by Peter Watts
“More than you can count,” says the distant voice. This frail body it’s using scarcely seems animate.
“Such as?”
“Targeted delivery. Drugs, genes, replacement organelles. Its cell wall, you’ve never seen anything like it. Nothing has. No immune response to worry about, slips past counterintrusion enzymes like they were blind and deaf. Target cell takes it right in, lyses the wall, COD. Like a biodegradable buckyball.”
“What else?”
“The ultimate pep pill. Under the right conditions the thing pumps out ATP so fast you could roll a car over single-handed. Makes mitochondria look like yesterday’s sockeye. Soldier with βehemoth in his cells might even give an exoskel a run for the money, if you feed him enough.”
“And if βehemoth were tweaked properly,” Rowan amends.
“Aye,” whispers the old man. “There’s the rub.”
Rowan chooses her words very carefully. “Might there have been any … less precise applications? MAD machines? Industrial terrorism?”
“You mean, like what it does now? No. W—someone would have to be blind and stupid and insane all at once to design something like that.”
“But you’d have to increase the reproductive rate quite a bit, wouldn’t you? To make it economically viable.”
He nods, his eyes still on far-focus. “Those deep-rock dwellers, they live so slow you’re lucky if they divide once a decade.”
“And that would mean they’d have to eat a lot more, wouldn’t it? To support the increased growth rate.”
“Of course. Child knows that much. But that’s not why you’d do it, nobody would do that because they wanted something that could—it would just be a, an unavoidable—”
“A side effect,” Jutta suggests.
“A side effect,” he repeats. His voice hasn’t changed. It still rises, calm and distant, from the center of the earth. But there are tears on Jakob Holtzbrink’s face.
“So nobody did it deliberately. They were aiming for something else, and things just—went wrong. Is that what you’re saying?”
“You mean, hypothetically?” The corners of his mouth lift and crinkle in some barely discernible attempt at a smile. A tear runs down one of those fleshy creases and drops off his chin.
“Yes, Jakob. Hypothetically.”
The head bobs up and down.
“Is there anything we can do? Anything we haven’t tried?”
Jakob shakes his head. “I’m just a corpse. I don’t know.”
She stands. The old man stares down into his own thoughts. His wife stares up at Rowan.
“What he’s told you,” she says. “Don’t take it the wrong way.”
“What do you mean?”
“He didn’t do this, any more than you did. He’s no worse than the rest of you.”
Rowan inclines her head. “I know, Jutta.”
She excuses herself. The last thing she sees, as the hatch seals them off, is Jutta Holtzbrink sliding a lucid dreamer over her husband’s bowed head.
There’s nothing to be done about it now. No point in recriminations, no shortage of fingers pointing in any direction. Still, she’s glad she paid the visit. Even grateful, in an odd way. It’s a selfish gratitude, but it will have to do. Patricia Rowan takes whatever solace she can in the fact that the buck doesn’t stop with her any more. It doesn’t even stop with Lenie Clarke, Mermaid of the Apocalypse. Rowan starts down the pale blue corridor of Res-D, glancing one more time over her shoulder.
The buck stops there.
PORTRAIT OF THE SADIST AS A FREE MAN
THE technical term was fold catastrophe. Seen on a graph it was a tsunami in cross-section, the smooth roof of an onrushing wave reaching forward, doubling back beneath the crest and plummeting in a smooth glassy arc to some new, low-energy equilibrium that left no stone standing on another.
Seen on the ground it was a lot messier: power grids failing; life-support and waste-management systems seizing up; thoroughfares choked with angry, frenzied mobs pushed one meal past revolution. The police in their exoskels had long since retreated from street level; pacification botflies swarmed overhead, scything through the mobs with gas and infrasound.
There was also a word for the leading edge of the wave, that chaotic inflection point where the trajectory reversed itself before crashing: breakpoint. Western N’AmPac had pulled through that hairpin turn sometime during the previous thirty-four hours; everything west of the Rockies was pretty much a write-off. CSIRA had slammed down every kind of barrier to keep it contained; people, goods, electrons themselves had been frozen in transit. To all intents and purposes the world ended at the Cordillera. Only ’lawbreakers could reach through that barrier now, to do what they could.
