by Peter Watts
“But it was talking back. Before it crashed.”
“No she wasn’t.”
“Ricketts, I heard it.”
He snorted; the sound turned into a racking cough. “She’s got a dialog tree, sure. She’s got like keyword reflexes and stuff, but that’s not—”
Heat rose in her cheeks. I’m such an idiot.
“I mean, some Shredders are smart enough, I guess,” he added. “Just not this one.”
She ran her fingers over her scalp. “Is there some other way to—interrogate it, maybe? Different interface? Or, I don’t know, decompile the code?”
“It evolved. You ever try to figure out evolved code?”
“No.”
“It’s really messy. Most of it doesn’t even do anything any more, it’s all just junk genes left over from...” his voice trailed off.
“And why don’t you just flush her anyway?” he asked, very softly. “These things aren’t smart. They’re not special. They’re just shitbombs some assholes throw at us to try and crash whatever we got left. They even attack each other if you give ’em half a chance. If it weren’t for the firewalls and the exorcists and stuff they’d have wrecked everything by now.”
Clarke didn’t answer.
Almost sighing, Ricketts said: “You’re really strange, you know?”
She smiled a bit.
“Nobody’s gonna believe me when I tell them about this. Too bad you can’t, you know, come back with me. Just so they won’t think I made it all up.”
“Back?”
“Home. When I get out of here.”
“Well,” she said, “you never know.”
A pathetic, gap-toothed smile bloomed beneath his headset.
“Ricketts,” she said after a while.
No answer. He lay there, patient and inert, still breathing. The telemetry panel continued to scribble out little traces of light, cardio, pulmo, neocort. All way too high; Seppuku had cranked his metabolic rate into the stratosphere.
He’s asleep. He’s dying. Let him be.
She climbed into the cockpit and collapsed into the pilot’s station. The viewports around her glowed with a dim green light, fading to gray. She’d left the cabin lights off; Phocoena was a submerged cave in the dying light, its recesses already hidden in shadow. By now she was almost fond of the blindness afforded her naked eyes.
So often now, darkness seemed the better choice.
Basement Wiring
First he blinded her, put stinging drops into her eyes that reduced the whole world to a vague gray abstraction. He wheeled her out of the cell down corridors and elevators whose presence she could only infer only through ambient acoustics and a sense of forward motion. Those were what she focused on: momentum, and sound, and the blurry photosensitivity that one might get by looking at the world through a thick sheet of waxed paper. She tried to ignore the smell of her own shit pooling beneath her on the gurney. She tried to ignore the pain, not so raw and electric now, but spread across her whole thorax like a great stinging bruise.
It was impossible, of course. But she tried.
Her vision was beginning to clear when the gurney rolled to a stop. She could see blurry shapes in the fog by the time the induction field cut back in and reduced her once more to a rag doll, unable even to struggle within restraint. The view sharpened in small increments as her tormentor installed her in some kind of rigid exoskeleton that would have posed her on all fours, if any part of her had been touching the ground. It was gimbaled; a gentle push from the side and the fuzzy outlines of the room rotated lazily past her eyes, as if she were affixed to a merry-go-round.
By the time she got her motor nerves back, she could see clearly again. She was in a dungeon. There was nothing medieval about it, no torches on the walls. Indirect light glowed from recessed grooves that ran along the edges of the ceiling. The loops and restraints hanging from the wall in front of her were made of memetic polymers. The blades and coils and alligator clips on the bench to her left were stainless gleaming alloy. The floor was a spotless mosaic of Escher tiles, cerulean fish segueing into jade waterfowl. Even the cleansers and stain removers on the cart by the door were, she had no doubt, filled with the latest synthetics. The only anachronistic touch was a pile of rough wooden poles leaning up against one corner of the room. Their tips had been hand-whittled to points.
There was a collar—a pillory, actually—around her neck. It blinded her to anything behind. Perhaps realizing this, Achilles Desjardins stepped accommodatingly into view at her left side, holding a handpad.
