Starfish

by Peter Watts

  “Pretty good odds,” Scanlon agreed. “What’s the punch line?”

  “Not good enough. We can’t take the chance.”

  “You take a bigger risk every time you step outside.”

  Rowan sighed. “And people play lotteries with odds of one in a million, all the time. But Russian roulette’s got much better odds than that, and you won’t find too many people taking their chances at it.”

  “Different payoffs.”

  “Yes. The payoffs.” Rowan shook her head; in some strange abstract way she seemed almost amused. “Cost-benefit analysis, Yves. Maximum likelihood. Risk assessment. The lower the risk, the more sense it makes to play.”

  “And the reverse,” Scanlon said.

  “Yes. More to the point. The reverse.”

  “Must be pretty bad,” he said, “to turn down ten thousand–to–one odds.”

  “Oh yes.” She didn’t look at him.

  He’d been expecting it, of course. The bottom dropped out of his stomach anyway.

  “Let me guess,” he said. He couldn’t seem to keep his voice level. “N’AmPac’s at risk if I go free.”

  “Worse,” she said, very softly.

  “Ah. Worse than N’AmPac. Okay, then. The human race. The whole human race goes belly-up if I so much as sneeze out-of-doors.”

  “Worse,” she repeated.

  She’s lying. She has to be. She’s just a refsucking dryback cunt. Find her angle.

  Scanlon opened his mouth. No words came out.

  He tried again. “Hell of a nanobacterium.” His voice sounded as thin as the silence that followed.

  “In some ways, actually, it’s more like a virus,” she said at last. “God, Yves, we’re still not really sure what it is. It’s old, older than the Archaea, even. But you’ve figured that out for yourself. A lot of the details are beyond me.”

  Scanlon giggled. “Details are beyond you?” His voice swerved up an octave, dropped again. “You lock me up for all this time and now you tell me I’m stuck here forever—I assume that’s what you’re about to tell me”—the words tumbled out too quickly for her to disagree—“and you just don’t have a head to remember the details? Oh, that’s okay, Ms. Rowan, why should I want to hear about those?”

  Rowan didn’t answer directly. “There’s a theory that life got started in rift vents. All life. Did you know that, Yves?”

  He shook his head. What the hell is she going on about?

  “Two prototypes,” Rowan continued. “Three, four billion years ago. Two competing models. One of them cornered the market, set the standard for everything from viruses up to giant sequoias. But the thing is, Yves, the winner wasn’t necessarily the best product. It just got lucky somehow, got some early momentum. Like software, you know? The best programs never end up as industry standards.”

  She took a breath. “We’re not the best either, apparently. The best never got off the ocean floor.”

  “And it’s in me now? I’m some sort of Patient Zero?” Scanlon shook his head. “No. It’s impossible.”

  “Yves—”

  “It’s just the deep sea. It’s not outer space, for God’s sake. There’s currents, there’s circulation, it would have come up a hundred million years ago, it’d be everywhere already.”

  Rowan shook her head.

  “Don’t tell me that! You’re a fucking corpse, you don’t know anything about biology! You said so yourself!”

  Suddenly Rowan was staring directly through him. “An actively maintained hypo-osmotic intracellular environment,” she intoned. “Potassium, calcium, and chlorine ions all maintained at concentrations of less than five millimoles per kilogram.” Tiny snowstorms gusted across her pupils. “The consequent strong osmotic gradient, coupled with high bilayer porosity, results in extremely efficient assimilation of nitrogenous compounds. However, it also limits distribution in aqueous environments with salinity in excess of twenty parts per thousand, due to the high cost of osmoregulation. Thermal elev—”

  “Shut up!”

  Rowan fell immediately silent, her eyes dimming slightly.

  “You don’t know what the fuck you just said,” Scanlon spat. “You’re just reading off that built-in TelePrompTer of yours. You don’t have a clue.”

