Behemoth r-3

by Peter Watts

  “What?” She struggled up on her elbows. “But—the tripwires, the kill-switches—he showed you...”

  “Props.”

  “You saw through them?”

  “No. They were quite convincing.”

  “Then how—”

  “It didn’t make sense that he’d do it.”

  “Ken, he destroyed Atlant—” A sudden, impossible ray of hope: “Unless that was a bluff too?...”

  “No,” Lubin said quietly.

  She sank back. Let me wake up from this, she prayed.

  “He destroyed Atlantis because he had another deterrent to fall back on. Making good on the smaller threat increased the credibility of the larger one.” The man without a conscience shrugged. “But once you’re dead, deterrence has already failed. There’s no point in acting on a threat when it can’t possibly achieve your goal.”

  “He could have, easily. I would have.”

  “You’re vindictive. Desjardins wasn’t. He was mainly interested in self-gratification.” Lubin smiled faintly. “That was unusually enlightened of him, actually. Most people are hardwired for revenge. Perhaps Spartacus freed him of that too.”

  “But he could have done it.”

  “It wouldn’t have been a credible threat otherwise.”

  “So how did you know?”

  “Doomsday machines are not easy things to assemble. It would have taken a great deal of time and effort for no actual payoff. Faking it was the logical alternative.”

  “That’s not good enough, Ken. Try again.”

  “I also subjected him to Ganzfeld interrogation once. It gave me certain insights into—”

  She shook her head.

  He didn’t speak for a while. Finally: “We were both off the leash.”

  “I thought you gave yourself a new leash. I thought your rules...”

  “Still. I know how he felt.” Lubin unfolded—carefully, carefully—and climbed slowly to his feet.

  “Did you know what he’d do?” She couldn’t hide the pleading in her voice.

  He seemed to look down at her. “Lenie, I’ve never known anything my entire life. All I can ever do is go with the odds.”

  It wasn’t what she wanted to hear. She wanted him to describe some telltale glitch in Desjardins’s shadow-show, some compelling bit of evidence that said the worst will not happen. She wanted some channel of ostensible input traced back to an empty socket, impossibly disconnected from its fiberop. Anything but a gamble based on empathy between two men without conscience.

  She wondered if he was disappointed, even a little bit, that Desjardins had been faking it after all. She wondered if he’d really been expecting it.

  “What are you so down about?” Lubin asked, sensing what he couldn’t see. “We just saved the world.”

  She shook her head. “He was going to lose anyway. He knew that better than we did.”

  “Then we advanced the schedule significantly, at least. Saved millions of lives.”

  How many millions, she wondered, and then: what difference does it make? Could saving twelve million today make up for killing ten million in the past? Could the blood-soaked Meltdown Madonna somehow transmute into Saint Lenie In the Black, savior of two million net? Was the algebra of guilt really so elementary?

  For Lenie Clarke, the question didn’t even apply. Because any millions saved today had only been spared from a fate she’d condemned them to in the first place. There was no way, no way at all, that she would ever be able to balance those books.

  “At least,” she said, “the debt won’t get any bigger.”

  “That’s a needlessly pessimistic outlook,” Lubin observed.

  She looked up at him. “How can you say that?” Her voice was so soft she could barely hear herself. “Everyone’s dead...”

  He shook his head. “Almost everyone. The rest of us get another chance.”

  Ken Lubin reached out his hand. The gesture was absurd to the point of farce; that this torn and broken monster, gored, bleeding, could pretend to be in any position to offer assistance to others. Lenie Clarke stared for a long moment before she found the strength to take it.

  Another chance, she reflected, pulling herself to her feet.

  Even though we don’t deserve one.

  Epilog: Singular Hessian

  Failure to converge. Confidence limits exceeded.

  Further predictions unreliable.

