Peter Watts - Maelstrom

A lump grew in her throat. "Where? Where's safe?"

"I don't know. I'm sorry."

"Lenie, listen to me . There's got to be a plan. You've got to have faith, there's a purpose behind all of this. Please, just—"

The crunch of plastic, ground underfoot.

" Lenie! "

Link lost flashed front and center.

She didn't know how long she sat there, in her own personal void. Eventually, link lost went away. Some other readout flashed off at the edge of vision, a rhythmic little scratch on her retina. The effort required to focus on it seemed almost superhuman.

Goodbye

It said. And:

Anemone. We like that.

A random trawl caught the anomaly fifteen nodes off the port bow. A thousand other channels were abuzz with Lenie Clarke , but this one was so clean : no packet locs, no drop-outs, none of the stutters and time-lags that always plagued civilian traffic in Maelstrom. The line was full of groupies with online handles like Squidnapper and White-eyes , all at rapt attention while something whispered disinformation in their midst. It called itself The General and it spoke with a thousand different voices: raw ASCII reinflated to specs set by each recipient's software.

It hung up the moment it heard Achilles Desjardins creeping in from behind.

Too fast for meat. Almost too fast even for the hounds Desjardins set on its trail; they circled the world in seconds, diving through gateways, tripping over wildlife, finding half-eaten carcasses where traffic registries had lived and breathed just moments before. Here, and here, and here: nodes through which The General's words had passed. Traffic logs mauled beyond recognition by earth-scorchers covering their tracks. The hounds replicated a thousandfold and dived through all available ports in unison, trying reacquire the scent through brute force.

This time they succeeded. The flag went up on Desjardins's board at t-plus-six seconds: something had been treed on a server in the Hokkaido microwave array. It wasn't a smart gel. There were no smart gels for at least four nodes in any direction. But it was dark, and it was massive, and it was holding its breath so tight that nothing could get a fix on its exact address. It was just in there, somewhere. Under the surface.

And when Achilles Desjardins seined the node, panicky wildlife scattering at his approach, The General was nowhere to be found.

"Shit … "

He rubbed his eyes and broke the link. The real world resolved around him—or at least, that part of it trapped within the walls of his cubby.

That was him, he remembered. Trapped in there. Undistracted by the endless frustration of hunting phantoms, it all came flooding back.

The real world had got even worse, now that Lubin had deserted him.

A hand on his shoulder. He started, then sagged.

"Killjoy. You look like shit," Jovellanos said kindly.

He looked up at her. "Maybe Rowan's right."

"Rowan?" She laid her hands on his shoulders and started kneading the muscles.

"It's not the gels. Maybe it really is some kind of—global conspiracy. I can't find any other explanation…"

"Uh, Killjoy—in case you've forgotten, I haven't seen you in four days." Her hair smelled like some extinct flower from Desjardins's childhood. "I hear you've been hobnobbing with all sorts of strange people, but I'm nowhere near the loop, you know?"

He waved at the board, then realized that she wouldn't see anything there; he'd routed the display to his inlays. "That whole movement. Rifter chic or whatever the hell they call it, you know? It's a propagation strategy. That's all it is. Isn't that wild?"

"Yeah? What's it propagating?"

"ßehemoth," Desjardins whispered.

" No ." Her hands dropped away. "How?"

"There's a vector out there. A rifter. Lenie Clarke. It's all just smoke to keep her from getting caught."

" Why , for God's sake? Why would anyone—"

"The gels started it. I mean, they weren't supposed to, they were supposed to contain it, but—"

" They put the gels in charge? "

"What else could they do?" Desjardins suppressed the urge to giggle. "Nobody trusted anyone. They knew there'd be sacrifices, they knew they might have to sterilize—major areas. But when Mercosaur says hey, our stats say Oregon's got to go for the greater good, do you think N'Am's gonna just roll over and take their word on that? They needed something that could decide, and act, andwho wouldn't play favorites…"

" Fuck ," Jovellanos whispered.

"They were so busy keeping an eye on each other they never stopped to think what kind of take-home rules a net might develop on its own, after spending a whole lifetime protecting small simple things from big complicated things. And then they tell it to protect a complex of five million species against one pissant nanobe, and they can't understand why it turns around and bites them in the ass."

Jovellanos said nothing.

"Anyway, it doesn't matter. They scrubbed the gels down to the last neuron and it didn't do any good. There's something else out there. I've flushed the fucker four times in the past twenty-four hours, and it keeps slipping through my fingers. We could swap out every gel in Maelstrom and the replacements would be reinfected inside a week."

"But if not the gels, then what?"

"I don't know. For all I know it's a pharm-baby thing, some corporation's got a cure and they're spreading ßehemoth to drive up the price. But how they’re pulling it off—"

"Turing app, maybe?"

"Or berserkers. I thought of that. But those leave footprints—op signatures on the hardware, huge memory demands. And anything that complex attracts wildlife like you wouldn't believe."

"You're not seeing any of that?"

"Lots of wildlife, maybe. Nothing else."

"So maybe it autowipes when it sees you coming."

"Footprints'd still be in the server log."

"Not if it doctors the log before it deletes."

"Then the deletion would be on file. I'm telling you, Alice, this is something else."

"What if the wildlife's gotten brainy?" she said.

He blinked. "What?"

"Why not? It evolves. Maybe it got smart."

He shook his head. "Nets are nets. Doesn't matter if someone coded them or they just evolved; if they're smart enough to think, they're going to have a certain signature. I'm not seeing it, and nobody else is either and I'm just…completely-- wasted.. ."

He leaned forward, let the board take the weight of his forearms. His head weighed a tonne.

"Come on," Jovellanos said after a moment.

"What?"

"We're going to Pickering's Pile. I'm buying you a derm. Or ten."

He shook his head. "Thanks, Alice. I can't."

"I checked the logs, Killjoy. You haven't been out of this building for almost forty hours. Sleep deprivation reduces IQ, did you know that? Yours must be around room temp by now. Take a break."

He looked up at her. "I can't . If I leave—"

Don't worry about it , Lubin had said.

"— I may not be able to come back," he finished.

She frowned. "Why not?"

I'm unchained , he thought. I'm free.

"Lubin—this guy did something to me, and…if the bloodhounds…"

She took his hand, firmly. "Come."

"Alice, you don't know what—"

"Maybe I know more than you think, Killjoy. If you don't think you're up to a blood test, well maybe that's a problem and maybe it isn't, but you're gonna have to bite the bullet eventually. Unless you're planning on spending the rest of your life in this cubicle?"