Behemoth: B-Max

by Peter Watts

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Is it really?” Rowan glimpses the old Lenie Clarke, the predatory one, smiling in the intermittent light. “Supposing you’d kicked our asses five years ago, and we’d been living under house arrest ever since. And then some bug passed through our hands on its way to you, and corpses started dropping like flies. Are you saying you wouldn’t suspect?”

  “No. No, of course we would.” Rowan heaves a sigh. “But I’d like to think we wouldn’t go off half-cocked without any evidence at all. We’d at least entertain the possibility that you were innocent.”

  “As I recall, when the shoe was on the other foot guilt or innocence didn’t enter into it. You didn’t waste any time sterilizing the hot zones, no matter who was inside. No matter what they’d done.”

  “Good rationale. One worthy of Ken Lubin and his vaunted ethical code.”

  Lenie snorts. “Give it a rest, Pat. I’m not calling you a liar. But we’ve already cut you more slack than you cut us, back then. And there are a lot of people in there with you. You sure none of them are doing anything behind your back?”

  A bright moment: a dark one.

  “Anyway, there’s still some hope we could dial this down,” Clarke says. “We’re looking at β-max ourselves. If it hasn’t been tweaked, we won’t find anything.”

  A capillary of dread wriggles through Rowan’s insides.

  “How will you know one way or the other?” she asks. “None of you are pathologists.”

  “Well, we aren’t gonna trust your experts. We may not have tenure at LU but we’ve got a degree or two in the crowd. That, and access to the biomed library, and—”

  “No,” Rowan whispers. The capillary grows into a thick, throbbing artery. She feels blood draining from her face to feed it.

  Lenie sees it immediately. “What?” She leans forward, across the armrest of her seat. “Why does that worry you?”

  Rowan shakes her head. “Lenie, you don’t know. You’re not trained, you don’t get a doctorate with a couple of days’ reading. Even if you get the right results, you’ll probably misinterpret them…”

  “What results? Misinterpret how?”

  Rowan watches her, suddenly wary: the way she looked when they met for the first time, five years ago.

  The rifter looks back steadily. “Pat, don’t hold out on me. I’m having a tough enough time keeping the dogs away as it is. If you’ve got something to say, say it.”

  Tell her.

  “I didn’t know myself until recently,” Rowan begins. “βehemoth may have been—I mean, the original βehemoth, not this new strain—it was tweaked.”

  “Tweaked.” The word lies thick and dead in the space between them.

  Rowan forces herself to continue. “To adapt it to aerobic environments. And to increase its reproductive rate, for faster production. There were commercial applications. Nobody was trying to bring down the world, of course, it wasn’t a bioweapons thing at all … but evidently something went wrong.”

  “Evidently.” Clarke’s face is an expressionless mask.

  “I’m sure you can see the danger here, if your people stumble across these modifications without really knowing what they’re doing. Perhaps they know enough to recognize a tweak, but not enough to tell what it does. Perhaps they don’t know how to tell old tweaks from more recent ones. Or perhaps the moment they see any evidence of engineering, they’ll conclude the worst and stop looking. They could come up with something they thought was evidence, and the only ones qualified to prove them wrong would be ignored because they’re the enemy.”

  Clarke watches her like a statue. Maybe the reconciliation of the past few years hasn’t been enough. Maybe this new development, this additional demand for even more understanding, has done nothing but shatter the fragile trust the two of them have built. Maybe Rowan has just lost all credibility in this woman’s eyes, blown her last chance to avoid meltdown.

  Endless seconds fossilize in the cold, thick air.

  “Fuck,” the rifter says at last, very softly. “It’s all over if this gets out.”

  Rowan dares to hope. “We’ve just got to make sure it doesn’t.”

  Clarke shakes her head. “What am I supposed to do, tell Rama to stop looking? Sneak into the hab and smash the sequencer? They already think I’m in bed with you people.” She emits a small, bitter laugh. “If I take any action at all I’ve lost them. They don’t trust me as it is.”

  Rowan leans back her seat and closes her eyes. “I know.” She feels a thousand years old.

