Rifters 1 - Starfish

by Peter Watts

  Go on.

  He pushes off the bottom, glides into the cone of shadow beneath the object. A bright shiny disk a meter across, facing down, wriggles inside a circular rim. He looks up into it.

  Something looks back.

  Startled, he twists down and away. The disk writhes in the sudden turbulence. He stops, turns back.

  A bubble. That's all it is. A pocket of gas, trapped underneath the

  —the airlock.

  That's nothing to be scared of, Shadow tells him. That's how you get in.

  Still nervous, he swims back underneath the sphere. The air pocket shines silver in the reflected light. A black wraith moves into view within it, almost featureless except for two empty white spaces where eyes should be. It reaches out to meet his outstretched hand. Two sets of fingertips touch, fuse, disappear. One arm is grafted onto its own reflection at the wrist. Fingers, on the other side of the looking glass, touch metal.

  He pulls back his hand, fascinated. The wraith floats overhead, empty and untroubled.

  He draws one hand to his face, runs an index finger from one ear to the tip of the jaw. A very long molecule, folded against itself, unzips.

  The wraith's smooth black face splits open a few centimeters; what's underneath shows pale gray in the filtered light. He feels the familiar dimpling of his cheek in sudden cold.

  He continues the motion, slashing his face from ear to ear. A great smiling gash opens below the wraith's eyespots. Unzipped, a flap of black membrane floats under its chin, anchored at the throat.

  There's a pucker in the center of the skinned area. He moves his jaw; the pucker opens.

  By now most of his teeth are gone. He's swallowed some, spat others out if they came loose when his face was unsealed. No matter. Most of the things he eats these days are even softer than he is. When the occasional mollusk or echinoderm proves too tough or too large to swallow whole, there are always hands. Thumbs still oppose.

  But this is the first time he's actually seen that gaping, toothless ruin where a mouth used to be. He knows this isn't right, somehow.

  What happened to me? What am I?

  You're Gerry, Shadow says. You're my best friend. You killed me. Remember?

  She's gone, Gerry realizes.

  It's okay.

  I know it is. I know.

  You helped her, Gerry. She's safe now. You saved her.

  I know. And he remembers something, small and vital, it that last instant before everything turns white as the sun:

  —This is what you do when you really—

  Sunrise

  The lifter was still reeling CSS Forcipiger up into its belly when the news appeared on the main display. Joel checked it over, frowning, then deliberately looked outside. Gray predawn light was starting to wash out the eastern horizon.

  When he looked back again, the information hadn't changed. "Shit. This doesn't make any sense at all."

  "What?" Clarke said.

  "We're not going back to Astoria. Or I am, but you're getting dropped off over the conshelf somewhere."

  "What?" Clarke came forward, stopped just short of the cockpit.

  "Says right here. We follow the usual course, but we dip down to zero altitude fifteen klicks offshore. You debark. Then I go on to Astoria."

  "What's offshore?"

  He checked. "Nothing. Water."

  "Maybe a boat? A submarine?" Her voice went oddly dull on the last word.

  "Maybe. No mention of it here, though." He grunted. "Maybe you're supposed to swim the rest of the way."

  The lifter locked them tight. Tame thunderbolts exploded aft, superheating bladders of gas. The ocean began to fall away.

  "So you're just going to dump me in the middle of the ocean," Clarke said coldly.

  "It's not my decision."

  "Of course not. You're just following orders."

  Joel turned around. Her eyes stared back at him like twin snowscapes.

  "You don't understand," he told her. "These aren't orders. I don't fly the lifter."

  "Then what—"

  "The pilot's a gel. It's not telling me to do anything. It's just bringing us up to speed on what it's doing, all on its own."

  She didn't say anything for a moment. Then, "Is that the way it's done now? We take orders from machines?"

  "Someone must have given the original order. The gel's following it. They haven't taken over yet. And besides," he added, "they're not exactly machines."

  "Oh," she said softly. "I feel much better now."

