Rifters 2 - Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  At Channer, they had. Something had drawn those little nightmares down deeper than they went anywhere else, turned them into ravenous giants big as people. You didn't go outside Beebe without a gas billy strapped to your leg; you rarely came back in without having used it.

  Something at Channer had created monsters. Lubin sent a message into Haven asking what it was.

  Haven wasn't exactly sure. But there was a tech report in the gray lit that took a guess: some kind of endosymbiotic infection that increased growth energy. The phrase infectious neomitochondria popped up in the discussion.

  The authors of the report—a couple of eggs out of Rand/Washington University—suggested that some microbe at Channer could infect cells symbiotically, providing extra growth energy to the host cell in exchange for room and board. Whatever the bug was, they claimed it would have some fairly obvious characteristics. Small enough to fit inside a eukaryotic cell, high assimilation efficiency for inorganic sulfur, that sort of thing.

  An infection that caused giantism in fish. Again, hmmm.

  One of the first things Lubin had done after coming ashore had been to check himself out for pathogens. He'd tested clean. But this Channer thing was new, and strictly speaking, not even a disease. It might not show up on the standard slate.

  Lubin's credit was good. More extensive blood work wouldn't be an issue.

  There were other issues, though. One of them dawned gradually as he explored, betrayed itself in the way Haven answered his questions. Sometimes the metabase thought for a moment or two before telling him what he wanted to know. That was normal. But other times—other times, it spat an answer back almost before he'd asked the question. Almost as though it had already been thinking along those very lines, as though it didn't have to go and look up the relevant facts.

  Maybe, Lubin reflected, that was exactly it.

  Haven's agents were not nearly so pressed for resources as the engines that combed Maelstrom; they could afford to cache recent searches. Very few lines of inquiry were utterly unique. If someone asked about the price of a Parkinson's fix today, chances were someone else would want to know something similar tomorrow. Haven's search engines held onto their executive summaries, the better to speed responses to related inquiries.

  Ask and it shall be given:

  —After a mean of 2.3 seconds when answering questions about giantism in deepwater fish;

  —after a mean of 3 seconds when talking about benthic sulfur-reducing microbes;

  —about a second for queries containing the phrase "Channer Vent";

  —0.5 seconds for searches combining sulfur-reducing microbes with fire.

  Fire. Benthic sulfur-reducing microbes. An odd combination of terms. What relevance could fire have to life on the bottom of the ocean?

  He added a third concept, almost on a whim: shipyard.

  0.1 seconds.

  Well.

  He was following in someone's footsteps. Someone had been in Haven before him, asking the same questions, making the same connections. Searching for answers, or looking for loose ends?

  Ken Lubin resolved to find out.

  An Archetype of Dislocation

  There had been a time when Sou-Hon Perreault had truly loved her husband. Martin had projected a serenity in those days, a gentleness and an unwillingness to judge that made her feel safe. He'd been unfailingly supportive when she needed it (hardly ever, before the breakdown); he'd never been afraid to look at both sides of an issue. For love, he could balance on the edge of any fence.

  Even now, he'd forever hold her and whisper inane reassurances. Things couldn't be that bad, he'd say. Quarantines and dark zones always popped up here and there, not without good reason. Sometimes restrictions were necessary for the good of everyone, she knew that—and besides, he had it on good authority that there were safeguards even on those who made the Big Decisions. As if he was privy to some grand secret, as if Maelstrom wasn't rotten with threads and rumors about the corpses and their mind-controlling drugs.

  Her caring, supportive husband. Sitting across the table, his face overflowed with loving concern. She hated the sight of him.

  "You should eat," he said. He put a forkful of mashed Spirulina into his mouth and chewed, demonstrating.

  "Should I?"

  "You're losing weight," Martin told her. "I know you're upset—goodness, you've got every reason to be—but starving yourself won't make you feel any better."

  "That's your solution to the world's problems? Stuff your face so we'll all feel better?"

