Rifters 2 - Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  Ken can head her off.

  Ken Lubin was Guilt-Tripped for tight security. Lubin kept slipping up, just so he could prove that again and again.

  Someone got away, once, he'd said. And then: It's a shame. She really deserved a fighting chance…

  Lenie Clarke had had more than a fighting chance: she had legions of followers watching her back. But they'd never really been following her. They'd been chasing some blue-shifted evolutionary distortion, racing past at lightspeed. Unless Anemone knew where she was and sounded the alarm—and whatever else it was, Anemone was no clairvoyant—how would anyone even know about the lone black figure crawling past them in the night?

  Lenie Clarke was just one woman. And Ken Lubin was hunting her down.

  There was no great need to kill her. She could be cleansed. She could be neutralized without being erased. But that wouldn't matter, not to Lubin.

  She's the only security breach he ever left unsealed. That's what he said.

  Achilles Desjardins had never met Lenie Clarke. By rights, she should be one of the far-off millions. And yet, somehow, he knew her: someone driven entirely by other people's motives. Everything she did, everything she felt, was the result of surgical and biochemical lies placed within her for the service of others.

  Oh yes. I know her all right.

  Suddenly, the fact that she was also a vector for global apocalypse barely even mattered any more. Lenie Clarke had a face. He could feel her in his gut, another human being, far more real than the distant abstraction of an eight-digit death toll.

  I'm going to get to her first.

  Sure, Lubin was a trained killer; but Desjardins had his own set of enhancements. All 'lawbreakers did. His system was awash in chemicals that could crank his reflexes into overdrive in an instant. And with luck—if he moved fast enough—he might just beat Lubin to the target. He might, just barely, have half a chance.

  It wasn't his job. It wasn't the greater good.

  Fuck both those things.

  AWOL

  "There's been a breach," the corpse said. "We were hoping you could fill in some relevant details."

  Half of Alice Jovellanos's facial muscles tried to go into spasm right there. She clamped a tight lid on their aspirations and presented what she hoped was a look of oh please God let it be innocent and concerned curiosity.

  Then again, what's the point? whispered some smart-ass inner voice. They must know already. Why else would they even call you in?

  She clamped down on that one, too.

  They're just toying with you. No one gets to be a corpse without developing a taste for sadism.

  And that…just barely.

  There were four of them, gender-balanced, ringed around the far side of the conference table up in the stratosphere of Admin-14. Slijper was the only one Jovellanos recognized—she'd just been brought in as Lertzman's replacement. The corpses all sat arrayed on the far side of the table, backlit by little halogen spots, their faces lost in the shadow of that glare. Except for the eyes. All four sets of eyes twinkled intermittently with corporate intel.

  They'd be monitoring her vitals, of course. They'd know she was stressed. Of course, anyone would be stressed under these conditions. Hopefully subtleties like guilt and innocence were beyond the scope of the remotes.

  "You're aware of the recent attack on Don Lertzman," Slijper said.

  Jovellanos nodded.

  "We think it may have been connected with a colleague of yours. Achilles Desjardins."

  Okay, just the right amount of surprise here… "Achilles? Why?"

  "We were hoping you could tell us," one of the other corpses replied.

  "But I don't know any—I mean, why not ask him directly?" They already have, you idiot. That's what led them to you, he sold you out, after all this he sold—

  "—disappeared," Slijper finished.

  Jovellanos straightened in her chair. "Excuse me?"

  "I said, Dr. Desjardins seems to have gone AWOL. When he didn't show up for his shift we were concerned that he might have run into the same complications as Don, but the evidence suggests he disappeared of his own volition."

  "Evidence?"

  "He wants you to feed his cat," Slijper said.

  "He—what do—"

  Slijper held up one hand: "I know, and I hope you'll forgive the intrusion. He left the message on your queue. He said he didn't know how long he was going to be gone, but he'd be grateful if you took care of —Mandelbot, is it?— and he'd keyed the door to let you in. At any rate"—the hand dropped back below table level—"this kind of behavior is frankly unprecedented from anyone on the Trip. He seems to have simply abandoned his post, with no apology, no explanation, no advance warning. It's—impulsive, to say the least."

