Peter Watts - Maelstrom

Something had just thrown her thirteen hundred kilometers to the northeast.

"I was sent," she finished. "I don't know, I think—to help…" She heard the absurdity in every word.

"Help." A flat voice, betraying nothing.

"Hang on a moment…" Perreault lifted the 'fly above the Greyhounds, did a quick three-sixty. She was floating over a docking bay where buses slept and suckled in rows. The main terminal loomed forty meters away, elevated loading platforms extending from its sides. Two buses were presently onloading; the animated greyhounds on their sides raced nowhere, as if running on invisible treadmills.

And there, by the decontamination stalls: a small seething knot of confusion. An aftermath. Perreault accessed the 'fly's black box, quick-scanned the previous few minutes. Suddenly, in comical fast-forward, she was closing on a younger disturbance. Even at this stage the show had been winding down, people turning away. But there was Lenie Clarke, holding an ebony shockprod. There was a man with his arms raised against her, a wide-eyed little girl hiding behind his legs.

Perreault slowed the flow. The man took a step back in realtime.

"Lady, I've never even seen you before…"

Clarke stepped forward, but some former aggression was draining from her stance. Uncertainty took its place. "I–I thought you—"

"Seriously, lady. You are one fucked-up little chimera…"

"You all right, kid?" The wand in one hand wavered. The other hand extended, tentatively. "I didn't meant to sc—"

" Go away! " the child howled.

The father glanced up, distracted by overhead motion. "You want to pick a fight?" he snarled at the mermaid. "Pick on that !" — pointing straight at the approaching 'fly.

She had run. The drone had followed, armed and hungry.

And now—somehow—Sou-Hon Perreault had been placed in possession.

Perreault dropped back down between the buses. "You're safe for the moment. You—"

The cul-de-sac was empty.

She one-eightied the 'fly; something flickered out of sight around a corner.

" Wait ! You don't understand—"

Perreault cranked the throttle. For a moment nothing happened. Then her whole perceptual field lurched , right down to the semicircular canals. A readout flickered upper-right, then held steady: RECONNECT.

Weapons icons bloomed like pulsing tumors. Somewhere in the distant realm of her own flesh, Perreault hammered frantic arpeggios against remote controls. Nothing worked.

" Run !" she cried as the link went down.

But she was back in Montana again, and her voice didn't carry.

400 Megs hovers on a knife-edge of complacency.

For thousands of generations it has known the secret of success in Maelstrom. Predators have pursued it with powerful legs and gnashing teeth; competitors have raced it to each new refuge, each new patch of forage; diseases have striven to eat it from the inside. And yet 128 begat 142, and 142 begat 137 (a bit of pruning there, getting rid of redundant code), and 137 began 150, and so on, and so on, up unto the present crisis-laden instant. All because of a very special secret encoded in the genes:

You want to get around fast in Maelstrom, the name you drop is Lenie Clarke .

400 doesn't know why this should be. That's not really the point. What it does know is, that particular string of characters gets you in anywhere . You can leap from node to node as though disinfectants and firewalls and shark-repellants did not exist. You can pass undamaged through the vicious fleshy meatgrinder that is a head cheese, a passage guaranteed to reduce you to instant static without the protective amulet of Lenie Clarke in your pocket. Even Haven —mythic, inaccessible Haven, a vast smorgasbord virtually untouched by the appetites of the living—may someday be within reach.

Problem is, too many others are getting into the act.

It's not an uncommon development in Maelstrom; evolution happens so quickly, in so many different directions, that you can't go half a second without a bunch of wannabes rediscovering the wheel you thought you had all to yourself. By now the free rides to open fields are growing crowded. Binary beasts of burden each labor under the weight of dozens of hitchhikers, each grabbing up its own little aliquot of memory, each slowing the procession a tiny bit farther. Now the carrier files themselves are attracting attention—from checksum monitors who just know in their gut that no casual e-mail should weigh in at a hundred gigs, to sharks hungry for prey grown almost too fat to move.

Want to spread your seed through Maelstrom? Hitch your wagon to Lenie Clarke . Want to be shark food? Do the same thing.

It's not everybody's problem, though. Some creatures leap around as fast as they ever did. Faster, even. Something they know, maybe. Or someone. 400Megs has never been able to figure out the secret.

It's about to, though.

400 Megs is currently inbreeding with a middling sib whose lineage only diverged a few hundred generations ago. Almost all the genes are the same, which doesn't promote a lot of diversity but at least reinforces the tried-and-true. Both parties have a few dozen copies of Lenie Clarke , for instance, which they exchange with mindless redundancy.

But no gene is an island, even in Maelstrom. There's no such thing as an independent locus. Each travels linked to others, little constellations of related traits, junk code, happenstance association. And as 400Megs is about to find out, it isn't just Lenie Clarke that matters. It's also the company she keeps.

All the bits are lining up to be counted. Replication subroutines march down the line like messenger-RNA, ready to cut and paste. Chance shuffles the cards, orgasm squirts them hence, and 400Megs injects Lenie Clarke into its cousin. Strings like vampire and Beebe and ßehemoth go along for the ride.

And in return, following the usual hermaphrodite credo of tit-for-tat, 400Megs gets Lenie Clarke with a whole different circle of friends. Like doomsday . Like meltdown . Like bestservedcold .

By all appearances, just another unremarkable fuck. But afterward, things start to change for 400Megs.

Suddenly its replication rate is going through the roof. And where before its progeny languished and withered in backwater caches, now Maelstrom itself scoops them up and copies them a thousand times over. One fine cycle a N'AmPac security sieve finds several such prodgies drifting north off the coast of the GA. Recognizing them as high-priority communications, it shunts them directly to the nearest smart gel. The gel scans the relevant embedded bits and sends copies into Haven for secure storage.

All of a sudden, the most powerful forces in Maelstrom want to give members of The 40 °Club anything they want. The Club doesn't question their good fortune; they merely exploit it.

They are no longer 400 Megs, hitchhiker.

What they are is John the fucking Baptist.

He'd been out of circulation too long. He was losing his edge. How else to explain an ambush at the hands of three glassy-eyed children on the back streets of Santa Cruz?

Of course, Lubin had had a lot on his mind. He was coming to terms with some very disturbing test results, for one thing. He'd been pursuing them for days now, rejecting each new clean bill of health, running increasingly specific tests for increasingly implausible maladies—and now, finally, there it was. Something in his blood that neither nature nor N'AmPac had put there.

Something strangely backward .