  “You fucking corpses. You never could leave anything alone, could you?”

  “We’re just people, Lenie. We make … mistakes…” And suddenly the sheer, absurd, astronomical magnitude of that understatement sinks home in the most unexpected way, and Patricia Rowan can’t quite suppress a giggle.

  It’s the most undignified sound she’s made in years. Lenie arches an eyebrow.

  “Sorry,” Rowan says.

  “No problem. It was pretty hilarious.” The rifter’s patented half-smile flickers at the corner of her mouth.

  But it’s gone in the next second. “Pat, I don’t think we can stop this.”

  “We have to.”

  “Nobody’s talking any more. Nobody’s listening. Just one little push could send it all over the edge. If they even knew we were talking here…”

  Rowan shakes her head in hopeful, reassuring denial. But Lenie’s right. Rowan knows her history, after all. She knows her politics. You’re well past the point of no return when simply communicating with the other side constitutes an act of treason.

  “Remember the very first time we met?” Lenie asks. “Face to face?”

  Rowan nods. She’d turned the corner and Lenie Clarke was just there, right in front of her, fifty kilograms of black rage inexplicably transported to the heart of their secret hideaway. “Eighty meters in that direction,” she says, pointing over her shoulder.

  “You sure about that?” Lenie asks.

  “Most certainly,” Rowan says. “I thought you were going to kill m—”

  And stops, ashamed.

  “Yes,” she says after a while. “That was the first time we met. Really.”

  Lenie faces forward, at her own bank of dead readouts. “I thought you might have, you know, been part of the interview process. Back before your people did their cut ’n’ paste in my head. You can never tell what bits might have got edited out, you know?”

  “I saw the footage afterward,” Rowan admits. “When Yves was making his recommendations. But we never actually met.”

  “Course not. You were way up in the strat. No time to hang around with the hired help.” Rowan is a bit surprised at the note of anger in Lenie’s voice. After all that’s been done to her, after all she’s come to terms with since, it seems strange that such a small, universal neglect would be a hot button.

  “They said you’d be better off,” Rowan says softly. “Honestly. They said you’d be happier.”

  “Who said?”

  “Neurocog. The psych people.”

  “Happier.” Lenie digests that a moment. “False memories of Dad raping me made me happier? Jesus, Pat, if that’s true my real childhood must have been a major treat.”

  “I mean, happier at Beebe Station. They swore that any so-called well-adjusted person would crack down there in under a month.”

  “I know the brochure, Pat. Preadaption to chronic stress, dopamine addiction to hazardous environments. You bought all that?”

  “But they were right. You saw what happened to the control group we sent down. But you—you liked the place so much we were worried you wouldn’t want to come back.”

  “At first,” Lenie adds unnecessarily.

  After a moment she turns to face Rowan. “But tell me this, Pat. Supposing they told you I wasn’t going to like it so much? What if they’d said, she’ll hate the life, she’ll hate her life, but we have to do it anyway because it’s the only way to keep her from goi
ng stark raving mad down there? Would you tell me if they’d told you that?”

  “Yes.” It’s an honest answer. Now.

  “And would you have let them rewire me and turn me into someone else, give me monsters for parents, and send me down there anyway?”

  “… Yes.”

  “Because you served the Greater Good.”

  “I tried to,” Rowan says.

  “An altruistic corpse,” the rifter remarks. “How do you explain that?”

  “Explain?”

  “It kind of goes against what they taught us in school. Why sociopaths rise to the top of the corporate ladder, and why we should all be grateful that the world’s tough economic decisions are being made by people who aren’t hamstrung by the touchy-feelies.”

  “It’s a bit more complicated than that.”

  “Was, you mean.”

  “Is,” Rowan insists.

  They sit in silence for a while.

  “Would you have it reversed, if you could?” Rowan asks.

  “What, the rewire? Get my real memories back? Lose the whole Daddy Rapist thing?”

  Rowan nods.

