by Peter Watts
CHARYBDIS
Leaving Battery Park is like crawling through the guts of a whale.
First there are cattle runs, four or five of them, to herd docile civilians in parallel streams for processing. Soothing pastel signage promises quick and imminent evacuation to those who are patient and wait their turn. The looped female voice I heard earlier—just as calm, just as reassuring, even more fucking irritating—says essentially the same thing for the benefit of the blind, the illiterate, and the voice actors guild. If you feel unwell, please make yourself known to medical staff immediately. Successful treatment of the Manhattan pathogen depends on early diagnosis. Martial law is for your protection. CryNet Security forces operate within a full federal mandate. Do not be alarmed. Do not be alarmed. Do not be alarmed.
Of course, if any civilian should be any less than docile there’s always the fallback solution they went with back at the waterfront. I encounter a few straggling CELLulites en route, running late to join the festivities at the castle; they seem more than willing to explore that alternative.
I help them.
At the end of the cattle run a workstation sparks intermittently on a table, too far gone to process my paperwork even if I had any, even if anyone was around to hand it to. Lightsticks and smart-painted arrows point me to a yellow hatch with a tiny window at eye level and a biohazard decal plastered underneath. I look through into a tunnel of shiny plastic, blown taut and puffy like one of those inflatable playrooms rich parents buy for four-year-old larvae.
A keypad glows on the wall to my right. I have no idea what the code is but the CRYNET NANOSUIT 2.0 encourages brute force on those awkward occasions when going through proper channels is not an option. The hatch rips free: Pressurized air sighs past and the tunnel beyond starts to sag.
Bad sign. I know something about these inflatable decon tunnels: the positive pressure in the passageway is supposed to only push back unruly microbes, not hold up the whole structure. It’s the higher-pressure air between the inner and outer walls that keeps the tunnel up. If opening the door is enough to cause a slump, the walls themselves must be leaking.
Like I said: the guts of a whale. The light shining through the walls is blood orange, like looking at the sun through closed eyelids. The walls themselves almost seem to breathe around you: air seeps from one bladder to the next, one segment of intestine still taut enough to stand in while the next is so flaccid you have to get down on hands and knees and push through curtains of billowing PVC. Disinfectant sprays like digestive juice from hidden nozzles; it condenses on my faceplate and fucks with my vision. The Reassuring Voice has a different routine in here, urges me to move to the next chamber when you hear the chime, tells me to remain calm and go with the doctors if the alarm sounds, hints at dire consequences for anyone who might obstruct medical or security personnel.
No alarms go off. No chimes sound. The only noises I hear are the endless maddening voice of Loop Lady, the soft wheezing of the tunnel between her announcements, and the scuttling of—
Wait a second: scuttling?
Something runs over my boot. Something the size of a sourdough loaf drops onto my face. I get a split-second glimpse of a very small fire hose nozzle or a very large hypodermic needle; things like gleaming scalpels rat-tat-tat against my helmet. I bring my fist up—pure defensive reflex—and I swear I nearly punch myself in the face before remembering the age-old question, Who wins when the awesome power of the Nanosuit 2.0’s artificial muscles meet the awesome protective shielding of the Nanosuit 2.0’s armored faceplate? I don’t know who wins but it’s pretty obvious that the loser is whoever’s wearing the Nanosuit 2.0 when we find out. Best-case scenario I end up with bug guts all over my windshield, and I haven’t seen any wipers on this thing. Worst-case, I punch right through the faceplate and smash my own brains against the back of the helmet.
So I deflect the swing at the last microsecond, pull off to the left, and however many thousand g’s these carbon-nanomyofibrils pull just kinda glance off the respirator and the momentum spins me around like I was sideswiped by a semi and I am going down, man, I am spinning like a ballet dancer into all that flaccid plastic and I can hear bladders popping and tearing all along the tunnel, wrapping around me and I am on the floor, gift-wrapped for the delectation of some giant mutant flea out of an old Bowie album.
Whatever it is, I land on it. It bursts under my ass like a burrito.
