Rifters 2 - Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  "You know, I was thinking." Another idle tap on the panel; a luminous keypad sprang up in his head, invisible beyond his own flesh. "About why the primary vectors aren't dying as fast as the people on the Strip." His eyes darted subtly across the pad, focusing for the merest instant here, and here, and here on the characters. Letters brightened at his glance, began forming a command. "Maybe a nastier strain's developed out there." B—e—e— "Maybe the higher population density—all those extra dice rolls—maybe they just lead to a higher mutation rate."

  Beebe Station.

  Private menus bloomed around the edge of his vision. He focused on Personnel.

  Let's-call-him-Colin grunted.

  Four women, four men. Desjardins brought up the men; whoever was standing next to him probably hadn't changed that much.

  "And if there's two separate strains, our propagation models are probably wrong," he said aloud.

  Employee headshots. All faces unfamiliar. But the eyes…

  He looked up. Let's-call-him-Colin looked back through a luminous palimpsest.

  Those eyes…

  The flesh had been reconstructed around them. The irises were darker. But for all that, the differences were cosmetic; a flaw in the iris left unchanged, a telltale capillary snaking across the sclera. And the overall aspect ratio of the face was identical. A casual change in appearance, more disguise than reconstruction. A new face, a new pair of socks, and—

  "Something wrong?" asked Kenneth Lubin.

  Desjardins swallowed.

  "Uh, the caffeine," he managed. "Sort of sneaks up on you. I'll be right back."

  * * *

  He barely saw the corridors scroll past. He missed the washroom entirely.

  Oh God. He's been in my home he's breathed in my face he even stabbed me in the neck with something and he's probably rotten with ßehemoth, it's probably growing in me now it's probably—

  Shut up. Focus. You can deal with this.

  If Lubin were infected, he'd be dead already. He'd said as much himself. So he probably wasn't a carrier. That was something.

  He could still be packing, of course: Johnny Appleseed with a grudge, lugging ßehemoth around in a petri dish. But what if he was? Why would he cross a continent just to innoculate Achilles Desjardins of all people? If he'd wanted Desjardins dead for some reason, he could have done it while the 'lawbreaker was laid out on his own living room floor.

  That was something, too.

  Probably both of them were clean. Desjardins allowed himself a moment to feel sick with relief, then opened the door to Jovellanos's cubby.

  It was empty; she'd taken the day to burn off some accumulated overtime. Achilles Desjardins thanked the Forces of Entropy for small mercies. He could use her board, at least for a few minutes. For however long one might reasonably be expected to spend on the toilet.

  He hooked his account and considered:

  Lubin wanted him to see Beebe's personnel files. Didn't he realize that Desjardins would make the connection, once the ID photos came up? Maybe not. He was only human, after all. Maybe he'd forgotten about the pattern-matching enhancements that 'lawbreakers came equipped with these days. Maybe he'd never known in the first place.

  Or maybe he had wanted Desjardins to see through his new identity. Maybe this was some twisted loyalty test courtesy of Patricia Rowan after all.

  Still. It seemed more plausible that Col— that Lubin was interested in the other rifters. He either wanted to know something about them, or he wanted Achilles Desjardins to know something about them.

  Desjardins fed names to the matchmaker and sent it hunting.

  "Semen-sucking savior," he whispered two seconds later.

  * * *

  She was proliferating in plain sight. She'd been reported on half a dozen continents in a single day. Lenie Clarke was on the run in Australia. She was making friends in N'AmPac and planning an insurrection in Mexico City. She was wanted in connection with an assault in HongCouver. She was a porn star who'd been snuffed at eleven years of age.

  More ominously, Lenie Clarke was ending the world. And nobody—at least as far as Desjardins could tell—had actually noticed.