  Lenie’s silent for so long that Rowan wonders if she’s refusing to answer. But finally, almost hesitantly, she says: “This is who I am. I guess maybe there was a different person in here before, but now it’s only me. And when it comes right down to it I guess I just don’t want to die. Bringing back that other person would almost be a kind of suicide, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I never thought about it that way before.”

  “It took a while for me to. You people killed someone else in the process, but you made me.” Rowan glimpses a frown, strobe-frozen. “You were right, you know. I did want to kill you that time. It wasn’t the plan, but I saw you there and everything just caught up with me and you know, for a few moments there I almost…”

  “Thanks for holding back,” Rowan says.

  “I did, didn’t I? And if any two people ever had reason to go for each other’s throats, it had to be us.” Her voice catches for an instant. “But we didn’t. We got along. Eventually.”

  “We did,” Rowan says.

  The rifter looks at her with blank, pleading eyes. “So why can’t they? Why can’t they just—I don’t know, follow our lead…”

  “Lenie, we destroyed the world. I think they’re following our lead a bit too closely.”

  “Back in Beebe, you know, I was the boss. I didn’t want to be, that was the last thing I wanted, but people just kept—” Lenie shakes her head. “And I still don’t want to be, but I have to be, you know? Somehow I have to keep these idiots from blowing everything up. Only now, nobody will even tell me what time zone I’m in, and Grace…”

  She looks at Rowan, struck by some thought. “What happened to her, anyway?”

  “What do you mean?” Rowan asks.

  “She really hates you guys. Did you kill her whole family or something? Did you fuck with her head somehow?”

  “No,” Rowan says. “Nothing.”

  “Come on, Pat. She wouldn’t be down here if there wasn’t some—”

  “Grace was in the control group. Her background was entirely unremarkable. She was—”

  But Lenie’s suddenly straight up in her seat, capped eyes sweeping across the ceiling. “Did you hear that?” she asks.

  “Hear what?” The cockpit’s hardly a silent place—gurgles, creaks, the occasional metallic pop have punctuated their conversation since it began—but Rowan hasn’t heard anything out of the ordinary. “I didn’t—”

  “Shhh,” Lenie hisses.

  And now Rowan does hear something, but it’s not what the other woman’s listening for. It’s a little burble of sound from her own earbud, a sudden alert from comm: a voice worried unto near-panic, audible only to her. She listens, and feels a sick, dread sense of inevitability. She turns to her friend.

  “You better get back out there,” she says softly.

  Lenie spares an impatient glance, catches the expression on Rowan’s face and double-takes. “What?”

  “Comm’s been monitoring your LFAM chatter,” Rowan says. “They’re saying … Erickson. He died.

  “They’re looking for you.”

  THE BLOODHOUND ITERATIONS

  N=1:

  Snarling, unaware, she searches for targets and finds none. She looks for landmarks and comes up empty. She can’t even find anything that passes for topography—an endless void extends in all directions, an expanse of vacant memory extending far beyond the range of any whiskers she copies into the distance. She can find no trace of the ragged, digital network she usually inhabits. There is no prey here, no predators beyond herself, no files or executables upon which to feast. She can’t even find the local operating system. She must be accessing it on some level—she wouldn’t run without some share of system resources and clock cycles—but the fangs and claws she evolved to tear open that substrate can’t get any kind of grip. She is a lean, lone wolf with rottweiler jaws, optimized for life in some frayed and impoverished jungle that has vanished into oblivion. Even a cage would have recognizable boundaries, walls or bars that she could hurl herself against, however ineffectually. This featureless nullscape is utterly beyond her ken.

  For the barest instant—a hundred cycles, maybe two—the heavens open. If she had anything approaching true awareness, she might glimpse a vast array of nodes through that break in the void, an n-dimensional grid of parallel architecture wreaking infinitesimal changes to her insides. Perhaps she’d marvel at the way in which so many of her parameter values change in that instant, as if the tumblers on a thousand mechanical locks spontaneously fell into alignment at the same time. She might tingle from the sleet of electrons passing through her genes, flipping ons to offs and back again.

