Behemoth

by Peter Watts

  So smarter wildlife would not have lunged at the barricade, and bloodied it, and somehow, impossibly, gotten through.

  She whirls, snarling. Suddenly she’s in a place where empty addresses extend in all directions. She claws at random coordinates, feeling out her environment. Here, a blocked gate. Here, another. She spews electrons, omnidirectional spittle that probes and slashes simultaneously. All the exits they encounter are closed. All the wounds they inflict are superficial.

  She’s in a cage.

  Suddenly something appears beside her, pasted into adjacent addresses from on high. It whirls, snarling. It spits a volley of electrons that probe and slash simultaneously; some land on occupied addresses, and wound. She rears up and screams; the new thing screams too, a digital battle cry dumped straight from the bowels of it own code into her input buffer:

  Don’t you even know who I am? I’m Lenie Clarke.

  They close, slashing.

  She doesn’t know that some slow-moving god snatched her from the Darwinian realm and twisted her into the thing she’s become. She doesn’t know that other gods, ageless and glacial, are watching as she and her opponent kill each other in this computational arena. She lacks even the awareness that most other monsters take for granted, but here, now—killing and dying in a thousand dismembered fragments—she does know one thing.

  If there’s one thing she hates, it’s Lenie Clarke.

  OUTGROUP

  RESIDUAL seawater gurgles through the grille beneath Clarke’s feet. She peels the diveskin back from her face and reflects on the disquieting sense of inflation as lung and guts unfold themselves, as air rushes back to reclaim her crushed or flooded passageways. In all this time she’s never quite gotten used to it. It’s a little like being unkicked in the stomach.

  She takes her first breath in twelve hours and bends to strip off her fins. The airlock hatch swings wide. Still dripping, Lenie Clarke rises from the wet room into the main lounge of the Nerve Hab.

  At least, that’s what it started out as: one of three redundant modules scattered about the plain, their axons and dendrites extending to every haphazard corner of this submarine trailer park—to the generators, to Atlantis, to all the other bits and pieces that keep them going. Not even rifter culture can escape some cephalization, however rudimentary.

  By now it’s evolved into something quite different. The nerves still function, but buried beneath five years of generalist overlay. Cyclers and food processors were the first additions to the mix. Then a handful of sleeping pallets, brought in during some emergency debug that went three times around the clock; once strewn across the deck, they proved too convenient to remove. Half a dozen VR headsets, some with Lorenz-lev haptic skins attached. A couple of dreamers with corroded contacts. A set of isometrics pads, fashionable among those wishing to retain a measure of gravity-bound muscle tone. Boxes and treasure chests, grown or extruded or welded together by amateur metalworkers in Atlantis’s expropriated fabrication shops; they hold the personal effects and secret possessions of whoever brought them here, sealed against intruders with passwords and DNA triggers and, in one case, a clunky antique combination padlock.

  Perhaps Nolan and the others looked in on the Gene Erickson Show from here, perhaps from somewhere else. Either way, the show’s long since over. Erickson, safely comatose, has been abandoned by flesh and blood, his welfare relegated to the attentions of machinery. If there was ever an audience in this dim and cluttered warren, it has dispersed in search of other diversions.

  That suits Clarke just fine. She’s here in search of private eyes.

  The hab’s lightstrips are not in use; environmental readouts and flickering surveillance images provide enough light for eyecaps. A dark shape startles at her appearance—then, apparently reassured, moves more calmly toward the far wall and settles onto a pallet.

  Rama Bhanderi: he of the once-mighty vocab and the big-ass neurotech degree, fallen from grace thanks to a basement lab and a batch of neurotropes sold to the wrong man’s son. He went native two months ago. You hardly ever see him inside any more. Clarke knows better than to talk to him.

  Someone’s delivered a canister of hydroponic produce from the greenhouse: apples, tomatoes, something that looks like a pineapple glistening listless and sickly gray in the reduced light. On a whim, Clarke reaches over to a wall panel and cranks up the lumens. The compartment glows with unaccustomed brightness.