It’s only him, she thought, a bit giddily. The others didn’t know. If they had, why had they been wearing body condoms? Why the pretense of a quarantine cell, why not just bring her here directly? The men who’d delivered her didn’t know what was going on. They must have been told she was a vector, a danger, someone who’d try to escape the moment she knew the jig was up. They must have thought they’d been doing the right thing.
It didn’t make any difference to her current predicament. But it mattered just the same: the whole world wasn’t mad. Parts of it were just misinformed.
Achilles looked down at her. She looked back; the stock pushed against her head as she craned her neck.
She squirmed. The frame that held her body seemed to tighten a tiny bit. “Why are you doing this?”
He shrugged. “To get off. Thought that’d be obvious even to a fuckup like you, Alice.”
Her lower lip trembled uncontrollably. She bit down on it, hard. Don’t give him anything. Don’t give him anything. But of course it was way too late for that.
“You look like you want to say something,” Achilles remarked.
She shook her head.
“Come on, girl. Speak! Speak, girl!”
I’ve got nothing to say to you, you fucking asshole.
His hand was in his pocket again. Something in there made a familiar snick-snick noise.
He wants me to talk. He told me to talk. What happens if I don’t?
Snick-snick.
What if I do, and he doesn’t like what I say? What if—
It didn’t matter, she realized. It didn’t make any difference at all. Hell was an arbitrary place. If he wanted to hurt her, he’d hurt her no matter what she said.
She was probably already as good as dead.
“You’re not human,” she whispered.
Achilles hmmed a moment. “Fair enough. I used to be, though. Before I was liberated. Did you know humanity can be extracted? Little bug called Spartacus sucks it right out of you.” He wandered back out of sight. Taka strained to follow, but the stocks kept her facing forward. “So don’t blame me, Alice. I was the victim.”
“I’m...I’m sorry,” Taka tried.
“I’ll bet. They all are.”
She swallowed, and tried not to go where that led.
The exoskeleton must have been spring-loaded; there was a click and suddenly her arms were yanked up behind her, spread back in a delta-V. The motion stretched the flesh tight across her chest; the pain that had diffused across her body collapsed back down to a sharp agonized focus in her breast. She bit back a scream. Some distant, irrelevant part of her took pride in her success.
Then something cold slapped against her ass and she cried out anyway—but Achilles was just cleaning her up with a wet rag. The wetness evaporated almost instantly, chilling her. Taka smelled alcohol.
“Excuse me? You said something?”
“Why do you want to hurt me?” The words burst from the throat of some wounded animal before she could bite them back: Stupid, stupid bitch. Whining and crying and groveling just the way he likes it. You know why he does it. Your whole life you’ve known people like this existed.
But of course the animal hadn’t been asking why at all. The animal wouldn’t have even understood the answer. The animal only wanted him to stop.
His hand ran lightly over her ass. “You know why.”
She thrashed her head from side to side in fra
ntic, violent denial. “There are other ways, easier ways! Without the risk, without anyone trying to stop you—”
“Nobody’s trying to stop me now,” Achilles pointed out.
“But you must know, with a good set of phones and a feedback skin you could do things that wouldn’t even be physically possible in the real world, with more women than you could ever dream of having in—”
“Tried it.” Footsteps, returning. “Jerking off in a hallucination.”
“But they look and feel and even smell so real you’d never know—”
Suddenly his hand was knotted tightly in her hair, twisting her head around, putting her face a few scant centimeters from his. He was not smiling now, and when he spoke again, his voice had lost all pretense of civility.
“It’s not about the sights or the smells, okay? You can’t hurt a hallucination. It’s play-acting. What’s the point of torturing something that can’t even suffer?” He yanked her head again for good measure.
