Rifters 1 - Starfish

by Peter Watts

  A sudden vicarious tingle shoots along Clarke's spine. The creature sinks, twitching. Clarke feels it die before it touches bottom.

  "Jesus," she says. "You sure the laser didn't do that?"

  "No. Way too weak," Brander tells her. "Didn't you feel it? An electric shock?"

  She nods.

  "Hey," Brander realizes. "You haven't seen this before, have you?"

  "No. Alice told me about it, though."

  "The lasers lure them in sometimes, when they wobble."

  Clarke eyes the carcass. Neurons hiss faintly inside it. The body's dead, but it can take hours for the cells to run down.

  She glances back at the machinery that killed them. "Lucky none of us touched that thing," she buzzes.

  "I was keeping my distance anyway. Lubin said it wasn't hot enough to be dangerous, but, well..."

  "I was tuned in to the gel, when it happened," she says. "I don't think it—"

  "The gel never even notices. I don't think it's hooked into the defense system." Brander looks up at the metal structure. "No, our head cheese has far too much on its mind to waste its time worrying about fish."

  She looks at him. "You know what it is, don't you?"

  "I don't know. Maybe."

  "Well?"

  "I said I don't know. Just got some ideas."

  "Come on, Mike. If you've got ideas, it's only because the rest of us have been out here taking notes for the past two weeks. Give."

  He floats above her, looking down. "Okay," he says at last. "Let me just dump what you got today and run it against the rest. Then, if it pans out..."

  "About time." Clarke grabs her squid off the bottom and tweaks the throttle. "Good."

  Brander shakes his head. "I don't think so. Not at all."

  * * *

  "Okay, then. Smart gels are especially suited for coping with rapid changes in topography, right?"

  Brander sits at the library. In front of him, one of the flatscreens cycles through a holding pattern. Behind, Clarke and Lubin and Nakata do the same.

  "So there are two ways for your topographic environment to change rapidly," he continues. "One, you move quickly through complex surroundings. That's why we're getting gels in muckrakers and ATVs these days. Or you could sit still, and let your surroundings change."

  He looks around. Nobody says anything. "Well?"

  "So it's thinking about earthquakes," Lubin remarks. "The GA told us that much."

  Brander turns back to the console. "Not just any earthquake," he says, a sudden edge in his voice. "The same earthquake. Over and over again."

  He touches an icon on the screen. The display rearranges itself into a pair of axes, x and y. Emerald script glows adjacent to each line. Clarke leans forward: time, says the abscissa. Activity, says the ordinate.

  A line begins to crawl left to right across the display.

  "This is a mean composite plot of every time we ever watched that thing," Brander explains. "I tried to pin some sort of units onto the y-axis, but of course all we can tune in is now it's thinking hard, or now it's slacking off. So you'll have to settle for a relative scale. What you're seeing now is just baseline activity."

  The line shoots about a quarter of the way up the scale, flattens out.

  "Here it's started thinking about something. I can't correlate this to any real events like local tremors, it just seems to start on its own. An internally-generated loop, I think."

  "Simulation," Lubin grunts.

  "So it's thinking along like this for a while," Brander continues, ignoring him, "and then, voila..." Another jump, to halfway up the y-axis. The line holds its new altitude for a few pixels, slides into a gentle decline for a pixel or two, then jumps again. "So here it started thinking quite hard, starts to relax, then starts thinking even harder." Another, smaller jump, another gradual decline. "Here it's even more lost in thought, but it takes a nice long break afterwards." Sure enough, the decline continues uninterrupted for almost thirty seconds.

  "And right about now…"

  The line shoots almost to the top of the scale, fluctuates near the top of the graph. "And here it just about gives itself a hemorrhage. It goes on for a while, then—"

  The line plummets vertically.

  "—drops right back to baseline. Then there's some minor noise, I think it's storing its results or updating its files or something, and the whole thing starts all over again." Brander leans back in his chair, regards the rest with his hands clasped behind his head. "That's all it's been doing. As long as we've been watching it. The whole cycle takes about fifteen minutes, give or take."

