Maelstrom r-2

by Peter Watts

  She looked past him to the aquarium. Brown algae filmed the glass. Inside, the glorious anemone was shrunken and frayed; its tentacles twitched feebly in the current.

  "Jesus, Marty. You couldn't even be bothered to clean the tank?"

  "I just got home. I've been in Fairbanks for the past two weeks."

  She'd forgotten.

  "Sou, the prescriptions aren't working. I really think we should consider wiring you up with a therapist."

  "I'm fine," she said automatically.

  "You're not fine. I've looked into it already, we can afford it. It'll be available around the clock, whenever you need it."

  "I don't trust therapists."

  "Sou, it'd be a part of you. It already is, in a way, they just haven't—isolated it yet. And it runs pathways right to your temporal lobe, so you can talk to it as easily as you can talk to anyone."

  "You want to cut out a part of my brain."

  "No, Sou, just rewire it. Did you know the brain can support over a hundred fully sentient personalities? It doesn't affect sensory or motor performance at all. This would just be one, and it'd take up such a small amount of space—"

  "My husband, the walking brochure."

  "Sou—"

  "It's multiple personality disorder, Martin. I don't care what cute name they give it these days, and I don't care how many of our friends live happy fulfilling lives because they hear voices in their heads. It's sick."

  "Sou, please. I love you. I'm only trying to help."

  "Then get out of my way."

  She ran for shelter.

  * * *

  Sou-Hon. Are you there?

  "Yes."

  Good. Stand by.

  Static. A brief spiderweb of connections and intercepts, orange filaments proliferating across a continent. Then no visual front and center, darkness everywhere else.

  Go ahead.

  "Lenie?" Perreault said.

  "So. I wondered when they'd get around to this."

  "Get around to what?"

  "Hijacking my visor. Sou-Hon, right?"

  "Right."

  "They got that right, at least."

  Perreault took a grateful breath. "You okay?"

  "I got out. Thanks partly to you, I guess. That was you in the 'fly, wasn't it? At Yankton?"

  "That was me."

  "Thanks."

  "Don't thank me. Thank—"

  A damselfish flashed across Perreault's mind, safe in a nest of stinging tentacles.

  "…anemone," she finished softly.

  Silence on the line. Then: "Thank an enemy. That makes a lot of sense."

  Perreault shook her head. "Sea anemone. It's this undersea ambush predator, it eats fish but sometimes—"

  "I know what a sea anemone is, Suze. So what?"

  "Everything's been perverted, somehow. The 'flies, the matchmakers— the whole system's done a one-eighty, it's protecting the very thing it was supposed to attack. You see?"

  "Not really. But I was never that big on metaphors." A soft laugh. "I still can't get used to being a starfish."

  Perreault wondered but didn't ask.

  "This anemone of yours," Clarke said. "It kicks ass. It's powerful."

  "Yes."

  "So why is it so fucking stupid?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "It doesn't seem to have any kind of focus, you know? I saw the threads—it described me a thousand different ways and then it just went with the one that stuck. I don't know how many head cases it threw at me, through my watch, my visor—they even started coming at me out of vending machines, did you know that?—and it wasn't until I stopped talking to anyone else that it settled on you. Any haploid would've known better than to audition most of those assholes, but your anemone is just—random. Why is that?"

  "I don't know."

  "Didn't you ever wonder?"

  She had, of course. But somehow it hadn't seemed to matter that much.

  "Maybe that's why you made the cut," Clarke said.

  "Why?"

  "You're a good soldier. You need a cause, you follow orders, you don't ask embarrassing questions." A whisper of static. Then: "Why are you helping me, Sou? You've seen the threads."

  "You said the threads were bullshit," Perreault said.

  "Most of them are. Almost all. But they blew up Channer. They must have known the kind of collateral that would bring down, and they did it anyway. They burned the Strip. And the life down there on the rift, it was—God knows what was down there. What I brought back."

  "I thought your blood tested clean."

  "Tests only see what they're looking for. You haven't answered my question."

