Peter Watts - Maelstrom

I'm sorry , he thought. I really don't have any choice .

Of course she still had the billy. Of course she kept it concealed until the last moment, then yanked it into play with desperate swiftness. Of course she tried to use it on herself; doomed anyway, what better act of final revenge than to set ßehemoth free in one final, suicidal catharsis?

Lubin saw all of it coming, and disarmed her with barely a thought. But the billy, when he checked, was empty. Gandhi had taken its final charge. Lubin dropped it onto the muddy junkscape.

I'm sorry . The sexual anticipation of imminent murder began stirring in him. I liked you. You were the only—you really deserved to win…

She stared back. She didn't trip her vocoder. She didn't try to speak.

Any second now Guilt Trip would kick in. Once again, Lubin felt almost sick with gratitude: that an engineered neurochemical could so easily shoulder all responsibility for his acts. That he was about to kill his only friend, and remain blameless of any wrongdoing. That—

It was impossible to close one's eyes while wearing a diveskin. The material bonded to the eyecaps, pinned the lids back in an unblinking stare. Lenie Clarke looked at Ken Lubin. Ken Lubin looked away.

Guilt Trip had never taken this long before.

It's not working. Something's wrong.

He waited for his gut to force him into action. He waited for orders and absolution. He went down into himself as deep as he dared, looking for some master to take the blame.

No. No. Something's wrong.

Do I have to kill her myself?

By the time he realized he wasn't going to get an answer, it was too late. He looked back into Lenie Clarke's final refuge, steeling himself for damnation.

And saw that it was empty.

An icon flashed at the corner of Desjardins's board. He ignored it.

The new feed had just gone online: a thread of fiberop snaking in all its messy physicality under the door and down the hallway. There hadn't been any other way; CSIRA was far too security-conscious to allow civilian nodes inside its perimeter, and The General—or Anemone , or whatever it was called today—hadn't talked to any other kind since before Yankton. If Desjardins wanted to go into combat, he'd have to do it on enemy turf.

That meant a hardline. Outside wireless was jammed as a matter of course; even wristwatches couldn't get online in CSIRA without going through the local hub. Desjardins had envisioned a cable running through the lobby into the street, hanging a left and tripping up pedestrians all the way to the nearest public library. Fortunately, there'd been a municipal junction box in the basement.

His board upped the lumens on the icon, a visual voice-raising: Alice Jovellanos still wants to talk. Please respond.

Forget it, Alice. Your face is the last thing I want to see right now.You're lucky I haven't turned you in already.

If Guilt Trip had been doing his— its job, he would have turned her in. God only knew how badly he could screw up now, thanks to that little saboteur's handiwork. God only knew how many other 'lawbreakers she was putting at risk the same way, how many catastrophes would result from sheer glandular indecision at a critical moment. Alice Jovellanos had potentially put millions of lives in jeopardy.

Not that that amounted to a fart in a hurricane next to what ßehemoth was gearing up for, of course. N'AmWire had just made it public: a big chunk of the west coast was now officially under quarantine. Even the official death toll had left the starting gate at four digits.

The splice fed into a new panel that crowded him on the right. It was stand-alone and self-contained, unconnected and unconnectable to any CSIRA sockets. Vast walled spaces waited within—spaces that could swallow the contents of a node and walls that could mimic its architecture at a moment's notice. A habitat replicator, in effect. A terrarium.

The icon began beeping. He muted it.

Take a hint, Alice .

She'd really fucked him up the ass. The problem—and the fact that it was a problem only emphasized how thoroughly she'd messed things up—was that she obviously didn't see it that way. She thought of herself as some sort of liberator . She'd acted out of some kind of twisted concern for his welfare. She'd actually put his interests above the Greater Good.

Desjardins booted the terrarium. Start-up diagnostics momentarily cluttered the display. He wouldn't be using his inlays this time around; they were part of the CSIRA network, after all. It was going to be raw visual and touchpads all the way.

The Greater Good. Right.

That had always been a faceless, abstract thing to human sensibilities. It was easier to feel for the one person you knew than for the far-off suffering millions you didn't. When the Big One had hit the Left Coast, Desjardins had watched the threads and spun his filters and breathed a silent sigh of relief that it hadn't been him under all that rubble—but on the day that Mandelbrot died, he knew, his heart would break.

It was that illogical fact that made Guilt Trip necessary in the first place. It was that illogical fact that kept him from betraying Alice Jovellanos. He sure as shit wasn't ready to sit down and have a friendly chat with her, but he couldn't bring himself to sell her out either.

Besides. If he really had figured out this whole Anemone thing, it was Alice who'd given him the idea.

He tapped the board. A window opened. Maelstrom howled on the other side.

Either way, he'd know within the hour.

It was everywhere.

Even where it wasn't, it was. Where it wasn't talking, it was being talked about . Where it wasn't being talked about it was being sown, tales and myths of Lenie Clarke left inert until some unsuspecting vector opened a mailbox to hatch a whole new generation.

"She's everywhere. That's why they can't catch her."

"You're shitting static. How can she be everywhere?"

"Imposters. Clones. Who says there's only one Lenie Clarke?"

"She can, you know, beam herself. Quantum teleportation. It's the blood nanos she's carrying."

"That's impossible."

"Remember the Strip?"

"What about it?"

"Lenie started it, haploid. She just strolled onto the beach and everyone she touched just threw off the drugs and woke up. Just like that. Sounds nano to me."

"That wasn't nano. That's just, you know, that firewitch bug from NoCal, the one that makes your joints fall apart? It got into the cyclers and fucked up some molecule in the valium. You want to know what Lenie started ,she started that fucking plague …"

It had gotten smarter, too. Subtler. Hundreds of 'lawbreakers were on the watch now, prowling civilian channels for the inexplicable clarity that had alerted Desjardins the day before. That slip hadn't been repeated, as far as anyone could tell.

And when Desjardins finally did acquire a target, it wasn't baud rate or drop-out that clued him in, but content:

"I know where Lenie Clarke is." It spoke with the sexless, neutral voice of inflated ascii set to default ; its handle was Tesseract . "Les-beus are on her ass, but they've lost the trail for now."

"How do you know?" asked someone claiming to be Poseidon - 23 .

"I'm Anemone," Tesseract said.

"Sure. And I'm Ken Lubin."

"Then your days are numbered, litcrit-o'-mine. Ken Lubin's been turned. He's working for the corpses now."

A lot smarter, to have known that. Not so smart to admit it in mixed company. Desjardins began sketching lines on his board.