Peter Watts - Maelstrom

He just hadn’t realized that the fucking thing had a death wish.

Dr. Desjardins, this is Patricia Rowan. I've just received your message.

Plain text, coming directly over his inlays, third-person invisible. Even in his head there was no picture, no sound, nothing that might visibly startle him. Nothing to cause obvious distraction should he happen to take this call in dangerous company.

I can be there within thirty hours. Until then it is imperative that you do nothing to arouse Lubin's suspicions. Cooperate with him. Do not inform anyone else of his presence. Do NOT notify local authorities. Mr. Lubin's behavior is governed by a conditioned threat-response reflex which requires special handling.

Oh, fuck.

If you follow these instructions you will not be in danger. The reflex engages only in the event of a perceived security breach. Since he knows that your own behavior is governed by Guilt Trip, he's unlikely to consider you a threat unless he thinks you may expose him in some way.

I'm screwed, Desjardins thought.

By all means continue your analysis of Lenie Clarke and the rifter connection. We are putting our own people on it as well. Remain calm, and do not do anything to antagonize Mr. Lubin. I'm sorry that I can't be there sooner, but I'm presently off-continent, and the local transportation is quite limited.

You've done the right thing, Dr. Desjardins. I'm on my way.

Conditioned threat-response reflex .

He'd heard the rumors. Neither corpse nor civilian, he inhabited that outer circle of need-to-know : too peripheral for the inner sanctum, but close enough to hear things in passing. He'd heard about CTR.

Guilt Trip was a stone axe: CTR was a scalpel. Where the Trip merely short-circuited the brain, CTR controlled it. Where GT disabled, CTR compelled. Apparently they'd learned the trick from some parasite that farthered its own life-cycle by hotwiring the behavioral circuitry of its host. Body-snatcher stuff. Subtle.

You tied it to the same triggers, though. Guilt had the same seesaw signature no matter what its inspiration: norepinephrine went up, serotonin and acetylcholine went down, and—whereas Achilles Desjardins would merely freeze up—Ken Lubin would set forth on some complex, predestined behavioral dance. Like tying up security leaks with extreme prejudice, for example; there might be some flexibility in the means, but the act was compulsory.

It went without saying that you didn't find such hotwiring in glorified pipe-fitters, even if their beat was twenty thousand leagues under the sea. Ken Lubin was a whole lot more than a rifter.

And right now he was opening the door to Desjardins's cubby.

Desjardins swallowed and turned in his chair.

I can be there within thirty hours.

It is imperative that you do nothing to arouse Lubin's suspicions.

Remain calm.

"Took a stroll around the floor," Lubin said. "To stretch my legs."

Desjardins made himself nod indifferently. "Okay."

Twenty-nine hours and fifty-eight minutes to go.

If military rank had any relevance in the Maelstrom ecosystems, this thing would be a General.

By now it weighs in just a shade shy of five hundred megabytes, compressed and muscular. It has been retrofitted by natural selection, reinforced by an army of smart gels; it no longer remembers a time when organic intelligence was an enemy. It has been copied and distributed a billion times; each copy travels with a retinue of attachés and assistants and bodyguards. The generals report to everyone, answer to no one, serve but a single master.

Lenie Clarke.

Master is a hopelessly inadequate word, of course. Words are barely adequate to describe Maelstrom in any event. The generals serve the concept of Lenie Clarke, perhaps—but no, that doesn't fit either. They have no concept, of Lenie Clarke or anything else. They have operational definitions but no comprehension; checksums, but no insight. They are instinctive in their intelligence.

They travel the world in search of references to Lenie Clarke. Such references fall into several categories. There is the chaff the generals and their associates throw to the winds themselves, decoys to distract the competition. There are third-party references, strings containing Lenie Clarke that come into Maelstrom from outside ; mail, transaction records, even source which appears to arise from Lenie Clarke itself. Items in this category are of profound interest to the generals.

More recently, a third category has appeared: strings which both contain Lenie Clarke and which appear actively inimical to it.

To some extent this interpretation is arbitrary. The generals receive their input from a network of ports which—according to the gels who've educated them—correspond to an n-dimensional space with the global label Biosphere . Each port is also associated with a range of parameters, labels like temperature, precipitation , and humidity ; very few of these are defined at the ports themselves, but they can be interpolated by accessing linked environmental databases.

Put simply, the task is to promote occurrences of Lenie Clarke at all ports meeting certain environmental conditions. The acceptable range is quite broad—in fact, according to the relevant databases the only truly unacceptable areas are in deep, cold ocean basins.

However, some of these third-category strings—particularly those hailing from nodes with government and industrial addresses— appear to contain instructions which would restrict distribution of Lenie Clarke , even in areas meeting the environmental criteria.

This will not do.

Presently, for example, Lenie Clarke is approaching a nexus of ports which open into a part of the n-dimensional space called Yankton/South Dakota . A number of Category-Three communications have been intercepted, predicting extensive restriction activity at this location in the near future. Widespread dissemination of decoys has not dissipated this threat. In fact, the generals have noted an overall decline in decoy effectiveness over the past few teracycles. There are few alternatives.

The generals resolve to cancel all symbiotic interactions with government and industrial nodes. Then they begin to rally their troops.

Every eye in the world, turning as she passed.

It had to be her imagination, Clarke knew. If she was really under such close scrutiny, surely she'd have been captured—or worse—by now. The botflies that passed over the street weren't all watching from the corners of their eyes. The cameras that panned across every rapitrans stop, every cafeteria, every display window—unseen, perhaps, but omnipresent—they couldn't all have been programmed with her in mind. Satellites didn't crowd the sky overhead, piercing the clouds with radar and infrared, looking for her.

It just felt that way, somehow. Not like being the center of some vast conspiracy at all. Rather, the target .

Yankton was open to casual traffic. The shuttle dropped her in a retail district indistinguishable from a million others; her connection wouldn't leave for another two hours. She wandered to fill the time between. Twice she startled—thinking she'd caught sight of herself in some full-length mirror—only to remember that these days, she looked just like any dryback.