by Peter Watts
"Oh, shit," Jovellanos whispered invisibly. "Killjoy, pull back."
Desjardins zoomed back to a low-resolution overview. He could see almost a sixth of Maelstrom now, a riot of incandescent logic rotated down into three dimensions.
There was a cyclone on the horizon. It whirled across the display at over sixty-eight nodes per second. The Cincinnati bubble was directly in its path.
* * *
A storm convected from ice and air. A storm constructed of pure information. Beyond the superficial details, is there any significant difference between the two?
There's at least one. In Maelstrom, a weather system can sweep the globe in fourteen minutes flat.
They start out pretty much the same way inside as out: high-pressure zones, low-pressure zones, conflict. Several million people log on to a node that's too busy to support them all; or a swarm of file packets, sniffing step-by-step to myriad destinations, happen to converge on too few servers at once. A piece of the universe stops dead; the nodes around it screech to a crawl.
The word goes out: fellow packet, Node 5213 is an absolute zoo. Route through 5611 instead, it's so much faster. Meanwhile an angry horde of gridlocked users logs off in disgust. 5213 clears like Lake Vostok.
5611, on the other hand, is suddenly jam-packed. Gridlock epicenter leaps 488 nodes to the left, and the storm is up and moving.
This particular blizzard was about to shut down the links between Achilles Desjardins and the Cincinnati bubble. It was going to do so, according to tactical, in less than ten seconds.
His throat went tight. "Alice."
"Fifty seconds," she reported. "Eighty percent arced in fifty—"
Kill the nodes. Feed the swarm. Either. Or.
"Forty-eight…forty-seven…"
Isolate. Contaminate. Either. Or.
An obvious call. He didn't even need Guilt Trip to tell him.
"I can't wait," he said.
Desjardins laid his hands on a control pad. He tapped commands with his fingers, drew boundaries with eye movement. Machines assessed his desires, raised obligatory protests—you're kidding, right? You're sure about this? —and relayed his commands to the machinery under them.
A fragment of Maelstrom went black, a tiny blot of darkness hemorrhaging into the collective consciousness. Desjardins caught a glimpse of implosion before the storm snowed out his display.
He closed his eyes. Not that it made any difference, of course; his inlays projected the same images onto line-of-sight whether or not his eyelids were in the way.
A few more years. A few more years and they'll have smart gels at every node and the sharks and anemones and trojans will all just be a bad memory. A few years. They keep promising.
It hadn't happened yet. It wasn't even happening as fast as it had been. Desjardins didn't know why. He only knew, with statistical certainty, that he had killed people today. The victims were still walking around, of course—no planes had fallen from the sky, no hearts had stopped just because Achilles Desjardins had squashed a few terabytes of data. Nothing that vital relied upon Maelstrom any more.
But even old-fashioned economics had its impacts. Data had been lost, vital transactions voided. Industrial secrets had been corrupted or destroyed. There would be consequences: bankruptcies, lost contracts, people staggering home in sudden destitution. Domestic violence and suicide rates would spike a month or two down the road in a hundred different communities, geographically unconnected but all within forty or fifty nodes of the CinciGen Pathfinder. Desjardins knew all about cascade effects; he tripped over them every day of the job. It'd be enough to drive anyone over the edge after a while.
Fortunately there were chemicals for that too.
Backflash
She woke to the sight of an airborne behemoth with wreckage in its jaws. It covered half the sky.
Cranes. Armatures. Grasping tearing mouthparts sufficient to dismember a city. An arsenal of deconstruction, hanging from a monstrous bladder of hard vacuum; the skin between its ribs sucked inward like the flesh of something starved.
It passed, majestic, unmindful of the insect screaming in its shadow.
"It is nothing, Ms. Clarke," someone said. "It does not care about us."
English, with a Hindian accent. And behind it, a soft murmur of other words in other tongues. A quiet electrical hum. The steady drip-drip-drip of a field desalinator.
