Peter Watts - Behemoth

She resolved to find out.

She was no codemeister. She knew nothing about growing programs or pruning software to specs. She did, however, know how to snap prefab components together, and Phocoena 's lockers and glove compartments were overflowing with the legacy of five years' service. The little sub had carried a thousand survey instruments to Impossible Lake, served in the repair and maintenance of them all. It had slipped across thermoclines and through Langmuir Cells, seeding drogues and TDRs into the water column. It had spied on corpses and moved supplies and served as a general workhorse far beyond anything its designers had ever intended. After five years, it had accumulated more than enough building blocks for Lenie Clarke to play with.

She found a Cohen board in the bottom of a drawer, plugged a battery onto one of its sockets and a generic OS chip onto another. A tracery of whisker-thin filaments flickered briefly between the new components as the board's autodiscovery routines sniffed them out and made introductions. She had to look a little harder for a user interface; she couldn't risk a wireless hookup. Finally she found an old fiberop headset with an integrated infrared keyboard, and plugged it in. More flickering handshakes.

She slid on the headset. A pastel keyboard hovered in the air before her. She reached out; the headset's infrared eyes watched her hands move in empty space, mapped real fingers onto illusory controls. She brought up a map of the Cohen board, built a fence around a handful of empty sockets, cut a single gateway and locked it tight from the outside. She assigned a panic button, just in case: it floated off to one side, an orange spark in virtual space. There would be no need to reach out and touch it. Merely focusing her eyes on that icon would freeze the system solid. But the safeguard had a price attached. The headset couldn't see through photocollagen. Her eyes would have to be stripped naked during the encounter.

She doffed the headset and regarded her handiwork in the real world: two miniscule Platonic solids and a thread of fiberop rising from a dimpled grid of empty pinhead sockets. A sparse right-angle spiderweb of emerald threads connected the plug-ins. Beside it, a glowing crimson border enclosed a rectangular patch of unoccupied terrain.

It was completely self-contained and utterly isolated. There were no antennae, no wireless interfaces, nothing that could send a signal from that landscape to any other. Nothing plugged into the board would be able to get off of it.

She studied the infected and excised lobe of Miri's brain: a Lilliputian necklace of OPMs and memory chips lying isolated and inert in the palm of her hand. For all Clarke knew there was nothing left inside; the memory was nonvolatile, but who knew what damage had been inflicted during the exorcism? She remembered her challenge to Ken Lubin— how do you know I can't wake the fucker with a kiss? — but she had no idea how to actually do that. She'd kept these components only because she could not throw them away. And because she hoped that if she spoke to the thing inside, it might speak back.

She lifted the necklace with a pair of force-feedback tweezers whose touch was as fine as eyelashes. She seated it into the center of the red zone. Green threads sprouted from the other components and converged just outside the gate, and stopped.

She donned the headset. She took a breath.

She opened the gate.

An explosion of pixels, right in front of her. Anger and ravenous hunger and bared teeth, furious input that bypassed the upper brain entirely and plunged icy needles right into the brainstem.

" Let —"

The flight response took over before she'd even parsed what she'd seen; the orange panic-button flared in her sights. The image froze.

She realized she was gasping. She forced herself to calm down.

A motionless face, black and green and radiant. A furious portrait of inverted flesh-tones. It didn't look like her at all. Except for the eyes: those empty, raging eyes.

And not even those , she remembered after a moment. Because her eyes were uncapped, now. She faced this radioactive doppelganger completely naked.

Is this what I was?

She took a breath, held it briefly, let it out. She focused on the panic button and released it.

" —me out! " the apparition screamed.

Clarke shook her head. "There's nowhere for you to go."

" Let me out or I'll grind every fucking address in here to pulp! "

"Answer some questions first."

"Answer this , you worm-riddled twat."

The universe flickered and went out.

Nothing but her own rapid breathing and the quiet hiss of Phocoena 's air conditioner. After a moment, her headset etched a message across the void:

System Crash. Restart?

Y N

Clarke tried again.

" Let me out! "

She shook her head. "Tell me what you want."

"What do you want?" The question seemed to calm the monster down a bit. It even smiled. "You don't want to fuck with me, friend. I've killed more people than you can count."

"Why? Revenge? For the GA? For—for Daddy, for what he did while mom was—how could you care about that? How could you even know ?"

The face desaturated, its black-light pigments fading as if in twilight. In moments it was blacks and grays and two angry, crystalline ovals of pure white.

"Are you trying to kill everyone?" Clarke asked softly. "Are you trying to kill yourself ?"

It glared at her and spat, " Kill yourself? You —"

Dark, and void, and System Crash.

And the next time.

And the next.

A CSIRA drone, floating like thistledown just below the jet stream, caught the heat trace at 0300. It was warming Service Road 23 northeast of Skowhagen, and it shared certain characteristics with another source— two hours older— that had been glimpsed by a lifter shipping medical supplies out of Portland. Resupply hauls weren't normally charged with surveillance, but everyone was on alert since the word had come down from Sudbury.

Both signatures matched the emissions put out by a brand of hydrogen cell that hadn't been manufactured since 2044. Someone was driving the shit out of an old Ford Fugitive, traveling inland along back roads in the middle of the night.

One of Ouellette's vectors had driven a Fugitive. Lubin caught up with her somewhere on the far side of the New Hampshire border.

Desjardins had requisitioned him an ultralight. It wasn't as fast as ground-effect transport, but its cruising altitude was a lot higher and it drank fewer Joules than a chopper. Lubin was flying west at about two hundred meters when the Ford bounced sunlight into his eye. It was parked on the edge of an acid-washed bog full of rusty tannins and jagged waterlogged stumps. The wetland seemed to have grown since Highway Maintenance had given up on the neighborhood; a tongue of dark water lapped across a few meters of low-lying asphalt just ahead of the vehicle.

That wasn't what had stopped it, though.

Lubin landed fifty meters up the road and approached from behind. His inlays performed the usual schematic vivisection as he drew near, cluttered up his vision with icons and wiring diagrams. His gut rebelled at the mere thought of tuning out usable intel from any source, but sometimes it distracted more than it informed. He shut down the display in his head; the Fugitive dropped back into the real world, seemed to flatten somehow, luminous guts vanishing behind dirty plastic skin.

A blonde mocha woman sat in the driver's seat, forehead against the wheel, long straight hair obscuring her face. She seemed oblivious to his approach.