Peter Watts - Maelstrom

"You're immune to Guilt Trip," the intruder told him. "Want to guess how that happened?"

The naked 'lawbreaker was watching him with wary curiosity. Not much actual fear, Lubin noted. When you routinely juggled thousands of lives for a living, you probably figured that other people were the ones with cause to worry. Sudbury was a safe, law-abiding place. Wielding his godlike control over the real world, Desjardins had probably forgotten what it was like to actually live in it.

"Who are you?" Desjardins asked.

"Name's Colin," Lubin said.

"Uh-huh. And why does Rowan have such a hard-on for testing my loyalty?"

"Maybe you didn't hear me," Lubin said. "You're immune to Guilt Trip."

"I heard you. I just think you're full of shit."

"Really." Lubin laid the slightest emphasis on the word.

"Nice try, Colin , but I kind of keep up on that stuff."

"I see."

"Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's indestructible. Just off the top of my head I can think of a few commercial enzymes that break it down The right kind of reuptake inhibitor blockers could do the job too, I'm told. That's why they have these tests, you see? That's why I can barely go two days without some bloodhound sniffing my crotch. Believe me, if I was immune to Guilt Trip I'd already know it, and so would every security database up to geosynch. And you know, the really odd thing about this is that Rowan must know that alread—"

He never had a chance to move. Lubin was behind him in the space of a syllable, had one arm locked around his throat in two. The long curved needle in his other hand tickled Desjardins's eardrum suggestively.

"You have three seconds to tell me what it's called," Lubin whispered, relaxing his grip just enough to permit some semblance of speech.

"ßehemoth," Desjardins gasped.

Lubin tightened his grip again. "Place of origin. Two seconds." Relaxed it.

"Deep sea! Juan de Fuca, Channer Vent I thin—"

"Worst-case scenario. One."

"Everything dies , for fuck's sake! Everything just fades away… "

Lubin let him go.

Desjardins staggered forward against the sink, gulping air. Lubin could see his face reflected in the mirror: panic subsiding, the higher brain kicking in, reassessment of threat potential, dawning awareness of—

Three breaches he'd just committed. Three violations when Guilt Trip should have risen from within and throttled him even more tightly than Lubin just had…

Achilles Desjardins turned and faced Lubin with horror and fear spreading across his face.

"Maudite marde …"

"I told you, " Lubin said. "You're a free agent. Vive le gardien libre. "

"How'd you do it?" Desjardins slumped morosely on the couch next to his clothes. "More to the point, why ? The next time I show up for work I'm screwed. Rowan knows that. What's she trying to prove?"

"I'm not here for Rowan," Lubin said. "Rowan's the problem, in fact. I'm here on behalf of her superiors."

"Yeah?" Desjardins actually seemed to approve of that. Not surprising. Patricia Rowan had never exactly endeared herself to the lower ranks.

"There are concerns that some of the information we've received from her office has been tainted," Lubin continued. "I'm here to cut out the middleman and get the unadulterated truth. You're going to help me."

"And I'm not much good to you if my brain seizes up every time you ask a touchy question."

"Yes."

Desjardins began getting dressed. "Why not just go through channels? GT won't raise a peep if I know the orders are coming from higher up the food chain."

"Rowan would peep."

"Oh. Right." Desjardins pulled his shirt on over his head. "So tell me if I've got this down: you ask me a bunch of questions, and if I don't answer them to the best of my ability you stick a needle in my ear. If I do, you let me go and the next time I go to work I set off more sirens than I can count. They take me apart piece by piece to find out what went wrong, and if I'm very very lucky they'll just throw me into the street as a security risk. Is that about right?"

"Not exactly," Lubin said.

"What, then?"

"I'm not the snuff fairy," Lubin said. In fact, that was exactly what someone had called him, nearly two years before. "I don't leap gaily from door to door killing people for no good reason. And you're going to do more than answer a few questions for me. You're going to take me to work and show me your files."

"Not after—"

Lubin held up a derm between thumb and forefinger. "Trip analog. Short-lived and fairly inert, but it looks pretty much the same to a bloodhound. Stick it under your tongue fifteen minutes before getting to work and you'll pass the tests. If you cooperate, no one will know the difference."

"Until you bugger off and take your analog with you."

"You're forgetting how Guilt Trip works, Desjardins. Your own cells are producing the stuff. I haven't stopped that. I've just dosed you with something to break down the finished product before it hits your motor nerves. Eventually it'll get used up and you'll be a happy little slave again."

"How long?"

"Week or ten days. Depends on individual metabolism. Even if I do bugger off, you could always just call in sick until it wears off."

"I can't, and you know it. I got my immunes boosted when I joined the Patrol. I'm even immune to Supercol."

Lubin shrugged. "Then you'll just have to trust me."

It fact, it had been lies from the word go.

Lubin had not freed Achilles Desjardins. He'd merely stumbled on the discovery as they both lay on the floor, disconnected from themselves and strangely linked to each other through a mechanical interrogator. The derm he'd presented had been an acetylcholine booster, a memory aid one step removed from candy. His words had been spun on the fly, woven around the 'lawbreaker's reactions in the Ganzfeld: Rowan, yes. Strong reaction there. No reaction to rifter names, but horror and recognition at the thought of earthquakes and tidal waves and mysterious fires.

Desjardins had pursued the truth, and recoiled from it. He had not set any of the larger wheels in motion. As far as Lubin could tell, he didn't even know how many wheels there were.

He hadn't known that he was immune to Guilt Trip, either. That was especially interesting. Desjardins had been right—it would be impossible to avoid one of CSIRA's spot checks for more than a day or two. So barring the unlikely possibility that Desjardins had acquired his immunity within the past few hours, his body had done a lot more than throw off GT; it had managed to hide that fact from the bloodhounds.

Lubin had not realized that freedom from Guilt Trip was possible. It raised certain prospects he had not previously considered.

Marq Quammen was primed and ready.

Tornado season was just winding down in the Dust Belt; three solid months of flywheel repairs had fed the chip in his thigh until it was six digits fat, and he had a month until spring run-off started clogging the dams up north. Options were tempting and plentiful in the meantime. He could boost his chloroplasts to UV-shield levels and bugger off to the Carolines. He could check out the underwater Club Med over in Hatteras—he'd heard they'd walled off a whole bay with this big semipermeable membrane, let the ocean in but kept out all those nasty synthetic macromolecules and heavy metals. Their cultured coral had finally taken off; it might even be open to the tourists by now. That would be something to see. There hadn't been wild coral anywhere in N'Am since Key West had packed it in.