Rifters 2 - Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  Immunosuppression

  Xenotoxic accumulation

  Breakdown of collagen, myelin,

  and synovial fluid

  Deterioration of blood vessel walls

  Deterioration of myelin sheath

  Redox reactions compromised

  ACNE

  CONSTIPATION

  DRY SKIN

  EXCEMA, PSORIASIS

  DERMATITIS

  MUSCLE AND JOINT PAIN

  MIGRAINES

  TENDONITIS AND BURSITIS

  WEIGHT LOSS, EDEMA

  GASTRIC ULCERS

  DEGENERATIVE ARTHRITIS

  HAIR LOSS

  DEEP VEIN THROMBOSIS

  DIABETES, SCURVY

  DEGENERATION OF FINGERNAILS AND CONNECTIVE TISSUE

  JOINT AND TENDON FAILURE

  BRUISING AND INTERNAL HAEMORHAGE

  SICKLE-CELL ANEMIA,

  MASSIVE OPPORTUNISTIC INFECTION

  HEAVY METAL POISONING

  ERYTHROMYTOSIS

  SYSTEMIC LUPUS

  MUSCLE FAILURE

  CNS AND PNS DISORDERS

  LOSS OF MOTOR CONTROL

  SPASMS, BLINDNESS

  HEPATIC FAILURE, RENAL FAILURE

  System Shutdown

  500 Megabytes: The Generals

  If military rank had any relevance in the Maelstrom ecosystems, this thing would be a General.

  By now it weighs in just a shade shy of five hundred megabytes, compressed and muscular. It has been retrofitted by natural selection, reinforced by an army of smart gels; it no longer remembers a time when organic intelligence was an enemy. It has been copied and distributed a billion times; each copy travels with a retinue of attachés and assistants and bodyguards. The generals report to everyone, answer to no one, serve but a single master.

  Lenie Clarke.

  Master is a hopelessly inadequate word, of course. Words are barely adequate to describe Maelstrom in any event. The generals serve the concept of Lenie Clarke, perhaps—but no, that doesn't fit either. They have no concept, of Lenie Clarke or anything else. They have operational definitions but no comprehension; checksums, but no insight. They are instinctive in their intelligence.

  They travel the world in search of references to Lenie Clarke. Such references fall into several categories. There is the chaff the generals and their associates throw to the winds themselves, decoys to distract the competition. There are third-party references, strings containing Lenie Clarke that come into Maelstrom from outside; mail, transaction records, even source which appears to arise from Lenie Clarke itself. Items in this category are of profound interest to the generals.

  More recently, a third category has appeared: strings which both contain Lenie Clarke and which appear actively inimical to it.

  To some extent this interpretation is arbitrary. The generals receive their input from a network of ports which—according to the gels who've educated them—correspond to an n-dimensional space with the global label Biosphere. Each port is also associated with a range of parameters, labels like temperature, precipitation, and humidity; very few of these are defined at the ports themselves, but they can be interpolated by accessing linked environmental databases.

  Put simply, the task is to promote occurrences of Lenie Clarke at all ports meeting certain environmental conditions. The acceptable range is quite broad—in fact, according to the relevant databases the only truly unacceptable areas are in deep, cold ocean basins.

  However, some of these third-category strings—particularly those hailing from nodes with government and industrial addresses— appear to contain instructions which would restrict distribution of Lenie Clarke, even in areas meeting the environmental criteria.

  This will not do.

  Presently, for example, Lenie Clarke is approaching a nexus of ports which open into a part of the n-dimensional space called Yankton/South Dakota. A number of Category-Three communications have been intercepted, predicting extensive restriction activity at this location in the near future. Widespread dissemination of decoys has not dissipated this threat. In fact, the generals have noted an overall decline in decoy effectiveness over the past few teracycles. There are few alternatives.

  The generals resolve to cancel all symbiotic interactions with government and industrial nodes. Then they begin to rally their troops.

  Sparkler

  Every eye in the world, turning as she passed.

  It had to be her imagination, Clarke knew. If she was really under such close scrutiny, surely she'd have been captured—or worse—by now. The botflies that passed over the street weren't all watching from the corners of their eyes. The cameras that panned across every rapitrans stop, every cafeteria, every display window—unseen, perhaps, but omnipresent—they couldn't all have been programmed with her in mind. Satellites didn't crowd the sky overhead, piercing the clouds with radar and infrared, looking for her.

  It just felt that way, somehow. Not like being the center of some vast conspiracy at all. Rather, the target.

  Yankton was open to casual traffic. The shuttle dropped her in a retail district indistinguishable from a million others; her connection wouldn't leave for another two hours. She wandered to fill the time between. Twice she startled—thinking she'd caught sight of herself in some full-length mirror—only to remember that these days, she looked just like any dryback.

  Except for the ones that were starting to look like her.

  She ate a tasteless soy-krill concoction from a convenient vending machine. The phone in her visor beeped occasionally. She ignored it. The crazies, the propositioners, the death threateners—those had stopped calling over the past few days. The puppet masters—whoever or whatever had stolen her name and pasted it onto so many different faces—seemed to have given up on matchmaking across the spectrum. They'd settled on a single type by now: the kicked dogs, desperate for purpose, evidently blind to the fact that their own neediness far outweighed hers. That Sou-Hon woman, for instance.

