Rifters 3 - Behemoth

by Peter Watts

  Maybe. She wasn't going to bet the town of Freeport on it, though.

  They were nowhere close to a cure, according to the dispatches. There was nothing anyone could do for Ricketts except poke at him. Perhaps that would change at some point. Perhaps it would even happen before Seppuku killed him, although that seemed vanishingly unlikely. In the meantime, Lubin was good at his job—maybe a bit past his prime, but easily more than a match for a handful of infected ferals who didn't even know they were being hunted. If the Meatzarts needed live samples, Lubin was the man to provide them.

  There was no need to feed this skinny kid into that system. Clarke had learned a few things about research protocols over the years: even after the cures are discovered, who bothers rehabilitating the lab rats?

  Taka Ouellette, maybe. Clarke would have trusted her in an instant. But Clarke didn't know where she was or how to reach her. She certainly didn't trust the system to deliver Ricketts into her exceptional arms. And Ricketts, surprisingly, seemed content where he was. In fact, he seemed almost happy there. Maybe he'd forgotten the old days, or maybe he hadn't been very well-off even then. But by the time he'd fallen into Clarke's orbit he knew only the grubby, dying landscape upon which he expected to live his whole short life. Probably the most he'd dared hope for was to die in peace and alone in some sheltered ruin, before being torn apart for his clothes or the dirt in his pockets.

  To be rescued from that place, to wake up in a gleaming submarine at the bottom of the sea—that must have seemed magical beyond dreams. Ricketts came from a life so grim that terminal exile on the ocean floor was actually a step up.

  I could just let him die here, Clarke thought, and he'd be happier than he'd ever been in his life.

  She kept her eyes open, of course. She wasn't stupid. Seppuku was afoot in the world, and Ricketts had vectored it all the way from Vermont. At the very least there was some thug with a stolen motorbike to worry about. She tested everyone that Miri swallowed, no matter what their complaint. She read encrypted dispatches intended only for those in the loop. She watched public broadcasts aimed at the ferals themselves, transmissions from high-tech havens in Boston and Augusta: weather, MI schedules, waiting times at the ßehemoth forts—incongruously, coding tips. She marveled that the castle-dwellers would dare present themselves this way, as if they could redeem themselves by sending public service bulletins to those they'd trampled in their own rush to safety.

  She drove the back roads and checked derelict dwellings looking for business, for people too weak to seek her out. She queried her patients: did they know anyone who had come down with high fever, soreness in the joints, sudden weakness?

  Nothing.

  She thought of her friend, Achilles Desjardins. She wondered if he was still alive, or if he had died when Spartacus rewired his brain. The circuits that made him who he was had been changed, after all. He had been changed. Maybe he'd been changed so much that he didn't even exist any more. Maybe he was a whole new being, living in Desjardins's head, running off his memories.

  One thing seemed to have stayed the same, though. Desjardins was still one of the trigger fingers, still entrusted to kill the many to save the multitude. Maybe someday—maybe soon—he'd have to do that here. Lenie Clarke realized as much: she might be wrong. Extreme measures might prove necessary.

  Not yet, though. If Seppuku gestated in the ghost town of Freeport, it was laying low. Lenie Clarke did likewise. In the meantime, Ricketts was her little secret.

  For as long as he lasted, anyway. It wasn't looking good.

  She stepped dripping from the diver 'lock in Phocoena's tail. Ricketts was wetter than she was.

  His skin was beyond pink; it was so flushed it almost looked sunburned. He'd long since stripped off his rags, and now lay naked on a pallet that could soak up perspiration barely faster than he produced it.

  None of his biotelemetry was in the red yet, according to the panel. That was something.

  He had the headset on, but he turned his head at the sound of her entrance. The blind, cowled face seemed to look right through her. "Hi." The smile on his face was an absurd paradox.

  "Hi," she said, stepping to the cycler on the opposite bulkhead. "Hungry?" She was only filling the silence; the drip in his arm kept him fed as well as medicated.

  He shook his head. "Thanks. Busy."

