by Peter Watts
"I'm...I'm sorry," Taka tried.
"I'll bet. They all are."
She swallowed, and tried not to go where that led.
The exoskeleton must have been spring-loaded; there was a click and suddenly her arms were yanked up behind her, spread back in a delta-V. The motion stretched the flesh tight across her chest; the pain that had diffused across her body collapsed back down to a sharp agonized focus in her breast. She bit back a scream. Some distant, irrelevant part of her took pride in her success.
Then something cold slapped against her ass and she cried out anyway—but Achilles was just cleaning her up with a wet rag. The wetness evaporated almost instantly, chilling her. Taka smelled alcohol.
"Excuse me? You said something?"
"Why do you want to hurt me?" The words burst from the throat of some wounded animal before she could bite them back: Stupid, stupid bitch. Whining and crying and groveling just the way he likes it. You know why he does it. Your whole life you've known people like this existed.
But of course the animal hadn't been asking why at all. The animal wouldn't have even understood the answer. The animal only wanted him to stop.
His hand ran lightly over her ass. "You know why."
She thrashed her head from side to side in frantic, violent denial. "There are other ways, easier ways! Without the risk, without anyone trying to stop you—"
"Nobody's trying to stop me now," Achilles pointed out.
"But you must know, with a good set of phones and a feedback skin you could do things that wouldn't even be physically possible in the real world, with more women than you could ever dream of having in—"
"Tried it." Footsteps, returning. "Jerking off in a hallucination."
"But they look and feel and even smell so real you'd never know—"
Suddenly his hand was knotted tightly in her hair, twisting her head around, putting her face a few scant centimeters from his. He was not smiling now, and when he spoke again, his voice had lost all pretense of civility.
"It's not about the sights or the smells, okay? You can't hurt a hallucination. It's play-acting. What's the point of torturing something that can't even suffer?" He yanked her head again for good measure.
And in the next instant released it, casually cheerful once more. "Anyway, I'm really no different than any other guy. You're an educated stumpfuck, you must know that the only difference between fucking someone and flaying them is a few neurons and a whole lotta social conditioning. You're all like me. I've just lost the parts that pretend it isn't true.
"And now," he added, with a good-natured wink, "you've got an oral exam."
Taka shook her head. "Please..."
"Don't sweat it, it's mainly review. As I recall, in our last lesson we were talking about Seppuku, and you seemed surprised at the thought that it might reproduce sexually. I know, I know—never even occurred to you, did it? Even though everything has sex, even though bacteria have sex. Even though you and I are having sex, it never occurred to you that Seppuku might. Not too smart, Alice. David would be very disappointed."
Oh Dave. Thank God you can't see me now.
"But let's move past that. Today we're gonna start with the idea that sex might kick in as, say, as a density-dependent response. Population increases, sexual mode cuts in, what happens?"
He moved behind her again. She tried to focus, tried to put her mind to this absurd, humiliating game on the remote chance there might be some way to win. Sexual mode cuts in, she thought, genes shuffle, and the recessives—
Another click. The exoskeleton stretched its legs back and forced hers apart, a meter off the floor.
—the reces—oh God—it's got all those lethal recessives, they start to express and the whole genotype—it collapses...
Achilles laid something hard and dry and room-temperature across the back of her right thigh. "Anything? Or should I just get started back here?"
"It self-destructs!" she blurted. "It dies off! Past some critical density..."
"Mmmm."
She couldn't tell if that had been the answer he was looking for. It made sense. As if sense would matter in this godforsaken—
"So why hasn't it died off?" he asked curiously.
"It—it—it hasn't hit the threshold yet. You keep burning it before it gets enough of a foothold."
No sound or motion for an eternity.
"Not bad," Achilles said finally.
Relief crashed through her like a wave. Some inner voice berated her for it, reminded her that she was still captive and Achilles Desjardins could change the rules whenever he pleased, but she ignored it and savored the tiny reprieve.
