by Peter Watts
It glared at her and spat, “Kill yourself? You—”
Dark, and void, and System Crash.
And the next time.
And the next.
The Skill of the Chase
A CSIRA drone, floating like thistledown just below the jet stream, caught the heat trace at 0300. It was warming Service Road 23 northeast of Skowhagen, and it shared certain characteristics with another source— two hours older— that had been glimpsed by a lifter shipping medical supplies out of Portland. Resupply hauls weren’t normally charged with surveillance, but everyone was on alert since the word had come down from Sudbury.
Both signatures matched the emissions put out by a brand of hydrogen cell that hadn’t been manufactured since 2044. Someone was driving the shit out of an old Ford Fugitive, traveling inland along back roads in the middle of the night.
One of Ouellette’s vectors had driven a Fugitive. Lubin caught up with her somewhere on the far side of the New Hampshire border.
Desjardins had requisitioned him an ultralight. It wasn’t as fast as ground-effect transport, but its cruising altitude was a lot higher and it drank fewer Joules than a chopper. Lubin was flying west at about two hundred meters when the Ford bounced sunlight into his eye. It was parked on the edge of an acid-washed bog full of rusty tannins and jagged waterlogged stumps. The wetland seemed to have grown since Highway Maintenance had given up on the neighborhood; a tongue of dark water lapped across a few meters of low-lying asphalt just ahead of the vehicle.
That wasn’t what had stopped it, though.
Lubin landed fifty meters up the road and approached from behind. His inlays performed the usual schematic vivisection as he drew near, cluttered up his vision with icons and wiring diagrams. His gut rebelled at the mere thought of tuning out usable intel from any source, but sometimes it distracted more than it informed. He shut down the display in his head; the Fugitive dropped back into the real world, seemed to flatten somehow, luminous guts vanishing behind dirty plastic skin.
A blonde mocha woman sat in the driver’s seat, forehead against the wheel, long straight hair obscuring her face. She seemed oblivious to his approach.
He tapped on the window. She turned apathetically at the sound. He knew immediately that something was wrong: her face was flushed and shiny with perspiration.
She knew something was wrong, too. Lubin’s isolation skin would have pretty much given that away even if she hadn’t been sick.
Three days, he thought.
The door was unlocked. He pulled it open and stepped back.
“They told us...it was a cure,” she said. It took her two breaths.
“Do you have any left?” Lubin asked.
She gulped. “Some. Spread most of it around.” She shook her head. “Gave some to Aaron, too. Couple of days ago.”
A transparent bladder lay on the seat beside her. It had been drained almost flat. The culture that remained, sucked into creases and wrinkles in the deflated bag, was no longer amber in color; it was dark and gray as anoxic mud.
“What happened to it?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Changed.” She shook her head tiredly. “She said it would last a week...”
He leaned forward. She still had the presence of mind to look vaguely startled when she saw him up close. “You were one of them. You were one of them. I saw you there...”
“I need to know where you seeded it,” he said. “I need to know everyone you’ve been in contact with since Freeport, and how to get in touch with them.”
She held up one limp-wristed arm, showing off her wristwatch. “Aaron’s in here. We split up. Thought...we’d cover more ground...”
He took the watch. Its phone feature wasn’t much use without the earbud, but he could deal with Aaron later.
“I was talking to him just this morning,” the woman managed. “He’s not—not doing too well himself.”
He circled the Fugitive and climbed in the passenger’s side. Nav was offline—a precaution left over from the previous week, when the ether had been enemy territory. He brought up dashboard GPS and scaled the map to include the coast.
“Everywhere you stopped,” he said. “Everyone you met.”
“I’m sick,” she sighed.
“I can get you to a hospital. A real hospital,” he promised, sweetening the pot. “But you have to help me first.”
She told him what she could. Finally he climbed back into sunshine and headed for the ultralight. Halfway there he paused and looked back.
She could make a run for it, he thought. She’s not too sick to drive. She could try to escape.
