by Peter Watts
"That's absurd, Lenie. Why would we?"
"To give you an—excuse, I guess. Or as some kind of last-ditch self-destruct, to take us out with you. I don't know." Lenie shrugs. "I'm not saying they're making sense. I'm just telling you where they're at."
"And how are we supposed to be putting together all this ordinance, when you people control our fabrication facilities?"
"Ken says you can get a standard Calvin cycler to make explosives if you tweak the wiring the right way."
Ken again.
Rowan still isn't sure how to broach the subject. There's a bond between Lenie and Ken, a connection both absurd and inevitable between two people for whom the term friendship should be as alien as a Europan microbe. It's nothing sexual—the way Ken swings it hardly could be, although Rowan suspects that Lenie still doesn't know about that—but in its own repressed way, it's almost as intimate. There's a protectiveness, not to be taken lightly. If you attack one, you better watch out for the other.
And yet, from the sound of it, Ken Lubin is beginning to draw different alliances…
She decides to risk it. "Lenie, has it occurred to you that Ken might be—"
"That's crazy." The rifter kills the question before she has to answer it.
"Why?" Rowan asks. "Who else has the expertise? Who else is addicted to killing people?"
"You gave him that. He was on your payroll."
Rowan shakes her head. "I'm sorry, Lenie, but you know that isn't true. We instilled his threat-response reflex, yes. But that was only to make sure he took the necessary steps—"
"To make sure he killed people," Lenie interjects.
"—in the event of a security breach. He was never supposed to get—addicted to it. And you know as well as I do: Ken has the know-how, he has access, he has grudges going all the way back to childhood. The only thing that kept him on the leash was Guilt Trip, and Spartacus took care of that."
"Spartacus was five years ago," the rifter points out. "And Ken hasn't gone on any killing sprees since then. If you'll remember, he was one of exactly two people who prevented your last uprising from turning into The Great Corpse Massacre."
She sounds as if she's trying to convince herself as much as anyone. "Lenie—"
But she's having none of it. "Guilt Trip was just something you people laid onto his brain after he came to work for you. He didn't have it before, and he didn't have it afterwards, and you know why? Because he has rules, Pat. He came up with his own set of rules, and he damn well stuck to them, and no matter how much he wanted to, he never killed anyone without a reason."
"That's true," Rowan admits. "Which is why he started inventing reasons."
Lenie, strobing slowly, looks out a porthole and doesn't answer.
"Maybe you don't know that part of the story," Rowan continues. "You never wondered why we'd assign him to the rifter program in the first place? Why we'd waste a Black Ops Black Belt on the bottom of the ocean, scraping barnacles off geothermal pumps? It was because he'd started to slip up, Lenie. He was making mistakes, he was leaving loose ends all over the place. Of course he always tied them up with extreme prejudice, but that was rather the point. On some subconscious level, Ken was deliberately slipping up so that he'd have an excuse to seal the breach afterwards.
"Beebe Station was so far out in the boondocks that it should have been virtually impossible to encounter anything he could interpret as a security breach, no matter how much he bent his rules. That was our mistake, in hindsight." Not even one of our bigger ones, more's the pity. "But my point is, people with addictions sometimes fall off the wagon. People with self-imposed rules of conduct have been known to bend and twist and rationalize those rules to let them both have their cake and eat it. Seven years ago, our psych people told us that Ken was a classic case in point. There's no reason to believe it isn't just as true today."
The rifter doesn't speak for a moment. Her disembodied face, a pale contrast against the darkness of her surroundings, flashes on and off like a beating heart.
"I don't know," she says at last. "I met one of your psych people once, remember? You sent him down to observe us. We didn't like him much."
Rowan nods. "Yves Scanlon."
"I tried to look him up when I got back to land." Look him up: Leniespeak for hunt him down. "He wasn't home."
"He was decirculated." Rowan says, her own euphemism—as always—easily trumping the other woman's.
"Ah."
But since the subject has come up... "He—he had a theory about you people," Rowan says. "He thought that rifter brains might be…sensitive, somehow. That you entered some heightened state of awareness when you spent too long on the bottom of the sea, with all those synthetics in your blood. Quantum signals from the brainstem. Some kind of Ganzfeld effect."
