by Peter Watts
It doesn’t die. But it goes down, pinned under two thousand kilograms of Chevrolet’s finest alloys. I can hear the roars of my vanquished enemy, I can see the car swaying and rocking as the thing underneath struggles to free itself before the timers run down.
Doesn’t take much to set off a sticky. Even a footstep within a couple of meters is enough if you crank the sensitivity. And this bruiser, it’s moving that cab around like a goddamn seesaw. It’s half a second, tops, between the timers zeroing out and the whole damn vehicle going up in a ball of fire, HE, and gasoline. It’s almost too long. The Heavy’s actually tipping the cab up on its side by the time the stickies detonate, actually getting back to its feet when its feet get blown out from under it.
But you know what they say. Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
After a while they stop coming for me. After a while they get harder to find. But Jacob Hargreave is still there, telling me what I have to do.
A riot of alien machinery sits in the center of the pit like some kind of nerve ganglion, radiating those massive spokes in all directions. The base of a Ceph spire rises from its center: the same spire I saw past City Hall. Most of the spokes look like the backbones of some colossal cyborg; three sprout a pair of leg-like spines from each segment. They look like the bodies of monstrous centipedes.
“Ah,” Hargreave says. “Yes. Well.”
I wait for something a bit more helpful. I wait for more Ceph to come pouring through the walls and tear me apart. All I see are spines, and pipes, and see-through panels here and there—portholes, almost—behind which clouds of spore swirl and seethe like coffee grounds. They’re not going anywhere, though. The flow is random, chaotic, like boiling water trapped in a pot: all wired up and no place to go.
“From the look of this feed, the spore loop’s running near dormant levels,” Hargreave says at last. “We’ll need to fix that. There must be triggers around here, but what they look like is anyone’s guess …”
Turns out those centipede spokes are key. So I follow one of them out of the spear, across the pit, back down to earth where it plunges into some terminal structure of plates and spines and glowing orange slots. I find the interfaces, I go through the motions. The plumbing trembles under my hand; the spore in the nearest porthole begins to surge back up the conduit, toward the machinery at center stage. One down, two to—
What?
Uh, Hargreave must’ve—Yeah, that’s right. Hargreave told me. I mean, how else would I know? It’s not like those controls looked like anything I’d ever seen before.
Damn good question. You should ask him.
Oh. Right.
Emergency Forensic Session on the Manhattan Incursion CSIRA Blackbody Council
Pre-Testimony Interview, Partial Transcript, 27/08/2023
Subject: Nathan Gould
Excerpt begins:
You know how dreams work, right? Our brains are full of static; neurons just fire off at random sometimes, not thoughts or anything, just—background noise. The visual cortex gets its share, but normally you don’t notice ’cause the signals coming in over your optic nerves are so much stronger, they just swamp everything else.
When you’re asleep, though, there’s nothing coming in through the main cables. Nothing to drown out the static. And the brain—notices. It’s got these pattern-matching circuits and when static’s all they’ve got to work with, they’ll find signal in that noise even if there isn’t any signal to find. They try and shoehorn these random flickers into the experiential database. Same reason we see faces in clouds.
That’s what I thought those visions were, when they first started coming over the feeds. Just static. So I laid some dynamic filters over them, just to try and clean up the signal, and wouldn’t you know the residuals weren’t random. There was a whole other AV track embedded in there, and holy shit the things it showed.
Fragments, mainly. A few seconds, maybe the longest was getting up around a minute. Glimpses of the inside of some weird gloomy structure, blue end of the spectrum, like it was deep underwater or way out around Neptune or something. Architecture. Machinery. Some kind of twisted plumbing everywhere, all tangled and messed up. Not human, though. Not even close.
