Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

Maelstrom

  βehemoth: β-Max

  βehemoth: Seppuku

  PRAISE FOR MAELSTROM

  “An eerie journey of revenge and salvation.”

  —Library Journal

  “[Watts’s] fiction exhibits a wonderful Darwinian adaptability. Internalizing the lessons and modes taught by cyberpunk and fusing them with the Bear/Benford pedigree of hard SF, Watts has bred a robust, streamlined, snarling kind of science fiction which achieves both a sharp-edged verisimilitude and visionary exuberance … . These two novels are state-of-the art SF And best of all, Maelstrom does not merely repeat the successes of Starfish but extends them into new territory.”

  —Paul Di Filippo, Science Fiction Weekly

  “The premise is interesting, the humor dark … unexpected plot twists and an ending that is complete in itself.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “Watts displays a gleefully macabre inventiveness combined with scientific rigor. With its chaotically alive portrayal of the World Wide Web and its disturbing ruminations on the uses of conscience, Maelstrom is a dark, sardonic, and uncompromisingly moral book.”

  —Nalo Hopkinson, Quill & Quire

  “Watts’s hard-boiled prose screams along [with] nothing to step it down … . Lifting beyond cyberconspiracy are Watts’s convincing writing, his killer pacing, and the delicate secondary themes … . This is speculative fiction of maximum wattage.”

  —John Burns, The Georgia Straight

  PRAISE FOR STARFISH

  A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR

  “No one has taken this premise to such pitiless lengths—and depths—as Watts … . In a claustrophobic setting enlivened by periodic flashes of beauty and terror, the crew of Beebe Station come across as not only believable but likeable as they fight for equilibrium against their own demons, one another, their superiors, and their remorselessly hostile surroundings.”

  —The New York Times

  “A savage, bitter, and often blackly comic vision of the near future … [The ending] is both startling and oddly satisfying in its earned nihilism. A terrific debut from an author we will be seeing again.”

  —Edmonton Journal

  “Fizzing with ideas, and glued together with dark psychological tension: an exciting debut.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Peter Watts delivers—solid, inventive hard SF about the deep sea, but as we’ve never seen before. This moves like the wind.”

  —Gregory Benford

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks first for the forbearance: to Mike Brander, one of the nicest guys you could hope to meet, for not suing me after I inadvertently used his name in the last book.

  Thanks next for the help: Laurie Channer, Nalo Hopkinson, Brent Hayward, and Bob Boyczuk all poked and prodded an embryonic stage of the first few chapters. Laurie also endured my endless stream-of-consciousness rambling as I tried to fit all the pieces together; hopefully her sacrifice has spared the rest of you from a similar fate. My agent, Don Maass, made a vital criticism of opening chapters which resulted in a whole new plot thread (and hopefully, less “straining for effect”). David Hartwell edited with his usual renowned acumen, even if he did force me to cut the exploding daddy scene.

  I also got diverse technical assistance from other folks with postgraduate degrees like mine, the difference being that theirs were in subjects that actually proved to be good for something. Prof. Denis Lynn (of the University of Guelph) provided not answers, but questions, and lines of inquiry for me to pursue. (It’s been twenty years since I took a course from the man and he’s still forcing me to think for myself.) He also donated a copy of Lodish et al.’s Molecular Cell Biology to the cause, a text which easily outweighs the yellow pages for the GTA. Isaac “Buckaroo Bonzai” Szpindel—an MD, neurologist, sf writer, screenwriter, and (no shit) electrical engineer—helped me out with the chemistry of guilt, and suggested plausible field strengths for rifler implants. He also kept me from slipping into steroid psychosis during a massive poison-ivy infection while I was writing this book. Drs. Alison Sinclair and Fran Terry offered insights, suggestions, and/or overheads on matters microbial. Colin Bamsey told me what kind of alpine trees would be likely to survive the great warming.

