Peter Watts - Maelstrom

That said, it kind of pissed her off to realize that she'd probably made it to the finals.

That much had been obvious even before this firewitch thing had started burning its way across the continent. There'd been a time, she'd heard, you could just pick up and go places; none of these whackamole barriers going up and down all the time, like you had to shoot some kind of lottery every time you wanted to cross the street. There'd been a time when you could fight off plagues and parasites yourself , just using your own body systems, without having to buy a fix from some pharm who'd probably tweaked the disease in the first place so you had to buy their crummy genes. According to Vive's pater, there'd even been a time when the police themselves had been under control.

Of course, parents weren't exactly paragons of reliability. That whole generation was too busy shooting itself up with crocodilian and plant organelles to worry about getting their facts right. Not that Vive had any objections to good health—she'd been taking croc supplements herself for years. She even took proglottids and Ascaris eggs every now and then—she hated the idea of all those worms hatching out in her gut, but these days your immune system needed every workout it could get.

And besides, that was a long way from polluting your genotype with lizard DNA, even if Pfizer did have a discount this month and wouldn't it be great to not be so dependent on outside drugs all the time, sweetie?

Sometimes Vive wondered if her parents even really knew what a species was any more. In fact, that was the whole problem: rather than clean the shit out of the world, people just turned themselves into coprovores. In a couple of years the human race was going to be half cockroach. If everything hadn't already melted down by then.

Meltdown, actually, was preferable. Better to tear everything down and just start over. Put everyone on the same footing for a change.

That's why Aviva Lu was here now, waiting for Lenie Clarke to show up.

Lenie Clarke was the Meltdown Madonna.

Actually, Aviva Lu wasn't exactly sure what Lenie Clarke was. She seemed to be an army of one. She had died, and risen again. She'd kick-started the Big One out of sheer impatience, tired of waiting for some long-overdue apocalypse that had always threatened and never delivered. She'd single-handedly broken open the Strip, led a refugee revolt whose existence N'AmPac still wouldn't admit to. Fire followed in her wake; anyone who opposed her was ash inside a week.

What Lenie Clarke really was, Vive had always figured, was bullshit.

There were a lot of people who thought otherwise, of course. People who swore up and down that Lenie Clarke was a real person, not just some marketing icon trying to electroshock rifter chic back off the slab. They said that the Meltdown Madonna actually was a rifter, one of N'AmPac's trained deep-seals— but that something had happened on the bottom of the ocean, something mythic. The Big One had only been a symptom, they said, of what had changed her. Now Lenie Clarke was a sorceress, able to transmute organic matter into lead or something. Now she wandered the world spreading apocalypse in her wake, and the masters she'd once served would stop at nothing to bring her down.

It made a good story—hey, any apocalypse that threatened the corpses was long overdue as far as Vive was concerned—but she'd heard too many others. Lenie Clarke was the Next Big Sensorium Personality. Lenie Clarke was a quantum AI, built in defiance of the Carnegie Protocols. Lenie Clarke was an invention of the corpses themselves, a bogeyman to scare restless civilians into obedience. For a couple of days Lenie Clarke had even been some kind of escaped microbe from Lake Vostok.

These days the stories were a lot more consistent; Lenie Clarke hadn't been anything but the Meltdown Madonna for weeks now, as far as Vive could tell. Probably the test marketers had settled on the line that would sell the most faux diveskins, or something. And why not? The look was in, the eyes were killer, and Vive was a much a fashion hound as anyone.

At least, that was what she'd thought until all of bloody Maelstrom started talking in one voice.

Now that had been wild. Half of Maelstrom might have been wildlife, but the other half was spam filters; there was just no way that anyone could have pulled that off, even the corpses. But she'd seen it herself, on her own (only slightly illegal) wristwatch: everyone she knew had seen it on theirs, or heard it from some matchmaker, or even seen it printed across personal visors that should have been hawking drugs or Levi's: Lenie Clarke is closing on Yankton. Lenie Clarke is in trouble. Lenie Clarke needs your help.

Now. Cedar and West Second.

Whatever Lenie Clarke was, she had very powerful friends to pull off something like that. All of a sudden Vive found herself taking rifter chic very seriously indeed. Lindsey'd said they were all being used—someone with really long arms must be building a bandwagon as cover for something else, Carnegie knew what exactly—and Lindsey was probably right. So what? They were decoys for something, but that something was headed here , and whatever it was, Vive was going to be part of it.

It was gonna be a great ride.

Les beus knew it, too.

There were two kinds of uniforms swarming across the concourse: police and rifters. Les beus bristled with shockprods and botflies and armored exoskels. The rifters had their fake diveskins and their cheap white contacts. Everything else, Vive knew, was bravado. Maelstrom had called out, and they'd come on faith and adrenaline. By now it was pretty obvious that faith wasn't all that necessary; the enforcer presence was more than enough evidence that something big was in town.

So far, nothing had exploded. Both sides were still jockeying for position, maybe pretending—to those scattered pedestrians who still hadn't grabbed the bone and vanished—that there was really nothing to worry about. The police had cordoned off whole sections of the concourse, not herding yet but well into corral mode. For their part, the rifters were testing the perimeter; milling along halls and slidewalks, dodging back and forth across the exoskel lines, always stopping just short of anything the antibodies could cite afterward as provocation . Botflies swarmed overhead like big black eggs, taking pre-game footage of everything.

Both sides were behaving really well, all things considered. Which made sense, kind of, since neither side was mainly there for the other. Vive figured things would heat up pretty quick once the star attraction showed up.

Her watch beeped. That was a surprise: the opposition always jammed the local frequencies way in advance, before anything even broke out. It kept people from organizing on the fly.

"Yeah?"

"Hey, we got through!" Lindsey's voice.

"Yeah," Vive said. "Forces of darkness slow on the draw today."

"I forgot to say I want mustard. Oh, and Jen wants a samosa."

"As well as a dog, or instead?"

"Instead."

"'Kay." Lindsey and Jen were at the perimeter, keeping an eye on enemy movements while Vive went for supplies. They were all veterans now, pros with two or three actions under their belts. All of them had been gassed or shocked at least once. Jen had even spent a night in a pacifier, from which they'd all learned a timely lesson in the importance of pre-game nourishment: POWs didn't get fed for at least the first twelve hours—bad enough in any case, but worse when you'd gotten yourself all 'dorphed up for the party. Cranking your BMR really brought on the munchies.