by Peter Watts
“I see,” Slijper said. “Well, thank you anyway, Dr. Jovellanos.”
“Is that all?” She started to rise.
“Not quite,” said one of the other corpses. “There’s one other thing. Concerning—”
—Oh please no—
“—your own involvement in all this.”
Jovellanos slumped back into her chair and waited for the axe to fall.
“Dr. Desjardins’s disappearance leaves—well, a vacancy we really can’t afford at this time,” the corpse continued.
Jovellanos looked at the backlit tribunal. A tiny part of her dared to hope.
“You worked closely with him through a great deal of this. We understand that your own contribution to date hasn’t been negligible—in fact, you’ve been working below your own potential for some time now. And you’re certainly further up the learning curve than anyone else we could bring in at this point. On the usual scales you’re overdue for a promotion. But apparently … that is, according to Psych you have certain objections to taking Guilt Trip …”
I. Can’t. Believe. It.
“Now please understand, we don’t hold this against you,” said the corpse. “Your issues concerning invasive technology are—very understandable, after what happened to your brother. I can’t honestly say I’d feel any differently in your shoes. That whole nanotech thing was such a debacle … .”
A sudden, familiar lump rose in Jovellanos’s throat.
“So you see, we understand your objections. But perhaps you could understand that Guilt Trip hails from a whole different arena, there’s certainly nothing dangerous—”
“I do know the difference between bio and nano,” Jovellanos said mildly.
“Yes, of course … I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s just that, what happened to Chito—logic doesn’t always enter into it when you …”
Chito. Poor, dead, tortured Chito. These haploids don’t have the slightest clue the things I’ve done.
All for you, kiddo.
“Yes. We understand that, of course. And even though your prejudice—again, entirely understandable—even though it’s held you back professionally, you’ve proven to be an exceptional performer. The question is, after all these years, will you continue to be held back?”
“Because we all think that would be a shame,” Slijper said.
Jovellanos looked across the table and said nothing for a full ten seconds.
“I think … I think maybe it’s time to let go,” she said at last.
“So you’d be willing to get your shots and move up to senior ’lawbreaker,” Slijper said.
For you, Chito. Onward and upward.
Alice Jovellanos nodded gravely, stoically refusing to let her facial muscles do a whole different kind of dance. “I think I’d be up for that.”
Scheherezade
Fossil water, cold and gray.
She remembered the local lore, although she was no longer certain how she’d learned it. Less than one percent of the Lakes hailed from runoff or rainfall; she swam through the liquid remains of a glacier that had melted ten thousand years before. It would never refill once human appetites had drained it dry.
For now, there was more than enough to cover her passage.
For days the mermaid had passed through its depths. Visions of a past she couldn’t remember rose like bubbles through the dark water and the pain in her side; she’d long since stopped trying to deny them. At night she would rise like some oversize plankter. She couldn’t risk coming ashore, but she’d stocked her pack with freeze-dried rations in Chicago; she’d float on the surface and tear into the vacuumsealed pouches like a sea otter, resubmerging before dawn.
She thought she remembered part of a childhood, spent where the three greatest lakes converged: Sault Sainte Marie, commercial bottleneck into Lake Superior. The city sat on its locks and dams like a troll at a bridge, extorting levies from passing tonnage. It wasn’t as populous now as it had been; four hundred kilometers from the edge of the Sovereign Quebec but still too close for some, especially in the wake of the Nunavut Lease. A giant’s shadow is a cold place to live at the best of times; a giant grown invincible overnight, nursing grudges from an oppressed childhood, was a complete nonstarter. So people had left.
Lenie Clarke remembered leaving. She’d had a whole lot of firsthand experience with shadows, and giants, and unhappy childhoods. So she, too, had moved away, and kept moving until the Pacific Ocean had stood in her way and said, no farther. She’d settled in Hongcouver and lived day to day, year to year, until that moment when the Grid Authority had turned her into something that even the ocean couldn’t stop.
Now she was back.
Past midnight. The mermaid cut quietly through a surface squirming with reflected metropolitan light. The walls of a distant lift lock huddled against the western sky like a low fortress, holding back the elevated waters of Lake Superior—one relic, at least, still resisting depletion. Clarke kept the lock to her left, swam north to the Canadian side. Derelict wharves had been rotting there since before she’d been born. She split her hood and filled her chest with air. She left her fins behind.
Even with night eyes, there was no one else to be seen.
She walked north to Queen and turned east, her feet following their own innate path beneath the dim streetlights. No one and nothing accosted her. Eastbourne Manor continued to rot undemolished, although someone had swept away the cardboard prefabs in the past twenty years.
At Coulson she stopped, looking north. The house she remembered was still there, just up from the corner. Odd how little it had changed in two decades. Assuming, of course, that those memories hadn’t been … acquired … more recently.
She still hadn’t seen a single vehicle, or another human being. Farther east, though—on the far side of Riverview—there was no mistaking the line of hovering botflies. She turned back the way she’d come; there too. They’d moved in behind her without a sound.
She turned up Coulson.
