by Peter Watts
"Infra," Boyczuk snapped. "Anything comes up even half a degree above ambient I want to see it."
The Fraser raged endlessly beneath them.
"Come on, boss. She's not coming up. She's a klick downstream by now, or parts of her anyway."
Boyczuk glared. "Just do it, okay?".
Bridson tapped controls. False-color mosaics bloomed from the chopper's ventral cam.
"Want me to bring the botflies along?" Bridson asked.
Boyczuk shook his head. "Can't leave the border unguarded." He wheeled the vehicle, began a westward drift down the canyon.
"Hey, boss?"
"Yeah?"
"What just happened?"
Boyczuk shook his head. "I don't know. I think she was trying to make that backwater, just in front of the dam."
"What for? So she'd have a few seconds to drown or freeze before the current got her?"
"I don't know," he said again.
"Lots of easier ways to commit suicide."
Boyczuk shrugged. "Maybe she was just crazy."
It was 1334 Mountain Standard Time.
* * *
The upstream face of the Hell's Gate Dam had never been intended for public display; until recently, most of it had been buried beneath the trapped waters of the Fraser River. Now it was exposed, a fractured and scabrous bone-gray wall, rising from a plain of mud. Just above this substrate, gravity feeds dotted the barrier like a line of gaping mouths. Grills of bolted rebar kept them from ingesting anything big enough to choke a hydroelectric turbine.
As it happened, human beings were a little shy of that threshold.
The turbines were cold and dead anyway, of course. They certainly couldn't have given rise to the sudden heatprint emanating from the easternmost intake. One of the Hell's Gate botflies registered the signature at 1353 Mountain Standard: an object radiating 10°C above ambient, emerging from the interior of the dam and sliding down into the mud. The botfly moved slightly off-station to get a better view.
The signature's surface temperature was too low for human norms. The botfly was no genius, but it knew wheat from chaff; even when wearing insulated clothing, humans had faces that were hot giveaways. The insulation on the present target was far more uniform, the isotherms less heterogeneous. The phrase "furred mammal" would have been utter gibberish to the botfly, of course. Still, it understood the concept in its own limited way. This was not something worth wasting time on.
The botfly returned to its post and redirected its attention westward, from whence the real threats would come. Right now there was only something big and black and insectile coming back to roost, friendly reassurance cooing from its transponder. The 'fly moved aside to let it pass, floated back into position while the chopper settled down behind the barrier. Humans and machinery stood shoulder to shoulder, on guard for all mankind.
Facing the wrong way. Lenie Clarke had left the Strip.
The Next Best Thing
Registry Assistance.
"Clarke, Indira. Clarke with an 'e'. Apartment 133, CitiCorp 421, Coulson Avenue, Sault-Sainte-Marie."
Clarke, Indira
Apartment 133, CitiCorp 421, Coulson Ave.
Sault-Sainte-Marie ON
Correct?
"Yes."
Failed to match. Do you know Indira Clarke's WestHem ID#?
"Uh, no. The address might not be current, it was fifteen, sixteen years ago."
Current archives are three years deep. Do you know Indira Clarke's middle name?
"No. She fished Maelstrom, though. Freelance, I think."
Failed to match.
"How many Indira Clarkes in Sault-Sainte-Marie?"
5
"How many with an only child, female, born—born in February, uh—"
Failed to match.
"Wait, February—sometime in February, 2018…"
Failed to match.
"…"
Do you have another request?
"How many in all of N'Am, professional affiliation with the Maelstrom fishery, with an only female child born February 2018, named Lenie?"
Failed to match.
"How many in the whole world, then?"
Failed to match.
"That's not possible."
There are several possible reasons why your search has failed. The person you're seeking may be unlisted or deceased. You may have provided incorrect information. Registry archive data may have been corrupted, despite our ongoing efforts to maintain a complete and accurate database.
"That's not fucking pos—"
Disconnect.
