Rifters 2 - Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  "Maybe I know more than you think, Killjoy. If you don't think you're up to a blood test, well maybe that's a problem and maybe it isn't, but you're gonna have to bite the bullet eventually. Unless you're planning on spending the rest of your life in this cubicle?"

  "The next five days, maybe…" He was so very tired.

  "I know what I'm doing, Killjoy. Trust me on this."

  Desjardins managed a feeble laugh. "People keep saying that."

  "Maybe. But I mean it." She drew him to his feet. "Besides, I have something to tell you."

  * * *

  He couldn't bring himself to enter the Pile, after all; too many ambient ears, and discretion prevailed even without Guilt Trip. For that matter, even walking under the open sky made him a bit queasy. The heavens had eyes.

  They walked, letting chance choose the course. Intermittent beds of kudzu4 lined their path; the filamentous blades of windmills turned slowly overhead on the tops of buildings, along pedestrian concourses, anywhere that a bit of fetch could insinuate itself into the local architecture. Alice Jovellanos took all of it in without a word: Lubin, Rowan, Guilt Trip. Autonomy thrust upon the unwilling.

  "Are you sure?" she asked at last. A streetlight flickered on overhead. "Maybe he was lying. He lied about Rowan, after all."

  "Not about this, Alice. Believe me. He had his hand around my throat and I just sang, I told him stuff the Trip would never've let out."

  "That's not what I mean. I believe you're Trip-free, for sure. I just don't believe that Lubin had anything to do with it."

  "What?"

  "I think he just found out about it, after the fact," Jovellanos continued, "and he used it to his own advantage. I don't know what was in those derms he was giving you, but I'd bet a year's worth of Mandelbrot's kibble that you could walk past those bloodhounds right now and they wouldn't even twitch."

  "Yeah? And if you were in my shoes, do you think you'd be quite so optimistic?"

  "I'd guarantee it."

  "Fuck, Alice, this is serious."

  "I know, Killjoy. I'm serious."

  "But if Lubin didn't do it to me, then who—"

  Her face was fading in the twilight, like the smile of a Cheshire cat.

  "Alice?" he said.

  "Hey." She shrugged. "You always knew my politics were a bit radical."

  * * *

  "Fuck, Alice." Desjardins put his head in his hands. "How could you?"

  "It was easier than you might think. Just build a Trip analog with an extra side-group—"

  "That's not what I mean. You know what I mean."

  She stepped in front of him, blocking his way.

  "Listen, Killjoy. You've got ten times the brains of those felchers, and you let them turn you into a puppet."

  "I'm not a puppet."

  "Not any more, anyway."

  "I never was."

  "Sure you were. Just like Lubin."

  "I'm nothing like—"

  "They turned you into one big reflex arc, my man. Took all that gray matter and hammered it into pure hardwired instinct, through and through."

  "Fuck you. You know that isn't true."

  She put her hand on Desjardins's shoulder. "Look, I don't blame you for being in denial about—"

  He shrugged it off. "I'm not in denial! You think instinct and reflex can handle the decisions I have to make, every hour I'm on the job? You think weighting a thousand variables on the fly doesn't require a certain degree of autonomy? Jesus Christ, I—"

  —I may be a slave, but I'm not a robot. He caught it at the back of his throat; no sense giving her any more ammunition than she already had.

  "We gave you back your life, man," Jovellanos said softly.

  "We?"

  "There's a few of us. We're kind of political, in a ragtag sorta way."

  "Oh Christ." Desjardins shook his head. "Did you even ask me if I wanted this?"

  "You would've said no. Guilt Trip would've made you. That's the whole point."

  "And just maybe I'd've said no anyway, did you ever stop to think of that? I can kill a half-million people before lunchtime; you don't think it's a good idea to have safeguards in place? Maybe you remember the buzz on absolute power?"

  "Sure," Jovellanos said. "Every time I see a Lertzman or a Rowan."

  "I don't care about Lertzman or fucking Rowan! You did this to me!"

  "I did it for you, Achilles."

  He glanced up, startled. "What did you call me?"

  "Achilles."

  "Jesus."

