Rifters 3 - Behemoth

by Peter Watts

  Odd, Taka reflected, how often it comes down to that...

  It wasn't just the end of the world, not to Laurie. It seemed somehow more—more intimate than that. It was almost as if someone had betrayed her personally. Welcome back, Taka thought to the vulnerable creature peeking again, at long last, from behind the mask. I've missed you.

  "I don't know," she said at last. "I don't know who would do this or why. But the point is, now we stop it. Now we culture these babies, and we send them out to do battle." Taka pulled up the stats on her incubators. "I've already got five liters of the stuff ready to go, and I'll have twenty by morn..."

  That's odd, she thought as a little flashing icon caught her eye for the first time.

  That shouldn't—that looks like—

  The bottom dropped out of her stomach. "Oh, shit," she whispered.

  "What?" Ken and Laurie leaned in as one.

  "My lab's online." She stabbed at the icon; it blinked back at her, placidly unresponsive. "My lab's online. It's uploading—God knows what it's—"

  In an instant Ken was scrambling up the side of the van. "Get the toolkit," he snapped, sliding across the roof towards a little satellite dish rising somehow from its recessed lair, pointing at the sky.

  "What? I—"

  Laurie dove into the cab. Ken yanked against the dish, breaking its fixation on some malign geosynchronous star. Suddenly he cried out and thrashed, stopped himself just short of rolling off the roof. His back was arched, his hands and head lifted away from the metal.

  The dish stuttered back towards alignment, stripped gears whining.

  "Fuck!" Laurie tumbled out onto the pavement. The toolkit spilled its guts beside her. She scrambled to her feet, yelled "Shut it down, for Chrissakes! The hull's electrified!"

  Taka stumbled towards the open door. She could see Ken wriggling back towards the dish on his back and elbows, using his diveskin as insulation. As she ducked her head to hop past the trim—Thank God we disarmed the internals—a familiar hum started up deep in Miri's guts.

  The weapons blister, deploying.

  GPS was online. She killed it. It resurrected. All external defenses were awake and hungry. She called them off. They ignored her. Outside, Ken and Laurie shouted back and forth.

  What do I do—what—

  She scrambled under the dash and pulled open the fuse box. The circuit breakers were clunky manual things, unreachable to any demon built of electrons. She pulled the plugs on security and comm and GPS. She yanked autopilot too, just in case.

  A chorus of electrical hums fell instantly silent around her.

  Taka closed her eyes for a moment and allowed herself a deep breath. Voices drifted through the open door as she pulled herself back up into the driver's seat.

  "You okay?"

  "Yeah. Skin took most of the charge."

  She knew what had happened. What happened again, she corrected herself, grabbing the headset from its hook.

  She was no coder. She barely knew how to grow basic programs. But she was a competent medical doctor, at least, and even bottom-half graduates knew their tools. She'd spared the med systems from disconnection; now she brought up an architectural schematic and ran a count of the modules.

  There were black boxes in there. One of them, according to the icon, even had a direct user interface. She tapped it.

  The Madonna hung in front her, not speaking. Its teeth were bared—a smile of some kind, full of hate and triumph. Some distant, unimportant part of Taka Ouellette's mind wondered at what possible selective advantage an app could accrue by presenting itself in this way. Did intimidation in the real world somehow increase fitness in the virtual one?

  But a much bigger part of Taka's mind was occupied with something else entirely, something that had never really sunk in before: this avatar had capped eyes.

  They all did. Every Lenie she'd ever encountered: the faces changed from demon to demon, different lips, different cheeks and noses, different ethnicities. But always centered on eyes as white and featureless as snowdrifts.

  My name's Taka Ouellette, she had said an eternity ago.

  And this strange cipher of a woman—who seemed to take the apocalypse so personally— had replied Le— Laurie.

  "Taka."

  Taka started, but no—the Lenie wasn't talking to her. This Lenie wasn't.

