by Peter Watts
And the dice had just kept rolling, and the hundredth throw had landed square on the Oregon coast. Desjardins knew the story: microbes, in sufficient numbers, make their own rules. Now there was a place in the sun where βehemoth didn’t have to fit into someone else’s world. It had begun creating its own: trillions of microscopic terraformers at work in the soil, changing pH and electrolyte balances, stripping away all the advantages once held by natives so precisely adapted to the way things used to be …
It was every crisis he’d ever faced, combined and distilled and reduced. to pure essence. It was chaos breaking, maybe unbreakable: little bubbles of enemy territory growing across the face of the coast, then the continent, then the planet. Eventually there’d come a fulcrum, a momentary balance of some interest to the theoreticians. The area inside and outside the bubbles would be the same. An instant later, βehemoth would be the outside, a new norm that enclosed shrinking pockets of some other, irrelevant reality.
Alice Jovellanos—rager within The System, face of the faceless, staunch advocate of the Rights of the Individual—was looking at him with fire and fear in her eyes.
“Whatever it takes,” she said. “Whatever the cost. Or we are definitely out of a job.”
Groundswell
He knows something, Sou-Hon Perrault thought. And it’s killing them.
She wasn’t the only one riding ’flies along the Strip, but she was the only one who seemed to have noticed the stickman. She’d mentioned him casually to a couple of colleagues, and been met with benign indifference. The Strip was braindead gig, a herd to be watched with one eye. Why would anyone actually interact with those cattle? They were too boring for entertainment, too placid for revolt, too powerless to do anything even if this Amitav was being a shit-disturber. They were functionally invisible.
But three people threw rocks at her botfly the next day, and the upturned faces that met her were not so placid as they had been.
Such faith you have in your machines, Amitav had said. You have never thought that perhaps they are not working as well as you think?
Maybe it was nothing. Maybe Amitav’s cryptic grumbles had only primed her imagination. After all, a few stone throwers were hardly remarkable in a population of millions, and almost everywhere on the Strip the refugees milled as harmlessly as ever. Only along the stickman’s beat were things even hinting at ugliness.
But were people starting to look—well, thinner—along that particular sliver of the Oregon coast?
Maybe. Not that gaunt faces were unusual on the Strip. Gastroenteritis, Maui-TB, a hundred other diseases thrived in those congested environs, utterly indifferent to the antibiotics that traditionally laced cycler food. Most of those bugs caused some degree of wasting. If people were losing weight, mere starvation was the least likely explanation.
It is only after they begin starving that they see your cyclers for what they are …
Amitav refused to explain what he’d meant by that. When she sidled toward the subject he ignored the bait. When she’d asked him directly he dismissed her with a bitter laugh.
“Your wonderful machines, not working? Impossible! Loaves and fishes for all!”
And all the while, malnourished disciples accreted in his wake like the tail of a smoldering comet. Some seemed to be losing hair and fingernails. She stared back at their closed, hostile faces, increasingly convinced that it was not her imagination. Starvation took time to erode the body—perhaps a week before the flesh began visibly ebbing from the bones.
But some of these people seemed to be hollowing out almost overnight. And what was causing that subtle blight of discoloration on so many cheeks and hands?
She didn’t know what else to do. She called in the dogcatchers.
128 Megabytes: Hitchhiker
It’s grown a fair bit since the old days. Back then it was only 94 megabytes, and a lot dumber than it is now. Now it weighs in at 128, none of it flab. No valuable resources wasted on nostalgic memories, for example. It doesn’t remember its pint-sized great-grandparents a million times removed. It doesn’t remember anything that doesn’t help it survive in some way, according to its own stripped-down and ruthless empiricism.
Pattern is everything. Survival is all. No use for the veneration of progenitors. No time for the stratagems of the obsolete.
Which is a shame in a way, because the basic problems haven’t changed all that much.
Take the present situation: jammed into the congested confines of a wristwatch linked into the Mérida Credit Union. There’s just enough space to hide in if you don’t mind partial fragmentation, but not enough to reproduce. It’s almost as bad as an academic network
It gets worse. The watch is disinfecting.
Wildlife is all going one way across the system; that never happens unless it’s being chased by something. Natural selection—which is to say, successful trial and error by those long-forgotten ancestors—has equipped 128 with a handy little rule in case of such events; go with the flow. 128 uploads into the Mérida node.
Bad call. Now there’s barely even room to move; 128 has to split into fourteen fragments just to fit. Life struggles for existence on all sides, overwriting, fighting, shooting off copies of itself in the blind hope that random chance will spare one or two.
128 fends off panicky egg layers and looks around. Two hundred forty gates; two hundred sixteen already closed, seventeen open but hostile (incoming logic bombs; the disinfection is obviously no local affair). The remaining seven are so crowded with fleeing wildlife that 128 could never get through in time. Almost three-quarters of the local node has been disinfected already; 128 has perhaps a dozen millisecs before it starts losing bits of itself.
But wait a nan: those guys over there, they’re jumping the queue somehow. They’re not even alive, they’re just files; but the system is giving them preferential treatment.