  Oh, man. Killjoy, you were covered. Why'd you have to blow it?

  "I didn't know that was even possible," Jovellanos said. "He had his shots years ago."

  "Nonetheless, here we are." Slijper leaned back in her chair. "We were wondering if you had noticed anything unusual in his behavior lately. Anything which, looking back, might have suggested—"

  "No. Nothing. Although—" Jovellanos took a breath. "Actually, he has been kind of—I don't know, withdrawn lately." Well, it's true enough, and they probably know already; it'd look suspicious if I didn't mention it…

  "Any idea why?" asked another corpse.

  "Not really." She shrugged. "I've seen it happen before—it's bound to wear on you, having to deal with high-level crises all the time. And Tripped people can't always talk about what's on their minds, you know? So I just let him be."

  Please, please, please don't let them have high-level telemetry on me now…

  "I see," Slijper said. "Well, thank you anyway, Dr. Jovellanos."

  "Is that all?" She started to rise.

  "Not quite," said one of the other corpses. "There's one other thing. Concerning—"

  —Oh please no—

  "—your own involvement in all this."

  Jovellanos slumped back into her chair and waited for the axe to fall.

  "Dr. Desjardins's disappearance leaves—well, a vacancy we really can't afford at this time," the corpse continued.

  Jovellanos looked at the backlit tribunal. A tiny part of her dared to hope.

  "You worked closely with him through a great deal of this. We understand that your own contribution to date hasn't been negligible—in fact, you've been working below your own potential for some time now. And you're certainly farther up the learning curve than anyone else we could bring in at this point. On the usual scales you're overdue for a promotion. But apparently...that is, according to Psych you have certain objections to taking Guilt Trip…"

  I. Can't. Believe. It.

  "Now please understand, we don't hold this against you," said the corpse. "Your issues concerning invasive technology are— very understandable, after what happened to your brother. I can't honestly say I'd feel any differently in your shoes. That whole nanotech thing was such a debacle…"

  A sudden, familiar lump rose in Jovellanos's throat.

  "So you see, we understand your objections. But perhaps you could understand that Guilt Trip hails from a whole different arena, there's certainly nothing dangerous—"

  "I do know the difference between bio and nano," Jovellanos said mildly.

  "Yes, of course…I didn't mean to—"

  "It's just that, what happened to Chito—logic doesn't always enter into it when you…"

  Chito. Poor, dead, tortured Chito. These haploids don't have the slightest clue the things I've done.

  All for you, kiddo.

  "Yes. We understand that, of course. And even though your prejudice—again, entirely understandable—even though it's held you back professionally, you've proven to be an exceptional performer. The question is, after all these years, will you continue to be held back?"

  "Because we all think that would be a shame," Slijper said.

  Jovellanos looked across the table an
d said nothing for a full ten seconds.

  "I think….I think maybe it's time to let go," she said at last.

  "So you'd be willing to get your shots and move up to senior 'lawbreaker," Slijper said.

  For you, Chito. Onward and upward.

  Alice Jovellanos nodded gravely, stoically refusing to let her facial muscles do a whole different kind of dance. "I think I'd be up for that."

  Scheherezade

  Fossil water, cold and gray.

  She remembered the local lore, although she was no longer certain how she'd learned it. Less than one percent of the Lakes hailed from run-off or rainfall; she swam through the liquid remains of a glacier that had melted ten thousand years before. It would never refill once human appetites had drained it dry.

  For now, there was more than enough to cover her passage.

  For days the mermaid had passed through its depths. Visions of a past she couldn't remember rose like bubbles through the dark water and the pain in her side; she'd long since stopped trying to deny them. At night she would rise like some oversize plankter. She couldn't risk coming ashore, but she'd stocked her pack with freeze-dried rations in Chicago; she'd float on the surface and tear into the vacuum-sealed pouches like a sea otter, resubmerging before dawn.