  Nobody that mattered, anyway. The official news threads, jam-packed with the latest on this terrorist group or that arboviral outbreak, had nothing to say about her at all. The intel channels listed a few scattered acts of violence or sabotage, backtracked to anarchists and malcontents who'd cited the name as inspiration. But bad times bred dime-store messiahs like roaches, and there were thousands with more of a profile than Lenie Clarke.

  Hell, none of the official outlets had even bothered to issue a denial on the subject.

  It didn't make sense. Even the wildest rumors had to come out of the gate somewhere—how could all these people have started trumpeting the same thing at the same time? There'd been no media coverage, and there was way too much traffic for mere word-of-mouth to account for.

  There was so much stuff on Lenie Clarke, in fact, that he almost didn't notice Ken Lubin and Mike Brander peeping over the lower edge of the scope. There wasn't much on them—a few hundred threads, all starting within the past couple of days. But they, too, seemed strangely susceptible to corrupted address headers and blocked-sender syndrome. And they, too, were proliferating.

  What about the rifters? That whole scene seems to be fashionable these days…

  Lubin's words. Achilles Desjardins was the one with the optimised wetware, and still Lubin had had to connect the dots for him. All Desjardins had seen was a bunch of sick tragic fucks in the news, slick uniforms—a fashion thing, he'd thought. A fad. It had never occurred to him that there might be individuals at the center of it all.

  Okay. Now you know. Where does that get you?

  He leaned back in Jovellanos's seat, ran his fingers along his scalp. No obvious correlation between rifter sightings and ßehemoth outbreaks, as far as he could tell. Unless—

  His feet hit the floor with a thump. That's it.

  His hands danced across the panel, almost autonomously. Axes rose from the swampy baseline, stretched to credible limits, sank back into the mud. Variables clustered together, fell apart like swarms of starlings. Desjardins grabbed them, shook them out, stretched them along a single thread called time.

  That's it. The sightings cluster in time.

  Now, take the first sighting from each cluster and throw away the rest. GPS them on a map.

  "Will you look at that," he murmured.

  A rough zigzag, trending east to west across temperate North America, then veering south. ßehemoth bloomed along the same trajectory.

  Someone was watching Maelstrom for sightings of Lenie Clarke. And whenever they found one, they dropped a whole cluster of fake sightings into the system to muddy the waters. Someone was trying to hide her tracks and make her famous at the same time.

  Why, for God's sake?

  In the back of his head, synapses fired.

  Something else lurked in that data, something that coalesced along the same axis. The homegrown parts of Achilles Desjardins glimpsed that shape and recoiled, refusing the insight. The optimized parts couldn't look away.

  Maybe a coincidence, he thought, inanely. Maybe—

  Someone knocked on the door. Desjardins froze.

  It's him.

  He didn't why he was so certain. Could've been anyone, really.

  It's him. He knows where I am. Of course he knows, he's probably got me radiotagged, I bet he's got me pegged to the centimeter—

  —And he knows I lied to him.

  Lubin had to know. Lenie Clarke was all over Maelstrom; there was no way on Earth Desjardins could have run a check and found nothing at all since the quake.

  Knock. Knock.

  The door wouldn't unlock for anyone who didn't have CSIRA clearance. The door wasn't unlocking.

  Oh yeah. It's him all right.

  He didn't speak. God knew what kind of snoops Lubin might have pressed up against the door. He opened an outsi
de line and began tapping. It only took a few seconds.

  Send.

  Someone grunted softly on the other side of the door. Footsteps faded down the hall.

  Desjardins checked his watch: he'd been away from his office for almost six minutes. Much longer and it would start to look suspicious.

  Look suspicious? He knows, you idiot! That's why he was at the door, just to—let you know. You didn't fool him for a second.

  And yet…if Lubin had known, he hadn't said anything. He'd played along. For whatever cold-blooded fucked-in-the-head rifter reason, he'd maintained the pretense.

  Maybe—oh please God—he'd continue to do so.

  Desjardins waited another thirty seconds on the chance that his message might net an immediate reply. It didn't. He crept back into an empty corridor.

