Peter Watts - Maelstrom

Interested?

Not enough information to be useful. Just enough to catch the attention of someone like him. Not data at all, really: bait.

Reply.

"Thanks for dropping in." Canned voice, no graphic.

Desjardins flipped his own voice filter on. "Got your message. What can I do for you?"

"We have a mutual interest in biochemistry," the voice said pleasantly. "I have information you might find useful. The reverse may also be true."

"And who are you, exactly?"

"I'm someone who shares your interest in biochemistry, and who has information you might find useful."

"Actually," Desjardins remarked, "you’re a secretarial app. Pretty basic one, too."

Nothing disagreed.

"Okay then. Pocket whatever you've got and tag it the same way you tagged your invite. I'll pick it up on my next sweep and get back to you."

"Sorry," said the app. "That doesn't work from this end."

Of course not . "So what would work for you?"

"I'd like to meet."

"Fine. Name a time, I'll clear a channel."

"Face-to-face."

"Well, as I—you mean in person ?"

"Yes."

"What for ?"

"I'm suspicious by nature. I don't trust digital images. I can be at your location within forty-eight hours."

"Do you know my location?"

"No."

"You know, if I wasn't also suspicious by nature , I sure as shit would be now," Desjardins said.

"Then an interest in biochemistry is not all we have in common."

Desjardins hated it when apps did that—threw in little asides and lame witticisms to appear more human. Of course, Desjardins hated it when people did that, too.

"If you'd like to choose a place and time we could meet," the app told him, "I'll be sure to show up."

"How do you know I'm not quarantined?" For that matter, how do I know you're not? What am I getting into here?

"That won't be a problem."

"What are you really? Some kind of loyalty test Rowan's siccing on me?"

"I don't understand."

"Because it's really not necessary. A corpse of all people should know that." Whoever the app was negotiating for had to be corpse-level at least, to be so confident about travel clearances. Unless the whole thing was some kind of pointless and elaborate put-on.

"I'm not administering a loyalty test," the app replied. "I'm asking for a date."

"Okay, then. Pickering's Pile. Drink'n'drug in Sudbury, Ontario. Wednesday, 1930."

"That will be fine. How will I know you?"

"Not so fast. I think I'd rather approach you."

"That would be a problem."

"That is a problem. If you think I'm going to amble innocently into the clutches of someone who won't even give me their name, you're sadly in need of a patch."

"I'm sorry to hear that. However, it doesn't matter. We can still meet."

"Not if neither of us knows how to tag the other, we can't."

"I'll see you on Wednesday," the app told him. "Goodbye."

"Wait a second…"

No answer.

Oh, man. Someone was going to meet him on Wednesday. Someone who evidently could drop down onto any place under geosynch at 48 hours' notice. Someone who knew of a link between Channer Vent and ßehemoth, and who seemed to think they could find him without any identifiers at all.

Someone was going to meet him whether he wanted to or not.

Achilles Desjardins found that a little bit ominous.

There were places in the world that lived on the arteries between here and there ; whatever they generated within wasn’t self-sustaining. When tourniqueted—a quarantine, a poisoned water table, the sheer indifference of citizens abandoning some industrial lost-cause—they withered and turned gangrenous.

Sometimes, eventually, the walls would come down. The quarantine would end or atrophy. Gates would open, or just rust away. But by then it was too late; the tissue was long since necrotic. No new blood flowed into the dead zone. Maybe a few intermittent flickers along underground cables, peripheral nerves where Maelstrom jumped the gap. Maybe a few people who hadn't gotten out in time, still alive; others arriving, not so much seeking this place as avoiding some other.

Lenie Clarke was in such a place now, a town full of wreckage and smashed windows and hollow eyes staring from buildings nobody had bothered to condemn. Whatever life was here did not, for the most part, take any notice of her passing. She avoided the obvious territorial boundaries: the toothless skulls of children significantly arranged along a particular curb; a half-mummified corpse, crucified upside-down beneath the cryptic phrase St. Peter the Unworthy ; derelict vehicles that just happened to block this road or that—rusty barricades, herding the unwary toward some central slaughterhouse like fish in a weir.

Two days before she'd skirted a coven of do-gooders who'd been live-trapping derelicts as though they were field mice, forcibly injecting them with some kind of gene cocktail. Xanthoplast recipes, probably. Since then, she’d managed to avoid seeing anyone. She moved only at night, when her marvelous eyes gave her every advantage. She steered clear of the local headquarters and territorial checkpoints with their burning oil drums and their light poles and their corroded, semi-functional Ballard stacks. There were traps and hidden guard posts, manned by wannabes eager to make their way up the local hierarchy; they seeped slight infrared, or slivers of light invisible to mere meat. Lenie Clarke noted them a block away and changed course, their attendants never the wiser.

She was almost through the zone when someone stepped from a doorway ten meters ahead of her; a mongrel with dominant Latino genes, skin the color of slate in the washed-out light boosted through her eyecaps. Bare feet, shreds of sprayed-on plastic peeling from the soles. A firearm of some kind in one hand; two fingers missing. The other hand had been transformed into an improvised prosthetic, wrapped round and round in layers of duct tape studded with broken glass and rusty nails.

He looked directly at her with eyes that shone as white and empty as her own.

"Well," Clarke said after a moment.

His clubbed limb gestured roughly at the surrounding territory. "Not much, but mine." His voice was hoarse with old diseases. "There's a toll."

"I'll go back the way I came."

"No you won't.”

She casually tapped a finger against her wristwatch. She kept her voice low, almost subvocal: "Shadow."

"Funds transferred," the device replied.

Clarke sighed and sloughed off her pack. One corner of her mouth curled the slightest fraction.

"So how do you want me?" she asked.

He wanted her from behind, and he wanted her face in the dirt. He wanted to call her Bitch and cunt and stumpfuck . He wanted to cut her with his homebuilt mace.

She wondered if this could be called rape . She hadn't been offered a choice. Then again, she hadn't exactly said no , either.

He hit her when he came, backhanded her head against the ground with his gun hand, but the gesture had an air of formality about it. Finally, he rolled off of her and stood.

She allowed herself back inside then, let the distant observation of her own flesh revert again to first-hand experience. "So." She rolled onto her back, wiping the street from her mouth with the back of one hand. "How was I?"

He grunted and turned his attention to her pack.

"Nothing you want in there," she said.

"Uh-huh." Something caught his eye anyway. He reached in and pulled out a tunic of black shimmering fabric.

It squirmed in his hand.