Behemoth r-3

by Peter Watts

  How would it work? she wondered. How to outcompete the hypercompetitor? Brute force, perhaps? Sheer cellular voracity, the same scramble-competition strategy that ßehemoth had used to beat Life 1.0, turned back upon itself? Would life burn twice as bright and half as long, would the whole biosphere move faster, think faster, live furiously and briefly as mayflies?

  But that was the old paradigm, to transform yourself into your enemy and then claim victory. There were other options, once you gave up on reinforcing and turned to redesign instead. Taka Ouellette, mediocre progeny of the Old Guard, couldn’t begin to guess at what they were. She doubted anyone could. What simulation could predict the behavior of a multimillion-species system when every living variable was perturbed at once? How many carefully-selected experimental treatments would it take to model a billion simultaneous mutations? Seppuku—whatever Seppuku was poised to become—threw the very concept of a controlled experiment out the window.

  North America was the experiment—unannounced, uncontrolled, an inconceivably tangled matrix of multiway ANOVAs and Hyperniche tables. Even if it failed, the world would hardly be worse off. ßehemoth would have suffered a major setback, Seppuku would have fallen on its sword, and whatever came after would at least—unlike ßehemoth— be limited to the inside of a host cell.

  And maybe it wouldn’t fail. Maybe everything would change for the better. There would be monsters, some hopeful. Mitochondria themselves might finally be driven to extinction, their ancient lease expired at last. Maybe people would change from the inside out, the old breed gone, replaced by something that looked the same but acted better.

  Maybe it was about fucking time.

  A little man nattered at her from a great distance. He stood in front of her, an irritating homunculus in ultrasharp focus, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. He paced back and forth, gesticulating madly. Taka gathered that he was afraid of something, or someone. Yes, that was it: someone was coming for him. He spoke as if his head was full of voices, as if he had lost control of a great many things at once. He threatened her—she thought he was threatening her, although his efforts seemed almost comical. He sounded like a lost little boy trying to act brave while looking for a place to hide.

  “I figured it out,” Taka told him. Her voice cracked like cheap brittle plastic. She wondered why that was. “It wasn’t so hard.”

  But he was too caught up in his own little world. It didn’t matter. He didn’t seem like the kind of person who’d really appreciate the dawn of a new age anyway.

  So many things were about to happen. The end of Life As We Knew It. The beginning of Life As We Don’t. It had already started. Her biggest regret was that she wouldn’t be around to see how it all turned out.

  Dave, honey, she thought. I did it. I got it right at last.

  You’d be proud of me.

  Bastille

  Sudbury rose in the night like a luminous tumor.

  Its core glowed from within, faintly by dryback standards but bright as day to Lenie Clarke: a walled, claustrophobic cluster of refitted skyscrapers in an abandoned wasteland of suburbs and commercial zones. The static field was obvious by inference. The new buildings and the grafted retrofits, the galls of living space wedged into the gaps between buildings—all extended to the inner edge of the field and no further. Like metastasis constrained under glass, Sudbury had grown into a hemisphere.

  They cut through from the east. Clarke’s diveskin squirmed in the field like a slug in a flame. Charged air transformed the rotors into whirling vortices of brilliant blue sparks. She found the effect oddly nostalgic; it seemed almost bioluminescent, like microbes fluorescing in the heat of a deep-sea vent. For a moment she could pretend that some airborne variant of Saint Elmo’s Fire trailed from those spinning blades.

  But only for a moment. There was only one microorganism up here worth mentioning, and it was anything but luminous.

  Then they were through, sniffing westward through the upper reaches of the Sudbury core. City canyon walls loomed close on either side. Sheet lightning sparked and flickered along the strip of sky overhead. Far below, intermittently eclipsed by new construction, some vestigial rapitrans line ran along the canyon floor like a taut copper thread.

  She resumed loading clips from the open backpack at her feet. Lubin had toured her through the procedure somewhere over Georgian Bay. Each clip contained a dozen slug grenades, color-coded by function: flash, gas, shipworm, clusterfuck. They went into the belt-and-holster arrangement draped over her thigh.

