by Peter Watts
"Because it's your life. Not mine."
Alyx didn't seem to have been expecting that. She glared back, obviously unconvinced, obviously unequipped to respond.
"Have you ever wanted to die?" Clarke asked her. "Seriously?"
"No, but—"
"I have."
Alyx fell silent.
"And believe me," Clarke continued, "it's no fun listening to a bunch of professional head lice telling you how much there is to live for and how things aren't really so bad and how five years from now you'll look back and wonder how you ever could have even imagined offing yourself. I mean, they don't know shit about my life. If there's one thing I'm the world's greatest expert on, it's how it feels to be me. And as far as I'm concerned it's the height of fucking arrogance to tell another human being whether their life is worth living."
"But you don't have to feel that way," Alyx said unhappily. "Nobody does! You just slap a derm on your arm and—"
"It's not about feeling happy, Lex. It's about having cause to feel happy." Clarke put her palm against the girl's cheek. "And you say I don't care enough to stop you from killing yourself, but I say I care about you so goddamned much I'd even help you do it, if that was you really wanted."
Alyx stared at the deck for a long time. When she looked up again her eyes shone.
"But you didn't die," she said softly. "You wanted to, but you didn't, and that's why you're alive right now."
And that's why a lot of other people aren't... But Clarke kept the thought to herself.
And now she's about to repudiate it all. She's about to hunt down someone who's chosen to retire, and she's going to ignore that choice, and inflict her own in its place. She'd like to think that maybe Alyx would find the irony amusing, but she knows better. There's nothing funny about any of this. It's all getting way too scary.
She's foregone the use of a squid this time out; natives tend to shy away from the sound of machinery. For what seems like forever she's been traversing a plain of bone-gray mud, a bottomless ooze of dead plankton ten million years in the making. Someone has preceded her here; a sudden contrail crosses her path, a fog of tiny bodies still swirling in the wake of some recent turbulence. She follows it. Scattered chunks of pumice and obsidian rise from the substrate like fractured sundials. Their shadows sweep across the bright scrolling footprint of Clarke's headlamp, stretching and dwindling and merging again with the million-year darkness. Eventually they come to dominate the substrate, no longer isolated protrusions in mud but a fractured tumbledown landscape in their own right.
A jumbled talus of cracked volcanic glass rises in Clarke's path. She brightens her headlamp: the beam puddles on a sheer rock wall a few meters further on, its surface lacerated with deep vertical fissures.
"Hello? Rama?"
Nothing.
"It's Lenie."
A white-eyed shadow slips like an eel between two boulders. "...bright..."
She dials down the light. "Better?"
"Ah...Len..." It's a mechanical whisper, two syllables spaced seconds apart by the effort it takes to get them out. "Hi..."
"We need your help, Rama."
Bhanderi buzzes something incomprehensible from his hiding place.
"Rama?"
"Don't...help?"
"There's a disease. It's like ßehemoth, but our tweaks don't work against it. We need to know what it is, we need someone who knows genetics."
Nothing moves among the rocks.
"It's serious. Please. Can you help?"
"...teomics," Bhanderi clicks
"What? I didn't hear you."
"...Proteomics. Only...minored in gen...genetics."
He's almost managed a complete sentence. Who better to trust with hundreds of lives?
"...had a dream about you," Bhanderi sighs. It sounds like someone strumming a metal comb.
"It wasn't a dream. This isn't either. We really need your help, Rama. Please."
"That's wrong," he buzzes. "That doesn't make sense."
"What doesn't?" Clarke asks, encouraged by the sudden coherence.
"The corps...ask the corpses."
"The corpses may have made the bug. Tweaked it, anyway. We can't trust them."
"...poor you..."
"Can you just—"
"More histamine," Bhanderi buzzes absently, lost again. Then: "Bye..."
"No! Rama!"
She brightens her beam in time to see a pair of fins disappear into a crevice a few meters up the cliff. She kicks up after him, plunges into the fissure like a high-diver, arms above her head. The crevice splits the rock high and deep, but not wide; two meters in she has to turn sideways. Her light floods the narrow gash, bright as a topside day; somewhere nearby a vocoder makes distressed ratcheting sounds.