It wouldn’t be enough. Not this time.
Of course, the system had been degrading for decades. Centuries, even. Desjardins owed his very job to that vibrant synergism between entropy and human stupidity; without it, damage control wouldn’t be the single largest industry on the planet. Eventually everything had been bound to fall apart, anyone with a pair of eyes and an IQ even slightly above room temperature knew that. But there’d been no ironclad reason why it had had to happen quite as quickly as it had. They could have bought another decade or two, a little more time for those who still had faith in human ingenuity to go on deluding themselves.
But the closer you got to breakpoint, the harder it was to suture the cracks back together. Even equilibria were unstable, so close to the precipice. Forget butterflies: with a planet teetering this close to the edge, the fluttering of an aphid’s wings might be enough to push it over.
It was 2051, and it was Achilles Desjardins’s sworn duty to squash Lenie Clarke like an insect of whatever kind.
He watched her handiwork spread across the continent like a web of growing cracks shattering the surface of a frozen lake. His inlays gulped data from a hundred feeds: confirmed and probable sightings over the previous two months, too stale to be any use in a manhunt but potentially useful for predicting the next βehemoth outbreak. Memes and legends of the Meltdown Madonna, far more numerous and metastatic—a reproductive strategy for swarms of virtual wildlife Desjardins had only just discovered and might never fully understand. Reality and legend in some inadvertant alliance, βehemoth blooming everywhere they converged; firestorms and blackouts coming up from behind, an endless ongoing toll of innocent lives preempted for the greater good.
It was a lie, Desjardins knew. N’Am was past breakpoint despite all those draconian measures. It would take a while for the whole system to shake out; it was a long drop from crest to trough. But Desjardins was nothing if not adept at reading the numbers. He figured two weeks—three at the most—before the rest of the continent followed N’AmPac into anarchy.
A newsfeed running in one corner of his display served up a fresh riot from Hongcouver. State-of-the-art security systems gave their lives in defense of glassy spires and luxury enclaves—defeated not by clever hacks or superior technology, but by the sheer weight of flesh against their muzzles. The weapons died of exhaustion, disappeared beneath a tide of live bodies scrambling over dead ones. The crowd breached the gates as he watched, screaming in triumph. Thirty thousand voices in superposition: a keening sea, its collective voice somehow devoid of any humanity. It sounded almost mechanical. It sounded like the wind.
Desjardins killed the channel before the mob learned what he already knew: the spires were empty, the corpses they’d once sheltered long since gone to ground.
Or to sea, rather.
A light hand brushed against his back. He turned, startled; Alice Jovellanos was at his shoulder. Desjardins shot a furtive glance back to his board when he saw who was with her; Rome burned there on a dozen insets. He reached for the cutoff.
“Don’t.” Lenie Clarke slipped the visor from her face and stared at the devastation with eyes as blank as eggshells. Her face was calm and expressionless, but when she spoke again, her voice trembled.
“
Leave it on.”
* * *
He had first met her two weeks before. He’d been tracking her for months, searching the archives, delving into her records, focusing his superlative pattern-matching skills on the cryptic, incomplete jigsaw called Lenie Clarke. But those assembled pieces had revealed more than a brood sac for the end of the world, as Rowan had put it. They’d revealed a woman whose entire childhood had been pretense, programmed to ends over which she’d had no awareness or control. All this time she had been trying to get home, trying to rediscover her own past.
Ken Lubin, slaved to his own brand of Guilt Trip, had been trying to kill her. Desjardins had tried to get in his way; at the time it had seemed the only decent thing to do. It seemed odd, in retrospect, that such an act of kindness could have been triggered by his own awakening psychopathy.
His rescue attempt had not gone well. Lubin had intercepted him before Clarke even showed up in Sault Sainte Marie. Desjardins had sat out the rest of the act tied to a chair in a pitch-black room, half the bones in his face broken.
Surprisingly, it had not been Ken Lubin who had done that to him.
