Maelstrom r-2

by Peter Watts

  "Ask the kid with the wristwatch," Desjardins said. He jerked his head at Lubin, twitching in his bubble. "If you've got any more like that one, you'll know everything in about two seconds."

  "Everything the kid knows, maybe. Which is next to nothing."

  "You just said—"

  "We almost got her, did you know that?" Rowan said. "Just yesterday. Once you gave us the heads-up we filtered through the chaff, and we located her in South Dakota. We closed in and found that half the city was running interference for her. She got away."

  "You interrogated the fans, though."

  "Summoned by a voice in the Maelstrom. Someone out there rallying the troops."

  "Who? Why?"

  "Nobody knew. Apparently it just jumps into likely conversations and starts cheerleading. We left all kinds of bait when we found that out, but so far it isn't talking to us."

  "Wow," Desjardins said.

  "You know what's really ironic? We thought something like this might happen. We took precautions against it."

  "You were expecting this?"

  "Not specifically, of course. The whole rifter thing just came out of left field." Rowan sighed, her face full of shadow. "Still, things—go wrong. You'd think a guy with a name like Murphy would realize that, but no. As far as ChemCog was concerned, it was just some junk meme the gels were spreading."

  "The gels are behind this?"

  She shook her head. "As I said, we took precautions. We tracked down every tainted node, we partitioned them and replaced them, we made damn sure that there was no trace of the meme left. Just to be absolutely sure. But here it is, somehow. Metastasized and mutated and born again. And all we know is that this time, the gels aren't behind it."

  "But they were before, is that what you're saying? They—they started the ball rolling?"

  "Maybe. Once upon a time."

  "Why, for God's sake?"

  "Well, that's the funny thing," Rowan admitted. "We told them to."

  * * *

  Rowan fed it all directly to his inlays. There was too much for even an optimized 'lawbreaker to take in on the spot, but the executive summary thumbnailed it in fifteen seconds: the growing threat, the rabid mutual distrust, the final reluctant surrender of control to an alien intelligence with its own unsuspected take on the virtues of parsimony.

  "Jesus," Desjardins said.

  "I know," Rowan agreed.

  "And how the Christ did Lenie Clarke take control?"

  "She didn't. That's what's so crazy. As far as we can tell, she didn't think anyone even knew about her until Yankton."

  "Huh." Desjardins pursed his lips. "Still. Whatever's out there, it's taking its lead from her."

  "I know," she said softly. She glanced at Lubin. "That's where he comes in."

  Lubin twitched and jerked under the ongoing assault. His face—the part of it not covered by the headset, anyway—was expressionless.

  "What's he watching in there?" Desjardins wondered.

  "Briefing stats. For his next mission."

  He watched a little longer. "Would he have killed me?"

  "I doubt it."

  "Who is—"

  "He's not someone you have to worry about any more."

  "No." Desjardins shook his head. "That's not good enough. He tracked me down across a whole continent, he broke into my home, he—" cut Guilt Trip right out from under me but of course he wasn't going to admit that to Rowan, not now for Chrissakes— "I gather he's got some kind of kill-switch hardwired into him, and he answers to you, Ms. Rowan. Who is he?"

  He could see her bristling. For a moment he thought he'd gone too far. No peon truly in Guilt Trip's grasp would ever mouth off to a superior that way, Rowan would know, the alarms would start sounding any second—

  "Mr. Lubin has—you might call it an impulse-control problem," she said. "He enjoys certain acts that most would find unpleasant. He never behaves—gratuitously is the word, I guess—but sometimes he tends to set up situations that provoke a particular response. Do you see what I'm saying?"

  He kills people, Desjardins thought numbly. He sets up breaches so he'll have an excuse to kill people…

  "We're helping him deal with his problem," Rowan said. "And we've got him under control."

  Desjardins bit his lip.

  She shook her head, a trace of disapproval on those pale features. "ßehemoth, Dr. Desjardins. Lenie Clarke. Lose sleep over those, if you must. Believe me, Ken Lubin's part of the solution." Her voice went up a touch: "Aren't you, Ken?"