One of them barely even notices when 128 jumps onto its back. They go through together.
Much better. A nice roomy buffer, a couple of terabytes if it’s a nybble, somewhere between the last node and the next. It’s nobody’s destination—really, just a waiting room—but the present is all that really matters to those who play by Darwin’s rules, and the present looks good.
There’s no other life in evidence. There are three other files, though, including the horse 128 rode in on: barely animate but still somehow deserving of the royal treatment that got them fast-tracked out of Mérida. They’ve de-arced their rudimentary autodiagnostics and are checking themselves for bruises while they wait.
It’s an opportunity 128 is well prepared to exploit, thanks to an inherited subroutine for which it remains eternally ungrateful. While these beasts of burden look under their own hoods, 128 can peek over their shoulders.
Two compressed mail packets and an autonomic crossload between two BCC nodes. 128 evinces the subelectronic equivalent of a shudder. It steers well clear of nodes with the BCC prefix; it’s seen too many brethren go into such addresses, and none at all come out. Still, peeking at a few lines of routine stats shouldn’t do any harm.
In fact, it proves quite enlightening. Once you disregard all the formatting and addressing redundancies, these three files seem to have two remarkable things in common:
They all go the head of the line when traveling through Maelstrom. And they all contain the text string Lenie Clarke.
128 is literally built out of numbers. It certainly knows how to add two and two.
Animal Control
The pretense had ended long before Sou-Hon Perrault joined the ranks.
There’d been a time, she knew, when those who fell ill on the Strip were actually treated on-site. There’d been clinics, right next to the prefab offices where refugees came to hand in forms and hold out hopes. In those days the Strip had been a temporary measure, a mere stopgap until we deal with the backlog. People had stood at the door and knocked; a steady stream had trickled through.
Nothing compared to the cascade piling
up behind.
Now the offices were gone. The clinics were gone. N’AmPac had long since thrown up its hands against the rising tide; it had been years since anyone had described the Strip as a way station. Now it was pure terminus. And now, when things went wrong over the wall, there were no clinics left to put on the case.
Now there were only the dogcatchers.
They came in just after sunrise, near the end of her shift. They swooped down like big metal hornets: a nastier breed of botfly, faces bristling with needles and taser nodes, bellies distended with superconducting ground-effectors that could lift a man right off his feet. Usually that wasn’t necessary; the Strippers were used to occasional intrusions in the name of public health. They endured the needles and tests with stoic placidity.
This time, though, some snapped and snarled. In one instance Perrault glimpsed a struggling refugee carried aloft by a pair of dogcatchers working in tandem—one subduing, the other sampling, both carrying out their tasks beyond reach of the strangely malcontent horde below. Their specimen fought to escape, ten meters above the ground. For a moment it almost looked as though he might succeed, but Perrault switched channels without waiting to find out. There was no point in hanging around; the dogcatchers knew what they were doing, after all, and she had other duties to perform.
She occupied herself with research.
The usual tangle of conflicting rumors still ran rampant along the coast. Lenie Clarke was on the Strip, Lenie Clarke had left it. She was raising an army in NoCal, she had been eaten alive north of Corvallis. She was Kali, and Amitav was her prophet. She was pregnant, and Amitav was the father. She could not be killed. She was already dead. Where she went, people shook off their lethargy and raged. Where she went, people died.
There was no shortage of stories. Even her botfly began telling them.
She was interrogating an Asian woman near the NoCal border. The filter was set to Cantonese: a text translation scrolled across a window in her HUD while her headset whispered the equivalent spoken English.
Suddenly that equivalence disappeared. The voice in Perrault’s ear insisted, “I do not know this Lenie Clarke but I have heard of the man Amitav,” but the text on her display said something else entirely:
angel. No shit. Lenie Clarke, her name was her up but Lenie Clarke isn’t exactly sockeye a place called Beebe? Anyhow, far as
“Wait. Wait a second,” Perrault said. The refugee fell obediently silent.
The text box kept scrolling, though,
Lenie? That’s her first name?
It cleared quickly enough when Perrault wiped the window. But by then her headset was talking again.
“Lenie Clarke was very … not even your antidepressants seemed to work on her,” it said.
Amitav’s words. She remembered them.
Not his voice, of course. Something cool, inflectionless, with no trace of accent. Something familiar and inhuman. Spoken words, converted to ASCII for transmission then reconstructed at the other end: it was a common trick for reducing file size, but tone and feeling got lost in the wash.
Amitav’s words. Maelstrom’s voice. Perrault felt a prickling along the back of her neck.
“Hello? Who is this?”
The refugee was speaking. Perrault had no idea what she said. Certainly it wasn’t
Brander, Mi/ke/cheal
Caraco, Jud/y/ith
Clarke, Len/ie
Lubin, Ken/neth
Nakata, Alice
which was all that appeared on the board.
“What about Lenie Clarke?” There was no way to source the signal—as far as the system could tell, the input had arisen from a perplexed-looking Asian woman on the NoCal shoreline.
