by Peter Watts
My friend, Clarke thought again. He’d been that when even Ken Lubin had been trying to kill her. He’d risked his life for her before they’d even met. By that measure, although their paths had only crossed briefly, he was the best friend she’d ever had.
She had grieved at word of his death; by rights, now, she should be overjoyed. But one word looped endlessly through her mind, subverting joy with apprehension.
Spartacus.
“So,” she said carefully. “You’re still a lawbreaker?”
“Fighting Entropy for the Greater Good,” the botfly recited.
“And that includes burning thousands of hectares down to the bedrock?” Lubin queried.
The botfly descended to Lubin-eye level and stared lens to lens. “If killing ten saves a thousand it’s a deal, Ken, and nobody knows that better than you.. Maybe you didn’t hear what our lovely friend just told you, but there’s a war on. The bad guys keep lobbing Seppuku into my court and I’ve been doing my damndest to keep it from getting a foothold. I’ve got barely any staff and the infrastructure’s falling apart around my ears but I was managing, Ken, I really was. And then, as I understand it, you two walked into poor Taka’s life and now at least three vectors have snuck past the barricades.”
Lubin turned to Ouellette. “Is this true?”
She nodded. “I checked it myself, when he told me what to look for. It was subtle, but it was...right there. Chaperone proteins and alternative splicing, RNA interference. A bunch of second and third-order effects I never saw. They were all tangled up in the polyploid genes, and I just didn’t look hard enough. It gets inside you. It kills ßehemoth sure enough, but then it just keeps going and it—I didn’t see it. I was so sure I knew what it was, and I just—fucked up.” She stared at the ground, away from accusing eyes. “I fucked up again,” she whispered.
Lubin said nothing for a few seconds. Then, to the ’fly: “You understand that there are reasons for caution here.”
“You don’t trust me.” Desjardins sounded almost amused. “I’m not the one with the compulsive murder fetish, Ken. And I’m not the only one who shook off the Trip. Are you really in a position to throw stones?”
Ouellette looked up, startled from her bout of self-loathing.
“And whatever misgivings you have,” the ’lawbreaker continued, “Give me credit for a little self-interest. I don’t want Seppuku in my back yard any more than you do. I’m just as vulnerable as the rest of you.”
“How vulnerable is that?” Lubin wondered. “Taka?”
“I don’t know,” Ouellette whispered. “I don’t know anything...”
“Guess.”
She closed her eyes. “It’s a whole different bug than ßehemoth, but it’s designed—I think it’s designed for the same niche. So being tweaked against ßehemoth won’t save you, but it might buy you some time.”
“How much?”
“I can’t even guess. But everyone else, you know—I’d guess, most anyone who hasn’t got the retrofits...symptoms after three or four days, death within fourteen.”
“Dead slow,” Lubin remarked. “Any decent necrotising strep would kill you in three hours.”
“Yes. Before you had a chance to spread it.” Ouellette’s voice was hollow. “They’re smarter than that.”
“Mmm. Mortality rate?”
The doctor shook her head. “It’s designed, Ken. There’s no natural immunity.”
The muscles tightened around Lubin’s mouth.
“It actually gets worse,” Desjardins added. “I’m not the only watchdog on this beat. There are still a few others in N’Am, and a lot more overseas. And I’ve got to tell you, my limited-containment strategy is not all that popular. There are people who’d just as soon nuke the whole bloody seaboard just to be on the safe side.”
“Why don’t they nuke whoever’s launching Seppuku?” Lubin wondered.
“Try getting a fix on half a dozen submerged platforms moving around the deep Atlantic at sixty knots. Truth be told, some thought it was you guys.”
“It’s not.”
“Doesn’t matter. People are itching to go nuclear on this. I’ve only been able to hold them off because I could keep Seppuku from spreading without resorting to fissiles. But now, r’s and K’s, you’ve handed the nuclear lobby everything they need. If I were you I’d start digging fallout shelters. Deep ones.”
