Rifters 2 - Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  It's about to, though.

  400 Megs is currently inbreeding with a middling sib whose lineage only diverged a few hundred generations ago. Almost all the genes are the same, which doesn't promote a lot of diversity but at least reinforces the tried-and-true. Both parties have a few dozen copies of Lenie Clarke, for instance, which they exchange with mindless redundancy.

  But no gene is an island, even in Maelstrom. There's no such thing as an independent locus. Each travels linked to others, little constellations of related traits, junk code, happenstance association. And as 400Megs is about to find out, it isn't just Lenie Clarke that matters. It's also the company she keeps.

  All the bits are lining up to be counted. Replication subroutines march down the line like messenger-RNA, ready to cut and paste. Chance shuffles the cards, orgasm squirts them hence, and 400Megs injects Lenie Clarke into its cousin. Strings like vampire and Beebe and ßehemoth go along for the ride.

  And in return, following the usual hermaphrodite credo of tit-for-tat, 400Megs gets Lenie Clarke with a whole different circle of friends. Like doomsday. Like meltdown. Like bestservedcold.

  By all appearances, just another unremarkable fuck. But afterward, things start to change for 400Megs.

  Suddenly its replication rate is going through the roof. And where before its progeny languished and withered in backwater caches, now Maelstrom itself scoops them up and copies them a thousand times over. One fine cycle a N'AmPac security sieve finds several such prodgies drifting north off the coast of the GA. Recognizing them as high-priority communications, it shunts them directly to the nearest smart gel. The gel scans the relevant embedded bits and sends copies into Haven for secure storage.

  All of a sudden, the most powerful forces in Maelstrom want to give members of The 400 Club anything they want. The Club doesn't question their good fortune; they merely exploit it.

  They are no longer 400 Megs, hitchhiker.

  What they are is John the fucking Baptist.

  Microstar

  He'd been out of circulation too long. He was losing his edge. How else to explain an ambush at the hands of three glassy-eyed children on the back streets of Santa Cruz?

  Of course, Lubin had had a lot on his mind. He was coming to terms with some very disturbing test results, for one thing. He'd been pursuing them for days now, rejecting each new clean bill of health, running increasingly specific tests for increasingly implausible maladies—and now, finally, there it was. Something in his blood that neither nature nor N'AmPac had put there.

  Something strangely backward.

  More than sufficient to distract any normal man, perhaps. No excuse for someone who'd once transplanted a micronuke from his own gut to the heart of the Troise-Rivieres switching station, without benefit of anesthesia. No excuse for Ken Lubin.

  It was inexcusable. His assailants barely even qualified as punks; ranging in age from perhaps sixteen to twenty, pumped on some sort of neurotrope, evidently convinced that their transderm steroids and corneal caps and shockprods made them invulnerable. Sometime during Lubin's Pacific tour, the rifter template had become fashionable among drybacks. It was probably the eyes more than anything. Back on the seabed, eyecaps had hidden a multitude of sins, kept fear and weakness and hatred safely hidden behind masks of blank indifference. Down there the caps had provided cover, imposed enough protective distance for weak people to become strong, given time.

  Up here, though, they only seemed to make weak people stupid.

  They wanted money, or something. He wasn't really paying attention. He didn't even bother warning them off. They didn't seem in the mood to listen.

  Five seconds later they weren't in the mood to do anything but run. Lubin—having foreseen this on some level long since relegated to subconsciousness—had deprived them of the use of their legs. He felt a token, distracted reluctance at the necessary next step; they had, after all, seen more of his abilities than good security would dictate. It had been his own damn fault—if he hadn't been so careless, he'd have avoided the situation altogether—but the damage was done. Loose ends were fraying, and had to be cut.

  There were no witnesses. The children had chosen wisely in that regard at least. There were no screams, only quiet gasps and the soft pop of dislocating vertebrae. No ineffective pleas for mercy. Only one of them even tried to speak, perhaps emboldened by the realization that somehow—incredibly, in the space of barely a minute—she had reached the point of having nothing left to lose.

  "Mange de la marde, enculé," she croaked as Lubin reached down. "Who the fuck died and made you Lenie Clarke?"

  Lubin blinked. "What?"

  The child spat blood in his face and stared defiantly back with featureless white eyes.

  Well, Lubin thought, maybe there would've been hope for you after all. And twisted.

  * * *

  It was a bit disturbing, of course. He'd had no idea that Lenie Clarke was famous.

  He asked the matchmakers for references to Lenie Clarke. Maelstrom hiccoughed and advised him to narrow his search criteria: there were over fifty million hits.

  He started exploring.

  Lenie Clarke was an anarchist. Lenie Clarke was a liberator. Lenie Clarke was a fashion symbol. Lenie Clarke was an avenging angel, resurrected from the ocean depths to tear down the system that had abused and victimized her. Lenie Clarke had followers; mostly in N'AmPac so far, but the word was spreading. Hordes of disaffected, powerless people had found someone to relate to, a fellow victim with impervious eyes who had learned to fight back. Against what, exactly, there was no consensus. With whose army, not a whisper. Lenie Clarke was a mermaid. Lenie Clarke was a myth.