  "Listen, you're safe. The hounds will find Trip in your blood like they always have. That's the beauty of it, Spartacus doesn't touch the Trip. It just blocks the receptors."

  "Spartacus? That's what you call it?"

  Jovellanos nodded.

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "Look it up. The point is—"

  "And why now, of all times?" Desjardins threw his hands in the air. "If you were going to do this to me you couldn't have picked a worse time if you tried."

  She shook her head. "Killjoy, you're up at bat and the whole world's hanging in the balance. If you ever needed a clear head, now's the time. You can't afford to be chained to any corpse agenda. Nobody can afford it."

  He glared at her. "You are such a fucking hypocrite, Alice. You infected me. You didn't ask, you didn't even tell, you just stuck me with some bug that could get me thrown out of my job, or worse—"

  She raised her hands, as if to ward off his words. "Achilles, I—"

  "Yeah, yeah, you did it for me. What an altruist. Ramming Spartacus Brand Home-Cooked Autonomy down my throat whether I like it or not. I'm your friend, Alice! Why did you do this?"

  She stared at him for a moment in the fading light.

  "You don't know?" she said at last, in a cold angry voice. "The goddamned boy genius doesn't have a clue? Why don't you do a path analysis or something to find out?"

  She spun on her heel and walked away.

  Spartacus

  "Achilles, you can be such a raging idiot sometimes I just don't believe it.

  "You know what I was risking, coming clean with you yesterday. You know what I'm risking sending this to you now—it'll autowipe, but there's nothing these assholes can't scan if they feel like it. That's part of the problem, that's why I'm taking this huge risk in the first place.

  "I'm sorry I stomped off like that. Things just weren't going like I hoped, you know? But I do have some answers for you if you'll just hear me out, okay? Just—hear me out.

  "I heard what you said about trust and betrayal, and maybe some of it rings a bit more true than I'd like. But don't you see there was no point in asking you beforehand? As long as Guilt Trip was running the show, you were incapable of making your own decision. You keep insisting that's wrong, you go on about all the life-and-death decisions you make and the thousands of variables you juggle, but Achilles my dear, whoever told you that free will was just some complicated algorithm for you to follow?

  "Look at bumblebees dancing some time. You wouldn't believe the stuff they talk about. Solar elevation, topographic cues, time-stamps—they write roadmaps to the best food sources, scaled to the centimeter, and they do it all with a few butt-wiggles. Does that make them free agents? Why do you think we call them drones?

  "Look at the physics of a spider spinning its web. Hell, look at a dog catching a ball—that's ballistic math, my man. The world's full of dumb animals who act as though they're juggling third-order differentials in their heads and it's all just instinct, man. It's not freedom. It's not even intelligence. And you stand there and tell me you're autonomous just because you can follow a decision tree with a few dozen variables?

  "I know you don't want to be corrupted. But maybe a decent, honest human being is his own safeguard, did you ever think of that? Maybe you don't have to let them turn you into one big conditioned reflex. Maybe you just want them to, because then it's not really your responsibility, is it? It's so easy never to have to make your ow
n decisions. Addictive, even. Maybe you even got hooked on it, and you're going through a little bit of withdrawal now.

  "I bet you don't even know what they took away, do you? I bet you weren't even interested. Sure, you read their cheery little leaflets about serving the greater good and you learned enough to pass the tests, but it was all just hoops you had to jump through to get into the next tax bracket, right? Jesus, Killjoy. I mean, don't get me wrong—you're a flaming genius with sims and nonparametric stats, but when it comes to the real world you wouldn't know a come-on if someone got down on their knees and unzipped your fly for you. I mean, really.

  "Anyhow, what they stole, we gave back. And I'm going to tell you exactly what we did, on the premise, you know, ignorance breeds fear and all that.

  "You know about the Minsky receptors in your frontal lobes, and how all those nasty little guilt transmitters bind to them, and how you perceive that as conscience. They made Guilt Trip by tweaking a bunch of behavior-modification genes snipped from parasites; the guiltier you feel, the more Trip gets pumped into your brain. It binds to the transmitters, which changes their shape and basically clogs your motor pathways so you can't move.

