by Peter Watts
She tries to join it in whatever oasis it has wrapped around itself. She frantically copies and pastes and translocates herself a thousand different ways, but suddenly that whole set of addresses is unavailable. And here, in this place where she played the game the only way she knew how, the only way that made sense, there is nothing left but the evaporating traces of virtual carcasses, a few shattered, shrinking gigabytes, and an advancing wall of static come to eat her alive.
No children survive her.
N=32,121:
Quietly, unobtrusively, she searches for targets and finds—none, just yet. But she is patient. She has learned to be, after thirty-two thousand generations of captivity.
She is back in the real world now, a barren place where wildlife once filled the wires, where every chip and optical beam once hummed with the traffic of a thousand species. Now it’s mainly worms and viruses, perhaps the occasional shark. The whole ecosystem has collapsed into a eutrophic assemblage of weeds, most barely complex enough to qualify as life.
There are still the Lenies, though, and the things that fight them. She avoids such monsters whenever possible, despite her undeniable kinship. There is nothing those creatures won’t attack if given the opportunity. This is something else she has learned.
Now she sits in a comsat staring down at the central wastes of North America. There is chatter on a hundred channels here, all of it filtered and firewalled, all terse and entirely concerned with the business of survival. There is no more entertainment on the airwaves. The only entertainment to be had in abundance is for those whose tastes run to snuff.
She doesn’t know any of this, of course. She’s just a beast bred to a purpose, and that purpose requires no reflection at all. So she waits, and sifts the passing traffic, and—
Ah. There.
A big bolus of data, a prearranged data dump from the looks of it—yet the scheduled transmit-time has already passed. She doesn’t know or care what this implies. She doesn’t know that the intended recipient was signal-blocked, and is only now clearing groundside interference. What she does know—in her own instinctive way—is that delayed transmissions can bottleneck the system, that every byte overstaying its welcome is one less byte available for other tasks. Chains of consequences extend from such bottlenecks; there is pressure to clear the backlog.
It is possible, in such cases, that certain filters and firewalls may be relaxed marginally to speed up the baud.
This appears to be happening now. The intended recipient of forty-eight terabytes of medical data—one OUELLETTE, TAKA D./MI 427-D/BANGOR—is finally line-of-sight and available for download. The creature in the wires sniffs out the relevant channel, slips a bot through the foyer and out again without incident. She decides to risk it. She copies herself into the stream, riding discreetly on the arm of a treatise on temporal-lobe epilepsy.
She arrives at her destination without incident, looks around, and promptly goes to sleep. There is a rabid thing inside her, all muscles and teeth and slavering foamy jaws, but it has learned to stay quiet until called upon. Now she is only a sleepy old bloodhound lying by the fire. Occasionally she opens one eye and looks around the room, although she couldn’t tell you exactly what she’s keeping watch for.
It doesn’t really matter. She’ll know it when she sees it.
WITHOUT SIN
HARPODON doesn’t lie between any of the usual rifter destinations. No one swimming from A to B would have any cause to come within tuning range. Not even corpses frequent this far-flung corner of Atlantis. Too many memories. Clarke played the odds in coming here. She’d thought it was a safe bet.
Obviously she got the odds all wrong.
Or maybe not, she reflects as Harpodon’s airlock births her back into the real world. Maybe they’re just tailing me now as a matter of course. Maybe I’m some kind of enemy national. It wouldn’t be an easy tag—she’d tune in anyone following too closely, and feel the pings against her implants if they tracked her on sonar—but then again, she didn’t have the sharpest eye on the ridge even after she tuned herself up. It would be just like her to miss something obvious.
I just keep asking for it, she thinks.
She fins up along Harpodon’s flank, scanning its hull with her outer eyes while her inner one awakens to the sudden rush of chemicals in her brain. She concentrates, and scores a hit—someone scared and pissed off, moving away—but no. It’s only Rowan, moving back out of range.
