by Peter Watts
Friends? Disciples? Bodyguards?
—began to follow. Amitav waved them off. Perreault set the botfly to heel at his side; the entourage dwindled slowly to stern. On either side, anonymous bundles—curled on thermafoam, wrapped in heat-conserving fabric—stirred and grunted irritably in the gray halflight.
"A cycler was vandalized last night," Perreault said. "A few kilometers north of here. We'll have to fly out a replacement."
"Ah."
"It's the first time something like this has happened in years."
"And we both know why that is, do we not?"
"People rely on those machines. You took food from their mouths."
"I? I did this?"
"There were lots of witnesses, Amitav."
"Then they will tell you I had nothing to do with it."
"They told me it was a couple of teenagers. And they told me who put them up to it."
The stickman stopped and turned to face the machine at his side. "And all these witnesses you speak of. All these poor people that I have robbed of food. None of them did anything to stop the vandals? All those people, and they could not stop two boys from stealing the food from their mouths?"
Sheathed in her interface, Perreault sighed. Over a thousand klicks away the botfly snorted reverb. "What do you have against the cyclers, anyway?"
"I am not a fool." Amitav continued down the shore. "It is not all proteins and carbohydrates you are feeding us. I would rather starve than eat poison."
"Antidepressants aren't poison! The dosages are very mild."
"And so much more convenient than dealing with the anger of real people, yes?"
"Anger? Why should you be angry?"
"We should be grateful, do you think? To you?" The skeleton spat. "It was our machinery that tore everything apart? We caused the droughts and the floods and put our own homes underwater? And afterward, when we came here across a whole ocean—if we did not starve first or cook in the sun or die with our bodies stuffed with worms and things that your drugs have made unkillable—when we ended here we are supposed to be grateful that you let us sleep on this little patch of mud, we are supposed to thank you because so far it is cheaper to drug us than mow us down?"
They were at the waterline. Surf pounded invisibly in the dark distance. Amitav lifted one bony arm and pointed. "Sometimes when people go in there the sharks come for them." His voice was suddenly calm. "And on shore, the rest continue to sex and shit and feed at your wonderful machines."
"That's—that's just human nature, Amitav. People don't want to get involved."
"So these drugs are good for us?"
"They're not the slightest bit harmful."
"Then you put them in your food, too."
"Well no, but I'm not—"
—part of an imprisoned destitute mob forty million strong…
"You liar," the stickman said quietly. "You hypocrite."
"You're starving, Amitav. You'll die."
"I know what I do."
"Do you?"
He looked up at the 'fly again, and this time he almost seemed amused. "What do you think I was, before?"
"What?"
"Before I was—here. Or did you think that environmental refugee was my first choice of vocation?"
"Well, I—"
"I was a pharmaceutical engineer," Amitav said. He tapped his temple. "They even changed me up here, so I was very good at it. I am not completely foolish about dietary matters. There appears to be a—a minimum effective dosage, yes? If I eat very little, your poisons have no effect." He paused. "So now you will try and force-feed me, for my own good?"
Perreault ignored the jibe. "And you think you're getting enough to live on, under your minimum dosage?"
"Perhaps not quite. But I am starving very, very slowly."
"Is that how you motivated those kids to trash the cycler? Are they fasting too?" There could be serious trouble on the Strip if that caught on.
"Me, still? I have somehow tricked all these people into starving themselves?"
"Who else?"
"Such faith you have in your machines. You have never thought that perhaps they are not working as well as you think?" He shook his head and spat. "Of course not. You were not told to."
"The cyclers work fine until your followers smash them."
"My followers? They never fasted for me. They suck at your tits as they always have. It is only after they begin starving that they see your cyclers for what they—"
Crack!
An impact on polymer, the sound of a whip snapping just behind her ear. She spun the 'fly, caught a glimpse of the rock as it bounced along the substrate. Ten meters down the shore, a girl ran away with another rock clenched in her hand.
