Rifters 2 - Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  "Alice said deepsea proteins were—stiff," Desjardins remembered.

  "More difficult to break apart, yes. And since the body's sulfur's locked up in the proteins, ßehemoth has a tougher time stealing it from a rifter. But we only backed-up the most pressure-sensitive molecules; ßehemoth can still get at the others. It just takes longer to compromise the cellular machinery."

  "Unless you back up everything."

  "The small stuff, anyway. Anything under fifty or sixty aminos is vulnerable. Something about the disulfide bridges, apparently. There's individual variation of course, vectors can stay asymptomatic for a month or more sometimes, but the only way to really…" She shrugged. "At any rate, I became half-fish."

  "A mermaid." The image was absurd.

  Rowan rewarded him with a brief smile. "You know the drill, Ken. Face down please."

  The operating board was inclined at a twenty-degree angle. Ken Lubin, naked, face masked by the headset, braced over it as though doing push-ups and eased himself down.

  The air shimmered and hummed. Lubin went utterly limp. And the insectile machine above him spread nightmare arms with too many joints, and descended to feed.

  * * *

  "Holy shit," Desjardins said.

  Lubin had been stabbed in a dozen places. Mercury filaments snaked into his wrists and plunged through his back. A catheter had slid autonomously up his ass; another seemed to have kabobed his penis. Something copper slithered into mouth and nose. Wires crawled along his face, wormed beneath his headset. The table itself was suddenly stippled with fine needles: Lubin was fixed in place like an insect pushed onto the bristles of a wire brush.

  "It's not as bad as it looks," Rowan remarked. "The neuroinduction field blocks most of the pain."

  "Fuck." The second cube, empty and waiting, shone like a threat of inquisition. "Am I—"

  Rowan pursed her lips. "I doubt that will be necessary. Unless you've been infected, which seems unlikely."

  "I've been exposed for two days, going on three."

  "It's not smallpox, doctor. Unless you exchanged body fluids with the man, or used his feces as compost, chances are you're clean. The sweep on your apartment didn't turn up anything…although you might want to know that your cat has a tapeworm."

  They swept my apartment. Desjardins tried to summon some sense of outrage. Relief was all that answered: I'm clean. I'm clean…

  "You'll have to undergo the gene therapy, though," Rowan said. "So you can stay clean. It's quite extensive, unfortunately."

  "How extensive?"

  She knew exactly what he was asking.

  "Too extensive to immunize nine billion human beings. At least, not in time; the vast majority of the world's population has never even been sequenced. And even if we could, there are still—other species. We can't reverse-engineer the whole biosphere."

  He'd expected it, of course. He still felt it like a blow.

  "So containment's our only option," she said quietly. "And as you may know, someone's trying very hard to prevent that."

  "Yeah." Desjardins looked at her. "Why is that, exactly?"

  "We want you to find out."

  "Me?"

  "We've already got our own people on it, of course. We'll link you up. But you've been exceeding our performance projections right across the board, and you were the one who made the connection after all."

  "I didn't make it so much as trip over it. I mean, you'd have to be blind not to see it, once you knew what to look for."

  "Well that's the problem, isn't it? We weren't looking. Why would we? Why would anyone trawl Maelstrom for the names of dead rifters? And now it turns out that everyone knows about Lenie Clarke except us. We've got the world's best intelligence-gathering machinery, and any kid with a stolen wristwatch knows more than we do." The corpse took a deep breath, as if adjusting some great weight on her back. "How did that happen, do you suppose?"

  "Ask the kid with the wristwatch," Desjardins said. He jerked his head at Lubin, twitching in his bubble. "If you've got any more like that one, you'll know everything in about two seconds."

  "Everything the kid knows, maybe. Which is next to nothing."

  "You just said—"

  "We almost got her, did you know that?" Rowan said. "Just yesterday. Once you gave us the heads-up we filtered through the chaff, and we located her in South Dakota. We closed in and found that half the city was running interference for her. She got away."

  "You interrogated the fans, though."

  "Summoned by a voice in the Maelstrom. Someone out there rallying the troops."