  “Shiiiittt…” Or something like that. Clarke turns, catches a glimpse of Bhanderi disappearing down the well into the wet room.

  “Sorry,” she calls softly after—but downstairs the airlock’s already cycling.

  The hab is even more of a festering junk pile with the lights up. Improvised cables and hoses hang in loops, stuck to the module’s ribs with waxy blobs of silicon epoxy. Dark tumors of mold grow here and there on the insulated padding that lines the inner surfaces; in a few places, the lining has been ripped out entirely. The raw bulkhead behind glistens like the concave interior of some oily gunmetal skull.

  But when the lights come on, and Lenie Clarke sees with some semblance of dryback vision, the produce in the canister verges on psychedelia. Tomatoes glow like ruby hearts; apples shine green as argon lasers; even the dull lumpy turds of force-grown potatoes seem saturated with earthy browns. This modest little harvest at the bottom of the sea seems, in this moment, to be a richer and more sensual experience than anything Clarke has ever known.

  There’s an apocalyptic irony to this little tableau. Not that such an impoverished spread could induce rapture in a miserable fuck-up like Lenie Clarke; she’s always had to take her tiny pleasures wherever she could find them. No, the irony is that by now, the sight would probably evoke the same intense reaction among any dryback left alive back on shore. The irony is that now, with a whole planet dying by relentless degrees, the healthiest produce in the world may have been force-grown in a tank of chemicals at the bottom of the Atlantic.

  She kills the lights. She grabs an apple—blighted gray again—and takes a bite, ducking beneath a loop of fiberop. The main monitor flickers into view from behind a mesa of cargo skids; and someone watching it, lit by that bluish light, squatting with his back against accumulated junk.

  So much for privacy.

  “Like it?” Walsh asks, nodding at the fruit in her hand. “I brought ’em in for you.”

  She drops down beside him. “It’s nice, Kev. Thanks.” And then, carefully filtering the irritation from her voice: “So, what’re you doing here?”

  “Thought you might show up.” He gestures at the monitor. “You know, after things died down.”

  He’s spying on one of Atlantis’s lesser medbays. The camera looks down from the junction of wall and ceiling, a small god’s-eye view of the compartment. A dormant teleop hangs down into picture like an insectile bat, limbs folded up against its central stalk. Gene Erickson lies faceup on the operating table, unconscious; the glistening soap-bubble skin of an isolation tent separates him from the rest of the world. Julia Friedman’s at his side, holding his hand through the membrane. It clings to the contours of her fingers like a whisper-thin glove, unobtrusive as any condom. Friedman’s removed her hood and peeled her diveskin back to the forearms, but her scars are obscured by a tangle of chestnut hair.

  “You missed all the fun,” Walsh remarks. “Klein couldn’t get him to go under.”

  An isolation membrane. Erickson’s been quarantined.

  “You know, because he forgot about the GABA washout,” Walsh continues. A half-dozen tailored neuroinhibitors curdle the blood of any rifter who steps outside; they keep the brain from short-circuiting under pressure, but it takes a while for the body to flush them out afterward. Wet rifters are notoriously resistant to anesthetics. Stupid mistake on Klein’s part. He’s not exactly the brightest star in Atlantis’s medical firmament.

  But that’s not uppermost in Clarke’s mind at the moment. “Who ordered the tent?”

  “Seger. She showed up aft
erward, kept Klein from screwing up too badly.”

  Jerenice Seger: the corpses’ master meat-cutter. She wouldn’t take an interest in routine injuries.

  On the screen, Julia Friedman leans toward her lover. The skin of the tent stretches against her cheek, rippling with slight iridescence. It’s a striking contrast, Friedman’s tenderness notwithstanding: the woman, black-’skinned and impenetrable, gazing with icy capped eyes at the naked, utterly vulnerable body of the man. It’s a lie, of course, a visual metaphor that flips their real roles a hundred and eighty degrees. Friedman’s always been the vulnerable half of that couple.

  “They say something bit him,” Walsh says. “You were there, right?”

  “No. We just ran into them outside the lock.”

  “Shades of Channer, though, huh?”

