Rifters 2 - Maelstrom

by Peter Watts

  "Piss off, Tessie." Some skeptic going by Hiigara. "You expect us to sub to Lenie Clarke's personal manager just showing up to chat?"

  Nothing in the local node. Desjardins started snooping adjacent servers.

  "I sense skepticism," Tesseract remarked. "Special effects is what you want. A demonstration."

  "Yowsers," said Poseidon-23, and drowned in the roar of an ocean.

  Desjardins blinked. An instant before, there'd been six people on the channel listing. Now there were four thousand eight hundred sixty two, all speaking at once. No one voice was comprehensible, but even the collective blare was impossibly clear: a digital babble with no distortion, no static, no arrhythmic stutter of bytes delayed or lost in transit.

  Silence returned. The channel listing imploded back down to the six it had started with.

  "There you go," said Tesseract.

  Shit, Desjardins thought. Shaken, he studied the results on his board. It's talking to all of them. At once.

  "How'd you do that?" Hiigara asked.

  "I'd rather not," Tesseract whispered. "It attracts attention. Are any of you in central N'Am, say around the Great Lakes?"

  He muted the chatter; he didn't need it, now that he had the scent. There seemed to be a fair bit of wildlife in a hospital server across town. He stepped inside, looked out through its portals.

  Even more wildlife over there. Desjardins stepped sideways, and found himself in Oslo National's account records. And even more wildlife flowing out to…

  Step.

  Timor. Real heavy infestation. Of course, those little subsidiaries were still back in the twentieth century when it came to pest control, but still...

  This is it, he thought.

  Don't touch anything. Go straight to the root.

  He did. He whispered sweet nothings to gatekeepers and system clocks, flashed his ID to ease their concerns. A very large number of users are about to get very pissed off, he reflected.

  He tapped his board. On the other side of the world, every portal on the edge of the Timor node slammed shut.

  Inside, time stuttered.

  It didn't stop completely—without some level of system iteration there'd be no way to copy what was inside. Hopefully that wouldn't matter. A few thousand cycles, a few tens of thousands. Maybe enough for the enemy to lurch in stop-motion increments toward some dim awareness of what was happening, but not enough—if he was lucky—to actually do anything about it.

  He ignored the traffic piling up at Timor's gates. He ignored the plaintive queries from other nodes who wondered why their feeds had gone dark. All he saw was the math in the bubble: architecture, operating system, software. Files and executables and wildlife. It was almost a kind of teleportation—each bit fixed and read and reconstructed half a world away, the original left unchanged for all the intimacy of its violation.

  He had it.

  The Timor node jerked back up to speed. Sudden panic from something inside; wildlife flew like leaves in a tornado, tearing at records, bursting through doorways, disemboweling itself after the fact. It didn't matter. It was too late.

  Desjardins smiled. He had an Anemone in a tank.

  * * *

  In the terrarium, he could stop time completely.

  It was all laid out before him, flash-frozen: a software emulation of the node itself, copies of every register and address, every spin and every bit. He could set it all running with a single command.

  And it would fly apart in seconds. Just like the Timorese original.

  So he set up inviolable backups of the logs and registries and placed them outside, with a filtered two-way pipe to the originals. He went through each of the portals leading out of the node—gates into oblivion now, from a bubble suspended in the void—and gave a little half-twist to each.

  He regarded his handiwork. Time stood still. Nothing moved.

  "Moebius, come forth," he murmered.

  Anemone screamed. A thousand unregistered executables leapt forward and clawed the traffic log to shreds; a million more escaped through the portals.

  Ten times as many rustled and watched:

  As the mutilated logs repaired themselves with barely time to bleed, magically replenished from on high;

  As the wildlife which had fled through that portal came plunging back in through this one, wheeling in confusion;

  As a channel opened in the midst of the wilderness and a voice rang out from Heaven: "Hey, you. Anemone."

  "We don't talk to you." Sexless, neutral. Default.