And in the next instant released it, casually cheerful once more. “Anyway, I’m really no different than any other guy. You’re an educated stumpfuck, you must know that the only difference between fucking someone and flaying them is a few neurons and a whole lotta social conditioning. You’re all like me. I’ve just lost the parts that pretend it isn’t true.
“And now,” he added, with a good-natured wink, “you’ve got an oral exam.”
Taka shook her head. “Please...”
“Don’t sweat it, it’s mainly review. As I recall, in our last lesson we were talking about Seppuku, and you seemed surprised at the thought that it might reproduce sexually. I know, I know—never even occurred to you, did it? Even though everything has sex, even though bacteria have sex. Even though you and I are having sex, it never occurred to you that Seppuku might. Not too smart, Alice. David would be very disappointed.”
Oh Dave. Thank God you can’t see me now.
“But let’s move past that. Today we’re gonna start with the idea that sex might kick in as, say, as a density-dependent response. Population increases, sexual mode cuts in, what happens?”
He moved behind her again. She tried to focus, tried to put her mind to this absurd, humiliating game on the remote chance there might be some way to win. Sexual mode cuts in, she thought, genes shuffle, and the recessives—
Another click. The exoskeleton stretched its legs back and forced hers apart, a meter off the floor.
—the reces—oh God—it’s got all those lethal recessives, they start to express and the whole genotype—it collapses...
Achilles laid something hard and dry and room-temperature across the back of her right thigh. “Anything? Or should I just get started back here?”
“It self-destructs!” she blurted. “It dies off! Past some critical density...”
“Mmmm.”
She couldn’t tell if that had been the answer he was looking for. It made sense. As if sense would matter in this godforsaken—
“So why hasn’t it died off?” he asked curiously.
“It—it—it hasn’t hit the threshold yet. You keep burning it before it gets enough of a foothold.”
No sound or motion for an eternity.
“Not bad,” Achilles said finally.
Relief crashed through her like a wave. Some inner voice berated her for it, reminded her that she was still captive and Achilles Desjardins could change the rules whenever he pleased, but she ignored it and savored the tiny reprieve.
“So it is a counteragent,” she babbled. “I was right all along. It’s programmed to outcompete ßehemoth and then take itself out of the picture.”
From somewhere behind her shoulder, the sense of a trap snapping shut.
“You’ve never heard the term relict population, then?” The weight lifted from her thigh. “You think a bug that hid for four billion years wouldn’t be able to find some little corner, somewhere, where Seppuku couldn’t get at it? One’s all it would take, you know. One’s all it took the first time. And then Seppuku takes itself out of the picture, as you say, and ßehemoth comes back stronger than ever. What does Seppuku do then, I wonder? Rise from the grave?”
“But wh—”
“Sloppy thinking, Alice. Really sloppy.”
Smack.
Something drew a stinging line across her legs. Taka cried out; the inner voice sneered told you so.
“Please,” she whimpered.
“Back of the class, cunt.” Something cold tickled her vulva. A faint rasping sound carried over her shoulder, like the sound of a fingernail on sandpaper.
“I can see why pine furniture used to be so cheap,” Desjardins remarked. “You get all these splinters...”
She stared hard at the tiled floor, the fish-to-bird transition, focused on that indefinable moment when background and foreground merged. She tried to lose herself in the exercise. She tried to think of nothing but the pattern.
She couldn’t escape the thought that Achilles had designed the floor for exactly that purpose.
Splice
She was safe. She was home. She was deep in the familiar abyss, water pressing down with the comforting weight of mountains, no light to betray her presence to the hunters overhead. No sound but her own heartbeat. No breath.
No breath...
But that was normal, wasn’t it? She was a creature of the deep sea, a glorious cyborg with electricity sparking in her chest, supremely adapted. She was immune to the bends. Her rapture owed nothing to nitrogen. She could not drown.
But somehow, impossibly, she was.