  "That's it?" Lubin says.

  "Some interesting variations, but that's the basic pattern."

  "So what does it mean?" Clarke asks.

  Brander leans forward again, towards the library. "Suppose you were an earthquake tremor, starting here on the rift and propagating east. Guess how many faults you'd have to cross to get to the mainland."

  Lubin nods and says nothing.

  Clarke eyes the graph, guesses: five.

  Nakata doesn't even blink, but then, Nakata hasn't done much of anything for days.

  Brander points to the first jump. "Us. Channer Vent." The second: "Juan de Fuca, Coaxial Segment." Third: "Juan de Fuca, Endeavour Segment." Fourth: "Beltz minifrac." The last and largest: "Cascadia Subduction Zone."

  He waits for their reaction. Nobody says anything. Faintly, from outside, comes the sound of windchimes in mourning.

  "Jesus. Look, any simulation is computationally most intensive whenever the number of possible outcomes is greatest. When a tremor crosses a fault it triggers ancillary waves perpendicular to the main direction of travel. Makes for very hairy calculations at those points, if you're trying to model the process."

  Clarke stares at the screen. "Are you sure about this?"

  "Christ, Len, I'm basing it on stray emissions from a blob of fucking nerve tissue. Of course I'm not sure. But I'll tell you this much: if you assume that this first jump represents the initial quake, and this last dropoff is the mainland, and you also assume a reasonably constant speed of propagation, these intermediate spikes fall almost exactly where Cobb, Beltz, and Cascadia would be. I don't think that's a coincidence."

  Clarke frowns. "But doesn't that mean the model stops running as soon as it reaches N'AmPac? I would've thought that's when they'd be most interested."

  Brander bites his lip. "Well, that's the thing. The lower the activity near the end of a run, the longer the run seems to last."

  She waits. She doesn't have to ask. Brander's far too proud of himself to not explain further.

  "And if you assume that lower end-run activity reflects a smaller predicted quake, the cheese spends more time thinking about quakes with lower shoreline impact. Usually, though, it just stops when it hits the coast."

  "There's a threshold," Lubin says.

  "What?"

  "Every time it predicts a coastal quake above a certain threshold, the model shuts down and starts over. Unacceptable losses. It spends more time thinking about the milder ones, but so far they've all resulted in unacceptable losses."

  Brander nods, slowly. "I was wondering about that."

  "Stop wondering." Lubin's voice is even more dead than usual. "That thing's only got one question on its mind."

  "What question?" Clarke asks.

  "Lubin, you're being paranoid," Brander snorts. "Just because it's a bit radioactive—"

  "They lied to us. They took Judy. Even you're not naive enough —"

  "What question?" Clarke asks again.

  "But why?" Brander demands. "What would be the point?"

  "Mike," Clarke says, softly and clearly, "shut up."

  Brander blinks and falls silent. Clarke turns to Lubin. "What question?"

  "It's watching the local plates. It's asking, what happens on N'AmPac if there's an earthquake here, right now?" Lubin parts his lips in an expression few would mistake for a smile. "So far it hasn't liked the answer. Bu
t sooner or later predicted impact's going to fall below some critical level."

  "And then what?" Clarke says. As if I didn't know.

  "Then it blows up," says a small voice.

  Alice Nakata is talking again.

  Ground Zero

  Nobody speaks for a long time.

  "That's insane," Lenie Clarke says at last.

  Lubin shrugs.

  "So you're saying it's some kind of a bomb?"

  He nods.

  "A bomb big enough to cause a major earthquake three, four hundred kilometers away?"

  "No," Nakata says. "All of those faults it would have to cross, they would stop it. Firewalls."

  "Unless," Lubin adds, "one of those faults is just about ready to slip on its own."

  Cascadia. Nobody says it aloud. Nobody has to. One day, five hundred years ago, the Juan de Fuca Plate developed an attitude. It got tired of being endlessly ground under North America's heel. So it just stopped sliding, hung on by its fingernails and dared the rest of the world to shake it free. So far the rest of the world hasn't been able to. But the pressure's been building now for half a millennium. It's only a matter of time.