  She slipped off the eyephones. A woman in black with machinery in her chest and eyes like little glaciers looked in at her. She didn't look anything like the creature in the wires. No rage, no hate, no triumph. Somehow, it was this expressionless, flesh-and-blood face that she would have associated with machinery.

  "It was one of—it was a Le—a Madonna," Taka said. "Inside the med system. I don't know how long it's been in there."

  "We have to go," Laurie said.

  "It was hiding in there. Spying, I guess." Taka shook her head. "I didn't even know they could run silent like that, I thought they always just—automatically tore things apart every chance they got..."

  "It got a signal out. We've got to go before the lifters get here."

  "Right. Right." Focus, Tak. Worry about this later.

  Ken was at Laurie's shoulder. "You said you had five liters in culture. We'll take some with us. You disperse the rest. Drive into town, ring your siren, give at least a few mils to anybody who qualifies, and get out. We'll catch up with you later if we can. You have the list?"

  Taka nodded. "There are only six locals with wheels. Seven, if Ricketts is still around."

  "Don't give it to anyone else," Ken said. "People on foot aren't likely to get out of the burn zone in time. I'd also advise you to avoid mentioning the lifters to anyone who doesn't have an immediate need to know."

  She shook her head. "They all need to know, Ken."

  "People without transportation are liable to steal it from those who do. I sympathize, but causing a panic could seriously compromise—"

  "Forget it. Everyone deserves a heads-up, at least. If they can't outrun the flamethrowers, there are places to hide from them."

  Ken sighed. "Fine. Just so you know the risks you're taking. Saving a dozen lives here could doom a much greater number down the road."

  Taka smiled, not entirely to herself. "Weren't you the one who didn't think the greater number was worth saving in the first place?"

  "It's not that," Laurie said. "He just likes the idea of people dying."

  Taka blinked, surprised. Two faces looked back at her; she could read nothing in either.

  "We have to hurry," Ken said. "If they scramble from Montreal we can only count on an hour."

  The onboard lab could dispense product either fore or aft. Taka moved to the back of the MI and tapped instructions. "Lenie?"

  "Ye—" Laurie began, and fell suddenly silent.

  "No," Taka said quietly. "I meant what about the Lenie?"

  The other woman said nothing. Her face was as blank as a mask.

  Ken broke the silence: "Are you certain it can't get out again?"

  "I physically cut power to nav, comm, and GPS," Taka said, not taking her eyes off the woman in front of her. "I pretty much lobotomized the old girl."

  "Can it interfere with the culture process?"

  "I wouldn't think so. Not without being really obvious about it."

  "You're not certain."

  "Ken, right now I'm not certain about anything." Although I'm approaching certainty about a thing or two...

  "It's living where? Reference and analytical?"

  Taka nodded. "The only systems with enough room."

  "What happens if you shut them down?"

  "The wet lab's on its own circuit. The cultures should be okay as long as we don't need to do any more heavy-duty analysis on them."

  "Pull the plug," Ken said.

  A heat-sealed sample bag, half-full of straw-colored liquid, slid from the dispensary and hung by its upper edge. Taka tore it free and handed it over. "Keep the diffusion disk uncovered or the culture will suffocate. Other
than that they should be okay for about a week, depending on the temperature. Do you have a lab in your submarine?"

  "Basic medbay," Lenie said. "Nothing like this."

  "We can improvise something," Lubin added. "Can the diffuser handle seawater?"

  "Ninety minutes, tops."

  "Okay. Go."

  Ken turned and started down the beach.

  Taka raised her voice: "What if—"

  "We'll catch up with you afterwards," he said, not turning.

  "I guess this is it, then," Taka said.

  Lenie, still beside her, tried on a smile. It didn't fit.

  "How will you find me?" Taka asked her. "I don't dare go online."

  "Yeah. Well." The other woman took a step towards the water. A swirl on that surface was all that remained of her partner. "Ken's got a lot of tricks up his sleeve. He'll track you down."

  White eyes set into flesh and blood. White eyes, sneering out from the circuitry of Miri's cortex.