Four meters overhead, Bhanderi scrambles froglike up the gap. It narrows up there—he seems in imminent danger of wedging himself inextricably between the rock faces. Clarke starts after him.
"Too bright!" he buzzes.
Tough, she thinks back at him.
Bhanderi's a skinny little bastard after two months of chronic wasting. Even if he gets stuck in here, he might get wedged too far back for Clarke to reach him. Maybe his panicked devolving little brain is juggling those variables right now—Bhanderi zig-zags, as if torn between the prospects of open water and protective confinement. Finally he opts for the water, but his indecision has cost him; Clarke has him around the ankle.
He thrashes in a single plane, constrained by faces of stone. "Fucking bitch. Let go!"
"Vocabulary coming back, I see."
"Let...go!"
She works her way towards the mouth of the crevice, dragging Bhanderi by the leg. He scrabbles against the walls, resisting—then, pulled free of the tightest depths, he twists around and comes at her with his fists. She fends him off. She has to remind herself how easily his bones might break.
Finally he's subdued, Clarke's arms hooked around his shoulders, her hands interlocked behind his neck in a full nelson. They're still inside the mouth of the crevice, barely; Bhanderi's struggles jam her spine against cracked slabs of basalt.
"Bright," he clicks.
"Listen, Rama. There's way too much riding on this for me to let you piss away whatever's left in that head of yours. Do you understand?"
He squirms.
"I'll turn off the light if you stop fighting and just listen to me, okay?"
"...I...you..."
She kills the beam. Bhanderi stiffens, then goes limp in her arms.
"Okay. Better. You've got to come back, Bhanderi. Just for a little while. We need you."
"...need... bad zero—"
"Will you just stop that shit? You're not that far gone, you can't be. You've only been out here for—" It's been around two months, hasn't it? More than two, now. Is that enough time for a brain to turn to mush? Is this whole exercise a waste of time?
She starts again. "There's a lot riding on this. A lot of people could die. You could die. This—disease, or whatever it is, it could get into you as easily as any of us. Maybe it already has. Do you understand?"
"...understand..."
She hopes that's an answer and not an echo. "It's not just the sickness, either. Everyone's looking for someone to blame. It's only a matter of time before—"
Boom, she remembers. Blew it up. Way too bright.
"Rama," she says slowly. "If things get out of hand, everything blows up. Do you understand? Boom. Just like at the woodpile. Boom, all the time. Unless you help me. Unless you help us. Understand?"
He hangs against her in the darkness like a boneless cadaver.
"Yeah. Well," he buzzes at last. "Why didn't you just say so?"
The struggle has hobbled him. Bhanderi favors his left leg when he swims; he veers to port with each stroke. Clarke hooks her hand under his armpit to share thrust but he startles and flinches from her touch. She settles for swimming at his side, nudging him back on course when necessary.
Three times
he breaks away in a crippled lunge for oblivion. Three times she brings him back to heel, flailing and gibbering. The episodes don't last, though. Once subdued, he calms; once calm, he cooperates. For a while.
She comes to understand that it isn't really his fault.
"Hey," she buzzes, ten minutes out from Atlantis.
"Yeah."
"You with me?"
"Yeah. It comes and goes." An indecipherable ticking. "I come and go."
"Do you remember what I said?"
"You drafted me."
"Do you remember what for?"
"Some kind of disease?"
"Some kind."
"And you...you think the corpses did..."
"I don't know."
"...leg hurts..."
"Sorry..."
And his brainstem rises up and snatches him away again. She grapples and holds on until it lets go. Until he fights his way back from wherever he goes at times like this.
"...still here, I see.."
"Still here," Clarke repeats.
"God, Len. Please don't do this."
"I'm sorry," she tells him. "I'm sorry..."
"I'm not worth shit to you," Bhanderi grates. "I can't remember anything..."
"It'll come back." It has to.
"You don't know. You don't know any...thing about us."