  It was still going after the records, but it was taking a dozen tacks at once: subtle forgery, full frontal assault, everything in between. None of it worked, but Desjardins was impressed anyway. Damn smart.

  As smart as an orb-weaving spider, blindly obeying lifetime fitness functions. As smart as a bird, noting wind and distance and optimizing seed load to three decimal places.

  "You really should talk to me," Desjardins said mildly. "I'm God." He caught a piece of wildlife at random, tagged it, set it free again.

  "You're shitting static. Lenie Clarke is God." A school of fish, a flock of wheeling birds so complex you needed matrix algebra and thinking machines to understand it all. The ascii came from somewhere inside.

  "Clarke's not God," Desjardins said. "She's a petri dish."

  Wildlife still flew through the wraparound gateways, but less randomly; some sort of systematic exploration, evolving on the fly. Desjardins checked on the piece he'd tagged. It had descendents already, all carrying the Mark of Cain he'd bestowed on their ancestor. And their descendents had had descendents.

  Two hundred sixty generations in fourteen seconds. Not bad.

  Thank you, Alice. If you hadn't ranted on about dancing bumblebees, who knows when I would've figured this out…

  "Maybe you need a demonstration," said the swarm. "Special effects is what you want, yes?"

  And she'd been right. Genes have their own intelligence. They can wire an ant for the cultivation of underground farms, the domestication of aphid cattle...even the taking of slaves. Genes can shape behaviors so sophisticated they verge on genius, given time.

  "A demonstration," Desjardins said. "Sure. Hit me."

  Time's the catch, of course. Genes are slow: a thousand generations to learn some optimal-foraging trick that a real brain could pick up in five minutes. Which is why brains evolved in the first place, of course. But when a hundred generations fit into the space of a yawn, maybe the genes get their edge back. Maybe wildlife learns to talk using only the blind stupid logic of natural selection— and the poor lumbering meat-sack on the other end never suspects that he's having a chat that spans generations.

  "I'm waiting," Desjardins said.

  "Lenie Clarke is not a demonstration." The swarm swirled in the terrarium. Was it Desjardins imagination, or did it seem to be—fading, somehow?

  He smiled. "You're losing it, aren't you?"

  "Loaves and fishes for Anemone."

  "But you're not Anemone. You're just a tiny piece of it, all alone…"

  Time's not enough in and of itself, of course. Evolution needs variance as well. Mutation and shuffling to create new prototypes, variable environments to weed out the unfit and shape the survivors.

  "Clarke, Lenie. Water lights up all cool and radium glow…"

  Life can survive in a box, for a while at least. But it can't evolve there. And down in Desjardins's terrarium, the population was starting to look pretty inbred.

  "Free hardcore pedosnuff," the swarm murmured. "Even to enter."

  Countless individuals. Jostling, breeding. Stagnating.

  It's all just pattern.

  "Sockeye," said the wildlife, and nothing more.

  Desjardins realized he'd been holding his breath. He let it out, slowly.

  "Well," he whispered, "you're not so smart after all.

  "You just act like you are…"

  Soul Mate

  Someone was pounding on his door. Someone was definitely not takin
g the hint.

  "Killjoy! Open up!"

  Go away, Desjardins thought. He flashed his findings to the rest of the Anemone team, a far-flung assemblage of 'lawbreakers he'd never met in the flesh and probably never would. I nailed the sucker. I figured it out.

  "Achilles!"

  Grudgingly, he leaned back and thumbed the door open without looking. "What do you want, Alice?"

  "Lertzman's dead!"

  He spun in his chair. "You're kidding."

  "He was pithed." Jovellanos's almond eyes were wide and worried. "They found him this morning. He was braindead, he was just lying there starving to death. Someone stuck a needle up the base of his skull and just shredded his white matter… "

  "Jesus." Desjardins stood. "You sure? I mean—"

  "Of course I'm sure, you think I'm making it up? It was Lubin. It had to be, that's how he tracked you down, that's how he—"

  "Yeah, Alice, I get it." He took a step toward her. "Thanks for—for telling me." He began to close the door.