  "Who? Why?"

  "Nobody knew. Apparently it just jumps into likely conversations and starts cheerleading. We left all kinds of bait when we found that out, but so far it isn't talking to us."

  "Wow," Desjardins said.

  "You know what's really ironic? We thought something like this might happen. We took precautions against it."

  "You were expecting this?"

  "Not specifically, of course. The whole rifter thing just came out of left field." Rowan sighed, her face full of shadow. "Still, things—go wrong. You'd think a guy with a name like Murphy would realize that, but no. As far as ChemCog was concerned, it was just some junk meme the gels were spreading."

  "The gels are behind this?"

  She shook her head. "As I said, we took precautions. We tracked down every tainted node, we partitioned them and replaced them, we made damn sure that there was no trace of the meme left. Just to be absolutely sure. But here it is, somehow. Metastasized and mutated and born again. And all we know is that this time, the gels aren't behind it."

  "But they were before, is that what you're saying? They—they started the ball rolling?"

  "Maybe. Once upon a time."

  "Why, for God's sake?"

  "Well, that's the funny thing," Rowan admitted. "We told them to."

  * * *

  Rowan fed it all directly to his inlays. There was too much for even an optimized 'lawbreaker to take in on the spot, but the executive summary thumbnailed it in fifteen seconds: the growing threat, the rabid mutual distrust, the final reluctant surrender of control to an alien intelligence with its own unsuspected take on the virtues of parsimony.

  "Jesus," Desjardins said.

  "I know," Rowan agreed.

  "And how the Christ did Lenie Clarke take control?"

  "She didn't. That's what's so crazy. As far as we can tell, she didn't think anyone even knew about her until Yankton."

  "Huh." Desjardins pursed his lips. "Still. Whatever's out there, it's taking its lead from her."

  "I know," she said softly. She glanced at Lubin. "That's where he comes in."

  Lubin twitched and jerked under the ongoing assault. His face—the part of it not covered by the headset, anyway—was expressionless.

  "What's he watching in there?" Desjardins wondered.

  "Briefing stats. For his next mission."

  He watched a little longer. "Would he have killed me?"

  "I doubt it."

  "Who is—"

  "He's not someone you have to worry about any more."

  "No." Desjardins shook his head. "That's not good enough. He tracked me down across a whole continent, he broke into my home, he—" cut Guilt Trip right out from under me but of course he wasn't going to admit that to Rowan, not now for Chrissakes— "I gather he's got some kind of kill-switch hardwired into him, and he answers to you, Ms. Rowan. Who is he?"

  He could see her bristling. For a moment he thought he'd gone too far. No peon truly in Guilt Trip's grasp would ever mouth off to a superior that way, Rowan would know, the alarms would start sounding any second—

  "Mr. Lubin has—you might call it an impulse-control problem," she said. "He enjoys certain acts that most would find unpleasant. He never behaves—gratuitously is the word, I guess—but sometimes he tends to set up situations that provoke a particular response. Do you see what I'm saying?"

  He kills people, Desjardins th
ought numbly. He sets up breaches so he'll have an excuse to kill people…

  "We're helping him deal with his problem," Rowan said. "And we've got him under control."

  Desjardins bit his lip.

  She shook her head, a trace of disapproval on those pale features. "ßehemoth, Dr. Desjardins. Lenie Clarke. Lose sleep over those, if you must. Believe me, Ken Lubin's part of the solution." Her voice went up a touch: "Aren't you, Ken?"

  "I don't know her," Lubin said. "Not well."

  Desjardins glanced at Rowan, alarmed. "He can hear us?"

  She answered Lubin instead. "You know her better than you think."

  "You have—profiles," Lubin said. His words were slurred; the induction field must be grazing his facial muscles. "That psychologist. Shcanlon."

  "Scanlon had his own issues," Rowan said. "You and Clarke have a lot more in common. Similar outlooks, similar backgrounds. If you were in her shoes—"

  "I am in her shoes. I came here…" Lubin licked his lips. A trickle of saliva glistened at the corner of his mouth.