  When Cascadia lets go, a lot of maps are going to end up in recyc.

  Clarke looks at Lubin. "You're saying even a small bomb here could kick Cascadia loose. You're saying the big one, right?"

  "That's what he's saying," Brander confirms. "So why, Ken old buddy? This some sort of Asian real estate scam? A terrorist attack on N'AmPac?"

  "Wait a minute." Clarke holds up a hand. "They're not trying to cause an earthquake. They're trying to avoid one."

  Lubin nods. "You set off a fusion charge on the rift, you trigger a quake. Period. How serious depends on conditions at detonation. This thing is just holding itself back until it causes as little damage as possible, back on shore."

  Brander snorts. "Come on, Lubin, isn't this all kind of excessive? If they wanted to take us out, why not just come down here and shoot us?"

  Lubin looks at him, empty-eyed. "I don't believe you're that stupid, Mike. Perhaps you're just in denial."

  Brander rises out of his chair. "Listen, Ken—"

  "It's not us," Clarke says. "It's not just us. Is it?"

  Lubin shakes his head, not taking his eyes off Brander.

  "They want to take out everything. The whole rift."

  Lubin nods.

  "Why?"

  "I don't know," Lubin says. "Perhaps we could ask them."

  Figures, Clarke muses. I just never get a break.

  Brander sinks back into his chair. "What are you smiling at?"

  Clarke shakes her head. "Nothing."

  "We must do something," Nakata says,

  "No shit, Alice." Brander looks back at Clarke. "Any ideas?"

  Clarke shrugs. "How long do we have?"

  "If Lubin's right, who knows? Tomorrow, maybe. Ten years from now. Earthquakes are classic chaotic systems, and the tectonics around here change by the minute. If the Throat slips a millimeter it could make the difference between a shiver and a meltdown."

  "Perhaps it is a small-yield device," Nakata suggests hopefully. "It is a ways away, and all this water might damp down the shock wave before it reaches us?"

  "No," Lubin says.

  "But we do not know—"

  "Alice," Brander says, "It's almost two hundred kilometers to Cascadia. If this thing can generate P-waves strong enough to kick it loose at that range, we're not going to ride it out here. We might not get vaporized, but the shockwave would tear us into little pieces."

  "Perhaps we can disable it somehow," Clarke says.

  "No." Lubin is flat and emphatic.

  "Why not?" Brander says.

  "Even if we get past its front-line defense, we're only seeing the top of the structure. The vitals are buried."

  "If we can get in at the top, there might be access—"

  "Chances are it's set for damped detonation if tampered with," Lubin says. "And there are others we haven't found."

  Brander looks up. "And how do you know that?"

  "There have to be. At this depth it would take almost three hundred megatons to generate a bubble even half a kilometer across. If they want to take out any significant fraction of the vent, they'll need multiple charges, distributed."

  There's a moment's silence.

  "Three hundred megatons," Brander repeats at last. "You know, I can't tell you how disturbed I am to find that you know such things."

  Lubin shrugs. "It's basic physics. It shouldn't intimidate anyone who isn't totally innumerate."

  Brander is standing again, his face only centimeters from Lubin's.

  "And I am getting pretty fucking disturbed by you too, Lubin," he says through clenched teeth, "Who the fuck are you, anyway?"

  "Mike," Clarke begins.

  "No, I fucking mean it. We don't know shit about you, Lubin. We can't tune you in, we sell your bullshit story to the drybacks for you and you still haven't explained why, and now you're mouthing off like some kind of fucking secret agent. You want to call the shots, say so. Just drop this bullshit man-with-no-name routine."

  Clarke takes a small step back. Okay. Fine. If he thinks he can fuck with Lubin he's on his own.