“No.” Clarke shook her head. “There were only, what, six people with wheels?”
“Only three showed up,” Ouellette said. “But they could be anywhere. They didn’t leave me an itinerary. And they’ll be spreading the stuff. They’ll be seeding it in ponds and fields and—”
“If we can catch up with them, we can backtrack,” Lubin pointed out.
“But we don’t even know where they were headed! How can we—”
“I don’t know how.” The botfly wiggled on its ground-effectors, a tiny flourish. “But you better get started. You have made one industrial-strength tar pit of a mess here, folks. And if you want to stand even a one-in-fifty chance of keeping this place from melting down to radioactive glass, you are damn well gonna help clean it up.”
There was a silence. Stubborn flames crackled and spat faintly in the distance.
“We’re going to help you,” Lubin said at last.
“Well, you can all do your bit, of course,” Desjardins replied, “but it’s your efforts in particular, Ken, that are gonna come in most handy right now.”
Lubin pursed his lips. “Thanks, but I’ll pass. I wouldn’t do you much good.”
Clarke bit her tongue. He’s got to be working some kind of angle.
The botfly hovered for a moment, as if considering. “I haven’t forgotten your skill set, Ken. I’ve experienced it first-hand.”
“I haven’t forgotten yours either. You could mobilize the whole hemisphere in thirty seconds flat.”
“A lot’s changed since you retired, friend. And in case you haven’t noticed, there’s not much left of the hemisphere even if I did still have all my super powers.”
Ouellette’s eyes flickered between man and machine, watching the point-counterpoint with a mixture of outrage and confusion. But at least she, too, seemed to know enough to keep her mouth shut.
Lubin glanced around at the charred and darkling landscape. “Your resources seem more than sufficient. You don’t need me.”
“You’re not listening, Ken. A lot has changed. A lifter or two is nothing, it’s background noise. But you start mobilizing too many resources at once, the wrong kind of people pay attention. And not everybody on this side is on this side, if you know what I mean.”
He’s talking about other lawbreakers, Clarke realized. Maybe it’s Spartacus vs. the Trip. Or maybe all of them are off the leash by now.
“You’d rather keep a low profile,” Lubin surmised.
“I’ve always preferred subtlety. And your rather blunt social skills notwithstanding, when it comes right down to it even you’re more subtle than a fleet of fire-breathing killer blimps.”
When it comes down to war, he means. Private war of the psychos, by invitation only. Clarke wondered how many sides there were. Could they even have sides? How do you form an alliance with someone you know will stab you in the back the first chance they get? Maybe it’s just every sociopath for himself, she mused.
Then again, it wasn’t Lubin who’d had difficulty choosing sides recently.
“I’m otherwise engaged,” Lubin said.
“Naturally. You’d have to have a damn good reason to come all the way back here. The Mid Atlantic Ridge isn’t exactly in the neighborhood.”
“It might be before too long, judging by the recent traffic.”
“Ah. Somebody pay you a visit?”
“Not yet. But they’re sniffing around close by. It’s an unlikely coincidence.”
“Don’t look at me, Ken. If I’d spilled the beans, they wouldn’t have to sniff around.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Still, you naturally want to know who’s on the trail. Ken, I’m hurt. Why didn’t you come to me at—oh, right. You thought I was dead.” Desjardins paused, then added, “You’re really lucky I came along.”
“I’m even luckier,” Lubin said, “that you need my help.”
The botfly bobbled in a sudden gust of hot wind. “Okay then. You help me keep N’Am from dying a little while longer, and I’ll try and find out who’s stalking you. Deal?”
Lubin considered.
“Seems fair,” he said.
Crash
The Crusade, thought Lenie Clarke, could go on without her.