"So it is a counteragent," she babbled. "I was right all along. It's programmed to outcompete ßehemoth and then take itself out of the picture."
From somewhere behind her shoulder, the sense of a trap snapping shut.
"You've never heard the term relict population, then?" The weight lifted from her thigh. "You think a bug that hid for four billion years wouldn't be able to find some little corner, somewhere, where Seppuku couldn't get at it? One's all it would take, you know. One's all it took the first time. And then Seppuku takes itself out of the picture, as you say, and ßehemoth comes back stronger than ever. What does Seppuku do then, I wonder? Rise from the grave?"
"But wh—"
"Sloppy thinking, Alice. Really sloppy."
Smack.
Something drew a stinging line across her legs. Taka cried out; the inner voice sneered told you so.
"Please," she whimpered.
"Back of the class, cunt." Something cold tickled her vulva. A faint rasping sound carried over her shoulder, like the sound of a fingernail on sandpaper.
"I can see why pine furniture used to be so cheap," Desjardins remarked. "You get all these splinters..."
She stared hard at the tiled floor, the fish-to-bird transition, focused on that indefinable moment when background and foreground merged. She tried to lose herself in the exercise. She tried to think of nothing but the pattern.
She couldn't escape the thought that Achilles had designed the floor for exactly that purpose.
Splice
She was safe. She was home. She was deep in the familiar abyss, water pressing down with the comforting weight of mountains, no light to betray her presence to the hunters overhead. No sound but her own heartbeat. No breath.
No breath...
But that was normal, wasn't it? She was a creature of the deep sea, a glorious cyborg with electricity sparking in her chest, supremely adapted. She was immune to the bends. Her rapture owed nothing to nitrogen. She could not drown.
But somehow, impossibly, she was.
Her implants had stopped working. Or no, her implants had disappeared entirely, leaving nothing in her chest but a pounding heart, flopping on the bottom of a great bleeding hole where lung and machinery had once been. Her flesh cried out for oxygen. She could feel her blood turning to acid. She tried to open her mouth, tried to gasp, but even that useless reflex was denied her here; her hood stretched across her face like an impermeable skin. She panicked, thrashing towards a surface that might have been lightyears away. The very core of her was a yawning vacuum. She convulsed around her own emptiness.
Suddenly, there was light.
It was a single beam from somewhere overhead, skewering her through the darkness. She struggled towards it; gray chaos seethed at the edges of sight, blinding her peripheral vision as her eyes began to shut down. There was light above and oblivion on all sides. She reached for the light.
A hand seized her wrist and lifted her into atmosphere. Suddenly she could breathe again; her lungs had been restored, her diveskin miraculously removed. She sank to her knees on a solid deck, sucked great whooping breaths.
She looked up, into the face of her salvation. A fleshless, pixelated caricature of herself grinned back; its eyes were empty whirling holes. "You're not dead yet," it said, and ripped out her heart.
It stood over her,
frowning as she bled out on the deck. "Hello?" it asked, its voice turned strangely metallic. "Are you there? Are you there?"
She awoke. The real world was darker than her dream had been.
She remembered Rickett's voice, thin and reedy: They even attack each other if you give 'em half a chance...
"Are you there?"
It was the voice from her dream. It was the ship's voice. Phocoena.
I know what to do, she realized.
She turned in her seat. Sunset biotelemetry sparkled in the darkness behind her: a fading life-force, rendered in constellations of yellow and orange.
And for the first time, red.
"Hello?" she said.
"How long i been asleep?"
Ricketts was using the saccadal interface to talk. How weak do you have to be, Clarke wondered, before it's too much effort to speak aloud?
"I don't know," she told the darkness. "A few hours, I guess." And then, dreading the answer: "How are you feeling?"
"About same," he lied. Or maybe not, if Phocoena was doing its job.
