by Peter Watts
“A demonstration,” Desjardins said. “Sure. Hit me.”
Time’s the catch, of course. Genes are slow: a thousand generations to learn some optimal-foraging trick that a real brain could pick up in five minutes. Which is why brains evolved in the first place, of course. But when a hundred generations fit into the space of a yawn, maybe the genes get their edge back. Maybe wildlife learns to talk using only the blind stupid logic of natural selection—and the poor lumbering meat sack on the other end never suspects that he’s having a chat that spans generations.
“I’m waiting,” Desjardins said.
“Lenie Clarke is not a demonstration.” The swarm swirled in the terrarium. Was it Desjardins’s imagination, or did it seem to be—fading, somehow?
He smiled. “You’re losing it, aren’t you?”
“Loaves and fishes for Anemone.”
“But you’re not Anemone. You’re just a tiny piece of it, all alone …”
Time’s not enough in and of itself, of course. Evolution needs variance as well. Mutation and shuffling to create new prototypes, variable environments to weed out the unfit and shape the survivors.
“Clarke, Lenie. Water lights up all cool and radium glow …”
Life can survive in a box, for a while at least. But it can’t evolve there. And down in Desjardins’s terrarium, the population was starting to look pretty inbred.
“Free hard-core pedosnuff,” the swarm murmured. “Even to enter.”
Countless individuals. Jostling, breeding. Stagnating.
It’s all just pattern.
“Sockeye,” said the wildlife, and nothing more.
Desjardins realized he’d been holding his breath. He let it out, slowly.
“Well,” he whispered, “you’re not so smart after all.
“You just act like you are …”
Soul Mate
Someone was pounding on his door. Someone was definitely not taking the hint.
“Killjoy! Open up!”
Go away, Desjardins thought. He flashed his findings to the rest of the Anemone team, a far-flung assemblage of ’lawbreakers he’d never met in the flesh and probably never would. I nailed the sucker. I figured it out.
“Achilles!”
Grudgingly, he leaned back and thumbed the door open without looking. “What do you want, Alice?”
“Lertzman’s dead!”
He spun in his chair. “You’re kidding.”
“He was pithed.” Jovellanos’s almond eyes were wide and worried. “They found him this morning. He was braindead, he was just lying there starving to death. Someone stuck a needle up the base of his skull and just shredded his white matter … .”
“Jesus.” Desjardins stood. “You sure? I mean—”
“Of course I’m sure, you think I’m making it up? It was Lubin. It had to be, that’s how he tracked you down, that’s how he—”
“Yeah, Alice, I get it.” He took a step toward her. “Thanks for—for telling me.” He began to close the door.
She stuck her foot in the way. “That’s it? That’s all you’ve got to say?”
“Lubin’s gone, Alice. He’s not our problem anymore. And besides”—nudging her foot out of the way with his own—“you didn’t like Lertzman any more than I did.”
He closed the door in her face.
Lertzman’s dead.
Lertzman the bureaucrat. The cyst in “system,” too dormant to contribute, too deeply embedded to excise, too ineffective to matter.
Dead.
Why do you care? He was an asshole.
But I knew him …
The one person you know. The far-off millions you don’t.
Could’ve been me.
Nothing to do about Lertzman now. Nothing to do about his killer, even: Lubin was out of Desjardins’s life, hot on the trail of Lenie Clarke. If he succeeded, Ken Lubin could be the savior of the planet. Ken-the-fucking-psychopath-Lubin, savior of billions. It was almost funny. Maybe, after saving the world, he’d go on a killing spree to celebrate. Set up breach after breach, sealing each with extreme and unfettered prejudice. Would anyone have the heart to stop him, after all the good he’d done? The salvation of billions could buy you a whole lot of forgiveness, Desjardins supposed.
Ken Lubin, for all his quirks, was doing something worthwhile. He was hunting the other Lenie Clarke, the real one. The Lenie Clarke that Achilles Desjardins had been tracking was a mirage. There was no great conspiracy after all. No global death cult. Anemone was a drooling idiot. All it knew was that tales of global apocalypse were good for breeding, and that Lenie Clarke was a free pass into Haven. It had only connected those threads through blind dumb luck.
It was a blazing irony that the person behind the words actually lived up to the billing.
Lubin’s problem. Not his.
But that was dead wrong, and he knew it. Lenie Clarke was everyone’s problem. A threat to the greater good if he’d even seen one.
Forget Lertzman. Forget Alice. Forget Rowan and Lubin and Anemone, even. None of them would matter if it wasn’t for Lenie Clarke.
Worry about Clarke. She’s the one that’s going to kill us all.
She’d come onto the Oregon Strip, moved north to Hongcouver. Inland from there; she’d got through the quarantine somehow. Then nothing for a month or so, when she’d appeared in the midwest, heading south. Skirting the edge of a no-go zone that stretched across three states. Two outbreaks down at the edge of the Dust Belt. Then Yankton: the head of an arrow, pointing somewhere in the vicinity of the Great Lakes.
Home, Lubin had said. Sault Sainte Marie.
Desjardins tapped the board: the main menu for the N’AmPac Grid Authority lit up his inlays. Personnel. Clarke, Lenie.
Deceased.
No surprise there: bureaucracy’s usual up-to-the-minute grasp of current events. At least the file hadn’t been wiped.
