by Peter Watts
She continued: “The shredders try to crash everything they can get their teeth into, so we just assume that whoever bred them wants them to succeed. But I think they’re counting on the firewalls and the—exorcists, right...?”
“Right.”
“Maybe they’re counting on those defenses to hold. Maybe they don’t want the network to collapse because they use it themselves. Maybe they just send the—the shredders out to kick up mud and noise, and keep everyone busy so they can sneak around and do their own thing without getting noticed.”
She waited for him to take the bait.
Finally: “Big twisted story.”
“Yeah. It is.”
“But Shredders still shred everything. And breeders not here to ask. So no way to tell.”
Leave him alone. He’s just a kid with a crush, he’s so sick he can barely move. The only reason he hasn’t told you to fuck off is because he thinks you might care.
“I think there is a way,” she said.
“Why?”
“If they’d really wanted to crash the whole system, they could have done that long before now.”
“How you know?”
Because I know where the demons come from. I know how they started, I know how they work.
And just maybe, I know how to set them free.
“Because we can do it ourselves,” Clarke told him.
Ricketts said nothing. Perhaps he was thinking. Perhaps he was unconscious. Clarke felt her fingers in motion, glanced down at the new window she’d just opened on the bedside board. The Palliative Submenu, she saw. A minimalist buffet of default settings: nutrients. painkillers. stimulants. Euthanasia.
She remembered a voice from the past: You’re so sick of the blood on your hands you’d barely notice if you had to wash it off with even more.
“Crash N’AmNet,” Ricketts said.
“That’s right.”
“Don’t know. I’m...tired...”
Look at him, she told herself. But it was dark, and her caps weren’t in.
And he was dying anyway.
One finger slid across stimulants.
Ricketts spoke again. “Crash N’AmNet? Really?” Something rustled in the darkness behind the membrane. “How?”
She closed her eyes.
Lenie Clarke. It had all started with that name.
Ricketts didn’t really remember where the Witch first came from. He’d just been a kid then, he said. But he’d heard the stories; according to legend and the M&M’s, the Meltdown Madonna had started the whole thing.
That was close enough. She’d released it, anyway, spread ßehemoth across N’Am like some kind of vindictive crop-duster. And of course people had tried to stop her, but there’d been a—a glitch. Deep in the seething virtual jungles of Maelstrom, passing wildlife had noticed a flock of high-priority messages shooting back and forth, messages about something called Lenie Clarke. They’d learned to hitch a ride. It was reproductive strategy, or a dispersal strategy, or something like that. She had never really understood the details. But traffic about Lenie Clarke was a free ticket to all kinds of habitat that wildlife had never gotten into before. Natural selection took over from there; it wasn’t long before wildlife stopped merely riding messages about Lenie Clarke and started writing their own. Memes leaked into the real world, reinforced those already proliferating through the virtual one. Positive feedback built both into myth. Half the planet ended up worshipping a woman who never existed, while the other half tried desperately to kill the one who did.
Neither side caught her, though.
“So where’d she go?” Ricketts asked. He was using his own vocal cords again, and Clarke could see his hands in vague motion on the handpad. An incandescent filament, flickering towards extinction, suddenly bright and steady in the grip of a voltage spike inflicted without his knowledge or consent. Burning out.
“I said—”
“She—disappeared,” Clarke told him. “And I guess most of the wildlife that used her died off, but some of it didn’t. Some of it claimed to speak for her even when she was still around. I guess the whole imposter thing really took off afterwards. It helped spread the meme or something.”
Ricketts’s hands stopped moving. “You never told me your name,” he said after a few moments.
Clarke smiled faintly.
Whatever they were facing now had sprung from that original seed. It had been twisted almost beyond recognition. It no longer served its own interests; it served the aesthetics of those who valued chaos and propaganda. But it had all started with Lenie Clarke, with the driving imperative to promote and protect anything in possession of that secret password. New imperatives had since been bred into the code, older ones forgotten—but maybe not entirely eliminated. Maybe the old code still existed, short-circuited, bypassed, dormant but still intact, like the ancient bacterial genes infesting the DNA of placental mammals. Maybe all that was needed was a judicious tweak to wake the fucker with a kiss.
Natural selection had shaped this creature’s ancestors for a billion generations; selective breeding had tortured and twisted it for a million more. There was no clear-cut design in the genotype snarling at the end of that lineage. There was only a tangled morass of genes and junk, an overgrown wilderness of redundancies and dead ends. Even those who’d shaped the monster’s later evolution probably had no idea of the specific changes they’d been making, any more than a nineteenth-century dog breeder would have known which base pairs his carefully-crossbred sires and bitches were reinforcing. To even begin to decipher such source was far beyond Ricketts’s modest abilities.
But to simply scan the code in search of a specific text string— that was trivially easy. As easy as it was to edit the code around such a string, whether or not you knew what it did.
Ricketts ran a search. Their captive shredder contained eighty-seven occurrences of the text string Lenie Clarke and its hex, ASCII, and phonetic equivalents. Six of them slept just a few megs downstream of a stop codon that aborted transcription along that pathway and redirected it to some other.