"Scanlon was an idiot," Lenie remarks.
"No doubt. But was he wrong?"
Lenie smiles faintly.
"I see," Rowan says.
"It's not mind-reading. Nothing like that."
"But maybe, if you could…what would be the word, scan?"
"We called it fine-tuning," Lenie says, her voice as opaque as her eyes.
"If you could fine-tune anybody who might have…"
"Already done. It was Ken who suggested it, in fact. We didn't find anything."
"Did you fine-tune Ken?"
"You can't—" She stops.
"He blocked you, didn't he?" Rowan nods to herself. "If it's anything like Ganzfeld scanning, he blocks it without even thinking. Standard procedure."
They sit without speaking for a few moments.
"I don't think it's Ken," Clarke says after a while. "I know him, Pat. I've known him for years."
"I've known him longer."
"Not the same way."
"Granted. But if not Ken, who?"
"Shit, Pat, the whole lot of us! Everybody has it in for you guys now. They're convinced that Jerry and her buddies—"
"That's absurd."
"Is it really?" Rowan glimpses the old Lenie Clarke, the predatory one, smiling in the intermittent light. "Supposing you'd kicked our asses five years ago, and we'd been living under house arrest ever since. And then some bug passed through our hands on its way to you, and corpses started dropping like flies. Are you saying you wouldn't suspect?"
"No. No, of course we would." Rowan heaves a sigh. "But I'd like to think we wouldn't go off half-cocked without any evidence at all. We'd at least entertain the possibility that you were innocent."
"As I recall, when the shoe was on the other foot guilt or innocence didn't enter into it. You didn't waste any time sterilizing the hot zones, no matter who was inside. No matter what they'd done."
"Good rationale. One worthy of Ken Lubin and his vaunted ethical code."
Lenie snorts. "Give it a rest, Pat. I'm not calling you a liar. But we've already cut you more slack than you cut us, back then. And there are a lot of people in there with you. You sure none of them are doing anything behind your back?"
A bright moment: a dark one.
"Anyway, there's still some hope we could dial this down," Clarke says. "We're looking at ß-max ourselves. If it hasn't been tweaked, we won't find anything."
A capillary of dread wriggles through Rowan's insides.
"How will you know one way or the other?" she asks. "None of you are pathologists."
"Well, they aren't gonna trust your experts. We may not have tenure at LU but we've got a degree or two in the crowd. That, and access to the biomed library, and—"
"No," Rowan whispers. The capillary grows into a thick, throbbing artery. She feels blood draining from her face to feed it.
Lenie sees it immediately. "What?" She leans forward, across the armrest of her seat. "Why does that worry you?"
Rowan shakes her head. "Lenie, you don't know. You're not trained, you don't get a doctorate with a couple of days' reading. Even if you get the right results, you'll probably misinterpret them…"
"What results? Mi
sinterpret how?"
Rowan watches her, suddenly wary: the way she looked when they met for the first time, five years ago.
The rifter looks back steadily. "Pat, don't hold out on me. I'm having a tough enough time keeping the dogs away as it is. If you've got something to say, say it."
Tell her.
"I didn't know myself until recently," Rowan begins. "ßehemoth may have been—I mean, the original ßehemoth, not this new strain—it was tweaked."
"Tweaked." The word lies thick and dead in the space between them.
Rowan forces herself to continue. "To adapt it to aerobic environments. And to increase its reproductive rate, for faster production. There were commercial applications. Nobody was trying to bring down the world, of course, it wasn't a bioweapons thing at all…but evidently something went wrong."
"Evidently." Clarke's face is an expressionless mask.
"I'm sure you can see the danger here, if your people stumble across these modifications without really knowing what they're doing. Perhaps they know enough to recognize a tweak, but not enough to tell what it does. Perhaps they don't know how to tell old tweaks from more recent ones. Or perhaps the moment they see any evidence of engineering, they'll conclude the worst and stop looking. They could come up with something they thought was evidence, and the only ones qualified to prove them wrong would be ignored because they're the enemy."
