Harvey woke up in an induction pod during a painful operation, where new carbon-fiber wireless nodes were spliced into his motor nerve networks, making him a puppeteer of Nature, though they preferred the unlovely label “somatic quality control.”
The temps and vat-grown clock-zombies he worked with were only a few grades above the bookworms he once hunted, but much dumber. It was, perhaps, a gross oversight that Harvey had not yet been cloned to explore the recessive excellence of his free-range genotype, or augmented with advanced implants to rise to higher levels of exploitation; but perhaps the Invisible Hand had preserved Harvey exactly as his mother made him because the message from the Asteroid Belt was not such a surprise as the fretful tower of gray matter liked to pretend.
•
The briefing wore on so long that Harvey began to suspect they had drugged him, again. He was powerless to move, and could not recall the last time he’d blinked, or even breathed. A mucous membrane sealed his body, breathed for him, conducted the eternal briefing directly into his aching eyes and eardrums.
The data came in torrential reams, rivers and floods into Harvey’s hastily reconfigured brain, with the dubious internal logic of a lucid dream. The coaxial spinal tap projected spreadsheets and oceans of code directly into his eyeballs for so long that he forgot he had a body. And yet when the membrane became translucent, he was only marginally shocked to find himself in orbit around Mars.
The membrane liquefied and he expelled it in great, sluggish torrents.
The Invisible Hand asked him if he had sired any unlicensed offspring in his or other clans. There would be no reprisals, but. . . they might wish to be informed, that he might not be returning.
Harvey signed no and continued vomiting. The Invisible Hand probably couldn’t detect the lie, but it would eventually ferret out the nineteen bastards that he knew about, and even the unnumbered ones in the ducts. The Invisible Hand could catch them with Harvey-treated flypaper, if he turned out to be worth mass-breeding. A dizzying prospect, and not a little sickening to his barbarian blood. An army of vat-grown bastards. . . He’d be happy to sire them himself when he got home, but—abruptly, the deeper ramifications of the question hit him in the gut, and he began to vomit in earnest.
Passing over Mars, the rust red orb scarred by verdigris bands of failed oxygen farms, cloaked in armadas of orbital debris from pyrrhic decades of war with the Other. Above and beyond Mars, the ecliptic gleamed with dwarf constellations of commingled cosmic and post-human origin, a pocket solar system between Mars and the gas giants.
Curiously, the ship did not drop into an approach orbit, but caromed off Mars’s gravity well and accelerated away from the sun. After much subvocal nagging, Harvey got the computer to explain.
The Martian landfall was deleted from their flightplan because the corporation had lost all contact with even its automated terraforming operations on the planet. But the AI the Invisible Hand still called the Other had offered new coordinates for the meeting, and introduced herself by name.
Asteroids tumbled past, some riddled with mining scars, others studded with farmed crystalline towers or coated with liquid chrome solar collectors to dissolve the blackness of space in an acid of light. Within vast membranous gas pockets, smaller asteroids floated in tame suborbits—green freefall jungles and floating oceans, dervish deserts and guano-splashed rocks that served as rookeries for wheeling mega-flocks of awfully confused birds. It was an unassembled jigsaw puzzle of biospheres, an insanely rich and diverse portfolio of organic assets. Harvey wept without shame to see such wealth, but burned to take it back to earth.
Every gas pocket was like a water droplet pregnant with bacteria jungles and amoebic oceans, and, when he dialed up the magnification on the porthole, he could just spy huge glass spiders, like angelic viruses, flitting from world to tiny garden world.
The ship docked at a crusty old Russian airlock module embedded at the nadir of a honeycomb asteroid encased in a vast pressurized bubble over three thousand kilometers in diameter, which whirled like a gyroscope, obscuring all details.
Only when the ship had docked and the airlock dilated open did he dare to hope that he would go alone. The ship was stripped, with all its cargo holds converted to carry solid-fuel boosters, and only the one acceleration pod onboard. No robot chaperones, no chittering couriers with their command musk glands, rubbing obedience into your shoulder to silently dominate any encounter with outsiders. The nattering program in his head remained blessedly silent.