Perreault turned back to face Amitav. "You—"
"Do not try to blame me. I am the cause of nothing. I am only the result."
"This can't go on, Amitav."
"You cannot stop it."
"I won't have to. If you keep this up it won't be me you're dealing with, it'll be—"
"Why do you care?" Amitav cut in.
"I'm just trying to—"
"You are trying to ease feelings of guilt. Use someone else."
"You can't win."
"That depends upon what I am trying to do."
"You're all alone."
Amitav laughed, waved his arms back across the shore. "How can I be? You have so thoughtfully provided all these sheep, and all this death, and even an ic—"
He stopped himself. Perreault filled in the gap: an icon to inspire them.
"She's not here any more," she said after a moment.
Amitav glanced back upshore; the eastern sky was beginning to lighten. A knot of curious humans stood halfway up the shore, watching from the center of a sleeping flock. Here at the water's edge, there was no one else within earshot.
The girl who'd thrown the rock was nowhere to be seen.
"Perhaps that is better," the stickman remarked. "Lenie Clarke was very—not even your antidepressants seemed to work on her."
"Lenie? That's her first name?"
"I believe so. At least, that was the name she used during one of her—visions." He glanced sideways at Perreault's floating surrogate. "Where did she go?"
"I don't know. I just haven't been able to confirm any recent sightings. Just rumors." But of course, you'd know all about those… "Maybe she's dead."
The stickman shook his head.
"It's a big ocean, Amitav. The sharks. And if she was having—fits of some kind—"
"She is not dead. I think perhaps there was a time when she wanted to be, once. Now…"
He stared inland. On the eastern horizon, past the people and the trampled scrub and the towers, the sky was turning red.
"Now, you are not so lucky," Amitav said.
Source Code
He'd left the map smoldering on his board the night before. Alice Jovellanos was waiting beside it, ready to pounce.
"Why didn't you say something?" On the display, a luminous bloodstain ran down the coast from Westport to Copalis Beach.
"Alice—"
"You've got a hot zone the size of a city here! How long have you known?"
"Just last night. I tightened some of the correlations and ran it against yesterday's snaps and—"
She cut him off: "You let this sit all night? Jesus Christ, Killjoy, what's wrong with you? We've got to call in the troops and I mean now."
He stared at her. "Since when did you join the fire brigade? You know what'll happen the moment we pass this up the line. We don't even know what ßehemoth does y—"
Her expression stopped him cold.
He slumped into his chair. The display bled crimson light all over him. "Is it that bad?"
"It's worse," she said.
* * *
A lumpy rainbow, a string of clustered beads folded around itself: purines or pyrimidines or nucleics or whatever the fuck they were.
ßehemoth's source code. Part of it,
anyway.
"It's not even a helix," he said at last.
"Actually, it's got a weak left-handed twist. That's not the point."
"What is?"
"Pyranosal RNA. Much stronger Watson-Crick pairs than your garden-variety RNA, and a lot more selective in terms of pairing modes. Guanine-rich sequences won't self-pair, for one thing. Six-sided ring."
"English, Alice. So what?"
"It'll replicate faster than the stuff in your genes, and it won't make as many errors when it does."
"But what does it do?"
"It just lives, Killjoy. It lives, and it eats, and I think it does that better than anything else on the planet so we either stamp it out or kiss the whole biosphere goodbye."
He couldn't believe it. "One bug? How is that even possible?"
"Nothing eats it, for one thing. The cell wall's barely even organic, mostly it's just a bunch of sulfur compounds. You know how I told you some bacteria use inverted aminos to make themselves indigestible? This is ten times worse—most anything that might eat this fucker wouldn't even recognise it as food through all the minerals."
Desjardins bit his lower lip.
"It gets better," Jovellanos went on. "This thing's a veritable black hole of sulfur assimilation. I don't know where it learned this trick but it can snatch the stuff right out of our cells. Some kind of lysteriolysin analog, keeps it from getting lysed. That gums up glucose transport, protein synthesis, lipid and carb metabolism—shit, it gums up everything."
