Peter Watts - Maelstrom

"You liar," the stickman said quietly. "You hypocrite."

"You're starving, Amitav. You'll die."

"I know what I do."

"Do you?"

He looked up at the 'fly again, and this time he almost seemed amused. "What do you think I was, before?"

"What?"

"Before I was—here. Or did you think that environmental refugee was my first choice of vocation?"

"Well, I—"

"I was a pharmaceutical engineer," Amitav said. He tapped his temple. "They even changed me up here, so I was very good at it. I am not completely foolish about dietary matters. There appears to be a—a minimum effective dosage, yes? If I eat very little, your poisons have no effect." He paused. "So now you will try and force-feed me, for my own good?"

Perreault ignored the jibe. "And you think you're getting enough to live on, under your minimum dosage ?"

"Perhaps not quite. But I am starving very, very slowly."

"Is that how you motivated those kids to trash the cycler? Are they fasting too?" There could be serious trouble on the Strip if that caught on.

"Me, still? I have somehow tricked all these people into starving themselves?"

"Who else?"

"Such faith you have in your machines. You have never thought that perhaps they are not working as well as you think?" He shook his head and spat. "Of course not. You were not told to."

"The cyclers work fine until your followers smash them."

" My followers? They never fasted for me . They suck at your tits as they always have. It is only afterthey begin starving that they see your cyclers for what they—"

Crack!

An impact on polymer, the sound of a whip snapping just behind her ear. She spun the 'fly, caught a glimpse of the rock as it bounced along the substrate. Ten meters down the shore, a girl ran away with another rock clenched in her hand.

Perreault turned back to face Amitav. "You—"

"Do not try to blame me. I am the cause of nothing. I am only the result."

"This can't go on, Amitav."

"You cannot stop it."

"I won't have to. If you keep this up it won't be me you're dealing with, it'll be—"

"Why do you care?" Amitav cut in.

"I'm just trying to—"

"You are trying to ease feelings of guilt. Use someone else."

"You can't win."

"That depends upon what I am trying to do."

"You're all alone."

Amitav laughed, waved his arms back across the shore. "How can I be? You have so thoughtfully provided all these sheep, and all this death, and even an ic—"

He stopped himself. Perreault filled in the gap: an icon to inspire them .

"She's not here any more," she said after a moment.

Amitav glanced back upshore; the eastern sky was beginning to lighten. A knot of curious humans stood halfway up the shore, watching from the center of a sleeping flock. Here at the water's edge, there was no one else within earshot.

The girl who'd thrown the rock was nowhere to be seen.

"Perhaps that is better," the stickman remarked. "Lenie Clarke was very—not even your antidepressants seemed to work on her."

"Lenie? That's her first name?"

"I believe so. At least, that was the name she used during one of her—visions." He glanced sideways at Perreault's floating surrogate. "Where did she go?"

"I don't know. I just haven't been able to confirm any recent sightings. Just rumors." But of course, you'd know all about those… "Maybe she's dead."

The stickman shook his head.

"It's a big ocean, Amitav. The sharks. And if she was having—fits of some kind—"

"She is not dead. I think perhaps there was a time when she wanted to be, once. Now…"

He stared inland. On the eastern horizon, past the people and the trampled scrub and the towers, the sky was turning red.

"Now, you are not so lucky," Amitav said.

He'd left the map smoldering on his board the night before. Alice Jovellanos was waiting beside it, ready to pounce.

"Why didn't you say something?" On the display, a luminous bloodstain ran down the coast from Westport to Copalis Beach.

"Alice—"

"You've got a hot zone the size of a city here! How long have you known?"

"Just last night. I tightened some of the correlations and ran it against yesterday's snaps and—"

She cut him off: "You let this sit all night ? Jesus Christ , Killjoy, what's wrong with you? We've got to call in the troops and I mean now ."

He stared at her. "Since when did you join the fire brigade? You know what'll happen the moment we pass this up the line. We don't even know what ßehemoth does y—"

Her expression stopped him cold.

He slumped into his chair. The display bled crimson light all over him. "Is it that bad?"

"It's worse," she said.

A lumpy rainbow, a string of clustered beads folded around itself: purines or pyrimidines or nucleics or whatever the fuck they were.

ßehemoth's source code. Part of it, anyway.

"It's not even a helix," he said at last.

"Actually, it's got a weak left-handed twist. That's not the point."

"What is?"

"Pyranosal RNA. Much stronger Watson-Crick pairs than your garden-variety RNA, and a lot more selective in terms of pairing modes. Guanine-rich sequences won't self-pair, for one thing. Six-sided ring."

"English, Alice. So what?"

"It'll replicate faster than the stuff in your genes, and it won't make as many errors when it does."

"But what does it do ?"

"It just lives , Killjoy. It lives, and it eats, and I think it does that better than anything else on the planet so we either stamp it out or kiss the whole biosphere goodbye."

He couldn't believe it. " One bug ? How is that even possible?"

"Nothing eats it, for one thing. The cell wall's barely even organic, mostly it's just a bunch of sulfur compounds. You know how I told you some bacteria use inverted aminos to make themselves indigestible? This is ten times worse—most anything that might eat this fucker wouldn't even recognise it as food through all the minerals."

Desjardins bit his lower lip.

"It gets better," Jovellanos went on. "This thing's a veritable black hole of sulfur assimilation. I don't know where it learned this trick but it can snatch the stuff right out of our cells . Some kind of lysteriolysin analog, keeps it from getting lysed. That gums up glucose transport, protein synthesis, lipid and carb metabolism—shit, it gums up everything ."

"There's no shortage of sulfur , Alice."

"Oh, there's lots to go around now . We fart the stuff out, nobody's even bothered to come up with a recommended daily dosage. But this, this ßehemoth, it needs sulfur even more than we do. And it breeds faster and it chews faster and believe me, Killjoy, in a few years there is not going to be enough to go around and this little fucker's gonna have the market cornered ."

"That's just—" A straw floated to the front of his mind. He grasped it: "How can you be so sure? You didn't even think you had all the pieces to work with."

"I was wrong."

"But—you said no phospholipids, no—"

" It doesn't have those things. It never did. "

"What?"

" It's simple , it's so simple it's bloody well indestructible. No bilayer membranes, no—" She spread her hands, as if in surrender. "Yeah, I did think maybe they scrambled the sample to keep me from stealing trade secrets. Maybe even filtered some stuff right out, stupid as that might seem. Corpses have done dumber things. But I was wrong." She ran the fingers of one hand nervously over her scalp. "It was all there. All the pieces. And you know why I think they scrambled them up the way they did? I think they were afraid of what this thing could do if they left it in one piece."