by Peter Watts
“I’m saying history gets written by the victors. Rio’s history. How do we know the good guys won?”
End of intercept. If McMurdo had had an answer, he hadn’t got it out before the frequency skidded away.
Wow, Desjardins thought.
It was horseshit, of course. The idea that twenty-one separate CSIRA franchises could have simultaneously gone rogue was hardly more plausible than the thought that Rio alone had. Ms. London was a ’lawbreaker, not an idiot. She knew about parsimony. She’d just been blowing smoke out her ass, yanking poor old McMurdo’s chain.
Still, it gave Desjardins pause. He’d gotten used to being the Man Who Stopped Rio. It put him above suspicion on so many counts. And it didn’t sit well, to think that there were people out there who could doubt his virtue even for a moment.
That could lead to second thoughts, he reflected. It could lead to closer looks.
The board beeped again. For a moment he thought that he’d beaten all odds and reacquired the signal—but no. The new alert came from a different source entirely, a broadband dump from somewhere in Maine.
That’s odd, he thought.
A Lenie had gotten into a medical database and was spewing random intelligence across half the EM spectrum. They did that a lot, these days—not content to merely scramble and hash, some had taken to shouting into the ether, indiscriminately dumping data into any network they could access. Some reproductive subroutine, mutated to spread data instead of executables. At the very least it threw more chaff into a system already losing usable bandwidth by the hour; at worst it could blow the lid off all sorts of secret and sensitive data.
Either way it was bad news for the real world; that would be enough to keep it going.
This particular demon had uploaded a whole shitload of biomedical stuff from the database it had plundered. Desjardins’s board had flagged it for potential epidemiological significance. He popped the lid and looked inside.
And immediately forgot about any trivial bullshit gossip from London.
There were two items, both rife with dangerous pathology. Desjardins was no pathologist, but then again he didn’t have to be; the friends and advisors arrayed about him distilled all those biochemical details down to an executive summary that even he could understand. Now they served up a pair of genotypes with red flags attached. The first was almost ßehemoth, only better: greater resistance to osmotic stress, sharper teeth for cleaving molecules. Higher virulence. At least one critical feature was the same, though. Like baseline ßehemoth, this new strain was optimized for life at the bottom of the sea.
It did not exist in the standard database. Which raised the question of what its technical specs were doing in a glorified ambulance out of Bangor.
It would have been enough to grab his attention even if it had arrived unaccompanied. It had brought a date, though, and she was the real ballbreaker. She was the bitch he had always dreaded. She was the last thing he would have ever expected.
Because he had always known that Seppuku would gain a foothold eventually.
But he hadn’t expected anyone on his own side to be culturing the damn thing.
Corral
Taka cursed her own lack of foresight. They’d spread the word, all right. They’d told all who came by of their plan to save the world: the need for samples, the dangers of lingering afterwards, the places she’d patrol to take charge of vital payloads. They’d taken special note of those few who’d driven up in cars or motorbikes or even plain old pedal-powered flywheels, got addresses from those who still had them and told the rest to check back regularly: if all went well, they might save the world.
And things had gone well, and then so horribly wrong, in such quick succession. They had their counteragent, or some of it anyway, but no prearranged signals to bring in the couriers. And after all, why would they have even bothered? They could have taken an afternoon and driven around the county. They could have waited for those of no fixed address to check in, tomorrow or the next day.
And now Taka Ouellette had the salvation of the world in her hands, and some shrinking fraction of a sixty-minute window to get it to safety.
She ran the siren continuously from one end of Freeport to the other, a shrieking departure from the music employed to announce her day-to-day presence. Hopefully it would summon the healthy as well as the sick.
She got some of both. She warned them all to take shelter; she promised a mother with a broken arm and a son with incipient stage-one that she’d come back and help them when the fires had passed. She urged the others, as they fled, to send the Six her way, or anyone else with wheels to burn.
After thirty minutes, one of them came by. After forty, two more; she loaded them all with precious milliliters of amber fluid and sent them running. She begged them to send the others, if they knew their whereabouts. If they could find them in time.
Forty-five minutes, and nothing but a ragged handful of the hungry and the feeble. She chased them away with stories about fire-breathing dragons, sent them down to a fisherman’s wharf that had once been the community’s breadbasket. Now, if they were lucky, it might at least serve as a place from which to jump into the ocean; surely the flames wouldn’t scorch the whole Atlantic?
Fifty minutes.
I can’t wait.
But there were others here, she knew. People she hadn’t seen today. People she hadn’t warned.
And they’re not coming, Tak. If you want to warn them, you might as well start going door to door. Search every house and hovel within twenty klicks. You’ve got ten minutes.
Ken had said they could count on sixty minutes. A minimum estimate, right? It might take longer, a lot longer.
She knew what Dave would have said. She still had two liters of culture. Dave would have told her she could make all the difference, if she didn’t just sit there and wait for the furnace.
It might not happen at all. What were they basing this on, anyway? A couple of firestorms that happened to follow aborted missile attacks? What about the times when the missiles fell and nothing happened afterwards? There had to be times when nothing had happened. What about the times when the fires came, or the floods or the explosions, with nothing to presage them? Correlation wasn’t causation...and this wasn’t even strong correlation...