It wasn’t as though it needed her services. Saving lives and ending them were the only two causes worth pursuing now, and she had no great skill in either. Of course that wasn’t exactly true, she realized even as the thought occurred. When it came to total kills, there wasn’t a person on the planet who could match her score. But those deaths had been indiscriminate and untargeted, faceless collateral she’d barely spared a thought for. Right now, the greater good needed something considerably more precise: specific individuals, not whole populations. Isolated faces to be hunted down and—what was the word Rowan had used?—decirculated.
It didn’t have to be a euphemism. There’d be no reason to kill the vectors once they’d been found, even assuming that Seppuku hadn’t killed them first. There were only three of them after all, with less than a day’s head start in a place where people were no longer a major part of the landscape. It was quite possible they’d be found before they could infect too many others, before uneconomies of scale made wholesale extermination the only viable option. Ten thousand carriers might have to be burned for want of facilities to contain them; but ten could be taken alive, isolated and cared for, their condition studied in hopes of finding a cure. There’d be no need for outright murder.
I’m not the one with the compulsive murder fetish, Ken.
Either way, it didn’t matter. Soon Lubin would be on the hunt, backed up by all the resources Desjardins could provide; and whether he was in it for the kill or the thrill of the chase, Clarke’s presence at his side would only slow him down. Taka Ouellette had already gone on to better things, whisked away to a CSIRA facility where, as Desjardins had put it, “your skill set can be much better utilized”. She had left with barely another word or a glance at Lenie Clarke. Now she was probably sitting at the end of a line that would start with Lubin, waiting to process the people he tracked down. There was no point along that short route where Lenie Clarke could be useful.
She couldn’t save, and she couldn’t kill. Here, though, in the broken shells of Freeport, she could do something in between. She could delay. She could hold the fort. She could keep people from dying of tumors or broken bones, so that ßehemoth and Seppuku could take a crack at them instead.
Lubin did her one last favor before leaving. He navigated through the virtual lightscape of Miri’s neocortex, found the infestation that had betrayed them, and isolated it. It was too insidious, too deeply dug-in to trust to mere deletion; there were too many places it could be hiding, too many ways to subvert the search protocols. The only way to be sure it was gone was to physically throw out the memory with the monster.
Crouched over the dashboard, Lubin read reams of diagnostic arcana and called instructions over his shoulder. Behind him, Clarke—up to her elbows in crystals and circuitry—did the actual cutting. Lubin told her which card to extract; she did so. He told her which array to peel from its surface, using a tri-pronged tool with delicate whisker-thin fingers. She obeyed. She waited while he ran checks and double-checks on the rest of the system, reseated the lobotomized unit at his command, poised herself to yank it again should any remnant of the monster have somehow escaped containment. Satisfied at last that Miri was clean, Lubin told Clarke to lock and reboot. She did it without question.
He never told her outright to destroy the infected component. That was just too obvious a measure to mention.
It was, after all, a part of her.
She didn’t know how, exactly; the perverse logic that had spawned and twisted these electronic demons was something better left to hackers and evolutionary ecologists. But back at the beginning, she’d been the template. This thing had taken its lead from her; it was a reflection, however perverse, of Lenie Clarke. And irrational though it seemed, she couldn’t shake the sense that it still owed something of itself to the flesh and blood it was modeled after. She had raged, and hated, for so very long; perhaps these reflections weren’t so distorted after all.
She resolved to find out.
She was no codemeister. She knew nothing about growing programs or pruning software to specs. She did, however, know how to snap prefab components together, and Phocoena’s lockers and glove compartments were overflowing with the legacy of five years’ service. The little sub had carried a thousand survey instruments to Impossible Lake, served in the repair and maintenance of them all. It had slipped across thermoclines and through Langmuir Cells, seeding drogues and TDRs into the water column. It had spied on corpses and moved supplies and served as a general workhorse far beyond anything its designers had ever intended. After five years, it had accumulated more than enough building blocks for Lenie Clarke to play with.
