by Peter Watts
They spend most of their time in their suite, plugged into virtual environments far more compelling than the confines of this place could ever be. They come out to get their meals, of course—in-suite food production is a thing of the past, ever since the rifters confiscated "their share" of the resource base—but even then, they retreat back into their quarters with their trays of Cycler food and hydroponic produce, to eat behind closed doors. It's a minor and inoffensive quirk, this sudden desire for privacy from their peers. Patricia Rowan never gave it much thought until that day in the Comm Cave when Ken Lubin, in search of clues, had asked What about the fish? Perhaps they hitched a ride. Are the larvae planktonic?
And Jerry Seger, impatient with this turncoat killer posing as a deep thinker, dismissed him as she would a child: If it had been able to disperse inside plankton, why wait until now to take over the world? It would have done it a few hundred million years ago.
Maybe it would have, Rowan muses now.
The Holtzbrincks made their mark in pharmaceuticals, stretching back even to the days before gengineering. They've kept up with the times, of course. When the first hydrothermal ecosystems were discovered, back before the turn of the century, an earlier generation of Holtzbrincks had been there—reveling in new Domains, sifting through cladograms of freshly-discovered species, new microbes, new enzymes built to work at temperatures and pressures long thought impossibly hostile to any form of life. They catalogued the cellular machinery ticking sluggishly in bedrock kilometers deep, germs living so slowly they hadn't divided since the French Revolution. They tweaked the sulfur-reducers that choked to death on oxygen, coaxed them into devouring oil slicks and curing strange new kinds of cancer. The Holtzbrink Empire, it was said, held patents on half the Archaebacteria.
Now Patricia Rowan sits across from Jakob and Jutta in their living room, and wonders what else they might have patented in those last days on earth.
"I'm sure you've heard the latest," she says. "Jerry just confirmed it. ßehemoth's made it to Impossible Lake."
Jakob nods, a birdlike gesture including shoulders as well as head. But his words carry denial: "No, I don't think so. I saw the stats. Too salty." He licks his lips, stares at the floor. "ßehemoth wouldn't like it."
Jutta puts a comforting hand on his knee.
He's a very old man, his conquests all in the past. He was born too early, grew too old for eternal youth. By the time the tweaks were available—every defective base pair snipped out, every telomere reinforced—his body had already been wearing out for the better part of a century. There's a limit to how much you can fix so late in the game.
Rowan gently explains. "Not in the Lake itself, Jakob. Somewhere nearby. One of the hot vents."
He nods and nods and will not look at her.
Rowan glances at Jutta; Jutta looks back, helplessness on her face.
Rowan presses on: "As you know, this wasn't supposed to happen. We studied the bug, we studied the oceanography, we chose this place very carefully. But we missed something."
"Goddamn Gulf Stream shut down," the old man says. His voice is stronger than his body, although not by much. "They said it would happen. Change all the currents. Turn England into goddamn Siberia."
Rowan nods. "We've looked at a lot of different scenarios. Nothing seems to fit. I think maybe there might be something about ßehemoth itself that we're missing." She leans forward slightly. "Your people did a lot of prospecting out around the Rim of Fire, didn’t they? Back in the thirties?"
"Sure. Everyone was. Those bloody Archaea, it was the gold rush of the Twenty-First."
"Your people spent a lot of time on Juan de Fuca back then. They never encountered ßehemoth?"
"Mmmm." Jakob Holtzbrink shakes his head. His shoulders don't move.
"Jakob, you know me. You know I've always been a staunch supporter of corporate confidentiality. But we're all on the same side here, we're all in the same boat so to speak. If you know anything, anything at all…"
"Oh, Jakob never did any of the actual research," Jutta interjects. "Surely you know that, he was really more of a people person."
"Yes, of course. But he also took a real interest in the cutting edge. He was always quite excited about new discoveries, remember?" Rowan laughs softly. "There was a time back there when we thought the man practically lived in a submarine."
