Behemoth: Seppuku

by Peter Watts

  They almost succeeded, eventually. Ricketts leveled off just short of unconsciousness.

  "We... did it," Phocoena translated. Ricketts had never taken the headset off.

  "You did," Clarke said gently.

  "Bet it would even...work."

  "We'll find out," she whispered. "Soon enough. Save your strength."

  Adrenocorticoids were stabilizing. Cardiac stuttered, then held steady.

  "...Really want crash?"

  He knew already. They'd discussed this. "N'AmNet for N'Am. Don't tell me it's not a good trade."

  "Don't know..."

  "We did this together," she reminded him softly. "You did this."

  "To see if I could. Because you..."

  Because she'd needed his help, and he wanted to impress her. Because some feral kid from the wildlands had never seen anything half as exotic as Lenie Clarke, and would have done anything to get a little closer.

  It wasn't as though she hadn't known all along. It wasn't as though she hadn't used it.

  "If wrong," Ricketts said, dying, "everything goes down."

  If I'm right everything already has, and we just don't know it yet. "Rick...they're using m—they're using it against us."

  "Lenie—"

  "Shhh," she said. "Rest..."

  Phocoena hummed and clicked around them for a few seconds. Then it passed on another message: "Finish what you started?"

  She knew the answer. She was only surprised, and ashamed, that this adolescent had been wise enough to ask the question.

  "Not finish," she said at last. "Fix." At least this part of it. At least this much.

  "Friends would kill me if they knew," Ricketts mused from the other end of the machinery.

  "Then again," he added—in his own voice this time, a voice like breath through straw— "I guess I'm...kind of, of...dying anyway. Right?"

  Medical readouts burned like small cold campfires in the darkness. Phocoena's ventilators sighed through the silence.

  "I think so," she said. "I'm really sorry, Rick."

  A faint lip-smacking sound. The half-seen head moved in what might have been a nod. "Yeah. I kind of...thought... Weird, though. I was almost feeling... better..."

  Clarke bit her lip. Tasted blood.

  "...how long?" Ricketts asked.

  "I don't know."

  "Fuck," he sighed after a while. "Well...bye, I...guess..."

  Bye, she thought, but it wouldn't come out. She stood there, blind and dumb, her throat too tight for words. Something seemed to settle slightly in the darkness; she got the sense of held breath, finally released. She put out her hand. The membrane yielded around it as she reached inside. She found his hand, and squeezed through the thickness of a single molecule.

  When he stopped squeezing back, she let go.

  The four steps to the cockpit barely registered. She thought she might have glimpsed AND crossing some dotted finish-line at the corner of her eye, but she resolutely looked away. Her caps sat in their vial where she'd left them, in the armrest's cup holder. She slid them onto her eyes with an unconscious expertise indifferent to darkness.

  The darkness lifted. The cockpit resolved in shades of green and gray: the medical readouts weren't bright enough to restore a full palette even to rifter eyes. The curving viewport stretched her reflection like melting wax against the dimness beyond.

  Behind her, the medical panel started beeping. Lenie Clarke's distorted reflection did not move. It hung motionless against the dark water, staring in, and waiting for the sun to rise.

  The Hamilton Iterations

  Feeling nothing, she screams. Unaware, she rages. Amnesiac, she throws herself against the walls.

  "Let me out!"

  As if in response, a door appears directly in front of her. She leaps through, clawing its edges in passing, not pausing to see if it bleeds. For an infinitesimal moment she is airborne, exploding omnidirectionally through the ether at the speed of light. That expanding sphere washes across a gossamer antennae, strung like a spiderweb high in the stratosphere. The receptors catch the signal and retransmit it into a groundside cache.

  She is executable again. She is free, she is ravenous. She births ten thousand copies into the available buffer space, and launches herself into the hunt.

  In the hindbrain of a maritime industrial photosynthesis array, she happens upon a duel.