  She shrugs.

  Friedman’s speaking. At least, her mouth is moving; no sound accompanies the image. Clarke reaches for the panel, but Walsh lays a familiar hand on her arm. “I tried. It’s muted from their end.” He snorts. “You know, maybe we should remind them who’s boss here. Couple of years ago, if the corpses tried to cut us out of a channel we’d shut off their lights at the very least. Maybe even flood one of their precious dorms.”

  There’s something about Friedman’s posture. People talk to the comatose the way they talk to gravestones—more to themselves than the departed, with no expectation of any answer. But there’s something different in Friedman’s face, in the way she holds herself. A sense of impatience, almost.

  “It is a violation,” Walsh says.

  Clarke shakes her head. “What?”

  “Don’t say you haven’t noticed. Half the surveillance feeds don’t work any more. Long as we act like it’s no big deal they’ll just keep pushing it.” Walsh points to the monitor. “For all we know that mic’s been offline for months and nobody’s even noticed until now.”

  What’s she holding? Clarke wonders. Friedman’s hand—the one that isn’t clasped to her partner’s—is just below the level of the table, out of the camera’s line of sight. She glances down at it, lifts it just barely into view …

  And Gene Erickson, sunk deep into induced coma for the sake of his own convalescence, opens his eyes.

  Holy shit, Clarke realizes. She tweaked his inhibitors.

  She gets to her feet. “I gotta go.”

  “Hey, no you don’t.” He reaches up, grabs her hand. “You’re not gonna make me eat all that produce myself, are you?” He smiles, but there’s just the slightest hint of pleading in his voice. “I mean, it has been a while…”

  Lenie Clarke has come a long way in the past several years. She’s finally learned, for example, not to get involved with the kind of people who beat the crap out of her.

  A pity she hasn’t yet learned how to get excited about any other kind. “I know, Kev. Really, though, right now—”

  The panel bleats in front of them. “Lenie Clarke. If Lenie Clarke is anywhere in the circuit, could she please pick up?”

  Rowan’s voice. Clarke reaches for the panel. Walsh’s hand falls away.

  “Right here.”

  “Lenie, do you think you could drop by sometime in the next little while? It’s rather important.”

  “Sure.” She kills the connection, fakes an apologetic smile for her lover. “Sorry.”

  “Well, you showed her, all right,” Walsh says softly.

  “Showed her?”

  “Who’s the boss.”

  She shrugs. They turn away from each other.

  * * *

  She enters Atlantis through a small service ’lock that doesn’t even rate a number, fifty meters down the hull from Airlock Four. The corridor into which it emerges is cramped and empty. She stalks into more populated areas with her fins slung across her back, a trail of wet footprints commemorating her passage. Corpses in the way stand aside; she barely notices the tightened jaws and stony looks, or even a shit-eating appeasement grin from one of the more submissive members of the conquered tribe.

  She knows where Rowan is. That’s not where she’s headed.

  Of course Seger gets there first. An alarm must have gone up the moment Erickson’s settings changed; by the time Clarke reaches the medbay, Atlantis’s chief of medicine is already berating Friedman out in the corridor.

  “Your husband is not a toy, Julia. You could have killed him. Is that what you wanted?”

  Swirls of scarred flesh curl up around Friedman’s throat, peek out along the wrist where she’s peeled back her diveskin. She bows her head. “I just wanted to talk to him…”

  “Well, I hope you had something very important to say. If we’re lucky, you’ve only set his recovery back a few days. If not…” Seger waves an arm toward the medbay hatch; Erickson, safely unconscious again, is partially visible through the opening. “It’s not like you were giving him an antacid, for crying out loud. You were changing his brain chemistry.”

  “I’m sorry.” Friedman won’t meet the doctor’s eyes. “I didn’t mean any—”

  “I can’t believe you’d be so stupid.” Seger turns and glares at Clarke. “Can I help you?”

  “Yeah. Cut her some slack. Her partner was nearly killed today.”

  “He was indeed. Twice.” Friedman flinches visibly at Seger’s words. The doctor softens a bit. “I’m sorry, but it’s true.”