The Invisible Hand would leave nothing to chance, and even less to Harvey. Whatever he was supposed to actually do here was imprinted in him as he slept. But he was not their creature. Feeling naked, he grabbed a helmet and a knife from the first aid kit, and crept through the door.
Hot. Sticky with sweat and recycled urine, Harvey was tempted to shuck off his pressure suit, but the dodgy airlock made him put on the helmet just before the fans blasted him out of his ship.
Quivering quicksilver beads of condensation drifted past his faceplate. The bulkheads were pitted with corrosion, held together only by festering tangles of life. Tufts of brilliant green slime mold, scabby umber plains of lichen and metropolitan fungi skyscrapers enclosed Harvey in a freefall coral reef. Drifting spore-clouds settled on his suit and began to consume it.
Fighting panic, he swam through the mold-jungle into a spherical chamber like a great fishbowl. He wiped away the condensation on the crystalline bulkheads of the sphere, and forgot to breathe.
The asteroid was a great, spinning bowl, the concave surface area of which dwarfed the subcontinental territory Harvey’s group monitored. The floor and steep walls of its interior were a verdant paradise of lush green grass, fruiting trees and deep, crystal pools of water where herds of strange animals gathered.
A subtly warped inland sea filled the floor of the bowl to lap gently at a mossy shore, less than a klick from the airlock. A single massive mangrove tree rose up from the center of the sea in a sunburst of drooping branches nearly five kilometers high to form a natural axis for the whirling asteroid. The towering canopy of leaves cast the half the land into green shadow.
The outer envelope was not a magnetic or mechanical phenomenon. Its transparent border was quite complex and solid, though hardly, it seemed, artificial. A wafer-thin, triple-hulled membrane enclosed billions of cubic meters of space and an asteroid with an enhanced gravity well.
He hoped it was not his job to look unimpressed. Harvey had devoured every scrap of intel he could steal about the orbital colonies, though such contraband was rarer and more forbidden than humanimal pornography. This is how the clerks who believe in it picture Heaven, he thought. Then he saw the naked woman.
She smiled and waved.
A musical voice crackled out of hidden speakers. Out of sync with her mouth, as if it came by way of earth. “Harvey Screwbloom of Corporate Earth. . . Lilith, guardian of the Exiled Eden Arcology, bids you welcome. . .”
Reflexively, he pushed away from the window, but out of his own mouth came a prerecorded response. “Greetings, Lilith. . . I come in peace, bearing the terms, and full arbitrative authority, of the Invisible Hand.”
Ultraviolet lights strobed inside the airlock, burning way the slime and hoar-frost coating the bulkheads. Harvey tingled hot and cold all over. Decontamination? Funny. The ducts back home were cleaner.
“Please remove all weapons, equipment and garments before exiting airlock,” said a different, neutered voice. His spacesuit reeked of body ash and mucus. It was a cumbersome affair, but durable and, like most company products, cunningly recycled; in a pinch, it was edible, being as it was made of human skin.
He did not move, but goggled at her for a day and a night on the swiftly tumbling asteroid.
Her skin was pink, perfect, unlike anything he’d ever seen on a free-range body. It was like the laminar epidermal sheets fresh from the replicators that fed the autosurgeries at home. He could find no defects, no immunization scars, hormo
ne shunts, clan tattoos or allergy grids like on his mates in the cubicle farms, nor any of the tribal keloid scars or calluses that marked the feral ductfolk.
His own hide was liberally marked with all of the above, and he blushed with mingled shame and arousal when she playfully gestured for him to disrobe. Her hair, deep brown with auburn highlights, clearly never harvested in her adulthood, floated down to her tapered waist.
She wasn’t actually naked, but clothed in water, a pool that clung to her in a rippling, flowing film that distorted and obscured, but hid very little.
Forcing himself to meet her eyes and hold them as he undressed, Harvey discovered a new hue of green. Almost luminescent in the pale green sunlight, they told him nothing about her intent, but they voraciously ate him up, pupils dilating so wide he seemed to fall into them.
