by Peter Watts
Organic? Are you fucking kidding me? Dude, even we’ve got CPUs made out of meat, we had neuron cultures wired into machines back before the turn of the century! Why do you think those blobs in the exoskels are any different? What makes you think the Ceph—whatever made the Ceph—what makes you think they even draw a distinction between meat and machinery?
Because I’m telling you, Roger, that line is not nearly as black-and-white as you seem to think.
Trust me on this.
Strickland sketches out the essentials while we make our escape. Hargreave’s a sick twisted motherfucker—“totally insane,” she says, “thinks he’s the only competent human being on the planet”—but Gould was right: He knows more about the Ceph than any other backbone around. It goes back farther than Ling Shan, farther than Arizona; apparently Hargreave’s known about the Ceph ever since he jacked some of their tech out of the Siberian backwoods in 1908. (Which would make Hargreave around 130 years old by now. Kinda surprised that didn’t prick up any ears over at the Census Department. Of course, Hargreave probably owns the Census Department.)
Tunguska is the word Strickland throws over her shoulder, as if it’s supposed to mean something to me. Turns out that was the site of a fifteen-megaton airburst back then, decades before the human race figured out how to make nukes. Two thousand square kilometers of forest flattened just like that. Nobody ever figured out for sure what it was: comet fragment, meteorite, microsingularity. Nobody ever found anything definitive, because Jacob Hargreave and Karl Rasch got there first and carted it all away.
And in all the long decades since, Hargreave has been walled away with the fire he stole from the gods, breathing on those dangerous embers all through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, patiently waiting for our technology to grow into something that could crack the codes and solve the riddles. Sometimes not so patiently; you have to wonder how much of our vaunted human technology really belongs to us and how much we were herded toward by some megalomaniac and his stolen box of miracles, working behind the scenes.
Not enough, judging by the past couple of days.
So three years back Hargreave engineers some ill-fated foray into a Ceph outpost in the South China Sea; the Ceph wake up and Tara Strickland’s father doesn’t come home. Hargreave’s been waiting for the other shoe to drop ever since. He’s had a hundred years to get ready and three years early warning and he’s got some kind of plan to beat back the invaders; Strickland’s masters need to know what it is.
I know what it is. It’s a plan to rip me out of the N2 like ripping someone out of their own skin and nerves, throw away the parts you don’t need, and graft yourself into the rest. After that I’m not sure; but Strickland’s already foiled Part A, so I suppose it can’t hurt to find out. It might even save the world.
We rise again. The cargo elevator is a metal cube with a grillwork floor and no walls: I-beams and cable conduits and greasy white cinder blocks scroll sedately past as Strickland talks. “He’s holed up in the executive level. You’ll be running into heavy resistance. No one gets in to see him face-to-face; believe me, I’ve tried, and I’m his head of security. You’re going to have to break in.”
She doesn’t seem to notice the dead employee sharing the car with us. He’s got a very nice silencer screwed onto the end of his M12. He won’t be needing it.
The elevator lurches to a halt on some level not meant for open house: server cabinets, ammo crates, lockers. Another one of those rotating amber lights.
Oh, and cameras.
“I’ve locked down local wireless; you’ve got maybe five minutes before Hargreave breaks the lock and sets the dogs on you.” She snorts softly. “I guess that’d be on us, now. I’ll get up to the helipad and secure our transport. Bring him out and meet me on the roof. We fly him out, we take him away, we make him talk. Go.”
I cloak. I hear the elevator grind back into motion as I run invisibly past the securicams on my way to the stairwell.
No waypoints, this time. No helpful filepics or friendly voices telling me what to do. Just stairs and switchbacks and, two or three landings above me, low worried voices:
“Comms still dead in the skinning lab.”
“Where the hell’s Strickland?”
“Must be offline, too. I can’t get hold of her, anyway.”
“Shit. This isn’t good.”