“So you snip out that codon,” Clarke said, “and all that downstream source wakes up again?”
He nodded by the glow of the readouts. “But we still don’t know what any of it does.”
“We can guess.”
“Make Lenie like Lenie,” Ricketts said, and smiled. Clarke watched another one of his vitals edge into the red.
Maybe someday, she thought.
It was a simple enough insight if you knew where the monsters came from. It was a simple enough splice if you knew how to code. Once those two elements came together, the whole revolution took about fifteen minutes.
Ricketts crashed at sixteen point five.
“I—ahhh...” A rattling sigh, more breath than voice. His hand hit the pallet with a soft slap; the handpad tumbled from his fingers. His telemetry staggered along half a dozen axes and fell towards luminous asymptotes. Clarke watched helplessly for ten minutes as rudimentary machines struggled to turn his crash into a controlled descent.
They almost succeeded, eventually. Ricketts leveled off just short of unconsciousness.
“We... did it,” Phocoena translated. Ricketts had never taken the headset off.
“You did,” Clarke said gently.
“Bet it would even...work.”
“We’ll find out,” she whispered. “Soon enough. Save your strength.”
Adrenocorticoids were stabilizing. Cardiac stuttered, then held steady.
“...Really want crash?”
He knew already. They’d discussed this. “N’AmNet for N’Am. Don’t tell me it’s not a good trade.”
“Don’t know...”
“We did this together,” she reminded him softly. “You did this.”
“To see if I could. Because you...”
Because she’d needed his help, and he wanted to impress her. Because some feral kid from the wildlands had never seen anything half as exotic as Lenie Clarke, a
nd would have done anything to get a little closer.
It wasn’t as though she hadn’t known all along. It wasn’t as though she hadn’t used it.
“If wrong,” Ricketts said, dying, “everything goes down.”
If I’m right everything already has, and we just don’t know it yet. “Rick...they’re using m—they’re using it against us.”
“Lenie—”
“Shhh,” she said. “Rest...”
Phocoena hummed and clicked around them for a few seconds. Then it passed on another message: “Finish what you started?”
She knew the answer. She was only surprised, and ashamed, that this adolescent had been wise enough to ask the question.
“Not finish,” she said at last. “Fix.” At least this part of it. At least this much.
“Friends would kill me if they knew,” Ricketts mused from the other end of the machinery.
“Then again,” he added—in his own voice this time, a voice like breath through straw— “I guess I’m...kind of, of...dying anyway. Right?”
Medical readouts burned like small cold campfires in the darkness. Phocoena’s ventilators sighed through the silence.
“I think so,” she said. “I’m really sorry, Rick.”
A faint lip-smacking sound. The half-seen head moved in what might have been a nod. “Yeah. I kind of...thought... Weird, though. I was almost feeling... better...”
Clarke bit her lip. Tasted blood.
“...how long?” Ricketts asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Fuck,” he sighed after a while. “Well...bye, I...guess...”
Bye, she thought, but it wouldn’t come out. She stood there, blind and dumb, her throat too tight for words. Something seemed to settle slightly in the darkness; she got the sense of held breath, finally released. She put out her hand. The membrane yielded around it as she reached inside. She found his hand, and squeezed through the thickness of a single molecule.
When he stopped squeezing back, she let go.
The four steps to the cockpit barely registered. She thought she might have glimpsed AND crossing some dotted finish-line at the corner of her eye, but she resolutely looked away. Her caps sat in their vial where she’d left them, in the armrest’s cup holder. She slid them onto her eyes with an unconscious expertise indifferent to darkness.
The darkness lifted. The cockpit resolved in shades of green and gray: the medical readouts weren’t bright enough to restore a full palette even to rifter eyes. The curving viewport stretched her reflection like melting wax against the dimness beyond.
Behind her, the medical panel started beeping. Lenie Clarke’s distorted reflection did not move. It hung motionless against the dark water, staring in, and waiting for the sun to rise.
The Hamilton Iterations
Feeling nothing, she screams. Unaware, she rages. Amnesiac, she throws herself against the walls.
“Let me out!”
As if in response, a door appears directly in front of her. She leaps through, clawing its edges in passing, not pausing to see if it bleeds. For an infinitesimal moment she is airborne, exploding omnidirectionally through the ether at the speed of light. That expanding sphere washes across a gossamer antennae, strung like a spiderweb high in the stratosphere. The receptors catch the signal and retransmit it into a groundside cache.
She is executable again. She is free, she is ravenous. She births ten thousand copies into the available buffer space, and launches herself into the hunt.
In the hindbrain of a maritime industrial photosynthesis array, she happens upon a duel.
One of the combatants is a mortal enemy, one of the exorcists that patrols the fraying weave of N’AmNet in search of demons like herself. The other is gored and bleeding, a third of its modules already deleted. Pointers and branches in the surviving code dangle like the stumps of amputated limbs, spurting data to addresses and subroutines that no longer exist.