  Given a world in which Quebec has become the predominant economic power, I figured various Quebecisms would have worked their way into casual N’Am conversation—hence all those italicized expletives that left most of you scratching your heads. For a crash course in how to be foulmouthed in Canada’s Other Official Language, I thank Joël Champetier, Glenn Grant, Daniel Sernine, and Jean-Louis Trudel, even though they couldn’t come up with an alliterative translation for “blood-spewing semen-sucking sickle-celled savior.” (They did, however, dissuade me from turning “Celine Dion” into a swear word. Just barely.)

  Once again, the music of Ian Anderson and the inestimable Jethro Tull kept me company during the many long nights it took to lay this puppy to rest. As did the music of REM, from whom I stole a couple of chapter titles.

  My thanks to all of these for their efforts and/or inspiration, and my apologies for all the stuff I probably got wrong anyway.

  REFERENCES

  The following references helped me beat Maelstrom into a shape that’s (hopefully) more plausible than if I’d just made everything up myself. This is in addition to the references I cited two years ago in Starfish, which I won’t bother repeating here: go buy the damn book if you’re so interested.

  βehemoth

  When I started writing this book, strange claims had just started surfacing in the scientific literature: a new kind of extremely primitive microbe freshly discovered, something inconceivably small.1 So small, in fact—less than 100 nanometers in some cases—that many argued they couldn’t possibly be alive.2 Believers dubbed them nanobes. (Formal taxonomy—Nanobacterium sanguineum—has been suggested, but not yet formally adopted.3)

  Now, a couple of years later, nanobes have been found not only in hot springs and Triassic sandstone, but in the blood of mammals (including humans).4 Evidently they find us comfortably reminiscent of the primordial soup in which life originally evolved some 3.5 billion years ago; they feed off the phosphorus and calcium in our blood.

  βehemoth is not N. sanguineum, of course. It’s more sophisticated in some ways, more primitive in others. Its genome is encoded in p-RNA, not DNA; it snarfs sulfur, not phosphorus and calcium; it can’t survive in cold saline environments (real nanobes probably can’t metabolize under such conditions either, but they can withstand them in a dormant state); it has advanced adaptations for cell penetration that are way out of Nanobacterium’s league. It’s larger, as large as conventional mycoplasmas and marine bacterioplankton. It is also much nastier, and—last but not least—it doesn’t actually exist.

  I have, however, tried to make this bug reasonably plausible, given the dramatic constraint of a global apocalypse in a crunchy coating. As a result, βehemoth is like one of those “composite serial killers” you read about in True Crime books—bits and pieces of various real-world bugs, thrown together with lots of dramatic license. “A-51” really exists, both in deep lake sediments and the human mouth.5 Pseudomonas aeruginosa is another bacterium that lives quite happily in soil, water, worms, and people;6 like βehemoth, it has genes that allow it to speed up and slow down its own rate of mutation so it can quick-adapt to novel environments. (I’ve called them “Blachford genes” here, in the hopes that one Alistair Blachford will get off his ass and publish his thesis on genetic metavariation as an evolutionary strategy.7) March and McMahon’s 1999 review of receptor-mediated endocytosis8 told me how βehemoth would be most likely to get inside a host cell, and Decatur and Portnoy9 told me how it could avoid getting digested afterward. And once again, a nod to Denis Lynn of the University of Guelph for forcing me to worry about such things in the first place.

  βehemoth’s genetics are cadged from a variety of sources, many of which I quoted without really understanding. T
he stuff on mitochondria and pyranosal RNA comes from Eschenmoser, 10 Gesteland et al.,11 Gray et al.,12 and Orgel.13,14 βehemoth’s size and genome are consistent with theoretical size limits for microorganisms,15 and big enough to sustain a normal microbial metabolic rate. (Real nanobes are too small to contain many enzymes, which means that many of their metabolic pathways crawl along at uncatalyzed speeds. They therefore metabolize about ten thousand times slower than bacteria such as E. coli4, which makes them pretty poor candidates for outcompeting a whole biosphere.) And of course, it’s looking more and more likely that life itself began as a sulfur-dependent phenomenon in a hydrothermal rift vent.16 I cobbled other bits and pieces from Lodesh et al.’s Molecular Cell Biology.17