It isn’t good, but it’s quick and it’s easy. They go down before either of them can draw a weapon or a breath. The silencer works like a charm.
I’m a shark circling a shipwreck. I work my way through befuddled mercenaries torn among so many masters—Lockhart, Strickland, Hargreave—that they were starting to suffer whiplash even before Strickland jammed their communications. I move up from spartan basement storage into rows of spotless offices, into conference rooms paneled in oak and leather. Each floor is more opulent than the last, each outfitted with darker grains and older antiques, each more anachronistic. The whole building is a time machine. Waypoints would be redundant here; the path to Jacob Hargreave is obvious. Just follow him back to the Victorian era.
It takes closer to ten minutes for Hargreave to undo Strickland’s sabotage; thirty seconds for the kill order to spread. By that time I’m already on the executive level. A tiny knot of armored mercs kills the lights and hunts me on thermal, but they’ve just spent the last thirty-six hours watching Golem Boy cut their numbers in half. Last night, maybe, they were jonesing for payback; right now I can track them by the sound of their knees knocking together.
I’d put them out of their misery myself, but the Ceph beat me to the punch.
I don’t know where they came from. Haven’t seen a Squid since I hit the island, but here they are: an intrepid little band of stalkers, eye clusters blazing, dorsal tentacles flailing, crashing through the walls and tearing out human hearts for all the world as though they’re on my side. There are only four of them—three after one of the CELLulites gets off a lucky shot—and I manage to take out another before diving into a convenient stairwell and dropping down a level. I back against a corner that offers decent cover and a slitscan view of the door above. I aim the SMG.
They don’t come after me.
Not an assault force. Not a measly four stalkers. Recon party at most; but advance scouts implies scouts in advance of something. Strickland was right: The Squids are coming to Roosevelt Island.
It would be a really good idea to get Hargreave out before that happens.
“So. Despite all the betrayals, all the pain, you are coming to get me out. Remarkable. Almost heroic, one might say.” No hysteria in that voice, no more anger. Just—weariness. Resignation. Something almost approaching amusement. “But I fear our tentacular friends have formulated a similar plan. You’d better hurry if you hope to beat them to it.”
Our tentacular friends are not back in the hall where I left them.
“Come. I won’t fight you anymore. I’ve even rescinded the kill order, for the benefit of any soldiers you may have left alive.”
There it is: a golden thread of waypoints. A trail of bread crumbs to the inner sanctum: down the hall, hang a right, hang a left. Knock.
“It is time to admit that loyalties are concentric. It is time to unite against the greater enemy …”
For some reason—only SECOND knows why—I finally believe him.
Marble columns. Double doors between them, ornately carved, brass-handled, high enough for a pinger to walk through without stooping.
I don’t knock.
The doors creak as they swing inward. They grind. You’d think that someone of Hargreave’s means would have been able to afford a can of WD-40.
Then again, maybe there’s no point. Maybe these doors don’t get used enough to matter.
Not just a room, through those doors. A cathedral. The great hall of some museum. A library. An endless carpet, three meters wide and red as clay, runs down the center of this vast space. On either side, rows of marble columns hold up dark skyli
ghts twenty meters overhead; suits of armor stand between them, mounted in glass cabinets. Massive bookshelves rise along one wall, barely visible in the dim distance; dark draperies go up forever on another.
“Theseus, at last. Welcome.”
His voice does not crackle over comm. It booms. It fills the room.
Breakers chunk overhead. The lights come on. The glowing face of Jacob Hargreave, four meters high, smiles sadly down on me from overtop a wall-sized map of the planet: an old Eckert projection in faded yellow and pale blue.
Not armor in those glass cases, I see now. Nanosuits. Prototypes. Antiques in their own right, even now; Moore’s law makes everything new old again.
“Scant reward for so much effort, eh. Crack the labyrinth, and you would at least expect to see the Minotaur before it kills you.”
Dwarfed by map and monitor, someone has arranged half a dozen overstuffed antique chairs around a massive wooden desk. Its surface is smooth and polished and utterly empty.
