by Peter Watts
The microwave pistol lay on the scree a few meters away. He retrieved it, wincing.
Phong still lay on his back, winded, bruised, his left leg twisted at an angle impossible to reconcile with the premise of an intact tibia. His skin reddened as Lubin watched, small blisters rising on his face in the wake of the microwave burst. Phong was in bad shape.
“Not bad enough,” Lubin remarked, looking down at him.
Phong looked up through glazed eyes and muttered something like Wha...
You were not worth the trouble, Lubin thought. There was no excuse for me to even break a sweat over the likes of you. You’re nothing. You’re less than nothing. How dare you get so lucky. How dare you piss me off like this.
He kicked Phong in the ribs. One broke with a satisfying snap.
Phong yelped.
“Shhh,” Lubin murmured soothingly. He brought the heel of his boot down on Phong’s outstretched hand, ground it back and forth. Phong screamed.
Lubin spent a moment contemplating Phong’s right leg—the intact one—but decided to leave it unbroken. There was a certain aesthetic in the asymmetry. Instead, he brought his foot down again, hard, on the broken left one.
Phong screamed and fainted, escaping into brief oblivion. It didn’t matter; Lubin’s hard-on had been assured with the first snapping bone.
Go on, he urged himself.
He walked unhurriedly around the broken man until he found himself next to Phong’s head. Experimentally, he lifted his foot.
Go on. It doesn’t matter. Nobody cares.
But he had rules. They weren’t nearly so inviolable as when he’d been Guilt Tripped, but in a way that was the whole point. To make his own decisions. To follow his own algorithm. To prove he didn’t have to give in, to prove he was stronger than his impulses.
Prove it to who? Who’s here to care? But he already knew the answer.
It’s not his fault. It’s yours.
Lubin sighed. He lowered his foot, and waited.
“A man named Xander gave you a vial,” he said calmly, squatting at Phong’s side a half-hour later.
Phong stared wide-eyed and shook his head. He did not seem pleased to be back in the real world. “Please...don’t—”
“You were told that it contained a counteragent, that it would kill off ßehemoth if it was disseminated widely enough. I thought so myself, at first. I understand that you were only trying to do the right thing.” Lubin leaned in close. “Are you following me, Phong?”
Phong gulped and nodded.
Lubin stood. “We were both misinformed. The vial you were given will only make things worse. If you hadn’t been so busy trying to kill me you could have saved us both a lot—” A sudden thought occurred to him. “Just out of interest, why were you trying to kill me?”
Phong looked torn.
“I’d really like to know,” Lubin said, without the slightest trace of threat in his voice.
“You—they said people trying to stop the cure,” Phong blurted.
“Who?”
“Just people. On the radio.” Alone, helpless, half his bones broken, and still he was trying to protect his contacts. Not bad, Lubin had to admit.
“We’re not,” he said. “And if you had been in touch with Xander and Aaron and their friends lately, you’d know that for yourself. They’re very sick.”
“No.” It was probably meant to be a protest, but Phong didn’t seem able to put any conviction into the word.
“I need to know what you did with that vial,” Lubin said.
“I...I ate it,” Phong managed.
“You ate it. You mean, you drank the contents.”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t disseminate it anywhere. You drank it all yourself.”
“Yes.”
“Why, may I ask?”
“They say it cure ßehemoth. I—I first stage already. They say I dead by winter, and I could not get into forts...”
Lubin didn’t dare touch the man, not with his isolation skin in tatters. He studied Phong’s exposed and reddened skin, at the blisters rising across it. If there had been any obvious signs of either ßehemoth or Seppuku, they were now indistinguishable under the burns. He tried to remember if Phong had presented any symptoms prior to being shot.
“When did you do this?” he asked at last.
“Two days. I felt fine until...you...you...” Phong squirmed weakly, winced at the result.
Two days. Seppuku was fast, but all the symptomatic vectors Lubin had encountered had been infected for longer than that. It was probably only a matter of hours before Phong started presenting. A day or two at most.
“—to me?” Phong was saying.
Lubin looked down at him. “What?”
“What you do to me?”
“A lifter’s on the way. You’ll be in a medical facility by nightfall.”
“I’m sorry,” Phong said, and coughed. “They say I be dead by winter,” he repeated in a weak voice.
“You will be,” Lubin told him.
Matryoska
Clarke didn’t make the call.
She’d had closer contact with Ricketts than anyone except the person who’d assaulted him, and she’d checked out clean. She was willing to bet that the people of Freeport were clean too.
She wasn’t willing to bet that the trigger fingers would agree with her.
She knew the arguments. She knew the virtues of erring on the side of caution. She just didn’t buy them, not when the people making those decisions sat in untouchable far-off towers adding columns of empty numbers and Bayesian probabilities. Maybe the experts were right, maybe the only people truly qualified to run the world were those without conscience—clear-eyed, rational, untroubled by the emotional baggage that the sight of piled bodies could induce in the unblessed. People weren’t numbers, but maybe the only way to do the right thing was to act as if they were.
Maybe. She wasn’t going to bet the town of Freeport on it, though.