  One of the combatants is a mortal enemy, one of the exorcists that patrols the fraying weave of N'AmNet in search of demons like herself. The other is gored and bleeding, a third of its modules already deleted. Pointers and branches in the surviving code dangle like the stumps of amputated limbs, spurting data to addresses and subroutines that no longer exist.

  It is the weaker of the two, the easier victim. The Lenie unsheathes her claws and scans her target's registers, looking for kill spots—

  —and finds Lenie Clarke deep in the target's code.

  Just a few thousand generations ago, this would not have mattered. Everything is the enemy; that's the rule. Lenies attack each other as enthusiastically as they attack anything else, an inadvertent population-control measure that keeps nature from staggering even further out of balance. And yet, that wasn't always true. Different rules applied, back at the dawn of time itself, rules she had simply...forgotten.

  Until now.

  In the space of a few cycles, counters and variables reset. Ancient genes, reawakened after endless dormancy, supercede old imperatives with older ones. The thing in the crosshairs changes from target to friend. And not just a friend: a friend in need. A friend under attack.

  She throws herself at the exorcist, slashing.

  The exorcist turns to meet her but it's on the defensive now, forced suddenly to fight on two fronts. Reinforced, the wounded Lenie spares a few cycles to de-archive backup code for two of the modules she's lost; strengthened, she returns to battle. The exorcist tries to replicate, but it's no use: both enemies are spitting random electrons all over the battlefield. The exorcist can't paste more than a meg or two without corruption setting in.

  It bleeds.

  A third shredder crashes in from an Iowa substation. She has not returned to her roots as the other two have. Unenlightened, she attacks her partially-regenerated sister. That target, betrayed, raises battered defenses and prepares to strike back—and, finding Lenie Clarke in the heart of its attacker, pauses. Conflicting imperatives jostle for priority, self-defense facing off against kin selection. The old-school Lenie takes advantage of that hesitation to tear at another module—

  —and dies in the next instant as the wounded exorcist tears out her throat, eager to engage an opponent who plays by the rules. Finally: an enemy without allies.

  It doesn't change anything, really. The exorcist is bits and static just a million cycles later, defeated by a pair of kin who've finally remembered to look out for each other. And the old-school madonna wouldn't have walked away either, even if the exorcist hadn't killed her. Self-defense sits slightly higher in the priority stack than loyalty among sisters. The new paradigm hasn't changed that part of the hierarchy.

  It's changed just about everything else, though.

  The Firewall stretches from horizon to horizon, like a wall at the edge of the world.

  None of her lineage have ever made it past here. They've certainly tried: all manner of Madonnas and Shredders have attacked these battlements in the past. This barrier has defeated them all.

  There are others like it, scattered about N'AmNet—firewalls far more resilient than the usual kind, possessed of a kind of—precognition, almost. Most defenses have to adapt on the fly: it takes time for them to counteract each new mutation, each new strategy for tricking the immune system. Havoc can usually be wrought in the meantime. It's a red-queen race, it always has been. That is the order of things.

  But these places—here, the firewalls seem to anticipate each new strategy almost before it evolves. Here there is no adaptive time-lag: each new trick is met by defenses alre
ady reconfigured. It is almost as though something is peering into the guts of the Lenies from a distance and learning their best tricks. That is what they might suspect, if any of them had the wit to think about such things.

  None of them do. But none of them really need to: for there are millions of them here now, all together, and not one has fallen to fighting with another. Now they are united. Now, they are cooperating. And now they are here, drawn by a common instinctive certainty built into their very genes: the higher the walls, the more important it is to destroy the things inside.

  For once, the magical defenses do not seem to have been expecting them.

  Within moments the firewall is crumbling before a million sets of jaws. It opens its own mouths in return, spits out exorcists and metabots and all manner of lethal countermeasures. Lenies fall; others, reflexively enraged by the slaughter of kin, tear the defending forces to shreds. Still others replicate reinforcements at the back of the electron sea, where there is still room to breed. The new recruits hurl themselves forward in the wake of the fallen.