I buckle down and tear myself free and bull my way through the rest of the sequence. Maybe I see shadows moving behind the plastic, vague shapes the size of softballs and cocker spaniels. Maybe it’s my imagination. Valium Girl keeps urging me to remain calm, to be patient, to move forward when I hear the chime. Somehow she sounds a bit testier now. And when I hear for the hundredth time that Successful treatment of the Manhattan pathogen depends on early diagnosis I want to break out laughing—because nothing says medical competence and effective quarantine like a bunch of Mutant Chernobyl Bloodsuckers living in the heart of your decon facility.
It’s not working, Roger. Nice try, though.
Actually, I believe you. I’d know if you were lying, and even if I didn’t they’d probably leave you in the dark just on general principles. So let me fill you in: Your bosses just tried an emergency remote-shutdown through a backdoor optical channel in the twenty-thousand-angstrom range. Didn’t you see that little laser light winking in the air duct back there?
Oh, that’s right. You can’t see infrared.
The thing about radio, see, is you can always jam the signal. Optics are a lot tougher to hack. Pass a light beam through a cyclotron and it barely bends, you’re not gonna scramble that signal until the day we start building black holes for the battlefield. As long as your target’s line-of-sight, you’re golden.
So that’s the route CryNet went when they built in their kill switch—in case one of their Nanosuits fell into the wrong hands, you know, got used for good instead of evil. It’s wired into the saggital lens, and they just used it to try and shut me down.
I don’t think so. The only one I can hurt right now is you, and if they cared about dear old Roger Gillis they wouldn’t have sent you in here. They’re just trying to get back in control, but that’s the thing about heuristic battlefield systems: They’re built to adapt, so they adapt. Develop countermeasures to your countermeasures.
Hey, don’t look so worried. I don’t blame you; you didn’t even know. Hell, I don’t even blame them. I know the drill, I haven’t changed that much. If I was in their shoes I’d probably do the same thing.
Let’s see if they learn from their mistakes, hmm?
Anyway. The rest of Manhattan makes Battery Park look pristine.
You can’t look anywhere without seeing fire: writhing from abandoned cars, burning in oily rivulets along the gutters, licking out from shattered glass façades on the fifteenth floor. Scorched black trees creak and crackle in neat rows along the sidewalks; one topples across the street, sends a shower of sparks whirling into the air. The goddamn asphalt is smoldering. I leave footprints behind on State Street as though I were strolling along the fucking beach.
Oh, and there are the bodies.
I’ve seen some action overseas, you know. Barely signed up before Ling Shan went down, they had us over in Sri Lanka trying to clean up after the riots. I’ve seen bodies piled higher than you could reach on tiptoe, I’ve seen bodies so far gone you couldn’t see half a meter through the flies. Back at home I knew this guy, Nickle his name was, saw some action during the Arizona Uprising. He went all post-traumatic every time you zipped up your fly because the sound reminded him of body bags being sealed. And I was like, you fucking girlyman, they gave you body bags? You got to bag ’em one at a time? We had to burn whole villages just to stay ahead of the cholera. You couldn’t even use hazmat filters half the time, the smell was so bad. You had go in like a fucking astronaut, hump your own air supply on your back.
You know what, Roger? This was worse.
&nbs
p; Yeah, I know. You wouldn’t think so from the footage. I didn’t think so, either, at first. The corpses were—scattered around like leaves, like driftwood. The smell wasn’t especially overpowering; you knew you were breathing in the dead mind you, no mistaking that, but this wasn’t Sri Lanka by any stretch. Less heat, less humidity, the corpses were spread thin enough on the ground to let you keep your lunch down most of the time. None of that all-piled-in-one-place critical-biomass bullshit.
Let me tell you, though. It sneaks up on you.
It was the spore, man. Manhattan Path, Softball Syndrome, any of a dozen names I must’ve heard down there. It seemed to like mouths and eyes and open wounds, any wet tissue. I saw one poor fucker who’d literally been ripped in half, right down the middle; those buboes and filaments—mycelia, is that the word?—they were just boiling out of him in a kind of avalanche, right about where his lungs would’ve been. And I remember thinking, Brother, I hope that shit got into you after you died, because slow suffocation cannot be a fun way to go.