Or, eyeing the stained water by the road, she could just lurch into the water and infect the whole bog. Much more difficult to contain after that.
Maybe she’s a loose end.
Idle musing, of course. There was no immediate threat here, nothing to justify extreme prejudice. Not that that was always likely to be the case, the way this thing was spreading. This was the second vector Lubin had tracked down, and the first of Ouellette’s original trio. The other had been a secondary who’d picked up the baton in her wake, and he’d admitted to seeding still others. How far the other two Patient Zeroes had run was still anyone’s guess. And now there was Aaron to deal with, not to mention the half-dozen places where this woman had dribbled little aliquots of Seppuku in her wake...
He could afford to wait, he told himself. The way things were going, he’d have all the excuse he needed before long. Not that he needed excuses any more, of course. Ken Lubin had been a free agent for years.
Play nice, he told himself. Play by the rules.
He did. He called the ambulance before he called the flamethrowers, stood guard until it floated in from the west, sprayed himself down and climbed back into the sky. He banked southeast, backtracking the vector’s route. A lifter appeared in the middle distance and paced him for a while, cruising like a great dark cloud towards the target areas he’d pinpointed. Pilot lights sparked faintly at the tips of the long, incendiary muzzles hanging from its underbelly. Puffy pink and green clouds erupted intermittently in the airspace beneath it, cotton-candy litmus tests sniffing out infection.
He edged up the throttle. By now, Aaron’s partner would be bagged and on her way. Taka Ouellette would be running tests on her by nightfall.
If Ouellette was running tests on anything, of course. Lubin had his doubts.
He remembered the first time he had met Achilles Desjardins. He had broken into the ’lawbreaker’s home and caught him in flagrante delecto with a VR sensorium that served up wraparound scenarios of sexual torture. Desjardins would have never inflicted those impulses on the real world back then, of course, but a lot of things had changed in the meantime. Rules had changed. Leashes had been slipped. Official hierarchies had crumbled, leaving those who wielded power miraculously free of oversight.
Lubin had eavesdropped briefly on Desjardins’s fantasy life before getting down to business. He’d gained some idea of that man’s taste in women, as well as what he liked to do to them. And so five years later, when Taka Ouellette had climbed into the belly of a CSIRA helicopter, Lubin had watched with a dispassionate sense of finality.
Desjardins had promised her a role in the fight against Seppuku. He had evoked visions of bright gleaming laboratories normally reserved for bona-fide Meatzarts. The prospect had lit her up like a halogen floodlamp. One look and Lubin had known her secret desire, the desperate, unimagined hope of redemption for some past sin.
By now, it was easy enough to recognize.
He had been interested in whether the aircraft would head southwest, towards Boston. That was where the nearest research facilities would be. But instead it had disappeared to the north, and Lubin had not heard from Ouellette in the days since.
Not that he could have expected to, of course. Even if Desjardins had been telling the truth. And Lubin had to admit, with the logical clarity of an amoral mind, that it didn’t make much difference either way.
Taka Ouellette was not the caliber of scientist who’d last in the ring against any kind of heavyweight opponent. If she had been, they wouldn’t have found her relegated to wildland patrol, handing out crumbs to the ferals. Her loss would matter not at all in the fight against Seppuku.
Achilles Desjardins, on the other hand, was vital. Whether he was also a sexual predator was irrelevant; he might well be instrumental in the saving of billions. Lubin couldn’t think of many depravities that could not be overlooked in the pursuit of that higher goal. It was what the Greater Good was all about.
He almost felt envious.
Remedial Ed
Taka Ouellette was, in fact, within a research facility of some sort. She was not, however, playing the role of experimenter. Perhaps the man at her side had arrogated that role unto himself.
His appearance was unremarkable. Brown hair, uncombed, cut with a haphazard asymmetry as consistent with some faux-feral style as with outright incompetence. Thin squarish face. Not enough lines on the forehead, too many around the eyes. Large eyes, brown and wet, almost childlike. Nose slightly off-kilter. Baggy green sweatshirt, a TwenCen throwback with no animations.