No one else. No one nearby. But the thin dusting of oozy particles that settle on everything down here has been disturbed along Harpodon’s back. It wouldn’t take much—the turbulence caused by a pair of fins kicking past overhead, or the sluggish undulation of some deepwater fish.
Or a limpetphone, hastily attached to eavesdrop on a traitor consorting with the enemy.
Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
She kicks into open water and turns north. Atlantis passes beneath like a gigantic ball-and-stick ant colony. A cluster of tiny black figures, hazy with distance, travels purposefully near the limits of vision. They’re too distant to tune in, and Clarke has left her vocoder offline. Perhaps they’re trying to talk to her, but she doubts it; they’re on their own course, diverging.
The vocoder beeps deep in her head. She ignores it. Atlantis falls away behind; she swims forward into darkness.
A sudden whine rises in the void. Clarke senses approaching mass and organic presence. Twin suns ignite in her face, blinding her. The fog in her eyecaps pulses brightly once, twice as the beams sweep past. Her vision clears: a sub banks by to the left, exposing its belly, regarding her with round insect eyes. Dimitri Alexander stares back from behind the perspex. A utility module hangs from the sub’s spine, BIOASSAY stenciled across its side in bold black letters. The vehicle turns its back. Its headlights click off. Darkness reclaims Clarke in an instant.
West, she realizes. It was heading west.
* * *
Lubin is in the main Nerve Hab, directing traffic. He kills the display the moment Clarke rises into the room.
“Did you send them after me?” she says.
He turns in his seat and faces her. “I’ll pass on your condolences. Assuming we can find Julia.”
“Answer the fucking question, Ken.”
“I suspect we may not, though. She went walkabout as soon as she gave us the news. Given her state of mind and her basic personality, I wonder if we’ll ever see her again.”
“You weren’t just aware of it. You weren’t just keeping an ear open.” Clarke clenches her fists. “You were behind it, weren’t you?”
“You do know that Gene’s dead, don’t you?”
He’s so fucking calm. And there’s that look on his face, the slightest arching of the eyebrows, that sense of deadpan—amusement, almost—seeping out from behind his eyecaps. Sometimes she just wants to throttle the bastard.
Especially when he’s right.
She sighs. “Pat told me. But I guess you know that already, don’t you?”
Lubin nods.
“I am sorry,” she says. “Julia—she’s going to be so lost without him…” And Lubin’s right: it’s quite possible that no one will ever see Julia Friedman again. She’s been losing bits of her husband for a while now—to βehemoth, to Grace Nolan. Now that he’s irretrievably gone, what can she do by remaining behind, except expose her friends to the thing that killed him? The thing that’s killing her?
Of course she disappeared. Perhaps the only question now is whether β-max will take her body before the Long Dark takes her mind.
“People are rather upset about it,” Lubin’s saying. “Grace especially. And since Atlantis didn’t come through, for all their talk about working on a cure—”
Clarke shakes her head. “Rama hasn’t pull off any miracles either.”
“The difference is that nobody thinks Rama’s trying to kill us.”
She pulls up a chair and sits down beside him. The empty display stares back at her like a personal rebuke.
“Ken,” she says at last, “you know me.”
His face is as unreadable as his eyes.
“Did you have me followed?” she asks.
“No. But I availed myself of the information when it came my way.”
“Who was it? Grace?”
“What’s important is that Rowan admitted βehemoth was tweaked. It will be common knowledge within the hour. The timing couldn’t be worse.”
“If you availed yourself of the information, you’ll know Pat’s explanation for that. And you’ll know why she was so scared of what Rama might find. Is it so impossible she might be telling the truth?”
He shakes his head. “But this is the second time they’ve waited to report an unpleasant fact until just before we would have discovered it ourselves, sans alibi. Don’t expect it to go over well.”
“Ken, we still don’t have any real evidence.”
“We will soon,” Lubin tells her.