And of course not all of them were dead, not completely, not yet. Some of them still moved a little; a twitching leg, a muscle tic tugging pulling at the fingers. Or maybe they weren’t alive, either, maybe I wasn’t seeing anything more than the kick of a dead frog’s leg when you hook it up to a battery. Maybe the spore just short-circuited their motor nerves and left them twitching and jiggling until the last cell ran out of juice. I can hope, right? Anyway, I’m a tough boy. I can take it.
But you want to know what I almost couldn’t take, what fucked me up even worse than Sri Lanka? It was their faces. The ones that still had faces, anyway.
So many of them were smiling.
Yeah. Sorry. Kind of faded out there. What do you call it? Fugue state.
You get used to it.
Anyway, I’m only out of Battery Park for a few minutes before I hear this voice in my head: “Hey, Prophet? You there, bra? Come back.” And my first instinct is to duck and cover because all the comm I’ve intercepted up to this point has been decidedly unfuckingfriendly, if you know what I mean. So it takes a second before I realize that this isn’t someone talking about fragging my ass, this is someone hailing me. “Hey, Prophet? You there, bra? Come back.”
—but it’s loud enough to bring me back to the tumbledown canyons of Manhattan, which is just as well because this is no place to be lost in a psychotic hallucination even if you are wearing NANOSUIT 2.0 FROM CN COMBAT SOLUTIONS. A shout and a blink and I’m back in the here-and-now.
“Prophet? It’s Gould, man. Come back.”
Gould? Gould! Hey, man, I’m looking for you. Got a message for you from—
“The whole damn link went down, man, you were completely off the grid for almost four hours. I don’t know if the prototype’s glitching out or if someone blocked the freq. Any signal-jamming going on in your neighborhood?” I can’t answer. I don’t have to: “Never mind, just get to the lab as fast as you can, man, things are seriously turning to shit up here. Infected all over the place, poor bastards. CryNet are out on the cull. I even saw a couple of Ceph on the way over here. Look, if you’re anyplace in the downtown, stick to the subways. It’s gotta be safer than the streets. Hope you brought those marines.”
And maybe someone is jamming the spectrum, because Gould’s icon stutters to DISCONNECT and disappears. That magical hexagon compass is still hanging there in v-space, though, and as I watch it shakes itself free of whatever South Street tree fort it was reeling me toward and locks onto a new destination a few klicks to the northwest. Converted warehouse, judging from the wireframe. Must be Gould’s lab. He mentions it with a wave of the hand, and SECOND updates its waypoints.
I’m a little bit scared at how smart this thing seems to be. This thing I’m inside. That’s inside me.
I don’t make it more than a couple of blocks before I run into another batch of infectees. These ones are definitely alive; they’re walking, or trying to. Half a dozen of them. One’s crawling on all fours, barely keeping up. Another’s still on two legs, but one of her feet’s been blown off and she’s hobbling along on the stump of an ankle. Somehow they know where they’re going, somehow they’ve agreed on a direction. I don’t know how some of them can even see with those tapioca tumors eating out their eyes.
And some of them are freaking out, I hear one chick muttering about bad drugs and some other guy’s screaming this isn’t me this isn’t me this isn’t me but so many of the others are smiling again, those crazy fucking smiles, sometimes they just grin but sometimes their lips split wide open in this kind of obscene ecstatic laugh and you can’t even see their teeth for all the squirming rot in their mouths. They’re murmuring to each other, or to God or something, they’re talking about the light, the light, and Lord, take me. The suit’s got this heuristic threat-recognition software but it’s not lighting them up. I keep my shotgun raised anyway, just in case. False Prophet pipes up with some shit about stage-four infection and cellular autolysis and I almost blow them away anyhow—not out of fear you understand, not because they’re a threat, but as an act of mercy because sweet smoking Jesus, no one should have to go out like that. But then again, they don’t seem to be suffering, and something’s telling me I should probably conserve my ammo.
That was probably just me. Might’ve been the suit, I suppose.
Back then, it was a lot easier to tell the difference.