  Acknowledgements

  The usual gang of suspects, without whom I could never have pulled this off:

  David Hartwell, my editor, nailed some serious structural problems with the first draft and helped me fix them. Moshe Feder took point through the day-to-day grind from delivery to rewrite to kicking-and-screaming to rending-of-garments to wracking, hysterical sobs, and finally to parturition

  In what has become an annual rite, a motley collection of subversive literary and political malcontents—Laurie Channer, Cory Doctorow, Nalo Hopkinson, Becky Maines, John McDaid, Janis O’Conner, Steve Samenski, Isaac Szpindel, and Pat York— met clandestinely at an Undisclosed Location back during the summer of 2002. There, they tore apart the first two chapters of this puppy (among others), then helped to sow them back together again. This is the second time that a whole bunch of people have seen how my novel begins, while virtually no one sees the rest until it’s too late to change anything. I suspect self-esteem issues may be involved.

  But the fact that hardly anybody read the whole thing doesn’t mean that lots of people didn’t contribute to it. David Nickle offered advice, insights, and endless mockery throughout the process; his input proved so valuable I can almost overlook the fact that I had to get up at five thirty in the fucking morning and go running for ten miles to avail myself of it. Laurie Channer withstood endless pissing and moaning over a story for which her input was frequently solicited even though she was never actually allowed to read the damned thing. (She still hasn’t, as of this writing.)

  I owe many details of the helicopter crash scene to Glenn Norman and Glenn Morrison, both pilots, and both more helpful to pesky authors than I had any right to expect. I was astonished to learn that even when a helicopter loses all power in mid-flight, it’s still possible to walk away from the crash by practicing an emergency technique called “autorotation”. Glenn Morrison, in fact, survived a crash eerily parallel to the one described herein, except for the fact that he is not blind. (For the record, he doesn’t think there’s a hope in hell off pulling off that maneuver in real life if you are blind, and he knows his stuff. On the other hand, he doesn’t know Ken Lubin.)

  Parts of other people’s life histories made their way into the story. Certain impressionistic details of the dog attack took their inspiration from wild canines encountered by one Rob Cunningham on his travels through India. (You may know Rob as the dude who created those gorgeous spaceship designs for Homeworld and Homeworld 2, the RTS computer games from Relic Entertainment.) Eight-year-old Achilles Desjardins’s experiments with aerobraking were lifted from the childhood confessions of Mark Showell, fisheries biologist, although Mark is not a sexual sadist so far as I know. (If anything he’s a masochist, judging by the guy he chose to do his Master’s under.)

  Isaac Szpindel, MD, Ph.D., skilled in so many and varied endeavors that it makes me sick, helped me load Taka’s lines with plausible medical chrome. Dave “the bioinformatician” Block answered numerous impertinent questions about artificial nucleotides and minimum genotype sizes. (Unfortunately, one of the things he taught me was that you can’t cram a 1.1MB genotype into a cell 250nm across, which contradicts physical stats for ßehemoth already described in Maelstrom.) Major David Buck, of the New Zealand Defence Force, helped me out on the subject of Fuel Air Explosive ordnance. Steve Ballentine, Hannu Blommila, Rick Kleffel, Harry Pulley, Catriona Sparks, Bebe Schroer, Janine Stinson, Mac Tonnies, and David Williams have all pointed me to relevant research papers, reviews, opinions, and/or news articles that went into the ßehemoth mix one way or another. Jan
Stinson also went through the manuscript with an editorial eagle-eye, catching typos and bigger problems which I hope the rest of you won’t notice. Not to mention others whom I’ve probably forgotten, and of whom I hereby pre-emptively beg forgiveness.

  You can’t blame any of these good folks if this book sucks, since none of them were allowed to read it. (If it does suck, maybe that’s why.) You can’t even blame David Hartwell, who did read it, because the book would have sucked even harder without his input. You can only blame me, and you might as well since I’ve already got your money.

  Well, fifty cents of it, anyway.

  Notes and references

  Once again it’s time to trot out a variety of citations that will hopefully serve as a valuable educational resource, even though they’re primarily intended to cover my ass against nitpickers.

