by Peter Watts
So for a while, Achilles Desjardins had been a star. Even Lertzmann had pretended to like him for the better part of a month, told him he was fast-tracked for senior status just as soon as they got the security checks out of the way. Unless he had a bunch of butchered babies in his past he'd be getting his shots before Hallowe'en. Hell, he'd probably be getting them even if he did have a bunch of butchered babies in his past. Background checks were nothing but empty ritual in the higher ranks of the Patrol; you could be a serial killer and it wouldn't make a damn bit of difference once Guilt Trip was bubbling in your brain. You'd be just as thoroughly enslaved to the Greater Good.
Aurora, her name was. She wore the zebra hair that had been fashionable at the time, and an endearingly-tasteless armload of faux refugee branding scars. They'd hooked up at some CSIRA soirée hosted from the far side of the world by the EurAfrican Assembly. Their jewelry sniffed each other's auras to confirm a mutual interest (which still meant something, back then), and their path chips exchanged the usual clean bills of health (which didn't). So they left the party, dropped three hundred meters from CSIRA's executive stratosphere to the Sudbury Streets—then another fifty into the subterranean bowels of Pickering's Pile, where the pathware was guaranteed hackproof and tested for twice the usual range of STDs to boot. They gave blood behind a cute little r'n'r couple who broke up on the spot when one of them tested positive for an exotic trematode infesting his urinary tract.
Desjardins had yet to acquire most of the tailored chemicals that would cruise his system in later years; he could still safely imbibe all manner of tropes and mood-changers. So he and Aurora grabbed a booth just off the bar while their bloods ran, stroked the little psychotropic amphibians clambering about in the tabletop terrarium. Dim green light filtered in from the great underground tank in which the Pile was immersed, a radium-glow mock-up of an old nuclear-storage lagoon visible through the plexi walls. After a few minutes one of the in-house butterflies lit on their table, its membranous wings sparkling with refracted data: green on all wavelengths.
"Told you," Aurora said, and kissed his nose.
Pickering's Pile rented fuck-cubbies by the minute. They split five hours between them.
He fucked her inside and out. Outside, he was the consummate caring lover. He tongued her nipples, teeth carefully sheathed. He left trails of kisses from throat to vagina, gently explored every wet aperture, breath shaky with fevered restraint. Every move deliberate, every signal unmistakable: he would rather die than hurt this woman.
Inside, he was tearing her apart. No caresses in there; he slapped her so hard her fucking head just about came off. Inside she was screaming. Inside, he beat her until she didn't have the strength to flinch when the whip came down.
She murmered and sighed sweetly throughout. She remarked on how he obviously worshipped women, on what a change this made from the usual rough-and-tumble, on how she didn't know if she belonged on this pedestal. Desjardins patted himself on the back. He didn't mention the tiny scars on her back, the telltale little lozenges of fresh pink skin that spoke of topical anabolics. Evidently Aurora had use for accellerated healing. Perhaps she had recently escaped from an abusive relationship. Perhaps he was her sanctuary.
Even better. He imagined some past partner, beating her.
"Oh, fuck it," she said, four hours in. "Just hit me."
He froze, terrified, betrayed by body language or telepathy or a lucky guess for all he knew. "What?"
"You're so gentle," Aurora told him. "Let's get rough."
"You don't—" He had to stifle a surprized laugh. "I mean, what?"
"Don't look so startled." She come-hithered a smile. "Haven't you ever smacked a woman before?"
Those were hints, he realised. She was complaining. And Achilles Desjardins, pattern-matcher extraordinaire, master of signal-from-noise, had missed it completely.
"I kind of minored in asphyx," she suggested now. "And I don't see that belt of yours getting any kind of work-out…"
It was everything he'd ever dreamed of, and hated himself for. It was his most shameful fantasy come to life. It was perfect. Oh, you glorious bitch. You are just asking for it, aren't you? And I'm just the one to give it to you.
Except he wasn't. Suddenly, Achilles Desjardins was as soft as a dollar.
"You serious?" he asked, hoping she wouldn't notice, knowing she already had. "I mean—you want me to hurt you?"
