Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  “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. 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 own 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, that 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 long-chain 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 25 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 roomtemperature 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 Afrikaner, 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. Antlike 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 150 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 midair, waiting for a fix. There were just too many approaches, too much megalopolitan 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 hi
mself for the thousandth time.

  The GA’s medics had caught it when they were cleansing him of βehemoth. 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 challenge. 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.

  He knew that Lenie Clarke’s desire would drive her along the straightest line she could manage. He’d known it from the moment he’d seen the records of that anomalous little outbreak in the Cariboo woods. A patch of alpine forest even deader than the norm. Something that had once been a man, curled protectively around something else that had once been a little girl. The crews hadn’t checked the lake at all, they’d simply burned the area the way they’d burned all the Others. It was only when Lubin had insisted—driven by his belated review of the story so far—that they’d sent back an ROV and surveyed the bottom. It was only then that anyone noticed the cobble and deadwood kicked into violent disarray fifty meters down, in a place where the largest inhabitants had been insects. As if something had dropped to the bottom and found it hopelessly wanting, clawed and pounded against bedrock as though driven to tunnel to the core of the earth itself. When Lubin had seen that telemetry, he’d known.

  He’d known then, as he knew now, because he felt exactly the same way. Lenie Clarke had been a fish out of water for too long; nothing in Burton’s arsenal would scare her off. She was coming.

  And if those towering black anvils advancing from the south were anything to go on, she was bringing the wrath of God along for the ride.

  Maybe she planned it that way, he mused. Maybe she summoned the storm the same way she summoned the quake.

  It was easy to indulge in the legend, even tempting. But you didn’t have to invoke sorcery to explain the thunderheads marching on Chicago; violent storms had been the spring norm for twenty years or more in these parts. Just another long-term surprise hatched from that chaotic package of cause and effect called climate change.

  It had actually proven beneficial to certain aspects of the economy. The market for shatterproof windows had never been stronger.

  If she hadn’t conjured the elements, though, she’d at least been smart enough to use them. Perhaps she’d been holding back, digging her heels in against that relentless pull of dark water, until the weather was perfectly poised to cast a wrench into the machinery.

  All for the better, then. It would give her greater confidence in her own success.

  The cockpit intercom beeped in his ear: “Front’s coming in too fast, sir. We’ll have to either get above it or set down.”

  “How long?” Lubin asked.

  “Half hour, tops.” Outside, the sky flashed stark white. An avalanche rumbled faintly through the deck.

  “Okay.” Lubin magged visual. Three hundred meters beneath him, Lake Michigan was a heaving gray cauldron of scrap metal. There were a dozen stealthed transports between the lifter and the lake, their Thayer nets set to obliterative countershade. Lubin could pick them out if he tried; the chromatophores lagged a bit when mimicking fast fractals. As far as any civilian would be able to tell, though, the lifter had local airspace all to itself.

  “The dolphins are down,” Burton reported from across the compartment. “And we’ve got a bad storm-sewer monitor on South Aberd—”

  Lubin cut him off with a wave of the hand: a white diamond icon had just appeared on the tabletop. A second later his comlink beeped.

  “West Randolph,” someone reported from the depths of Chicago. “Just past the river. Moving east.”

  They’d strung mist nets at strategic locations along the Chicago River, in addition to the usual antiexotic electricals; Clarke had already ridden a river past one dragnet, and there was a chance she’d try it again. No such luck, though. This sighting was on the wrong side of those barricades. A botfly had snapped an aura completely inconsistent with the outside accessories of the woman who’d worn it. The doorway she’d entered led down into a half-empty commercial warren with a hundred access points.

  Lubin realigned his pieces on the way in. Two of the choppers dropped to within spitting distance of the waves, each giving birth to twins; minisubs like finback calves, spacing themselves in an arc two kilometers off the waterfront. Each sub, in turn, birthed a litter of snoops that arranged themselves into a diffuse grid from surface to substrate.

  The other choppers touched down from Meigs Field to the Grand Avenue docks, disgorged their cargo, and hunkered down against the oncoming storm. The command lifter came in behind them, pausing fifty meters above the seawall; Lubin slid down inside an extensible tube that uncoiled from the lifter’s belly like an absurd proboscis. By the time the huge airship had wallowed away, a command hut had been set up at the foot of East Monroe.

  Lubin braced against the rising wind and looked over the edge of Chicago’s new seawall. The streaked gray precipice rose smoothly to the railing. The grated mouths of storm sewers punctuated the revetment at regular intervals, drooling insignificant trickles of wastewater. Each opening was twice as high as a man. Lubin ballparked the scale and nodded to himself: the weave of the grillwork was easily ti
ght enough to keep anyone from squeezing through.

  A low-flying helicopter flitted past, spraying the water: the waves in its wake swelled and congealed into a swath of gelatinous foam. Lubin had ordered the shoreline gelled from Lakeshore down to Meigs; the storm would probably smash the tanglefoam to lint after a while, but if Clarke hurled herself off a bridge before that point, she’d be stuck like an ant in honey. A floating pen bobbed at the offshore edge of the gelled zone, rimmed by an inflatable boom riding the waves like a boneless serpent. Lubin tapped a control on the side of his visor; the enclosure sprang into near focus.

  There.

  Just for a moment, a sleek gray back, metallic inlays glinting darkly along the leading edge of the dorsal fin. Another. Half a dozen there all told, although you’d never see more than one on the surface at any given time.

  The wind died.

  Lubin slipped off his headset and looked around with naked eyes. It was close to noon, as dark as a solar eclipse. Overhead the sky boiled in silent, ominous slow motion.

  A distant clattering roar began cascading through the city at his back: storm shutters, slamming shut along a thousand Euclidean canyons. It sounded as though the buildings themselves were applauding the rise of some long-awaited curtain. A single perfect raindrop, the size of his thumbnail, splatted on the asphalt at Lubin’s feet.

  He turned and entered the command hut.

  Another hallucinogenic tabletop dominated the single-room enclosure. Lubin studied the chessboard: two arms of security extended out from the waterfront, diverging northwest from Grand and southwest from Eisenhower. A funnel, to guide Lenie Clarke to a place of another’s choosing. Twopoint-five klicks west of the seawall, a band of botflies and exoskels formed a north-south line and began sealing off skyways and tunnels.