by Peter Watts
I could finish the job, she reflects. If Ken didn’t stop me.
Is she so disloyal to the memory of her friend, that she takes so little pleasure in this? Has the sudden fear of discovery simply eclipsed her rage, or is it the same old excuse—that Lenie Clarke, gorged on revenge for a thousand lifetimes, has lost the stomach for it?
Five years ago I didn’t care if millions of innocents died. Now I’m too much of a coward even to punish the guilty.
Some, she imagined, might even consider that an improvement...
“—are still uncertainties,” Lubin’s saying, back at the console. “Maybe whoever sent the drone is responsible for ß-max, maybe not. If they are, they’ve already made their move. If not, they’re not ready to move. Even if they know exactly where we are—and I think that unlikely—they either don’t have all their pieces in place yet, or they’re biding their time for some other reason.”
He unfreezes the numbers on the board, wasting no more attention on the thing gurgling on the deck behind him.
Chen glances uneasily at Nolan, but Lubin’s message is loud and clear: I’m in charge. Get over it.
“What reason?” she asks after a moment.
Lubin shrugs.
“How much time do we have?”
“More than if we tip our hand.” Lubin folds his arms across his chest and stretches isometrically. Muscles and tendons flex disconcertingly beneath his diveskin. “If they know we’re on to them they may feel their hand has been forced, move now rather than later. So we play along to buy time. We edit the drone’s memory and release it with some minor systems glitch that would explain any delay in its return. We’ll also have to search the Lake site for surveillance devices, and cut a grid within at least a half-kilometer of Atlantis and the trailer park. Lane’s right: it’s unlikely that an AUV planted those mines, but if one did there’ll be a detonator somewhere within LFAM range.”
“Okay.” Hopkinson looks away from her fallen comrade with evident effort. “So we—we make up with Atlantis, we fake out the drone, and we comb the area for other nasties. Then what?”
“Then I go back,” Lubin tells her.
“What, to the Lake?”
Lubin smiles faintly. “Back to N’Am.”
Hopkinson whistles in tuneless surprise. “Well, I guess if anyone can take them on…”
Take on who, exactly? Clarke wonders. No one asks aloud. Who is everyone left behind. Them. They are dedicated to our destruction They sniff along the Mid Atlantic Ridge, obsessed in their endless myopic search for that one set of coordinates to feed into their torpedoes.
No one asks why, either. There is no why behind the hunt: it’s just what they do. Don’t go rooting around for reasons. Asking why accomplishes nothing: there are too many reasons to count, none of the living lack for motive. This fractured, bipolar microcosm stagnates and festers on the ocean floor, every reason for its existence reduced to an axiom: just because.
And yet, how many of the people here—how many of the rifters, how many, even of the drybacks— really brought the curtain down? For every corpse with blood on her hands, how many others—family, friends, drones who maintain plumbing and machinery and flesh—are guilty of nothing but association?
And if Lenie Clarke hadn’t been so furiously intent on revenge that she could write off an entire world as an incidental expense, would any of it have come to this?
Alyx, Rowan said.
“No you don’t.” Clarke shakes her head.
Lubin speaks to the screen. “The most we can do down here is buy time. We have to use that time.”
“Yes, but—”
“We’re blind and deaf and under attack. The ruse has failed, Lenie. We need to know what we’re facing, which means we have to face it. Hoping for the best is no longer a viable option.”
“Not you,” Clarke says.
Lubin turns to face her, one eyebrow raised in silent commentary.
She looks back, completely unfazed. “We.”
He refuses three times before they even get outside.
“Someone needs to take charge here,” he insists as the airlock floods. “You’re the obvious choice. No one will give you any trouble now that Grace has been sidelined.”
Clarke feels a chill in her gut. “Is that what that was? She’d served her purpose and you wanted me back in play so you just—broke her in half?”
“I’d wager it’s no worse than what you had in mind for her.”