  Why did I choose something as mind-bogglingly common as sulfur for a bottleneck element? I was trying to make a point about carrying capacity in ecological systems: life is greedy, and if you give it long enough, anything can become limiting. Besides, any primitive microbe from a hydrothermal environment is likely to have a serious sulfur-dependency problem. (The specialists in the audience will notice that I carefully avoided making βehemoth an obligate sulfurreducer; I actually envision the little mother’s metabolism as being more akin to that of the giant sulfide-consuming microbes reported by Schulz et al.18)

  Bottom line, most of βehemoth’s traits have real-world precedents. Whether evolution could actually pack all those attributes into a package 250 nanometers across is a whole different issue, of course. Still. Look at all the stuff that fits into Batman’s utility belt.

  Guilt Trip

  The idea of behavior-modification technology is old stuff in fiction; Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange is an obvious example. In Maelstrom I’ve taken a stab at rediscovering that wheel by explicitly tweaking genes and neurochemistry.

  As far as I know, the existence of the “Minsky receptors” that Alice Jovellanos mentions has yet to be confirmed. Something like them, however, must be seated in the frontal cortex where human conscience and morality (such as they are) reside.19,20 At the very least, certain types of frontal-lobe damage have a tendency to turn good God-fearing folk into sociopaths.

  I imagine that Ken Lubin’s murder reflex is wired into the neural circuitry described by R. Davidson et al.21 The conceit of using tweaked parasite genes to program such behavior came to me when I was teaching an undergraduate course in animal ecology. The parasites mentioned in Maelstrom are real, and have a lot of company.22,23 One fly-eating fungus hijacks its victim’s nervous system just before killing it, forcing it to fly to an upside-down perch and orient its abdomen at an optimum angle for spore dispersal. An ant-fluke called Dicrocoelium takes control of its host each night, riding it to the top of a convenient stalk of grass and freezing it there until morning in hopes that some other hapless host will eat it. And yes, Toxoplasma really does cause rats to lose their fear of cats (and in some cases, actually to be attracted to the smell of cat urine). It is also found in about half the members of our species. This stuff is straight out of The Puppet Masters, folks. There’s even a substantial amount of evidence to suggest that sex itself evolved primarily as a countermeasure against parasite attacks.24

  Anemone/Maelstrom

  First, the Wilderness. The Internet is already more like a wildlife habitat than you might expect. Internet “storms” were first described in 1997,25 which makes them old news: nowadays you can link to “weather maps” of Internet meteorology, 26 updated several times daily. (Once again, my far-flung futuristic foresight has proven wonderfully adept at predicting the past. The last time was when Starfish predicted submarine ecotours to deep-sea rifts within fifty years, only to have such tours advertised in the real world by 1999.)

  Those of you who have taken an undergraduate physiology course may remember the power law. It’s a surface-areato-volume relationship that governs living systems from whole food webs right down to the capillaries of shrews—essentially a pattern typical of self-organizing (i.e., biological) systems. As it turns out, the World Wide Web itself appears to be evolving in concordance with this law.27 Something to think about …

  Second, the Wildlife. These days it’s hardly necessary to cite references on the subject of “artificial life”: a web search on the phrase (or on “cellular automata”) will demonstrate how massively the field has exploded over the past ten years. That subset of e-life that goes by the name Anemone is admittedly a bit more speculative, and based upon two premises. The first is that simple systems, in aggregate, display emergent behaviors beyond the capability of their individual parts. This is pretty much self-evident within a body—who’d deny that a brain is smarter than an individual neuron, for example?—but the principle extends even to aggregations of completely unconnected individuals. A school of fish or a flock of birds can be thought of, in effect, as a diffuse neural net.28,29

  A related premise is that lineages with genetically determined behavior would be able to pass a Turing test if they evolved fast enough. This won’t be hard to swallow for anyone familiar with how sophisticated such behavior can be; we do, after all, live in a world where ants practice animal husbandry, birds follow orthodome routes to navigate halfway around the world, and honeybees convey sophisticated travel instructions by wiggling their asses at each other. Skeptics might want to read any of E.O. Wilson’s books on sociobiology, or an old Scientific American article by John Holland.30 It’s way out-of-date, but it clearly conveys the principles behind genetic algorithms.

