Rifters 1 - Starfish

by Peter Watts

  But we could have killed him.

  He started it. He attacked Gerry. He was holding him hostage.

  As if the GA's going to make any sort of allowance for that...

  So far, Clarke's kept her doubts to herself. It's not that she fears no one will listen to her. She fears the exact opposite. She doesn't want to change anybody's mind. She's not out to rally the troops. Initiative is a prerogative of leaders; she doesn't want the responsibility. The last thing she wants to be is

  Leader of the pack, Len. Head wolf. A-fucking-kayla.

  Acton's been dead for months and he's still laughing at her.

  Okay. Scanlon was a nuisance at worst. At best he was an amusing diversion. "Shit," Brander said once, "You tune him in out there? I bet the GA doesn't even take him seriously." The Grid needs them, and it's not going to pull the plug just because a few rifters had some fun with an asshole like Scanlon. Makes sense.

  Still, Clarke can't help thinking about consequences. She's never been able to avoid them in the past.

  Brander's finally out of the shower; his voice drifts down from the lounge. Showers are an indulgence down here, hardly necessary when you live inside a self-flushing semipermeable diveskin but a sheer hot hedonistic pleasure just the same. Clarke grabs a towel off the rack and heads up the ladder before anyone else can cut in.

  "Hey, Len." Caraco, seated at the table with Brander, waves her over. "Check out the new look."

  Brander's in real shirtsleeves. He doesn't even have his caps in.

  His eyes are brown.

  "Wow." Clarke doesn't know what else to say. Those eyes look really strange. She looks around, vaguely uncomfortable. Lubin's over on the sofa, watching. "What do you think, Ken?"

  Lubin shakes his head. "Why do you want to look like a dryback?"

  Brander shrugs. "Don't know. I just felt like giving my eyes a rest for a couple of hours. I guess seeing Scanlon down here in shirtsleeves all the time." Not that anyone would even think of popping their caps in front of Scanlon.

  Caraco affects an exaggerated shudder. "Please. Tell me he's not your new role model."

  "He wasn't even my old one," Brander says.

  Clarke can't get used to it. "Doesn't it bother you?" —Walking around naked like that?

  "Actually, the only thing that bothers me is I can't see squat. Unless someone wants to turn up the lights..."

  "So anyway." Caraco picks up the thread of some previous conversation. "You came down here why?"

  "It's safe," Brander says, blinking against his own personal darkness.

  "Uh huh."

  "Safer, anyway. You were up there not so long ago. Didn't you see it?"

  "I think what I saw up there was sort of skewed. That's why I'm down here."

  "You never thought that things were getting, well, top-heavy?"

  Caraco shrugs. Clarke, imagining steamy needles of water, takes a step towards the corridor.

  "I mean, look how fast the net changed," Brander says. "It wasn't that long ago you could just sit in your living room and go all over the world, remember? Anywhere could link up with anywhere else, for as long as they liked."

  Clarke turns back. She remembers those days. Vaguely.

  "What about the bugs?" she asks.

  "There weren't any. Or there were, but they were really simple. Couldn't rewrite themselves, couldn't handle different operating systems. Just a minor inconvenience at first, really."

  "But there were these laws they taught us in school," Caraco says.

  Lenie remembers: "Explosive speciation. Brookes' Laws."

  Brander holds up a finger. "Self-replicating information strings evolve as a sigmoid-difference function of replication error rate and generation time." Two fingers. "Evolving information strings are vulnerable to parasitism by competing strings with sigmoid-difference functions of lesser wavelength." Three. "Strings under pressure from parasites develop random substring-exchange protocols as a function of the wavelength ratio of the host and parasite sigmoid functions. Or something like that."

  Caraco looks at Clarke, then back at Brander. "What?"

  "Life evolves. Parasites evolve. Sex evolves to counter the parasites. Shuffles the genes so they have to shoot for a moving target. Everything else— species diversity, density-dependence, everything— it all follows from those three laws. You get a self-replicating string past a certain threshold, it's like a nuclear reaction."