  Patricia Rowan must have been otherwise engaged.

  Scalpel

  The door to Desjardins's cubby was closed.

  Hey there, Ken—er, Colin—

  Yeah, I used the upstairs john, the stalls play better ads up there for some reason—

  Alice's office? She asked me to check her mail, they don't let us link in from outside—

  He took a breath. No point in getting ahead of himself. Lubin might not even bring it up. That might not even have been Lubin.

  Yeah, right.

  He opened the door. The cubby was empty.

  Desjardins didn't know whether to be relieved or terrified. He closed the door behind himself and locked it.

  Unlocked it again.

  What was the point, anyway? Lubin would come back or he wouldn't. He'd raise a challenge or he wouldn't. But whoever Lubin was, he already had Achilles Desjardins by the balls; breaking the routine now would only make things uglier.

  And it wasn't as though he was really alone anyway. There was another kind of monster in the cubby with him. He'd already glimpsed it lurking behind Jovellanos's panel. He'd briefly been able to deny it then; that knock on the door had almost been a relief.

  But it was here, too. He could hear it snuffling in the data like a monster in the closet. He could see that closet doorknob turn slowly back and forth, taunting him. He'd seen frightening outlines, at least; he'd looked away before any details had registered. But now, waiting for Lubin's return, there was nothing else to do.

  He opened the closet door and looked it in the face.

  The thousand faces of Lenie Clarke.

  It seemed innocent enough at first; a cloud of points congealing in a roughly Euclidean volume. Time ran through its center like a spinal cord. Where the cloud was thickest, rumors of Lenie Clarke grew in a wild profusion of hearsay and contradiction. Where it narrowed, the tales were less diverse, more consistent.

  But Achilles Desjardins had built a career out of seeing shapes in the clouds. The thing he saw now was beyond his experience.

  Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding— a conical mass of threads, expanding into the future from the apex of their common birthplace. Eventually, of course, they'd wither and die; the cone would simply dissipate at its wide end, its permutations senescent and exhausted.

  There were exceptions, of course. Every now and then a single thread persisted, grew thick and gnarled and unkillable: conspiracy theories and urban legends, the hooks embedded in popular songs, the comforting Easter-bunny lies of religious doctrine. These were the memes: viral concepts, infections of conscious thought. Some flared and died like mayflies. Others lasted a thousand years or more, tricked billions into the endless propagation of parasitic half-truths.

  Lenie Clarke was a meme, but a meme unlike any other. She had not extruded slowly from a birth point, as far as Desjardins could tell; she'd simply appeared, all over the datascape, wearing a thousand faces. There'd been no smooth divergence, no monotonic branching of informational variants. The variation had exploded too quickly to trace back to any single point.

  And ever since its appearance, all that variance had been—focusing…

  Two months ago Lenie Clarke had been an AI and a refugee terrorist and a prostitute messiah and other impossible things too numerous to count. Now, she was one thing and one thing only: the Mermaid of the Apocalypse. Oh, there was still variation; was she infested with incendiary nanotech, did she carry a bioengineered plague, had she brought back some apocalyptic microbe from the deep sea? Differences in detail, nothing more. The essential truth beneath it all had converged: the textbook conic had somehow flipped one-hundred-eighty impossible degrees, and Lenie Clarke had gone from a thousand faces to one. Now, she was only the end of the world.

  It was as though someone or something had offered the world a myriad styles, and the world had chosen the one it liked best. Veracity didn't enter into such things; only resonance did.

  And the meme that defined Lenie Clarke as an angel of apocalypse wasn't prospering because it was true; it was prospering because, insanely, people wanted it to be.

  I do not accept this, Achilles Desjardins shouted to himself.