  Uncomfortably, Joel turned back to the console. "It is kind of odd, though."

  "Really." Clarke didn't seem especially interested.

  "Getting this from the gel, I mean. We've got a radio link. Why didn't someone just tell us?"

  "Because your radio's out," Clarke said distantly.

  Surprised, he checked the diagnostics. "No, it's working fine. In fact, I think I'll call in right now and ask what the fuck this is all about..."

  Thirty seconds later he turned back to her. "How did you know?"

  "Lucky guess." She didn't smile.

  "Well the board's green, but I can't raise anyone. We're flying deaf." A doubt tickled the back of his mind. "Unless the gel's got access we don't, for some reason." He linked into the lifter's interface and called up that vehicle's afferent array. "Huh. What was that you said about machines giving the orders?"

  That got her attention. "What is it?"

  "The lifter got its orders through the Net."

  "Isn't that risky? Why doesn't the GA just talk to it direct?"

  "Dunno. It's as cut off as we are right now, but the last message came from this node here. Shit; that's another gel."

  Clarke leaned forward, managing somehow not to touch him in the crowded space. "How can you tell?"

  "The node address. BCC stands for biochemical cognition."

  The display beeped twice, loudly.

  "What's that?" Clarke said.

  Sunlight flooded up from the ocean. It shone deep and violent blue.

  "What the fuck—"

  The cabin filled with computer screams. The altimeter readout flashed crimson and plummeted. We're falling, Joel thought, and then, no, we can't be. No acceleration.

  The ocean's rising...

  The display was a blizzard of data, swirling by too fast for human eyes. Somewhere overhead the gel was furiously processing options that might keep them alive. A sudden lurch: Joel grabbed useless submarine controls and hung on for dear life. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Clarke flying back towards the rear bulkhead.

  The lifter clawed itself into the sky, lightning crackling along its length. The ocean raced after it, an enormous glowing bulge swelling towards the ventral port. Its murky light brightened as Joel watched; blue intensifying to green, to yellow.

  To white.

  A hole opened in the Pacific. The sun rose in its center. Joel flung his hands in front of his eyes, saw the bones there silhouetted in orange flesh. The lifter spun like a kicked toy, rammed deep into the sky on a pillar of steam. Outside, the air screamed. The lifter screamed back, skidding.

  But it didn't break.

  Somehow, after endless seconds, the keel steadied. The readouts were still online; atmospheric disturbance, they said, almost eight kilometers away now, bearing one-twenty. Joel looked out the starboard port. Off in the distance, the glowing ocean was ponderously collapsing upon itself. Ring-shaped waves expanded past beneath his feet, racing to the horizon.

  Back where they had started, cumulus grew into the sky like a soft gray beanstalk. From here, against the darkness, it looked almost peaceful.

  "Clarke," he said, "we made it."

  He turned in his chair. The rifter was curled into a fetal position against the bulkhead. She didn't move.

  "Clarke?"

  But it wasn't Clarke that answered him. The lifter's interface was bleating again.

  Unregistered contact, it complained.

  Bearing 125x87 V1440 6V5.8m1s
ec-2 range 13000m

  Collision imminent 12000m

  11000m

  10000m

  Barely visible through the main viewport, a white cloudy dot caught a high-altitude shaft of morning sunlight. It looked like a contrail, seen head-on.

  "Ah, shit," Joel said.

  Jericho

  One whole wall was window. The city spread out beyond like a galactic arm. Patricia Rowan locked the door behind her, sagged against it with sudden fatigue.

  Not yet. Not yet. Soon.

  She went through her office and turned out all the lights. City glow spilled in through the window, denied her any refuge in darkness.

  Patricia Rowan stared back. A tangled grid of metropolitan nerves stretched to the horizon, every synapse incandescent. Her eyes wandered southwest, selected a bearing. She stared until her eyes watered, almost afraid even to blink for fear of missing something.

  That was where it would come from.

  Oh God. If only there was another way.