  "Life explodes," Clarke murmurs.

  "Actually, information explodes. Organic life's just a really slow example. Happened a lot faster in the net."

  Caraco shakes her head. "So what? You're saying you came down here to get away from bugs in the Internet?"

  "I came down here to get away from entropy."

  "I think," Clarke remarks, "You've got one of those language disorders. Dyslexia or something."

  But Brander's going full tilt now. "You've heard the phrase Entropy increases? Everything falls apart eventually. You can postpone it for a while, but that takes energy. The more complicated the system, the more energy it needs to stay in one piece. Back before us everything was sun-powered, all the plants were like these little solar batteries that everything else could build on. Only now we've got this society that's on an exponential complexity curve, and the 'net's on the same curve only a lot steeper, right? So we're all balled up in this runaway machine, it's got so complicated it's always on the verge of flying apart, and the only thing that prevents that is all the energy we feed it."

  "Bad news," Caraco says. Clarke doesn't think she's really getting the point, though.

  "Good news, actually. They'll always need more energy, so they'll always need us. Even if they ever do get fusion figured out."

  "Yeah, but—" Caraco's frowning all of a sudden. "If you say it's exponential, then it hits a wall eventually, right? The curve goes straight up and down."

  Brander nods. "Yup."

  "But that's infinity. There's no way you could keep things from falling apart, no matter how much power we pump out. It'd never be enough. Sooner or later—"

  "Sooner," says Brander, "And that's why I'm staying right here. Like I said, it's safer."

  Clarke looks from Brander to Caraco to Brander. "That is just so much bullshit."

  "How so?" Brander doesn't seem offended.

  "Because we'd have heard about it before now. Especially if it's based on some kind of physical law everyone knows about. They couldn't keep something like that under wraps, people would keep figuring it out for themselves."

  "Oh, I think they have," Brander says mildly, smiling from naked brown eyes. "They'd just rather not think about it too much."

  "Where do you get all this, Mike?" Clarke asks. "The library?"

  He shakes his head. "Got a degree. Systems ecology, artificial life."

  Clarke nods. "I always thought you were too smart to be a Rifter."

  "Hey. A rifter's the smartest thing to be right now."

  "So you chose to come down here? You actually applied?"

  Brander frowns. "Sure. Didn't you?"

  "I got a phone call. Offered me this new high-paying career, even said I could go back to my old job if it didn't work out."

  "What was your old job?" Caraco wonders.

  "Public relations. Mostly Honquarium franchises."

  "You?"

  "Maybe I wasn't very good at it. What about you?"

  "Me?" Caraco bites her lip. "It was sort of a deal. One year with an option to renew, in lieu of prosecution." The corner of her mouth twitches. "Price of revenge. It was worth it."

  Brander leans back in his chair, looks around Clarke. "What about you, Ken? Where'd you come—"

  Clarke turns to follow Brander's stare. The sofa's empty. Down the corridor, Clarke can hear the shower door swinging shut.

  Shit.

  Still, it'll only be a short wait. Lubin's already been inside for four hours straight, he'll be gone in no time. And it's not as though there's any shortage of hot water.
>
  "They should just shut the whole bloody net down for a while," Caraco is saying behind her. "Just pull the plug. Bugs wouldn't be able to handle that, I bet."

  Brander laughs, comfortably blind. "Probably not. Of course, neither would the rest of us."

  Carousel

  She's been staring at the screen for two minutes and she still can't see what Nakata's going on about. Ridges and fissures run along the display like long green wrinkles. The Throat returns its usual echoes, crammed especially close to center screen because Nakata's got the range topped out. Occasionally a small blip appears between two of the larger ones: Lubin, lazing through an uneventful shift.

  Other than that, nothing.

  Lenie Clarke bites her lip. "I don't see any—"

  "Just wait. I know I saw it."

  Brander looks in from the lounge. "Saw what?"

  "Alice says she's got something bearing three twenty."

