Peter Watts - Beyond the Rift

“I really overstepped myself,” she says at last.

No. Concentration. She’s rebuilding her defences, she’s pushing the tip of that bloody iceberg back below the surface. It can’t be easy. Thomas can see it, ponderous and massively buoyant, pushing up from the depths while Jasmine Fitzgerald leans down and desperately pretends not to strain.

“I know it must be difficult to think about,” Thomas says.

She shrugs. “Sometimes.” Going … “When my head slips back into the old school. Old habits die hard.” Going… “But I get over it.”

The frown disappears.

Gone.

“You know when I told you about Core Wars?” she asks brightly.

After a moment, Thomas nods.

“All viruses replicate, but some of the better ones can write macros— micros , actually, would be a better name for them—to other addresses, little subroutines that autonomously perform simple tasks. And some of those can replicate too. Get my drift?”

“Not really,” Thomas says quietly.

“I really should have souped you up a bit more. Anyway, those little routines, they can handle all the book-keeping. Each one tracks a few variables, and each time they replicate that’s a few more, and pretty soon there’s no limit to the size of the problem you can handle. Hell, you could rewrite the whole damn operating system from the inside out and not have to worry about any of the details, all your little daemons are doing that for you.”

“Are we all just viruses to you, Jaz?”

She laughs at that, not unkindly. “Ah, Myles. It’s a technical term, not a moral judgement. Life’s information, shaped by natural selection. That’s all I mean.”

“And you’ve learned to—rewrite the code,” Thomas says.

She shakes her head. “Still learning. But I’m getting better at it all the time.”

“I see.” Thomas pretends to check his watch. He still doesn’t know the jargon. He never will. But at least, at last, he knows where she’s coming from.

Nothing left but the final platitudes.

“That’s all I need right now, Jasmine. I want to thank you for being so co-operative. I know how tough this must be on you.”

She cocks her head at him, smiling. “This is goodbye then, Myles? You haven’t come close to curing me.”

He smiles back. He can almost feel each muscle fibre contracting, the increased tension on facial tendons, soft tissue stretching over bone. The utter insincerity of a purely mechanical process. “That’s not what I’m here for, Jaz.”

“Right. You’re assessing my fitness.”

Thomas nods.

“Well?” she asks after a moment. “Am I fit?”

He takes a breath. “I think you have some problems you haven’t faced. But you can understand counsel, and there’s no doubt you could follow any proceedings the court is likely to throw at you. Legally, that means you can stand trial.”

“Ah. So I’m not sane, but I’m not crazy enough to get off, eh?”

“I hope things work out for you.” That much, at least, is sincere.

“Oh, they will,” she says easily. “Never fear. How much longer do I stay here?”

“Maybe another three weeks. Thirty days is the usual period.”

“But you’ve finished with me. Why so long?”

He shrugs. “Nowhere else to put you, for now.”

“Oh.” She considers. “Just as well, I guess. It’ll give me more time to practice.”

“Goodbye, Jasmine.”

“Too bad you missed Stuart,” she says behind him. “You’d have liked him. Maybe I’ll bring him around to your place sometime.”

The doorknob sticks. He tries again.

“Something wrong?” she asks.

“No,” Thomas says, a bit too quickly. “It’s just—”

“Oh, right. Hang on a sec.” She rustles in her sheets.

He turns his head. Jasmine Fitzgerald lies flat on her back, unblinking, staring straight up. Her breath is fast and shallow.

The doorknob seems subtly warmer in his hand.

He releases it. “Are you okay?”

“Sure,” she says to the ceiling. “Just tired. Takes a bit out of you, you know?”

Call the nurse , he thinks.

“Really, I just need some rest.” She looks at him one last time, and giggles. “But Myles to go before I sleep…”

“Dr. Desjardins, please.”

“Speaking.”

“You performed the autopsy on Stuart MacLennan?”

A brief silence. Then: “Who is this?”

“My name’s Myles Thomas. I’m a psychologist at FPSS. Jasmine Fitzgerald is—was a client of mine.”

The phone sits there in his hand, silent.

“I was looking at the case report, writing up my assessment, and I just noticed something about your findings—”

“They’re preliminary,” Desjardins interrupts. “I’ll have the full report, um, shortly.”

“Yes, I understand that, Dr. Desjardins. But my understanding is that MacLennan was, well, mortally wounded.”

“He was gutted like a fish,” Desjardins says.

“Right. But your r—your preliminary report lists cause of death as ‘undetermined.’”

“That’s because I haven’t determined the cause of death.”

“Right. I guess I’m a bit confused about what else it could have been. You didn’t find any toxins in the body, at least none that weren’t involved in MacLennan’s chemo, and no other injuries except for these fistulas and teratomas—”

The phone barks in Thomas’s hand, a short ugly laugh. “Do you know what a teratoma is ?” Desjardins asks.

“I assumed it was something to do with his cancer.”

“Ever hear the term primordial cyst ?”

“No.”

“Hope you haven’t eaten recently,” Desjardins says. “Every now and then you get a clump of proliferating cells floating around in the coelomic cavity. Something happens to activate the dormant genes— could be a lot of things, but the upshot is you sometimes get these growing blobs of tissue sprouting teeth and hair and bone. Sometimes they get as big as grapefruits.”

“My God. MacLennan had one of those in him?”

“I thought, maybe. At first. Turned out to be a chunk of his kidney. Only there was an eye growing out of it. And most of his abdominal lymph nodes, too, the ducts were clotted with hair and something like fingernail. It was keratinised, anyway.”

“That’s horrible,” Thomas whispers.

“No shit. Not to mention the perforated diaphragm, or the fact that half the loops of his small intestine were fused together.”

“But I thought he had leukaemia.”

“He did. That wasn’t what killed him.”

“So you’re saying these teratomas might have had some role in MacLennan’s death?”

“I don’t see how,” Desjardins says.

“But—”

“Look, maybe I’m not making myself clear. I have my doubts that Stuart MacLennan died from his wife’s carving skills because any one of the abnormalities I found should have killed him more or less instantly.”

“But that’s pretty much impossible, isn’t it? I mean, what did the investigating officers say?”

“Quite frankly, I don’t think they read my report,” Desjardins grumbles. “Neither did you, apparently, or you would have called me before now.”

“Well, it wasn’t really central to my assessment, Dr. Desjardins. And besides, it seemed so obvious—”

“For sure. You see someone laid open from crotch to sternum, you don’t need any report to know what killed him. Who cares about any of this congenital abnormality bullshit?”

Congen —“You’re saying he was born that way?”

“Except he couldn’t have been. He’d never have even made it to his first breath.”

“So you’re saying—”