  If you have come late to this saga, you may not find the following references as complete as you’d like. Any real-world science elements introduced in Starfish and Maelstrom were cited at the end of those books; I don’t repeat those citations here, even though many elements persist into ßehemoth. (I do, however, cite related research that has come out since Maelstrom was released, especially if it makes me look especially prescient in some way.) So if you’re looking for my original sources on smart gels, “fine-tuning”, or the Maelstrom Ecosystems, you’ll have to go back and check the other books. You still may not find everything you’re looking for, but you might at least make my Amazon numbers look a little less dismal.

  Atlantis: There Goes the Neighborhood

  There is a place in the middle of the North Atlantic where the currents stop dead, an eye in the middle of that great slow gyre revolving between Europe and North America[1]. It seemed like a reasonable spot to hide from lethal particles potentially borne on wind and water, so I put Atlantis there. The surrounding topography took some inspiration from a 2003 report on abyssal mineralogy[2]. Impossible Lake was inspired by the ultrasaline lens of heavy water described in the ground-breaking documentary series “Blue Planet”[3]. The failure of the Labrador Current and the Gulf Stream is increasingly likely in view of increased melt water discharge from the Arctic (e.g., [4]­­,[5]). And I know they don’t actually figure into the plot anywhere, but Lenie Clarke worries about them on her way to the surface in Chapter One so it’s fair game: giant squids now outmass the whole human race, and they’re getting even bigger[6]!

  ßehemoth

  We continue to discover life increasingly deep in the lithosphere. At last count, deep crustal rocks beneath the Juan de Fuca Ridge—yes, the very ridge from which ßehemoth escaped at the end of Starfish—have yielded evidence of heretofore unknown microbial lifeforms[7]. Water samples from boreholes 300 m below that seabed show depleted levels of sulphate: something down there is alive, unclassified, and consuming sulphur. There’s no evidence that it would destroy the world if it ever reached the surface, but then again there’s no evidence it wouldn’t, either. I can always hope.

  That hope is a faint one, though. Patricia Rowan was right to argue that ßehemoth, by virtue of its ancient origins, should be an obligate anaerobe[8]. To even make it out onto the seabed would require either a very convenient mutation, or a deliberate tweak. Damn lucky the plot called for one anyway.

  Waters et al. have recently reported the discovery of an ancient, hot-vent-dwelling nanobe called Nanoarchaeum equitans[9]; genome size, proportion of junk DNA, and diameter are all in the ßehemoth ballpark. Even better, it’s a parasite/symbiont (it lives on a much larger Archeon called Ignicoccus). However, its minimalist genome (about 500 kilobases, half the size of ßehemoth’s) lacks the recipes for certain vital enzymes, which it must therefore get from its host. It could never be a free-liver. ßehemoth, with its larger genome, is more self-sufficient—but how it crams all those extra genes into a capsule only 60% the size remains a mystery.

  The fishheads and the corpses got into a bit of a debate about the odds of ßehemoth hitching a ride in the flesh of dispersing larval fish. I was always worried about that myself, even back when I was writing Starfish—if true, there’d be no reason why ßehemoth would not have, in fact, taken over the world billions of years ago. Invertebrate larvae do seem to cross vast distances in the deep sea; fortunately they generally go into a sort of arrested development en route1, making them unlikely carriers of ßehemoth (which needs an actively-metabolizing host to withstand long-term thermo-osmotic stress). It also appears that even highly-dispersing larval fish species maintain fairly distinct geographic ranges, judging by the lack of genetic flow between populations around adjacent islands[10],[11]. Worst comes to worst, local topographic and chemical conditions can constrain the distribution of various deep-water species[12],[13].

  So I dodged the bullet. This was not prescience on my part, and it may yet come back and bite me in the ass: at least one adult fish may have swum through deep water from Patagonia all the way up to Greenland[14].

  Seppuku

  Artificial microbes are almost mainstream these days: J. Craig Venter (the Human Genome guy) has completed an entirely artificial genome even as I type[15], hoping that such organisms will be able to cure the world’s environmental ills. Peter Schulz and his team have already tweaked E. coli to synthesize a novel amino acid not found in nature[16], hoping it will be able to outcompete the baseline strain. Entirely synthetic organisms, built from interchangeable genetic modules, are just around the corner[17]. I wish all these guys better luck than Jakob Holtzbrink’s gel-jocks had when they tweaked ßehemoth.