The door recognized her after all that time. It opened like a mouth, but the inside lights—as if knowing she’d have no need of their services—remained off.
The front hall receded in front of her, barren and unfurnished; its walls glistened strangely, as if freshly lacquered. An archway cut into the left wall: the living room, where Indira Clarke used to sit and do nothing. Past that, the staircase. An empty gray throat leading up into hell.
She wouldn’t be going up there just yet. She sighed and turned the corner into the living room.
“Ken,” she said.
The living room, too, was an unfurnished shell. The windows had been blacked out, but the faint street light leaking in through the hall was more than enough for rifter vision. Lubin stood in the middle of that stark space; he wore dryback clothes, but his eyes were capped. Just behind him, the room’s only furniture: a chair, with a man tied into it. He appeared to be merely unconscious.
“You shouldn’t have come,” Lubin said.
“Where else was I going to go?”
Lubin shook his head. He seemed suddenly agitated. “It was a stupid move. Easy to anticipate. You must’ve known that.”
“Where else was there?” she said again.
“This isn’t even what you think it is. This isn’t what you remember.”
“I know,” said Clarke.
Lubin looked at her, frowning.
“They fucked me over, Ken. I know that. I guess I knew it ever since I started having the—visions, although it took me a while to …”
“Then why did you come here?” Ken Lubin was nowhere to be found. This thing in his place seemed almost human.
“I must have had a real childhood somewhere,” Clarke said after a moment “They can’t have faked all of it. This seemed like the best place to start looking.”
“And you think they’ll let you? You think I can let you?”
She looked at him. His flat, empty eyes looked back from a face in unexpect
ed torment.
“I guess not,” she sighed at last, “But you know something, Ken? It was almost worth it. lust—learning this much. Knowing what they did to me …”
Behind Lubin, the man in the chair stirred briefly.
“So what happens now?” Clarke asked. “You kill me for playing Typhoid Mary? They need me as a lab rat?”
“I don’t know how much that matters anymore. It’s all over the place now.”
“What kind of plague is this, anyway?” With mild surprise she noted the weakness of her own curiosity. “I mean, it’s been almost a year and I’m not dead. I don’t even have any symptoms …”
“Takes longer with rifters,” Lubin said. “And it’s not even a disease, strictly speaking. More of a soil nanobe. Locks up sulfates or something.”
“That’s it?” Clarke shook her head. “I let all those losers fuck me and it’s not even going to kill them?”
“It’ll kill most everyone,” Lubin said softly. “It’s just going to take a while.”
“Oh.”
She tried to summon some sort of reaction to that news, some gut-level feeling of appropriate scale. She was still trying when Lubin said, “You gave us a good run, anyway. No one can believe you got as far as you did.”
“I had help,” Clarke said.
“You heard.”
“I heard a lot of things,” Clarke told him. “I don’t know what to make of any of it.”
“I do,” said the man in the chair.
“I’m sorry, Lenie,” the man said. “I tried to stop him.”
I don’t know you. Clarke looked back at Lubin. “He did?”
Lubin nodded.
“But he’s still alive.”
“I didn’t even break anything.”
“Wow.” She looked back at the bound man. “So who is he?”
“Guy called Achilles Desjardins,” Lubin said. “’Lawbreaker with the Entropy Patrol. Big fan of yours, actually.”
“Yeah? Why’s he tied up like that?”
“For the greater good.”
She wondered briefly whether to pursue it. Instead she turned to Desjardins, squatted down in front of him. “You actually tried to stop him?”
Desjardins nodded.
“For me?”
“Sort of. Not exactly,” he said. “It’s—kind of hard to explain.” He wriggled against the elastic filaments binding him to the chair; they tightened visibly in response. “Think maybe you could cut me loose?”
She glanced over her shoulder; Lubin stared back in shades of gray. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Not yet.” Probably not ever.
“Come on, you don’t need his permission,” Desjardins said.
“You can see?” It should have been too dark for mortal eyes to have registered her movements.
“He’s a ’lawbreaker,” Lubin reminded her.
“So what?”
“Enhanced pattern-matching. He doesn’t actually see any better than your average dryback, but he’s better at interpolating weak input.”
Clarke turned back to Desjardins, leaned close. “You said you knew.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Tell me,” she whispered.
“Look, this is not the time. Your friend is seriously unbalanced and in case you haven’t figured it out yet we are both—”
“Actually,” Clarke said, “I don’t think Ken’s himself today. Or we’d both be dead already.”
Desjardins shook his head and swallowed.
“Okay, then,” Clarke said. “Do you know the story of Scheherezade? Do you remember why she told her stories?”
“Oh, Jesus,” Desjardins said weakly.
The mermaid smiled. “Tell us a story, Achilles …”
Adaptive Shatter
Lubin listened while Desjardins laid it out. The ’lawbreaker had obviously been reading up since their last encounter.