  "I don't know her," Lubin said. "Not well."

  Desjardins glanced at Rowan, alarmed. "He can hear us?"

  She answered Lubin instead. "You know her better than you think."

  "You have—profiles," Lubin said. His words were slurred; the induction field must be grazing his facial muscles. "That psychologist. Shcanlon."

  "Scanlon had his own issues," Rowan said. "You and Clarke have a lot more in common. Similar outlooks, similar backgrounds. If you were in her shoes—"

  "I am in her shoes. I came here…" Lubin licked his lips. A trickle of saliva glistened at the corner of his mouth.

  "Fair enough. But suppose you had no information and no clearance, and no—behavioral constraints. What would you be after?"

  Lubin didn't speak. His cowled face was an eyeless, high-contrast mask in the spots. His skin almost glowed.

  Rowan stepped forward. "Ken?"

  "'s easy," he said at last. "Revenge."

  "Against who, exactly?"

  "The—GA. We did try to kill us, after all."

  Rowan's contacts glowed with sudden input. "She was never seen near any GA offices."

  "She ashaulted someone in Hongcouver." A spasm ran up the length of Lubin's body. His head lolled. "Looking for Yves Shcanlon."

  "But Scanlon was her only lead, as far as we know. It didn't go anywhere. We don't think she's even been in N'AmPac for months."

  "She has other grudges," Lubin said. "Maybe she's—going home."

  Rowan frowned, concentrating. "Her parents, you mean."

  "She mentioned Sault Sainte Marie."

  "Suppose she couldn't get to her parents?"

  "Don' know."

  "What would you do?"

  "I'd—keep trying…"

  "Suppose her parents were dead," Rowan suggested.

  "…'f we killed them for her?"

  "No, suppose they were already—suppose they'd been dead a long time."

  Clumsily, Lubin shook his head. "The people she hates're very mush…alive..."

  "Suppose, Ken." Rowan was getting impatient. "Theoretical scenario. You've got a score to settle with the GA, and a score to settle with your parents, and you know you'll never get to either of them. What do you do?"

  His mouth moved. Nothing came out.

  "Ken?"

  "—I redirect," he said at last.

  "What do you mean?"

  Lubin jerked like a blind marionette with most of its strings cut.

  "The whole world fucked me over. I—I wanna return the favor."

  "Huh." Rowan shook her head. "She's pretty much doing that already."

  * * *

  One crucifixion was enough, as it turned out. Achilles Desjardins was clean, if still vulnerable; the second surgery, prepped and waiting, had no interest in scouring his insides.

  It only wanted to change him into a flounder.

  Lubin's little chamber of horrors had backed off for the moment. The pallet had folded itself up into recliner mode; the assassin sat on it while a mechanical spider skittered across his body on legs like jointed whiskers.

  In the adjacent cube, Desjardins looked down at an identical device on his own body. He'd already been injected with a half-dozen tailored viruses, each containing the code for a different suite of ßehemoth-proof proteins. There'd be other injections over the next few days. Lots of them. The fever would start within a week; the nausea was already underway.

  The spider was taking baselines: bacteri
a from skin and hair, organ biopsies, gut contents. Every now and then it plunged a hair-thin proboscis into his flesh, provoking a diffuse ache from within the tissues. Reverse-engineering was a tricky business these days. If you weren't careful, tweaked genes could change the microflora in the gut as easily as the flesh of the host. E. coli. could turn from commensal to cancer with the flip of a base-pair. A few wily bacteria had even learned how to slip some of their own genes into viral carriers en route, and hence into human cells. It made Desjardins long for those good old-fashioned germs which merely fed on antibiotics.

  "You didn't tell her," Lubin said.

  Rowan had left them to their own devices. Desjardins looked at the other man through two layers of membrane and tried to ignore the creepy tickle on his skin.

  "Tell her what?" he asked finally.

  "That I took you off Guilt Trip."

  "Yeah? What makes you so sure?"

  Lubin's spider scrambled up his throat and tapped on his lower lip. The assassin obligingly opened his mouth; the little robot scraped at the inside of his cheek with one appendage and retreated back down the torso.