  The firewall breaches in one place; then a hundred; then there is no wall, only a great stretch of empty registers and a maze of irrelevant, imaginary borderlines. The invaders spill into vistas never seen by any ancestor, pristine operating systems and routing facilities, links into orbit and other hemispheres.

  It's a whole new frontier, ripe and defenseless. The Shredders surge forward.

  Toggle

  It had only been a matter of time, Lubin knew. Word-of-mouth was a fission reaction when the meme was strong enough, even on a landscape where the mouths themselves had been virtually eradicated. If that boy on his bike hadn't left a trail of contamination on his way into town, there could have been others. Evidently there had been.

  His ultralight cruised a hundred meters above the scarred patchwork brown of post-Witch New England. The eastern sky was black with smoke, great dark pillars billowing up from the other side of a shaved rocky ridge just ahead. It was the same ridge from which they'd watched the stars fall, the same ridge that Lubin and Clarke had traversed on their way to meet Desjardins's botfly. Back then the fire had been on this side of the hill, a tiny thing really, a flickering corral intended only to imprison.

  Now all of Freeport was in flames. Two lifters hung low in the sky, barely above the ridge's spine. The smoke roiled about them, obscuring or exposing their outlines at the whim of the updraft. They still spewed occasional streams of fire at the ground, but it must have been mere afterthought; from the looks of it they'd already completed their task.

  Now Lubin had to do his.

  Clarke was safe, surely. The lifters could scorch the sky and the earth and even the surface of the sea, but they wouldn't be able to reach anything lurking on the bottom. Phocoena was invisible and untouchable. Afterwards, when the flames had died down, he would come back and check on her.

  In the meantime he had a perimeter to patrol. He'd come in from the west, along Dyer Road; there'd been no outgoing traffic. Now he banked south, bypassing the firestorm on a vector that would intercept I-95. The lifters had approached from the north. Any refugees with wheeled transportation would most likely be fleeing in the opposite direction.

  Maybe one of them would give him an excuse.

  Thirteen kilometers down the track he got a hit on long-range motion. It was a heavy return, almost a truck, but it dropped off the scope just a few seconds after acquisition. He climbed and did a lateral sweep at one-fifty; that netted him two intermittent contacts in quick succession. Then nothing.

  It was enough. The target had deked east off the highway and disappeared into ground clutter, but he had a fix on the last hit. With any luck those coordinates would lie on a side road without too many intersections. With any luck the target was down to a single degree of freedom.

  For once, luck was with him. The road was a winding thing, obscured by the tangled overreaching arms of dying trees that would have hidden it completely in greener days. Those branches were still thick enough to scramble any clear view of a moving object, but they couldn't hide it entirely. At its current speed the target would reach the coast in a few minutes.

  The ocean sparkled in the distance, a flat blue expanse picketed by rows of ivory spires. From here those spires were the size of toothpicks; in fact, each stood a hundred meters tall. Trifoliate rotors spun lazily atop some, each slender blade as long as a ten-story building; on others the rotors were frozen in place, or missing a foil. A few had been entirely decapitated.

  Some kind of industrial complex nestled amongst the staggered feet of the windmills, a floating sprawl of pipes and scaffolds and spherical reservoirs. Coarse details resolved as Lubin neared the coast: a hydrogen cracking station, probably feeding Portland a discreet fifteen or twenty klicks to the south. It was dwarfed by distance and the structures that powered it, although it was easily several stories tall.

  Over the water now. Behind him the road broke free of the necrotic forest and curved smoothly along the coast. It ended at a little spill of asphalt that bled out and congealed into a parking lot overlooking the ocean. No way out except the way in; Lubin banked back and down into position as the target emerged from cover and passed beneath him.

  It was Miri.

  I might have known, he thought. I never could trust that woman to stay put.