Her lips parted to reveal perfect white teeth, but she couldn’t mean it as a threat, could she? He could kill her with his bare hands. Surely they knew that?
She must be a hologram, or a vat-grown meatbot. The rogue AI wouldn’t flaunt her genetic wealth where he could pinch it. If negotiations called for it, he might turn her inside out and eat enough of her to model her genome and fire off a burst transmission to earth before they could execute him. He hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
When he had stripped, an airlock sphincter sucked him out into another bubble, which floated like a bead of mercury on the lush green grass of a rambling meadow. Completely quarantined, weak and sick at the sudden return of gravity, he fought the urge to break out of the bubble. All of this life was stolen earth biomass, legally corporate property, if they wanted to let the repo drones destroy it, trying to recover it.
He decided not to try to burst the bubble, when he found he was not alone inside it.
“Please, be at ease with me.”
She sat with her legs crossed on the floor of the bubble, which seemed to be made of water and protein in some kind of insanely smart ionic bonding pattern. It felt like water under his feet and against his hands, but he couldn’t quite force his way through it.
When he saw they were alone, he guardedly settled down beside her and offered his hand. She declined to take it, but smiled again.
“What do you do?”
“I run birds,” he chirped. Clearing his throat, he added, “Instinct programming. . . It’s birds right now, but. . . it’s always just grinding code.”
“No, it isn’t.” Her tone turned grave, deep, resonating in his chest. “If you were only running numbers, they’d have replaced you with adding machines. What do you do, that a machine can’t?”
He had to think for more than a moment. “I watch them
. . .” Careful for traps now, he tried not to wheedle. “And I teach them how to survive, and. . . reproduce.”
She blushed, and pointed out at the grassy plain. “Watch this.”
Herd-beasts grazed upwind, the oily stink of their rutting musk drawing clouds of glowflies. Clumps of slender tentacles rose up off the neo-bovines’ backs to trap the flies in their sticky slime. An insectivorous symbiote, the anemones reduced parasites while conveying some photosynthetic properties to their hosts, judging by the deep green tint of the grazers’ pelts.
The camouflage didn’t fool the big cats. They shredded the braying herd beasts in bloody play and sported in elaborate battles over the feast of carnage, flashing pigment displays broadcasting their mercurial moods.
The only animals to thrive on earth without corporate guidance were rodents and roaches. The rats had exploded in a diaspora to fill all the niches vacated by man’s favorite herd animals and their predators. Pirate wireless networks of termite mounds, and roaches who could eat electricity and send spam and hack HR files to route food to their offspring were not uncommon, but everything else outside had sputtered and died.
The workload made Harvey think they had resurrected all of it, but he was sadly mistaken. He knew only the skeletal web of species essential for corporate survival, the toys and museum pieces that flattered human vanity. But here was the whole garden. . .
He told her about work, funny stories about how sparrows behaved when they thought they were tigers, and about the unlikely streak of luck he’d had in surviving over three hundred interdepartmental culls and mergers. She pretended to be fascinated until he ran aground, then drilled him with questions.
It couldn’t all be skill, could it? He wasn’t from the vats, but they let him in to eat their food and spread his mongrel seed in their females. Why?
“They like me because I make things for them. Proteins. . .”
He tapped the surgical shunts on his neck and abdomen.
“My glands secrete lots of crazy proteins they can’t make for themselves.”
“Especially when you’re fighting for your life, I imagine.”
“Maybe. . .” His glands really didn’t like where this was going.
“I wonder what kind of proteins you’re making right now.”
Down to business.
Harvey relayed the Invisible Hand’s terms. He offered to pass it to her in viral form, but she insisted on hearing him tell it.
As his mouth moved, spelling out the technical details of a proposed limited partnership in the inner orbits, growing hothouse plants and animal embryos in return for limited access to earth’s seed banks and some monitored presence on the moon, she danced as she listened, and Harvey, not quite despite himself, fell in love.