She climbed from her seat and stepped carefully back to the telemetry panel. A facet of isolation membrane glistened dimly beyond, barely visible to her uncapped eyes.
Ricketts's antibodies and glucose metabolism had both gone critical while she'd slept. If she was reading the display right Phocoena had been able to compensate for the glucose to some extent, but the immune problems were out of its league. And an entirely new readout had appeared on the diagnostic panel, cryptic and completely unexpected: something called AND was increasing over time in Rickett's body. She tapped the label and invoked the system glossary: AND expanded into Anomalous Nucleotide Duplex, which told her nothing. But there was a dotted horizontal line etched near the top of the y-axis, some critical threshold that Ricketts was approaching but had not yet met; and the label on that feature was one she knew.
Metastasis.
It can't be long now, Clarke thought. Then, hating herself: Maybe long enough...
"Still there?" Ricketts asked.
"Yes."
"It's lonely in here."
Under the cowl, maybe. Or inside his own failing flesh.
"Talk to me."
Go ahead. You know you want an opening.
"About what?"
"Anything. Just—anything."
You can't exploit someone if you don't even ask...
She took a breath. "You know what you said about the, the shredders? How someone was using them to try and crash everything?"
"Yes."
"I don't think they're supposed to crash the system at all," she said.
A brief silence. "But that's what they do. Ask anyone."
"That's not all they do. Taka said they breach dams and short out static-fields and who knows what. That one on the board was sitting in her MI for God knows how long, and it never even peeped until she'd figured out Seppuku. They're attacking a lot of targets through the network, and they need the network to get to them."
She looked into the darkness, past the telemetry panel, past the faint shimmer of reflecting membrane. Ricketts's head was a dim crescent, its edges rough and smooth in equal measure: outlined hints of disheveled hair and contoured plastic. She couldn't see his face. The headset would have covered his eyes even if her caps had been in. His body was an invisible suggestion of dark mass, too distant for the meager light of the display. It did not move.
She continued: "The shredders try to crash everything they can get their teeth into, so we just assume that whoever bred them wants them to succeed. But I think they're counting on the firewalls and the—exorcists, right...?"
"Right."
"Maybe they're counting on those defenses to hold. Maybe they don't want the network to collapse because they use it themselves. Maybe they just send the—the shredders out to kick up mud and noise, and keep everyone busy so they can sneak around and do their own thing without getting noticed."
She waited for him to take the bait.
Finally: "Big twisted story."
"Yeah. It is."
"But Shredders still shred everything. And breeders not here to ask. So no way to tell."
Leave him alone. He's just a kid with a crush, he's so sick he can barely move. The only reason he hasn't told you to fuck off is because he thinks you might care.
"I think there is a way," she said.
"Why?"
"If they'd really wanted to crash the whole system, they could have done that long before now."
"How you know?"
Because I know where the demons come from. I know how they started, I know how they work.
And just maybe, I know how to set them free.
"Because we can do it ourselves," Clarke told him.
Ricketts said nothing. Perhaps he was thinking. Perhaps he was unconscious. Clarke felt her fingers in motion, glanced down at the new window she'd just opened on the bedside board. The Palliative Submenu, she saw. A minimalist buffet of default settings: nutrients. painkillers. stimulants. Euthanasia.
She remembered a voice from the past: You're so sick of the blood on your hands you'd barely notice if you had to wash it off with even more.
"Crash N'AmNet," Ricketts said.
"That's right."
"Don't know. I'm...tired..."
Look at him, she told herself. But it was dark, and her caps weren't in.
And he was dying anyway.
One finger slid across stimulants.
Ricketts spoke again. "Crash N'AmNet? Really?" Something rustled in the darkness behind the membrane. "How?"
She closed her eyes.
Lenie Clarke. It had all started with that name.
Ricketts didn't really remember where the Witch first came from. He'd just been a kid then, he said. But he'd heard the stories; according to legend and the M&M's, the Meltdown Madonna had started the whole thing.