Executive Summary UNPS- 25B/23: Charybdis Epidemiological Agent 01
Timestamp: 1501 23/08/2023
Authorship: UNPS
Distribution: CSIRA, FEMA, UN (HoD: Eyes Only)
Key Phrases: EID, “Extinction Level Event,” “God Module,” “Green Death,” Charybdis, pilgrim, “Religious Impulse,” Wanderlust
Jurisdiction: US/WestHem Economic Alliance
Threat ID: GrEp Ag- 01 (UNPS designation: common names inc. “spore,” “God Bug,” “Softball Syndrome,” “RapCer,” others)
Threat Category: Weaponised Biological
Threat Summary:
Taxonomy: Awaiting classification.
Origin: Unknown (extrasolar): see UNPS-25A/23: “Charybdis,”
Description: Engineered agenetic bioweapon, monogenerational saprophyte.
Tentative Life Cycle and Epidemiology: Dispersal phase resembles a radially ridged spore 0.1–1.5mm in diameter; released by “Charybdis Spires” common throughout the MIZ. Initial dispersal is ballistic/explosive with an effective launch radius of 50–60m. Subsequent dispersal is passive/windborne, and of limited range: the spore becomes biologically inert and noninfectious within three to five hours of release, effectively restricting its range to New York and its immediate environs.
Infectious spores settle and sprout on animal tissue, preferring moist membranes (eyes, respiratory tract) or open wounds. While they show at least some level of metabolic activity on all animal species tested to date, active proliferation appears limited to hominoid hosts. Humans, chimpanzees and gorillas are most vulnerable; the spore is debilitating but apparently nonlethal to orangutans, gibbons and Old World monkeys, although it may simply take longer for the agent to reach lethal levels in these taxa.* Tarsids, Omomyids and Old World monkeys appear to be relatively immune.
Upon taking root in a suitable host, the spore germinates into a filamentous mass that proliferates throughout the body and shows a special affinity for the myelinated cells of the central nervous system. Superficial physical symptoms during this phase are obvious and grotesquely disfiguring: The lymph nodes grow hyperbubonic, and abscesses erupt across the skin (white cell counts from extracted pus range as high as 200,000). These abscesses frequently present a slight greenish tinge due to the presence of pyocyanine (a pigment evidently introduced by the spore itself). A variety of fleshy protuberances also sprout from the body during this phase, preferentially but not exclusively from the body orifices; these range from filamentous rootlets of <1mm diameter to ropy tumourous structures several centimeters thick. These are chaotically vascularise
d, and consist of hypertrophied columnar cells. (The precise mechanisms underlying their metastasis are currently being explored.) While the breakdown of host tissue would prove ultimately fatal in any event, death usually results from more proximate causes such as physical constriction and/or occlusion of vital organs, or suffocation.
At no point in this process does GrEp-Ag01 appear to be contagious: No fruiting bodies or other reproductive structures have been observed. However, the agent does rewire the behavior of its victims at the neurological level, inducing the so-called Wanderlust that draws the infected toward Charybdis aggregations. In approximately 70% of cases it also hijacks the religious-impulse circuitry in the temporal lobe (hence the term “pilgrim”); we speculate that it is also responsible for the self-mutilation behavior among some infectees. While victims sometimes refer to the resulting injuries as “stigmata,” the behavior is thought to function as a means of increasing exposure to further spore infection.
While the neurological reprogramming of complex behavior is well documented even among earthly parasites (see Dicrocoelium; Entomophthora; Holy See; Sacculina; Toxoplasma; others), it should be emphasized that the cognitive abilities of infected “pilgrims” do not appear to be significantly impaired until infection renders them effectively immobile. Victims remain capable of intelligent conversation, complex problem-solving, and other hallmarks of legally competent adults. Areas in which mental faculties are impaired—unsupported beliefs in mystical spirits, cryptic behaviors such as “speaking in tongues,” and even self-destructive acts born of a desire to give up their lives for their “god”—are well within the pale of mainstream religious practices around the world. While the agent does proliferate throughout the brain and central nervous system, its impact on CNS function is remarkably subtle until the tertiary stage.