  "She wouldn't have left us alone otherwise," Lubin said.

  "I thought you were leashed, Horatio."

  He shrugged. "One leash of many. It doesn't matter."

  "It sure the fuck does."

  "Why? Do you really think I was so out of control before? Do you think I'd have even been able to unTrip you, if I honestly thought you'd breach?"

  "Sure, if you sealed it up afterward. Isn't that your whole problem? You set yourself up to kill people?"

  "So I'm a monster." Lubin settled back in the chair and closed his eyes. "What does that make you?"

  "Me?"

  "I saw what you were playing at when we first met."

  Heat spilled across Desjardins's face. "That's fantasy. I'd never do that in real life. I don't even fuck in real life."

  Lubin opened one eye and assayed a trace of smile. "Don't trust yourself?"

  "I've just got too much respect for women."

  "Really? Seems a bit inconsistent with your choice of hobbies."

  "That's normal. That's brainstem." It had been such a relief to discover that at last, to see aggression and sex sharing the same hardwired pathways through the mammalian brain— to know his secret shame was a legacy millions of years old, ubiquitous for all the denial of civilized minds. But Lubin…"As if you don't know. You get your rocks off every time you kill someone."

  "Ah." Lubin's not-quite-smile didn't change. "So I'm a monster, but you're just a prisoner of your inner drives."

  "I fantasize. You kill people. Sorry, you seal security breaches."

  "Not always," Lubin said.

  Desjardins looked away without answering. The spider ran down his leg.

  "Someone got away once," said a strange soft voice behind him.

  He turned. Lubin was staring into space, not moving. Even his spider had paused, as if startled by some sudden change in its substrate.

  "She got away," Lubin said again. He almost sounded as though he were talking to himself. "I may have even let her."

  Clarke, Desjardins realized.

  "She wasn't really a breach then, of course. There was no way she'd ever make it out alive, there was no—but she did, somehow."

  Lubin no longer wore the face of a passionless predator. There was something new looking out from behind those eyes, and it seemed almost…confused…

  "It's a shame," he said softly. "She really deserved a fighting chance…"

  "A lot of people seem to agree with you," Desjardins said.

  Lubin mm'd.

  "Look.." Desjardins cleared his throat. "I need some of those derms before you go."

  "Derms." Lubin seemed strangely distant.

  "The analog. You said a week or ten days before the Trip kicked back in, and that was three days ago—if they spot-test me in the next few days I'm screwed."

  "Ah." Lubin came back to earth. "That's out of my hands now, I'm afraid. Horatio and all."

  "What do you mean, it's out of your hands? I just need a few derms, for Chrissake!"

  Lubin's spider skittered off under the pallet, its regimen complete. The assassin grabbed his clothes and began dressing.

  "Well?" Desjardins said after a while.

  Lubin pulled on his shirt and stepped out of the cube. Its skin swirled in his wake.

  "Don't worry about it," he said, and didn't look back.

  Anthopleura

  Mug Shot

  Exotics Infestation: Executive Summary (nontechnical)

  DO NOT mail

  DO NOT send through Haven

  DO NOT copy

  PURGE AFTER DECRYPT

  To: Rowan, PC.

  Priority: Ultra (Global PanD)

  EID Code: ßehemoth

  General Classification: nanobial/decomposer

  Taxonomy: Formal nomenclature awaiting declassified release to Linnean Society. Eventual outgroup clade to be at supraDomain level.

  Description: Unique heterotrophic nanobe, 200-250nm diameter. Opportunistic freeliver/commensal. Genome 1.1M (pRNA template): nonsense codons <0.7% of total.

  Biogeography: Originally native to hydrothermal deep-sea environments; 14 relict populations confirmed (Fig. 1). Can also exist symbiotically in intracellular environments with salinity =< 30ppt and/or temperatures ranging from 4-60°C. A secondary strain has been found with advanced adaptations for intracellular existence.

