by Peter Watts
"I remember." Lubin tweaked controls. "You broke his nose."
"That's not the point."
"That person doesn't exist any more," he said. "Spartacus turned him into something else."
"Yeah? And what did it do to you, Ken?"
His blind, pitted face turned.
"I know one thing it didn't do," she went on. "It didn't give you your murder habit. You had that all along, didn't you?"
The pince-nez stared back at her like mantis eyes. A green LED ignited on its left lens.
"What's it like, Ken? Is it cathartic? Is it sexual? Does it get you off?" A part of her looked on, alarmed. The rest couldn't stop goading him. "Do you have to be right there, watching us die, or is it enough to just plant the bomb and know we'll be dropping like flies offstage?"
"Lenie." His voice was very calm. "What exactly are you trying to accomplish?"
"I just want to know what you're after, that's all. I don't see anyone waving pitchforks and torches at you just because Spartacus rewired your brain. If you're sure about this, if he really did all these things and he's really some kind of monster, then fine. But if this is just some fucked-up excuse for you to indulge your perverse little fetish, then..."
She shook her head in disgust and glared into the darkness.
"You'd like his perversions somewhat less than mine," Lubin said quietly.
"Right," she snorted. "Thanks for the input."
"Lenie..."
"What?"
"I'm never gratuitous," he told her.
"Really?" She looked a challenge at him. "Never?"
He looked back. "Well. Hardly ever."
Expiration Date
Equal parts dead and alive— and hardly caring which way the balance went—Taka Ouellette had figured it out.
She'd never done well under pressure. That had always been her problem. And Achilles the monster hadn't understood that. Or maybe he'd understood it too well. Whatever. He had put her under the mother of all high-pressure scenarios, and of course she'd fallen apart. She'd proven once again to be the eternal fuck-up. And it was so unfair, because she knew she had a good head on her shoulders, she knew she could figure things out if only people would stop leaning on her. If only Ken hadn't been there with his biowar canister, expecting answers right now. If only Achilles hadn't come within a hair of incinerating her alive, and then rushing her through Seppuku's gene sequence without so much as letting her catch her breath.
If only Dave hadn't been so impatient. If only she hadn't hurried on that last crucial diagnostic...
She was a smart lady. She knew it. But she was terrible under pressure. Bad, bad Alice, she chided herself.
But now that the pressure was off, see how well she put everything together?
It had only taken two things to get her over the hump. Achilles had to leave her alone for a bit, give her a chance to think. And she had to die. Well, start dying anyway. Once she knew she was dead, once she felt it in her bones, no reprieves, no last-minute rescue—all the pressure disappeared. For the first time in her life, it seemed, she could think clearly.
She didn't know how long it had been since Achilles had been by to torture her. She figured at least a day or two. Maybe a week—but no, surely she'd be dead already if he'd left her here for a whole week? Her joints had frozen up in the meantime. Even if she were to be released from the exoskeleton, her body was as rigid as rigor...
Maybe it was rigor. Maybe she'd already finished dying and hadn't noticed. Certainly things didn't seem to hurt as much as they had—although maybe she just didn't notice the pain so much now, on account of the raging thirst. One thing you could say about Achilles, he'd always kept her fed and watered. Didn't want her too weak to perform, he'd said.
But it had been so very long since he'd come by. Taka would have killed for a glass of water, if she hadn't already died for want of one.
But wasn't it nice that nothing mattered any more? And wasn't it nice that she'd actually figured it out?
She wished that Achilles would come back. Not just for the water, although that would be nice. She wanted to show him. She wanted to prove he was wrong. She wanted him to be proud of her.
It all had to do with that silly little song about the fleas. He must have known that, that's why he'd serenaded her in the first place. Has smaller fleas that on him prey, and these have smaller still to bite 'em...