It convinced Ken.
But she didn’t know Ken at all. Didn’t even know his last name, or Laur—Lenie’s. She would have had nothing but their own word that they were who they said they were, if they had even bothered to really tell her even that much. And now even their names were suspect. Laurie was not Laurie at all, it seemed.
Taka only had their word on the things they had said, her own speculation on all the things they hadn’t, and the disturbing similarities between this amphibious woman and the demons in the net...
Fifty-five minutes.
Go. You’ve done all you can here. Go.
She started the engine.
Committed, she didn’t look back. She drove down the decaying asphalt as fast as she could without risking some pothole-induced rollover. Her fear seemed to increase in lockstep with her velocity—as though the diffuse and overgrown remains of Freeport and its pathetic, half-starved inhabitants had somehow numbed her own instinct for self-preservation. Now, abandoning them, her heart rose in her mouth. She imagined the crackle of flames advancing along the road behind her. She fought the road; she fought panic.
You’re going south, you idiot! We were south when the signal went out, south is where they’ll start—
She screeched east onto Sherbourne. Miri took the bend on two wheels. A great shadow fell across the road before her, the sky darkened abruptly overhead. Her imagination saw great airships, spewing fire—but her eyes (when she dared to look away from the road) saw only overarching trees, brownish-green blurs streaking the world on both sides, leaning over and blocking the afternoon sun.
But no, that’s the sun up ahead, setting.
It was a great yellow-orange blob
, dimmed by its slanting angle through the atmosphere. It was centered in the bright archway that marked the end of the tunnel of trees. It was setting directly over the road ahead.
How can it be so late? It can’t be so late, it’s only aftern—
The sun was setting.
The sun was setting the trees on fire.
She hit the brakes. The shoulder strap caught her around the chest, threw her back into her seat. The world grew ominously quiet: no more spitting clatter of rock against undercarriage, no more rattling of equipment on hooks, banging against Miri’s walls. There was only the distant, unmistakable crackling of flame from up ahead.
A containment perimeter. They’d started at the outside and moved in.
She threw the MI into reverse and yanked hard on the stick. The vehicle skidded back and sideways, slewing into the ditch. Forward again. Back the way she’d come. The tires spun in the soft, muddy embankment.
A whooshing sound, from overhead, like the explosive breath of a great whale she’d heard in the archives as a child. A sheet of flame flooded the road, blocking her escape. Heat radiated through the windshield.
Oh Jesus. Oh God.
She opened the door. Scorched air blasted her face. The seatbelt held her fast. Panicky fingers took way too long to set her free and then she was on the ground, rolling. She scrambled to her feet, bracing against Miri’s side; the plastic burned her hands.
A wall of flame writhed barely ten meters away. Another—the one she’d mistaken for the setting sun—was further off, maybe sixty meters on the other side of the MI. She sheltered on the cooler side of the vehicle. Better. But it wouldn’t last.
Get the culture.
A mechanical groan, the bone-deep sound of twisting metal. She looked up: directly overhead, through a mosaic of leaves and branches not yet burning, she saw the fractured silhouette of a great swollen disk wallowing in the sky.
Get the culture!
The road was blocked ahead and behind. Miri would never be able to push through the dying woodlands to either side, but Taka could run for it. Every instinct, every nerve was telling her to run for it.
The culture! MOVE!
She yanked open the passenger door and climbed over the seat. The icons blinking on the cab’s rear wall seemed almost deliberately slow to respond. A little histogram appeared on the board. It rose as slowly as a tide.
Whoosh.
The forest across the road burst into flame.
Three sides gone now, one way left, one way. Oh Jesus.
The histogram blinked and vanished. The panel extruded a sample bag, swollen with culture. Taka grabbed it and ran.
Whoosh.
Flame ahead of her, pouring from the heavens like a liquid curtain.
Flame on all sides, now.
Taka Ouellette stared into the firestorm for some endless, irrelevant span of seconds. Then she sank to the ground with a sigh. Her knees made indentations in the softening asphalt. The heat of the road burned her flesh. Her flesh was indifferent. She noted, vaguely surprised, that her face and hands were dry; the heat baked the sweat from her pores before it even had the chance to wet her skin. It was an interesting phenomenon. She wondered if anyone had ever written it up.
It didn’t really matter, though.
Nothing did.
Turncoat
“That’s odd,” said Lenie Clarke.
The periscope had backed off from shore a ways, to get a better northwest view over the trees. The image it conveyed was surprisingly bucolic. It was too far to see Freeport from here—and Freeport’s dwellings and businesses had been spread far too widely to present anything approaching a skyline even in the old days— but they should have seen lifters, at least. They should have seen the flames or the smoke by now.
“It’s been three hours,” Clarke said, glancing across the cockpit. “Maybe you stopped the signal after all.” Or maybe, she mused, we’re completely off-base about this whole thing.
Lubin slid one finger a few millimeters along the panel. The ’scope’s-eye view panned left.
“Maybe she made it,” Clarke remarked. Such dull, lifeless words for all the meaning they conveyed: Maybe she saved the world.