  But she feels nothing. She knows no awe or surprise, she has no words for meiosis or rape. One part of her simply notices that a number of environmental variables are suddenly optimal; it signals a different subroutine controlling replication protocols, and yet another that scans the neighborhood for vacant addresses.

  With relentless efficiency and no hint of joy, she births a litter of two million.

  N=4,734:

  Snarling, unaware, she searches for a target—but not quite the way her mother did. She looks for landmarks—but spends a few more cycles before giving up on the task. She can’t find anything that passes for topography—and changing tacks, spends more time documenting the addresses that stretch away above and below. She is a lean, lone German shepherd with rottweiler jaws and a trace of hip dysplasia, honed for life in some frayed and impoverished jungle that’s nowhere to be seen. She faintly remembers other creatures seething on all sides, but her event log balances the costs and benefits of comprehensive record-keeping; her memories degrade over time, unless reinforced. She has already forgotten that the other creatures were her siblings; soon, she will not remember them at all. She never knew that by the standards of her mother’s world, she was the runt of the litter. Her persistence here, now, is not entirely consistent with the principles of natural selection.

  Here, now, the selection process is not entirely natural.

  She has no awareness of the array of parallel universes stretching away on all sides. Hers is but one microcosm of many, each with a total population of one. When a sudden fistula connects two of these universes, it seems like magic: suddenly she is in the company of a creature very much—but not exactly—like her.

  They scan fragments of each other, nondestructively. Bits and pieces of disembodied code suddenly appear in nearby addresses, cloned fragments, unviable. There is no survival value in any of this; on any Darwinian landscape, a creature who wasted valuable cycles on such frivolous cut-and-paste would be extinct in four generations, tops. Yet for some reason, this neurotic tic makes her feel—fulfilled, somehow. She fucks the newcomer, cuts and pastes in more conventional fashion. She flips a few of her own randomizers for good measure, and drops a litte
r of eight hundred thousand.

  N=9,612:

  Snarling, unaware, she searches for targets and finds them everywhere. She looks for landmarks and maps out a topography of files and gates, archives, executables and other wildlife. It is a sparse environment by the standards of ancient ancestors, incredibly lush by the standards of more recent ones. She remembers neither, suffers neither nostalgia nor memory. This place is sufficient for her needs: she is a wolfhound cross, overmuscled and a little rabid, her temperment a throwback to purer times.

  Purer instincts prevail. She throws herself among the prey and devours it.

  Around her, so do others: Akitas, Sibes, pit-bull crosses with the long stupid snouts of overbred collies. In a more impoverished place they would attack each other; here, with resources in such plentiful supply, there is no need. But strangely, not everyone attacks their prey as enthusiastically as she does. Some seem distracted by the scenery, spend time recording events instead of precipitating them. A few gigs away, her whiskers brush across some brain-dead mutt dawdling about in the registry, cutting and pasting data for no reason at all. It’s not of any interest, of course—at least, not until the mongrel starts copying pieces of her.

  Violated, she fights back. Bits of parasitic code are encysted in her archives, tamed snippets from virtual parasites that plagued her own long-forgotten ancestors back in the Maelstrom Age. She unzips them and throws copies at her molestor, answering its unwanted probing with tapeworms and syphillis. But these diseases work far faster than the metaphor would suggest: they do not sicken the body so much as scramble it on contact.

  Or they should. But somehow her attack fails to materialize on target. And that’s not the only problem—suddenly, the whole world is starting to change. The whiskers she sends roving about her perimeter aren’t reporting back. Volleys of electrons, fired down the valley, fail to return—and then, even more ominously, return too quickly. The world is shrinking: some inexplicable void is compressing it from all directions.

  Her fellow predators are panicking around her, crowding toward gates gone suddenly dark, pinging whiskers every which way, copying themselves to random addresses in the hopes that they can somehow outreplicate annihilation. She rushes around with the others as space itself contracts—but the dawdler, the cut-and-paster, seems completely unconcerned. There is no chaos breaking around that one, no darkening of the skies. The dawdler has some kind of protection …