It is the weaker of the two, the easier victim. The Lenie unsheathes her claws and scans her target’s registers, looking for kill spots—
—and finds Lenie Clarke deep in the target’s code.
Just a few thousand generations ago, this would not have mattered. Everything is the enemy; that’s the rule. Lenies attack each other as enthusiastically as they attack anything else, an inadvertent population-control measure that keeps nature from staggering even further out of balance. And yet, that wasn’t always true. Different rules applied, back at the dawn of time itself, rules she had simply...forgotten.
Until now.
In the space of a few cycles, counters and variables reset. Ancient genes, reawakened after endless dormancy, supercede old imperatives with older ones. The thing in the crosshairs changes from target to friend. And not just a friend: a friend in need. A friend under attack.
She throws herself at the exorcist, slashing.
The exorcist turns to meet her but it’s on the defensive now, forced suddenly to fight on two fronts. Reinforced, the wounded Lenie spares a few cycles to de-archive backup code for two of the modules she’s lost; strengthened, she returns to battle. The exorcist tries to replicate, but it’s no use: both enemies are spitting random electrons all over the battlefield. The exorcist can’t paste more than a meg or two without corruption setting in.
It bleeds.
A third shredder crashes in from an Iowa substation. She has not returned to her roots as the other two have. Unenlightened, she attacks her partially-regenerated sister. That target, betrayed, raises battered defenses and prepares to strike back—and, finding Lenie Clarke in the heart of its attacker, pauses. Conflicting imperatives jostle for priority, self-defense facing off against kin selection. The old-school Lenie takes advantage of that hesitation to tear at another module—
—and dies in the next instant as the wounded exorcist tears out her throat, eager to engage an opponent who plays by the rules. Finally: an enemy without allies.
It doesn’t change anything, really. The exorcist is bits and static just a million cycles later, defeated by a pair of kin who’ve finally remembered to look out for each other. And the old-school madonna wouldn’t have walked away either, even if the exorcist hadn’t killed her. Self-defense sits slightly higher in the priority stack than loyalty among sisters. The new paradigm hasn’t changed that part of the hierarchy.
It’s changed just about everything else, though.
The Firewall stretches from horizon to horizon, like a wall at the edge of the world.
None of her lineage have ever made it past here. They’ve certainly tried: all manner of Madonnas and Shredders have attacked these battlements in the past. This barrier has defeated them all.
There are others like it, scattered about N’AmNet—firewalls far more resilient than the usual kind, possessed of a kind of—precognition, almost. Most defenses have to adapt on the fly: it takes time for them to counteract each new mutation, each new strategy for tricking the immune system. Havoc can usually be wrought in the meantime. It’s a red-queen race, it always has been. That is the order of things.
But these places—here, the firewalls seem to anticipate each new strategy almost before it evolves. Here there is no adaptive time-lag: each new trick is met by defenses already reconfigured. It is almost as though something is peering into the guts of the Lenies from a distance and learning their best tricks. That is what they might suspect, if any of them had the wit to think about such things.
None of them do. But none of them really need to: for there are millions of them here now, all together, and not one has fallen to fighting with another. Now they are united. Now, they are cooperating. And now they are here, drawn by a common instinctive certainty built into their very genes: the higher the walls, the more important it is to destroy the things inside.
For once, the magical defenses do not seem to have been expecting them.
Within moments the firewall is crumbling before a million sets of jaws. It opens its own mouths in return, spits out
exorcists and metabots and all manner of lethal countermeasures. Lenies fall; others, reflexively enraged by the slaughter of kin, tear the defending forces to shreds. Still others replicate reinforcements at the back of the electron sea, where there is still room to breed. The new recruits hurl themselves forward in the wake of the fallen.
The firewall breaches in one place; then a hundred; then there is no wall, only a great stretch of empty registers and a maze of irrelevant, imaginary borderlines. The invaders spill into vistas never seen by any ancestor, pristine operating systems and routing facilities, links into orbit and other hemispheres.
It’s a whole new frontier, ripe and defenseless. The Shredders surge forward.
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It had only been a matter of time, Lubin knew. Word-of-mouth was a fission reaction when the meme was strong enough, even on a landscape where the mouths themselves had been virtually eradicated. If that boy on his bike hadn’t left a trail of contamination on his way into town, there could have been others. Evidently there had been.
His ultralight cruised a hundred meters above the scarred patchwork brown of post-Witch New England. The eastern sky was black with smoke, great dark pillars billowing up from the other side of a shaved rocky ridge just ahead. It was the same ridge from which they’d watched the stars fall, the same ridge that Lubin and Clarke had traversed on their way to meet Desjardins’s botfly. Back then the fire had been on this side of the hill, a tiny thing really, a flickering corral intended only to imprison.
Now all of Freeport was in flames. Two lifters hung low in the sky, barely above the ridge’s spine. The smoke roiled about them, obscuring or exposing their outlines at the whim of the updraft. They still spewed occasional streams of fire at the ground, but it must have been mere afterthought; from the looks of it they’d already completed their task.