  Maybe it's Gerry, Clarke muses. But Nakata wouldn't raise the alarm over that.

  "It was just— there!" Nakata jabs her finger at the display, vindicated.

  Something hovers at the very edge of Beebe's vision. Distance and diffraction make it hazy, but to bounce any kind of signal at that range it's got to have a lot of metal. As Clarke watches, the contact fades.

  "Not one of us," Clarke says.

  "It's big." Brander squints at the panel; his eyecaps reflect through white slits.

  "Muckraker?" Clarke suggests. "A sub, maybe?"

  Brander grunts.

  "There it is again," Nakata says.

  "There they are," Brander amends. Two echoes tease the edge of the screen now, almost indiscernible. Two large, unidentified objects, now rising just barely clear of the bottom clutter, now sinking back down into mere noise.

  Gone.

  "Hey," Clarke says, pointing. There's a tremor rippling along the seismo display, setting off sensors in a wave from the northwest. Nakata taps commands, gets a retrodict bearing on the epicenter. Three-twenty.

  "There is nothing scheduled to be out there," she says.

  "Nothing anyone bothered to tell us about, anyway." Clarke rubs the bridge of her nose. "So who's coming?"

  Brander nods. Nakata shakes her head. "I'll wait for Judy."

  "Oh, that's right. She's going all the way today, isn't she? Surface and back?"

  "Yes. She should be back in maybe an hour."

  "Okay." Brander's on his way downstairs. Clarke reaches past Nakata and taps into an outside channel. "Hey Ken. Wake up."

  * * *

  I tell myself I know this place, she muses. I call this my home.

  I don't know anything.

  Brander cruises just below her, lit from underneath by a seabed on fire. The world ripples with color, blues and yellows and greens so pure it almost hurts to look at them. A dusting of violet stars coalesces and sweeps across the bottom; a school of shrimp, royally luminous.

  "Has anyone been—" Clarke begins, but she feels wonder and surprise from Brander. It's obvious he hasn't seen this before. And Lubin— "It's news to me," Lubin answers aloud, as dark as ever.

  "It's gorgeous," Brander says. "We've been down here how long, and we never even knew this place existed..."

  Except Gerry, maybe. Every now and then Beebe's sonar picks someone up in this direction, when everyone else is accounted for. Not this far out, of course, but who knows how far afield Fischer— or whatever Fischer's become— wanders these days?

  Brander drops away from his squid and coasts down, one arm outstretched. Clarke watches him scoop something off the bottom. A faint tingle clouds her mind for a moment— that indefinable sense of some other mind working nearby— and she's past him, her own squid towing her away.

  "Hey Len," Brander buzzes after her. "Check this out."

  She releases the throttle and arcs back. Brander's got a glassy jointed creature in the palm of his hand. It looks a bit like that shrimp Acton found, back when—

  "Don't hurt it," she says.

  Brander's mask stares back at her. "Why would I hurt it? I just wanted to you to see its eyes."

  There's something about the way Brander's radiating. It's as though he's a little bit out of synch with himself, somehow, as though his brain is broadcasting on two bands at once. Clarke shakes her head. The sensation passes.

  "It doesn't have eyes," she says, looking.

  "Sure it does. Just not on its head."

  He flips it over, uses thumb and forefinger to pin it upside-down against the palm of his other hand. Rows of limbs— legs, maybe, or gills— scramble uselessly for purchase. Between them, where joints meet body, a row of tiny black spheres stare back at Lenie Clarke.

  "Weird," she says. "Eyes on its stomach."

  She's feeling it again: a strange, almost prismatic sense of fractured awareness.

  Brander lets the creature go. "Makes sense. Seeing as how all the light down here comes from below." Suddenly he looks at Clarke, radiating confusion. "Hey Len, you feeling okay?"

  "Yeah, I'm fine."

  "You seem kind of—"

  "Split," they say, simultaneously.

  Realization. She doesn't know how much of it is hers and how much she's tuning in from Brander, but suddenly they both know.