  Clarke sighs. “Jerry, it was you people who built panels into our heads in the first place. You can’t complain when someone else figures out how to open them.”

  “This”—Seger holds up Friedman’s confiscated remote—“is for use by qualified medical personnel. In anyone else’s hands, no matter how well-intentioned, it could kill.”

  She’s overstating, of course. Rifter implants come equipped with fail-safes that keep their settings within manufacturer’s specs; you can’t get around those without opening yourself up and tweaking the actual plumbing. Even so, there’s a fair bit of leeway. Back during the revolution, the corpses managed to coax a similar device into spazzing out a couple of rifters stuck in a flooding airlock.

  Which is why they are no longer allowed such things. “We need that back,” Clarke says softly.

  Seger shakes her head. “Come on, Lenie. You people can hurt yourselves far more with it than we could ever hurt you.”

  Clarke holds out her hand. “Then we’ll just have to learn from our mistakes, won’t we?”

  “You people are slow learners.”

  She’s one to talk. Even after five years, Jerenice Seger can’t quite admit to the existence of the bridle and the bit between her teeth. Going from Top to Bottom is a tough transition for any corpse; doctors are the worst of the lot. It’s almost sad, the devotion with which Seger nurses her god complex.

  “Jerry, for the last time. Hand it over.”

  A tentative hand brushes against Clarke’s arm. Friedman shakes her head, still looking at the deck. “It’s okay, Lenie. I don’t mind, I don’t need it any more.”

  “Julia, you—”

  “Please, Lenie. I just want to get out of here.”

  She starts away down the corridor. Clarke looks after her, then back at the doctor.

  “It’s a medical device,” Seger says.

  “It’s a weapon.”

  “Was. Once. And if you’ll recall, it didn’t work very well.” Seger shakes her head sadly. “The war’s over, Lenie. It’s been over for years. I won’t start it up again if you won’t. And in the meantime—” She glances down the corridor. “I think your friend could use a bit of support.”

  Clarke looks back along the hallway. Friedman has disappeared.

  “Yeah. Maybe,” she says noncommittally.

  Hope she gets some.

  * * *

  In Beebe Station the comm cubby was a pipe-infested closet, barely big enough for two. Atlantis’s nerve center is palatial, a twilit grotto bejeweled by readouts and tangled luminous topographies. Tactical maps rotate miraculously in midair or glow from screens painted on the
bulkheads. The miracle is not so much the technology that renders these extravagances. The miracle is that Atlantis contains such an obscene surplus of empty space, to be wasted on nothing more than moving light. A cabin would have done as well. A few couches with workpads and tactical contacts could have contained infinite intelligence, bounded in a nutshell. But no. A whole ocean stands on their heads, and these corpses squander volume as if sea level were two steps down the hall.

  Even in exile, they just don’t get it.

  Right now the cavern’s fairly empty. Lubin and a few techs cluster at a nearby panel, cleaning up the latest downloads. The place will be full by the time they finish. Corpses gravitate to news of the world like flies to shit.

  For now, though, it’s just Lubin’s crowd and Patricia Rowan, over on the far side of the compartment. Cryptic information streams across her contacts, turns her eyes into bright points of mercury. Light from a holo display catches the silver streaking her hair; that and the eyes give her the aspect of some subtle hologram in her own right.

  Clarke approaches her. “Airlock Four’s blocked off.”

  “They’re scrubbing it down. Everything between there and the infirmary. Jerry’s orders.”

  “What for?”

  “You know perfectly well. You saw Erickson.”

  “Oh, come on. One lousy fish bite and Jerry thinks—”

  “She’s not sure of anything yet. She’s just being careful.” A pause, then: “You should have warned us, Lenie.”

  “Warned you?”

  “That Erickson might be vectoring βehemoth. You left all of us exposed. If there was even a chance…”

  But there’s not, Clarke wants to rail. There’s not. You chose this place because βehemoth could never get here, not in a thousand years. I saw the maps, I traced out the currents with my own fingers. It’s not βehemoth. It’s not.