  "Fair enough. But suppose you had no information and no clearance, and no—behavioral constraints. What would you be after?"

  Lubin didn't speak. His cowled face was an eyeless, high-contrast mask in the spots. His skin almost glowed.

  Rowan stepped forward. "Ken?"

  "'s easy," he said at last. "Revenge."

  "Against who, exactly?"

  "The—GA. We did try to kill us, after all."

  Rowan's contacts glowed with sudden input. "She was never seen near any GA offices."

  "She ashaulted someone in Hongcouver." A spasm ran up the length of Lubin's body. His head lolled. "Looking for Yves Shcanlon."

  "But Scanlon was her only lead, as far as we know. It didn't go anywhere. We don't think she's even been in N'AmPac for months."

  "She has other grudges," Lubin said. "Maybe she's—going home."

  Rowan frowned, concentrating. "Her parents, you mean."

  "She mentioned Sault Sainte Marie."

  "Suppose she couldn't get to her parents?"

  "Don' know."

  "What would you do?"

  "I'd—keep trying…"

  "Suppose her parents were dead," Rowan suggested.

  "…'f we killed them for her?"

  "No, suppose they were already—suppose they'd been dead a long time."

  Clumsily, Lubin shook his head. "The people she hates're very mush…alive..."

  "Suppose, Ken." Rowan was getting impatient. "Theoretical scenario. You've got a score to settle with the GA, and a score to settle with your parents, and you know you'll never get to either of them. What do you do?"

  His mouth moved. Nothing came out.

  "Ken?"

  "—I redirect," he said at last.

  "What do you mean?"

  Lubin jerked like a blind marionette with most of its strings cut.

  "The whole world fucked me over. I—I wanna return the favor."

  "Huh." Rowan shook her head. "She's pretty much doing that already."

  * * *

  One crucifixion was enough, as it turned out. Achilles Desjardins was clean, if still vulnerable; the second surgery, prepped and waiting, had no interest in scouring his insides.

  It only wanted to change him into a flounder.

  Lubin's little chamber of horrors had backed off for the moment. The pallet had folded itself up into recliner mode; the assassin sat on it while a mechanical spider skittered across his body on legs like jointed whiskers.

  In the adjacent cube, Desjardins looked down at an identical device on his own body. He'd already been injected with a half-dozen tailored viruses, each containing the code for a different suite of ßehemoth-proof proteins. There'd be other injections over the next few days. Lots of them. The fever would start within a week; the nausea was already underway.

  The spider was taking baselines: bacteria from skin and hair, organ biopsies, gut contents. Every now and then it plunged a hair-thin proboscis into his flesh, provoking a diffuse ache from within the tissues. Reverse-engineering was a tricky business these days. If you weren't careful, tweaked genes could change the microflora in the gut as easily as the flesh of the host. E. coli. could turn from commensal to cancer with the flip of a base-pair. A few wily bacteria had even learned how to slip some of their own genes into viral carriers en route, and hence into human cells. It made Desjardins long for those good old-fashioned germs which merely fed on antibiotics.

  "You didn't tell her," Lubin said.

  Rowan had left them to their own devices. Desjardins looked at the other man through two layers of membrane and tried to ignore the creepy tickle on his skin.

  "Tell her what?" he asked finally.

  "That I took you off Guilt Trip."

  "Yeah? What makes you so sure?"

  Lubin's spider scrambled up his throat and tapped on his lower lip. The assassin obligingly opened his mouth; the little robot scraped at the inside of his cheek with one appendage and retreated back down the torso.

  "She wouldn't have left us alone otherwise," Lubin said.

  "I thought you were leashed, Horatio."

  He shrugged. "One leash of many. It doesn't matter."

  "It sure the fuck does."

  "Why? Do you really think I was so out of control before? Do you think I'd have even been able to unTrip you, if I honestly thought you'd breach?"

  "Sure, if you sealed it up afterward. Isn't that your whole problem? You set yourself up to kill people?"

  "So I'm a monster." Lubin settled back in the chair and closed his eyes. "What does that make you?"

  "Me?"

  "I saw what you were playing at when we first met."

