—hadn’t talked to any other kind since before Yankton. If Desjardins wanted to go into combat, he’d have to do it on enemy turf.

  That meant a hardline. Outside wireless was jammed as a matter of course; even wristwatches couldn’t get on-line in CSIRA without going through the local hub. Desjardins had envisioned a cable running through the lobby into the street, hanging a left and tripping up pedestrians all the way to the nearest public library. Fortunately, there’d been a municipal junction box in the basement.

  His board upped the lumens on the icon, a visual voiceraising: Alice Jovellanos still wants to talk. Please respond.

  Forget it, Alice. Your face is the last thing I want to see right now. You’re lucky I haven’t turned you in already.

  If Guilt Trip had been doing his—its job, he would have turned her in. God only knew how badly he could screw up now, thanks to that little saboteur’s handiwork God only knew how many other ’lawbreakers she was putting at risk the same way, how many catastrophes would result from sheer glandular indecision at a critical moment. Alice Jovellanos had potentially put millions of lives in jeopardy.

  Not that that amounted to a fart in a hurricane next to what βehemoth was gearing up for, of course. N’AmWire had just made it public: a big chunk of the west coast was now officially under quarantine. Even the official death toll had left the starting gate at four digits.

  The splice fed into a new panel that crowded him on the right. It was stand-alone and self-contained, unconnected and unconnectable to any CSIRA sockets. Vast walled spaces waited within—spaces that could swallow the contents of a node and walls that could mimic its architecture at a moment’s notice. A habitat replicator, in effect. A terrarium.

  The icon began beeping. He muted it.

  Take a hint, Alice.

  She’d really fuck
ed him up the ass. The problem—and the fact that it was a problem only emphasized how thoroughly she’d messed things up—was that she obviously didn’t see it that way. She thought of herself as some sort of liberator. She’d acted out of some kind of twisted concern for his welfare. She’d actually put his interests above the greater good.

  Desjardins booted the terrarium. Start-up diagnostics momentarily cluttered the display. He wouldn’t be using his inlays this time around; they were part of the CSIRA network, after all. It was going to be raw visual and touch pads all the way.

  The greater good. Right.

  That had always been a faceless, abstract thing to human sensibilities. It was easier to feel for the one person you knew than for the far-off suffering millions you didn’t. When the Big One had hit the Left Coast, Desjardins had watched the threads and spun his filters and breathed a silent sigh of relief that it hadn’t been him under all that rubble—but on the day that Mandelbrot died, he knew, his heart would break.

  It was that illogical fact that made Guilt Trip necessary in the first place. It was that illogical fact that kept him from betraying Alice Jovellanos. He sure as shit wasn’t ready to sit down and have a friendly chat with her, but he couldn’t bring himself to sell her out either.

  Besides. If he really had figured out this whole Anemone thing, it was Alice who’d given him the idea.

  He tapped the board. A window opened. Maelstrom howled on the other side.

  Either way, he’d know within the hour.

  It was everywhere.

  Even where it wasn’t, it was. Where it wasn’t talking, it was being talked about. Where it wasn’t being talked about it was being sown, tales and myths of Lenie Clarke left inert until some unsuspecting vector opened a mailbox to hatch a whole new generation.

  “She’s everywhere. That’s why they can’t catch her.”

  “You’re shitting static. How can she be everywhere?”

  “Imposters. Clones. Who says there’s only one Lenie Clarke?”

  “She can, you know, beam herself. Quantum teleportation. It’s the blood nanos she’s carrying.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “Remember the Strip?”

  “What about it?”

  “Lenie started it, haploid. She just strolled onto the beach and everyone she touched just threw off the drugs and woke up. just like that. Sounds nano to me.”

  “That wasn’t nano. That’s just, you know, that firewitch bug from NoCal, the one that makes your joints fall apart? It got into the cyclers and fucked up some molecule in the valium. You want to know what Lenie started, she started that fucking plague …”

  It had gotten smarter, too. Subtler. Hundreds of ’lawbreakers were on the watch now, prowling civilian channels for the inexplicable clarity that had alerted Desjardins the day before. That slip hadn’t been repeated, as far as anyone could tell.

  And when Desjardins finally did acquire a target, it wasn’t baud rate or dropout that clued him in, but content:

  “I know where Lenie Clarke is.” It spoke with the sexless, neutral voice of inflated ASCII set to default; its handle was Tesseract. “Les beus are on her ass, but they’ve lost the trail for now.”

  “How do you know?” asked someone claiming to be Poseidon-23.

  “I’m Anemone,” Tesseract said.

  “Sure. And I’m Ken Lubin.”

  “Then your days are numbered, litcrit-o’-mine. Ken Lubin’s been turned. He’s working for the corpses now.”

  A lot smarter, to have known that. Not so smart to admit it in mixed company. Desjardins began sketching lines on his board.

  “We need to back her up,” Tesseract was saying. “Any of you in central N’Am, say around the Great Lakes?”

  No queries to the local traffic log, no surreptitious trawl for Turing apps, no trace on the channel. No moves on anything that Tesseract might be keeping an eye on. Achilles Desjardins had gotten smarter, too.

  “Piss off, Tessie.” Some skeptic going by Hiigara. “You expect us to sub to Lenie Clarke’s personal manager just showing up to chat?”