"I know a little."
"No."
"I knew someone. Like you. He came back." Which is almost a lie.
"Let me go. Please."
"After. I promise."
She rationalizes in transit, not convincing herself for an instant. She's helping him as well as herself, she's doing him a favor. She's saving him from the ultimate lethality of his own lifestyle. Hyperosmosis; Slimy Implant Syndrome; mechanical breakdown. Rifters are miracles of bioengineering—thanks to the superlative design of their diveskins, they can even shit in the woods—but they were never designed to unseal outside of an atmosphere. Natives unmask all the time out here, let raw ocean into their mouths to corrupt and corrode and contaminate the brackish internal saline that braces them against the pressure. Do that often enough and something's bound to seize up eventually.
I'm saving your life, she thinks, unwilling to say the words aloud.
Whether he likes it or not, Alyx replies from the back of her mind.
"The light..." Bhanderi croaks.
Glimmers smear the darkness ahead, disfiguring the perfect void like faint glowing sores. Bhanderi stiffens at Clarke's side, but doesn't bolt. She knows he can handle it; it can't have been more than a couple of weeks since she found him inside the nerve hab, and he had to pass through brighter skies than these to get there. Surely he can't have slipped so far in such a short time?
Or is it something else, not so much a slip as a sudden jolt? Maybe it's not the light that bothers him at all. Maybe it's what the light reminds him of, now.
Boom. Blew it up.
Spectral fingers tap lightly against Clarke's implants: once, twice. Someone ahead, taking a sonar bearing. She takes Bhanderi's arm, holds it gently but firmly. "Rama, someone's—"
"Charley," Bhanderi buzzes.
Garcia rises ahead of them, ambient backlight framing him like a visitation. "Holy shit. You got him. Rama, you in there?"
"Client..."
"He remembers me! fuck it's good to see you, man. I thought you'd pretty much shuffled off the mortal coil."
"Tried. She won't let me."
"Yeah, we're all sorry about that but we really need your help. Don't sweat it though, buddy. We'll make it work." Garcia turns to Clarke. "What do we need?"
"Medhab ready?"
"Sealed off one sphere. Left the other in case someone breaks an arm."
"Okay. We'll need the lights off, to start with anyway. Even the externals."
"No problem."
"...Charley..." Bhanderi clicks.
"Right here, man."
"...you my techie...?"
"Dunno. Could be, I guess. Sure. You need one?"
Bhanderi's masked face turns to Clarke. Suddenly there's something different in the way he holds himself. "Let me go."
This time, she does.
"How long since I was inside?" he asks.
"I think maybe two weeks. Three at the outside." By rifter standards, the estimate is almost surgically precise.
"I may have...problems," he tells them. "Readjusting. I don't know if I can—I don't know how much I can get back."
"We understand," Clarke buzzes. "Just—"
"Shut up. Listen." Bhanderi's head darts from side to side, a disquieting reptilian gesture that Clarke has seen before. "I'll need to...to kickstart. I'll need help. Acetylcholine. Uh, tyrosine hydroxylase. Picrotoxin. If I fall apart...if I fall apart in there you'll need to get those into me. Understand?"
She runs them back. "Acetylcholine. Picrotoxin. Tyro, uh—"
"Tyrosine hydroxylase. Remember."
"What dose?" Garcia wonders. "What delivery?"
"I don't—shit. Can't remember. Check MedBase. Maximum recommended dosage for...for everything except the hydroxy...lase. Double for that, maybe. I think."
Garcia nods. "Anything else?"
"Hell yes," Bhanderi buzzes. "Just hope I can remember what..."
Portrait of the Sadist as a Team Player
Alice Jovellanos's definition of apology was a little unconventional.
Achilles, she had begun, you can be such a raging idiot sometimes I just don't believe it.
He'd never made a hard copy. He hadn't needed to. He was a 'lawbreaker, occipital cortex stuck in permanent overdrive, pattern-matching and correlative skills verging on the autistic. He had scrolled her letter once down his inlays, watched it vanish, and reread it a hundred times since, every pixel crisp and immutable in perfect recollection.