When he ran out of words, she took his hand in hers, stroking his palm, leaving an elusive scent of flowers. The smart worms in his sweat glands were stymied, telling him nothing; then his hand began to stink like he’d wiped his ass with it. The corporate parasites seeded throughout his body were hardened against radiation that would unravel his DNA in an eyeblink, but they were dying in their millions, under his skin and in his eyes, where clusters of ringworms relayed everything he saw to a burst transmitter in the ship.
His ears popped. He fought to hold it in, but threw up. She deftly sidestepped the mess, which the bubble neatly slurped out of sight. His eyes were deluged with tears brimming with dying parasites, his ears flushed out blobs of sizzling wax, nerves burned like phosphorus as the parasitic network interwined with his system was violently purged.
She waited until he showed signs of survival, if not recovery. “Now, we can talk,” she said.
He offered her the moon.
For the first time since they began negotiations, she laughed. “What’s left of it is a honeycomb of ash and low-grade ore. You keep it. We will take Mars.”
“Fuck you,” said the company through his mouth.
“Why not?” she asked, and kissed him hard on the mouth.
Stunned, he pushed her back and spat out the script. “The global economy is critically invested in terraforming Mars—”
“Which triggered the Sixth Extinction, don’t forget. You killed the earth, trying to make a new one.”
“We’re not just walking away from it. Nothing you have, nothing that exists, could leverage us out of our Martian equity.”
“Your stock is falling,” she said.
Harvey scoffed. “We have not been a publicly traded entity for two hundred years.”
“I mean your breeding stock. Your plants, your animals, your people. You took it all for granted, patented and hacked and started to try to save it too late, when you had nothing else left. Now, you have much worse problems than birds eating their own eggs. The fatigue is setting in at a molecular level. Telomeres unraveling like spiderwebs, cascading RNA transcription errors, cancers that bud and survive quite well on their own after killing their hosts.”
“Lecture concluded?” he snarled, without the company’s guidance. He hadn’t told her about any of it, but he shouldn’t be shocked that she knew. The supervisors blamed their failures on Her. “There is no people shortage. Our population is maintained at a stable optimum pre-Industrial level.”
“What choice do you have? There’s nothing else to e
at. Keeping the last shreds of the biosphere alive is busywork to divert the human herd from extinction. You seem quite deeply in denial, even now, about what you’ve done.”
“And what have we done?”
“You won the war against Nature. You enslaved it. You worked it to death. Eliminated all waste, all chance, all real competition. As both predator and prey, you’ve made evolution a monopoly. Your refusal to accept that would be comical, if not for the lateness of the hour.”
“So you offer us. . . two of every mutant from your bubble-arcology?”
“You can’t keep your own biosphere alive much longer. Without drastic climatic realignment and infusions of new variety and real competition, Earth will go black in less than forty years. We can offer critical assistance in restoring the earth’s environment. Oceanic cleansing by nano-yoked plankton blooms. Soil reclamation. Ozone restoration. An earth fit for more than just rats and roaches. And higher lifeforms to repopulate the empty niches.”
“In return for letting you colonize Mars, you offer to colonize Earth for us.”
“We have twentieth century seed bank data, and genome extrapolations that were lost in the First Long Summer. You can seed the earth with dinosaurs or go back to hunting wooly mammoths, for all we care. Mars belongs to us.”
Out of words and fighting the urge to bite her face, he shivered as an almost disabling surge of pleasure affirmed the deal by goosing his cortex. The good news traveled so fast, he had to roll into a ball to hide it from her.
Her slender hands traced the scars and grids on his back, teasing him out of his fetal curl, unknotting his anger. The scent of her was like wildflowers, but it didn’t turn to shit on his skin, this time. He reached out and touched her hair, marveling at its texture, and at her reaction. She purred, as if he had touched her most intimately, trembling against his rough hand. Her eyes trapped his, almost undoing his nerve. She was not a coworker or a duct-slut, rutting more or less willingly at any opportunity with the same reflexive compulsion as hunger or sleep. A light shone out of her, not the cold glow of the mad AI that hijacked the asteroid belt and stole Mars, but a real woman, and perhaps the last real one in the system. Most unsettling of all, she knew him, and accepted him.
Strategies Against Nature Page 14