  “They’re leaky, Yves.” Her voice was softer now. “It gives them a huge edge at nutrient assimilation, but it backfires in salt water because they have to spend so much energy osmoregulating. They have to keep their metabolism on high or they shrivel up like raisins. And metabolic rate rises and falls with the ambient temperature, do you follow?”

  He looked at her, surprised. “They need heat. They die if they leave the rift.”

  Rowan nodded. “It takes awhile, even at four degrees. Most of them just keep way down in the vents where it’s always warm, and they can survive cold spells between eruptions anyway. But deep circulation is so slow, you see, if they leave one rift they die long before they find another.” She took a deep breath. “But if they got past that, do you see? If they got into an environment that wasn’t quite so salty, or even one that wasn’t quite so cold, they’d get their edge back. It would be like trying to compete for your dinner with something that eats ten times faster than you do.”

  “Right. I’m carrying Armageddon around inside me. Come on, Rowan. What do you take me for? This thing evolved on the bottom of the ocean and it can just hop into a human body and hitchhike to the big city?”

  “Your blood is warm.” Rowan stared at her half of the table. “And not nearly as salty as seawater. This thing actually prefers the inside of a body. It’s been in the fish down there for ages, that’s why they get so big sometimes. Some sort of—intracellular symbiosis, apparently.”

  “What about the—the pressure difference, then? How can something that evolved under four hundred atmospheres survive at sea level?”

  She didn’t have an answer for that one at first. After a moment a faint spark lit her eyes. “It’s better off up here than down there, actually. High pressure inhibits most of the enzymes involved in metabolism.”

  “So why aren’t I sick?”

  “As I said, it’s efficient. Any body contains enough trace elements to keep it going for a while. It doesn’t take much. Eventually, they say, your bones will get brittle—”

  “That’s it? That’s the threat? A plague of osteoporosis?” Scanlon laughed aloud. “Well, bring on the exterminators, by all—”

  The sound of Rowan’s hand hitting the table was very loud.

  “Let me tell you what happens if this thing gets out,” she said quietly. “First off, nothing. We outnumber it, you see. At first we swamp it through sheer numbers, the models predict all sorts of skirmishes and false starts. But eventually it gets a foothold. Then it outcompetes conventional decomposers and monopolizes our inorganic nutrient base. That cuts the whole trophic pyramid off at the ankles. You, and me, and the viruses and the giant sequoias, all just fade away for want of nitrates or some stupid thing. And welcome to the Age of βehemoth.”

  Scanlon didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “Behemoth?”

  “With a beta. Beta life. As opposed to alpha, which is everything else.” Rowan snorted softly. “I think they named it after something from the Bible. An animal. A grass-eater.”

  Scanlon rubbed his temples, thinking furiously. “Assuming for the moment that you’re telling the truth, it’s still just a microbe.”

  “You’re going to talk about antibiotics. Most of them don’t work. The rest kill the patient. And we can’t tailor a virus to fight it because βehemoth uses a unique genetic code.” Scanlon opened his mouth; Rowan held up one hand. “Now you’ll suggest building something from scratch, customized to βehemoth’s genetics. We’re working on it, but this bug uses the same molecule for replication and catalysis; do you have any idea how much that complicates things? They tell me in another few weeks we may actually know where one gene ends and the next begins. Then we can start trying to decipher the alphabet. The
n the language. And then, maybe, build something to fight it. And then, when and if we let our counterattack loose, one of two things happens. Either our bug kills their bug so fast it destroys its own means of transmission, so you get local kills that implode without making a dent in the overall problem; or our bug kills their bug too slowly to catch up. Classic chaotic system. Almost no chance we could fine-tune the lethality in time. Containment’s really our only option.”

  The whole time she spoke, her eyes had stayed curiously dark.

  “Well. You seem to know a few details after all,” Scanlon remarked quietly.

  “It’s important, Yves.”

  “Please. Call me Dr. Scanlon.”

  She smiled, sadly. “I’m sorry, Dr. Scanlon. I am sorry.”

  “And what about the others?”

  “The others,” she repeated.