Clarke watches her like a statue. Maybe the reconciliation of the past few years hasn't been enough. Maybe this new development, this additional demand for even more understanding, has done nothing but shatter the fragile trust the two of them have built. Maybe Rowan has just lost all credibility in this woman's eyes. Maybe she's just blown her last chance to avoid meltdown.
Endless seconds fossilize in the cold, thick air.
"Fuck," the rifter says at last, very softly. "It's all over if this gets out."
Rowan dares to hope. "We've just got to make sure it doesn't."
Clarke shakes her head. "What am I supposed to do, tell Rama to stop looking? Sneak into the hab and smash the sequencer? They already think I'm in bed with you people." She emits a small, bitter laugh. "If I take any action at all I've lost them. They don't trust me as it is."
Rowan leans back her seat and closes her eyes. "I know." She feels a thousand years old.
"You fucking corpses. You never could leave anything alone, could you?"
"We're just people, Lenie. We make…mistakes…" And suddenly the sheer, absurd, astronomical magnitude of that understatement sinks home in the most unexpected way, and Patricia Rowan can't quite suppress a giggle.
It's the most undignified sound she's made in years. Lenie arches an eyebrow.
"Sorry," Rowan says.
"No problem. It was pretty hilarious." The rifter's patented half-smile flickers at the corner of her mouth.
But it's gone in the next second. "Pat, I don't think we can stop this."
"We have to."
"Nobody's talking any more. Nobody's listening. Just one little push could send it all over the edge. If they even knew we were talking here…"
Rowan shakes her head in hopeful, reassuring denial. But Lenie's right. Rowan knows her history, after all. She knows her politics. You're well past the point of no return when simply communicating with the other side constitutes an act of treason.
"Remember the very first time we met?" Lenie asks. "Face to face?"
Rowan nods. She'd turned the corner and Lenie Clarke was just there, right in front of her, fifty kilograms of black rage inexplicably transported to the heart of their secret hideaway. "Eighty meters in that direction," she says, pointing over her shoulder.
"You sure about that?" Lenie asks.
"Most certainly," Rowan says. "I thought you were going to kill m—"
And stops, ashamed.
"Yes," she says after a while. "That was the first time we met. Really."
Lenie faces forward, at her own bank of dead readouts. "I thought you might have, you know, been part of the interview process. Back before your people did their cut'n'paste in my head. You can never tell what bits might have got edited out, you know?"
"I saw the footage afterwards," Rowan admits. "When Yves was making his recommendations. But we never actually met."
"Course not. You were way up in the strat. No time to hang around with the hired help." Rowan is a bit surprised at the note of anger in Lenie's voice. After all that's been done to her, after all she's come to terms with since, it seems strange that such a small, universal neglect would be a hot button.
"They said you'd be better off," Rowan says softly. "Honestly. They said you'd be happier."
"Who said?"
"Neurocog. The psych people."
"Happier." Lenie digests that a moment. "False memories of Dad raping me made me happier? Jesus, Pat, if that's true my real childhood must have been a major treat."
"I mean, happier at Beebe Station. They swore that that any so-called well-adjusted person would crack down there in under a month."
"I know the brochure, Pat. Preadaption to chronic stress, dopamine addiction to hazardous environments. You bought all that?"
"But they were right. You saw what happened to the control group we sent down. But you—you liked the place so much we were worried you wouldn't want to come back."
"At first," Lenie adds unnecessarily.
After a moment she turns to face Rowan. "But tell me this, Pat. Supposing they told you I wasn't going to like it so much? What if they'd said, she'll hate the life, she'll hate her life, but we have to do it anyway because it's the only way to keep her from going stark raving mad down there? Would you tell me if they'd told you that?"
"Yes." It's an honest answer. Now.
"And would you have let them rewire me and turn me into someone else, give me monsters for parents, and send me down there anyway?"
"…Yes."
"Because you served the Greater Good."
"I tried to," Rowan says.
"An altruistic corpse," the rifter remarks. "How do you explain that?"