I’m going to fucking kill you, Grace. I’m going to gut you like a fish.
“I’m going.” she says. The hatch drops away beneath them.
“Do you honestly think you can force me to take you?” He brakes, turns, kicks out from under the light.
She follows. “Do you think you can afford to do this without any backup at all?”
“More than I can afford an untrained sidekick who’s signed up for all the wrong reasons.”
“You don’t know shit about my reasons.”
“You’ll hold me back,” Lubin buzzes. “I stand much better odds if I don’t have to keep watching out for you. If you get in trouble—”
“Then you’ll ditch me,” she says. “In a second. I know what your battlefield priorities are. Shit, Ken, I know you.”
“Recent events would suggest otherwise.”
She stares at him, adamant. He scissors rhythmically on into darkness.
Where’s he going? she wonders. There’s nothing on this bearing...
“You can’t deny that you’re not equipped for this kind of op,” he points out. “You don’t have the training.”
“Which must make it pretty embarrassing for you, given that I got all the way across N’Am before you and your army and all your ballyhooed training could even catch up with me.” She smiles under her mask, not kindly; he can’t see it but maybe he can tune in the sentiment. “I beat you, Ken. Maybe I wasn’t nearly as smart, or as well-trained, and maybe I didn’t have all of N’Am’s muscle backing me up, but I stayed ahead of you for months and you know it.”
“You had quite a lot of help,” he points out.
“Maybe I still do.”
His rhythm falters. Perhaps he hasn’t thought of that.
She takes the opening. “Think about it, Ken. All those virtual viruses getting together, muddying my tracks, running interference, turning me into a fucking myth…”
“Anemone wasn’t working for you,” he buzzes. “It was using you. You were just—”
“A tool. A meme in a plan for Global Apocalypse. Give me a break, Ken, it’s not like I could forget that shit even if I tried. But so what? I was still the vector. It was looking out for me. It liked me enough to keep you lot off my back, anyway. Who’s to say it isn’t still out there? Where else do those software demons come from? You think it’s a coincidence they name themselves after me?”
Barely discernible, his silhouette extends an arm. Click trains spray the water. He starts off again, his bearing slightly altered.
“Are you suggesting,” he buzzes, “that if you go back and announce yourself to Anemone—whatever’s become of it—that it’s going to throw some sort of magic shield around you?”
“Maybe n—”
“It’s changed. It was always changing, from moment to moment. It couldn’t possibly have survived the way we remember it, and if the things we’ve encountered recently are any indication of what it’s turned into, you don’t want to renew the acquaintance.”
“Maybe,” Clarke admits. “But maybe some part of its basic agenda hasn’t changed. It’s alive, right? That’s what everyone keeps saying. Doesn’t matter that it was built out of electrons instead of carbon, Life’s just self-replicating information shaped by natural selection so it’s in the club. And we’ve got genes in us that haven’t changed in a million generations. Why should this thing be any different? How do you know there isn’t some protect-Lenie subroutine snoozing in the code somewhere? And by the way, where the fuck are we going?”
It’s a patch of bone-gray mud like any other. She can’t see so much as a pebble to distinguish it.
Maybe it’s a burial plot, she thinks, suddenly giddy. Maybe this is where he’s been feeding his habit all these years, on devolved natives and MIAs and now on the stupid little girl who wouldn’t take no for an answer...
Lubin thrusts one arm into the ooze. The mud shudders around his shoulder, as if something beneath were pushing back. Which is exactly what’s happening; Ken’s awakened something under the surface. He pulls his arm back up and the thing follows, heaving into view. Clumps and chalky clouds cascade from its sides as it clears the substrate.
It’s a swollen torus about a meter and a half wide. A dotted line of hydraulic nozzles ring its equator. Two layers of flexible webbing stretch across the hole in its center, one on top, one on the bottom; a duffle bag, haphazardly stuffed with lumpy objects, occupies the space between. Through the billowing murk and behind clumps of mud still adhering to its surface, it shines slick as a diveskin.