  “Clarke. Lubin. Everyone, in all the deep stations.”

  “The other stations are clean, as far as we can tell. It’s just that one little spot on Juan de Fuca.”

  “It figures,” Scanlon said.

  “What does?”

  “They never got a break, you know? They’ve been fucked over since they were kids. And now, the only place in the world this bug shows up, and it has to be right where they live.”

  Rowan shook her head. “Oh, we found it other places too. All uninhabited. Beebe was the only—” She sighed. “Actually, we’ve been very lucky.”

  “No you haven’t.”

  She looked at him.

  “I hate to burst your balloon, Pat, but you had a whole construction crew down there last year. Maybe none of your boys and girls actually got wet, but do you really think βehemoth couldn’t have hitched a ride back on some of their equipment?”

  “No,” Rowan said. “We don’t.”

  Her face was completely expressionless. It took a moment to sink in.

  “The Urchin yards,” he whispered. “Coquitlam.”

  Rowan closed her eyes. “And others.”

  “Oh Jesus,” he managed. “So it’s already out.”

  “Was,” Rowan said. “We may have contained it. We don’t know yet.”

  “And what if you haven’t contained it?”

  “We keep trying. What else can we do?”

  “Is there a ceiling, at least? Some maximum death toll that’ll make you admit defeat? Do any of your models tell you when to concede?”

  Rowan’s lips moved, although Scanlon heard no sound: yes.

  “Ah,” he said. “And just out of curiosity, what would that limit be?”

  “Two and a half billion.” He could barely hear her. “Firestorm the Pacific Rim.”

  She’s serious. She’s serious. “Sure that’s enough? You think that’ll do it?”

  “I don’t know. Hopefully we’ll never have to find out. But if that doesn’t work, nothing will. Anything more would be—futile. At least, that’s what the models say.”

  He waited for it to sink in. It didn’t. The numbers were just too big.

  But way down the scale to the personal, that was a whole lot more immediate. “Why are you doing this?”

  Rowan sighed. “I thought I’d just told you.”

  “Why are you telling me, Rowan? It’s not your style.”

  “And what’s my style, Yv—Dr. Scanlon?”

  “You’re corporate. You delegate. Why put yourself through all this awkward one-on-one self-justification when you’ve got flunkies and doppelgängers and hit men to do your dirty work?”

  She leaned forward suddenly, her face mere centimeters from the barrier. “What do you think we are, Scanlon? Do you think we’d even contemplate this if there was any other way? All the corpses and generals and heads of state, we’re doing this because we’re just plain evil? We just don’t give a shit? Is that what you think?”

  “I think,” Scanlon said, remembering, “that we don’t have the slightest control over what we are.”

  Rowan straightened, pointed at the workpad in front of him. “I’ve collated everything we’ve got on this bug. You can access it right now, if you want. Or you can call it up back in your—your quarters if you’d rather. Maybe you can come up with an answer we haven’t seen.”

  He stared straight at her. “You’ve had platoons of Tinkertoy people all over that data for weeks. What makes you think I can come up with anything they can’t?”

  “I think you should have the chance to try.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “It’s there, Doctor. All of it.”

  “You’re not giving me anything. You just want me to let you off the hook.”

  “No.”

  “You think you can fool me, Rowan? You think I’ll look over a bunch of numbers I can’t understand, and at the end I’ll say ‘Ah yes, I see it now, you’ve made the only moral choice to save life as we know it, Patricia Rowan, I forgive you’? You think this cheap trick is going to win you my consent?”

  “Yves—”

  “That’s why you’re wasting your time down here.” Scanlon felt a sudden, giddy urge to laugh. “Do you do this for everyone? Are you going to walk into every burb you’ve slated for eradication and go door-to-door saying, ‘We’re really sorry about this but you’re going to die for the greater good and we’d all sleep better if you said it was okay’?”

  Rowan sagged back in her chair. “Maybe. Consent. Yes, I suppose that’s what I’m doing. But it doesn’t really make any difference.”