Now he sat still as stone, waiting for her. Sudbury's ever-dimming nightscape splashed haphazard patches of light across the walls of his apartment. There were too many lines-of-sight to nearby buildings, he noted. He would have to blank the windows before she arrived.
You know what I was risking coming clean with you yesterday, Alice had dictated. You know what I'm risking sending this to you now—it'll autowipe, but there's nothing these assholes can't scan if they feel like it. That's part of the problem, that's why I'm taking this huge risk in the first place...
I heard what you said about trust and betrayal, and maybe some of it rings a bit more true than I'd like. But don't you see there was no point in asking you beforehand? As long as Guilt Trip was running the show, you were incapable of making your own decision. You keep insisting that's wrong, you go on about all the life-and-death decisions you make and the thousands of variables you juggle but Achilles my dear, whoever told you that free will was just some complicated algorithm for you to follow?
I know you don't want to be corrupted. But maybe a decent, honest human being is his own safeguard, did you ever think of that? Maybe you don't have to let them turn you into one big conditioned reflex. Maybe you just want them to, because then it's not really your responsibility, is it? It's so easy to never have to make your own decisions. Addictive, even. Maybe you even got hooked on it, and you're going through a little bit of withdrawal now.
She'd had such faith in him. She still did; she was on her way here right now, not suspecting a thing. Surveillance-free accomodation wasn't cheap, but any senior 'lawbreaker could afford the Privacy Plus brand name and then some. The security in his building was airtight, ruthless, and utterly devoid of long-term memory. Once a visitor cleared, there would be no record of their comings and goings.
Anyhow, what they stole, we gave back. And I'm going to tell you exactly how we did that, on the premise, you know, ignorance breeds fear and all that. You know about the Minsky receptors in your frontal lobes, and how all those nasty little guilt transmitters bind to them, and how you perceive that as conscience. They made Guilt Trip by tweaking a bunch of behavior-modification genes snipped from parasites; the guiltier you
feel, the more Trip gets pumped into your brain. It binds to the transmitters, which changes their shape and basically clogs your motor pathways so you can't move.
Anyway, Spartacus is basically a guilt analog. It's got the same active sites, so it binds to the Trip, but the overall conformation is slightly different so it doesn't actually do anything except clog up the Minsky receptors. Also it takes longer to break down than regular guilt, so it reaches higher concentrations in the brain. Eventually it overwhelms the active sites through sheer numbers.
He remembered splinters from an antique hardwood floor, tearing his face. He remembered lying in the dark, the chair he was tied to toppled on its side, while Ken Lubin's voice wondered from somewhere nearby: "What about side effects? Baseline guilt, for example?"
And in that instant, bound and bleeding, Achilles Desjardins had seen his destiny.
Spartacus wasn't content to simply unlock the chains that the Trip had forged. If it had been, there might have been hope. He would have had to fall back on good old-fashioned shame to control his inclinations, certainly. He would have stayed depraved at heart, as he'd always been. But Achilles Desjardins had never been one to let his heart out unsupervised anyway. He could have coped, even out of a job, even up on charges. He could have coped.
But Spartacus didn't know when to quit. Conscience was a molecule like any other—and with no free receptor sites to bind onto, it might as well be neutral saline for all the effect it had. Desjardins was headed for a whole new destination, a place he'd never been before. A place without guilt or shame or remorse, a place without conscience in any form.
Alice hadn't mentioned any of that when she'd spilled her pixellated heart across his in-box. She'd only assured him how safe it all was. That's the real beauty of it, Killjoy; both your natural transmitters and the Trip itself are still being produced normally, so a test that keys on either of 'em comes up clean. Even a test looking for the complexed form will pass muster, since the baseline complex is still floating around—it just can't find any free receptor sites to latch onto. So you're safe. Honestly. The bloodhounds won't be a problem.
Safe. She'd had no idea what kind of thing looked out from behind his eyes. She should have known better. Even children know the simple truth: monsters live everywhere, even inside. Especially inside.