  But Lubin isn't showing any of the signs. No change in stance, no change in breathing, his hands stay unclenched at his sides. When he speaks, his voice is calm and even. "If it'll make you feel any better, by all means; call upstairs and tell them I'm still alive. Tell them you lied. If they "

  The eyes don't change. That flat white stare persists while the flesh around it twitches, suddenly, and now Clarke can see the signs, the slight lean forward, the subtle cording of veins and tendons in the throat. Brander sees them too. He's standing still as a dog caught in headlights.

  Fuck fuck fuck he's going to blow...

  But she's wrong again. Impossibly, Lubin relaxes. "As for your endearing desire to get to know me," —laying a casual hand on Brander's shoulder— "you're luckier than you know that that hasn't happened."

  Lubin takes back his hand, steps towards the ladder. "I'll go along with whatever you decide, as long as it doesn't involve tampering with nuclear explosives. In the meantime, I'm going outside. It's getting close in here."

  He drops through the floor. Nobody else moves. The sound of the airlock flooding seems especially loud.

  "Jesus, Mike," Lenie breathes at last.

  "Since when was he calling the shots?" Brander seems to have regained some of his bravado. He casts a hostile glance through the deck. "I don't trust that fucker. No matter what he says. Probably tuning us in right now."

  "If he is, I doubt he's picking up anything you haven't already shouted at him."

  "Listen," says Nakata. "We must do something."

  Brander throws his hands in the air. "What choice is there? If we don't disarm the fucking thing, we either get the hell out of here or we sit around and wait to get incinerated. Not really a tough decision if you ask me."

  Isn't it, Clarke wonders.

  "We cannot leave by the surface," Nakata points out, "if they got Judy..."

  "So we hug the bottom," Brander says. "Right. Scam their sonar. We'd have to leave the squids behind, they'd be too easy to track."

  Nakata nods.

  "Lenie? What?"

  Clarke looks up. Brander and Nakata are both staring at her. "I didn't say anything."

  "You look like you don't approve."

  "It's three hundred klicks to Vancouver Island, Mike. Minimum. It could take over a week to make it without squids, assuming we don't get lost."

  "Our compasses work fine once we're away from the rift. And it's a pretty big continent, Len; we'd have to try pretty hard not to bump into it."

  "And what do we do when we get there? How would we make it past the Strip?"

  Brander shrugs. "Sure. For all we know the refs could eat us alive, if our tubes don't choke on all the shit floating around back there. But really, Len, would you rather take your c
hances with a ticking nuke? It's not like we're drowning in options."

  "Sure." Clarke moves one hand in a gesture of surrender. "Fine."

  "Your problem, Len, is you've always been a fatalist," Brander pronounces.

  She has to smile at that. Not always.

  "There is also the question of food," Nakata says. "To bring enough for the trip will slow us considerably."

  I don't want to leave, Clarke realizes. Even now. Isn't that stupid.

  "—don't think speed is much of a concern," Brander is saying. "If this thing goes off in the next few days an few extra meters per hour won't to do us much good anyway."

  "We could travel light and forage on the way," Clarke muses, her mind wandering. "Gerry does okay."

  "Gerry," Brander repeats, suddenly subdued.

  A moment's silence. Beebe shivers with the small distant cry of Lubin's memorial.

  "Oh God," Brander says softly. "That thing can really get on your nerves after a while."

  Software

  There was a sound.

  Not a voice. It had been days since he'd heard any voice but his own. Not the food dispenser or the toilet. Not the familiar crunch of his feet over dismembered machinery. Not even the sound of breaking plastic or the clang of metal under assault; he'd already destroyed everything he could, given up on the rest.

  No, this was something else. A hissing sound. It took him a few moments to remember what it was.

  The access hatch, pressurizing.

  He craned his neck until he could see around the corner of an intervening cabinet. The usual red light glowed from the wall to one side of the big metal ellipse. It turned green as he watched.

  The hatch swung open. Two men in body condoms stepped through, light from behind throwing their shadows along the length of the dark room. They looked around, not seeing him at first.

  One of them turned up the lights.

  Scanlon squinted up from the corner. The men were wearing sidearms. They looked down at him for a few moments, folds of isolation membrane draped around their faces like leprous skin.