  “Fucking right, it doesn’t.”

  Rowan shrugged. Somehow, absurdly, she looked beaten.

  “And what about me?” Scanlon asked after a while. “What happens if the power goes out in the next six months? What are the odds of a defective filter in the system? Can you afford to keep me alive until your Tinkerboys find a cure, or did your models tell you it was too risky?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” Rowan said. “It’s not my decision.”

  “Ah, of course. Just following orders.”

  “No orders to follow. I’m just—well, I’m out of the loop.”

  “You’re out of the loop.”

  She even smiled at that. Just for a moment.

  “So who makes the decision?” Scanlon asked, his voice impossibly casual. “Any chance I could get an interview?”

  Rowan shook her head. “Not ‘who.’”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Not ‘who,’” Rowan repeated. “What.”

  Racter

  They were all absolutely top-of-the-line. Most members of the species were lucky to merely survive the meat grinder; these people designed the damned thing. Corporate or Political or Military, they were the best of the benthos, sitting on top of the mud that buried everyone else. And yet all that combined ruthlessness, ten thousand years of social Darwinism and four billion years of Darwin Classic before that, couldn’t inspire them to take the necessary steps today.

  “Local sterilizations went—okay, at first,” Rowan said. “But then the projections started climbing. It looked bad for Mexico, they could lose their whole western seaboard before this is over, and of course that’s about all they’ve got left these days anyway. They didn’t have the resources to do it themselves, but they didn’t want N’AmPac pulling the trigger either. Said it would give us an unfair advantage under NAFTA.”

  Scanlon smiled, despite himself.

  “Then Tanaka-Krueger wouldn’t trust Japan. And then the Colombian Hegemony wouldn’t trust Tanaka-Krueger. And the Chinese, of course, they don’t trust anybody since Korea…”

  “Kin selection,” Scanlon said.

  “What?”

  “Tribal loyalties. They’re basically genetic.”

  “Isn’t everything.” Rowan sighed. “There were other things, too. Unfortunate matters of—conscience. The only solution was to find some completely disinterested party, someone everyone could trust to do the right thing without favoritism, without remorse—”

  “You’re kidding. You’re fucking kidding.”


  “—so they gave the keys to a smart gel. Even that was problematic, actually. They had to pull one out of the net at random so no one could claim it’d been preconditioned, and every member of the consortium had to have a hand in team-training it. Then there was the question of authorizing it to take—necessary steps autonomously.…”

  “You gave control to a smart gel? A head cheese?”

  “It was the only way.”

  “Rowan, those things are alien!”

  She grunted. “Not as alien as you might think. The first thing this one did was get more gels installed down on the rift, running simulations. We figured under the circumstances, nepotism was a good sign.”

  “They’re black boxes, Rowan. They wire up their own connections, we don’t know what kind of logic they use.”

  “You can talk to them. If you want to know that sort of thing, you just ask.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Scanlon put his face in his hands, took a deep breath. “Look. For all we know these gels don’t understand the first thing about language.”

  “You can talk to them.” Rowan was frowning. “They talk back.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe they’ve learned that when someone makes certain sounds in a certain order, they’re supposed to make certain other sounds in response. They might not have any concept at all of what those sounds actually mean. They learn to talk through sheer trial and error.”

  “That’s how we learn, too,” Rowan pointed out.

  “Don’t lecture me in my own field! We’ve got language and speech centers hardwired into our brains. That gives us a common starting point. Gels don’t have anything like that. Speech might just be one giant conditioned reflex to them.”

  “Well,” Rowan said, “so far it’s done its job. We have no complaints.”

  “I want to talk to it,” Scanlon said.

  “The gel?”

  “Yes.”

  “What for?” She seemed suddenly suspicious.

  “I specialize in aliens.”

  Rowan said nothing.

  “You owe me this, Rowan. You fucking owe me. I’ve been a faithful dog to the GA for ten years now. I went down to the rift because you sent me, that’s why I’m a prisoner now, that’s why— This is the least you can do.”