Her implants had stopped working. Or no, her implants had disappeared entirely, leaving nothing in her chest but a pounding heart, flopping on the bottom of a great bleeding hole where lung and machinery had once been. Her flesh cried out for oxygen. She could feel her blood turning to acid. She tried to open her mouth, tried to gasp, but even that useless reflex was denied her here; her hood stretched across her face like an impermeable skin. She panicked, thrashing towards a surface that might have been lightyears away. The very core of her was a yawning vacuum. She convulsed around her own emptiness.
Suddenly, there was light.
It was a single beam from somewhere overhead, skewering her through the darkness. She struggled towards it; gray chaos seethed at the edges of sight, blinding her peripheral vision as her eyes began to shut down. There was light above and oblivion on all sides. She reached for the light.
A hand seized her wrist and lifted her into atmosphere. Suddenly she could breathe again; her lungs had been restored, her diveskin miraculously removed. She sank to her knees on a solid deck, sucked great whooping breaths.
She looked up, into the face of her salvation. A fleshless, pixelated caricature of herself grinned back; its eyes were empty whirling holes. “You’re not dead yet,” it said, and ripped out her heart.
It stood over her, frowning as she bled out on the deck. “Hello?” it asked, its voice turned strangely metallic. “Are you there? Are you there?”
She awoke. The real world was darker than her dream had been.
She remembered Rickett’s voice, thin and reedy: They even attack each other if you give ’em half a chance...
“Are you there?”
It was the voice from her dream. It was the ship’s voice. Phocoena.
I know what to do, she realized.
She turned in her seat. Sunset biotelemetry sparkled in the darkness behind her: a fading life-force, rendered in constellations of yellow and orange.
And for the first time, red.
“Hello?” she said.
“How long i been asleep?”
Ricketts was using the saccadal interface to talk. How weak do you have to be, Clarke wondered, before it’s too much effort to speak aloud?
“I don’t know,” she told the darkness. “A few hours, I guess.” And then, dreading the answer: “How are you feeling?”
“About same,” he lied. Or maybe not, if Phocoena was doing its job.
&nb
sp; She climbed from her seat and stepped carefully back to the telemetry panel. A facet of isolation membrane glistened dimly beyond, barely visible to her uncapped eyes.
Ricketts’s antibodies and glucose metabolism had both gone critical while she’d slept. If she was reading the display right Phocoena had been able to compensate for the glucose to some extent, but the immune problems were out of its league. And an entirely new readout had appeared on the diagnostic panel, cryptic and completely unexpected: something called AND was increasing over time in Rickett’s body. She tapped the label and invoked the system glossary: AND expanded into Anomalous Nucleotide Duplex, which told her nothing. But there was a dotted horizontal line etched near the top of the y-axis, some critical threshold that Ricketts was approaching but had not yet met; and the label on that feature was one she knew.
Metastasis.
It can’t be long now, Clarke thought. Then, hating herself: Maybe long enough...
“Still there?” Ricketts asked.
“Yes.”
“It’s lonely in here.”
Under the cowl, maybe. Or inside his own failing flesh.
“Talk to me.”
Go ahead. You know you want an opening.
“About what?”
“Anything. Just—anything.”
You can’t exploit someone if you don’t even ask...
She took a breath. “You know what you said about the, the shredders? How someone was using them to try and crash everything?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think they’re supposed to crash the system at all,” she said.
A brief silence. “But that’s what they do. Ask anyone.”
“That’s not all they do. Taka said they breach dams and short out static-fields and who knows what. That one on the board was sitting in her MI for God knows how long, and it never even peeped until she’d figured out Seppuku. They’re attacking a lot of targets through the network, and they need the network to get to them.”
She looked into the darkness, past the telemetry panel, past the faint shimmer of reflecting membrane. Ricketts’s head was a dim crescent, its edges rough and smooth in equal measure: outlined hints of disheveled hair and contoured plastic. She couldn’t see his face. The headset would have covered his eyes even if her caps had been in. His body was an invisible suggestion of dark mass, too distant for the meager light of the display. It did not move.