Life within life. She could see it now. She was amazed that she'd never seen it before. It wasn't even a new concept. It was downright old. Mitochondria were littler fleas that lived in every eukaryotic cell. Today they were vital organelles, the biochemical batteries of life itself—but a billion years ago they'd been independent organisms in their own right, little free-living bacteria. A larger cell had engulfed them, had forgotten to chew before it swallowed—and so they'd struck up a deal, the big cell and the little one. The big cell would provide a safe, stable environment; the little one, in turn, would pump out energy for its host. That ancient act of failed predation had turned into the primordial symbiosis...and even today, mitochondria kept their own genes, reproduced on their own schedule, within the flesh of the host.
It was still going on. ßehemoth itself had stuck up a similar relationship within the cells of some of the creatures that shared its deep-sea environment, providing an energy surplus which the host fish used to grow faster. It grew within the cells of things here on land, too—with somewhat less beneficial consequences, true, but then virulence is always high when two radically disparate organisms encounter each other for the first time...
Achilles hadn't been singing about fleas at all. He'd been singing about endosymbiosis.
Seppuku must carry its own little fleas. There was more than enough room—all those redundant genes could code for any number of viral organisms, as well as merely masking the suicidal recessives. Seppuku not only killed itself off when its job was done—it gave birth to a new symbiont, a viral one probably, that would take up residence inside the host cell. It would fill the niche so effectively that ßehemoth would find nothing but no-vacancy signs if it came sniffing around afterwards, looking to move back in.
There were even precedents, of a sort. Taka remembered some of them from med school. Malaria had been beaten when baseline mosquitoes lost out to a faster-breeding variant that didn't transmit Plasmodium. AIDS stopped being a threat when benign strains outnumbered lethal ones. Those were nothing, though, diseases that attacked a handful of species at most. ßehemoth threatened everything with a nucleus; you'd never beat the witch by infecting the Human race, or replacing one species of insect with another. The only way to win against ßehemoth would be to counterinfect everything.
Seppuku would have to redesign life itself, from the inside out. And it could do it, too: it had an edge that poor old ßehemoth had never even dreamed of. Achilles had forced her to remember that too, half an eternity ago: TNA could duplex with modern nucleic acids. It could talk to the genes of its host cell, it could join the genes of its host cell. It could change anything and everything.
If she was right—and hovering at the edge of her life, she'd never been more certain of anything—Seppuku was more than a cure for ßehemoth. It was the most profound evolutionary leap since the rise of the eukaryotic cell. It was a solution far too radical for the fiddlers and tweakers who hadn't been able to see beyond the old paradigm of Life As We Know It. The deep-sea enzymes, the arduous painstaking retrofits that had allowed Taka and others like her to claim immunity—improvised scaffolding, no more. Struts and crutches to keep some teetering body plan alive long after its expiration date. People had grown too attached to the chemical tinkertoys that had defined them for three billion years. The most nostalgia could ever do was postpone the inevitable.
Seppuku's architects were more radical. They'd thrown away the old cellular specs entirely and started from scratch, they were rewriting the very chemistry of life. Every eukaryotic species would be changed at the molecular scale. No wonder Seppuk
u's creators had kept it under wraps; you didn't have to be an M&M to be terrified by such an extreme solution. People always chose the devils they knew, even if that devil was ßehemoth. People just wouldn't accept that success couldn't be achieved through just a little more tinkering...
Taka could barely imagine the shape of the success that was unfolding now. Perhaps the strange new insects she'd been seeing were the start of it, fast short lives that evolved through dozens of generations in a season. Achilles hadn't been able to keep it out after all: those joyful, monstrous bugs proved it. He had only been able to keep it from infecting Humanity.
And even there, he was doomed to fail. Salvation would take root in everything eventually, as it had taken root in the arthropods. It would just take more time for creatures who lived at a slower pace. Our turn will come, Taka thought.
How would it work? she wondered. How to outcompete the hypercompetitor? Brute force, perhaps? Sheer cellular voracity, the same scramble-competition strategy that ßehemoth had used to beat Life 1.0, turned back upon itself? Would life burn twice as bright and half as long, would the whole biosphere move faster, think faster, live furiously and briefly as mayflies?