"I just took the tours, you know. Jutta's right, I didn't do any of the research. That was the gel-jocks, Jarvis and that lot." For the first time, Jakob meets Rowan's eye. "Lost that whole team when ßehemoth broke out, you know. CSIRA was conscripting our people right across the globe. Just waltzed right in, drafted them out from under our noses." He snorts. "Goddamn greater good."
Jutta squeezes his knee. They glance at each other; she smiles. He puts his hand over hers.
His eyes drift back to the floor. Very gently, he begins nodding again.
"Jakob wasn't close to the research teams," Jutta explains. "Scientists aren't all that good with people, as you know. It would be a disaster to let some of those people act as spokespersons, but they still resented the way Jakob presented their findings sometimes."
Rowan smiles patiently. "The thing is, Jakob, I've been thinking. About ßehemoth, and how old it is—"
"Oldest goddamn life on the planet," Jakob says. "The rest of us, we just dropped in later. Martian meteor or something. Bloody ßehemoth, it's the only thing that actually started here."
"But that's the thing, isn't it? ßehemoth doesn't just predate other life, it predates photosynthesis. It predates oxygen. It's over four billion years old. And all the other really ancient bugs we've found, the Archaebacteria and the Nanoliths and so forth, they're still anaerobes to this day. You only find them in reducing environments. And yet here's ßehemoth, even older, and oxygen doesn't bother it at all."
Jacob Holtzbrink stops rocking.
"Smart little bug," he says. "Keeps up with the times. Has those, what do you call them, like Pseudomonas has—"
"Blachford genes. Change their own mutation rate under stress."
"Right. Right. Blachford genes." Jakob brings one hand up, runs it over a sparsely-haired and liver-spotted scalp. "It adapted. Adapted to oxygen, and adapted to living inside fishes, and now it's adapting to every other goddamn nook and cranny on the goddamn planet."
"Only it never adapted to low temperature and high salinity in combination," Rowan observes. "It never adapted to the single biggest habitat on Earth. The deep sea stumped it for billions of years. The deep sea would still be stumping it if the Channer outbreak hadn't happened."
"What are you saying?" Jutta wonders, a sudden slight sharpness in her voice. Her husband says nothing.
Rowan takes a breath. "All our models are based on the assumption that ßehemoth has been in its present form for hundreds of millions of years. The advent of oxygen, hypotonic host bodies—all that happened in the deep, deep Precambrian. And we know that not much has changed since then, Blachford genes or no Blachford genes—because if it had, ßehemoth would have ruled the world long before now. We know it can't disperse through the abyss because it hasn't dispersed through the abyss, in all the millions of years it's had to try. And when someone suggests that maybe it hitched a ride in the ichthyoplankton, we dismiss them out of hand not because anybody's actually checked—who had the time, the way things were going?—but because if it could disperse that way, it would have dispersed that way. Millions of years ago."
Jakob Holtzbrink clears his throat.
Rowan lays it on the table: "What if ßehemoth hasn't had millions of years? What if it's only had a few decades?"
"Well, that's—" Jutta begins.
"Then we're not sure of anything any more, are we? Maybe we're not talking about a few isolated relicts here and there. Maybe we're talking about epicenters. And maybe it's not that ßehemoth isn't able to spread out, but that it's only just now got started."
That avian rocking again, and the same denial: "Nah. Nah. It's old.
RNA template, mineralized walls. Big goddamned pores all over it, that's why it can't hack cold seawater. Leaks like a sieve." A bubble of saliva appears at the corner of his mouth; Jutta absently reaches up to brush it away. Jakob raises his hand irritably, pre-empting her. Her hands drop into her lap.
"The pyranosal sequences. Primitive. Unique. That woman, that doctor: Jerenice. She found the same thing. It's old."
"Yes," Rowan agrees, "it's old. Maybe something changed it, just recently."
Jakob's rubbing his hands, agitated. "What, some mutation? Lucky break? Damn unlucky for the rest of us."
"Maybe someone changed it," Rowan says.
There. It's out.
"I hope you're not suggesting," Jutta begins, and falls silent.