“Ah well, it seems only fair. Come, then. Masks off.”
The sound of old machinery, grinding into gear.
“I am here.”
The map on the wall splits down the center and pulls apart like drawn curtains. There is only one antique inside, and at first I do not see it.
“Shocked? I would be.”
See him.
“I’d revel in it, if I were you: that sudden jump of the pulse, the cram of flight-or-fight chemicals into the belly. So sweet while it lasts. But it’s been so very long since I felt any of it.”
So pristine in there, Roger. So, so antiseptic. Past the great chrome bars sliding back into the wall, the enameled walls gleam; the concentric tiles on the floor form a spiderweb with Hargreave’s capsule at the center. Life-support machinery chirps and hisses around it. Half a dozen umbilicals sprout from its ends and loop up into a low ceiling. Flatscreens scroll nutrient levels and biotelemetry like billboards running stock prices.
There’s a window in that capsule. It runs nearly the whole length of the cylinder; it leaves nothing to the imagination. The capsule is full of yellow-green liquid, like a public swimming pool too many six-year-olds have pissed in. The thing looking out from inside does not look like Jacob Hargreave. It barely even looks human.
“A century or more since my pleasures were anything but cerebral. I took the path Karl Rasch refused, the cold road to immortality.”
Its lips don’t move. The eyes above them are bright and hard as obsidian, and they don’t leave me for an instant.
“I can still hear him—cursing Tunguska and what we found there, screaming at me for a coward and a fool. I wonder which of us really was the coward.”
You ever see those bog men, Roger? On National Geographic, online, anything? The ones that died hundreds of years ago, somewhere in England or Ireland or something. Whoever killed them threw them into these peat bogs full of tannins, lignins. Natural preservatives. Bodies don’t rot in there. They shrink, they shrivel up. They turn brown and wrinkly like baked apples but they don’t rot, not for hundreds of years. You could fish them out of those bogs and they’d, they’d—
—They’d look just like Jack Hargreave, floating in his tank.
“And now so little time remaining.”
Oh, Jack. You’re not going anywhere, are you?
“I’d hoped to wear Prophet’s suit myself. Take on the weapons he brought us, wear his armor. Enter the labyrinth and confront the Minotaur. But now …”
Hargreave’s lips move at last. They tighten, split, pull back over toothless gums. He probably thinks of it as a smile.
“You. You will have to finish what Prophet began.”
Something flickers in all this brightness. I can’t tell what it is.
“Nathan? Are you there? Are you eavesdropping on my affairs again?”
And he is: There’s his filepic, up above my left eye. There’s his voice in my ear, faint and grainy and shot through with static: “Get out of there, Alcatraz!”
“No, wait.”
That flicker again. A bad fluorescent, maybe.
“Wait,” Hargreave repeats. “You need the final piece of the puzzle. There on the desk.”
Behind me. I turn and look out into the hall. That’s where the flicker is coming from. Not in here, not in this bright sterile oasis. Out there, among the towering bookcases and the marble pillars and the caged Nanosuits.
“Go!” the wizard urges from behind his curtain. “Take it!”
The surface of the desk opens as I approach: Panels slide back to reveal a shallow compartment, flat-gray, soft blue light glowing from the rim of a beveled disk in its center. A wooden cigar box waits for me there. I open it.
“This is m—your destiny now, Alcatraz. Use it.”
Close, but no cigar. A loaded hypodermic syringe.
“Stick it anywhere! Are you looking for a vein? How can you have spent so much time in that armor and still not realize that it knows, Alcatraz. It knows what to do.”
And Hargreave’s right. Because good old Alcatraz would have had serious second thoughts about shooting himself up with a hypo full of Formula X, but the suit knows what it wants. SECOND knows.
We stick the needle in and plunge it down.
“Yes, there.” Hargreave’s avatar is almost purring. “The Tunguska Iteration.”