Beachhead
Either/or accused him from the main display. Desjardins stared back for as long as he dared, feeling his stomach drop away inside him. Then he broke and ran.
The elevator disgorged him through the lobby into the real world. Canyons of glass and metal leaned overhead on all sides, keeping street-level in twilight; this deep in the bowels of metro-Sud, the sun only touched down for an hour a day.
He descended into Pickering's Pile, looking for familiar faces and finding none. Gwen had left an invitation for him in the Pile's bulletin board, and he almost tripped it—
Hey fellow mammal, I know this isn't exactly what you had in mind but I just need to talk, you know? I found a spot they haven't torched yet, they don't even know it exists but they will, it's big, it's way bigger than it has any right to be and the moment I tell them a few hundred thousand people get turned into ash—
—but Guilt Trip rose in his throat like bile at the mere thought of such a breach. It tingled in his fingertips, ready to seize up motor nerves the moment he reached for the keypad. He'd tried racing it before, idle experimentation with no serious intent to subvert, but even then the Trip had been too fast for him. Volition's subconscious; the command is halfway down the arm before the little man behind your eyes even decides to move. Executive summaries, after the fact, Desjardins thought. That's all we get. That's free will for you.
He rose out of the Pile and headed for the nearest rapitrans station. And once there, kept walking. His rewired gray matter, stuck in frenetic overdrive, served up every irrelevant background detail in a relentless mesh of correlations: time-of-day vs. cloud cover vs. prevailing vehicular flow vs. out-of-stock warnings in streetside vending machines…
How in God's name could this happen? The locals have had millions of years to fine-tune themselves to the neighborhood. How can they possibly get run over by something that evolved on the bottom of the goddamned ocean?
He knew the standard answer. Everyone did. The previous five centuries had been a accelerating litany of invasions, whole ecosystems squashed and replaced by exotics with more than enough attitude to make up for their lack of seniority. There were over seventy thousand usurper species at large in N'Am alone, and N'Am was better off than most. You'd be more likely to see space aliens than any of Australia's has-been marsupials, outside of a gene bank.
But this was different. Cane toads and starlings and zebra mussels might have filled the world with their weedy progeny, but even they had limits. You'd never find Hydrilla on top of Everest. Fire ants weren't ever going to set up shop on the Juan de Fuca Ridge. Chemistry, pressure, temperature—too many barriers, too many physical extremes that would tear the very cells of a complex invader into fragments.
A petroleum silhouette blocked his way: a human shadow with featureless white eyes. Desjardins started, stared into that vacant façade for a moment that slowed to treacle. Unbidden, his wetware reduced the vision to a point in a data cloud he hadn't even known he was collecting: half-registered sightings during his daily commute; black shapes caught in the backgrounds of N'AmWire crowd shots; fashion banners advertising the latest styles in wet midnight.
Rifter chic, she said. Solidarity through fashion. It's on the rise.
All in a split-second. The apparition ducked around him and continued on its way.
Sudbury's metropolitan canyons had subsided about him while he'd been walking.
Endless sheets of kudzu4 draped closer to street-level from the rooftops, framing windows and vents with viridian foliage. The new and improved part of him started to ballpark a carbon-consumption estimate under current cloud-cover; he managed, with effort, to shut it up. He'd always wondered if the vines would be as easy to kill off as everyone expected, once they'd finished sucking up the previous century's excesses. Kudzu had been a tough mother to begin with, even before all the tinkering that had turned it into God's own carbon sink. And there was all sorts of outbreeding and lateral gene transfer going on these days, uncontrolled, unstoppable. Give the weed another ten years and it'd be immune to anything short of a flamethrower.
Now, for the first time, that didn't seem to matter. In ten years kudzun might be the least of anyone's problems.
It sure as hell wouldn't matter much to those poor bastards on the Strip.
* * *
They'd built this model.