  Evolution/Ecology: ßehemoth is the only organism known to have truly terrestrial origins, predating the Martian Panspermia event by approximately 800 million years. The existence of a secondary strain geared especially to the eukaryotic intracellular environment is reminiscent of the Precambrian serial endosymbiosis which gave rise to mitochondria and other modern subcellular organelles. Free-living ßehemoth expends significant metabolic energy maintaining homeostasis in stressful hydrothermal environments. Intracellularly, infectious ßehemoth produces an ATP surplus which can be utilized by the host cell. This results in abnormal growth and giantism amongst certain deepwater fish; it confers increases in stamina and strength to infected humans in the short term, although these benefits are massively outweighed by disruption of short-chain sulfur-containing proteins and consequent deficiency syndromes (see below).

  Notable Histological & Genetic Features: No phospholipid membranes: body wall consists of accreted mineralized sulfur/phosphate compounds. Genetic template based upon Pyranosal RNA (Fig.2); also used for catalysis of metabolic reactions. Resistant to g-radiation (1 megarad not effective). The ßehemoth genome contains Blachford genes analagous to the metamutators of Pseudomonas; these allow it to dynamically increase mutation rate in response to environmental change, and are probably responsible for its ability to fool steroid receptors on the host cell membrane.

  Modes of Attack: Freed from the rigors of the hydrothermal environment, free-living ßehemoth assimilates several inorganic nutrients 26-84% more efficiently than its closest terrestrial competitors (Table 1). This is especially problematic when dealing with sulfur. In a free-living state, ßehemoth is theoretically capable of bottlenecking even that extremely common element; this is the primary ecological threat. ßehemoth is, however, more comfortable within the bodies of homeothermic vertebrates, which provide warm, stable, and nutrient-rich environments reminiscent of the primordial soup. ßehemoth enters the cell via receptor-mediated endocytosis; once inside it breaks down the phagosomal membrane prior to lysis, using a 532-amino listeriolysin analog. ßehemoth then competes with the host cell for nutrients. Host death can occur from any of a several dozen proximal causes including renal/hepatic failure, erythromytosis, CNS disorders, blood poisoning, and opportunistic infections.

  Vertebrate hosts serve as reservoirs which periodically reinoculate the nanobe into the external environment, increasing the chance of self-sustaining outbreaks.

  Diagnostics: Methionine labeling is effective in culture. Free-living ßehemoth i
n concentrations of greater than 1.35 billion/cc exert detectable effects on soil pH, conductivity, porphyrin counts, and chlorophylls A and B (Table 2); the extent of these effects varies with baseline conditions. ßehemoth can be infered in asymptomatic patients by the presence of d-cysteine and d-cystine in the blood (unsuccessful attempts to cleave bound sulfur sometimes stereoisomerizes the molecule).

  Present Status: See Figure 3. 4,800km2 sterilized at last report. 426,000km2 under immediate threat.

  Ecological Trajectory: If current trends continue, present models suggest long-term competitive exclusion of all competing life forms between 62°N and S latitude, due to monopolization and transformation of nutrient base. Ultimate fate of polar components unknown at this time. Sensitivity analysis generates 95% confidence limits of 50 to 94 years for EL90.

  Recommendations: Continue ongoing efforts to alter present trajectory. Allocate Fallback Options budget as follows:

  Orbital: 25%

  Cheyenne: 5%

  M.A. Ridge: 50%

  Metamorph: 20%

  Anemone

  She'd become a scavenger in her own home.

  Sou-Hon Perreault virtually lived in her office now. It held everything of importance: a window on the world. A purpose. A sanctuary.

  She still had to eat, though, and use the toilet. Once or twice a day she'd venture from her cave and see to life's necessities. Most of the time she didn't have to deal with Martin; his contracts took him into the field more often than not.

  But now—oh God, why now of all times?— he was in the living room when she came back.

  He was digging around in the aquarium, his back turned. She almost got past.

  "The male died," he said.

  "What?"

  He turned to face her. A damselfish, pale and stiff, weighted the dip net in his hand. One milky eye stared blindly through the mesh.

  "He looks like he's been dead for a while," Martin said.