  "There's someone else here," Brander says, unnecessarily.

  Clarke looks around. Lubin. She can't see him.

  "Shit. You think that's it?" Brander's scanning the water too. "You think ol' Ken is finally starting to tune in?"

  "I don't know."

  "Who else could it be?"

  "I don't know. Who else is out here?"

  "Mike. Lenie." Lubin's voice, faintly, from somewhere ahead.

  Clarke looks at Brander. Brander looks back.

  "Right here," Brander calls, edging his volume up.

  "I found it," Lubin says, invisibly distant.

  Clarke launches off the bottom and grabs her squid. Brander's right beside her, sonar pistol out and clicking. "Got him," he says after a moment. "That way."

  "What else?"

  "Don't know. Big, anyhow. Three, four meters. Metallic."

  Clarke tweaks the throttle. Brander follows. A riot of fractured color unspools below them.

  "There."

  Ahead of them, a mesh of green light sections the bottom into squares.

  "What—"

  "Lasers," Brander says. "I think."

  Emerald threads float perfectly straight, a luminous profusion of right angles a few centimeters off the bottom. Beneath them, drab metal pipes run along the rock; tiny prisms erupt at regular intervals along their length, like spines. Each prism, an interstice; from each interstice, four beams of coherent light, and four, and four, a wire-frame checkerboard overlaid against bedrock.

  They cruise two meters over the grid. "I'm not sure," Brander grates, "but I think it's all just one beam. Reflected back across itself."

  "Mike—"

  "I see it," he says.

  At first it's just a fuzzy green column resolving out of the middle distance. Nearness brings clarity; the beams crisscrossing the ocean floor converge in a circle here, bend vertically up to form the luminous bars of a cylindrical cage. Within that cage a thick metal stalk rises out of the seabed. A great disk flowers at its top, spreads out like some industrial parasol. The spokes of laser light stream down from its perimeter and bounce endlessly away along the bottom.

  "It's like a— a carousel," Clarke buzzes, remembering an old picture from an even older time. "Without horses..."

  "Don't block those beams," Lubin buzzes. He's hanging off to one side, aiming a sonar pistol at the structure. "They're too weak to hurt you unless you get it in the eye, but you don't want to interfere with what they're doing."

  "And that is?" Brander says.

  Lubin doesn't answer.

  What in the world— But Clarke's confusion is only partly directed at the mechanism before her. The rest dwells on a disorienting sense of alien cognition, very strong now, not her, not
Brander, but somehow familiar.

  Ken? That you?

  "This isn't what we saw on sonar," Brander's saying. Clarke feels his confusion even as he talks over it. "Whatever we saw was moving around."

  "Whatever we saw was probably planting this," Lubin buzzes. "It's long gone by now."

  "But what is..." Brander's voice trails down to a mechanical croak.

  No. It's not Lubin. She knows that now.

  "It's thinking," she says. "It's alive."

  Lubin's got another instrument out now. Clarke can't see the visual readout but its telltale tic tic ticking carries clearly through the water.

  "It's radioactive," he says.

  * * *

  Alice Nakata's voice comes to them in the endless darkness between Beebe and the Land of the Carousel.

  "—Judy—" it whispers, almost too faint to make out. "—scatter— lay—"

  "Alice?" Clarke's got her vocoder cranked loud enough to hurt her own ears. "We can't hear you. Say again?"

  "—just— no sign—"

  Clarke can barely distinguish the words. Somehow, though, she can hear the fear in them.

  A small tremor shudders past, raising clouds of mud and swamping Nakata's signal. Lubin throttles up his squid and pulls away. Clarke and Brander follow suit. Somewhere in the darkness ahead, Beebe draws closer in decibel fractions.

  The next words they hear manage to cut through the noise: "Judy's gone!"

  "Gone?" Brander echoes. "Gone where?"

  "She just disappeared!" The voice hisses softly from every direction. "I was talking to her. She was up above the deep scattering layer, she was— I was telling her about the signal we saw and she said she saw something too and then she was gone..."