She found a Cohen board in the bottom of a drawer, plugged a battery onto one of its sockets and a generic OS chip onto another. A tracery of whisker-thin filaments flickered briefly between the new components as the board’s autodiscovery routines sniffed them out and made introductions. She had to look a little harder for a user interface; she couldn’t risk a wireless hookup. Finally she found an old fiberop headset with an integrated infrared keyboard, and plugged it in. More flickering handshakes.
She slid on the headset. A pastel keyboard hovered in the air before her. She reached out; the headset’s infrared eyes watched her hands move in empty space, mapped real fingers onto illusory controls. She brought up a map of the Cohen board, built a fence around a handful of empty sockets, cut a single gateway and locked it tight from the outside. She assigned a panic button, just in case: it floated off to one side, an orange spark in virtual space. There would be no need to reach out and touch it. Merely focusing her eyes on that icon would freeze the system solid. But the safeguard had a price attached. The headset couldn’t see through photocollagen. Her eyes would have to be stripped naked during the encounter.
She doffed the headset and regarded her handiwork in the real world: two miniscule Platonic solids and a thread of fiberop rising from a dimpled grid of empty pinhead sockets. A sparse right-angle spiderweb of emerald threads connected the plug-ins. Beside it, a glowing crimson border enclosed a rectangular patch of unoccupied terrain.
It was completely self-contained and utterly isolated. There were no antennae, no wireless interfaces, nothing that could send a signal from that landscape to any other. Nothing plugged into the board would be able to get off of it.
She studied the infected and excised lobe of Miri’s brain: a Lilliputian necklace of OPMs and memory chips lying isolated and inert in the palm of her hand. For all Clarke knew there was nothing left inside; the memory was nonvolatile, but who knew what damage had been inflicted during the exorcism? She remembered her challenge to Ken Lubin—how do you know I can’t wake the fucker with a kiss?—but she had no idea how to actually do that. She’d kept these components only because she could not throw them away. And because she hoped that if she spoke to the thing inside, it might speak back.
She lifted the necklace with a pair of force-feedback tweezers whose touch was as fine as eyelashes. She seated it into the center of the red zone. Green threads sprouted from the other components and converged just outside the gate, and stopped.
She donned the headset. She took a breath.
She opened the gate.
An explosion of pixels, right in front of her. Anger and ravenous hunger and bared teeth, furious input that bypassed the upper brain entirely and plunged icy needle
s right into the brainstem.
“Let—”
The flight response took over before she’d even parsed what she’d seen; the orange panic-button flared in her sights. The image froze.
She realized she was gasping. She forced herself to calm down.
A motionless face, black and green and radiant. A furious portrait of inverted flesh-tones. It didn’t look like her at all. Except for the eyes: those empty, raging eyes.
And not even those, she remembered after a moment. Because her eyes were uncapped, now. She faced this radioactive doppelganger completely naked.
Is this what I was?
She took a breath, held it briefly, let it out. She focused on the panic button and released it.
“—me out!” the apparition screamed.
Clarke shook her head. “There’s nowhere for you to go.”
“Let me out or I’ll grind every fucking address in here to pulp!”
“Answer some questions first.”
“Answer this, you worm-riddled twat.”
The universe flickered and went out.
Nothing but her own rapid breathing and the quiet hiss of Phocoena’s air conditioner. After a moment, her headset etched a message across the void:
System Crash. Restart?
Y / N
Clarke tried again.
“Let me out!”
She shook her head. “Tell me what you want.”
“What do you want?” The question seemed to calm the monster down a bit. It even smiled. “You don’t want to fuck with me, friend. I’ve killed more people than you can count.”
“Why? Revenge? For the GA? For—for Daddy, for what he did while mom was—how could you care about that? How could you even know?”
The face desaturated, its black-light pigments fading as if in twilight. In moments it was blacks and grays and two angry, crystalline ovals of pure white.
“Are you trying to kill everyone?” Clarke asked softly. “Are you trying to kill yourself?”
