Peter Watts - Maelstrom

Of course, these days there were all sorts of nasty things waiting to jump on you when you ventured outside. That new bug the left-coast refugees had brought over, for instance—the all-purpose number that killed you a dozen different ways. Maybe it'd be better just to stay in this dark, cozy little booth in this dark, cozy little drink'n'drug at the edge of the Belt, and let Breakthroughs in BrainChem provide him a richness of experience he could never get in the real world. That was pretty tempting, too. Plus he could start immediately.

Already had started, in fact. Quammen stretched and settled deeper into his cushioned alcove and watched the local butterflies sparkling at each other. Upstairs the world was a salt-baked oven; if you were an unprotected eyeball out there, the only question was whether you'd go saltblind before the wind sandblasted you down to pitted gelatin. In here, though, it was always dark, and the air barely moved. He felt like a cat in a nook in a dark green cave, surveying a subterranean domain.

There was a little blond K-selector sitting alone at the bar. Quammen absently stuck a derm behind his ear and aimed his watch at her. Passive infrared and a few ultrasonic squeaks, barely audible even to bats, bounced back and forth.

She turned and looked at him. Her eyes were a flat and startling ivory.

She started toward him.

He didn't know her. Quammen's watch flashed him an executive summary: she wasn't horny, either.

He couldn't think of any other reason she'd approach him, though.

She stopped just outside the alcove, a hint of a smile beneath those strange blank eyes.

"Nice effect," Quammen said, seizing the initiative. "You see in X-ray with those things?"

"So what was that?"

"What was what?"

"You zapped me with something."

"Oh." Quammen raised his hand, let her see the whisper-thin filament extending from his watch. "You got some kind of sensor on you?"

She shook her head. Thin lips, small tits, great hips. Sharp edges, just slightly smoothed. Like a perfect little ice-sculpture, left a minute too long in the sun.

"So how'd you know?" Quammen asked.

"I felt it."

"Bullshit. The IR's passive, the sonar's real weak."

"I've got an implant," said the K. "Hard stuff. You can feel it when the sound hits."

"Implant?" This could be interesting.

"Yeah. So, what are you doing here?"

Quammen sneaked another peek at his watch; no, she wasn't on the prowl. Hadn't been a minute ago, anyway. Maybe that was open to negotiation. Maybe it had already changed. He wanted to scope her out again, but he didn't want to give himself away. Shit. Why'd she have to be sensitive to probes?

"I said—"

"Just coming off a nice fat contract," he told her. "Riding flywheels. Figuring out my next move."

She slid in beside him, grabbed a derm from the table dispenser. "Tell me about it."

She was fucking cryptic, was what she was.

Or maybe just old-fashioned. She hadn't propositioned him outright, which was a drag; it wasted time. Quammen would've propositioned her in an instant, but unless his plug-in was wrecked she hadn't been receptive at first, and that probably meant he was going to have to work at it. He couldn't remember the last time he'd had to rely on instinct of all things to know whether a woman was interested or not, and this Lenie wasn't making things any easier. A couple of times he'd put a hand here or there, and she'd literally flinched. But then she'd run a finger down his arm, or tap the back of his hand, and just generally come on wet as a hagfish.

If she wasn't interested, why was she wasting his time? Was she really here for the conversation?

By the third derm it didn't seem to matter so much.

"You know what I am?" Quammen demanded. An influx of exogenous transmitters had made him suddenly eloquent. "I'm a fucking crusader, is what I am! It is my personal mission to save the world from the Quebecois!"

She blinked lazily over her alien eyes. "Too late," she said.

"You know, only fifty years ago, people paid less than a third of their disposable income on energy? Less than a third ?"

"I did not know that," Lenie answered.

"And the world's ending. It's ending right now."

"That," Lenie said, "I did know."

"Do you know when? Do you know when the end began?"

"Last August."

"Twenty thirty-five. The onset of adaptive shatter. When damage control started accounting for more of the GGP than the production of new goods."

"Damage control?"

"Damage control." He pounded the table for emphasis. "My whole life is damage control. I fix the things that entropy breaks. Things fall apart, Lenie my lass. The only way you can stop the slide is throw energy at it. That's the only way we got from primordial slime to human slime. Evolution'd be sockeye without the sun to lean on."

"Oh, there are places where evolution didn't need the sun—"

"Yeah, yeah, but you get my point. The more complicated a system gets, the more fragile it is. All that ecobabble about diversity promotes stability , that's pure bullshit. You take your coral reef or your tropical rainforest, those things were starved for energy. You've got so many species, so many energy pathways using up resources that there's hardly a spare erg left over. Drive through a rainforest with a bulldozer or two and tell me how stable that system ends up being."

"Oops," Lenie said. "Too late."

Quammen barely heard her. "Now what we've got here 's a system that's so complicated, it makes a tropical rainforest look like a fucking monoculture . Everything gets way too complicated for mere mortals so we set up webs and networks and AIs to keep track of things except they end up exploding into these huge cancers of complexity too—so that only makes the problem worse—and of course now all the underlying infrastructure is breaking down, the weather and the biosphere are all fucked up so not only do we need oodles more energy to keep this huge wobbling gyro from crashing over on its side, but those same factors keep knocking out the systems we put in place to produce all that extra energy, you see what I'm sayin'? You know what apocalypse is? It's a positive feedback loop!"

"So why blame Quebec for all this? They're the only ones who got their asses in gear fast enough to save anything. It was the Hydro Wars that—"

"Here it comes. Quebec was gonna save the world, and if only we hadn't ganged up on the frogs, we'd all be sipping neurococktails on a beach somewhere and Maelstrom would be nice and clean and bug-free, and—ah, don't get me started."

"Too late for that, too."

"Hey, I'm not saying the war didn't kick Maelstrom past critical mass. Maybe it did. But it would've happened anyway. Five years, tops. And do you really think the frogs had any more foresight than the rest of us? They just lucked out with their geography. Anyone could make the world's biggest hydro facility if they had all of Hudson Bay to dam up. And who was going to stop them? The Cree tried, did you know that? Remember the Cree? A few thousand malcontents up around James Bay, just before that nasty and unfortunate plague that only killed abos. And after that went down, Nunavut just rolled over and did what they were told, and the rest of fucking Canada was still so busy trying to lure the frogs back into bed they were willing to look the other way over pretty much anything . And now it's too late, and the rest of us run around playing catch-up with our windfarms and our photosynthesis arrays and our deep-sea geothermal—"

Lenie's eyes floated in front of him. Something clicked in Quammen's head.