  Nothing in the local node. Desjardins started snooping adjacent servers.

  “I sense skepticism,” Tesseract remarked. “Special effects is what you want. A demonstration.”

  “Yowsers,” said Poseidon-23, and drowned in the roar of an ocean.

  Desjardins blinked. An instant before, there’d been six people on the channel listing. Now there were 4,862, all speaking at once. No one voice was comprehensible, but even the collective blare was impossibly clear: a digital babble with no distortion, no static, no arrhythmic stutter of bytes delayed or lost in transit.

  Silence returned. The channel listing imploded back down to the six it had started with.

  “There you go,” said Tesseract.

  Shit, Desjardins thought. Shaken, he studied the results on his board. It’s talking to all of them. At once.

  “How’d you do that?” Hiigara asked.

  “I’d rather not,” Tesseract whispered. “It attracts attention. Are any of you in central N’Am, say around the Great Lakes?”

  He muted the chatter; he didn’t need it, now that he had the scent. There seemed to be a fair bit of wildlife in a hospital server across town. He stepped inside, looked out through its portals.

  Even more wildlife over there. Desjardins stepped sideways, and found himself in Oslo National’s account records. And even more wildlife flowing out to …

  Step.

  Timor. Real heavy infestation. Of course, those little subsidiaries were still back in the twentieth century when it came to pest control, but still …

  This is it, he thought.

  Don’t touch anything. Go straight to the root.

  He did. He whispered sweet nothings to gatekeepers and system clocks, flashed his ID to ease their concerns. A very large number of users are about to get very pissed off, he reflected.

  He tapped his board. On the other side of the world, every portal on the edge of the Timor node slammed shut.

  Inside, time stuttered.

  It didn’t stop completely—without some level of system iteration there’d be no way to copy what was inside. Hopefully that wouldn’t matter. A few thousand cycles, a few tens of thousands. Maybe enough for the enemy to lurch in stopmotion increments toward some dim awareness of what was happening, but not enough—if he was lucky—to actually do anything about it.

  He ignored the traffic piling up at Timor’s gates. He ignored the plaintive queries from other nodes who wondered why their feeds had gone dark. All he saw was the math in the bubble: architecture, operating system, software. Files and executables and wildlife. It was almost a kind of teleportation—each bit fixed and read and reconstructed half a world away, the original left unchanged for all the intimacy of its violation.

  He had it.

  The Timor node jerked back up to speed. Sudden panic from something inside; wildlife flew like leaves in a tornado, tearing at records, bursting through doorways, disemboweling itself after the fact. It didn’t matter. It was too late.

  Desjardins smiled. He had an Anemone in a tank.

  In the terrarium, he could stop time completely.

  It was all laid out before him, flash-frozen: a software emulation of the node itself, copies of every register and address, every spin and every bit. He could set it all running with a single command.

  And it would fly apart in seconds. Just like the Timorese original.

  So he set up inviolable backups of the logs and registries and placed them outside, with a filtered two-way pipe to the originals. He went through each of the portals leading out of the node—gates into oblivion now, from a bubble suspended in the void—and gave a little half-twist to each.

  He regarded his handiwork. Time stood still. Nothing moved.

  “Moebius, come forth,” he murmured.

  Anemone screamed. A thousand unregistered executables leapt forward and clawed the traffic log to shreds; a millio
n more escaped through the portals.

  Ten times as many rustled and watched:

  As the mutilated logs repaired themselves with barely time to bleed, magically replenished from on high;

  As the wildlife that had fled through that portal came plunging back in through this one, wheeling in confusion;

  As a channel opened in the midst of the wilderness and a voice rang out from heaven: “Hey, you. Anemone.”

  “We don’t talk to you.” Sexless, neutral. Default.

  It was still going after the records, but it was taking a dozen tacks at once: subtle forgery, full frontal assault, everything in between. None of it worked, but Desjardins was impressed anyway. Damn smart.

  As smart as an orb-weaving spider, blindly obeying lifetime fitness functions. As smart as a bird, noting wind and distance and optimizing seed load to three decimal places.

  “You really should talk to me,” Desjardins said mildly. “I’m God.” He caught a piece of wildlife at random, tagged it, set it free again.

  “You’re shitting static. Lenie Clarke is God.” A school of fish, a flock of wheeling birds so complex you needed matrix algebra and thinking machines to understand it all. The ASCII came from somewhere inside.

  “Clarke’s not God,” Desjardins said. “She’s a petri dish.”

  Wildlife still flew through the wraparound gateways, but less randomly; some sort of systematic exploration, evolving on the fly. Desjardins checked on the piece he’d tagged. It had descendants already, all carrying the Mark of Cain he’d bestowed on their ancestor. And their descendants had had descendants.

  Two hundred sixty generations in fourteen seconds. Not bad.

  Thank you, Alice. If you hadn’t ranted on about dancing bumblebees, who knows when I would’ve figured this out … .

  “Maybe you need a demonstration,” said the swarm. “Special effects is what you want, yes?”

  And she’d been right. Genes have their own intelligence. They can wire an ant for the cultivation of underground farms, the domestication of aphid cattle … even the taking of slaves. Genes can shape behaviors so sophisticated they verge on genius, given time.