  Lenie Clarke is dead, Lubin reminded himself. None of the references he could find would confirm that fact.

  Perhaps she'd made it after all. The GA had promised a shuttle to evacuate Beebe. Lubin had assumed—along with everyone else—that they'd been lying. Clarke had been the only one to stay behind and find out.

  Maybe all of them made it. Maybe something happened, after I got separated…

  He entered separate queries: Alice Nakata, Michael Brander—Judy Caraco, just to be thorough. Maelstrom knew of many by those names, but none seemed to have the cachet of Lenie Clarke. He fed the same list through Haven; the results were smoother, the data much higher in quality, but the bottom line remained unchanged.

  Just Lenie Clarke. Something with that name was infecting the world.

  "Lenie Clarke is alive," said a voice in his ear.

  He recognized it: one of the generic disembodied matchmakers that came out of Haven in answer to user questions. Lubin glanced across his display, puzzled. He hadn't entered any queries.

  "It is almost certain," the voice continued, distant and inflectionless. Almost as though it were talking to itself. "Lenie Clarke lives. Temperature and salinity are well within acceptable ranges."

  It paused.

  "You are Kenneth Lubin. You are alive as well."

  He disconnected.

  * * *

  Anonymity. That was the whole point of the exercise.

  Lubin knew the specs on Ridley, and on similar facilities distributed invisibly throughout the world. They didn't scan eyes or faces. They only cared that entrants could do no harm. Everyone was equal within the frosted glass tubes of the fourteenth floor. Everyone was no one. Yet someone in Haven had called him by name.

  He left Santa Cruz.

  There was another secure gateway at the Packard Tower, in Monterey. This time Lubin wasn't taking any chances: he linked to his terminal through three separate watches connected in series, each scrambled on a different seed. He restarted a search on Lenie Clarke, carefully following different query trees than he had the first time.

  "Lenie Clarke is on the move," a far-off voice mused.

  Lubin started a trace.

  "Kenneth Lubin has been sighted in Sevastopol," the voice remarked. "Recent reports have also placed it in Whitehorse and Philadelphia sometime with
in the past eighty-four hours. Lenie and Lubin are on the comeback trail. Are you a fan of alliteration?"

  This is very strange, he thought.

  "We looking out for Kenny and Lenie," the voice continued. "We intent on translocating and disseminating both parties into novel environments with acceptable salinity range varies directly with temperature, within the environments considered. Do you relate to rhyme?"

  It's a neural net, he realized. A Turing app. Maybe a gel. Whatever was talking to him, it wasn't programmed: it had learned to speak through trial-and-error, had worked out its own rules of grammar and syntax. Lubin had seen such devices—or organisms, or whatever they were—demonstrated. They picked up the rules easily enough, but they always seemed to throw in a few stylistic quirks of their own. It was hard to track down exactly how that happened. The logic evolved, synapse by synapse. It was opaque to conventional analysis.

  "No," he said, experimentally. "For one, I don't relate to rhyme. Although that's not true all the time."

  A brief silence. Then: "Excellent. I would've paid, you know?"

  "Mediocre at best. What are you?"

  "I am telling you about Lenie and Kenny. You don't want to fuck with them, friend. You wanna know what side you're on, right?"

  "Tell me, then."

  Nothing.

  "Hello?"

  Nothing. To make things worse, his trace failed—return address blocked at source.

  He waited for a good five minutes in case the voice started talking again. It didn't. Lubin disconnected from his terminal, logged in on a different one farther along the row. This time he left Lenie Clarke and Ken Lubin strictly alone. Instead he stored the results of his worrisome blood tests in an open file, tagged to certain keywords that would hopefully attract attention from the right sources. Someone out there was paralleling his investigation; it was time to lure them in.

  He logged off, distracted by an obvious and uncomfortable coincidence:

  A smart gel had been running the nuke that vaporized Beebe Station.

  Matchmaker

  Prions:

  OK

  Viruses:

  Adeno

  OK

  Arbo

  OK

  Arena

  OK

  Filo

  ben

  Morbilli

  chron/asymp

  Orbi

  OK

  Paramyx

  chron/asymp

  Parvo

  OK

  Picorna

  OK

  Hanta

  resid

  Retro

  resid

  Rota

  light

  Bacteria:

  Bacillus

  heavy/norm

  Coccus

  norm

  Myco/Spiro

  STD mod

  Chlam:

  OK

  Fungi:

  not crit

  Protozoa:

  not crit

  Nematode:

  OK

  Platyhelminth:

  OK

  Cestode:

  OK

  Arthropod:

  OK

  Cleared for Travel.

  "Are you sure? No—no ergots, or psychoactives?"

  Cleared for travel. Please proceed to check-in.

  "Are you equipped for NMR?"

  This booth is designed to scan for communicable parasites and diseases. You may visit a commercial medbooth if you wish to be tested for other disorders.

  "Where's the nearest commercial medbooth, then?"

  Please don't leave me.