  She stuck her foot in the way. "That's it? That's all you've got to say?"

  "Lubin's gone, Alice. He's not our problem any more. And besides"— nudging her foot out of the way with his own—"you didn't like Lertzman any more than I did."

  He closed the door in her face.

  * * *

  Lertzman's dead.

  Lertzman the bureaucrat. The cyst in "system", too dormant to contribute, too deeply embedded to excise, too ineffective to matter.

  Dead.

  Why do you care? He was an asshole.

  But I knew him…

  The one person you know. The far-off millions you don't.

  Could've been me.

  Nothing to do about Lertzman now. Nothing to do about his killer, even: Lubin was out of Desjardins's life, hot on the trail of Lenie Clarke. If he succeeded, Ken Lubin could be the savior of the planet. Ken-the-fucking-psychopath-Lubin, savior of billions. It was almost funny. Maybe, after saving the world, he'd go on a killing spree to celebrate. Set up breach after breach, sealing each with extreme and unfettered prejudice. Would anyone have the heart to stop him, after all the good he'd done? The salvation of billions could buy you a whole lot of forgiveness, Desjardins supposed.

  Ken Lubin, for all his quirks, was doing something worthwhile. He was hunting the other Lenie Clarke, the real one. The Lenie Clarke that Achilles Desjardins had been tracking was a mirage. There was no great conspiracy after all. No global death cult. Anemone was a drooling idiot. All it knew was that tales of global apocalypse were good for breeding, and that Lenie Clarke was a free pass into Haven. It had only connected those threads through blind dumb luck.

  It was a blazing irony that the person behind the words actually lived up to the billing.

  Lubin's problem. Not his.

  But that was dead wrong, and he knew it. Lenie Clarke was everyone's problem. A threat to the greater good if he'd even seen one.

  Forget Lertzman. Forget Alice. Forget Rowan and Lubin and Anemone, even. None of them would matter if it wasn't for Lenie Clarke.

  Worry about Clarke. She's the one that's going to kill us all.

  She'd come onto the Oregon Strip, moved north to Hongcouver. Inland from there; she'd got through the quarantine somehow. Then nothing for a month or so, when she'd appeared in the midwest, heading south. Skirting the edge of a no-go zone that stretched across three states. Two outbreaks down at the edge of the Dust Belt. Then Yankton: the head of an arrow, pointing somewhere in the vicinity of the Great Lakes.

  Home, Lubin had said. Sault Sainte Marie.

  Desjardins tapped the board: the main menu for the N'AmPac Grid Authority lit up his inlays. Personnel. Clarke, Lenie.

  Deceased.

  No surprise there: bureaucracy's usual up-to-the-minute grasp of current events. At least the file hadn't been wiped.

  He called up next-of-kin: Clarke, Indira and Butler, Jakob.

  Deceased.

  Suppose she couldn't get to her parents? Rowan had wondered. Suppose they'd been dead a long time?

  And Lubin had said, The people she hates are very much alive…

  He called up the public registry. No Sault-St.-Marie listing for Indira Clarke or Jakob Butler in the past three years. That was as far back as public records went. The central archives went back another four; nothing there either.

  Suppose they'd been dead a long time? Sort of an odd question, now that he thought about it.

  Forget the registry, Desjardins thought. Too easy to edit. He tried the matchmaker instead, threw a bottle into Maelstrom and asked if anyone had seen Indira Clarke or Jakob Butler hanging out with Sault Sainte Marie.

  The hit came back from N'AmPac Directory Assistance, an inquiry over seven months old. By rights, it should have been purged just hours after its inception. It hadn't been. Indira was not the only Clarke it mentioned.

  Clarke, Indira, went the transcript. Clarke with an 'e'.

  How many Indira Clarkes in Sault SainteMarie?

  How many in all of N'Am, professional affiliation with the Maelstrom fishery, with an only female child born February 2018, named Lenie?

  That's not fucking pos—

  Lenie Clarke's mother did not appear to exist anywhere in North America. And Lenie Clarke hadn't known.