A gaunt brown face, somewhere between middle-aged and Methuselan, leaned into her field of view. Clarke turned her head. Other refugees, better fed, stood about her in a ragged circle. Vaguely mechanical shapes teased the corner of her eye.
Daylight. She must have passed out. She remembered gorging herself at the cycler, late at night. She remembered some tenuous cease-fire breaking down in her belly. She remembered hitting the ground and vomiting an acid stew onto fresh sand.
And now there was daylight, and she was surrounded. They hadn’t killed her. Someone had even brought her fins; they lay on the cobble at her side.
"…tupu jicho…" someone whispered.
"Right—" her voice rusty with disuse "—my eyes. Don't let them throw you, they're just…"
The Hindian reached toward her face. She rolled weakly away and fell into a fit of coughing. A squeezebulb appeared at her side. She waved it off. "Not thirsty."
"You came from the sea. You cannot drink the sea."
"I can. Got—" She struggled up on her elbows, turned her head; the desalinator came into view. "I've got one of those, in my chest. An implant. You know?"
The skinny refugee nodded. "Like your eyes. Mechanical."
Close enough. She was too weak to explain.
She looked out to sea. Distance had bled the lifter of detail, reduced it to a vague gibbous silhouette. Wreckage dropped from its belly as she watched, raising a silent gray plume on the horizon.
"They clean house as they always have," the Hindian remarked. "We are lucky they don't drop their garbage on us, yes?"
Clarke weathered another cough. "How did you know my name?"
"GA Clarke." He tapped the patch on her shoulder. "I am Amitav, by the way."
His hand, his face: both were nearly skeletal. And yet Calvin cyclers were tireless. There should be enough for all, here on the Strip. The faces surrounding them were only lean, not starving. Not like this Amitav.
A distant sound tugged at her concentration, a soft whine from overhead. Clarke sat up. A shadow of motion flickered through the clouds.
"Those watch us, of course," Amitav said.
"Who?"
"Your people, yes? They make sure the machines are working, and they watch us. More since the wave, of course."
The shadow tracked south, fading.
Amitav squatted back on bony haunches and stared inland. "There is little need, of course. We are not what you would call activists here. But they watch us just the same." He stood up, brushed wet sand from his knees. "And of course you will wish to return to them. Are your people looking for you?"
Clarke took a breath. "I—"
And stopped.
She followed his gaze through a tangle of brown bodies, caught glimpses of tent and shanty in the spaces between. How many thousands—millions—had made their way here over the years, driven from their homes by rising seas and spreading deserts? How many, starving, seasick, had cheered at the sight of N'Am on the horizon, only to find themselves pushed back against the ocean by walls and guards and the endless multitudes who'd gotten here first?
And who would they blame? What do a million have-nots do, when one of the haves falls into their hands?
Are your people looking for you?
She lay back on the sand, not daring to speak.
"Ah," said Amitav distantly, as though she had.
* * *
For days she'd been an automaton, a single-minded machine created for the sole purpose of getting back on dry land. Now that she'd made it, she didn’t dare stay.
She retreated to the ocean floor. Not t
he clear black purity of the deep sea; there weren't any living chandeliers or flashlight predators to set the ocean glowing. What life there was squirmed and wriggled and scavenged through the murky green light of the conshelf. Even below the surge, viz was only a few meters.
It was better than nothing.
She'd long since learned to sleep with a diveskin pinning her eyes open. In the abyss it had been simple—just swim into the distance and leave Beebe’s floodlights behind, so far that even eyecaps failed. You'd drift off wrapped in a darkness more absolute than any dryback could even imagine.
Here, though, it wasn't so easy. Here there was always light in the water; night-time only bled the color out of it. And when Clarke did fall into some restless foggy dreamworld, she found herself surrounded by sullen, vengeful throngs assembling just out of sight. They picked up whatever was at hand—rocks, gnarled clubs of driftwood, garrotes of wire and monofilament—and they closed in, smoldering and homicidal. She thrashed awake and found herself back on the ocean floor—and the mob melted into fragments of swirling shadow, fading overhead. Most were too vague to make out; once or twice she glimpsed the leading edge of something curved.