They were nowhere close to a cure, according to the dispatches. There was nothing anyone could do for Ricketts except poke at him. Perhaps that would change at some point. Perhaps it would even happen before Seppuku killed him, although that seemed vanishingly unlikely. In the meantime, Lubin was good at his job—maybe a bit past his prime, but easily more than a match for a handful of infected ferals who didn’t even know they were being hunted. If the Meatzarts needed live samples, Lubin was the man to provide them.
There was no need to feed this skinny kid into that system. Clarke had learned a few things about research protocols over the years: even after the cures are discovered, who bothers rehabilitating the lab rats?
Taka Ouellette, maybe. Clarke would have trusted her in an instant. But Clarke didn’t know where she was or how to reach her. She certainly didn’t trust the system to deliver Ricketts into her exceptional arms. And Ricketts, surprisingly, seemed content where he was. In fact, he seemed almost happy there. Maybe he’d forgotten the old days, or maybe he hadn’t been very well-off even then. But by the time he’d fallen into Clarke’s orbit he knew only the grubby, dying landscape upon which he expected to live his whole short life. Probably the most he’d dared hope for was to die in peace and alone in some sheltered ruin, before being torn apart for his clothes or the dirt in his pockets.
To be rescued from that place, to wake up in a gleaming submarine at the bottom of the sea—that must have seemed magical beyond dreams. Ricketts came from a life so grim that terminal exile on the ocean floor was actually a step up.
I could just let him die here, Clarke thought, and he’d be happier than he’d ever been in his life.
She kept her eyes open, of course. She wasn’t stupid. Seppuku was afoot in the world, and Ricketts had vectored it all the way from Vermont. At the very least there was some thug with a stolen motorbike to worry about. She tested everyone that Miri swallowed, no matter what their complaint. She read encrypted dispatches intended only for those in the loop. She watch
ed public broadcasts aimed at the ferals themselves, transmissions from high-tech havens in Boston and Augusta: weather, MI schedules, waiting times at the ßehemoth forts—incongruously, coding tips. She marveled that the castle-dwellers would dare present themselves this way, as if they could redeem themselves by sending public service bulletins to those they’d trampled in their own rush to safety.
She drove the back roads and checked derelict dwellings looking for business, for people too weak to seek her out. She queried her patients: did they know anyone who had come down with high fever, soreness in the joints, sudden weakness?
Nothing.
She thought of her friend, Achilles Desjardins. She wondered if he was still alive, or if he had died when Spartacus rewired his brain. The circuits that made him who he was had been changed, after all. He had been changed. Maybe he’d been changed so much that he didn’t even exist any more. Maybe he was a whole new being, living in Desjardins’s head, running off his memories.
One thing seemed to have stayed the same, though. Desjardins was still one of the trigger fingers, still entrusted to kill the many to save the multitude. Maybe someday—maybe soon—he’d have to do that here. Lenie Clarke realized as much: she might be wrong. Extreme measures might prove necessary.
Not yet, though. If Seppuku gestated in the ghost town of Freeport, it was laying low. Lenie Clarke did likewise. In the meantime, Ricketts was her little secret.
For as long as he lasted, anyway. It wasn’t looking good.
She stepped dripping from the diver ’lock in Phocoena’s tail. Ricketts was wetter than she was.
His skin was beyond pink; it was so flushed it almost looked sunburned. He’d long since stripped off his rags, and now lay naked on a pallet that could soak up perspiration barely faster than he produced it.
None of his biotelemetry was in the red yet, according to the panel. That was something.
He had the headset on, but he turned his head at the sound of her entrance. The blind, cowled face seemed to look right through her. “Hi.” The smile on his face was an absurd paradox.
“Hi,” she said, stepping to the cycler on the opposite bulkhead. “Hungry?” She was only filling the silence; the drip in his arm kept him fed as well as medicated.
He shook his head. “Thanks. Busy.”
In VR, perhaps. The handpad lay discarded by his knees, but there were other interfaces.
“This is great,” he murmured.
Clarke looked at him. How can you say that? she wondered. How can you just act as though there’s nothing wrong? Don’t you know you’re dying?
But of course he probably didn’t. If Phocoena couldn’t cure him, at least it wasn’t letting him suffer: it kept his fluids up, gagged internal alarms, soothed nerves when they burned with fever or nausea. And it wasn’t just ßehemoth’s ravages that the medbed would have swept under the rug. Ricketts’s whole life must have been an ongoing litany of low-level discomfort, chronic infections, parasite loads, old injuries badly healed. All those baseline aches and pains would be gone too, as far as this boy could tell. He probably felt better than he had in years. He probably thought his weakness would pass, that he was actually getting better.
The only way he’d know otherwise would be if Lenie Clarke told him the truth.
She turned from the cycler and climbed forward into the cockpit. Systems telltales winked and wriggled under the dark crystal of the pilot’s dash. There was something vaguely off about those readouts, something Clarke couldn’t quite—
“It’s so clean in here,” Ricketts said.
He wasn’t in VR. He wasn’t playing games.
He’d hacked into nav.