  Seppuku’s genetic template was first synthesized by Leslie Orgel[18] back in 2000; TNA actually does duplex with conventional nucleic acids. The idea of alien genes incorporating themselves into our own nuclear material is even more old-hat than artificial microbes—not only are our genes rife with parasitic DNA from a range of bugs, but functional genes originally brought into the cell by the ancestors of our own mitochondria appear to have migrated into the nucleus[19]. Massive horizontal gene transfer between species has occurred throughout much of Earth’s history[20], and of course the symbiotic incorporation of small cells into larger ones has a long and honorable history reflected in every eukaryotic cell on the planet. (Back in Maelstrom I cited chloroplasts and mitochondria; apicoclasts are a related example, devolved endosymbionts found in Toxoplasma and Plasmodium[21].)

  Taka Ouellette’s awed appreciation of proline as a metabolic catalyst will probably be a little behind the times by mid-century, since Movassaghi and Jacobsen have already pointed out the potential of such simple molecules to act as enzymes[22].

  The Chemistry of Character

  Some readers may wonder if I have trouble distinguishing between personality and neurochemistry. It’s a fair point, but don’t blame me: blame the scientists who can’t let a week go by without reporting yet more evidence that personality is just another word for biochemistry, albeit written in an exceedingly complex font (e.g. Hannuk Yaeger’s propensity for violence, rooted in his monoamine oxidase levels[23]). Unless you’re one of those Easter-bunny vitalists who believes that personality results from some unquantifiable divine spark, there’s really no alternative to the mechanistic view of human nature.

  A central tenet of the whole rifters saga—introduced in Starfish, and expanded in Maelstrom and Behemoth—is that false memories of abuse can cause neurological changes in the individual every bit as real as genuine memories can. That was pretty speculative when Starfish first came out, but recent research has added empirical evidence of this effect[24], [25].

  Details on the care and feeding of sociopaths were largely taken from the work of Robert Hare[26] and others[27]. ßehemoth’s musings regarding the adaptive value of sociopathy in corporate settings may not be entirely off the mark, either[28],[29],[30], (And as these references should make clear, neither Ken Lubin nor Achilles Desjardins are sociopaths in the classic sense. More goes into such creatures than a mere absence of conscience.)

  Maelstrom established that Guilt
Trip took its lead largely from the genes of certain parasites which could alter the behavior of their hosts. The actual mechanism by which this occurred was not known when that book came out, although some had speculated that it occured right down at the neurotransmitter level. I hung Guilt Trip’s hat on that hypothesis, and am now relieved to report that the gamble paid off: at least one such parasitic puppet-master works by screwing with its host’s serotonin-producing neurons[31].

  Alice Jovellanos’s denigration of the ethical impulse takes its lead from recent studies which establish that moral “reasoning” is not reasonable at all—it occurs primarily in the emotional centers of the brain, resulting in inconsistent and indefensible beliefs about whether a course of action is “right” or “wrong”[32]. An accompanying commentary article gives a very nice summary of the so-called “Trolley Paradox”, not to mention an airtight rationale for pushing people in front of trains[33]. Jovellanos’s arguments may be simplistic—the prefrontal cortex, after all, seems to play at least some role in moral decision-making[34],[35],[36]—but then again, Jovellanos was a bit of a zealot. For which she paid a price.

  Speaking of moral decision-making, Lenie Clarke’s passion for revenge earlier in the rifters saga—not to mention Ken Lubin’s unacknowledged passion for same later on—are not merely overused dramatic tropes. We appear to be hardwired to punish those who have slighted us, even if—and this is the counterintuitive bit—even if our acts of vengeance hurt us more than those who have trespassed against us[37]. I like to think the reason the world gets another chance at the end of this story is because, as Lubin speculates, Spartacus disabled the vengeance response in Achilles Desjardins at the same time it destroyed his conscience. He may have been a monster. He may have been sexual sadist. But in that one retrofitted corner of his soul, he may have been more civilized that you or I will ever be.