"Achilles the hero." She cocked her head mischieviously. "Don't get out much, do you?"
"I do okay," he said, defensive despite himself. "But—"
"It's just a scene, kiddo. Nothing radical. I'm not asking you to kill me or anything."
Too bad. But his own unspoken bravado didn't fool him for an instant. Achilles Desjardins, closet sadist, was suddenly scared to death.
"You mean acting," he said. "Silk cords, safe words, that kinda thing."
She shook her head. "I mean," she said patiently, "I want to bleed. I want to hurt. I want you to hurt me, lover."
What's wrong with me? he wondered. She's just what I've always wanted. I can't believe my luck.
And an instant later: If it is luck...
He was, after all, on the cusp of his life. Background checks were in progress. Risk assessments were underway. Just below the surface, the system was deciding whether Achilles Desjardins could be trusted to daily decide the fate of millions. Surely they already knew his secret—the mechanics had looked inside his head, they'd have noticed any missing or damaged wiring. Maybe this was a test, to see if he could control his impulses. Maybe Guilt Trip wasn't quite the failsafe they'd told him it was, maybe enough wonky neurons screwed it up, maybe his baseline depravity was a potential loophole of some kind. Or maybe it was a lot simpler. Maybe they just couldn't afford to risk investing too much PR in a hero who couldn't control inclinations that some of the public might still find—unpleasant…
Aurora curled her lip and bared her neck. "Come on, kid. Do me."
She was the glimmer in the eye of every partner he'd ever had, that hard little twinkle that always seemed to say Better be careful, you sick twisted piece of shit. One slip and you're finished. She was six-year-old Penny, broken and bleeding and promising not to tell. She was his father, standing in a darkened hallway, staring through him with unreadable eyes that said I know something about you, son, and you'll never know exactly what it is
"Rory," Desjardins said carefully, "have you ever talked to anyone about this?"
"All the time." She was still smiling, but a sudden wariness tinged her voice.
"No, I mean someone—you know—"
"Professional." The smile was gone. "Some piece of corpsy wetware that sucks down my account while telling me that I don't know my own mind, it's all just low self-esteem and my father raped me when I was preverbal." She reached for her clothes. "No, Achilles, I haven't. I'd rather spend my time with people who accept me for who I am than with misguided assholes who try to change me into what I'm not." She pulled up her panties. "I guess you just don't run into those types at official functions any more."
He tried: "You don't have to go."
He tried: "It was just so unexpected, you know?"
He tried: "It's just, you know, it seems to disrespectful—"
Aurora sighed. "Kiddo, if you really respected me you'd at least give me credit for knowing what I like."
"But I like you," he blundered, free-falling in smoke and flame. "How am I supposed to enjoy hurting you when—"
"Hey, you think I enjoyed everything I did to get you off?"
She left him in the cubby with a flaccid penis, fifty minutes left on the clock and the stunning, humiliating realization that he was forever trapped within his own disguise. I'll never let it out, he realised. No matter how much I want to, no matter who asks me, no matter how safe it seems. I'll never be sure there isn't an open circuit somewhere. I'll never be sure it isn't a trap. I'm gonna be undercover for the rest of my life, I'm too fucking terrified to come
out.
His Dad would have been proud. He was a good Catholic boy after all.
But Achilles Desjardins was nothing if not practised at the art of adaptation. By the time he emerged, chastened and alone, he was already beginning to rebuild his defenses. Maybe it was better this way. The biology was irrefutable, after all: sex was violence, literally, right down to the neurons. The same synapses lit up whether you fucked or fought, the same drive to violate and subjugate. It didn't matter how gentle you were on the outside, it didn't matter how much you pretended: even the most consensual intercourse was nothing more than the rape of a victim who'd given up.
If I do all this and have not love, I am as sounding brass, he thought.
He knew it in the floor of his brain, he knew it in the depths of his id. Sadism was hardwired, and sex—sex was more than violent. It was disrespect. There was no need to inflict it on another human being, here in the middle of the twenty-first century. There was no right to. Especially not for monsters with broken switches. He had a home sensorium that could satify any lust he could imagine, serve up virtual victims at such high rez that even he might be fooled.