  Heat spilled across Desjardins's face. "That's fantasy. I'd never do that in real life. I don't even fuck in real life."

  Lubin opened one eye and assayed a trace of smile. "Don't trust yourself?"

  "I've just got too much respect for women."

  "Really? Seems a bit inconsistent with your choice of hobbies."

  "That's normal. That's brainstem." It had been such a relief to discover that at last, to see aggression and sex sharing the same hardwired pathways through the mammalian brain— to know his secret shame was a legacy millions of years old, ubiquitous for all the denial of civilized minds. But Lubin…"As if you don't know. You get your rocks off every time you kill someone."

  "Ah." Lubin's not-quite-smile didn't change. "So I'm a monster, but you're just a prisoner of your inner drives."

  "I fantasize. You kill people. Sorry, you seal security breaches."

  "Not always," Lubin said.

  Desjardins looked away without answering. The spider ran down his leg.

  "Someone got away once," said a strange soft voice behind him.

  He turned. Lubin was staring into space, not moving. Even his spider had paused, as if startled by some sudden change in its substrate.

  "She got away," Lubin said again. He almost sounded as though he were talking to himself. "I may have even let her."

  Clarke, Desjardins realized.

  "She wasn't really a breach then, of course. There was no way she'd ever make it out alive, there was no—but she did, somehow."

  Lubin no longer wore the face of a passionless predator. There was something new looking out from behind those eyes, and it seemed almost…confused…

  "It's a shame," he said softly. "She really deserved a fighting chance…"

  "A lot of people seem to agree with you," Desjardins said.

  Lubin mm'd.

  "Look.." Desjardins cleared his throat. "I need some of those derms before you go."

  "Derms." Lubin seemed strangely distant.

  "The analog. You said a week or ten days before the Trip kicked back in, and that was three days ago—if they spot-test me in the next few days I'm screwed."

  "Ah." Lubin came back to earth. "That's out of my hands now, I'm afraid. Horatio and all."

  "What do you mean, it's out of your ha
nds? I just need a few derms, for Chrissake!"

  Lubin's spider skittered off under the pallet, its regimen complete. The assassin grabbed his clothes and began dressing.

  "Well?" Desjardins said after a while.

  Lubin pulled on his shirt and stepped out of the cube. Its skin swirled in his wake.

  "Don't worry about it," he said, and didn't look back.

  Anthopleura

  * * *

  Mug Shot

  Exotics Infestation: Executive Summary (nontechnical)

  DO NOT mail

  DO NOT send through Haven

  DO NOT copy

  PURGE AFTER DECRYPT

  To: Rowan, PC.

  Priority: Ultra (Global PanD)

  EID Code: ßehemoth

  General Classification: nanobial/decomposer

  Taxonomy: Formal nomenclature awaiting declassified release to Linnean Society. Eventual outgroup clade to be at supraDomain level.

  Description: Unique heterotrophic nanobe, 200-250nm diameter. Opportunistic freeliver/commensal. Genome 1.1M (pRNA template): nonsense codons <0.7% of total.

  Biogeography: Originally native to hydrothermal deep-sea environments; 14 relict populations confirmed (Fig. 1). Can also exist symbiotically in intracellular environments with salinity  30ppt and/or temperatures ranging from 4-60C. A secondary strain has been found with advanced adaptations for intracellular existence.

  Evolution/Ecology: ßehemoth is the only organism known to have truly terrestrial origins, predating the Martian Panspermia event by approximately 800 million years. The existence of a secondary strain geared especially to the eukaryotic intracellular environment is reminiscent of the Precambrian serial endosymbiosis which gave rise to mitochondria and other modern subcellular organelles. Free-living ßehemoth expends significant metabolic energy maintaining homeostasis in stressful hydrothermal environments. Intracellularly, infectious ßehemoth produces an ATP surplus which can be utilized by the host cell. This results in abnormal growth and giantism amongst certain deepwater fish; it confers increases in stamina and strength to infected humans in the short term, although these benefits are massively outweighed by disruption of short-chain sulfur-containing proteins and consequent deficiency syndromes (see below).