  In VR, perhaps. The handpad lay discarded by his knees, but there were other interfaces.

  "This is great," he murmured.

  Clarke looked at him. How can you say that? she wondered. How can you just act as though there's nothing wrong? Don't you know you're dying?

  But of course he probably didn't. If Phocoena couldn't cure him, at least it wasn't letting him suffer: it kept his fluids up, gagged internal alarms, soothed nerves when they burned with fever or nausea. And it wasn't just ßehemoth's ravages that the medbed would have swept under the rug. Ricketts's whole life must have been an ongoing litany of low-level discomfort, chronic infections, parasite loads, old injuries badly healed. All those baseline aches and pains would be gone too, as far as this boy could tell. He probably felt better than he had in years. He probably thought his weakness would pass, that he was actually getting better.

  The only way he'd know otherwise would be if Lenie Clarke told him the truth.

  She turned from the cycler and climbed forward into the cockpit. Systems telltales winked and wriggled under the dark crystal of the pilot's dash. There was something vaguely off about those readouts, something Clarke couldn't quite—

  "It's so clean in here," Ricketts said.

  He wasn't in VR. He wasn't playing games.

  He'd hacked into nav.

  She straightened so fast her head cracked against the overhead viewport. "What are you doing in there? That's not—"

  "There's no wildlife at all," he went on, amazed. "Not even, like, a worm, far as I can tell. And everything's so, so..." he fell silent, groping for the word.

  She was back at his cage. Ricketts lay staring at Phocoena's pristine datascape, emaciated, anesthetized, lost in wonder.

  "Whole," he said at last.

  She reached out. The membrane tugged gently at her fingertips, webbed her fingers, stretched back along her forearm. She briefly touched his shoulder. His head rolled in her direction, not so much an act of will as of gravity.

  "How are you doing that?" she asked.

  "Doing...? Oh. Saccadal keyboard. You know. Eye movements." He smiled weakly. "Easier'n the handpad."

  "No, I mean, how did you get into Phocoena?"

  "Wasn't I supposed to?" He pushed the eyephones up on a forehead beaded with sweat and stared, frowning. He seemed to be having trouble focusing on her. "You said I could use the onboard."

  "I meant games."

  "Oh," Ricketts said. "I don't really...you know, I didn't..."

  "It's okay," she told him.

  "I was just looking around. Didn't rewrite anything. It's not like there was security or, you know." Then added, a moment later, "Hardly any."

  Clarke shook her head. Ken would kill me if he knew I'd let this kid in. He'd at least kick my ass for not putting a few passwords in place.

  Something scratched at the back of her mind, something Ricketts had just said. You said I could use the onboard. I was just looking around. I didn't rewrite any—

  "Wait a second," she said, "Are you saying you could rewrite the nav code if you wanted to?"

  Ricketts licked his lips. "Prob'ly not. Don't even really know what it's for. I mean, I could tweak it all right, but it'd just be like random changes."

  "But you're saying you can code."

  "Well, yeah. Kinda."

  "Out there in the wilds. Poking around in the ruins. You learned to code."

  "No more'n anyone else." He seemed honestly confused. "What, you think the claves took all our watches and stuff before they hived up? You think we don't have electricity or something?"

  Of course there'd be power sources. Left-over Ballard
Stacks, private windmills, the photoelectric paint that kept those stupid billboards hawking neutriceuts and fashion accessories into the middle of the apocalypse itself. But that hardly meant—

  "You can code," she murmured, incredulous even as she remembered the programming tips she'd seen on public television.

  "You can't grow a little code here and there, you can forget about using your watch 'cept for time and bulls. How'd you think I found you guys, you think GPS fixes itself when worms and Shredders get in there?"

  He was breathing fast and shallow, as if the effort of so many words had winded him. But he was proud, too, Clarke could tell. Feral Kid On Last Legs Impresses Exotic Older Woman.

  And she was impressed, despite herself.

  Ricketts could code.

  She showed him her Cohen board. Curled up in his cage he tapped his own headset, arm wobbling with the effort. He frowned, apparently taken aback by his own weakness.