  Lubin spared a prosthetic glance. “Don’t forget to seal that pack when you’re done. How’s your tape?”

  She undid her top and checked the diveskin beneath. A broad X of semipermeable tape blocked off the electrolysis intake. “Still sticking.” She zipped the dryback disguise back into place. “Doesn’t this low-altitude stuff bother the local authorities?”

  “Not those authorities.” His tone evoked the image of blind eyes, turning. Evidently derms and antidotes and gutted bodies bought more than mere transportation. Clarke didn’t push the issue. She slid one last cartridge home and turned her attention forward.

  A couple of blocks ahead, the canyon ended in open space.

  “So that’s where he is,” she murmured. Lubin throttled back so that they were barely drifting forward.

  It spread out before their approach like a great dark coliseum, a clear zone carved from the claustrophobic architecture. Lubin brought the Sikorsky-Bell to a dead stop three hundred meters up, just short of that perimeter.

  It was a walled moat, two blocks on a side. A lone skyscraper—a fluted, multifaceted tower—rose from its center. A ghostly crown of blue lights glowed dimly from the roof; everything else was dead and dark, sixty-five floors with not so much as a pane alight. Patchwork foundations scarred the empty ground on all sides, the footprints of demolished buildings that had crowded the neighborhood back in happier times.

  She wondered what dryback eyes would see, if drybacks ever ventured here after dark. Maybe, when Sudbury’s citizens looked to this place, they didn’t see the Entropy Patrol at all. Maybe they saw a haunted tower, dark and ominous, full of skeletons and sick crawling things. Buried in the guts of the twenty-first century, besieged by alien microbes and ghosts in the machinery, could people be blamed for rediscovering a belief in evil spirits?

  Maybe they’re not even wrong, Clarke reflected.

  Lubin pointed to the spectral lights on the parapet. A landing pad rose from that nimbus, a dozen smaller structures holding court around it—freight elevators, ventilation shacks, the housings of retracted lifter umbilicals.

  Clarke looked back skeptically. “No.” Surely they couldn’t just land there. Surely there’d be defenses.

  Lubin was almost grinning. “Let’s find out.”

  “I’m not sure that’s—”

  He hit the throttle. They leapt into empty, unprotected space.

  Out of the canyon, they banked right. Clarke braced her hands against the dash. Earth and sky rotated around them; suddenly the ground was three hundred meters off her shoulder, an archeological ruin of razed foundations—and two black circles, meters across, staring up at her like the eye sockets of some giant cartoon skull. Not empty, though. Not even flat: they bulged subtly from the ground, like the exposed polar regions of great buried spheres.

  “What’re those?” she asked.

  No answer. Clarke glanced across the cockpit. Lubin was holding his binoculars one-handed between his knees, holding his pince-nez against their eyepieces. The apparatus stared down through the ventral canopy. Clarke shuddered inwardly: how to deal with the sense of one’s eyes floating half a meter outside the skull?

  “I said—” she began again.

  “Superheating artefact. Soil grains explode like popcorn.”

  “What would do that? Land mine?”

  He shook his head absently, his attention caught by something near the base of the building. “Particle beam. Orbital can
non.”

  Her gut clenched. “If he’s got—Ken, what if he sees—”

  Something flashed, sodium-bright, through the back of her skull. Clockwork stuttered briefly in her chest. The Sikorsky-Bell’s controls hiccoughed once, in impossible unison, and went dark.

  “I think he has,” Lubin remarked as the engine died.

  Wind whistled faintly through the fuselage. The rotor continued to whup-whup-whup overhead, its unpowered blades slapping the air through sheer inertia. There was no other sound but Lubin, cursing under his breath as they hung for an instant between earth and sky.

  In the next they were falling.

  Clarke’s stomach rose into her throat. Lubin’s feet slammed pedals. “Tell me when we pass sixty meters.”

  They arced past dark facades. “Wha—”

  “I’m blind.” Lubin’s teeth were bared in some twisted mix of fear and exultation; his hands gripped the joystick with relentless futility. “Tell me when—the tenth floor! Tell me when we pass the tenth floor!”