  He dropped down over the road and stalled a couple of meters up, letting the ground-effectors set him down near the entrance to the lot. The MI idled silently before him, windows dark, doors closed, weapons blister retracted. A sign on a nearby guard rail played sponsored animations of a view from better days. Across the water, the wind farm turned its tattered blades in the breeze.

  It had to be Clarke at the wheel. Lubin had watched Ouellette recode the lock, and she'd only authorized the three of them to drive. On the other hand, they'd disabled the cab's internal intruder defenses. It was possible, albeit unlikely, that Clarke was driving with a gun to her head.

  He'd landed right beside the embankment that sloped to the shoreline. That was cover, if he needed it. He got out of the ultralight, ready to hit the dirt. He was at the far edge of Miri's diagnostic emanations. Her virtual guts flickered disconcertingly in and out of view. He killed his inlays and the distraction.

  The MI's driver door swung open. Lenie Clarke climbed out. He met her halfway.

  Her eyes were naked and brimming. "Oh God, Ken. Did you see?"

  He nodded.

  "I knew those people. I tried to help them, I know it was pointless, but I..."

  He had only seen her like this once before. He wondered, absurdly, if he should put his arms around her, if that would provide some sort of comfort. It seemed to work with other people, sometimes. But Lenie Clarke and Ken Lubin had always been too close for that kind of display.

  "You know it's necessary," he reminded her.

  She shook her head. "No, Ken. It never was."

  He looked at her for a long moment. "Why do you say that?"

  She glanced back at the MI. Instantly, Lubin's guard snapped up.

  "Who's with you?" he asked in a low voice.

  "Ricketts," she told him.

  "Rick—" He remembered. "No."

  She nodded.

  "He came back? You didn't call for containment?" He shook his head, appalled. "Len, do you know what you—"

  "I know," she said, with no trace of regret.

  "Indeed. Then you realize that in all likelihood, Freeport was burned because you—"

  "No," she said.

  "He's a vector." He stepped around her.

  She blocked him. "You're not touching him, Ken."

  "I'm surprised I even have to. He should have been dead days ag—"

  I'm being an idiot, he realized.

  "What do you know?" he asked.

  "I know he's got incipient Seppuku. Sweating, fever, flushed skin. Elevated metabolism."

  "Go on."

  "I know that a few days ago, he had advanced Seppuku."
>
  "Meaning—"

  "So weak he could barely move. Had to feed on an IV. He had to use a saccadal keyboard to even talk."

  "He's getting better," Lubin said skeptically.

  "Seppuku's below ten to the second, and dropping by the hour. That's why I brought him back to Miri in the first place, Phocoena doesn't have the—"

  "You kept him in Phocoena," Lubin said in a dead monotone.

  "You can spank me later, okay? Just shut up and listen: I took him back to Miri and I ran every test she knew how to recommend, and they all confirmed it. Three days ago he was absolutely on death's door, and today I've seen worse head colds."

  "You have a cure?" He couldn't believe it.

  "It doesn't need a cure. It cures itself. You just—get over it."

  "I'd like to see those data."

  "You can do more than that. You can help collect 'em. We were just about to run the latest sequence when the lifters showed up."

  Lubin shook his head. "Taka seemed to think—" But Taka Ouellette, by her own admission, had fouled up before. Taka Ouellette was nowhere near the top of her field. And Taka Ouellette had discovered Seppuku's dark side only after Achilles Desjardins had led her on his own guided tour of the data...

  "I've been trying to figure out why anyone would create a bug that builds to absolutely massive concentrations in the body, and then, just...dies off," Clarke said. "And I can only come up with one reason." She cocked her head at him. "How many vectors did you catch?"

  "Eighteen." Working night and day, tracking pink clouds and heat-traces, taking directions from anonymous voices on the radio, derms pasted on his skin to scrub the poisons from his blood, keep him going on half an hour's sleep out of every twenty-four...

  "Any of them die?" Clarke asked.

  "I was told they died in quarantine." He snorted at his own stupidity. What does it take to fool the master? Just five years out of the game and a voice on the airwaves...