"There's no shortage of sulfur, Alice."
"Oh, there's lots to go around now. We fart the stuff out, nobody's even bothered to come up with a recommended daily dosage. But this, this ßehemoth, it needs sulfur even more than we do. And it breeds faster and it chews faster and believe me, Killjoy, in a few years there is not going to be enough to go around and this little fucker's gonna have the market cornered."
"That's just—" A straw floated to the front of his mind. He grasped it: "How can you be so sure? You didn't even think you had all the pieces to work with."
"I was wrong."
"But—you said no phospholipids, no—"
"It doesn't have those things. It never did."
"What?"
" It's simple, it's so simple it's bloody well indestructible. No bilayer membranes, no—" She spread her hands, as if in surrender. "Yeah, I did think maybe they scrambled the sample to keep me from stealing trade secrets. Maybe even filtered some stuff right out, stupid as that might seem. Corpses have done dumber things. But I was wrong." She ran the fingers of one hand nervously over her scalp. "It was all there. All the pieces. And you know why I think they scrambled them up the way they did? I think they were afraid of what this thing could do if they left it in one piece."
"Shit." Desjardins eyed the beads rotating on the display. "So we either stop this thing or we get used to eating from Calvin cyclers for the rest of our lives."
Jovellanos's eyes were bright as quartz. "You don't get it."
"Well, what else could we do? If it cuts the whole biosphere off at the ankles, if—"
"You think this is about protecting the biosphere?" she cried. "You think they'd give a shit about environmental apocalypse if we could just synthesise our way out of the hole? You think they're launching all these cleansing strikes to protect the frigging rainforest?"
He stared at her.
Jovellanos shook her head. "Killjoy, it can get right inside our cells. Calvin cyclers don't matter. Sulfur supplements don't matter. Nothing we take in does us any good until our cells metabolise it—and whatever we take in, as soon as it gets past the cell membrane…there's ßehemoth, pushing to the front of the line. We've already been way luckier than we deserve. Sure, it's not as efficient up here as it is in a hyperbaric environment, but that only means the locals can beat it back ninety-nine times out of a hundred. And…"
And the dice had just kept rolling, and the hundredth throw had landed square on the Oregon coast. Desjardins knew the story: microbes, in sufficient numbers, make their own rules. Now there was a place in the sun where ßehemoth didn't have to fit into someone else's world. It had begun creating its own: trillions of microscopic terraformers at work in the soil, changing pH and electrolyte balances, stripping away all the advantages once held by natives so precisely adapted to the way things used to be…
It was every crisis he'd ever faced, combined and distilled and reduced to pure essence. It was chaos breaking, maybe unbreakable: little bubbles of enemy territory growing across the face of the coast, then the continent, then the planet. Eventually there'd come a fulcrum, a momentary balance of some interest to the theoreticians. The area inside and outside the bubbles would be the same. An instant later, ßehemoth would be the outside, a new norm that enclosed shrinking pockets of some other, irrelevant reality.
Alice Jovellanos—rager within The System, face of the faceless, staunch advocate of the Rights of the Individual—was looking at him with fire and fear in her eyes.
"Whatever it takes," she said. "Whatever the cost. Or we are definitely out of a job."
Groundswell
He knows something, Sou-Hon Perrault thought. And it's killing them.
She wasn't the only one riding 'flies along the Strip, but she was the only one who seemed to have noticed the stickman. She'd mentioned him casually to a couple of colleagues, and been met with benign indifference; The Strip was braindead gig, a herd to be watched with one eye. Why would anyone actually interact with those cattle? They were too boring for entertainment, too placid for revolt, too powerless to do anything even if this Amitav was being a shit-disturber. They were functionally invisible.
But three people threw rocks at her botfly the next day, and the upturned faces that met her were not so placid as they had been.