But that was the old paradigm, to transform yourself into your enemy and then claim victory. There were other options, once you gave up on reinforcing and turned to redesign instead. Taka Ouellette, mediocre progeny of the Old Guard, couldn't begin to guess at what they were. She doubted anyone could. What simulation could predict the behavior of a multimillion-species system when every living variable was perturbed at once? How many carefully-selected experimental treatments would it take to model a billion simultaneous mutations? Seppuku—whatever Seppuku was poised to become—threw the very concept of a controlled experiment out the window.
North America was the experiment—unannounced, uncontrolled, an inconceivably tangled matrix of multiway ANOVAs and Hyperniche tables. Even if it failed, the world would hardly be worse off. ßehemoth would have suffered a major setback, Seppuku would have fallen on its sword, and whatever came after would at least—unlike ßehemoth— be limited to the inside of a host cell.
And maybe it wouldn't fail. Maybe everything would change for the better. There would be monsters, some hopeful. Mitochondria themselves might finally be driven to extinction, their ancient lease expired at last. Maybe people would change from the inside out, the old breed gone, replaced by something that looked the same but acted better.
Maybe it was about fucking time.
A little man nattered at her from a great distance. He stood in front of her, an irritating homunculus in ultrasharp focus, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. He paced back and forth, gesticulating madly. Taka gathered that he was afraid of something, or someone. Yes, that was it: someone was coming for him. He spoke as if his head was full of voices, as if he had lost control of a great many things at once. He threatened her—she thought he was threatening her, although his efforts seemed almost comical. He sounded like a lost little boy trying to act brave while looking for a place to hide.
"I figured it out," Taka told him. Her voice cracked like cheap brittle plastic. She wondered why that was. "It wasn't so hard."
But he was too caught up in his own little world. It didn't matter. He didn't seem like the kind of person who'd really appreciate the dawn of a new age anyway.
So many things were about to happen. The end of Life As We Knew It. The beginning of Life As We Don't. It had already started. Her biggest regret was that she wouldn't be around to see how it all turned out.
Dave, honey, she thought. I did it. I got it right at last.
You'd be proud of me.
Bastille
Sudbury rose in the night like a luminous tumor.
Its core glowed from within, faintly by dryback standards but bright as day to Lenie Clarke: a walled, claustrophobic cluster of refitted skyscrapers in an abandoned wasteland of suburbs and commercial zones. The static field was obvious by inference. The new buildings and the grafted retrofits, the galls of living space wedged into the gaps between buildings—all extended to the inner edge of the field and no further. Like metastasis constrained under glass, Sudbury had grown into a hemisphere.
They cut through from the east. Clarke's diveskin squirmed in the field like a slug in a flame. Charged air transformed the rotors into whirling vortices of brilliant blue sparks. She found the effect oddly nostalgic; it seemed almost bioluminescent, like microbes fluorescing in the heat of a deep-sea vent. For a moment she could pretend that some airborne variant of Saint Elmo's Fire trailed from those spinning blades.
But only for a moment. There was only one microorganism up here worth mentioning, and it was anything but luminous.
Then they were through, sniffing westward through the upper reaches of the Sudbury core. City canyon walls loomed close on either side. Sheet lightning sparked and flickered along the strip of sky overhead. Far below, intermittently eclipsed by new construction, some vestigial rapitrans line ran along the canyon floor like a taut copper thread.
She resumed loading clips from the open backpack at her feet. Lubin had toured her through the procedure somewhere over Georgian Bay. Each clip contained a dozen slug grenades, color-coded by function: flash, gas, shipworm, clusterfuck. They went into the belt-and-holster arrangement draped over her thigh.
Lubin spared a prosthetic glance. "Don't forget to seal that pack when you're done. How's your tape?"
She undid her top and checked the diveskin beneath. A broad X of semipermeable tape blocked off the electrolysis intake. "Still sticking." She zipped the dryback disguise back into place. "Doesn't this low-altitude stuff bother the local authorities?"