She couldn’t see below his waist. She was strapped to a medical gurney, flat on her back. If this disheveled r-selector was playing the researcher, it seemed that he’d reserved for her the role of experimental subject.
“Achilles Desjardins,” he said. “Pleased to meet you, Alice.”
The helicopter had dropped onto a rooftop pad somewhere north of the Great Lakes, well after midnight. She’d debarked and stepped unsuspectingly into a neuroinduction field that dropped her faster than a cervical dislocate. Faceless men in body condoms had brought her, conscious but paralyzed, into this quarantine cell. They had stripped her naked, catheterized her, and departed without speaking. Perhaps they’d been told she was some kind of fugitive or health risk. Perhaps they’d been in on the joke. She’d had no way of knowing, and no way to ask.
That had been a day ago, at least. Probably more. She had spent the time since isolated and immobilized, growing parched and ravenous by infinitesimal degrees.
The field was off now, though. Her motor nerves were back online. The only things holding her down were the nylon straps cinched painfully around wrists and ankles, waist and throat.
“There’s been a mistake,” she said quickly. “I’m not Alice, I’m Taka. Lenie and Ken’s friend.”
She wriggled against the restraints. Achilles smiled faintly.
“You’re really not a very good biologist, Alice,” he remarked, not unkindly. “I’m sorry, but it’s true. You’ve had all kinds of clues, but you never quite put them together the right way.” He sat on some unseen chair or stool next to the gurney. “If I hadn’t stepped in you’d still be spreading Seppuku far and wide, killing your patients even faster than usual. No real scientist would make such basic mistakes.”
“But I’m not—”
He put a finger to his lips, shushing her. He propped his elbows against the hard neoprene surface of the stretcher next to her head, rested chin in hands and looked down at her.
“Of course,” he continued softly, “no real scientist would kill her own family, either.”
So it wasn’t a mistake. He knew exactly who she was.
She knew him, too. At least, she knew his type. He was soft. He was pathetic. Every day she faced down people who’d break his neck without breaking stride. On his own, without the props, he was nothing.
Except right.
She closed her eyes. Keep control. He’s trying to scare you. Don’t let him. Deny him the satisfaction.
It’s a power game like all the others. If you aren’t intimidated, you take some back.
She opened her eyes and looked calmly into his. “So what’s the plan?”
“The plan.” Achilles pursed his lips. “The plan is rehabilitation. I’m going to give you another chance. Think of it as a kind of remedial education.” He stood. Something in his hand reflected the overhead lights, something small and shiny like a nail clipper. “We’re talking a kind of carrot and stick scenario. I have this hobby that a lot of people would describe as, well, unpleasant. You’ll find out how unpleasant, depending on how quick a study you turn out to be.”
Taka swallowed. She didn’t speak until she thought she could keep her voice level: “What’s the carrot, then?”
Not quite.
“That was the carrot. My carrot, anyway. Your carrot is, you pass your orals and I let you go. Alive and everything.” Achilles frowned, as if lost in thought. “Here’s an easy one to start with. How does Seppuku reproduce? Sexually or asexually?”
Taka stared at him. “You’re kidding.”
He watched her a moment. Then, almost sadly, he shook his head.
“You went to the seminars, I see. They told you all our secrets. We prey on fear. Once we see you’re not afraid, we’ll pick on someone else. Maybe even let you go.”
“You said—” she stopped, tried to control the tremor in her voice. “You said you’d let me go...”
He hadn’t laid a hand on her and already she was begging.
“If you do well,” Achilles reminded her gently. “But yes. I’ll let you go. In fact, as a gesture of good faith, I’ll let part of you go right now.”
He reached out. The shiny thing in his hand pressed against her breast like a tiny icicle. Something snicked.
Pain bloomed across her chest, razor-sharp, like the cracks in glass before it shatters. Taka screamed, writhing in useless millimeter increments against the straps.