He called up next-of-kin: Clarke, Indira and Butler, Jakob.
Deceased.
Suppose she couldn’t get to her parents? Rowan had wondered. Suppose they’d been dead a long time?
And Lubin had said, The people she hates are very much alive … .
He called up the public registry. No Sault Sainte Marie listing for Indira Clarke or Jakob Butler in the past three years. That was as far back as public records went. The central archives went back another four; nothing there either.
Suppose they’d been dead a long time? Sort of an odd question, now that he thought about it.
Forget the registry, Desjardins thought. Too easy to edit. He tried the matchmaker instead, threw a bottle into Maelstrom and asked if anyone had seen Indira Clarke or Jakob Butler hanging out with Sault Sainte Marie.
The hit came back from N’AmPac Directory Assistance, an inquiry over seven months old. By rights, it should have been purged just hours after its inception. It hadn’t been. Indira was not the only Clarke it mentioned.
Clarke, Indira, went the transcript. Clarke with an ‘e,’
How many Indira Clarkes in Sault Sainte Marie?
How many in all of N’Am, professional affiliation with the Maelstrom fishery, with an only female child born February 2018, named Lenie?
That’s not fucking pos—
Lenie Clarke’s mother did not appear to exist anywhere in North America. And Lenie Clarke hadn’t known.
Or at least, she hadn’t remembered … .
And how did they choose recruits for the rifter program? Desjardins reminded himself. That’s right—“preadaption to stressful environments” …
Deep in his gut, something opened one eye and began growling.
He was a special guy, these days. He even had a direct line to Patricia Rowan. Anytime, she’d told him. Day or night. It was, after all, nearly the end of the world.
She picked up on the second ring.
“It was tough, wasn’t it?” Desjardins said.
“What do you mean?”
“I bet antisocial personalities make really bad
students. I bet it was next to impossible, taking all those headcases and turning them into marine engineers. It must have been a lot easier to do it the other way around.”
Silence on the line.
“Ms. Rowan?”
She sighed. “We weren’t happy about the decision, Doctor.”
“I should fucking hope not,” he said. “You took human beings and—”
“Dr. Desjardins, this is not your concern.”
“Yeah? You’re confident making that kind of call, after the last time?”
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”
“βehemoth wasn’t my concern either, remember? You were so worried about some other corpse getting a leg up when it got out, but there was no way you were going to come to us, were you? No ma’am. You handed the reins to a head cheese.”
“Dr.—”
“Why do you think CSIRA even exists? Why chain us all to Guilt Trip if you aren’t going to use us anyway?”
“I’m sorry, Doctor—were you under the impression that Guilt Trip made you infallible?” Rowan’s voice was laced with frostbite. “It does not. It simply keeps you from being deliberately corrupt, and it does that by linking to your own gut feelings. And believe it or not, being especially tied to one’s gut is not the best qualification for long-term problemsolving.”
“That’s not—”
“You’re like any other mammal, Doctor. Your sense of reality is anchored in the present. You’ll naturally inflate the near term and sell the long term short; tomorrow’s disaster will always feel less real than today’s inconvenience. You may be unbeatable at putting out brush fires, but I shudder to think of how you’d handle issues that extend into the next decade, let alone the next century. Guilt Trip would herd you toward the short-term payoff every time.”
Her voice gentled a bit. “Surely, if we’ve learned anything from recent history, it’s that sometimes the short term must be sacrificed for the long.”
She waited, as if challenging him to disagree. The silence stretched.
“It wasn’t such a radical technique, really,” she said at last.
“What wasn’t?”
“They’re a lot more common than you might think. Even real memories are just—cobbled together out of bits and pieces, mostly. After the fact. Doesn’t take much to coax the brain into cobbling those pieces together in some other way. Power of suggestion, more than anything. People even do it by accident.”
She’s defending herself, Desjardins realized. Patricia Rowan is actually trying to justify herself.
“So what others did by accident, you did on purpose,” he said.
“We were more sophisticated. Drugs, hypnosis. Some deep ganglionic tweaks to keep real memories from surfacing.”
“You fucked her in the head.”
“Do you know what it is, to be fucked in the head? Do you know what that colorful little phrase actually means? It means a proliferation of certain receptor sites and stress hormones. It means triggers set at increased firing thresholds. It’s chemistry, Doctor, and when you believe you’ve been abused—well, beliefs just another set of chemicals in the mix, isn’t it? You get a—a sort of cascade effect, your brain rewires itself, and suddenly you can survive things that would leave the rest of us pissing in our boots. Yes, we faked Lenie Clarke’s childhood. Yes, she was never really abused—”
“By her parents,” Desjardins interjected.
“—but the fact that she believes she was abused is what made her strong enough to survive the rift. Fucking her in the head probably saved her life a dozen times over.”
“And now,” Desjardins pointed out, “she’s heading back to a home she never had, gunning for parents who don’t exist, driven by abuses that never happened. Her whole definition of herself is a lie.”
“And I thank God for that,” Rowan said.
“What?”
“Have you forgotten the woman’s a walking brood sac for the end of the world? At least we know where she’s going. Ken can head her off. That—that definition of herself makes her predictable, Doctor. It means we might still be able to save the earth.”
Random intelligence from around the world scrolled on all sides. He didn’t see it.
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 blueshifted 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 anymore. 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 …