  White eyes bringing fire, and flood, and any number of catastrophes down on the innocent, all across North America. All across the world, maybe.

  Both sets of eyes called Lenie.

  "You—" Taka began.

  Lenie, the Word Made Flesh, shook her head. "Really. We gotta go."

  Parsimony

  Achilles Desjardins was breeding exorcists when he learned he was a suspect.

  It was a real balancing act. If you made the little bastards immutable, they wouldn't adapt; even the vestigial wildlife hanging on in this pathetic corner of the net would chew them up and spit them out. But if you set the genes free, provoked mutation with too many random seeds, then how could you be sure your app would still be on-mission a few generations down the road? Natural selection would weed out any preprogrammed imperatives the moment they came into conflict with sheer self-interest.

  Sometimes, if you didn't get the balance just right, your agent would forget all about its mission and join the other side. And the other side didn't need any more help. The Madonnas—or the Shredders, or the Goldfish, or any of the other whispered mythic names they'd acquired over the years—had already survived this gangrenous quagmire long past any reasonable expectation. They shouldn't have; they'd codevolved to serve as little more than interfaces between the real world and the virtual one, mouthpieces for a superspecies assemblage that acted as a collective organism in its own right. By rights they should have died in the crash that took out the rest of that collective, that took out ninety percent of all Maelstrom's wildlife—for how many faces make it on their own after the body behind is dead and gone?

  But they had defied that logic, and survived. They had changed—been changed— into something more, more self-sufficient. Something purer. Something that even Desjardins's exorcists could barely match.

  They had been weaponised, the story went. There was no shortage of suspects. M&Ms and hobby terrorists and death-cult hackers could all be releasing them into the system faster than natural selection took them out, and there was a limit to what anyone could do without a reliable physical infrastructure. The best troops in the world won't last a minute if you set them down in quicksand, and quicksand was all that N'Am had to offer these days: a few hundred isolated fortresses hanging on by their fingernails, their inhabitants far too scared to go out and fix the fiberop. The decaying electronic habitat wasn't much better for wildlife than it was for Human apps, but at a hundred gens-per-sec the wildlife still had the adaptive edge.

  Fortunately, Desjardins had a knack for exorcism. There were reasons for that, not all of them common knowledge, but the results were hard to argue with. Even those ineffectual and self-righteous jerk-offs hiding out on the other side of the world gave him that much. At least they all cheered him on, safe behind their barricades, whenever he released a new batch of countermeasures.

  But as it turned out, they were saying other things as well.

  He wasn't privy to most of it—he wasn't supposed to be privy to any— but he was good enough to get the gist. He had his own hounds on the trail, prowling comsats, sniffing random packets, ever-watchful for digital origami which might—when unscrambled and unfolded and pressed flat—contain the word Desjardins.

  Apparently, people thought he was losing his edge.

  He could live with that. Nobody racks up a perfect score against the death throes of an entire planet, and if he'd dropped a few more balls than normal over the past months—well, his failure rate was still way below the pack average. He outperformed any of those bozos who grumbled, however softly, during the teleconferences and debriefings and post-fiasco post-mortems that kept intruding on the war. They all knew it, too; he'd have to slip a lot further than this before anyone else in the Patrol would be able to lay a hand on him.

  Still. There were hints of the wind, changing at his back. Fragments of encrypted conversations between veterans in Helsinki and rookies in Melbourne and middle-management stats-hounds in New Delhi. Disgruntled insistence from Weimers, King Sim himself, that there had to be some undiscovered variable wreaking havoc with his projections. And—

  And right this very second, a disembodied chunk of point-counterpoint snatched from the ether by one of Desjardins's minions. It was only a few seconds in length—thanks to a filthy spectrum and the dynamic channel-switching that coped with it, it was almost impossible to grab more without knowing which random seed to apply—but it seemed to have been connecting a couple of 'lawbreakers in London and McMurdo. It took forty seconds and six nested Bayesians to turn it back into English.