  And still she didn't, for a very long time.

  "Because they tried to hammer you down," she said at last. "And you're still here."

  "Huh." A long breath whispered through the headset. "You ever have a dog, Sou-Hon? As a pet?"

  "No."

  "You know what happens when you keep a dog locked away from every living thing, except you visit once a day and kick the shit out of him?"

  Perreault laughed nervously. "Someone actually tried that?"

  "What happens is, the dog's a social animal, and it gets so lonely it actually looks forward to the shit-kicking. It asks to be kicked. It begs."

  "What are you saying?"

  "Maybe everyone's just so used to being kicked around, they'll help out anyone they think has a big enough boot."

  "Or maybe," Perreault said, "we're so fucking tired of being kicked that we're finally lining up with anyone who kicks back."

  "Yeah? At any cost?"

  "What do we have to lose?"

  "You have no idea."

  "But you did. You must have known all along. If the danger was really so great, why didn't you turn yourself in? Save the world? Save yourself?"

  "The world had it coming," Clarke said softly.

  "Is that what you’re doing? Just—getting revenge on nine billion people you never even met?"

  "I don't know. Maybe before."

  "Now?"

  "I just—" Clarke's voice broke. Pain and confusion flooded through the breach. "Sou, I want to go home."

  "So go," Perreault said gently. "I'll help you."

  A ragged breath, brought back under tight control: "No."

  "You could really use—"

  "Look, you're not just a—a traveling companion any more. I don't think either of us was really on the scope before Yankton, but they know about us now, and you—you really got in their way. If they haven't tracked you down already, they're damn well working on it."

  "You're forgetting about our anemone."

  "No I'm not. I just don't trust the fucking thing."

  "Look—"

  "Sou-Hon, thanks for everything. I mean that. But it's too dangerous. Every second we talk, our trail gets brighter. You really want to help me, then help yourself. Don't try to talk to me again. Go away. Go somewhere safe."

  A lump grew in her throat. "Where? Where's safe?"

  "I don't know. I'm sorry."

  "Lenie, listen to me. There's got to be a plan. You've got to have faith, there's a purpose behind all of this. Please, just—"

  The crunch of plastic, ground underfoot.

  "Lenie!"

  Link lost flashed front and center.

  She didn't know how long she sat there, in her own personal void. Eventually, link lost went away. Some other readout flashed off at the edge of vision, a rhythmic little scratch on her retina. The effort required to focus on it seemed almost superhuman.

  Goodbye

  It said. And:

  Anemone. We like that.

  Behind the Lines

  A random trawl caught the anomaly fifteen nodes off the port bow. A thousand other channels were abuzz with Lenie Clarke, but this one was so clean: no packet locs, no drop-outs, none of the stutters and time-lags that always plagued civilian traffic in Maelstrom. The line was full of groupies with online handles like Squidnapper and White-ey
es, all at rapt attention while something whispered disinformation in their midst. It called itself The General and it spoke with a thousand different voices: raw ASCII reinflated to specs set by each recipient's software.

  It hung up the moment it heard Achilles Desjardins creeping in from behind.

  Too fast for meat. Almost too fast even for the hounds Desjardins set on its trail; they circled the world in seconds, diving through gateways, tripping over wildlife, finding half-eaten carcasses where traffic registries had lived and breathed just moments before. Here, and here, and here: nodes through which The General's words had passed. Traffic logs mauled beyond recognition by earth-scorchers covering their tracks. The hounds replicated a thousandfold and dived through all available ports in unison, trying reacquire the scent through brute force.

  This time they succeeded. The flag went up on Desjardins's board at t-plus-six seconds: something had been treed on a server in the Hokkaido microwave array. It wasn't a smart gel. There were no smart gels for at least four nodes in any direction. But it was dark, and it was massive, and it was holding its breath so tight that nothing could get a fix on its exact address. It was just in there, somewhere. Under the surface.

  And when Achilles Desjardins seined the node, panicky wildlife scattering at his approach, The General was nowhere to be found.

  "Shit..."