  "That's also why you're so fond of cats, by the way. Baseline Toxoplasma turns rodents into cat-lovers as a way of jumping between hosts. I bet a hundred Quebucks you weren't in such pathetic servitude to Mandelbrot until you got your shots, am I right?

  "Anyway, Spartacus is basically a guilt analog. It's got the same active sites, so it binds to the Trip, but the overall conformation is slightly different so it doesn't actually do anything except clog up the Minsky receptors. Also it takes longer to break down than regular guilt, so it reaches higher concentrations in the brain. Eventually it overwhelms the active sites through sheer numbers.

  "That's the real beauty of it, Killjoy; both your natural transmitters and the Trip itself are still being produced normally, so a test that keys on either of 'em comes up clean. Even a test looking for the complexed form will pass muster, since the baseline complex is still floating around—it just can't find any free receptor sites to latch onto.

  "So you're safe. Honestly. The bloodhounds won't be a problem. I wouldn't put you at risk, Achilles, believe me. You mean too—you're too much of a friend for me to fuck around like that.

  "Anyway, there you go. I've stuck my neck out for you, and what happens now is pretty much up to you. If you turn me in, though, know this: you're making that decision. However you rationalize it, you won't be able to blame some stupid longchain molecule. It'll be you all the way, your own free will.

  "So use it, and think about all the things you've done and why, and ask yourself if you're really so morally rudderless that you couldn't have made all those tough decisions without enslaving yourself to a bunch of despots. I think you could have, Achilles. You never needed their ball and chain to be a decent human being. I really believe that. I'm gambling everything on it.

  "Anyway. You know where I am. You know what your options are. Join me or stab me. Your choice.

  "Love, Alice."

  TursiPops

  She'd last been confirmed at Yankton. Sault Sainte Marie crouched at the eastern corner of Lake Superior. A straight line between those points cut through Lake Michigan.

  Ken Lubin knew exactly where to set up shop.

  The Great Lakes weren't quite so great these days, not since the water shortages of the twenty-first century had reduced their volume by twenty-five percent. (Lubin supposed it was a small price to pay to avoid the water wars breaking out everywhere else on the planet.) Still. Lenie Clarke was a rifter; the lakes were still deep, and dark, and long. Directly en route, too. Any amphibian trying to elude capture would be crazy not to take a dip.

  Of course, any amphibian with more than a room-temperature IQ would also know that her enemies would be waiting for her.

  He stood four hundred meters above Lake Michigan's southern reaches. An unbroken rim of industrial lakefront stretched around the horizon from Whiting to Evanston. Barely visible between land and water: the dark, broad bands of old mud that passed for shoreline wherever deep-water access wasn't a priority.

  "Check the forecast lately?" It was Burton, the Afrikaaner, still pissed that Lubin had usurped his command in the name of global salvation. Holo light from the tabletop played along the line of his jaw.

  Lubin shook his head. The other man glanced through the wraparound pane of the lifter's observation deck. Darkness was advancing overhead, as though someone were unrolling a great black rug across the sky. "Forecast's up to eight, now. It'll hit us in under an hour. If she can still breathe water, it's going to come in handy even on shore."

  Lubin grunted and ran a magged scan along the Chicago waterfront. Nothing of note there, of course. Ant-like civilians scuttling along under a morbid sky. She could be down there right now. Any second one of those bugs could just jump off the breakwater right in front of me, and it'd all be over. Or more likely I wouldn't even see it. All the troops, all the botflies, all the heavy equipment could just keep circling around here until the storm hits, and she's safe and cold under a hundred and fifty meters of muddy water.

  "You're sure she's going to try it," Burton said.

  Lubin tapped a panel on the table; the map zoomed back in scale, played false-color storm-front imagery across its airspace.

  "Even though she knows we're in her way," Burton continued.

  But they weren't in her way, of course. They were still hanging in mid-air, waiting for a fix. There were just too many approaches, too much megapolitan jungle full of pipes and wires and RF signals where a single unique signature could stay endlessly anonymous. There were some places one could safely exclude, of course. Clarke would never be foolish enough to cross the mudflats—a klick wide in some places—that the lakes had abandoned when the water fell. She'd stay in industrialized areas, indoors or under cover, her signal swamped and her passage unnoticed.

