Behemoth: Seppuku

by Peter Watts

  The fishheads and the corpses got into a bit of a debate about the odds of ßehemoth hitching a ride in the flesh of dispersing larval fish. I was always worried about that myself, even back when I was writing Starfish—if true, there'd be no reason why ßehemoth would not have, in fact, taken over the world billions of years ago. Invertebrate larvae do seem to cross vast distances in the deep sea; fortunately they generally go into a sort of arrested development en route1, making them unlikely carriers of ßehemoth (which needs an actively-metabolizing host to withstand long-term thermo-osmotic stress). It also appears that even highly-dispersing larval fish species maintain fairly distinct geographic ranges, judging by the lack of genetic flow between populations around adjacent islands10,11. Worst comes to worst, local topographic and chemical conditions can constrain the distribution of various deep-water species12,13.

  So I dodged the bullet. This was not prescience on my part, and it may yet come back and bite me in the ass: at least one adult fish may have swum through deep water from Patagonia all the way up to Greenland14.

  Seppuku

  Artificial microbes are almost mainstream these days: J. Craig Venter (the Human Genome guy) has completed an entirely artificial genome even as I type15, hoping that such organisms will be able to cure the world's environmental ills. Peter Schulz and his team have already tweaked E. coli to synthesize a novel amino acid not found in nature16, hoping it will be able to outcompete the baseline strain. Entirely synthetic organisms, built from interchangeable genetic modules, are just around the corner17. I wish all these guys better luck than Jakob Holtzbrink's gel-jocks had when they tweaked ßehemoth.

  Seppuku's genetic template was first synthesized by Leslie Orgel18 back in 2000; TNA actually does duplex with conventional nucleic acids. The idea of alien genes incorporating themselves into our own nuclear material is even more old-hat than artificial microbes—not only are our genes rife with parasitic DNA from a range of bugs, but functional genes originally brought into the cell by the ancestors of our own mitochondria appear to have migrated into the nucleus19. Massive horizontal gene transfer between species has occurred throughout much of Earth's history20, and of course the symbiotic incorporation of small cells into larger ones has a long and honorable history reflected in every eukaryotic cell on the planet. (Back in Maelstrom I cited chloroplasts and mitochondria; apicoclasts are a related example, devolved endosymbionts found in Toxoplasma and Plasmodium21.)

  Taka Ouellette's awed appreciation of proline as a metabolic catalyst will probably be a little behind the times by mid-century, since Movassaghi and Jacobsen have already pointed out the potential of such simple molecules to act as enzymes22.

  The Chemistry of Character

  Some readers may wonder if I have trouble distinguishing between personality and neurochemistry. It's a fair point, but don't blame me: blame the scientists who can't let a week go by without reporting yet more evidence that personality is just another word for biochemistry, albeit written in an exceedingly complex font (e.g. Hannuk Yaeger's propensity for violence, rooted in his monoamine oxidase levels23). Unless you're one of those Easter-bunny vitalists who believes that personality results from some unquantifiable divine spark, there's really no alternative to the mechanistic view of human nature.

  A central tenet of the whole rifters saga—introduced in Starfish, and expanded in Maelstrom and Behemoth—is that false memories of abuse can cause neurological changes in the individual every bit as real as genuine memories can. That was pretty speculative when Starfish first came out, but recent research has added empirical evidence of this effect24,25.

  Details on the care and feeding of sociopaths were largely taken from the work of Robert Hare26 and others27. ßehemoth's musings regarding the adaptive value of sociopathy in corporate settings may not be entirely off the mark, either26,2829 (And as these references should make clear, neither Ken Lubin nor Achilles Desjardins are sociopaths in the classic sense. More goes into such creatures than a mere absence of conscience.)

  Maelstrom established that Guilt Trip took its lead largely from the genes of certain parasites which could alter the behavior of their hosts. The actual mechanism by which this occurred was not known when that book came out, although some had speculated that it occured right down at the neurotransmitter level. I hung Guilt Trip's hat on that hypothesis, and am now relieved to report that the gamble paid off: at least one such parasitic puppet-master works by screwing with its host's serotonin-producing neurons30.

  Alice Jovellanos's denigration of the ethical impulse takes its lead from recent studies which establish that moral "reasoning" is not reasonable at all—it occurs primarily in the emotional centers of the brain, resulting in inconsistent and indefensible beliefs about whether a course of action is "right" or "wrong"31. An accompanying commentary article gives a very nice summary of the so-called "Trolley Paradox", not to mention an airtight rationale for pushing people in front of trains32. Jovellanos's arguments may be simplistic—the prefrontal cortex, after all, seems to play at least some role in moral decision-making33,34,35—but then again, Jovellanos was a bit of a zealot. For which she paid a price.