“I packed a few things away for a return trip,” Lubin buzzes. “As a precaution.”
He sculls backward a few meters. The mechanical bellhop spins a quarter-turn, spits muddy water from its thrusters, and heels.
They start back.
“So that’s your plan,” Lubin buzzes after a while. “Find something that evolved to help you destroy the world, hope that it’s got a better nature you can appeal to, and—”
“And wake the fucker with a kiss,” Clarke finishes. “Who’s to say I can’t?”
He swims on, towards the glow that’s just starting to brighten the way ahead. His eyes reflect crescents of dim light.
“I guess we’ll find out,” he says at last.
Fulcrum
She’d avoid it altogether if she could.
There’s more than sufficient excuse. The recent armistice is thin and brittle; it’s in little danger of shattering completely in the face of this new, common threat, but countless tiny cracks and punctures require constant attention. Suddenly the corpses have leverage, expertise that mere machinery cannot duplicate; the rifters are not especially happy with the new assertiveness of their one-time prisoners. Impossible Lake must be swept for bugs, the local seabed for eyes and detonators. For now there truly is no safe place—and if Lenie Clarke were not busy packing for the trip back, her eyes would be needed for perimeter patrol. Dozens of corpses died in the latest insurrection; there’s hardly time to comfort all the next of kin.
And yet, Alyx’s mother died in her arms mere days ago, and though the pace of preparation has not slowed in all that time, Lenie Clarke still feels like the lowest sort of coward for having put it off this long.
She thumbs the buzzer in the corridor. “Lex?”
“Come in.”
Alyx is sitting on her bed, practicing her fingering. She puts the flute aside as Lenie closes the hatch behind her. She isn’t crying: she’s either still in shock, or a victim of superadolescent self-control. Clarke sees herself at fifteen, before remembering: her memories of that time are all lies.
Her heart goes out to the girl anyway. She wants to scoop Alyx up in her arms and hold her into the next millennium. She wants to say she’s been there, she knows what it’s like; and that’s even true, in a fractured kind of way. She’s lost friends and lovers to violence. She even lost her mother—to tularemia—although the GA stripped that memory out of her head along with all the others. But she knows it’s not the same. Alyx’s mother died in a war, and Lenie Clarke fought on the other side. Clarke doesn’t know that Alyx would welcome an embrace under these conditions.
So she sits beside her on the bed, and rests one hand on the girl’s thigh—ready to withdraw at the slightest flinch—and tries to think of some words, any words, that won’t turn into clichés when spoken aloud.
She’s still trying when Alyx says, “Did she say anything? Before she died?”
“She—” Clarke shakes her head. “No. Not really,” she finishes, hating herself.
Alyx nods and stares at the floor.
“They say you’re going too,” she says after a while. “With him.”
Clarke nods.
“Don’t.”
Clarke takes a deep breath beside her. “Alyx, you—oh God, Alyx, I’m so sorr—”
“Why do you have to go?” Alyx turns and stares at her with hard, bright eyes that reveal far too much for comfort. “What are you going to do up there anyway?”
“We have to find out who’s tracking us. We can’t just wait for them to start shooting.”
“Why are so sure that’s what they’re going to do? Maybe they just want to talk, or something.”
Clarke shakes her head, smiling at the absurdity of the notion. “People aren’t like that.”
“Like what?”
Forgiving. “They’re not friendly, Lex. Whoever they are. Trust me on this.”
But Alyx has already switched to Plan B: “And what good are you going to be up there anyway? You’re not a spy, you’re not a tech-head. You’re not some rabid psycho killer like he is. There’s nothing you can do up there except get killed.”
“Someone has to back him up.”
“Why? Let him go by himself.” Suddenly, Alyx’s words come out frozen. “With any luck he won’t succeed. Whatever’s up there will tear him apart and the world will be a teeny bit less of a shithole afterwards.”