  At least they knew she was in Chicago somewhere; a patrolling botfly had picked up a characteristic rifter EMission just that morning, then lost it around a corner. Another had picked up the scent through the front window of a Holiday Inn; cold, of course, by the time reinforcements arrived, but a playback on the lobby cameras hadn't left much doubt. Lenie Clarke was in Chicago; Lubin had pulled back standbys from Cleveland to Detroit, brought them all into tight focus around the sightings.

  "You seem awfully certain, considering that whole mercury thing," Burton remarked. "Have you run this past anyone upstairs?"

  "I want the dolphins set down right about there," Lubin said, pinpointing a spot on the tabletop. "Take care of it, will you?"

  "Certainly." Burton moved back to his panel. Lubin spared a moment to watch his back.

  Patience, Burton. You'll get your chance soon enough.

  If I fuck up…

  * * *

  If he fucked up again, actually.

  He still couldn't believe it. All those blood tests he'd ordered, all those path scans, and he'd never thought to test for heavy metals. He'd been eating raw oceanic wildlife for weeks, and it had never even occurred to him.

  Idiot, he repeated to himself for the thousandth time.

  The GA's medics had caught it when they were cleansing him of ßehemoth. They'd assured him that he couldn't be held responsible. That was the thing about heavy metals; they affected the brain. The mercury itself had dulled his faculties, they said. All things considered, he'd actually been performing better than expected.

  But maybe Burton could have performed better. Maybe Burton knew it.

  Burton had never much liked him, Lubin knew. He wasn't quite sure why. Of course, you don't inject Rwanda11 into a man's cells without expecting some increase in the usual alpha-male head-butting responses, but dispassion was a trait even more valued than ruthlessness; both of them had been tweaked for enhanced self-control even more than for the euphemistic necessary steps.

  Lubin shrugged off the challenger and concentrated on the ch
allenge. At least Chicago narrowed the options somewhat. Still not enough to catch Clarke until she made her move. The simple geometry of πr2 saw to that: double your search radius and effectiveness dropped by a factor of four. The waterfront was the bottleneck; wherever Clarke was now, that was where she'd be heading. She'd be running into opposition that increased exponentially as she approached that target, the flip side of inverse-square. Most of his people, Lubin knew, expected to take her out before she even saw the water.

  He wasn't so sure. Clarke had none of the special skills and training that armed the least of her enemies, no botflies or talking guns, but she had something. She was smart, and she was tough, and she did not behave like a normal human being. Pain didn't seem to frighten her at all.

  And she hated, more purely and perfectly than anyone Lubin had ever known.

  She also had half of Maelstrom backing her up. Or had until recently, anyway. Lubin wondered if she'd grown used to being so unaccountably lucky. Had she started to believe her own PR, had she begun to think herself invincible? Did she know yet that she was back on her own?

  Hopefully not. Anything that built her confidence worked in Lubin's favor.

  Burton still didn't think she'd risk running the gauntlet. Burton wanted to descend from on high and impose martial law, shut that fucking sprawl down, right to the rivets, search room by room until the next millennium if that's what it took. Burton had no patience and no subtlety. No appreciation for πr2. You don't catch fish by chasing them around the ocean with a net; you set the net where you know the fish will come, and you wait.

  Of course, Burton didn't think this particular fish would come to the net. She wasn't an idiot. All she had to do was hang back and wait them out. It was a plausible enough line of reasoning, if you didn't know what Lubin knew.

  If you didn't know that Lenie Clarke, quite simply, was homesick.

  The lost distant abyss was an ache inside of her, and if Lake Michigan was a poor imitation of that world, at least it was an imitation of some kind. No smokers, no crystalline hot-and-cold running seawater, no glowing monsters to light the way—but fifteen atmospheres, at least. Darkness and cold, if you stayed near the bottom. Sheltering murk and currents enough to convect away any telltale heatprint. It might be enough, Lubin knew.