And yet somehow they were now all on what might loosely be called the same side: he and Alice and Kenny and Lenie, all working together under the banner of grayness and moral ambiguity and righteous vendetta. Spartacus had freed Lubin from Guilt Trip as it had freed Desjardins. The ’lawbreaker had to admit to a certain sympatico with the taciturn assassin, even now; he knew how it felt to be wrenched back into a position of genuine culpability, after years of letting synthetic neurotransmitters make all the tough decisions. Crippling anxiety. Guilt.
At first, anyway. Now the guilt was fading. Now there was only fear.
From a thousand directions the world cried out in desperate need of his attention. It was his sworn duty to offer it: to provide salvation or, failing that, to bail until the last piece of flotsam sank beneath the waves. Not so long ago it would have been more than a duty. It would have been a compulsion, a drive, something he could not prevent himself from doing. At this very moment he should be dispatching emergency teams, rerouting vital supplies, allocating lifters and botflies to reinforce the weakening quarantine.
Fuck it, he thought, and killed the feeds. Somehow he sensed Lenie Clarke flinching behind him as the display went dark.
“Did you get a fix?” Jovellanos asked. She’d taken a shot at it herself, but she’d only been a senior ’lawbreaker for a week: hardly enough time to get used to her inlays, let alone develop the seventh sense that Desjardins had honed over half a decade. The sharpest fix she’d been able to get on the vanished corpses was somewhere in the North Atlantic.
Desjardins nodded and reached out to the main board. Clarke’s onyx reflection moved up behind him, staring back from the dark surface. Desjardins suppressed the urge to look over his shoulder. She was right here in his cubby: just a girl, half his size. A skinny little K-selector that half the world wanted to kill and the other half wanted to die for.
Without even having met her, he had thrown away everything to come to her aid. When he’d finally met her face-to-face, she’d scared him more than Lubin had. But something had happened to Clarke since then. The ice-queen affect hadn’t changed at all, but something behind it seemed—smaller, somehow. Almost fragile.
Alice didn’t seem to notice, though. She’d been the rifters’ self-appointed mascot from the moment she’d seen a chance to get back at the Evil Corporate Oligarchy, or whatever she was calling it this week.
Desjardins opened a window on the board: a false-color satcam enhance of open ocean, a multihued plasma of color-coded contours.
“I thought of that,” Alice piped up, “but even if you could make out a heat print against the noise, the circulation’s so slow down there—”
“Not temperature,” Desjardins interrupted. “Turbidity.”
“Even so, the circulation—”
He shot her a look. “Shut up and learn, okay?”
She fell silent, the hurt obvious in her eyes. She’d been walking on eggshells ever since she’d admitted to infecting him.
Desjardins turned back to the board. “There’s a lot of variation over time, of course. Everything from whitecaps to squid farts.” He tapped an icon; layers of new data superimposed themselves atop the baseline, a translucent parfait. “You’d never get a track with a single snapshot, no matter how fine the rez. I had to look at mean values over a three-month period.”
The layers merged. The amorphous plasma disappeared; hard-edged contrails and splotches condensed from that mist.
Desjardins’s fingers played across the board. “Now cancel everything that shows up in the NOAA database,”—a myriad luminous scars faded into transparency—“Gulf Stream leftovers,”—a beaded necklace from Florida to England went dark—“and any listed construction sites or upwells inconsistent with minimum allowable structure size.”
A few dozen remaining pockmarks disappeared. The North Atlantic was dark and featureless but for a single bright blemish, positioned almost exactly in its center.
“So that’s it,” Clarke murmered.
Desjardins shook his head. “We still have to correct for lateral displacement during ascent. Midwater currents and the like.” He called forth algorithms: the blemish jiggled to the northwest and stopped.
39°20'14"N 25°16'03"W said the display.
“Dead northeast of the Atlantis Fracture Zone,” Desjardins said. “Lowest vorticity in the whole damn basin.”
“You said turbidity.” Clarke’s reflection, a bright bull’s-eye in its chest, shook its head. “But if there’s no vorticity—”
“Bubbles,” Alice exclaimed, clueing in.