  "I—what?"

  Stay, Lenie. We can work it out.

  Besides. There's someone you should meet.

  The screen went dark. The bead in her ear emitted a tiny belch of static.

  "It's me," said a sudden voice. "Sou-Hon. From the bus station."

  She grabbed her visor and fled into the tame green jungle of Concourse D. Startled pedestrian eyes, barely noticed, met her own. She slid the visor onto her face, not slowing.

  "You don't understand." The voice was a small pleading thing in her ear. "I'm on your side. I'm—"

  Glass doors, leading outside. Clarke pushed through. Sudden icy wind reduced global warming to a weak abstraction. The concourse arced around from behind her like a horseshoe-shaped canyon.

  "I'm here to help—"

  Clarke tapped her watch twice in succession. "Command mode," the device replied.

  "Off" she told it.

  "Amitav's de—"

  "Off," the watch acknowledged, and fell instantly asleep.

  She was alone.

  The sidewalk was empty. Light spilled from the warren of habitrail tubes that shielded McCall's patrons from winter. The whine of distant turbines drifted down from the rooftops.

  Two taps. "On."

  A soft fuzz of static from the earpiece, although her watch was well within its operational two-meter radius.

  "Are you there?" she said.

  "Yes."

  "What about Amitav?"

  "Just before it—I mean—" The voice caught on itself. "They just burned everything. Everyone. He must have been..."

  A passing gust of wind snapped at her face. The mermaid took a bitterly cold breath.

  "I'm sorry," the stranger whispered in her head.

  Clarke turned and went back inside.

  Heat Death

  It was an impoverished display, sparse informatics against a dark background: lats and longs, a tiny GPS overlay centered on Calgary International Airport, a no-visual icon blinking the obvious at two-second intervals.

  "How do you know?" breathed a disembodied voice in Perreault's ear.

  "I saw it. The start of it, anyway." Hard-edged airport ambience echoed in the background. "I'm sorry."

  "It was his own fault," Clarke said after a moment. "He made too much noise. He was just—asking for it..."

  "I don't think that was it," Perreault said. "They slagged eight whole kilometers."

  "What?"

  "Some kind of biohazard, I think. Amitav just got—caught in the sweep…"

  "No." Words so soft they were almost static. "Can't be."

  "I'm sorry."

  No visual. No visual.

  "Who are you?" Clarke asked at last.

  "I ride botflies," Perreault said. "Mop-ups, mainly. I saw you when you came out of the ocean. I saw how you affected the people on the Strip, I saw you when you had one of those—visions—"

  "Aren't you the faithful little stalker," Clarke said.

  "That wasn't me," she continued after a while. "Back on the Strip. That was Amitav."

  "He ran with it. You were the insp—"

  "It wasn't me."

  "Okay. Fine."

  No visual.

  "Why are you following me?" Clarke said.

  "Someone's—linked us up. And at the bus station, earlier."

  "Who?"

  "I don't know. Probably one of your friends."

  Something between a cough and a laugh. "I don't think so."

  Perreault took a breath. "You're—getting known, you know. People are noticing. Some of them must be protecting you."

  "From what, exactly?"

  "I don't know. Maybe from the people who started the quake."

  "What do you know about that?" Clarke's voice almost pounced down the link.

  "Millions died," Perreault said. "You know why. That makes you dangerous to all the wrong people."

  "Is that what you think."

  "It's one of the rumors. I don't know."

  "Don't know much, do you?"

  "I—"

  "You don't know who I am. You don't know what I want or what I've d— you don't know who they are or what they want. You just sit there and let them use you."

  "What do you want?"

  "None of your fucking business."

  Perreault shook her head. "I'm just trying to help, you know."

  "Lady, I don't know if you e
ven exist. For all I know that kid in South Bend is playing some kind of sick joke."

  "Something's happening because of you. Something real. You can check the threads yourself if you don't believe me. You're some kind of catalyst. Whether you know it or not."

  "And here you are, jumping in with no questions asked."

  "I've got questions."

  "No answers, then. I could be planting bombs. I could be spit-roasting babies. You don't know, but here you are with your tongue hanging out anyway."

  "Listen," Perreault snapped, "whatever you're doing, it—"

  —Can't be any worse than the way things are already…

  She stopped, astonished at the thought, grateful that she'd kept it back. She felt an absurd certainly that seven hundred kilometers away, Lenie Clarke was smiling.

  She tried again. "Look, I may not know what's going on but I know something is, and it revolves around you. And I bet that not everyone who knows that is on your side. Maybe you think I'm a head case. Fine. But even I wouldn't risk going through airport security with the kind of profile your implants put out. I'd get out now, and I'd forget about flying anywhere for the foreseeable future. There are other ways to get around."

  She waited. Tactical constellations glimmered about her.

  "Okay," Clarke said at last. "Thanks for the tip. Here's one for you. Stop trying to help me. Help whoever's trying to stamp me out, if you can find them."

  "For God's sake, why?"

  "For your own sake, Suzie. For everyone you ever cared about. Amitav was—he didn't deserve what happened to him."