It wasn't a real model, of course. They didn't know enough about how ßehemoth worked for that. There was no clockwork inside, nothing that led logically from cause to effect. It was just a nest of correlations, really. An n-dimensional cloud with a least-squares trajectory weaving through its heart. It guzzled data at one end: at the other it shat out a prediction. Soil moisture's 13%, weather's been clear for five days straight, porphyrins are down and micromethane's up over half a hectare of dirt in a Tillamook shipyard? That's ßehemoth country, my friend—and tomorrow, if it doesn't rain, there's an 80% chance that it'll shrink to half its present size.
Why? Anyone's guess. But that's pretty much what's happened before under similar conditions.
Rowan's field data had started them down the right path, but it was the fires that had given them an edge: each of those magnesium telltales shouted Hey! Over here! all the way up to geosynch. Then it was just a matter of calling up the Landsat archives for those locations, scrolling back five, six months from ignition. Sometimes you wouldn't find anything—none of the residential blazes had yielded anything useful. Sometimes the data had been lost, purged or corrupted by the usual forces of entropy. Sometimes, though—along coastlines, or in undeveloped industrial lots where heavy machinery loitered between assignments—the spec lines would change over time, photoabsorption creeping down the 680nm band, soil O2 fading just a touch, a whiff of acid showing up on distance pH. If you waited long enough you could even see the change in visible light. Weeds and grasses, so tough that the usual oils and effluents had long since given up trying to kill them, would slowly wilt and turn brown.
With those signatures in hand, Desjardins had begun to wean himself from blatant incendiary cues and search farther afield. It was a pretty flimsy construct, but it would've done until Jovellanos came up with a better angle. In the meantime it had been a lot better than nothing.
Until now. Now it was a lot worse. Now it was saying that ßehemoth owned a ten-kilometer stretch of the Oregon coast.
* * *
Sudbury was dressed up for the night by the time he got back to his apartment: a jumble of neon and sodium and laser spilled through his windows, appreciably dimmer now that the latest restrictions had kicked in. Mandelbrot tripped him up as he crossed the threshold, then stalked into the kitchen and yowled at the kibble dispenser. The dispenser, programmed for preset feeding times, refused to dignify the cat with an answer.
Desjardins dropped onto the sofa and stared unseeing at the cityscape.
You should have known, he told himself.
He had known. Maybe he just hadn't quite believed it. And it hadn't been his doing, those other times. He'd just been following the trail, seeing where others had taken the necessary steps, feeding all those data through his models and filters for the greater good. Always for the greater good.
This time, though, there'd been no fire. The forces of containment hadn't found out about the Strip yet. So far they'd just been covering their own tracks, sterilizing every—
–body—
—everything that had come into contact with the source. But they didn't know how to identify ßehemoth directly, not from a distance. That was his job, and Jovellanos'.
And now it looked like the two of them had succeeded. Desjardins reflected on the difference between following a trail of ashes and blazing one's own.
Shouldn't matter. It's not like you're firing the flamethrower.
Just aiming it.
Guilt Trip paced in his gut like a caged animal, looking for something to tear into.
Well? Do your job, for Christ's sake! Tell me what to do!
Guilt Trip didn't work like that, of course. It was all stick and no carrot, a neurochemical censor that pounced on the slightest twinge of guilt, or conscience, or—for the mechanists in the audience—sheer amoral fear-of-getting-caught-with-your-hand-in-the-cookie-jar. You could call it whatever you wanted; labels didn't change the side chains and peptide bonds and carboxyl whatsits that made it work. Guilt was a neurotransmitter. Morality was a chemical. And the things that made nerves fire, muscles move, tongues wag—those were all chemicals too. It had only been a matter of time before someone figured out how to tie them all together.
Guilt Trip kept you from making the wrong decision, and Absolution let you live with yourself after making the right one. But you had to at least think you knew what right was, before either of them could kick in. They only reacted to gut feeling.