  "Sou—"

  "That's right, Marty. Just eat a bit more and everything'll be just grand. Suck up all those cheery threads from N'AmWire and maybe they'll lull you right into forgetting about Crys…"

  It was a low blow—Martin's sister lived in Corvallis, which had not only been quarantined since the Big One but had dropped completely offline for the better part of a month. The official story involved unfortunate long-term aftershocks that kept taking out the land-lines; N'AmWire pictures showed the usual collage of citizens, shaken but not stirred, gamely withstanding temporary isolation. Martin hadn't been able to get through to Crys for three weeks.

  Her words should have stung him—even provoked him to anger—but he only sat there looking helpless, his hands spread. "Sou, you've been through so much these past few months, of course things look really grim. But I honestly think you're putting way too much weight on a bunch of rumors. Riots, and firestorms, and—I mean, half those postings don't even show up with address headers any more, you can't trust anything that comes out of Maelstrom these days—"

  "You'd rather trust N'AmWire? They don't spit out a word without some corpse chewing it for them first!"

  "But what do you know, Sou? What have you actually seen with your own eyes? By your own admission you just got a glimpse of one big ship moving inland, and you didn't even see it do anything—"

  "Because it shot the 'fly right out from under me!"

  "And you weren't supposed to be there in the first place, you idiot! You're lucky they didn't track you down and cancel your contract on the spot!"

  He fell silent. The burble of the aquarium in the next room suddenly seemed very loud.

  He was backpedaling the next instant: "Oh Sou, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to…"

  "Doesn't matter." Sou-Hon shook her head, waving off the overture. "We're done here anyway."

  "Sou…"

  She stood up from the table. "You could do with a bit of a diet yourself, hubby. Lose some weight, clear your mind. It might even make you wonder what they're putting in that so-called food you keep trying to force down my throat."

  "Oh, Sou. Surely you're not saying—"

  She went into her office and closed the door.

  * * *

  I want to do something!

  She leaned back against the door and closed her eyes. Martin, safely excluded, made soft shuffling noises on the other side and faded away.

  I've been a voyeur my whole fucking life! All I do is watch! Everything's falling apart and now they're bringing in their big guns and laying waste and I'm part of it and there's nothing I can do...

  She summoned a curse for the faulty derm she'd worn into Hongcouver. The epithet was an empty and colorless thing; even now, she couldn't truly regret having been slapped awake. She could only rage at the things she'd seen when her eyes had opened.

  And Martin's trying so hard to be a comfort, he's so earnest and he probably believes that things really will get better if I go back to being a haploid sheep like him…

  She clenched her fists, savored the pain of fingernails in the flesh of her palms. Lenie Clarke's no sheep, she thought.

  Clarke had long since left the Strip, for all Amitav's efforts to keep her spirit alive. But she was still out there, somewhere. She had to be. How else to explain the subtle proliferation of black uniforms and empty eyes in the world? Perreault didn't get out much but the signs were there, even the predigested pap that N'Amwire served up.
Dark shapes on street-corners. Eyes without pupils, staring from the crowds that always gathered in the background of newsworthy events.

  That was nothing new, of course. N'AmPac's divers had been all over the news, almost a year before; first lauded as saviors of the new economy, fashionable icons of cutting-edge reserve. Then pitied and feared, once the rumors of abuse and psychopathy reached some threshold of public awareness. Then inevitably, forgotten.

  Just an old fad. Rifter chic had already had its day. So why this sudden new life, breathed into some dusty blip on the rear-view mirror? Why the fine mycelium of innuendo threading its way through Maelstrom, whispers about someone risen from the deep sea, pregnant with apocalypse? Why the fragmentary rumors, their address headers corrupted or missing, of people taking sides?

  Perreault opened her eyes. Her headset rested on its peg, just in front of her desk. An LED blinked on its side: message waiting.

  Someone wanting to trade shifts, maybe. Some supervisor wanting to pay her overtime to keep looking the other way.