“Alyx—”
Rowan’s daughter rises from the bed and glares down at her. “How can you help him after he killed Mom? How can you even talk to him? He’s a psycho and a killer.”
The automatic denial dies on Clarke’s lips. After all, she doesn’t know that Lubin didn’t have a hand in Rowan’s death. Lubin was team captain during this conflict, as he was during the last; he’d probably have known about that so-called rescue mission even if he hadn’t actually planned it.
And yet somehow, Clarke feels compelled to defend the enemy of this grief-stricken child. “No, sweetie,” she says gently. “It was the other way around.”
“What?”
“Ken was a killer first. Then he was a psycho.” Which is close enough to the truth, for now.
“What are you talking about?”
“They tweaked his brain. Didn’t you know?”
“They?”
Your mother.
“The GA. It was nothing special, it was just part of the package for industrial spies. They fixed it so he’d seal up security breaches by any means necessary, without even really thinking about it. It was involuntary.”
“You saying he didn’t have a choice?”
“Not until Spartacus infected him. And the thing about Spartacus was, it cut the tweaks, but it cut a couple of other pathways too. So now Ken doesn’t have much of what you’d call a conscience, and if that’s your definition of a psycho then I guess he is one. But he didn’t choose it.”
“What difference does it make?” Alyx demands.
“It’s not like he went out shopping for an evil makeover.”
“So what? When did any psycho ever get to choose his own brain chemistry?”
It’s a pretty good point, Clarke has to admit.
“Lenie, please,” Alyx says softly. “You can’t trust him.”
And yet in some strange, sick way—after all the secrecy, all the betrayal—Clarke still trusts Ken Lubin more than anyone else she’s ever known. She can’t say it aloud, of course. She can’t say it because Alyx believes that Ken Lubin killed her mother, and maybe he did; and to admit to trusting him now might test the friendship of this wounded girl further than Clarke is willing to risk.
But that’s not all of it. That’s just the rationale that floats on the surface, obvious and visible and self-serving. There’s another reason, deeper and more ominous: Alyx may be right. The past couple of days, Clarke has caught glimpses of something u
nfamiliar looking out from behind Lubin’s eyecaps. It disappears the moment she tries to bring it into focus; she’s not even sure exactly how she recognizes it. Some subtle flicker of the eyelid, perhaps. A subliminal twitch of photocollagen, reflecting the motion of the eye beneath.
Until three days ago, Ken Lubin hadn’t taken a human life in all the time he’d been down here. Even during the first uprising he contented himself with the breaking of bones; all the killing was at the inexpert, enthusiastic hands of rifters still reveling in the inconceivable rush of power over the once-powerful. And there’s no doubt that the deaths of the past seventy-two hours can be completely justified in the name of self-defense.
Still. Clarke wonders if this recent carnage might have awakened something that’s lain dormant for five years. Because back then, when all was said and done, Ken Lubin enjoyed killing. He craved it, even though—once liberated—he didn’t use his freedom as an excuse, but as a challenge. He controlled himself, the way an old-time nicotine addict might walk around with an unopened pack of cigarettes in his pocket— to prove that he was stronger than his habit. If there’s one thing Ken Lubin prides himself on, it’s self-discipline.
That craving. That desire for revenge against the world at large: did it ever go away? Lenie Clarke was once driven by such a desire; quenched by a billion deaths or more, it has no hold on her now. But she wonders whether recent events have forced a couple of cancer-sticks into Lubin’s mouth despite himself. She wonders how the smoke tasted after all this time, and if Lubin, perhaps, is remembering how good it once felt...
Clarke shakes her head sadly. “It can’t be anyone else, Alyx. It has to be me.”
“Why?”
Because next to what I did, genocide is a misdemeanor. Because the world’s been dying in my wake while I hide down here. Because I’m sick of being a coward.
“I’m the one that did it,” she says at last.