  Part of her gibbered, senseless and panic-stricken. The rest struggled to obey, tried desperately to count the floors as they streaked past but they were too close, everything was a blur and they were going to crash they were going to crash right into the side of the tower but suddenly it was gone, swept past stage left, its edge passing almost close enough to touch. Now the structure’s north face coasted into view, the focus sharper with distance and—

  Oh God what is that—

  Some unaffordable, awestruck piece of her brain murmered it can’t be but it was, black and toothless and wide enough to swallow legions: a gaping mouth in the building’s side. She tried to ignore it as they fell past, forced herself to focus on the floors beneath, count from the ground up. They were diving straight past that impossible maw—they were diving into it—

  “Le—”

  “Now!” she yelled.

  For a second that went on forever, Lubin did nothing at all.

  The strangest sensations, in that elastic moment. The sound of the rotor, still impossibly awhirl through luck or magic or sheer stubborn denial, its machine-gun rhythm dopplered down like the slow, distant heartbeat of a receding astronaut. The sight of the ground racing up to spike them into oblivion. Sudden calm resignation, a recognition of the inevitable: we’re going to die. And a nod, sadly amused, to the irony that the mighty Ken Lubin, who always thought ten steps ahead, could have made such a stupid fucking mistake.

  But then he yanked on the stick and the chopper reared back, losing its nerve at the last moment. Suddenly she weighed a hundred tonnes. They faced the sky; the world skidded around them, earth and glass and far-off cloud rolling past the windshield in a blurry jumble. For one astonishing moment they hovered. Then something kicked them hard from behind: from behind, the sound of cracking polymers and tearing metal. They lurched sideways and that magical rotor slashed the earth and stopped dead, defeated at last. Lenie Clarke stared up mad-eyed at a great monolith leaning crazily against the night sky, descending along with the darkness to devour her.

  “Lenie.”

  She opened her eyes. That impossible mouth still yawned overhead. She squeezed her eyes shut, held them closed for a second. Tried again.

  Oh.

  Not a mouth after all. A great charred hole, partway up the north façade, stretching across ten gutted floors or more.

  Rio, she realized. They never repaired the damage.

  The roof of the building was clearly visible, straight ahead through the forward windshield. The lights up there had gone out. The whole building seemed to lean to the left; the chopper’s nose was twisted up at a thirty-degree angle, like some mechanical mole that had breached from the earth and torqued on its axis.

  Their ride was sockeye. The tail boom must have either crumpled at their backs or snapped off entirely.

  Pain in her chest and arms. There was something wrong with the sky. It was—that was it, it was dark. They were in a clave, where static-field generators hummed endless electricity into the air. Sudbury’s sky should have been flickering. Before they’d fallen, it had been.

  “Lenie.”

  “Was that—was that a pulse?” she wondered.

  “Can you move?”

  She focused, and located the source of the pain: Lubin’s backpack, hard and lumpy, clutched tightly as life itself against her chest. It must have risen from the floor during the dive, she must have grabbed it in midair. She remembered none of it. The slit along its top puckered like a mouth in her embrace, affording glimpses of the stuff inside—an angular jumble of tools and ordnance pressing painfully into her flesh.

  She willed her grip to relax. The pain subsided.

  “I think I’m okay. Are you—”

  He looked blindly back at her through sandblasted eyes.

  An image from the fall came to her, unregistered until now: Lubin’s pince-nez, sailing gracefully towards the back of the cabin. Clarke unbuckled and twisted to look behind her. Sudden sharp pain splintered down her spine like cracking ice. She cried out.

  Lubin’s hand was on her shoulder. “What?”

  “Wh—whiplash, I think. I’ve had worse.” She settled back in her seat. No point in looking for the pince-nez anyway; the pulse would have fried them as thoroughly as it had the chopper.

  “You’re blind again,” she said softly.

  “I packed another pair. The knapsack’s shielded.”