Everything goes fuzzy.
“The key to all gates …”
Everything goes black.
There in the void, Nathan Gould is with me. Whining.
“Here? They were here, in New York, all along?”
“Their dormant systems were, yes, Nathan.” Hargreave speaks slowly, patiently, as if explaining the facts of life to a special-needs child. “One of their cottages, and the quantum port facility to transmit themselves aboard. You think I’m based in this cesspit city because I like it here?”
Red clay carpet, going in and out of focus. Some weird pattern on it, like birds. Never noticed that before.
“Why didn’t you warn someone?”
“Warn whom, Nathan? Humanity at large? The species that has proven so bracingly honest with itself in the face of unpleasant truths? That race so quick to accept the facts about population growth and resource overconsumption and climate change? No, thank you very much, I preferred to trust only myself, and a few handpicked men.”
I’m back on my knees. I’m back on my feet.
“A few handpicked men. Right. And look what it’s brought us to. Look what you’ve done, old man. They’re here, you—”
“That’s right, Nathan! The owners are back—”
They are, too. I can see where that flickering is coming from now: the dark sky above those overhead panes, strobing to gray. I can see insectile shapes backlit against the clouds, scampering and leaping across the skylights. I can see the blinding blue sparks of arc-welding torches.
“—waking the systems, firing up the boiler. Back to spring-clean the old family residence, and not much liking what they’ve found festering behind the fridge.”
A Ceph gunship eclipses the moon. It hangs in the sky like a segmented crucifix, lining up the shot.
“And really. Can you blame them?”
The gunship cuts loose. All those superstrong reinforced windowpanes fall to earth in a shower of jagged glass.
Wind and rain and Ceph infantry cascade into Hargreave’s inner sanctum. The wizard on the wall welcomes them with a giddy laugh: “Ah, the angels of death at last! My escort back to human frailty! It took you long enough!”
They’re not just interested in him, though. Not judging by the fire I’m taking.
The flames are already rising. Stalkers and grunts leap across the chamber toward me like eager Dobermans. I flee up a metal staircase to a catwalk that accesses the upper reaches of all these bookshelves; it’s high ground at least, a place to shoot back from, a hill to die on. I don’t expect to find a way out but there it is, jammed into the narrow space between two bookcases: a backstage exit, an e
mergency stairwell, cinder-block walls and concrete steps and ventilation ducts running up the shaft like tendons.
Hargreave’s avatar urges me on: “Become Prophet! Take on his armor! Strike for your species, for humanity in all its fumbling, half-made glory! Go, go! Save us all!”
I charge up the stairs past spinning emergency beacons. The building shakes around me.
“This is Jacob Hargreave to all CELL personnel. Commander Lockhart is dead, I will be joining him shortly, and the Prism facility is wired to self-destruct. Subject Prophet is now your only hope of turning back the alien invasion. You will therefore afford him every assistance you can as you evacuate this island.”
That’s nice of him. I wonder if anyone’s listening.
Some machine—some other machine—starts a countdown in a cool feminine voice: “All Prism facilities will explosively self-seal in ten minutes. Your employee duties are terminated. Please exit via the indicated channels.”
Plenty of time to make it to the helipad, I’m thinking. Right up until Tara Strickland checks in to tell me that the whole damn roof’s been trashed. The Ceph have left nothing flyable up there at all. “I’m heading for the Queensboro Bridge,” she tells me. “Meet me on the far side if you can.”
The Ceph are everywhere. So are CELL, and it really doesn’t matter whether they heard Hargreave’s last orders or not; we’re all just animals in a forest fire now, all just trying to keep ahead of the flames, and there’s no predators and no prey when you’re all about to be burned alive. We run like hell; we shoot at Squids when they get in our way. Countdown Girl pops onto the channel every now and then with timely updates that All Prism facilities will explosively self-seal in eight minutes, seven minutes, six minutes, but it’s not like we need to be reminded. We get it already.