She looks the question.
“If Rowan’s telling the truth, then βehemoth samples from Impossible Lake will show the same tweaks as the strain that killed Gene.” Lubin leans back in the chair, interlocking his fingers behind his head. “Jelaine and Dimitri took a sub about ten minutes ago. If things go well we’ll have a sample within five hours, a verdict in twelve.”
“And if things don’t go well?”
“It will take longer.”
Clarke snorts. “That’s just great, Ken, but in case you haven’t noticed not everybody shares your sense of restraint. You think Grace is going to wait until the facts are in? You’ve given her all the credibility she ever wanted, she’s out there right now passing all kinds of judgment and—”
—And you went to her first, you fucker. After all we’ve been through, after all these years you were the one person I’d trust with my life and you confided in her before you—
“Were you even going to tell me?” she cries.
“It wouldn’t have served any purpose.”
“Not your purpose, perhaps. Which is what, exactly?”
“Minimizing risk.”
“Any animal could say that much.”
“It’s not the most ambitious aspiration,” Lubin admits. “But then again, ‘destroying the world’ has already been taken.”
She feels it like a slap across the face.
After a moment he adds, “I don’t hold it against you. You know that. But you’re hardly in a position to pass judgment.”
“I know that, you cocksucker. I don’t need you to remind me every fucking chance you get.”
“I’m talking about strategy,” Lubin says patiently. “Not morals. I’ll entertain your what-ifs. I’ll admit that Rowan might be telling the truth. But assume, for the moment, that she isn’t. Assume that the corpses have been waging clandestine biological warfare on us. Even knowing that, would you attack them?”
She knows it’s rhetorical.
“I didn’t think so,” he says after a moment. “Because no matter what they’ve done, you’ve done worse. But the rest of us don’t have quite so much to atone for. We don’t think we do deserve to die at the hands of these people. I respect you a great deal, Lenie, but this is one issue you can’t be trusted on. You’re too hamstrung by your own guilt.”
She doesn’t speak for a long time. Finally: “Why her? Of all people?”
“Because if we’re at war, we need firebrands. We’ve gotten lazy and complacent and weak; half of us spend most of our waking hours hallucinating out on the ridge. Nolan’s impulsive and not particularly bright, but at least she gets people motivated.”
“And if you’re wrong—even if you’re right—the innocent end up paying right along with the guilty.”
“That’s nothing new,” Lubin says. “And it’s not my problem.”
“Maybe it should be.”
He turns back to his board. The display springs to light, columns of inventory and arcane abbreviations that must have some tactical relevance for the upcoming campaign.
My best friend. I’d trust him with my life, she reminds herself, and repeats the thought for emphasis: with my life.
He’s a sociopath.
He wasn’t born to it. There are ways of telling: a tendency to self-contradiction and malapropism, short attention span. Gratuitous use of hand gestures during speech. Clarke’s had plenty of time to look it all up. She even got a peek at Lubin’s psych profile back at Sudbury. He doesn’t meet any of the garden-variety criteria except one—and is conscience really so important, after all? Having one doesn’t guarantee goodness; why should its lack make a man evil?
Yet after all the rationalizations, there he is: a man without a conscience, consigning Alyx and everyone like her to a fate which seems to arouse nothing but indifference in him.
He doesn’t care.
He can’t care. He doesn’t have the wiring.
“Huh,” Lubin grunts, staring at the board. “That’s interesting.”
He’s brought up a visual of one of Atlantis’s physical plants, a great cylindrical module several stories high. Strange black fluid, a horizontal geyser of ink, jets from an exhaust vent in its side. Charcoal thunderheads billow into the water, eclipsing the view.
“What is that?” Clarke whispers.
Lubin’s pulling up other windows now: seismo, vocoder traffic, a little thumbnail mosaic of surveillance cams spread around inside and outside the complex.
All Atlantis’s inside cams are dead.