There were other advantages, too. Never again the elaborate courtship rituals that he always seemed to fuck up at. Never again the fear of infection, the ludicrous efforts to romanticise path scans and pass blood work off as foreplay. Never again that hard twinkle in your victim's eyes, maybe knowing.
He had it worked out. Hell, he had a new Paradigm of Life.
From now on, Achilles Desjardins would be a civilised man. He would inflict his vile passions on machinery, not flesh—and he would save himself a shitload of embarrassment in the bargain. Aurora had been for the best, a narrow escape in the nick of time. Head full of bad wiring in that one, no doubt about it. Pain and pleasure centers all crosswired.
He didn't need to mix it up with a freak like that.
Fire Drill
She wakes up lost at sea.
She's not sure what called her back, exactly—she remembers a gentle push, as if someone was nudging her awake—yet she's perfectly alone out here. That was the whole point of the exercise. She could have slept anywhere in the trailer park, but she needed the solitude. So she swam out past Atlantis, past the habs and the generators, past the ridges and fissures that claw the neighborhood. Finally she arrived here, at this distant little outcropping of pumice and polymetallics, and fell into wide-eyed sleep.
Only now something has nudged her awake, and she has lost her bearings.
She pulls the sonar pistol off her thigh and sweeps the darkness. After a few seconds a fuzzy metropolitan echo comes back, just barely teasing the left edge of her sweep. She takes more direct aim and fires again. Atlantis and its suburbs come back dead center.
And a harder echo, smaller, nearer. Closing.
It's not an intercept course. A few more pings resolve a vector tracking past to starboard. Whoever it is probably doesn't even know she's here—or didn't, until she let loose with sonar.
They're moving pretty damned fast for someone without a squid. Curious, Clarke moves to intercept. She keeps her headlamp low, barely bright enough to tell substrate from seawater. The mud scrolls by like a treadmill. Pebbles and the occasional brittle star accent the monotony.
The bow wave catches her just before the body does. A shoulder rams into her side, pushes her into the bottom; mud billows up around her. A fin slaps Clarke in the face. She grabs blindly through the zeroed viz and catches hold of an arm.
"What the fuck!"
The arm yanks out of her grasp, but her expletive seems to have had some effect. The thrashing stops, at least. The muddy clouds continue to swirl, but by now it's all inertia.
"Who..." It's a rough, grating sound, even for a vocoder.
"It's Lenie." She brightens her headlamp; a billion suspended particles blind her in bright fog. She fins up into clearer water and points her beam at the bottom.
Something moves down there. "Shiiit...lights down..."
"Sorry." She dims the lamp. "Rama? That you?"
Bhanderi rises from the murk. "Lenie." A mechanical whisper. "Hi."
She supposes she's lucky he still recognizes her. Hell, she's lucky he can still talk. It's not just the skin that rots when you stop coming inside. It's not just the bones that go soft. Once a rifter goes native, the whole neocortex is pretty much a writeoff. You let the abyss stare into you long enough and that whole civilized veneer washes away like melting ice in running water. Clarke imagines the fissures of the brain smoothing out over time, devolving back to some primordial fish-state more suited to their chosen habitat.
Rama Bhanderi isn't that far gone yet, though. He still even comes inside occasionally.
"What's the rush?" Clarke buzzes at him. She doesn't really expect an answer.
She gets one, though: "ru...dopamine, maybe...Epi..."
It clicks after a second: dopamine rush. Is he still human enough to deliver bad puns? "No, Rama. I mean, why the hurry?"
He hangs beside her like a black wraith, barely visible in the dim ember of her headlamp. "Ah...ah...I'm not...." his voice trails off.
"Boom," he says after a moment. "Blew it up. Waayyyy too bright."
A nudge, she remembers. Enough to wake her. "Blew what? Who?"
"Are you real?" he asks distantly. "...I...think you're a histamine glitch..."