  Its open mouth grinned at her, zipper-toothed. Realization crashed over her in a sickening wave. “Oh, fuck, Ken, I—I forgot to zip it up. I’m—”

  He waved away her apology. “You’ll be my eyes. Is the cabin breached?”

  “What?”

  “Any breaks in the fuselage? Anything big enough for you to crawl through, say?”

  “Uh—” Clarke turned again, carefully. Pain feinted to the base of her skull, but stopped short of outright attack. “No. The rear bulkhead’s crumpled to shit, but...”

  “Good. Do you still have the pack?”

  She opened her mouth to answer—and remembered two carbonised mounds staring into the sky.

  “Focus, Len. Do you—”

  “It doesn’t matter, Ken.”

  “It matters a great—”

  “We’re dead, Ken.” She took a deep, despairing breath. “He’s got an orbital cannon, remember? Any second now he’ll just—and there’s not a fucking thing we can—”

  “Listen to me.” Suddenly, Lubin was close enough to kiss. “If he was trying to kill us we’d be dead already, do you understand? I’d doubt he’s even willing to bring his satellites online at this point; he doesn’t want to risk losing them to the shredders.”

  “But he already—the pulse—”

  “Didn’t come from orbit. He must have packed half the floors in that building with capacitors. He’s not trying to kill us. He’s only trying to soften us up.” He thrust out his hand. “Now where’s the pack?”

  She handed it over, numbly. Lubin set it on his knee and rummaged inside.

  He’s not trying to kill us. Lubin had made that claim before, laid it out as part of his working hypothesis en route from Toromilton. Clarke wasn’t entirely sure that recent events bore him out, especially since—

  A flicker of motion, just to the right. Clarke turned and gasped, the pain of that motion forgotten in an instant. A monstrous face stared back through the bubble of the canopy, centimeters away, a massive black wedge of muscle and bone. Small dark eyes glinted from deep sockets. The apparition grinned, showing sawtooth serrations embedded in jaws like a leghold trap.

  In the next moment it had dropped out of sight.

  “What?” Lubin’s face panned back and forth. “What do you see?”

  “I—I think it used to be a dog,” Clarke said, her voice quavering.

  “I think they all did,” Lubin told her.

  Tilted at the sky, she hadn’t seen them arrive; she had to look down to see forward, and now—through the ventral bubble between her
knees, over the edge of the door if she strained from her seat—the darkness seethed on all sides. The apparitions did not bark or growl. They made no sound at all. They didn’t waste energy on brute animal rage, didn’t throw themselves slavering against the hull to get at the soft meat inside. They circled like silent sharks.

  Boosted light stripped nothing from these creatures. They were utterly black.

  “How many?” Lubin ran one hand across his grenade pistol; the ammo belt lay across his knees, one end still trailing down into the knapsack between his feet.

  “Twenty. Thirty. At least. Oh Jesus, Ken, they’re huge, they’re twice as big as you are...” Clarke fought rising panic.

  Lubin’s pistol came with three cartridge slots and a little thumbwheel to choose between them. He felt out flash, shipworm, and clusterfuck from the belt and slotted them in. “Can you see the main entrance?”

  “Yes.”

  “What direction? How far?”

  “About eleven o’clock. Maybe—maybe eighty meters.” Might as well be eighty lightyears.

  “What’s between there and here?”

  She swallowed. “A pack of rabid monster dogs waiting to kill us.”

  “Besides that.”

  “We’re—we’re on the edge of the main drag. Paved. Old foundations either side, pretty much razed and filled.” And then, hoping he wasn’t heading where she feared—hoping she could deflect him if he was—she added, “No cover.”

  “Can you see my binocs?”

  She turned carefully, torsion and injury in uneasy balance. “Right behind you. The strap’s caught up in the cleat over the door.”

  He abandoned his weapon long enough to disentangle the binoculars and hand them over. “Describe the entrance.”

  Range-finding and thermal were dead, of course. Only the raw optics still worked. Clarke tried to ignore the dark shapes in the blurry foreground. “Bank of glass doors, eight of them. They’re set into this shallow indentation in the façade, CSIRA logo on top. Ken—”