  Or at least, she hadn't remembered…

  And how did they choose recruits for the rifter program? Desjardins reminded himself. That's right—"preadaption to stressful environments"…

  Deep in his gut, something opened one eye and began growling.

  He was a special guy, these days. He even had a direct line to Patricia Rowan. Any time, she'd told him. Day or night. It was, after all, nearly the end of the world.

  She picked up on the second ring.

  * * *

  "It was tough, wasn't it?" Desjardins said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I bet antisocial personalities make really bad students. I bet it was next to impossible, taking all those head cases and turning them into marine engineers. It must have been a lot easier to do it the other way around."

  Silence on the line.

  "Ms. Rowan?"

  She sighed. "We weren't happy about the decision, Doctor."

  "I should fucking hope not," he said. "You took human beings and—"

  "Dr. Desjardins, this is not your concern."

  "Yeah? You’re confident making that kind of call, after the last time?"

  "I'm sure I don't know what you mean."

  "ßehemoth wasn't my concern either, remember? You were so worried about some other corpse getting a leg up when it got out, but there was no way you were going to come to us, were you? No ma'am. You handed the reins to a head cheese."

  "Dr.—"

  "Why do you think CSIRA even exists? Why chain us all to Guilt Trip if you aren't going to use us anyway?"

  "I'm sorry, Doctor—were you under the impression that Guilt Trip made you infallible?" Rowan's voice was laced with frostbite. "It does not. It simply keeps you from being deliberately corrupt, and it does that by linking to your own gut feelings. And believe it or not, being especially tied to one's gut is not the best qualification for long-term problem-solving."

  "That's not—"

  "You're like any other mammal, Doctor. Your sense of reality is anchored in the present. You'll naturally inflate the near term and sell the long term short, tomorrow's disaster will always feel less real than today's inconvenience. You may be unbeatable at putting out brush fires, but I shudder to think of how you'd handle issues that extend into the next decade, let alone the next century. Guilt Trip would herd you toward the short-term payoff every time."

  Her voice gentled a bit. "Surely, if we've learned anything from recent history, it's that sometimes the short term must be sacrificed for the long."

  She waited, as if challenging him to disagree. The silence stretched.

  "It wasn't such a radical technique, really," she said at last.

  "What wasn't?"
/>
  "They're a lot more common than you might think. Even real memories are just—cobbled together out of bits and pieces, mostly. After the fact. Doesn't take much to coax the brain into cobbling those pieces together in some other way. Power of suggestion, more than anything. People even do it by accident."

  She's defending herself, Desjardins realized. Patricia Rowan is actually trying to justify her actions. To me.

  "So what others did by accident, you did on purpose," he said.

  "We were more sophisticated. Drugs, hypnosis. Some deep ganglionic tweaks to keep real memories from surfacing."

  "You fucked her in the head."

  "Do you know what it is, to be fucked in the head? Do you know what that colorful little phrase actually means? It means a proliferation of certain receptor sites and stress hormones. It means triggers set at increased firing thresholds. It's chemistry, Doctor, and when you believe you've been abused—well, belief's just another set of chemicals in the mix, isn't it? You get a—a sort of cascade effect, your brain rewires itself, and suddenly you can survive things that would leave the rest of us pissing in our boots. Yes, we faked Lenie Clarke's childhood. Yes, she was never really abused—"

  "By her parents," Desjardins interjected.

  "—but the fact that she believes she was abused is what made her strong enough to survive the rift. Fucking her in the head probably saved her life a dozen times over."

  "And now," Desjardins pointed out, "she's heading back to a home she never had, gunning for parents who don't exist, driven by abuses that never happened. Her whole definition of herself is a lie."

  "And I thank God for that," Rowan said.

  "What?"

  "Have you forgotten the woman's a living brood sac for the end of the world? At least we know where she's going. Ken can head her off. That—that definition of herself makes her predictable, Doctor. It means we might still be able to save the earth."

  * * *

  Random intelligence from around the world scrolled on all sides. He didn't see it.