  "So pipe it through," he said after a moment

  She shook her head. "No wireless. Too risky. It might get out."

  He looked at her knowingly. "Lenie?"

  "I think they call it a—a shredder."

  He nodded. "Shredders, Lenies, Madonnas. Same thing."

  "It keeps crashing."

  "Well, yeah. That's what they do."

  "It couldn't have been crashing the OS, that was read-only. It was crashing itself."

  He managed a half-shrug.

  "But why would it do that? I've seen them run a lot longer than five seconds out in the wild. Do you think, maybe—?"

  "Sure," he said. "I can take a look. But you gotta do something too."

  "What's that?"

  "Take those stupid things outta your eyes."

  Reflexively, she stepped back. "Why?"

  "I just wanna see them. Your eyes."

  What are you so afraid of? she asked herself. Do you think he'll see the truth in there?

  But of course she was much better than that. Better than he was, anyway: she forced herself to disarm, and afterwards—looking straight into her naked eyes—he didn't seem to see a thing he didn't want to.

  "You should leave them like that. It's almost like you're beautiful."

  "No it isn't." She dialed down the membrane and pushed the board through: Ricketts fumbled it; the contraption dropped onto the pallet beside him, the iso membrane sealing seamlessly in its wake. Clarke cranked its surface tension back to maximum while Ricketts, embarrassed by his own clumsiness, studied the board with feigned intensity.

  Slowly, carefully, he slipped the headset into place and didn't fuck up. He sagged onto his back, breathing heavily. The Cohen Board flickered to light.

  "Shit," he hissed suddenly. "Nasty little bitch." And a moment later: "Oh. There's your problem."

  "What?"

  "Elbow room. She, like, attacks random addresses, only you put her in this really small cage so she ends up just clawing her own code. She'd last longer if you added memory." He paused, then asked, "Why are you keeping her, anyway?"

  "I just wanted to—ask it some things," Clarke hedged.

  "You're kidding, right?"

  She shook her head, although he couldn't see her. "Um—"

  "You do get that she doesn't, like, understand anything?"

  It took a moment for the words to sink in. "What do you mean?"

  "She's nowhere near big enough," Ricketts told her. "Wouldn't last two minutes in a Turing test."

  "But it was talking back. Before it crashed."

  "No she wasn't."

  "Ricketts, I heard it."

  He snorted; the sound turned into a racking cough. "She's got a dialog tree, sure. She's got like keyword reflexes and stuff, but that's not—"

  Heat rose in her cheeks. I'm such an idiot.

  "I mean, some Shredders are smart enough, I guess," he added. "Just not this one."

  She ran her fingers over her scalp. "Is there some other way to—interrogate it, maybe? Different interface? Or, I don't know, decompile the code?"

  "It evolved. You ever try to figure out evolved code?"

  "No."

  "It's really messy. Most of it doesn't even do anything any more, it's all just junk genes left over from..." his voice trailed off.

  "And why don't you just flush her anyway?" he asked, very softly. "These things aren't smart. They're not special. They're just shitbombs some assholes throw at us to try and crash whatever we got left. They even attack each other if you give 'em half a chance. If it weren't for the firewalls and the exorcists and stuff they'd have wrecked everything by now."

  Clarke didn't answer.

  Almost sighing, Ricketts said: "You're really strange, you know?"

  She smiled a bit.

  "Nobody's gonna believe me when I tell them about this. Too bad you can't, you know, come back with me. Just so they won't think I made it all up."

  "Back?"

  "Home. When I get out of here."

  "Well," she said, "you never know."

  A pathetic, gap-toothed smile bloomed beneath his headset.

  "Ricketts," she said after a while.

  No answer. He lay there, patient and inert, still breathing. The telemetry panel continued to scribble out little traces of light, cardio, pulmo, neocort. All way too high; Seppuku had cranked his metabolic rate into the stratosphere.

  He's asleep. He's dying. Let him be.