"Not those authorities." His tone evoked the image of blind eyes, turning. Evidently derms and antidotes and gutted bodies bought more than mere transportation. Clarke didn't push the issue. She slid one last cartridge home and turned her attention forward.
A couple of blocks ahead, the canyon ended in open space.
"So that's where he is," she murmured. Lubin throttled back so that they were barely drifting forward.
It spread out before their approach like a great dark coliseum, a clear zone carved from the claustrophobic architecture. Lubin brought the Sikorsky-Bell to a dead stop three hundred meters up, just short of that perimeter.
It was a walled moat, two blocks on a side. A lone skyscraper—a fluted, multifaceted tower—rose from its center. A ghostly crown of blue lights glowed dimly from the roof; everything else was dead and dark, sixty-five floors with not so much as a pane alight. Patchwork foundations scarred the empty ground on all sides, the footprints of demolished buildings that had crowded the neighborhood back in happier times.
She wondered what dryback eyes would see, if drybacks ever ventured here after dark. Maybe, when Sudbury's citizens looked to this place, they didn't see the Entropy Patrol at all. Maybe they saw a haunted tower, dark and ominous, full of skeletons and sick crawling things. Buried in the guts of the twenty-first century, besieged by alien microbes and ghosts in the machinery, could people be blamed for rediscovering a belief in evil spirits?
Maybe they're not even wrong, Clarke reflected.
Lubin pointed to the spectral lights on the parapet. A landing pad rose from that nimbus, a dozen smaller structures holding court around it—freight elevators, ventilation shacks, the housings of retracted lifter umbilicals.
Clarke looked back skeptically. "No." Surely they couldn't just land there. Surely there'd be defenses.
Lubin was almost grinning. "Let's find out."
"I'm not sure that's—"
He hit the throttle. They leapt into empty, unprotected space.
Out of the canyon, they banked right. Clarke braced her hands against the dash. Earth and sky rotated around them; suddenly the ground was three hundred meters off her shoulder, an archeological ruin of razed foundations—and two black circles, meters across, staring up at her like the eye sockets of some giant cartoon skull. Not emp
ty, though. Not even flat: they bulged subtly from the ground, like the exposed polar regions of great buried spheres.
"What're those?" she asked.
No answer. Clarke glanced across the cockpit. Lubin was holding his binoculars one-handed between his knees, holding his pince-nez against their eyepieces. The apparatus stared down through the ventral canopy. Clarke shuddered inwardly: how to deal with the sense of one's eyes floating half a meter outside the skull?
"I said—" she began again.
"Superheating artefact. Soil grains explode like popcorn."
"What would do that? Land mine?"
He shook his head absently, his attention caught by something near the base of the building. "Particle beam. Orbital cannon."
Her gut clenched. "If he's got—Ken, what if he sees—"
Something flashed, sodium-bright, through the back of her skull. Clockwork stuttered briefly in her chest. The Sikorsky-Bell's controls hiccoughed once, in impossible unison, and went dark.
"I think he has," Lubin remarked as the engine died.
Wind whistled faintly through the fuselage. The rotor continued to whup-whup-whup overhead, its unpowered blades slapping the air through sheer inertia. There was no other sound but Lubin, cursing under his breath as they hung for an instant between earth and sky.
In the next they were falling.
Clarke's stomach rose into her throat. Lubin's feet slammed pedals. "Tell me when we pass sixty meters."
They arced past dark facades. "Wha—"
"I'm blind." Lubin's teeth were bared in some twisted mix of fear and exultation; his hands gripped the joystick with relentless futility. "Tell me when—the tenth floor! Tell me when we pass the tenth floor!"
Part of her gibbered, senseless and panic-stricken. The rest struggled to obey, tried desperately to count the floors as they streaked past but they were too close, everything was a blur and they were going to crash they were going to crash right into the side of the tower but suddenly it was gone, swept past stage left, its edge passing almost close enough to touch. Now the structure's north face coasted into view, the focus sharper with distance and—