Rowan leans forward and lays her hand on Jakob's knee. "I know how it was out there, thirty, forty years ago. It was a gold rush mentality, just as you said. Everybody and their organcloner was setting up labs on the rift, doing all kinds of in situ work—"
"Of course it was in situ, you ever try to duplicate those conditions in a lab—"
"But your people were at the forefront. You not only had your own research, you had your eye on everyone else's. You were too good a businessman to do it any other way. And so I'm coming to you, Jakob. I'm not making any claims or accusing anyone of anything, do you understand? I just think that if anyone in Atlantis might have any ideas about anything that might have happened out there, you'd be the one. You're the expert, Jakob. Can you tell me anything?"
Jutta shakes her head. "Jacob doesn't know anything, Patricia. Neither of us knows anything. And I do take your implication."
Rowan keeps her eyes locked on the old man. He stares at the floor, he stares through the floor, through the deck plating and the underlying pipes and conduits, through the wires and fullerene and biosteel, through seawater and oozing, viscous rock into some place that she can only imagine. When he speaks, his voice seems to come from there.
"What do you want to know?"
"Would there be any reason why someone—hypothetically—might want to take an organism like ßehemoth, and tweak it?"
"More than you can count," says the distant voice. This frail body it's using scarcely seems animate.
"Such as?"
"Targeted delivery. Drugs, genes, replacement organelles. Its cell wall, you've never seen anything like it. Nothing has. No immune response to worry about, slips past counterintrusion enzymes like they were blind and deaf. Target cell takes it right in, lyses the wall, COD. Like a biodegradable buckyball."
"What else?"
"The ultimate pep pill. Under the right conditions the thing pumps out ATP so fast you could roll a car over single-handed. Makes mitochondria look like yesterday's sockeye. Soldier with ßehemoth in his cells might even give an exoskel a run for the money, if you feed him enough."
"And if ßehemoth were tweaked properly," Rowan amends.
"Aye," whispers the old man. "There's the rub."
Rowan chooses her words very carefully. "Might there have been any…less precise applications? MAD machines? Industrial terrorism?"
"You mean, like what it does now? No. W—someone would have to be blind and stupid and insane all at once to design something like that."
"But you'd have to increase the reproductive rate quite a bit, wouldn't you? To make it economically viable."
He nods, his eyes still on far-focus. "Those deep-rock dwellers, they live so slow you're lucky if they divide once a decade."
"And that would mean they'd have to eat a lot more, wouldn't it? To support the increased growth rate."
"Of course. Child knows that much. But that's not why you'd do it, nobody would do that because they wanted something that could—it would just be a, an unavoidable—"
"A side effect," Jutta suggests.
"A side effect," he repeats. His voice hasn't changed. It still rises, calm and distant, from the center of the earth. But there are tears on Jakob Holtzbrinck's face.
"So nobody did it deliberately. They were aiming for something else, and things just—went wrong. Is that what you're saying?"
"You mean, hypothetically?" The corners of his mouth lift and crinkle in some barely-discernible attempt at a smile. A tear runs down one of those fleshy creases and drops off his chin.
"Yes, Jakob. Hypothetically."
The head bobs up and down.
"Is there anything we can do? Anything we haven't tried?"
Jakob shakes his head. "I'm just a corpse. I don't know."
She stands. The old man stares down into his own thoughts. His wife stares up at Rowan.
"What he's told you," she says. "Don't take it the wrong way."
"What do you mean?"
"He didn't do this, any more than you did. He's no worse than the rest of you."
Rowan inclines her head. "I know, Fran."
She excuses herself. The last thing she sees, as the hatch seals them off, is Fran Holtzbrink sliding a lucid dreamer over her husband's bowed head.
There's nothing to be done about it now. No point in recriminations, no shortage of fingers pointing in any direction. Still, she's glad she paid the visit. Even grateful, in an odd way. It's a selfish gratitude, but it will have to do. Patricia Rowan takes whatever solace she can in the fact that the buck doesn't stop with her any more. It doesn't even stop with Lenie Clarke, Mermaid of the Apocalypse. Rowan starts down the pale blue corridor of Res-D, glancing one more time over her shoulder.