  Maybe another trashed cycler, she thought hopefully. Probably not, though. The Strip had been a much quieter place since Amitav's corner of it had been—excised…

  She took a deep breath, one step forward, sat. She slipped on the headset:

  Souhon/Amitav (LNU)

  lucked into this avenging angel. No shit. Lenie Clarke, her name was.

  Oh my God.

  The text had been overlaid directly onto the tactical map for the botflies on the Strip. Sou-Hon forced herself to sit quietly, and shoveled dirt back into the tiny pit opening in her stomach.

  You're back. Whoever you are.

  What do you want?

  She hadn't made any secret of her interest in Amitav or Lenie Clarke. There'd been no need, at first; both had been legitimate topics of professional conversation, albeit apparently uninteresting ones to other 'flyers. But she'd kept quiet since Amitav had fallen into eclipse. Just barely. A big part of her had wanted to scream that atrocity into Maelstrom at full voice; afraid of repercussions, she'd settled for screaming at Martin, and hoped that whatever had shot down her 'botfly hadn't bothered tracking it to source.

  This wasn't CSIRA or the GA, though. This almost looked like a glitch of some kind.

  Another line of text appeared beneath the first two:

  She's like some kinda amphibian, one of those rifter cyborgs.

  No obvious channel to link in to, no icon to tap. Behind the text, the familiar long chain of red pinpoints patrolled the Pacific coastline, showing no hint of the places where they went into coma.

  Les beus are looking for her, but I bet fifty QueBucks they don't even know what she looks like under all that rifter gear. Souhon or Amitav (LNU)?

  Perhaps they'd hacked into her headset mic as well. "I'm—Sou-Hon. Hyphenated."

  Sou-Hon.

  "Yes."

  You know Lenie Clarke.

  "I—saw her, once."

  Good enough.

  An invisible fist closed around Sou-Hon Perreault and threw her halfway around the world.

  * * *

  Pacific coastlines and tactical overlays, gone in an instant; a cul-de-sac of brick and machinery suddenly in their place. Gusts of sleet, slashing an atmosphere colder than the Strip had ever seen. It rattled off glass and metal to either side. The stylized greyhounds etched into those surfaces didn't stir.

  Not all the flesh had disappeared, Perreault saw. A woman stood directly ahead, her back to a brick wall the color of raw meat. The buses on either side were plugged into sockets extending from that wall, cutting off lateral escape. If there was any way out it was straight ahead, through the center of Perreault's perceptual sphere. But that sphere showed a target framed within luminous crosshairs. Unfamiliar icons flashed to each side, options like ARM and STUN and LTHL.

  Perreault was riding some kind of arsenal, and she was aiming it right at Lenie Clarke.

  The rifter had gone native. Civilian clothes covered the body, a visor hid that glacial stare, and Perreault would never have recognized her if she'd had to rely on merely human eyes. But botflies looked out across a wider spectrum. This one saw a garish and distracting place, emissions bleeding from a dozen EM sources—but Clarke was close-range and line-of-sight, and there was no wiring in the wall directly behind her. Against that relative shadow, her thorax flickered like a riot of dim fireflies.

  "I'm not going to hurt you," Perreault said. Weapons icons flashed accusingly at the corner of her eye; she found a dimmer one that whispered DSRM, and hit it. The arsenal stood down.

  Clarke didn't move, didn't speak.

  "I'm not—my name's Sou-Hon. I'm not with the police, I'm—I think—" She spared a glance at GPS: Calgary. The Glenmore intercity shuttle nexus.

  Something had just thrown her thirteen hundred kilometers to the northeast.

  "I was sent," she finished. "I don't know, I think—to help..." She heard the absurdity in every word.

  "Help." A flat voice, betraying nothing.

  "Hang on a moment…" Perreault lifted the 'fly above the Greyhounds, did a quick three-sixty. She was floating over a docking bay where buses slept and suckled in rows. The main terminal loomed forty meters away, elevated loading platforms extending from its sides. Two buses were presently onloading; the animated greyhounds on their sides raced nowhere, as if running on invisible treadmills.