Desjardins nodded. “You don’t build a retirement home for a few thousand people without doing some serious welding. That’s gonna generate sagans of waste gas. Hence, turbidity.”
Clarke was still skeptical. “We welded at Channer. The pressure crushed the bubbles down to nothing as soon as they formed.”
“For point-welding, sure. But these guys must be fusing whole habs together: higher temperatures, greater outgassing, more thermal inertia.” Finally, he turned to face her. “We’re not talking about a boiling cauldron here. It’s just fine fizz by the time it hits the surface. Not even visible to the naked eye. But it’s enough to reduce light penetration, and that’s what we’re seeing right here.”
He tapped the tumor on the board.
Clarke stared at it a moment, her face expressionless. “Anybody else know about this?” she asked finally.
Desjardins shook his head. “Nobody even knows I was working on it.”
“You wouldn’t mind keeping it that way?”
He snorted. “Lenie, I don’t even want to think about what would happen if anyone found out I was spending time on this. And not that you’re unwelcome or anything, but the fact that you guys are even hanging around out here is a major risk. Do you—”
“It’s taken care of, Killjoy,” Alice said softly. “I told you. I catch on fast.”
She did, too. Promoted in the wake of his desertion, it had taken her only a few hours to figure out that some plus-thousand corpses had quietly slipped off the face of the earth. It had taken her less than two days to get him back onto the CSIRA payroll, his mysterious absence obscured by alibis and bureaucratic chaff. She’d started the game with an unfair advantage, of course: preinfected with Spartacus, Guilt Trip had never affected her. She’d begun her tenure with all the powers of a senior ’lawbreaker and none of the restraints. Of course she had the wherewithal to get Lenie Clarke into CSIRA’s inner sanctum.
But even now, Spartacus bubbled in Desjardins’s head like acid, eating away at the chains Guilt Trip had forged. It had already freed his conscience; soon, he very much feared, Spartacus would destroy it utterly.
He looked at Alice. You did this to me, he thought, and examined the feelings the accusation provoked. There had been anger at first, a sense of profound betrayal. Somethin
g bordering on hatred, even.
Now he wasn’t sure any more. Alice—Alice was a complication, his undoing and his salvation all rolled into one willowy chassis. She had saved his ass, for now. She had information that could be vital, for later. It seemed like a good idea to play along, for the time being at least. As for the rifters, the sooner he helped them on their way the sooner they’d drop out of the equation.
And all the while, some persistent splinter in the back of his mind contemplated the options that might soon be available to a man without a leash …
Alice Jovellanos offered him a tentative smile, ever hopeful. Achilles Desjardins smiled back.
“You catch on fast,” he repeated. “That you do.”
Hopefully not fast enough.
CONFESSIONAL
JERENICE Seger wants to make an announcement.
She won’t make it to Clarke or Lubin. She won’t even tell them what it’s about. “I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding,” she says. “I want to address your whole community.” Her pixelated likeness stares out from the board, grimly defiant. Patricia Rowan stands in the background; she doesn’t look pleased either.
“Fine,” Lubin says at last, and kills the connection.
Seger, Clarke reflects. Seger’s making the announcement. Not Rowan. “Medical news,” she says aloud.
“Bad news.” Lubin replies, sealing up his gauntlets.
Clarke sets the board for LFAM broadband. “Better summon the troops, I guess.”
Lubin’s heading down the ladder. “Ring the chimes for me, will you?”
“Why? Where you going?” The chimes serve to heads-up those rifters who leave their vocoders offline, but Lubin usually boots them up himself.
“I want to check something out,” he says.
The airlock hisses shut behind him.
* * *
Of course, even at their present numbers they can’t all fit into the nerve hab at once.
It might have been easier if rifter modules followed the rules. They’ve been designed to interconnect, each self-contained sphere puckered by six round mouths two meters across. Each can lock lips with any other, or with pieces of interposing corridor—and so the whole structure grows, lumpy and opportunistic, like a great skeleton of long bones and empty skulls assembling itself across the seabed. That’s the idea, anyway. A few basic shapes, infinitely flexible in combination.