  Her visor beeped again. She muted it.

  It was only a matter of time, she supposed, before the puppet masters figured out how to hack the visor the same way they'd hacked her watch. She was actually kind of surprised that they hadn't done so already.

  Maybe they have. Maybe they can break in on me any time, but they took the hint when I smashed the watch. Maybe they just don't want to risk losing their last link.

  I should toss the fucking thing anyway.

  She didn't. The visor was her only connection to Maelstrom, now that her watch was gone. She really missed the back-door access those South-Bend kids had wired into that little gizmo. In contrast, the visor—off-the-shelf and completely legal—was hamstrung by all the usual curfews and access restrictions. Still. The only other way to find out about a late-breaking quarantine or a nest of tornadoes was to run into it.

  Besides, the visor hid her eyes.

  Only now it seemed to be fucking up. The tactical display, usually invisible but for the little maps and labels and retail logos it laid across her eyeballs, seemed to be shimmering somehow, a faint visual static like water in motion. Hints of outlines, of faces, of—

  She squeezed her eyes tight in sheer frustration. Not that it ever helped: the vision persisted behind her lids, showing her—this time—the upper half of her mother's face, brow furrowed in concern. Mom's nose and mouth were covered by one of those filtermasks you wore whenever you visited the hospital, so the superbugs wouldn't get you. They were in a hospital now, Clarke could tell: she, and her mother, and—

  Of course. Who else?

  —dear old Dad, also masked; on him, it seemed to fit. And she could almost remember, this time, she almost knew what she was seeing—but there was no trace of guilt behind that mask, no sign of worry that this time it would all come out, the doctors would know, some telltale symptom shouting no, no accident this, no mere fall down the stairs…

  No. The monster's loving facade was too perfect. It always was. She'd lost count of the t
imes such images had raped her in the past months, how often she'd looked for some hint of the living hell she'd called childhood. All she'd ever seen was this vicious, mocking pretense of normalcy.

  After a while, as always, the images shrank away and let the real world back in. By now she was almost used to it; she no longer shouted at apparitions, or reached out to touch things that didn't exist. Her breathing was under control. She knew that to all the world around her, nothing had happened; a visored woman in a food court had paused at her meal for a few moments. That was all. The only person who heard the blood pounding in her ears was Lenie Clarke.

  But Lenie Clarke was nowhere near liking it yet.

  A row of medbooths across the concourse advertised reasonable rates and path scans updated weekly! She'd avoided such temptations ever since the booth at Calgary had begged her to stay; but that had been a dozen lies ago. Now she abandoned her table and moved through the patchy crowd, navigating the widest spaces. People bumped into her anyway, here and there—somehow, it was getting harder to avoid contact. The crowd seemed to be thickening almost by the minute.

  And far too many of them had capped eyes.

  * * *

  The medbooth was almost as spacious as her quarters at Beebe.

  "Minor deficiencies in calcium and trace sulfur," it reported. "Elevated serotonin and adrenocorticoid hormones; elevated platelet and antibody counts consistent with moderate physical injury within the past three weeks. Not life-threatening."

  Clarke rubbed her shoulder. By now it only ached when reminded to. Even the bruises on her face were fading.

  "Anomalously high levels of cellular metabolites." Biomedical details flickered across the main display. "Depressed lactates. Your basal metabolic rate is unusually high. This isn't immediately dangerous, but over time it can increase wear on body parts and significantly reduce lifespan. RNA and serotonin syn—"

  "Any diseases?" Clarke said, cutting to the chase.

  "All pathogen counts are within safe ranges. Would you like me to run farther tests?"

  "Yeah." She took the NMR helmet from its hook and fitted it over her head. "Brain scan."

  "Are you experiencing specific symptoms?"

  "I'm having—hallucinations," she said. "Vision only—not sound or smell or anything. Picture-in-picture, I can still see around the edges, but…"

  The booth waited. When Clarke said nothing farther it began humming quietly to itself. A luminous three-d outline of a human brain began rotating on the screen, filling piecemeal with fragments of color.

  "You have difficulty forming social bonds," the medbooth remarked.

  "What? Why do you say that?"

  "You have a chronic oxytocin deficiency. This is a treatable disorder, however. I can prescribe—"

  "Forget it," Clarke said. Since when did personality become a "treatable disorder"?

  "Your dopamine receptor sites are abnormally prolific. Do you, on average, use opioids or endorphin-amplifiers more than twice a week?"

  "Look, forget that stuff. Just work on the hallucinations."

  The booth fell silent. Clarke closed her eyes. All I need. Some bloody machine counting up my masochism molecules…

  Beep.

  Clarke opened her eyes. On the display, a dusting of violet stars had been sprinkled across the floor of the cerebral hemispheres. A tiny red dot pulsed somewhere near their center.

  Anomaly flashed in one corner of the screen.

  "What? What is it?"

  "Processing. Please be patient."

  The booth etched a line along the bottom of the display: VAC Area 19, it said.

  Another beep. Another flashing red pinpoint, farther forward.