She went ashore at night to feed, when the refugees had retreated from the perpetual glare of the feeding stations. At first she'd kept her billy in hand, to ward off anyone who got in her way. No one did. Perhaps that wasn't surprising, all thing considered. She could only imagine what the refugees saw when they looked in her eyes. A miracle of photoamplification technology, perhaps? A logical prerequisite for life on the ocean floor?
More likely they saw a monster, a woman whose eyes had been scooped from their sockets and replaced with spheres of solid ice. For whatever reason, they kept their distance.
By the second day she was keeping down most of what she ate. On the third she realized she wasn't hungry any more. She lay on the bottom and stared up into diffuse green brightness, feeling new strength trickling into her limbs.
That night she rose from the ocean before the sun had fully set. She left the gas billy sheathed on her leg, but nobody challenged her as she ascended the shore. If anything, they gave her an even wider berth than they had before; the babel of Cantonese and Punjabi seemed more tightly strung.
Amitav was waiting for her at the cycler. "They said you would return," he said. "They did not mention an escort."
Escort? He was looking past her shoulder, down the beach. Clarke followed his gaze; the setting sun was a diffuse fiery smear bleeding into the—
Oh Jesus.
Crescent dorsal fins sliced through the near-shore surf. A gray snout poked briefly into view, like a minisub with teeth.
"They were almost extinct once, did you know?" Amitav said. "But they have come back. Here at least."
She took a shaky breath; adrenaline shocked the body, too late for anything but weak-kneed hindsight. How close did they come? How many times have I—
"Such friends you have," the refugee remarked.
"I didn't—" but of course Amitav knew that she hadn't known. She turned to the cycler, putting her back to him.
"I had heard you were still here," Amitav said behind her. "I did not believe it."
She slapped a tab on the top of the cycler. A protein brick dropped into the dispensing trough. She started to reach for it, clenched her hand to stop it from shaking.
"Is it the food? Many here like the food. More than they should, considering."
Her hand steadied. She took the brick.
"You are afraid," Amitav said.
Clarke looked down at the ocean. The sharks had vanished.
"Not of them," Amitav said. "Of us."
She stared back at him. "Really."
A smile flickered across his face. "You are safe, Ms. Clarke. They will not hurt you." He swept his skeletal arm in a gesture that took in his fellows. "If they wanted to, would they have not done so when you were unconscious? Would they not at least have taken that weapon from your leg?"
She touched the sheath on her calf. "It's not a weapon."
He didn't argue the point. He looked around with a gaunt smile. "Are they starving? Do you think they will rip you apart for the meat on your bones?"
Clarke chewed, swallowed, looked around. All those faces. Some curious, some almost—awed. Behold, the zombie woman who swims with sharks.
No visible hatred.
It doesn't make sense. They have nothing. How can they not hate?
"You see," Amitav said. "They are not like you. They are contented. Docile." He spat.
She studied his bony face, his sunken eyes. Noticed the embers that smoldered there, deep in the sockets, almost hidden. She saw the sneer behind the smile.
This was the face her dreams had multiplied a thousand times over.
"They're not like you either," she said at last.
Amitav conceded the point with a slight bow. "More's the pity."
And a bright hole opened in his face.
* * *
Clarke stepped backward, startled.
The hole grew across the shoreline, bleeding light. She turned her head; it moved with her, fixed to the exact center of her visual field.
"Ms. Clarke—"
She turned to his voice; Amitav's disembodied arm was just visible in the halo of her dementia. She grabbed, caught it, dragged him close.
"What is it?" she hissed "What's—"
"Ms. Clarke, are you—"
Light, coalescing. Images. A backyard. A bedroom.
A field trip of some kind. To a museum, huge and cavernous, seen from child-height.