That was close enough. She'd released it, anyway, spread ßehemoth across N'Am like some kind of vindictive crop-duster. And of course people had tried to stop her, but there'd been a—a glitch. Deep in the seething virtual jungles of Maelstrom, passing wildlife had noticed a flock of high-priority messages shooting back and forth, messages about something called Lenie Clarke. They'd learned to hitch a ride. It was reproductive strategy, or a dispersal strategy, or something like that. She had never really understood the details. But traffic about Lenie Clarke was a free ticket to all kinds of habitat that wildlife had never gotten into before. Natural selection took over from there; it wasn't long before wildlife stopped merely riding messages about Lenie Clarke and started writing their own. Memes leaked into the real world, reinforced those already proliferating through the virtual one. Positive feedback built both into myth. Half the planet ended up worshipping a woman who never existed, while the other half tried desperately to kill the one who did.
Neither side caught her, though.
"So where'd she go?" Ricketts asked. He was using his own vocal cords again, and Clarke could see his hands in vague motion on the handpad. An incandescent filament, flickering towards extinction, suddenly bright and steady in the grip of a voltage spike inflicted without his knowledge or consent. Burning out.
"I said—"
"She—disappeared," Clarke told him. "And I guess most of the wildlife that used her died off, but some of it didn't. Some of it claimed to speak for her even when she was still around. I guess the whole imposter thing really took off afterwards. It helped spread the meme or something."
Ricketts's hands stopped moving. "You never told me your name," he said after a few moments.
Clarke smiled faintly.
Whatever they were facing now had sprung from that original seed. It had been twisted almost beyond recognition. It no longer served its own interests; it served the aesthetics of those who valued chaos and propaganda. But it had all started with Lenie Clarke, with the driving imperative to promote and protect anything in possession of that secret password. New imperatives had since been bre
d into the code, older ones forgotten—but maybe not entirely eliminated. Maybe the old code still existed, short-circuited, bypassed, dormant but still intact, like the ancient bacterial genes infesting the DNA of placental mammals. Maybe all that was needed was a judicious tweak to wake the fucker with a kiss.
Natural selection had shaped this creature's ancestors for a billion generations; selective breeding had tortured and twisted it for a million more. There was no clear-cut design in the genotype snarling at the end of that lineage. There was only a tangled morass of genes and junk, an overgrown wilderness of redundancies and dead ends. Even those who'd shaped the monster's later evolution probably had no idea of the specific changes they'd been making, any more than a nineteenth-century dog breeder would have known which base pairs his carefully-crossbred sires and bitches were reinforcing. To even begin to decipher such source was far beyond Ricketts's modest abilities.
But to simply scan the code in search of a specific text string— that was trivially easy. As easy as it was to edit the code around such a string, whether or not you knew what it did.
Ricketts ran a search. Their captive shredder contained eighty-seven occurrences of the text string Lenie Clarke and its hex, ASCII, and phonetic equivalents. Six of them slept just a few megs downstream of a stop codon that aborted transcription along that pathway and redirected it to some other.
"So you snip out that codon," Clarke said, "and all that downstream source wakes up again?"
He nodded by the glow of the readouts. "But we still don't know what any of it does."
"We can guess."
"Make Lenie like Lenie," Ricketts said, and smiled. Clarke watched another one of his vitals edge into the red.
Maybe someday, she thought.
It was a simple enough insight if you knew where the monsters came from. It was a simple enough splice if you knew how to code. Once those two elements came together, the whole revolution took about fifteen minutes.
Ricketts crashed at sixteen point five.
"I—ahhh..." A rattling sigh, more breath than voice. His hand hit the pallet with a soft slap; the handpad tumbled from his fingers. His telemetry staggered along half a dozen axes and fell towards luminous asymptotes. Clarke watched helplessly for ten minutes as rudimentary machines struggled to turn his crash into a controlled descent.