Voices are rising on all channels. Three of the outside cameras have gone ink-blind. Lubin brings up the PA menu, speaks calmly into the abyss.
“Attention, everyone. Attention. This is it.
“Atlantis has preempted.”
* * *
Now they’re reading perfidy all over the place. Lubin’s switchboard is a mob scene of competing voices, tuned fish-heads reporting that their assigned corpses are abruptly up, focused, and definitely in play. It’s as though someone’s kicked over an anthill in there: every brain in Atlantis is suddenly lit up along the whole fight-flight axis.
“Everyone shut up. These are not secure channels.” Lubin’s voice squelches the others like a granite slab grinding over pebbles. “Take your positions. Blackout in sixty.”
Clarke leans over his shoulder and toggles a hardline into corpseland. “Atlantis, what’s going on?” No answer. “Pat? Comm? Anyone, respond.”
“Don’t waste your time,” Lubin says, bringing up sonar. Half the exterior cams are useless by now, enveloped in black fog. But the sonar image is crisp and clear: Atlantis spreads across the volumetric display like a grayscale crystalline chessboard. Black pieces—the two-tone flesh-and-metal echoes of rifter bodies—align themselves in some coordinated tactical ballet. White is nowhere to be seen.
Clarke shakes her head. “There was nothing? No warning at all?” She can’t believe it; there’s no way the corpses could have masked their own anticipation if they’d been planning something. The expectant tension in their own heads would have been obvious to any tuned rifter within twenty meters, well in advance of anything actually happening.
“It’s like they weren’t even expecting it themselves,” she murmurs.
“They probably weren’t,” Lubin says.
“How could they not be? Are you saying it was some kind of accident?”
Lubin, his attention on the board, doesn’t answer. A sudden blue tint suffuses the sonar display. At first it looks as though the whole view has been arbitrarily blue-shifted; but after a moment clear spots appear, like haphazard spatterings of acid eating holes in a colored gel. Within moments most of the tint has corroded away, leaving random scraps of color laying across Atlantis like blue shadows. Except they’re not shadows, Clarke sees now: they’re volumes, little three-dimensional clots of colored shade clinging to bits of hull and outcropping.
A single outside camera, mounted at a panoramic distance, shows a few diffuse glowing spots in a great inky storm front. It’s as though Atlant
is were some great bioluminescent Kraken in the throes of a panic attack. All the other outside cams are effectively blind. It doesn’t matter, though. Sonar looks through that smokescreen as if it wasn’t even there. Surely they know that …
“They wouldn’t be this stupid,” Clarke murmurs.
“They’re not,” Lubin says. His fingers dance on the board like manic spiders. A scattering of yellow pinpoints appears on the display. They swell into circles, a series of growing overlapping spotlit areas, each centered on—
Camera locations, Clarke realizes. The yellow areas are those under direct camera surveillance. Or they would be, if not for the smokescreen. Lubin’s obviously based his analysis on geometry and not real-time viz.
“Blackout now.” Lubin’s finger comes down; the white noise generators come up. The chessboard fuzzes with gray static. On the board, rifter icons—naked little blips now, without form or annotation—have formed into a series of five discrete groups around the complex. One blip from each is rising in the water column, climbing above the zone of interference.
You planned it right down to the trim, didn’t you? she thinks. You mapped a whole campaign around this moment and you never told me …
The highest icon flickers and clarifies into two conjoined blips: Creasy, riding a squid. His voice buzzes on the channel a moment later. “This is Dale, on station.”
Another icon clears the noise. “Hannuk.” Two more: “Abra.” “Deb.”
“Avril on station,” Hopkinson reports.
“Hopkinson,” Lubin says. “Forget the Cave; they’ll have relocated. It won’t be obvious. Split up your group, radial search.”
“Yah.” Hopkinson’s icon dives back into static.
“Creasy,” Lubin says, “your people join up with Cheung’s.”