Maybe she saved me.
“I don’t think so,” Lubin said.
A pillar of smoke boiled up from behind the crest of a hill, staining the sky brown.
She felt a tightness in her throat. “Where is that?” she asked.
“Dead west,” Lubin replied.
They came ashore on the south side of the cove, a slope of smooth stones and gnarled driftwood growing slimy with ßehemoth. They followed the sun along a dirt road that had never seen so much as a signpost. The pillar of smoke led them on like a pole star with a half-life, thinning in the sky as they tracked it across paved roads and gravel ones, over the crest of a weathered bump called Snake Hill (judging by the name of the road that ran along its base), on into the setting sun itself. Moments into twilight Lubin stopped, one hand raised in warning.
By now the once-billowing column was all but exhausted, a few threads of smoke twisting into the sky. But they could see the source, a roughly rectangular patch of scorched woodland at the bottom of the hill. Or rather, a roughly rectangular outline: the center of the area appeared to be unburned.
Lubin had his binocs out. “See anything?” Clarke asked.
He hmmmed.
“Come on, Ken. What is it?”
He handed her the binoculars without a word.
There was disquieting moment when the device tightened itself around her head. Suddenly the world was huge, and in sharp focus. Clarke felt brief vertigo and stepped forward, bracing against sudden illusory imbalance. Twigs and blighted leaves the size of dinner tables swept past in a blur. She zoomed back to get her bearings. Better: there was the scorched earth, there was the patch in its midst, and there was—
“Oh shit,” she murmured.
Miri sat dead center of the clear zone. It looked undamaged.
Ouellette stood beside it. She appeared to be conversing with a gunmetal ovoid half her size, hovering a meter over her head. Its carapace was featureless; its plastron bristled with sensors and antennae.
A botfly. Not so long ago, teleoperated robots just like it had hounded Lenie Clarke across a whole continent.
“Busted,” Lubin said.
The world was bleaching in Clarke’s eyecaps by the time they reached the MI. Ouellette sat on the road with her back against the van, legs bent, arms crossed loosely over knees. She stared listlessly at the pavement between her feet. She looked up at the sound of their approach. The botfly hung overhead like a bodyguard. It showed no visible reaction to their arrival.
Bleached light wasn’t enough to account for the pallor of Ouellette’s face. She looked absolutely bloodless. There were wet streaks on her face.
She looked at Clarke and shook her head. “What are you?” she said. Her voice was as empty as a cave.
Clarke’s throat went dry.
“You’re not just some refugee. You’re not just some rifter who’s been hiding for five years. You—you started this, somehow. You started it all...”
Clarke tried to swallow, looked to Lubin. But Lubin’s eyes didn’t waver from the botfly.
She spread her hands. “Tak, I—”
“The monsters in the machines, they’re all—you,” Ouellette seemed stunned at the sheer magnitude of Clarke’s betrayal. “The M&Ms and the fanatics and the death cults, they’re all following you...”
They’re not, Clarke wanted to shout. I’d stop them all in a second if I could, I don’t know how any of it got started—
But that would be a lie, of course. Maybe she hadn’t formally founded the movements that had sprung up in her wake, but that didn’t make them any less faithful to the thing she’d been. They were the very essence of the rage and hatred that had driven her, the utter indifference to any loss but her own.
They hadn’t done it for her, of course. The seethi
ng millions had their own reasons for anger, vendettas far more righteous than the false pretenses on which Lenie Clarke had waged war. But she had shown them the way. She had proven it was possible. And with every drop of her blood that she spilled, every precious inoculation of ßehemoth into the world, she had given them their weapons.
Now there was nothing she could bring herself to say. She could only shake her head, and force herself to meet the eyes of this accuser and one-time friend.
“And now they’ve really outdone themselves,” Ouellette continued in her broken, empty voice. “Now, they’ve—”
She took a breath.
“Oh God,” she finished. “I fucked up so bad.”
Like a marionette she pulled herself to her feet. Still the botfly didn’t move.
“It wasn’t a counteragent,” Ouellette said.
This time, Lubin spared a glance. “What do you mean?”
“I guess we’re not dying fast enough. The witch was beating us but we were slowing it down at least, we lost four people for every one we saved but at least we were saving some. But the M&M’s don’t get into paradise until we’re all dead, so they came up with something better...”
“And they are?” Lubin asked, turning back to the teleop.
“Don’t look at me,” the machine said quietly. “I’m one of the good guys.”
Clarke recognized the voice in an instant.
So did Lubin. “Desjardins.”
“Ken. Old buddy.” The botfly bobbed a few centimeters in salute. “Glad you remember me.”
You’re alive, Clarke thought. After Rio, after Sudbury going dark, after five years. You’re alive. You’re alive after all.
My friend....
Ouellette watched the proceedings with numb amazement on her face. “You know—”
“He—helped us out,” Clarke told her. “A long time ago.”
“We thought you were dead,” Lubin said.
“Likewise. It’s been pretty much seven seconds to sockeye ever since Rio, and the only times I had a chance to ping you you’d gone dark. I figured you’d been done in by some disgruntled faction who never made the cut. Still. Here you are.”