I don't remember this, she thought.
She released Amitav's hand, staggered backwards a step. A sudden intake of breath.
The Hindian's hand waved through the hole in her vision. His fingers snapped just under her nose. "Ms. Clarke…"
The lights winked out. She stood there, frozen, her breath fast and shallow.
"I think—no," she said at last, relaxing fractionally.
Amitav. The Strip. The sky. No visions.
"I'm okay. I'm okay now."
A half-eaten nutrient brick lay coated in wet sand at her feet. Numbly, she picked it up. Something in the food?
On all sides, a silent watching throng.
Amitav leaned forward. "Ms. Clarke—"
"Nothing," she said. "I just…saw some things. From childhood."
"Childhood," Amitav echoed. He shook his head.
"Yeah," Clarke said.
Someone else's.
Maps and Legends
Perreault didn't know why it should be so important to her. It was almost as important not to think about it too much.
There was no language barrier to speak of. A hundred tongues were in common use on the Strip, maybe ten times as many dialects. Translation algorithms bridged most of them. Botflies were usually seen and not heard, but the locals seemed only slightly surprised when the machines accosted them in Sou-Hon Perreault's voice. Giant metal bugs were just a part of the background to anyone who’d been on the Strip for more than a day or two.
Most of the refs knew nothing of what she asked: a strange woman in black, who came from the sea? A striking image, yes—almost mythical. Surely we would remember such an apparition if we had seen it. Apologies. No.
One teenage girl with middle-aged eyes spoke in an arcane variant of Assamese that the system had not been adequately programmed for. She mentioned someone called Ganga, who had followed the refugees across the ocean. She had heard that this Ganga had recently come ashore. No more than this. There were possible ambiguities in translation.
Perreault lengthened the active search zone to a hundred kilometers. Beneath her eyes humanity moved northward in sluggish stages, following the reclaimed frontier. Now and then an unthinking few would cool off in the surf; indiscriminate sharks closed and frolicked. Perreault tweaked the thresholds on her sensory feed. Red water washed down to undistracting gray. Screams faded to whispers. Nature balanced itself from the corner
of her eye.
She continued her interrogations. Excuse me. A woman with strange eyes? Injured, perhaps?
Eventually she began hearing rumors.
* * *
Half a day south, a white woman all in black. A diver washed ashore in the wake of the tsunami, some said: swept from a kelp farm perhaps, or an underwater hotel.
Ten kilometers northward, an ebony creature who haunted the Strip, never speaking.
On this very spot, two days ago: a raging amphibian with empty eyes, violence implicit in every move. Hundreds had seen her and steered clear, until she'd staggered back into the Pacific, screaming.
You are looking for this woman? She is one of yours?
Almost certainly. The Missing Persons Registry was full of offshore workers vanished in the wake of the Big One. All surface people though, or conshelfers. The woman Perreault had seen had been built for the abyss. No one from the deep sea had been listed as missing; just six confirmed deaths hundreds of klicks offshore, from one of N'AmPac's geothermal stations. No farther details available.
The woman with the machinery inside had worn a GA shoulder patch. Maybe only five deaths, then. And one survivor, who'd somehow made it across three hundred kilometers of open ocean.
A survivor who, for some reason, did not wish to be found.
The rumors were metastasizing. No longer a diver from a kelp farm. A mermaid, now. An avatar of Kali. Some said she spoke in tongues; others, that the tongue was only English. There were stories of altercations, violence. The mermaid had made enemies. The mermaid had made friends. The mermaid had been attacked, and had left her assailants in pieces on the shore. Perreault smiled skeptically; a banana slug was more prone to violence than a Stripper.
The mermaid lurked in the foul waters offshore. The sharks did her bidding; at night she would come onto land and steal children to feed to her minions. Someone had foretold her coming, or perhaps merely recognized it; a prophet, some said. Or maybe just a man almost as insane as the woman he ranted about. His name was Amitav.