  It could have worked. The modellers had put even money on pulling this off without so much as a broken window. All those faults and fractures between here and there would work in their favor, firebreaks to keep the tremor from getting this far. Just wait for the right moment; a week, a month. Timing. That's all it would've taken.

  Timing, and a calculating slab of meat that followed human rules instead of making up its own.

  But she couldn't blame the gel. It simply didn't know any better, according to the systems people; it was just doing what it thought it was supposed to. And by the time anybody knew differently— after Scanlon's cryptic interview with that fucking thing had looped in her head for the hundredth time, after she'd taken the recording down to CC, after their faces had gone puzzled and confused and then, suddenly, pale and panicky— by then it had been too late. The window was closed. The machine was engaged. And a lone GA shuttle, officially docked securely at Astoria, was somehow showing up on satcams hovering over the Juan de Fuca Rift.

  She couldn't blame the gel, so she tried to blame CC. "After all that programming, how could this thing be working for ßehemoth? Why didn't you catch it? Even Scanlon figured it out, for Christ's sake!" But they'd been too scared for intimidation. You gave us the job, they'd said. You didn't tell us what was at stake. You didn't even really tell us what we were doing. Scanlon came at this from a whole different angle, who knew the head cheese had a thing for simple systems? We never taught it that...

  Her watch chimed softly. "You asked to be informed, Ms. Rowan. Your family got off okay."

  "Thank you," she said, and killed the connection.

  A part of her felt guilty for saving them. It hardly seemed fair that the only ones to escape the holocaust would be the beloved of one of its architects. But she was only doing what any mother would. Probably more: she was staying behind.

  That wasn't much. It probably wouldn't even kill her. The GA's buildings were built with the Big One in mind. Most of the buildings in this district would probably still be standing this time tomorrow. Of course, the same couldn't be said for much of Hongcouver or SeaTac or Victoria.

  Tomorrow, she would help pick up the pieces as best she could.

  Maybe we'll get lucky. Maybe the quake won't be so bad. Who knows, that gel down there might even have chosen tonight anyway...

  Please...

  Patricia Rowan had seen earthquakes before. A strike-slip fault off Peru had rebounded the time she'd been in Lima on the Upwell project; the moment magnitude of that quake had been close to nine. Every window in the city had exploded.

  She actually hadn't had a chance to see much of the damage then. She'd been trapped in her hotel when forty-six stories of glass collapsed onto the streets outside. It was a good hotel, five stars all the way; the ground-level windows, at least, had held. Rowan remembered looking out from the lobby into a murky green glacier of broken glass, seven meters deep, packed tight with blood and wreckage and butchered body parts jammed between piecemeal panes. One brown arm was embedded right next to the lobby window, waving, three meters off the ground. It was missing three fingers and a body. She'd spied the fingers a meter away, pressed floating sausages, but she hadn't been able to tell which of the bodies, if any, would have connected to that shoulder.

  She remembered wondering how that arm had got so high off the ground. She remembered vomiting into a wastebasket.

  It couldn't happen here, of course. This was N'AmPac; there were standards. Every building in the lower mainland had windows designed to break inwards in the event of a quake. It wasn't an ideal solution— especially to those who happened to be inside at the time— but it was the best compromise available. Glass can't get up nearly as much speed in a single room as it can racing down the side of a skyscraper.

  Small blessings.

  If only there was some other way to sterilize the necessary volume. If only ßehemoth didn't, by it's very nature, live in unstable areas. If only N'AmPac corpses weren't authorized to use nukes.

  If only the vote hadn't been unanimous.

  Priorities. Billions of people. Life as we know it.

  It was hard, though. The decisions were obvious and correct, tactically, but it had been hard to keep Beebe's crew quarantined down there. It had been hard to decide to sacrifice them. And now that they somehow seemed to be getting out anyway, it was—

  Hard? Hard to bring at 9.5 moment-magitude quake down on the heads of ten million people? Just hard?

  There was no word for it.

  But she had done it, somehow. The only moral alternative. It was still just murder in small doses, compared to what might be necessary down the—

  No. This is being done so nothing will be necessary down the road.