  Finally, anyone who treats the phrase group selection as an obscenity (I admit they’re right, most of the time) might first want to check out D. S. Wilson’s review article of the subject in Skeptic.31

  Smart Gels

  Research on the construction of thinking meat has proceeded apace since Starfish came out. Recent research is thumbnailed in “Neurons and silicon get intimate,” by Robert “no-notthat- Robert” Service.32 More conventional neural nets are literally in the driver’s seat: Carnegie Mellon’s ALVINN program (which I mentioned briefly in the references to Starfish ) has now moved onto the highway, where neural nets have autonomously taken ninety-mile jaunts on public highways, at speeds up to 70mph. They learned to drive by watching people at the same task. It took them less than five minutes.

  We still can’t be sure exactly what neural nets actually learn when we train them. Paradigm cock-ups of the sort that made my “head cheeses” betray their masters have happened in real life. One infamous military neural net taught itself to distinguish between various ambient light conditions, while all along its humans thought they were teaching it to recognize tanks.33

  Ganzfeld Interrogation

  Back in Starfish I cited Roger Penrose’s quantum-consciousness theory to justify the rudimentary psi-powers of the rifters. Here in Maelstrom Lubin uses the same trick to interrogate Achilles Desjardins. In the interest of full disclosure I should admit that Penrose’s theory has come under serious attack from a guy called Tegmark:34 The quantummind aficionados have rallied,35 but things may be looking a bit iffier on the quantum-consciousness front these days. What can you do.

  Haunted by Happiness

  Lenie Clarke’s “hallucinations” are loosely based on Bonnet’s Syndrome,36 a malady that sometimes results from macular degeneration. The brain really does compensate for loss of visual input by inserting images from visual memory into the gaps. In real life, Bonnet’s Syndrome tends to occur in elderly patients, and is frequently associated with bereavement; the hallucinations are more or less seamlessly incorporated into the visual environment (as opposed to the picture-in-picture format Lenie experienced).

  Finally …

  If you want a more luminous taste of all this stuff, check out www.rifters.com.

  NOTES

  1 Unwins, J. P. R. et al. 1998. “Novel nano-organisms from Australian sandstones.” American Minerologist 83: 1541—50.

  2 Broad, W. J. 2000. “Scientists find smallest form of life, if it lives.” New York Times, January 18.

  3 Eu
zéby, J. P. March 2001. List of bacterial names with standing in nomenclature. http://www.bacterio.cict.fr/index.html

  4 Kajander, E.O., et al., 1999. “Suggestions from observation on nanobacteria isolated from blood.” Size Limits of Very Small Microorganisms: Proceedings of a Workshop. National Academy Press, Washington, DC. 164 pp.

  5 Kroes, et al., 1999. “Bacterial diversity within the human subgingival crevice. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 796(25): 14547—52.

  6 Rainy, P. B. and E. R. Moxon. 2000.”When being hyper keeps you fit.” Science 288: 1186—8.

  7 Blachford, A. 1984. “Metavariation and long term evolutionary patterns.” M.Sc. thesis, Zoology, University of British Columbia, 140 pp.

  8 Marsh, M. And H. T. McMahon, 1999. “The structural era of endocytosis.” Science 284: 215—20.

  9 Decatur, A. L. and D. A. Portnoy. 2000. “A PEST-like sequence in Listeriolysin O essential for Listeria monocytogenes pathogenicity.” Science 290: 992—5.

  10 Eschenmoser, A. 1999. “Chemical etiology of nucleic acid structure.” Science 284: 2118—23.

  11 Gesteland, R. F., et al. 1999. The RNA World. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Cold Spring Harbor, NY. 735 pp.

  12 Gray, M. W., et al. 1999. “Mitochondrial Evolution.” Science 283: 1476—81.