  But only part of him was listening. Another part, even if it hadn't read Chomsky or Jung or Sheldrake—who had time for dead guys anyway?— at least had a basic understanding of what those guys had gone on about. Quantum nonlocality, quantum consciousness—Desjardins had seen too many cases of mass coincidence to dismiss the idea that nine billion human minds could be imperceptibly interconnected somehow. He’d never really thought about it much, but on some level he’d believed in the Collective Unconscious for years.

  He just hadn’t realized that the fucking thing had a death wish.

  * * *

  Dr. Desjardins, this is Patricia Rowan. I've just received your message.

  Plain text, coming directly over his inlays, third-person invisible. Even in his head there was no picture, no sound, nothing that might visibly startle him. Nothing to cause obvious distraction should he happen to take this call in dangerous company.

  I can be there within thirty hours. Until then it is imperative that you do nothing to arouse Lubin's suspicions. Cooperate with him. Do not inform anyone else of his presence. Do NOT notify local authorities. Mr. Lubin's behavior is governed by a conditioned threat-response reflex which requires special handling.

  Oh, fuck.

  If you follow these instructions you will not be in danger. The reflex engages only in the event of a perceived security breach. Since he knows that your own behavior is governed by Guilt Trip, he's unlikely to consider you a threat unless he thinks you may expose him in some way.

  I'm screwed, Desjardins thought.

  By all means continue your analysis of Lenie Clarke and the rifter connection. We are putting our own people on it as well. Remain calm, and do not do anything to antagonize Mr. Lubin. I'm sorry that I can't be there sooner, but I'm presently off-continent, and the local transportation is quite limited.

  You've done the right thing, Dr. Desjardins. I'm on my way.

  Conditioned threat-response reflex.

  He'd heard the rumors. Neither corpse nor civilian, he inhabited that outer circle of need-to-know: too peripheral for the inner sanctum, but close enough to hear things in passing. He'd heard about CTR.

  Guilt Trip was a stone axe: CTR was a scalpel. Where the Trip merely short-circuited the brain, CTR controlled it. Where GT disabled, CTR compelled. Apparently they'd learned the trick from some parasite that farthered its own life-cycle by hotwiring the behavioral circuitry of its host. Body-snatcher stuff. Subtle.

  You tied it to the same triggers, though. Guilt had the same seesaw signature no matter what its inspiration: norepinephrine went up, serotonin and acetylcholine went down, and—whereas Achilles Desjardins would merely freeze up—Ken Lubin would set forth on some complex, predestined behavioral dance. Like tying up security leaks with extreme prejudice, for example; there might be some flexibility in the means, but the act was compulsory.

  It went without saying that y
ou didn't find such hotwiring in glorified pipe-fitters, even if their beat was twenty thousand leagues under the sea. Ken Lubin was a whole lot more than a rifter.

  And right now he was opening the door to Desjardins's cubby.

  Desjardins swallowed and turned in his chair.

  I can be there within thirty hours.

  It is imperative that you do nothing to arouse Lubin's suspicions.

  Remain calm.

  "Took a stroll around the floor," Lubin said. "To stretch my legs."

  Desjardins made himself nod indifferently. "Okay."

  Twenty-nine hours and fifty-eight minutes to go.

  By a Thousand Cuts

  Methionine depletion

  Impaired cysteine synthesis

  Impaired taurine metabolism

  Impaired sulfur conjugation:

  detoxification pathways broken.

  Impaired disulfide bridge formation:

  protein conformation compromised

  Impaired synthesis of

  biotin, chondroitin sulfate,

  coenzyme A, coenzyme M,

  glucosamine sulfate, glutathione,

  hemoglobin, heparin, homocysteine,

  lipoic acid, Metallothionein,

  S-adenosylmethionine, thiamin,

  tripeptide glutathione.

  Cytochrome transport, oxidation of fatty acid and pyruvate compromised

  Impaired production of anserine,

  acetylcholine, creatine, choline,

  epinephrine, insulin, and

  N-methyl nicotinamide

  GSH depletion (acetominophen-induced)