  Speaking of moral decision-making, Lenie Clarke's passion for revenge earlier in the rifters saga—not to mention Ken Lubin's unacknowledged passion for same later on—are not merely overused dramatic tropes. We appear to be hardwired to punish those who have slighted us, even if—and this is the counterintuitive bit—even if our acts of vengeance hurt us more than those who have trespassed against us36. I like to think the reason the world gets another chance at the end of this story is because, as Lubin speculates, Spartacus disabled the vengeance response in Achilles Desjardins at the same time it destroyed his conscience. He may have been a monster. He may have been sexual sadist. But in that one retrofitted corner of his soul, he may have been more civilized that you or I will ever be.

  And finally, the most disturbing real-world echo of this imaginary hellhole comes from the Village Voice37, reporting on ongoing research towards an "anti-remorse pill"—a drug developed to cure post-traumatic stress syndrome, which would soothe the torturer as well as the tortured. Such neurochemical tweaks would work by short-circuiting guilt itself, making it that much easier to get a good night's sleep after mowing down crowds of unruly civilians protesting unpopular government policies. Yes, I called my version Absolution—but people, it was supposed to be ironic...

  Here, the Maelstrom just moved outside...

  Some background ambience from the world above the waterline:

  The developing world has no shortage of reasons to be pissed at the other two. By mid-century, I'm postulating a sort of Africa-wide schadenfreude in response to the collapse of N'Am's societal infrastructure. The icing on that bitter cake is the further prediction that the majority of the African population will consist of women; I base this on the fact that in Ethiopia at least, malnourished women are more likely to give birth to daughters than sons38 (presumably for the same energetics-related reasons this happens in other species). I'm basically suggesting that generations of disease, starvation, and exploitation/indifference will result in one righteously-pissed, gender-skewed hotbed of discontent in which the myth of a victimized woman's apocalyptic vendetta would catch on real fast. Think of Liberation Theology, that violent incarnation of Catholicism that arose from the political turnoil of Latin America in the last century; now move it to Africa, and emphasise the warrior Madonna at its heart.

  The various bits of weaponry portrayed in this novel—from Miri's arsenal to Desjardins' booby-traps to South Africa's ICBMs— are taken from a variety of sources including the USAF39; The Economist40; Cornell University Peace Studies Program41; and even the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts42. Evidently weapons-grade infrasound isn't all it's cracked up to be. (On the other hand, it seems surprisingly simple to generate your own electromagnetic pulse43).

  Electronic Wildlife & Digital Evolution

  Maelstrom hung on t
he premise that the same Darwinian processes that shape life in this world are equally applicable to the digital realm—that self-replicating software will be literally alive when the conditions of natural selection are met. That position has gained recent ground; terms like "digital organism" crop up in the most respectable scientific journals44,45,46, and you can now download freeware apps that let you experiment with digital evolution on your own desktop47. E-life is proceeding on track; maybe the Maelstrom Ecosystems won't be far behind.

  Maelstrom extended the conceit of Internet-as-Ecosystem to a "consensus superorganism" that exploited the myth of the Meltdown Madonna as a reproductive strategy. Five years further down the timeline, parts of that superorganism have transmuted—with a little help from their friends—into the "Shredders" and "Lenies" of ßehemoth. Ecologically, we've moved from a climax ecosystem to a weedy and impoverished landscape of virtual rats, gulls, and kudzu—and in keeping with that spirit, the virtual-ecology aspects of this novel echo the pest-species dynamics common in real-world ecosystems.

  A common response to outbreaks of unwanted insect species is to haul out the pesticides. The pest's usual response is to a) develop resistance, and b) crank up its reproductive rate to offset the increased mortality. Once this happens, human "managers" don't dare stop spraying, because the pest has been pushed into a state of chronic outbreak; its increased reproductive rate will result in a catastrophic population explosion the moment spraying sends. This is essentially what happened during the spruce budworm infestations of the North American Maritimes back in the seventies and eighties48; I rather suspect we may in for a replay with the current bark-beetle invasion.

  You don't need a Ph.D. to see the parallels between this and the exorcist/shredder dynamic at play in N'AmNet. Lenie Clarke never took Ecology 101; she made her moves for her own twisted and unrelated reasons. Ironically, though, it may have been the right course of action from a purely ecological standpoint. Pest species tend to peak and crash cyclically if you just leave them alone; once you've cranked them into outbreak mode, perhaps the only way to restore any kind of natural balance is to just take your foot off the brake, grit your teeth, and take your lumps until the system stabilizes.

  Assuming it does.

  Predicting the Past:

  Smart gels. Head cheeses. Those neuron puddings that the corpses used to jam the rifters in the first half of this book, and which played a much more central role in the previous ones. They exist now, in real life. Neurons cultured from rat brains, now operating remote-controlled robots at a lab near you49.

  Piss me right off. I thought I had years before this stuff caught up with me.

  * * *

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