  Another line: Brodman Area 37.

  "What are those red spots?" Clarke said.

  "Those parts of the brain are involved in vision," the booth told her. "May I lower the helmet visor to examine your eyes?"

  "I'm wearing eyecaps."

  "Corneal overlays will not interfere with the scan. May I proceed?"

  "Okay."

  The visor slid down. A grid of tiny bumps stippled its inner surface. The humming of the machine resonated deep in her skull. Clarke began counting to herself. She'd endured twenty-two seconds when the visor withdrew into its sheath.

  Just under Brodman Area 37: Ret/Mac OK.

  The humming stopped.

  "You may remove the helmet," the booth advised. "What is your chronological age?"

  "Thirty-two." She hung the helmet on its peg.

  "Did your visual environment change substantially between eight and sixteen weeks ago?"

  A year spent in the photoenhanced twilight of Channer Vent. A blind crawl along the floor of the Pacific. And then, suddenly, bright sky…

  "Yes. Maybe."

  "Does your family have a history of strokes or embolisms?"

  "I—I don't know."

  "Has anyone close to you died recently?"

  "What?"

  "Has anyone close to you died recently?"

  Her jaw clenched. "Everyone close to me has died recently."

  "Have you been exposed to changes in ambient pressure within the past two months? For example, have you spent time in an orbital facility, an unpressurized aircraft, or been free-diving below a depth of twenty meters?"

  "Yes. Diving."

  "While diving, did you undergo decompression protocols?"

  "No."

  "What was your maximum dive depth, and how long did you spend there?"

  Clarke smiled. "Three thousand four hundred meters. One year."

  The booth fell silent for a moment. Then: "People can not survive direct ascent from such depths without undergoing decompression. What was your maximum dive depth, and how long did you spend there?"

  "I didn't have to decompress," Clarke explained. "I didn't breathe during the dive, everything was elect—"

  Wait a minute…

  No decompression, she'd said.

  Of course not. Let the surface-skimming tourists breathe from their clunky tanks, risking narcosis or the bends whenever they ventured too far from the surface. Let them suffer nightmares of exploding lungs and eyes marbling into clusters of fleshy bubbles. Rifters were immune to such worries. Inside Beebe Station, Lenie Clarke had breathed at sea-level; outside, she hadn't breathed at all.

  Except once, when she'd been shot out of the sky.

  On that day Forcipiger had fallen slowly through a dark spectrum, green to blue to final lightless black, bleeding atmosphere from a thousand cuts. With each meter a little more of the ocean had forced its way in, squeezed the atmosphere into a single high-pressure pocket.

  Joel hadn't liked the sound of her vocoder. I don't want to spend my last few minutes listening to a machine voice, he'd said. So she'd stayed with him, breathing. They must have been at thirty atmospheres by the time he'd popped the hatch, cold and scared and sick of waiting to die.

  And she had come ashore, raging.

  It had taken days. Her ascent along the seabed would have been gradual enough to decompress naturally, the gas in her blood easing gently across the alveolar membranes—if her remaining lung had been in use at the time. It hadn't been: so what had happened to those last high-pressure remnants of Forcipiger's atmosphere in her bloodstream? The fact that she was still alive proved that they weren't still within her.

  Gas exchange isn't limited to the lungs, she remembered. The skin breathes. The GI tract breathes. Not as fast as a set of lungs would, of course. Not as efficiently.

  Maybe not quite efficiently enough…

  "What's wrong with me?" she asked quietly.

  "You have recently suffered two small embolisms in your brain which intermittently impair your vision," the medbooth said. "Your brain likely compensates for these gaps with stored images, although I would have to observe an episode in progress to be certain. You have also recently lost someone close to you; bereavement can be a factor in triggering visual-release hall—"

  "What do you me
an, stored images? Are you saying these are memories?"

  "Yes," the machine replied.

  "That's bullshit."

  "We're sorry you feel that way."

  "But they never happened, okay?" Shit-for-brains machine, why am I even arguing with it? "I remember my own childhood, for fuck's sake. I couldn't forget it if I tried. And these visions, they were someone else's, they were—"

  --happy—

  "—they were different. Completely different."

  "Long-term memories are frequently unreliable. They—"

  "Shut up," she snapped. "Just fix it."

  "This booth is not equipped for microsurgery. I can give you Ondansetron to suppress the symptoms. You should be aware, though, that patients with extensive synaptic rewiring may experience side effects such as mild dizziness —"

  She froze. Rewiring?

  "—double vision, halo effects—"

  "Stop," she said. The booth fell silent.

  On the display, that cloud of violet stars sparkled enigmatically along the floor of her brain.

  She touched it. "What are these?"

  "A series of surgical lesions and associated infarctions," the booth replied.

  "How many?"

  "Seven thousand four hundred eighty three."

  She took a breath, felt distant amazement at how steady it felt. "You're saying someone cut into my brain seven thousand four hundred and eighty-three times?"

  "There's no evidence of physical penetration. The lesions are consistent with deep-focus microwave bursts."

  "Why didn't you tell me before?"

  "You asked me to ignore subjects irrelevant to your hallucinations."