The buck stops back there.
Portrait of the Sadist as a Free Man
The technical term was fold catastrophe. Seen on a graph it was a tsunami in cross-section, the smooth roof of an onrushing wave reaching forward, doubling back beneath the crest and plummeting in a smooth glassy arc to some new, low-energy equilibrium that left no stone standing on another.
Seen on the ground it was a lot messier: power grids failing; life-support and waste-management systems seizing up; thoroughfares choked with angry, frenzied mobs pushed one meal past revolution. The police in their exoskels had long since retreated from street level; pacification botflies swarmed overhead, scything through the mobs with gas and infrasound.
There was also a word for the leading edge of the wave, that chaotic inflection point where the trajectory reversed itself before crashing: breakpoint. Western N'AmPac had pulled through that hairpin turn sometime during the previous thirty-four hours; everything west of the Rockies was pretty much a writeoff. CSIRA had slammed down every kind of barrier to keep it contained; people, goods, electrons themselves had been frozen in transit. To all intents and purposes the world ended at the Cordillera. Only 'lawbreakers could reach through that barrier now, to do what they could.
It wouldn't be enough. Not this time.
Of course, the system had been degrading for decades. Centuries, even. Desjardins owed his very job to that vibrant synergism between entropy and human stupidity; without it, damage control wouldn't be the single largest industry on the planet. Eventually everything had been bound to fall apart, anyone with a pair of eyes and an IQ even slightly above room temperature knew that. But there'd been no ironclad reason why it had had to happen quite as quickly as it had. They could have bought another decade or two, a little more time for those who still had faith in human ingenuity to go on deluding themselves.
But the closer you got to breakpoint, the harder it was to suture the cracks back together. Even equilibria were unstable, so close to the precipice. Forget butterflies: with a planet teetering this close to the edge, the fluttering of an aphid's wings might be enough to push it over.
It was 2051, and it was Achilles Desjardins sworn duty to squash Lenie Clarke like an insect of whatever kind.
He watched her handiwork spread across across the continent like a web of growing cracks shattering the surface of a frozen lake. His inlays gulped data from a hundred feeds: confirmed and probable sightings over the previous two months, too stale to be any use in a manhunt but potential useful fo
r predicting the next ßehemoth outbreak. Memes and legends of the Meltdown Madonna, far more numerous and metastatic—a reproductive strategy for swarms of virtual wildlife Desjardins had only just discovered and might never fully understand. Reality and Legend in some inadvertant alliance, ßehemoth blooming everywhere they converged; firestorms and blackouts coming up from behind, an endless ongoing toll of innocent lives preempted for the greater good.
It was a lie, Desjardins knew. N'Am was past breakpoint despite all those draconian measures. It would take a while for the whole system to shake out; it was a long drop from crest to trough. But Desjardins was nothing if not adept at reading the numbers. He figured two weeks—three at the most—before the rest of the continent followed N'AmPac into anarchy.
A newsfeed running in one corner of his display served up a fresh riot from Hongcouver. State-of-the-art security systems gave their lives in defence of glassy spires and luxury enclaves—defeated not by clever hacks or superior technology, but by the sheer weight of flesh against their muzzles. The weapons died of exhaustion, disappeared beneath a tide of live bodies scrambling over dead ones. The crowd breached the gates as he watched, screaming in triumph. Thirty thousand voices in superposition: a keening sea, its collective voice somehow devoid of any humanity. It sounded almost mechanical. It sounded like the wind.
Desjardins killed the channel before the mob learned what he already knew: the spires were empty, the corpses they'd once sheltered long since gone to ground.
Or to sea, rather.
A light hand brushed against his back. He turned, startled; Alice Jovellanos was at his shoulder. Desjardins shot a furtive glance back to his board when he saw who was with her; Rome burned there on a dozen insets. He reached for the cutoff.
"Don't." Lenie Clarke slipped the visor from her face and stared at the devastation with eyes as blank as eggshells. Her face was calm and expressionless, but when she spoke again, her voice trembled.