One fragment looked like a cross between a junkyard and a museum, full of things that had to be vehicles. Another looked like some kind of lab, Ceph running around everywhere, operating various bits of equipment. Not your usual Ceph, though, nothing we’ve seen in Manhattan. Some new geek caste, maybe. I saw a magic mirror once, a swirly portal that looked like some kind of teleportation device. Oh, and I kept seeing constellations: a cluster of blue stars, little sapphire pinpricks connected by a network of dim glowing filaments, rotating in midair. Arranged along the surface of an invisible sphere, you know, like a star globe. Ceph planetarium or something, I thought at first. Saw that track a few times, the suit must’ve had it listed as a favorite. Anyway, you’ve got the files. You must have turned my place inside out by now.
No comment. Right.
At first I thought this was all just a contaminant from the suit’s camera feed, right? Quantum echo of old footage, something from archival storage seeping into the signal. You could hardly blame the N2 for springing a leak or two after all the shit it had been through. And it was pretty fucking creepy, I mean finally I’m getting a glimpse of where Prophet’s actually been all those months, and wouldn’t you know he didn’t spend all that time getting pissed in some Taiwanese dive.
It never occurred to me that Alcatraz would even be aware of it. Even if he called up the cam feed, I’d had to squeeze the signal through a whole shitload of amps and filters to find the embed. Even if he had the wherewithal to do that from his end—which he does not—why would he? I didn’t even mention anything to him at the time. Poor fucker already had his hands full, he didn’t need me freaking him out with the news that his suit was haunted by the previous owner.
But once I figured out what was going on, I went back and looked at all those other burps and hiccups I’d written off as static the first time around. If there was anything useful in there, I figured I could pass it on. And then I run into that hive sequence, you know, the logs from when Hargreave was leading him around by the nose, and the only way that makes any sense at all is if Alcatraz already knows this shit. I mean, you must’ve seen the feed, right? He plays those Ceph controls like a fucking maestro, things I’d never have even tagged as controls. And sure enough, just before he pulls those moves out of his ass there’s static on the line, and when I squeeze out the signal it’s Prophet doing the same thing. Alcatraz was just going thou and doing likewise, bra.
So the suit isn’t just leaking these signals into the camera feed. It must be laying those images right across Alky’s visual cortex, poking those voxels the way you’d light up an LED. Far as I can figure the brain feed was the main feed; what I was getting off the camera was just an induction leak or something.
Now, I’m not saying Alcatraz is hiding anything, you understand? I know you fuckers, I know that’s the first place you’re gonna go with this, but most of the inputs our brains operate on are subconscious. You’re thinking Oooh, Alcatraz was seeing movies in his brain but for all we know he’s not even aware of the stimulus. It might all operate below the level of conscious perception, he could just get a feeling that this is how you’re supposed to work this or that control. So you might want to go easy on the poor bastard, unless you’ve started beating the shit out of people for having flashes of intuition.
You want something to blame, blame the N2. But really, it was only doing what it was supposed to. It’s programmed for mission success, right? It’s designed to analyze data from a thousand sources, figure out what’s most mission-relevant, serve up the intel most vital to current objectives. That’s all it was doing. That’s all it’s ever done.
We just had no idea it was going to be so goddamn good at it.
You ever have any direct dealings with Jack Hargreave, Roger
?
Well of course you wouldn’t have actually met. I’m asking if you ever got into a conversation with the man: text chat, Third Life, online chess club. That sort of thing.
Ah. Then you may not know that he liked to play things really close to the chest.
I was halfway through the sequence before I knew what I was actually doing, and even then it wasn’t because Hargreave let me in on his master plan. I was just kick-starting these damn spokes, one after another, fighting off grunts and stalkers every goddamn step of the way, and I basically put it together myself. We’re priming the pump, right? We’re booting up this spire to shoot a huge wadge of spore all over central Manhattan, which on the face of it doesn’t make a lot of sense if you’re actually fighting for the home team. But I remember what Hargreave said, that one insight Nathan Gould’s synapses were too drug-addled to parse: The suit doesn’t contain the specs for a weapon, the suit is the weapon. And the suit, it’s pirated, right? It’s Cephtech on a leash. And I’m remembering that first stalker, my hand going into whatever goo those fuckers use for blood, and the N2 trying to interface with it …
So finally I figure it out. The suit is a weapon. The suit is a virus—Prophet said as much before he blew his brains out and left me holding the bag. And Jack Hargreave, he’s the tenth-degree goddamn black belt in battlefield judo, he’s the absolute master at using your opponent’s strength against him. So I’m wearing a virus, and all this spore, and the spear over my head—that’s the delivery platform.