The bloody gobbet of a nipple dropped against her cheek.
Darkness swirled around the edges of vision. At some impossible distant remove, way south of the pain at the center of the universe, a monster fingered its way between her labia.
“Two more where that came from,” he remarked.
Decirculate
Clarke had learned a fair bit at Ouellette’s side. She was no doctor, but she still had the rudimentary medical training she’d received as a rifter and the MI did most of the diagnostic and prescriptive work anyway. Miri’s exorcism had cost them a few thousand patient records, half a year’s downloaded updates, and all the vehicle’s uplink capabilities—but whatever remained still knew enough to scan a body and prescribe basic treatments. Clarke wasn’t up to dealing with much more sophistication than that anyway; even lobotomized, Miri was hardly the rate-limiting step.
People trickled through town, seeking Ouellette’s ministrations but settling for Clarke’s. She did what the machinery told her, played doctor as best she could. At night she’d sneak offshore and bypass Phocoena entirely, sleeping breathless and exposed on the bright, shallow bottom. Each morning she came ashore, stripped her diveskin down to the tunic and pulled Ouellette’s borrowed clothing overtop. The strange dead fibers rubbed loosely against her limbs as she moved, an ill-fitting travesty full of folds and stitches. Removing the ’skin always felt a little like being flayed alive; this, this substitute might as well have been shed from the flanks of some great poorly-proportioned lizard. It wasn’t too bad, though. It was getting easier.
It was pretty much the only thing that was getting easier.
The worst part wasn’t her own medical ignorance, or the endless, rising count of those she couldn’t save. It wasn’t even the outbursts of violence that people sometimes directed at her when faced with their own death sentence, or with that of a loved one. She was almost grateful for the shouts and the fists, thrown too rarely to constitute any kind of real cost. She’d experienced far worse in her time, and Miri’s weapons blister was always there when things got out of hand.
Much, much worse than the violence of those she didn’t save was the gratitude of those she nearly could. The smiles on the faces of those for whom she’d bought a little time, too dulled by disease and malnutrition to ever question the economics of trading a quick death for a lingering one. The pathetic delight of some father who’d seen his daughter cured
of encephalitis, not knowing or caring that Seppuku or the Witch or some rogue flamethrower would take her next month or next year, not thinking of the rapes and broken bones and chronic starvation that would stalk her in the days between. Hope seemed nowhere more abundant than in the faces of the hopeless; and it was all she could do to meet their eyes, and smile, and accept their thanks. And not tell them who it was that had brought all this down upon the world in the first place.
Her experiment with naked eyes was long since over. If the locals didn’t like her affect, they could damn well go somewhere else.
She wanted desperately to talk to Taka. Most of the time she resisted the impulse, remembering: Ouellette’s friendship had evaporated the instant she’d learned the truth. Clarke didn’t blame her. It couldn’t be easy, discovering you’d befriended a monster.
One night, lonely enough to gamble, she tried anyway. She used a channel that Desjardins had assigned for reporting any late-breaking Seppuku incidents; it got her to an automated dispatcher and thence to an actual human being who—despite his obvious disapproval over personal use of dedicated channels—patched her through to someone claiming to speak for a biological countermeasures lab out of Boston. He had never heard of Taka Ouellette. When Clarke asked if there might be other facilities she could check with, the man replied that there must be—but the goddamned Entropy Patrol never told them anything, and he wouldn’t know where to point her.
She made do by indulging in false hopes. Lubin would catch his prey. Desjardins would honor the deal they had made. They would track down the threat to Atlantis, and disarm it. And Taka Ouellette, or others like her, would solve the mystery of Seppuku and stop it in its tracks.
Maybe then they could go home.
She didn’t even recognize him at first.
He came staggering out of the woods on foot, limping, purple-skinned, his face a swollen mass of scabs and pulpy bruises. He wore a thermochrome windbreaker with one of the arms torn away, and he lurched into sight just as Clarke was about to shut down for the evening.