She straightened so fast her head cracked against the overhead viewport. “What are you doing in there? That’s not—”
“There’s no wildlife at all,” he went on, amazed. “Not even, like, a worm, far as I can tell. And everything’s so, so...” he fell silent, groping for the word.
She was back at his cage. Ricketts lay staring at Phocoena’s pristine datascape, emaciated, anesthetized, lost in wonder.
“Whole,” he said at last.
She reached out. The membrane tugged gently at her fingertips, webbed her fingers, stretched back along her forearm. She briefly touched his shoulder. His head rolled in her direction, not so much an act of will as of gravity.
“How are you doing that?” she asked.
“Doing...? Oh. Saccadal keyboard. You know. Eye movements.” He smiled weakly. “Easier’n the handpad.”
“No, I mean, how did you get into Phocoena?”
“Wasn’t I supposed to?” He pushed the eyephones up on a forehead beaded with sweat and stared, frowning. He seemed to be having trouble focusing on her. “You said I could use the onboard.”
“I meant games.”
“Oh,” Ricketts said. “I don’t really...you know, I didn’t...”
“It’s okay,” she told him.
“I was just looking around. Didn’t rewrite anything. It’s not like there was security or, you know.” Then added, a moment later, “Hardly any.”
Clarke shook her head. Ken would kill me if he knew I’d let this kid in. He’d at least kick my ass for not putting a few passwords in place.
Something scratched at the back of her mind, something Ricketts had just said. You said I could use the onboard. I was just looking around. I didn’t rewrite any—
“Wait a second,” she said, “Are you saying you could rewrite the nav code if you wanted to?”
Ricketts licked his lips. “Prob’ly not. Don’t even really know what it’s for. I mean, I could tweak it all right, but it’d just be like random changes.”
“But you’re saying you can code.”
“Well, yeah. Kinda.”
“Out there in the wilds. Poking around in the ruins. You learned to code.”
“No more’n anyone else.” He seemed honestly confused. “What, you think the claves took all our watches and stuff before they hived up? You think we don’t have electricity or something?”
Of course there’d be power sources. Left-over Ballard Stacks, private windmills, the photoelectric paint that kept those stupid billboards hawking neutriceuts and fashion accessories into the middle of the apocalypse itself. But that hardly meant—
“You can code,” she murmured, incredulous even as she remembered the programming tips she’d seen on public television.
“You can’t grow a little code here and there, you can forget about using your watch ’cept for time and bulls. How’d you think I found you guys, you think GPS fixes itself when worms and Shredders get in there?”
He was breathing fast and shallow, as if the effort of so many words had winded him. But he was proud, too, Clarke could tell. Feral Kid On Last Legs Impresses Exotic Older Woman.
And she was impressed, despite herself.
Ricketts could code.
She showed him her Cohen board. Curled up in his cage he tapped his own headset, arm wobbling with the effort. He frowned, apparently taken aback by his own weakness.
“So pipe it through,” he said after a moment
She shook her head. “No wireless. Too risky. It might get out.”
He looked at her knowingly. “Lenie?”
“I think they call it a—a shredder.”
He nodded. “Shredders, Lenies, Madonnas. Same thing.”
“It keeps crashing.”
“Well, yeah. That’s what they do.”
“It couldn’t have been crashing the OS, that was read-only. It was crashing itself.”
He managed a half-shrug.
“But why would it do that? I’ve seen them run a lot longer than five seconds out in the wild. Do you think, maybe—?”
“Sure,” he said. “I can take a look. But you gotta do something too.”
“What’s that?”
“Take those stupid things outta your eyes.”
Reflexively, she stepped back. “Why?”
“I just wan
na see them. Your eyes.”
What are you so afraid of? she asked herself. Do you think he’ll see the truth in there?
But of course she was much better than that. Better than he was, anyway: she forced herself to disarm, and afterwards—looking straight into her naked eyes—he didn’t seem to see a thing he didn’t want to.
“You should leave them like that. It’s almost like you’re beautiful.”
“No it isn’t.” She dialed down the membrane and pushed the board through: Ricketts fumbled it; the contraption dropped onto the pallet beside him, the iso membrane sealing seamlessly in its wake. Clarke cranked its surface tension back to maximum while Ricketts, embarrassed by his own clumsiness, studied the board with feigned intensity.
Slowly, carefully, he slipped the headset into place and didn’t fuck up. He sagged onto his back, breathing heavily. The Cohen Board flickered to light.
“Shit,” he hissed suddenly. “Nasty little bitch.” And a moment later: “Oh. There’s your problem.”
“What?”
“Elbow room. She, like, attacks random addresses, only you put her in this really small cage so she ends up just clawing her own code. She’d last longer if you added memory.” He paused, then asked, “Why are you keeping her, anyway?”
“I just wanted to—ask it some things,” Clarke hedged.
“You’re kidding, right?”
She shook her head, although he couldn’t see her. “Um—”
“You do get that she doesn’t, like, understand anything?”
It took a moment for the words to sink in. “What do you mean?”
“She’s nowhere near big enough,” Ricketts told her. “Wouldn’t last two minutes in a Turing test.”