  She thought she remembered part of a childhood, spent where the three greatest lakes converged: Sault Sainte Marie, commercial bottleneck into Lake Superior. The city sat on its locks and dams like a troll at a bridge, extorting levies from passing tonnage. It wasn't as populous now as it had been; four hundred kilometers from the edge of the Sovereign Quebec but still too close for some, especially in the wake of the Nunavut Lease. A giant's shadow is a cold place to live at the best of times; a giant grown invincible overnight, nursing grudges from an oppressed childhood, was a complete nonstarter. So people had left.

  Lenie Clarke remembered leaving. She'd had a whole lot of first-hand experience with shadows, and giants, and unhappy childhoods. So she, too, had moved away, and kept moving until the Pacific Ocean had stood in her way and said, no farther. She'd settled in Hongcouver and lived day-to-day, year to year, until that moment when the Grid Authority had turned her into something that even the ocean couldn't stop.

  Now she was back.

  Past midnight. The mermaid cut quietly through a surface squirming with reflected metropolitan light. The walls of a distant lift-lock huddled against the western sky like a low fortress, holding back the elevated waters of Lake Superior—one relic, at least, still resisting depletion. Clarke kept the lock to her left, swam north to the Canadian side. Derelict wharves had been rotting there since before she'd been born. She split her hood and filled her chest with air. She left her fins behind.

  Even with night-eyes, there was no one else to be seen.

  She walked north to Queen and turned east, her feet following their own innate path beneath the dim streetlights. No one and nothing accosted her. Eastbourne Manor continued to rot undemolished, although someone had swept away the cardboard prefabs in the past twenty years.

  At Coulson she stopped, looking north. The house she remembered was still there, just up from the corner. Odd how little it had changed in two decades. Assuming, of course, that those memories hadn't been…acquired… more recently.

  She still hadn't seen a single vehicle, or another human being. Farther east, though—on the far side of Riverview—there was no mistaking the line of hovering botflies. She turned back the way she'd come; there too. They'd moved in behind her without a sound.

  She turned up Coulson.

  * * *

  The door recognized her after all that time. It opened like a mouth, but the inside lights—as if knowing she'd have no need of their services—remained off.

  The front hall receded in front of her, barren and unfurnished; its walls glistened strangely, as if freshly lacquered. An archway cut into the left wall: the living room, where Indira Clarke used to sit and do nothing. Past that, the staircase. An empty gray throat leading up into hell.

  She wouldn't be going up there just yet. She sighed and turned the corner into the living room.

  "Ken," she said.

  The living room, too, was an unfurnished shell. The windows had been blacked out, but the faint street light leaking in through the hall was more than enough for rifter vision. Lubin stood in the middle of that stark space; he wore dryback clothes, but his eyes were capped. Just behind him, the room's only furniture: a chair, with a man tied into it. He appeared to be merely unconscious.

  "You shouldn't have come," Lubin said.

  "Where else was I going to go?"

  Lubin shook his head. He seemed suddenly agitated. "It was a stupid move. Easy to anticipate. You must've known that."

  "Where else was there?" she said again.

  "This isn't even what you think it is. This isn't what you remember."

  "I know," said Clarke.

  Lubin looked at her, frowning.

  "They fucked me over, Ken. I know that. I guess I knew it ever since I started having the—visions, although it took me a while to…"

  "Then why did you come here?" Ken Lubin was nowhere to be found. This thing in his place seemed almost human.

  "I must have had a real childhood somewhere," Clarke said after a moment. "They can't have faked all of it. This seemed like the best place to start looking."

  "And you think they'll let you? You think I can let you?"

  She looked at him. His flat, empty eyes looked back from a face in unexpected torment.

  "I guess not," she sighed at last. "But you know something, Ken? It was almost worth it. Just— learning this much. Knowing what they did to me…"

  Behind Lubin, the man in the chair stirred briefly.

  "So what happens now?" Clarke asked. "You kill me for playing Typhoid Mary? They need me as a lab rat?"

  "I don't know how much that matters any more. It's all over the place now."