  And there, by the decontamination stalls: a small seething knot of confusion. An aftermath. Perreault accessed the 'fly's black box, quick-scanned the previous few minutes. Suddenly, in comical fast-forward, she was closing on a younger disturbance. Even at this stage the show had been winding down, people turning away. But there was Lenie Clarke, holding an ebony shockprod. There was a man with his arms raised against her, a wide-eyed little girl hiding behind his legs.

  Perreault slowed the flow. The man took a step back in realtime.

  "Lady, I've never even seen you before…"

  Clarke stepped forward, but some former aggression was draining from her stance. Uncertainty took its place. "I—I thought you—"

  "Seriously, lady. You are one fucked-up little chimera…"

  "You all right, kid?" The wand in one hand wavered. The other hand extended, tentatively. "I didn't meant to sc—"

  "Go away!" the child howled.

  The father glanced up, distracted by overhead motion. "You want to pick a fight?" he snarled at the mermaid. "Pick on that!"—pointing straight at the approaching 'fly.

  She had run. The drone had followed, armed and hungry.

  And now—somehow—Sou-Hon Perreault had been placed in possession.

  Perreault dropped back down between the buses. "You're safe for the moment. You—"

  The cul-de-sac was empty.

  She one-eightied the 'fly; something flickered out of sight around a corner.

  "Wait! You don't understand—"

  Perreault cranked the throttle. For a moment nothing happened. Then her whole perceptual field lurched, right down to the semicircular canals. A readout flickered upper-right, then held steady: RECONNECT.

  Weapons icons bloomed like pulsing tumors. Somewhere in the distant realm of her own flesh, Perreault hammered frantic arpeggios against remote controls. Nothing worked.

  "Run!" she cried as the link went down.

  But she was back in Montana again, and her voice didn't carry.

  400 Megabytes: Punctuated Equilibrium

  400 Megs hovers on a knife-edge of complacency.

  For thousands of generations it has known the secret of success in Maelstrom. Predators have pursued it with powerful legs and gnashing teeth; competitors have raced it to each new refuge, each new patch of forage; diseases have striven to eat it from the inside. And yet 128 begat 142, and 142 begat 137 (a bit of pruning there, getting rid of redundant code), and 137 began 150, and so on, and so on, up unto the present crisis-laden instant. All because of a very special secret encoded in the genes:

  You want to get around f
ast in Maelstrom, the name you drop is Lenie Clarke.

  400 doesn't know why this should be. That's not really the point. What it does know is, that particular string of characters gets you in anywhere. You can leap from node to node as though disinfectants and firewalls and shark-repellants did not exist. You can pass undamaged through the vicious fleshy meatgrinder that is a head cheese, a passage guaranteed to reduce you to instant static without the protective amulet of Lenie Clarke in your pocket. Even Haven—mythic, inaccessible Haven, a vast smorgasbord virtually untouched by the appetites of the living—may someday be within reach.

  Problem is, too many others are getting into the act.

  It's not an uncommon development in Maelstrom; evolution happens so quickly, in so many different directions, that you can't go half a second without a bunch of wannabes rediscovering the wheel you thought you had all to yourself. By now the free rides to open fields are growing crowded. Binary beasts of burden each labor under the weight of dozens of hitchhikers, each grabbing up its own little aliquot of memory, each slowing the procession a tiny bit farther. Now the carrier files themselves are attracting attention—from checksum monitors who just know in their gut that no casual e-mail should weigh in at a hundred gigs, to sharks hungry for prey grown almost too fat to move.

  Want to spread your seed through Maelstrom? Hitch your wagon to Lenie Clarke. Want to be shark food? Do the same thing.

  It's not everybody's problem, though. Some creatures leap around as fast as they ever did. Faster, even. Something they know, maybe. Or someone. 400Megs has never been able to figure out the secret.