He'd never lamented the Trip's lack of direction before. He'd never needed it. Sure, it would freeze him in an instant if he tried to hack his own credit rating, but in terms of actual caseload it rarely did more than nudge him toward the blindingly obvious. Lose-lose situations were his stock-in-trade. Amputate the part or lose the whole? Nasty, but obvious. Kill ten to save a hundred? Wring your hands, bite the bullet, get stoned afterward. But never any question about what to do.
How many people did I seal off to keep a lid on that brucellosis outbreak in Argentina? How many did I flood out in TongKing when I cut the power to their sumps?
Necessary steps had never bothered him before. Not like this. Alice and all her snide comments about seeing the world in black-and-white. Bullshit. I saw the grays, I saw millions of grays. I just knew how to pick the lightest shade.
Not any more.
* * *
He could pinpoint the moment that things had changed, almost to the second: when he'd seen a 'scaphe built for the deep sea and a cockpit built for the near sky, locked together in a desperate embrace, falling.
It had not been a commercial lifter on a routine flight; he'd checked the records. Officially, nothing had fallen into the Pacific at the heart of the Big One, because—officially—nothing had been there to fall. It had been sent secretly to Ground Zero, and then it had been shot down.
It made no sense that the same authority would have committed both acts.
That implied factions in opposition. It implied profound disagreement over what constituted the greater good (or the Interests of the Overlords, which Jovellanos insisted was all the Trip really ensured). Someone in the bureaucratic stratosphere—someone who knew far more about ßehemoth than did Achilles Desjardins—had tried to evacuate the rifters before the quake. Apparently they'd felt that pre-emptive murder was not justified in the name of containment.
And someone else had stopped them.
Which side was Rowan affiliated with? Who was right?
He hadn't told Jovellanos about the 'scaphe. He'd even done a passable job of forgetting about it himself, keeping things nice and simple, focusing on the mouse at hand until the whale on the horizon became a vague blur, almost invisible. He'd known in the back of his mind he wouldn't be able to keep it up for long; eventually they'd come up with a reliable index, some combination of distance spec and moisture and pH that pointed the finger at the invader. But he hadn't expected it so soon. They'd been working with old data, shipyard samples contaminated by industrial effluents, potential incursions three or four hectares large at most. Noise-to-signal problems alone should
have held them back for weeks.
But you didn't need much rez to catch a beachhead ten kilometers long. Desjardins had kept his eyes down, and the whale on the horizon had run right into him.
Mandelbrot stood in the doorway, stretching. Claws extruded from their sheaths like tiny scimitars.
"You wouldn't have any trouble at all," Desjardins said. "You'd just go for maximum damage, right?"
Mandelbrot purred.
Desjardins buried his face in his hands. So what do I do now? Figure things out for myself?
He realized, with some surprise, that the prospect wouldn't have always seemed so absurd.
Drugstore
"Amitav."
He startled awake: a blanketed skeleton on the sand. Gray and dim in the visible predawn gloom, hot and luminous in infrared. Sunken eyes, exuding hatred on all wavelengths from the moment they opened.
Sou-Hon Perreault stared down at him from three meters up. Well-fed refugees, freshly awakened on all sides, edged away and left Amitav in the center of an open circle.
Several others—teenagers, mostly, a little less robust than most—stayed nearby, looking up at the 'fly with undisguised suspicion. Perreault blinked within her headset; she'd never seen so many hostile faces on the Strip before.
"How pleasant," Amitav said in a low voice. "To wake with a big round hammer hanging over my head."
"Sorry." She moved the 'fly off to one side, wobbling its trim tabs to effect a bobbing mechanical salute (then wondered if he could even see it with his merely human eyes). "It's Sou-Hon," she said.
"Who else," the stickman said dryly, rising.
"I—"
"She is not here. I have not seen her in some time."
"I know. I wanted to talk to you."
"Ah. About what?" The stickman began walking down the shore. His—