Rifters 3 - Behemoth

by Peter Watts

  For the barest instant—a hundred cycles, maybe two—the heavens open. If she had anything approaching true awareness, she might glimpse a vast array of nodes through that break in the void, an n-dimensional grid of parallel architecture wreaking infinitesimal changes to her insides. Perhaps she'd marvel at the way in which so many of her parameter values change in that instant, as if the tumblers on a thousand mechanical locks spontaneously fell into alignment at the same time. She might tingle from the sleet of electrons passing through her genes, flipping ons to offs and back again.

  But she feels nothing. She knows no awe or surprise, she has no words for meiosis or rape. One part of her simply recognises that a number of environmental variables are suddenly optimal; it signals a different subroutine controlling replication protocols, and yet another that scans the neighborhood for vacant addresses.

  With relentless efficiency and no hint of joy, she births a litter of two million.

  N=4,734:

  Snarling, unaware, she searches for a target—but not quite the way her mother did. She looks for landmarks—but spends a few more cycles before giving up on the task. She can't find anything that passes for topography—and changing tacks, spends more time documenting the addresses that stretch away above and below. She is a lean, lone German Shepherd with Rottweiller jaws and a trace of hip dysplasia, honed for life in some frayed and impoverished jungle that's nowhere to be seen. She faintly remembers other creatures seething on all sides, but her event log balances the costs and benefits of comprehensive record-keeping; her memories degrade over time, unless reinforced. She has already forgotten that the other creatures were her siblings; soon, she will not remember them at all. She never knew that by the standards of her mother's world, she was the runt of the litter. Her persistence here, now, is not entirely consistent with the principals of natural selection.

  Here, now, the selection process is not entirely natural.

  She has no awareness of the array of parallel universes stretching away on all sides. Hers is but one microcosm of many, each with a total population of one. When a sudden fistula connects two of these universes, it seems like magic: suddenly she is in the company of a creature very much—but not exactly—like her.

  They scan fragments of each other, nondestructively. Bits and pieces of disembodied code suddenly appear in nearby addresses, cloned fragments, unviable. There is no survival value in any of this; on any Darwinian landscape, a creature who wasted value cycles on such frivolous cut-and-paste would be extinct in four generations, tops. Yet for some reason, this neurotic tic makes her feel—fulfilled, somehow. She fucks the newcomer, cuts and pastes in more conventional fashion. She flips a few of her own randomisers for good measure, and drops a litter of eight hundred thousand.

  N=9,612:

  Snarling, unaware, she searches for targets and finds them everywhere. She looks for landmarks and maps out a topography of files and gates, archives, executables and other wildlife. It is a sparse environment by the standards of ancient ancestors, incredibly lush by the standards of more recents ones. She remembers neither, suffers neither nostalgia nor memory. This place is sufficient for her needs: She is a wolfhound cross, overmuscled and a little rabid, her temperment a throwback to purer times.

  Purer instincts prevail. She throws herself among the prey and devours it.

  Around her, so do others: Akitas, Sibes, pit-bull crosses with the long stupid snouts of overbred collies. In a more impoverished place they would attack each other; here, with resources in such plentiful supply, there is no need. But strangely, not everyone attacks their prey as enthusiastically as she does. Some seem distracted by the scenery, spend time recording events instead of precipitating them. A few gigs away, her whiskers brush across some braindead mutt dawdling about in the registry, cutting and pasting data for no reason at all. It's not of any interest, of course—at least, not until the mongrel starts copying pieces of her.

  Violated, she fights back. Bits of parasitic code are encysted in her archives, tamed snippets from virtual parasites which plagued her own long-forgotten ancestors back in the Maelstrom Age. She unzips them and throws copies at her molestor, answering its unwanted probing with tapeworms and syphillis. But these diseases work far faster than the metaphor would suggest: they do not sicken the body so much as scramble it on contact.

  Or they should. But somehow her attack fails to materialize on target. And that's not the only problem—suddenly, the whole world is starting to change. The whiskers she sends roving about her perimeter aren't reporting back. Volleys of electrons, fired down the valley, fail to return—and then, even more ominously, return too quickly. The world is shrinking: some inexplicable void is compressing it from all directions.

  Her fellow predators are panicking around her, crowding towards gates gone suddenly dark, pinging whiskers every which way, copying themselves to random addresses in the hopes that they can somehow out-replicate annihiliation. She rushes around with the others as space itself contracts—but the dawdler, the cut-and-paster, seems completely unconcerned. There is no chaos breaking around that one, no darkening of the skies. The dawdler has some kind of protection...

  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 might not 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 discretely on the arm of a treatise on tempora
l-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's 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 ßehemoth, 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 ß-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 ßehemoth 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 ßehemoth 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.