“Lenie Clarke,” the dead voice repeated softly. “All of a sudden there’s this K-selector walking out of nowhere. Looks like one of those old litcrits with the teeth. You know. Vampires.”
“Who is this? How did you get on this channel?”
“Would you like to know about Lenie Clarke.” If the words had arisen from anything flesh and blood, they would have formed a question.
“Yes! Yes, but—”
“She’s still at large. Les beus are probably looking for her.”
Intelligence spilled across the text window:
Name: Clarke, Lenie Janice
WHID: 745 /43 907 20AE
Born: 07/10/2019
Voting Status: disqualified 2046 (failed prepoll exam)
“Who are you?”
“Ying Nushi. I have already said.”
It was the woman on the shore, returned to her rightful place in the circuit. The thing that had usurped her was gone.
Sou-Hon Perrault could not get it back. She didn’t even know how to try. She spent the rest of her shift on edge, waiting for cryptic overtures, startling at any click or flicker in the headset. Nothing happened. She went to bed and stared endlessly at the ceiling, barely noticing when Martin climbed in beside her and didn’t push.
Who is Lenie Clarke? What is Lenie Clarke?
More than some accidental survivor, certainly. More than Amitav’s convenient icon. More even than the incendiary legend Perrault had once thought, burning its way across the Strip. How much more, she didn’t know.
She’s still at large. Les beus are probably looking for her.
Somehow, Lenie Clarke was in the Net.
Ghost
The body hadn’t bothered Tracy Edison at all. That hadn’t been Mom, it hadn’t even looked like a person. It was just a bunch of smashed meat all covered up by plaster and cement. The eye that had stared so rudely from across the room was the right color, but it wasn’t really her mom’s eye. Mom’s eyes were inside her head.
And anyway, there’d been no time to even check. Dad had grabbed her right up and put her in the car (in the front seat, even) and they’d just driven right away without stopping. Tracy had looked back and the house hadn’t looked that bad from the outside, really, except for that one wall and the bit behind the garden. But then they’d gone around the corner and the house was gone, too.
Nothing stopped after that. Dad wouldn’t even stop to pick up food—there was food where they were going, he said, and they had to get there fast “before the wall came down.” He was always talking like that, about how they were carving the world up into little cookie-cutter shapes, and how all those exotic weeds and bugs were giving them the excuse they needed to rope everybody off into little enclaves. Mom had always said it was amazing how he kept coming up with all those full-blown conspiracy theories, but Tracy got the feeling that recent events kind of came down on Dad’s side. She wasn’t sure, though. It was all really confusing.
It had taken a long time to get up into the mountains. Lots of the roads were cracked and twisted so you couldn’t drive on them, and other ones were already jammed with cars and buses and trucks; there were so many that Tracy didn’t even see anyone glaring at their car, the way people usually did because well, honey, people don’t know that I work way out in the woods, so when they see we have our own car they think we’re just being wasteful and selfish. Dad took lots of back roads, and before she knew it they were way off in the mountains, just old clear-cuts as far as you could see, all green and fuzzing up with carbon-eating kudzu. And Dad still hadn’t stopped, except a few times to let Tracy out to pee and one time when he drove under some trees until a bunch of helicopters had gone by.
They hadn’t stopped until they got here, to this little cabin in the woods by a lake—a glacial lake, Dad said. He said there were lots of these cabins, strung out along valley floors all through the mountains. A long time ago Park Rangers would ride around on horseback, making sure everything was okay and staying at a different cabin each night. Now, of course, regular people weren’t allowed to go into the woods, so there was no need for rangers anymore. But they still kept some cabins ready for visitors, for biologists who came into the woods to study the trees and things.
“So we’re here on a kind of holiday,
” her dad said. “We’ll just play it by ear, and we’ll go hiking every day, and just explore and play until things settle down a bit back home.”
“When will Mommy be here?” Tracy asked.
Her dad looked down at the brown pine needles all over the ground. “Mommy’s gone, Lima-Bean,” he said after a bit. “It’s just us for a while.”
“Okay,” said Tracy.
She learned how to chop wood and start fires, both outside in the fire pit and in the cabin’s big black stove; it must have been over a hundred years old. She loved the smell of woodsmoke, although she hated it when the wind changed and it got in her eyes. They went hiking in the woods almost every day, and they watched the stars come out at night. Tracy’s dad thought the stars were something really special—“Never get a view like this in the city, eh, Lima-Bean?”—but the planetarium in Tracy’s watch was actually nicer, even if you did have to wear eyephones to see it. Still, Tracy didn’t complain; she could tell it was really important to Dad that she liked this whole holiday thing. So she smiled and nodded. Dad would be happy for a while.
At night, though, when they doubled up on the cot, he would hold her and hold her and not let go. Sometimes he hugged so tight it almost hurt; other times he’d just curl around her from behind, not moving at all, not squeezing but all tensed up.
Once Tracy woke up in the middle of the night and her dad was crying. He was wrapped around her and he didn’t make a sound; but every now and then he would shudder a little bit, and tears would splash onto Tracy’s neck. Tracy kept absolutely still, so her dad wouldn’t know she was awake.