  "What kind of plague is this, anyway?" With mild surprise she noted the weakness of her own curiosity. "I mean, it's been almost a year and I'm not dead. I don't even have any symptoms…"

  "Takes longer with rifters," Lubin said. "And it's not even a disease, strictly speaking. More of a soil nanobe. Locks up sulfates or something."

  "That's it?" Clarke shook her head. "I let all those losers fuck me and it's not even going to kill them?"

  "It'll kill most everyone," Lubin said softly. "It's just going to take a while."

  "Oh."

  She tried to summon some sort of reaction to that news, some gut-level feeling of appropriate scale. She was still trying when Lubin said, "You gave us a good run, anyway. No one can believe you got as far as you did."

  "I had help," Clarke said.

  "You heard."

  "I heard a lot of things," Clarke told him. "I don't know what to make of any of it."

  "I do," said the man in the chair.

  * * *

  "I'm sorry, Lenie," the man said. "I tried to stop him."

  I don't know you. Clarke looked back at Lubin. "He did?"

  Lubin nodded.

  "But he's still alive."

  "I didn't even break anything."

  "Wow." She looked back at the bound man. "So who is he?"

  "Guy called Achilles Desjardins," Lubin said. "Lawbreaker with the Entropy Patrol. Big fan of yours, actually."

  "Yeah? Why's he tied up like that?"

  "For the greater good."

  She wondered briefly whether to pursue it. Instead she turned to Desjardins, squatted down in front of him. "You actually tried to stop him?"

  Desjardins nodded.

  "For me?"

  "Sort of. Not exactly," he said. "It's—kind of hard to explain." He wriggled against the elastic filaments binding him to the chair; they tightened visibly in response. "Think maybe you could cut me loose?"

  She glanced over her shoulder; Lubin stared back in shades of gray. "I don't think so," she said. "Not yet." Probably not ever.

  "Co
me on, you don't need his permission," Desjardins said.

  "You can see?" It should have been too dark for mortal eyes to have registered her movements.

  "He's a 'lawbreaker," Lubin reminded her.

  "So what?"

  "Enhanced pattern-matching. He doesn't actually see any better than your average dryback, but he's better at interpolating weak input."

  Clarke turned back to Desjardins, leaned close. "You said you knew."

  "Yeah," he said.

  "Tell me," she whispered.

  "Look, this is not the time. Your friend is seriously unbalanced, and in case you haven't figured it out yet we are both—"

  "Actually," Clarke said, "I don't think Ken's himself today. Or we'd both be dead already."

  Desjardins shook his head and swallowed.

  "Okay, then," Clarke said. "Do you know the story of Scheherezade? Do you remember why she told her stories?"

  "Oh, Jesus," Desjardins said weakly.

  The mermaid smiled. "Tell us a story, Achilles…"

  Adaptive Shatter

  Lubin listened while Desjardins laid it out. The 'lawbreaker had obviously been reading up since their last encounter.

  "The first mutations must have been really simple," he was saying. "The gels were trying to spread ßehemoth, and this Lenie Clarke variable had been tagged as a carrier in some personnel file. So any bug that even had your name in its source would've had an edge, at least to start with—the gels would think it was important information so they'd let it pass. And even when they caught on that'd just pressure the wildlife to come up with something new, and wildlife's way faster than meat. We're like ice ages and continental drift to them; we drive their evolution but we're slow. They've got all the time they need to come up with countermeasures.

  "So now a bunch of them have gone symbiotic, some kind of —Lenie Clarke interdiction network. In exchange for protection from the gels. It's like, like being a mackeral with a bunch of sharks for bodyguards, it's a huge competitive edge. So everyone's jumping on the bandwagon."

  He looked through the darkness at Clarke. "You really catalyzed something amazing, you know. Group selection's rare enough, but you actually inspired a bunch of separate life-forms to make—well, a colonial superorganism, really. Individuals acting as body parts. Some of them don't do anything but shuttle messages around, like—living neurotransmitters, I guess. Whole lineages evolved just to handle conversation with humans. That's why nobody could track the fucker down—we were all looking for Turing apps and neural net code and there wasn't any. It was all genetic. Nobody made the connection."