“The first mutations must have been really simple,” he was saying. “The gels were trying to spread βehemoth, and this Lenie Clarke variable had been tagged as a carrier in some personnel file. So any bug that even had your name in its source would’ve had an edge, at least to start with—the gels would think it was important information, so they’d let it pass. And even when they caught on that’d just pressure the wildlife to come up with something new, and wildlife’s way faster than meat. We’re like ice ages and continental drift to them; we drive their evolution but we’re slow. They’ve got all the time they need to come up with countermeasures.
“So now a bunch of them have gone symbiotic, some kind of—Lenie Clarke interdiction network. In exchange for protection from the gels. It’s like, like being a mackerel with a bunch of sharks for bodyguards, it’s a huge competitive edge. So everyone’s jumping on the bandwagon.”
He looked through the darkness at Clarke. “You really catalyzed something amazing, you know. Group selection’s rare enough, but you actually inspired a bunch of separate life-forms to make—well, a colonial superorganism, really. Individuals acting as body parts. Some of them don’t do anything but shuttle messages around, like—living neurotransmitters, I guess. Whole lineages evolved just to handle conversation with humans. That’s why nobody could track the fucker down—we were all looking for Turing apps and neural net code and there wasn’t any. It was all genetic. Nobody made the connection.”
He fell silent.
“No.” Clarke shook her head. “That doesn’t explain anything.” She’d grown far too still during his recitation.
“It explains everything,” Desjardins said. “It—”
“So I’m just some kind of password, is that it?” She leaned in close. “Just a, a key to get through those fucking head cheeses. What about Yankton, you fucker? What about that Apocalypse Mermaid shit, and all those people with their fake eyecaps trying to suck me dry every time I turn around? Where’d they come from?”
“S-same thing,” Desjardins stammered. “Anemone was just spreading the meme any way it could.”
“Not good enough. Say something else.”
“But I don’t—”
“Say something else.”
“It happens all the time, for Chrissakes! People strap bombs onto their backs or they release sarin in the passenger lounge or they go to school one day and just start shooting and they know they’re gonna die, but it’s worth it, you know? As long as they get the bastards who victimized them.”
She laughed: a staccato bark, the sound of something snapping. “That’s what I am in all this? A victim?”
Desjardins shook his head. “They’re the victims. You’re just the gun they used to fight back with.”
She glared down at him. He looked back, helpless.
She hit him in the face.
Desjardins toppled backward; the back of his head hit the floor with a crack. He lay there, tied to the overturned chair, moaning.
She turned. Lubin was blocking her exit.
She faced him for a few seconds, unmoving. “If you’re going to kill me,” she said at last, “just do it. Either that or get out of my way.”
He considered a moment. He stepped aside. Lenie Clarke brushed past him and went upstairs.
She really had spent her childhood here, of course. The sets were real enough; it was only the supporting roles that had been imaginary. Lubin knew exactly where she was going.
He found her in the undarkness of her old bedroom. It had been stripped and sprayed, like the rest of the house. Clarke turned at his entrance, looked around tiredly at the bare walls: “So is it abandoned? On the market?”
“We did this before you arrived,” he said. “Just in case. To simplify cleanup.”
“Ah. Well, it doesn’t matter. Still seems like yesterday, in fact.” She aimed her capped eyes at one wall. “That’s where my bed was. That was where—Dad—used to play bedtime stories for me. Foreplay, I guess you’d call it. And there’s the air duct—” gesturing at a grille set into the baseboard—“that connects right down to the living ro
om. I could hear Mom playing with her favorite shows. I always thought those shows were really stupid, but looking back maybe she didn’t like them much either. They were just alibis.”
“It didn’t happen,” Lubin reminded her. “None of it.”
“I know that, Ken. I get the point.” She took a breath. “And you know, right now I think I’d give anything if it had.”
Lubin blinked, surprised. “What?”
She turned to face him. “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be—to be haunted by happiness?” She managed a bitter laugh. “All those months I kept denying it, chalking it up to stroke and hallucination because shit, Ken, I couldn’t have had a happy childhood. My parents couldn’t be anything but monsters, you see? The monsters made me what I am. They’re the only reason I survived all the shit that came later, they’re the only thing that kept me going. I was not gonna let those stumpfucks win. Everything that drove me, every time I didn’t quit, every time I beat the odds, it was a slap in their big smug all-powerful monster faces. Everything I ever did I did against them. Everything I am is against them. And now you stand there and tell me the monsters never even existed …”
Her eyes were hard, empty spots of rage. She glared up at him, her shoulders shaking. But finally she turned away, and when she spoke again her voice came out soft and broken.
“They do exist though, Ken. Honest-to-God flesh-andblood monsters, the old-fashioned kind. They hide from the daylight and they sneak out of the swamps at night and they go on rampages just like you’d expect.” A long, shuddering breath. “And all these monsters could ever say in their own defense is it happened to them first, the world fucked them long before they started fucking it back, and if anyone out there wasn’t guilty, well, they hadn’t stopped all the others who were, right? So everybody’s got it coming. But the monsters can’t plead self-defense, they can’t even plead righteous revenge. Nothing happened to them.”
“Something happened,” Lubin said. “Even if your parents didn’t do it.”
She didn’t speak for a while. Then: “I wonder what he was like, really.”