Simple, huh?
But you’re not gonna get a tight-ass like Hargreave to just come right out and explain it like that, are you? No sirree. That dude learned decades before you and I were even born that Knowledge Is Power. He’s been keeping his cards facedown for so long that I bet even spilling the time of day would make his shriveled little testicles crawl back up into his body.
Still. I figured it out, in between fighting off aliens and fucking with the plumbing. And now I’m standing there with Ceph bodies bleeding out all around me, spore flowing full-bore from all three substations, and Hargreave says: “Now we need to get you inside the central structure.”
It’s not like there’s a door in the base of the spear with a neon sign saying THIS WAY TO THE INNER WORKINGS. Hargreave suggests that I just blow the shit out of it—“Try to blast loose one of the spoke seals and use the resulting rupture to effect entry” is the way he puts it—and that seems kind of ham-fisted even to me, but I don’t have a better idea. So I line up an overhead joint that’s bleeding steam where spear meets spoke—must have taken a hit during the fighting—and I force-feed it a couple of sticky grenades from the L-TAG, praying to the goddamn Spaghetti Monster I’m not punching through a motherboard.
Boom.
The dust clears instantly, sucked into the hole I’ve just blown. Huh. Negative-pressure differential. This thing breathes. The tracheotomy wound is just big enough to let me squeeze inside, where I find—
—well, tentacles is what they look like.
It’s a kind of silo. Curved glassy panels on all sides, arteries of orange lava-light running vertically between them. I follow those arteries up along a vertical shaft ribbed with cross-bracing every ten or fifteen meters, like hoops of cartilage around a trachea. High up in that space lightning flickers: some kind of static discharge. Even higher: daylight.
But down here in the basement, spore seethes behind those transparent panels as if it were alive. As if it were really pissed off.
Hargreave says I have to get it from in there to out here. No obvious controls, no obvious hatches or access ports. No way through except, well, through.
Hey, it worked last time.
So I proceed to shoot the shit out of those panels, and the machinery—screams …
I don’t know how else to describe it. Maybe it’s an alarm, maybe it’s just the equivalent of metal fatigue, some kind of mechanical stress. Or maybe Ceph machinery is alive somehow, maybe I’m hurting it. Anyhow, it works: The air around me is thick with spore, I can barely see my hand in front of my face. Hargreave makes approving noises from the ass end of nowhere.
SECOND writes across my eyeballs—
Incoming Protocols Detected
Handshaking …
Handshaking …
Connected.
Compiling Interface.
—and even throws up a little progress bar so I can see Hargreave’s science fair project edging toward the blue ribbon. Little patches of orange light flicker across my forearms—some kind of photic interface—and for a moment there it almost looks as though we’re going to pull it off.
But then I guess the spore remembers: It eats backbones like me for lunch. And if we’re a little too tough to chew, it spits us out.
Something throws me against the wall. I rattle around on the floor for a moment like a pebble in a pickup; then the spire opens its throat and shoots me halfway to the goddamn jet stream. Suddenly my guts are in my boots; all I see is orange streaks and dark blurs. And then I’m out, the human spitball, shot into the sky like a watermelon seed. I hang there in midair for a moment, a tabletop Manhattan turning on all sides, God’s own middle finger jabbing up at me from a dark gray pit dead below. Then I’m coming back to earth and one hard fucking landing. I land back on the spire ass-first and off-center, like dropping onto a free-fall waterslide. I roll, bounce off into space again, grab some bit of alien corkscrew plumbing my body somehow knew was there even though my brain didn’t see it. I hang on for dear life: bait on a hook, thirty stories up. One precious handhold away from street pizza.