  He rubbed his eyes and broke the link. The real world resolved around him—or at least, that part of it trapped within the walls of his cubby.

  That was him, he remembered. Trapped in there. Undistracted by the endless frustration of hunting phantoms, it all came flooding back.

  The real world had got even worse, now that Lubin had deserted him.

  * * *

  A hand on his shoulder. He started, then sagged.

  "Killjoy. You look like shit," Jovellanos said kindly.

  He looked up at her. "Maybe Rowan's right."

  "Rowan?" She laid her hands on his shoulders and started kneading the muscles.

  "It's not the gels. Maybe it really is some kind of—global conspiracy. I can't find any other explanation…"

  "Uh, Killjoy—in case you've forgotten, I haven't seen you in four days." Her hair smelled like some extinct flower from Desjardins's childhood. "I hear you've been hobnobbing with all sorts of strange people, but I'm nowhere near the loop, you know?"

  He waved at the board, then realized that she wouldn't see anything there; he'd routed the display to his inlays. "That whole movement. Rifter chic or whatever the hell they call it, you know? It's a propagation strategy. That's all it is. Isn't that wild?"

  "Yeah? What's it propagating?"

  "ßehemoth," Desjardins whispered.

  "No." Her hands dropped away. "How?"

  "There's a vector out there. A rifter. Lenie Clarke. It's all just smoke to keep her from getting caught."

  "Why, for God's sake? Why would anyone—"

  "The gels started it. I mean, they weren't supposed to, they were supposed to contain it, but—"

  "They put the gels in charge?"

  "What else could they do?" Desjardins suppressed the urge to giggle. "Nobody trusted anyone. They knew there'd be sacrifices, they knew they might have to sterilize—major areas. But when Mercosaur says hey, our stats say Oregon's got to go for the greater good, do you think N'Am's gonna just roll over and take their word on that? They needed something that could decide, and act, and who wouldn't play favorites…"

  "Fuck," Jovellanos whispered.

  "They were so busy keeping an eye on each other they never stopped to think what kind of take-home rules a net might develop on its own, after spending a whole lifetime protecting small simple things from big complicated things. And then they tell it to protect a complex of five million species against one pissant nanobe, and they can't understand why it turns around and bites them in the ass."

  Jovellanos said nothing.

  "Anyway, it doesn't matter. They scrubbed the gels down to the last neuron and it didn't do any good. There's something else out there. I've flushed the fucker four times in the past twenty-four hours, and it keeps slipping through my fingers. We could swap out every gel in Maelstrom and the replacements would be reinfected inside a week."

  "But if not the gels, then what?"

  "I don't know. For all I know it's a pharm-baby thing, some corporation's got a cure and they're spreading ßehemoth to drive up the price. But how they’re pulling it off—"

  "Turing app, maybe?"

  "Or berserkers. I thought of that. But those leave footprints—op signatures on the hardware, huge memory demands. And anything that complex attracts wildlife like you wouldn't believe."

  "You're not seeing any of that?"

  "Lots of wildlife, maybe. Nothing else."

  "So maybe it autowipes when it sees you coming."

  "Footprints'd still be in the server log."

  "Not if it doctors the log before it deletes."

  "Then the deletion would be on file. I'm telling you, Alice, this is something else."

  "What if the wildlife's gotten brainy?" she said.

  He blinked. "What?"

  "Why not? It evolves. Maybe it got smart."

  He shook his head. "Nets are nets. Doesn't matter if someone coded them or they just evolved; if they're smart enough to think, they're going to have a certain signature. I'm not seeing it, and nobody else is either and I'm just…completely---wasted..."

  He leaned forward, let the board take the weight of his forearms. His head weighed a tonne.

  "Come on," Jovellanos said after a moment.

  "What?"

  "We're going to Pickering's Pile. I'm buying you a derm. Or ten."

  He shook his head. "Thanks, Alice. I can't."

  "I checked the logs, Killjoy. You haven't been out of this building for almost forty hours. Sleep deprivation reduces IQ, did you know that? Yours must be around room temp by now. Take a break."