  "Desjardins saved us from Rio," Mr. McMurdo had opined, moments earlier, in a Hindian accent. "We'd have surely taken ten times the losses had he not acted when he did. How those people threw off the Trip—"

  Ms. London: "How do you know they did?" Irish lilt. Enticing.

  "Well let me see. They launched an unprovoked attack on a large number of—"

  "How do we know it was unprovoked?"

  "Of course it was unprovoked."

  "Why? How do you know they didn't just see a threat to the greater good, and try to stop it?"

  Precious moments of this fleeting excerpt, wasted on astonished silence. Finally: "Are you suggesting that—"

  "I'm saying history gets written by the victors. Rio's history. How do we know the good guys won?"

  End of intercept. If McMurdo had had an answer, he hadn't got it out before the frequency skidded away.

  Wow, Desjardins thought.

  It was horseshit, of course. The idea that twenty-one separate CSIRA franchises could have simultaneously gone rogue was hardly more plausible than the thought that Rio alone had. Ms. London was a 'lawbreaker, not an idiot. She knew about parsimony. She'd just been blowing smoke out her ass, yanking poor old McMurdo's chain.

  Still, it gave Desjardins pause. He'd gotten used to being the Man Who Stopped Rio. It put him above suspicion on so many counts. And it didn't sit well, to think that there were people out there who could doubt his virtue even for a moment.

  That could lead to second thoughts, he reflected. It could lead to closer looks.

  The board beeped again. For a moment he thought that he'd beaten all odds and reacquired the signal—but no. The new alert came from a different source entirely, a broadband dump from somewhere in Maine.

  That's odd, he thought.

  A Lenie had gotten into a medical database and was spewing random intelligence across half the EM spectrum. They did that a lot, these days—not content to merely scramble and hash, some had taken to shouting into the ether, indiscriminately dumping data into any network they could access. Some reproductive subroutine, mutated to spread data instead of executables. At the very least it threw more chaff into a system already losing usable bandwidth by the hour; at worst it could blow the lid off all sorts of secret and sensitive data.

  Either way it was bad news for the real world; that would be enough to keep it going.

  This particular demon had uploaded a whole shitload of biomedical stuff
from the database it had plundered. Desjardins's board had flagged it for potential epidemiological significance. He popped the lid and looked inside.

  And immediately forgot about any trivial bullshit gossip from London.

  There were two items, both rife with dangerous pathology. Desjardins was no pathologist, but then again he didn't have to be; the friends and advisors arrayed about him distilled all those biochemical details down to an executive summary that even he could understand. Now they served up a pair of genotypes with red flags attached. The first was almost ßehemoth, only better: greater resistance to osmotic stress, sharper teeth for cleaving molecules. Higher virulence. At least one critical feature was the same, though. Like baseline ßehemoth, this new strain was optimized for life at the bottom of the sea.

  It did not exist in the standard database. Which raised the question of what its technical specs were doing in a glorified ambulance out of Bangor.

  It would have been enough to grab his attention even if it had arrived unaccompanied. It had brought a date, though, and she was the real ballbreaker. She was the bitch he had always dreaded. She was the last thing he would have ever expected.

  Because he had always known that Seppuku would gain a foothold eventually.

  But he hadn't expected anyone on his own side to be culturing the damn thing.

  Corral

  Taka cursed her own lack of foresight. They'd spread the word, all right. They'd told all who came by of their plan to save the world: the need for samples, the dangers of lingering afterwards, the places she'd patrol to take charge of vital payloads. They'd taken special note of those few who'd driven up in cars or motorbikes or even plain old pedal-powered flywheels, got addresses from those who still had them and told the rest to check back regularly: if all went well, they might save the world.

  And things had gone well, and then so horribly wrong, in such quick succession. They had their counteragent, or some of it anyway, but no prearranged signals to bring in the couriers. And after all, why would they have even bothered? They could have taken an afternoon and driven around the county. They could have waited for those of no fixed address to check in, tomorrow or the next day.