"It's Lenie, Rama. For real. What blew up?"
"...acetylcholine, maybe..." His hand passes back and forth in front of his face. "Only I'm not cramping..."
This is useless.
"...don't like her any more," Bhanderi buzzes softly. "And he chased me..."
Something tightens in her throat. She moves towards him. "Who? Rama, what—"
"Back off," he grates. "I'm all...territorial..."
"Sorry...I..."
Bhanderi turns and fins away. She starts after him and stops, realizing: there's another way.
She brightens her lamp. The muddy storm front still hangs beneath her, just off the bottom. It won't settle for hours in this dense, sluggish water.
Neither will the trails that lead to it.
One of them is hers: a narrow muddy contrail kicked into suspension as she arrowed in from the east. The other trail extends back along a bearing of 345°. Clarke follows it.
She's not heading for Atlantis, she soon realizes. Bhanderi's trail veers to port, along a line that should keep her well off the southwest shoulder of the complex. There's not much along that route, as far as Clarke can remember. Maybe a woodpile, one of several caches of prefab parts scattered about in anticipation of future expansion, back when the corpses first arrived. Sure enough, the water ahead begins to lighten. Clarke douses her own beam and sonars the brightness ahead. A jumble of hard Euclidean echoes bounce back, all from objects significantly larger than a human body.
She kicks forward. The diffuse glow resolves into four point sources: sodium floods, one at each corner of the woodpile. Stacked slabs of plastic and biosteel lie on pallets within the lit area. Curved slices of habhull lay piled on the substrate like great nested clamshells. Larger shapes loom in the murky distance: storage tanks, heat exchangers, the jackets of emergency reactors never assembled.
The distance is murky, Clarke realizes. Far murkier than usual.
She fins up into the water column and coasts above the industrial subscape. Something leans against the light like a soft dark wall, just past the furthest lamppost. She's been expecting it ever since she spoke to Bhanderi. Now it spreads out ahead of her in silent confirmation, a great billowing cloud of mud blown off the bottom and lingering, virtually weightless, in the aftermath of some recent explosion.
Of course, the corpses stockpiled blasting caps along with everything else...
Something tickles the corner of Clarke's eye, some small disarray somehow out of place among the organized chaos directly below. Two slabs of hull plating have been pulled from their stacks and laid out on the mud. Buckshot scatters of acne blemi
sh their surfaces. Clarke arcs down for a closer look. No, those aren't innocuous clots of mud or a recent colony of benthic invertebrates. They're holes, punched through three centimeters of solid biosteel. Their edges are smooth, melted and instantly congealed by some intense heat source. Carbon scoring around each breach conveys a sense of bruising, of empty eyes battered black.
Clarke goes cold inside.
Someone's gearing up for the finals.
Family Values
Ever since the founding of Atlantis, Jakob and Jutta Holtzbrink have kept to themselves. It wasn't always thus. Back on the surface, they were flamboyant even by corpse standards. They seemed to delight in the archaic contrast they presented to the world at large; their history together predates the Millennium, they were married so very long ago that the ceremony actually took place in a church. Jutta even took her husband's surname. Women did things like that back then, Rowan remembers. Sacrificed little bits of their own identity for the good of the Patriarchy, or whatever it was called.
An old-fashioned couple, and proud of it. When they appeared in public—which they did often—they appeared together, and they stood out.
Public doesn't exist here in Atlantis, of course. Public was left behind to fend for itself. Atlantis was the crème de la crème from the very beginning, only movers and shakers and those worker bees who cared for them, deep in the richest parts of the hive.
Down here, Jutta and Jakob don't get out much. The escape changed them. It changed everyone of course, humbled the mighty, rubbed their noses in their own failures even though, goddammit, they still made the best of it, adapted even to Doomsday, saw the market in lifeboats and jumped on board before anyone else. These days, mere survival is a portfolio to take pride in. But the Holtzbrincks have not availed themselves of even that half-assed and self-serving consolation. ßehemoth hasn't touched them in the flesh, not a single particle, and yet somehow it seems to have made them almost physically smaller.