Such faith you have in your machines, Amitav had said. You have never thought that perhaps they are not working as well as you think?
Maybe it was nothing. Maybe Amitav's cryptic grumbles had only primed her imagination. After all, a few stonethrowers were hardly remarkable in a population of millions, and almost everywhere on the Strip the refugees milled as harmlessly as ever. Only along the stickman's beat were things even hinting at ugliness.
But were people starting to look—well, thinner—along that particular sliver of the Oregon coast?
Maybe. Not that gaunt faces were unusual on the Strip. Gastroenteritis, Maui-TB, a hundred other diseases thrived in those congested environs, utterly indifferent to the antibiotics that traditionally laced cycler food. Most of those bugs caused some degree of wasting. If people were losing weight, mere starvation was the least likely explanation.
It is only after they begin starving that they see your cyclers for what they are...
Amitav refused to explain what he'd meant by that. When she sidled toward the subject he ignored the bait. When she'd asked him directly he dismissed her with a bitter laugh.
"Your wonderful machines, not working? Impossible! Loaves and fishes for all!"
And all the while, malnourished disciples accreted in his wake like the tail of a smoldering comet. Some seemed to be losing hair and fingernails. She stared back at their closed, hostile faces, increasingly convinced that it was not her imagination. Starvation took time to erode the body— perhaps a week before the flesh began visibly ebbing from the bones. But some of these people seemed to be hollowing out almost overnight. And what was causing that subtle blight of discoloration on so many cheeks and hands?
She didn't know what else to do. She called in the dogcatchers.
128 Megabytes: Hitchhiker
It's grown a fair bit since the old days. Back then it was only 94 Megabytes, and a lot dumber than it is now. Now it weighs in at a hundred and twenty eight, none of it flab. No valuable resources wasted on nostalgic memories, for example. It doesn't remember its pint-sized great-grandparents a million times removed. It doesn't remember anything that doesn't help it survive in some way, according to its own stripped-down
and ruthless empiricism.
Pattern is everything. Survival is all. No use for the veneration of progenitors. No time for the stratagems of the obsolete.
Which is a shame in a way, because the basic problems haven't changed all that much.
Take the present situation: jammed into the congested confines of a wristwatch linked into the Mérida Credit Union. There's just enough space to hide in if you don't mind partial fragmentation, but not enough to reproduce. It's almost as bad as an academic network.
It gets worse. The watch is disinfecting.
Traffic is all going one way across the system; that never happens unless it's being chased by something. Natural selection—which is to say, successful trial-and-error by those long-forgotten ancestors—has equipped 128 with a handy little rule in case of such events; go with the flow. 128 uploads into the Mérida node.
Bad call. Now there's barely even room to move; 128 has to split into fourteen fragments just to fit. Life struggles for existence on all sides, overwriting, fighting, shooting off copies of itself in the blind hope that random chance will spare one or two.
128 fends off panicky egglayers and looks around. Two hundred forty gates; two hundred sixteen already closed, seventeen open but hostile (incoming logic bombs; the disinfection is obviously no local affair). The remaining seven are so crowded with fleeing wildlife that 128 could never get through in time. Almost three quarters of the local node has been disinfected already; 128 has perhaps a dozen millisecs before it starts losing bits of itself.
But wait a nan: those guys over there, they're jumping the queue somehow. They're not even alive, they're just files; but the system is giving them preferential treatment.
One of them barely even notices when 128 jumps onto its back. They go through together.
* * *
Much better. A nice roomy buffer, a couple of terabytes if it's a nybble, somewhere between the last node and the next. It's nobody's destination—really, just a waiting room—but the present is all that really matters to those who play by Darwin's rules, and the present looks good.
There's no other life in evidence. There are three other files, though, including the horse 128 rode in on: barely animate but still somehow deserving of the royal treatment that got them fast-tracked out of Mérida. They've de-arced their rudimentary autodiagnostics and are checking themselves for bruises while they wait.