  He looked up at her. "I can't. If I leave—"

  Don't worry about it, Lubin had said.

  "—I may not be able to come back," he finished.

  She frowned. "Why not?"

  I'm unchained, he thought. I'm free.

  "Lubin—this guy did something to me, and…if the bloodhounds…"

  She took his hand, firmly. "Come."

  "Alice, you don't know what—"

  "Maybe I know more than you think, Killjoy. If you don't think you're up to a blood test, well maybe that's a problem and maybe it isn't, but you're gonna have to bite the bullet eventually. Unless you're planning on spending the rest of your life in this cubicle?"

  "The next five days, maybe…" He was so very tired.

  "I know what I'm doing, Killjoy. Trust me on this."

  Desjardins managed a feeble laugh. "People keep saying that."

  "Maybe. But I mean it." She drew him to his feet. "Besides, I have something to tell you."

  * * *

  He couldn't bring himself to enter the Pile, after all; too many ambient ears, and discretion prevailed even without Guilt Trip. For that matter, even walking under the open sky made him a bit queasy. The heavens had eyes.

  They walked, letting chance choose the course. Intermittent beds of kudzu4 lined their path; the filamentous blades of windmills turned slowly overhead on the tops of buildings, along pedestrian concourses, anywhere that a bit of fetch could insinuate itself into the local architecture. Alice Jovellanos took all of it in without a word: Lubin, Rowan, Guilt Trip. Autonomy thrust upon the unwilling.

  "Are you sure?" she asked at last. A streetlight flickered on overhead. "Maybe he was lying. He lied about Rowan, after all."

  "Not about this, Alice. Believe me. He had his hand around my throat and I just sang, I told him stuff the Trip would never've let out."

  "That's not what I mean. I believe you're Trip-free, for sure. I just don't believe that Lubin had anything to do with it."

  "What?"

  "I think he just found out about it, after the fact
," Jovellanos continued, "and he used it to his own advantage. I don't know what was in those derms he was giving you, but I'd bet a year's worth of Mandelbrot's kibble that you could walk past those bloodhounds right now and they wouldn't even twitch."

  "Yeah? And if you were in my shoes, do you think you'd be quite so optimistic?"

  "I'd guarantee it."

  "Fuck, Alice, this is serious."

  "I know, Killjoy. I'm serious."

  "But if Lubin didn't do it to me, then who—"

  Her face was fading in the twilight, like the smile of a Cheshire cat.

  "Alice?" he said.

  "Hey." She shrugged. "You always knew my politics were a bit radical."

  * * *

  "Fuck, Alice." Desjardins put his head in his hands. "How could you?"

  "It was easier than you might think. Just build a Trip analog with an extra side-group—"

  "That's not what I mean. You know what I mean."

  She stepped in front of him, blocking his way.

  "Listen, Killjoy. You've got ten times the brains of those felchers, and you let them turn you into a puppet."

  "I'm not a puppet."

  "Not any more, anyway."

  "I never was."

  "Sure you were. Just like Lubin."

  "I'm nothing like—"

  "They turned you into one big reflex arc, my man. Took all that gray matter and hammered it into pure hardwired instinct, through and through."

  "Fuck you. You know that isn't true."

  She put her hand on Desjardins's shoulder. "Look, I don't blame you for being in denial about—"

  He shrugged it off. "I'm not in denial! You think instinct and reflex can handle the decisions I have to make, every hour I'm on the job? You think weighting a thousand variables on the fly doesn't require a certain degree of autonomy? Jesus Christ, I—"

  —I may be a slave, but I'm not a robot. He caught it at the back of his throat; no sense giving her any more ammunition than she already had.

  "We gave you back your life, man," Jovellanos said softly.

  "We?"

  "There's a few of us. We're kind of political, in a ragtag sorta way."

  "Oh Christ." Desjardins shook his head. "Did you even ask me if I wanted this?"

  "You would've said no. Guilt Trip would've made you. That's the whole point."