“Ah,” Hargreave says with mild disappointment. “More resistance than I expected.”
You’ve got to be fucking kidding.
“An immune reaction, I suppose you could call it. You’d better—uh—
“Just hang on a sec,” he says, and drops off the channel. He’s probably not even being ironic. Either way, fuck that advice: I haul myself back up onto the rim that bounced my ass off the spire, climb back up the vent as far as the slope will let me, scope out the angles. Just off to the left a twisted strip of some avenue ramps up from the ground like a ski jump, a tangle of I-beams and blacktop pushed into space by the erupting spear. It’s close enough to make a jump, if I can get a running start.
I make it, barely. Lose my footing on the very first step, stumble, keep going three long loping steps down a forty-degree angle and push off into space, flailing like an idiot. But I make the jump and land on solid asphalt, in no more pieces than I was before.
I start down the road to ground level. I’m almost there when static cackles in my ear and Hargreave’s back. There’s nothing fake about his tone this time. I can tell with his first word that he’s stressed; I can tell by the second that he’s scared shitless.
He tells me the Pentagon has decided on drastic measures. He tells me bombers are inbound from McGuire.
He tells me they’re going to put all of Lower Manhattan underwater.
AQUARIUM
Ever seen a sweeper in the field, Roger?
Street-Sweeper. No, not the trucks that clear out the gutters. The basic theory’s chimp-simple: Drop a bomb into a body of water offshore from your target, blow it up, let the wave do the dirty work. Cleaner than an airborne nuke, more devastating than a neutron bomb—UniSec even tried to sell it as environmentally friendly, if you can believe it. It’s only water, after all—with a few rads mixed in, sure, but at least there’s no aerial fallout. Pure, clean, natural water.
A twenty-meter wall of it moving at two hundred klicks an hour. Mother Nature’s Doomsday Machine.
That’s what your bosses set on us, Roger. That’s what we had to deal with.
I didn’t believe it at first. Thought there was something wrong with the comm link—I mean, the ol’ N2 can certainly be forgiven for losing a little EM gain after all we’ve been through together, right? So when I get comm back and the first thing I hear is Hargreave shouting about tidal waves I thought I
must’ve misheard, you know, a fucking tidal wave? Are you joking, Jack? But the dude’s never been more serious about anything in his life. Because Manhattan has not been dealt enough shit yet, no Roger, it has not. And so there is a cleansing tsunami coming to flood out the aliens. Anything with a backbone that doesn’t have access to a pair of industrial-strength water wings has just been written off as collateral.
What do we know about the Ceph, Roger? I don’t mean whatever secret genetic insights the black labs have under wraps; what does every sad-sack sonofabitch on the street know about the Ceph? Well, we know that they need those exoskels to ride around in, which suggests they’re not great in earth-type gravity situations. We know that when you peel them out of those skels they really look a lot more like boneless sea creatures than like anything that ever walked on land. We call them Ceph because, you know, they remind us an awful lot of cephalopods. All of which strongly suggests a native lifestyle that’s at the very least amphibious, if not aquatic. So what secret weapon does the Pentagon use to take them out?
Seawater.
Let me repeat that, Roger, for the benefit of your chickenshit bosses behind the mirror. The Pentagon. Decided. That the best way. To take out. Super-advanced. Aquatic. Aliens.
Was to drown them.
Oh, and did I tell you I’ve got this phobia about water? I swear, sometimes I feel like cheering for the other side.
So I hear the jet streak by overhead and I don’t even waste time looking up; I’ve got maybe twenty seconds before it’s far enough offshore to deploy, maybe ten minutes—if I’m lucky—for the wave to drive back through the bottleneck and put us all in hot water. Hargreave’s yelling about getting to higher ground, but what’s higher ground in downtown Manhattan?