"Explain?"
"It kind of goes against what they taught us in school. Why sociopaths rise to the top of the corporate ladder, and why we should all be grateful that the world's tough economic decisions are being made by people who aren't hamstrung by the touchy-feelies."
"It's a bit more complicated than that."
"Was, you mean."
"Is," Rowan insists.
They sit in silence for while.
"Would you have it reversed, if you could?" Rowan asks.
"What, the rewire? Get my real memories back? Lose the whole Daddy Rapist thing?"
Rowan nods.
Lenie's silent for so long that Rowan wonders if she's refusing to answer. But finally, almost hesitantly, she says: "This is who I am. I guess maybe there was a different person in here before, but now it's only me. And when it comes right down to it I guess I just don't want to die. Bringing back that other person would almost be a kind of suicide, don't you think?"
"I don't know. I guess I never thought about it that way before."
"It took a while for me to. You people killed someone else in the process, but you made me." Rowan glimpses a frown, strobe-frozen. "You were right, you know. I did want to kill you that time. It wasn't the plan, but I saw you there and everything just caught up with me and you know, for a few moments there I almost…"
"Thanks for holding back," Rowan says.
"I did, didn't I? And if any two people ever had reason to go for each other's throats, it had to be us. I mean, you were trying to kill me, and I was trying to kill—everyone else…" Her voice catches for an instant. "But we didn't. We got along. Eventually. "
"We did," Rowan says.
The rifter looks at her with blank, pleading eyes. "So why can't they? Why can't they just—I don't know, follow our lead…"
"Lenie, we destroyed the world. I think they're following our lead a bit too closely."
&nbs
p; "Back in Beebe, you know, I was the boss. I didn't want to be, that was the last thing I wanted, but people just kept—" Lenie shakes her head. "And I still don't want to be, but I have to be, you know? Somehow I have to keep these idiots from blowing everything up. Only now, nobody will even tell me tell me what fucking time zone I'm in, and Grace..."
She looks at Rowan, struck by some thought. "What happened to her, anyway?"
"What do you mean?" Rowan asks.
"She really hates you guys. Did you kill her whole family or something? Did you fuck with her head somehow?"
"No," Rowan says. "Nothing."
"Come on, Pat. She wouldn't be down here if there wasn't some—"
"Grace was in the control group. Her background was entirely unremarkable. She was—"
But Lenie's suddenly straight up in her seat, capped eyes sweeping across the ceiling. "Did you hear that?", she asks.
"Hear what?" The cockpit's hardly a silent place—gurgles, creaks, the occasional metallic pop have punctuated their conversation since it began—but Rowan hasn't heard anything out of the ordinary. "I didn't—"
"Shhh," Lenie hisses.
And now Rowan does hear something, but it's not what the other woman's listening for. It's a little burble of sound from her own earbud, a sudden alert from Comm: a voice worried unto near-panic, audible only to her. She listens, and feels a sick, dread sense of inevitability. She turns to her friend.
"You better get back out there," she says softly.
Lenie spares an impatient glance, catches the expression on Rowan's face and double-takes. "What?"
"Comm's been monitoring your LFAM chatter," Rowan says. "They're saying… Erickson. He died.
"They're looking for you."
The Bloodhound Iterations
N=1:
Snarling, unaware, she searches for targets and finds none. She looks for landmarks and comes up empty. She can't even find anything that passes for topography—an endless void extends in all directions, an expanse of vacant memory extending far beyond the range of any whiskers she copies into the distance. She can find no trace of the ragged, digital network she usually inhabits. There is no prey here, no predators beyond herself, no files or executables upon which to feast. She can't even find the local operating system. She must be accessing it on some level—she wouldn't run without some share of system resources and clock cycles—but the fangs and claws she evolved to tear open that substrate can't get any kind of grip. She is a lean, lone wolf with rottweiller jaws, optimised for life in some frayed and impoverished jungle that has vanished into oblivion. Even a cage would have recognizable boundaries, walls or bars that she could hurl herself against, however ineffectually. This featureless nullscape is utterly beyond her ken.