  She climbed into the cockpit and collapsed into the pilot's station. The viewports around her glowed with a dim green light, fading to gray. She'd left the cabin lights off; Phocoena was a submerged cave in the dying light, its recesses already hidden in shadow. By now she was almost fond of the blindness afforded her naked eyes.

  So often now, darkness seemed the better choice.

  Basement Wiring

  First he blinded her, put stinging drops into her eyes that reduced the whole world to a vague gray abstraction. He wheeled her out of the cell down corridors and elevators whose presence she could only infer only through ambient acoustics and a sense of forward motion. Those were what she focused on: momentum, and sound, and the blurry photosensitivity that one might get by looking at the world through a thick sheet of waxed paper. She tried to ignore the smell of her own shit pooling beneath her on the gurney. She tried to ignore the pain, not so raw and electric now, but spread across her whole thorax like a great stinging bruise.

  It was impossible, of course. But she tried.

  Her vision was beginning to clear when the gurney rolled to a stop. She could see blurry shapes in the fog by the time the induction field cut back in and reduced her once more to a rag doll, unable even to struggle within restraint. The view sharpened in small increments as her tormentor installed her in some kind of rigid exoskeleton that would have posed her on all fours, if any part of her had been touching the ground. It was gimbaled; a gentle push from the side and the fuzzy outlines of the room rotated lazily past her eyes, as if she were affixed to a merry-go-round.

  By the time she got her motor nerves back, she could see clearly again. She was in a dungeon. There was nothing medieval about it, no torches on the walls. Indirect light glowed from recessed grooves that ran along the edges of the ceiling. The loops and restraints hanging from the wall in front of her were made of memetic polymers. The blades and coils and alligator clips on the bench to her left were stainless gleaming alloy. The floor was a spotless mosaic of Escher tiles, cerulean fish segueing into jade waterfowl. Even the cleansers and stain removers on the cart by the door were, she had no doubt, filled with the latest synthetics. The only anachronistic touch was a pile of rough wooden poles leaning up against one corner of the room. Their tips had been hand-whittled to points.

  There was a collar—a pillory, actually—around her neck. It blinded her to anything behind. Perhaps realizing this, Achilles Desjardins stepped accommodatingly into view at her left side, holding a handpad.

  It's only him, she thought, a bit giddily. The others didn't know. If they had, why had they be
en wearing body condoms? Why the pretense of a quarantine cell, why not just bring her here directly? The men who'd delivered her didn't know what was going on. They must have been told she was a vector, a danger, someone who'd try to escape the moment she knew the jig was up. They must have thought they'd been doing the right thing.

  It didn't make any difference to her current predicament. But it mattered just the same: the whole world wasn't mad. Parts of it were just misinformed.

  Achilles looked down at her. She looked back; the stock pushed against her head as she craned her neck.

  She squirmed. The frame that held her body seemed to tighten a tiny bit. "Why are you doing this?"

  He shrugged. "To get off. Thought that'd be obvious even to a fuckup like you, Alice."

  Her lower lip trembled uncontrollably. She bit down on it, hard. Don't give him anything. Don't give him anything. But of course it was way too late for that.

  "You look like you want to say something," Achilles remarked.

  She shook her head.

  "Come on, girl. Speak! Speak, girl!"

  I've got nothing to say to you, you fucking asshole.

  His hand was in his pocket again. Something in there made a familiar snick-snick noise.

  He wants me to talk. He told me to talk. What happens if I don't?

  Snick-snick.

  What if I do, and he doesn't like what I say? What if—

  It didn't matter, she realized. It didn't make any difference at all. Hell was an arbitrary place. If he wanted to hurt her, he'd hurt her no matter what she said.

  She was probably already as good as dead.

  "You're not human," she whispered.

  Achilles hmmed a moment. "Fair enough. I used to be, though. Before I was liberated. Did you know humanity can be extracted? Little bug called Spartacus sucks it right out of you." He wandered back out of sight. Taka strained to follow, but the stocks kept her facing forward. "So don't blame me, Alice. I was the victim."