  Maybe that was why she could bring herself to do it. Or maybe, somehow, reality had finally trickled down from her brain to her gut, inspired it to take the necessary steps. Certainly, something had hit her down there.

  I wonder what Scanlon would say. It was too late to ask him now. She'd never told him, of course. She was never even tempted. To tell him that they knew, that his secret was out, that once again he just didn't matter that much— somehow, that would have been worse than killing him. She'd had no desire to hurt the poor man.

  Her watch chimed again. "Override," it said.

  Oh God. Oh God.

  It had started, out there beyond the lights, under three black kilometers of seawater. That crazy kamikaze gel, interrupted in the midst of one of its endless imaginary games: forget that shit. Time to blow.

  And perhaps, confused, it was saying Not now, it's the wrong time, the damage. But it didn't matter any more. Another computer— a stupid one this time, inorganic and programmable and completely trustworthy— would send the requisite sequence of numbers and the gel would be right out of the loop, no matter what it thought.

  Or maybe it just saluted and stood aside. Maybe it didn't care. Who knew what those monsters thought any more?

  "Detonation," said the watch.

  The city went dark.

  The abyss rushed in, black and hungry. One isolated cluster sparkled defiantly in the sudden void; a hospital perhaps, running on batteries. A few private vehicles, self-powered antiques, staggered like fireflies along streets gone suddenly blind. The rapitrans grid was still glowing too, more faintly than usual.

  Rowan checked her watch; only an hour since the decision. Only an hour since their hand had been forced. Somehow, it seemed a lot longer.

  "Tactical feed from seismic 31," she said. "Descramble."

  Her eyes filled with information. A false-color map snapped into focus in the air before her, a scarred ocean floor laid bare and stretched vertically. One of those scars was shuddering.

  Beyond the virtual display, beyond the window, a section of cityscape flickered weakly alight. Further north, another sector began to shine. Rowan's minions were frantically rerouting power from Gorda and Mendocino, from equatorial sunfarms, from a thousand small dams scattered througho
ut the Cordillera. It would take time, though. More than they had.

  Perhaps we should have warned them. Even an hour's advance notice would have been something. Not enough time for evac, of course, but maybe enough time to take the china off the shelves. Enough time to line up some extra backups, for all the good they'd do. Lots of time for the entire coast to panic if the word got out. Which was why not even her own family had any idea of the reason behind their sudden surprise trip to the east coast.

  The sea floor rippled in Rowan's eyes, as though made of rubber. Floating just above it, a translucent plane representing the ocean's surface was shedding rings. The two shockwaves raced each other across the display, the seabed tremor in the lead. It bore down on the Cascadia Subduction Zone, crashed into it, sent weaker tremors shivering off along the fault at right angles. It seemed to hesitate there for a moment, and Rowan almost dared to hope that the Zone had firewalled it.

  But now the Zone itself began to slide, slow, ponderous, almost indiscernible at first. Way down in the moho, five hundred-year-old fingernails began tearing painfully free. Five centuries of pent-up tension, slumping.

  Next stop, Vancouver Island.

  Something unthinkable was rebounding along the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Kelp harvesters and supertankers would be sensing impossible changes in the depth of the water column below them. If there were humans on board, they'd have a few moments to reflect on how utterly useless a ninety second warning can be.

  It was more than the Strip got.

  The tactical display didn't show any of the details, of course. It showed a brown ripple sweeping across coastal bedrock and moving inland. It showed a white arc gliding in behind, at sea level. It didn't show the ocean rearing up offshore like a range of foothills. It didn't show sea level turning on edge. It didn't show a thirty-meter wall of ocean smashing five million refugees into jelly.

  Rowan saw it all anyway.

  She blinked three times, eyes stinging: the display vanished. In the distance the red pinpoints of ambulance and police lights were flashing here and there across the comatose grid; whether in response to alarms already sounded or merely pending, she didn't know. Distance and soundproofing blocked any siren song.