Peter Watts - Maelstrom

"We need to back her up," Tesseract was saying. "Any of you in central N'Am, say around the Great Lakes?"

No queries to the local traffic log, no surreptitious trawl for Turing apps, no trace on the channel. No moves on anything that Tesseract might be keeping an eye on. Achilles Desjardins had gotten smarter, too.

"Piss off, Tessie." Some skeptic going by Hiigara . "You expect us to sub to Lenie Clarke's personal manager just showing up to chat?"

Nothing in the local node. Desjardins started snooping adjacent servers.

"I sense skepticism," Tesseract remarked. "Special effects is what you want. A demonstration."

" Yowsers ," said Poseidon-23 , and drowned in the roar of an ocean.

Desjardins blinked. An instant before, there'd been six people on the channel listing. Now there were four thousand eight hundred sixty two, all speaking at once. No one voice was comprehensible, but even the collective blare was impossibly clear: a digital babble with no distortion, no static, no arrhythmic stutter of bytes delayed or lost in transit.

Silence returned. The channel listing imploded back down to the six it had started with.

"There you go," said Tesseract .

Shit , Desjardins thought.Shaken, he studied the results on his board. It's talking to all of them.At once.

"How'd you do that?" Hiigara asked.

"I'd rather not," Tesseract whispered. "It attracts attention. Are any of you in central N'Am, say around the Great Lakes?"

He muted the chatter; he didn't need it, now that he had the scent. There seemed to be a fair bit of wildlife in a hospital server across town. He stepped inside, looked out through its portals.

Even more wildlife over there . Desjardins stepped sideways, and found himself in Oslo National's account records. And even more wildlife flowing out to…

Step.

Timor. Real heavy infestation. Of course, those little subsidiaries were still back in the twentieth century when it came to pest control, but still…

This is it, he thought.

Don't touch anything. Go straight to the root.

He did. He whispered sweet nothings to gatekeepers and system clocks, flashed his ID to ease their concerns. A very large number of users are about to get very pissed off , he reflected.

He tapped his board. On the other side of the world, every portal on the edge of the Timor node slammed shut.

Inside, time stuttered.

It didn't stop completely—without some level of system iteration there'd be no way to copy what was inside. Hopefully that wouldn't matter. A few thousand cycles, a few tens of thousands. Maybe enough for the enemy to lurch in stop-motion increments toward some dim awareness of what was happening, but not enough—if he was lucky—to actually do anything about it.

He ignored the traffic piling up at Timor's gates. He ignored the plaintive queries from other nodes who wondered why their feeds had gone dark. All he saw was the math in the bubble: architecture, operating system, software. Files and executables and wildlife. It was almost a kind of teleportation—each bit fixed and read and reconstructed half a world away, the original left unchanged for all the intimacy of its violation.

He had it.

The Timor node jerked back up to speed. Sudden panic from something inside; wildlife flew like leaves in a tornado, tearing at records, bursting through doorways, disemboweling itself after the fact. It didn't matter. It was too late.

Desjardins smiled. He had an Anemone in a tank.

In the terrarium, he could stop time completely.

It was all laid out before him, flash-frozen: a software emulation of the node itself, copies of every register and address, every spin and every bit. He could set it all running with a single command.

And it would fly apart in seconds. Just like the Timorese original.

So he set up inviolable backups of the logs and registries and placed them outside , with a filtered two-way pipe to the originals. He went through each of the portals leading out of the node—gates into oblivion now, from a bubble suspended in the void—and gave a little half-twist to each.

He regarded his handiwork. Time stood still. Nothing moved.

"Moebius, come forth," he murmered.

Anemone screamed. A thousand unregistered executables leapt forward and clawed the traffic log to shreds; a million more escaped through the portals.

Ten times as many rustled and watched:

As the mutilated logs repaired themselves with barely time to bleed, magically replenished from on high;

As the wildlife which had fled through that portal came plunging back in through this one, wheeling in confusion;

As a channel opened in the midst of the wilderness and a voice rang out from Heaven: "Hey, you. Anemone."

"We don't talk to you." Sexless, neutral. Default.

It was still going after the records, but it was taking a dozen tacks at once: subtle forgery, full frontal assault, everything in between. None of it worked, but Desjardins was impressed anyway. Damn smart.

As smart as an orb-weaving spider, blindly obeying lifetime fitness functions. As smart as a bird, noting wind and distance and optimizing seed load to three decimal places.

"You really should talk to me," Desjardins said mildly. "I'm God." He caught a piece of wildlife at random, tagged it, set it free again.

"You're shitting static. Lenie Clarke is God." A school of fish, a flock of wheeling birds so complex you needed matrix algebra and thinking machines to understand it all. The ascii came from somewhere inside.

"Clarke's not God," Desjardins said. "She's a petri dish."

Wildlife still flew through the wraparound gateways, but less randomly; some sort of systematic exploration, evolving on the fly. Desjardins checked on the piece he'd tagged. It had descendents already, all carrying the Mark of Cain he'd bestowed on their ancestor. And their descendents had had descendents.

Two hundred sixty generations in fourteen seconds. Not bad.

Thank you, Alice. If you hadn't ranted on about dancing bumblebees, who knows when I would've figured this out…

"Maybe you need a demonstration," said the swarm. "Special effects is what you want, yes?"

And she'd been right. Genes have their own intelligence. They can wire an ant for the cultivation of underground farms, the domestication of aphid cattle…even the taking of slaves. Genes can shape behaviors so sophisticated they verge on genius, given time.

"A demonstration," Desjardins said. "Sure. Hit me."

Time's the catch, of course. Genes are slow : a thousand generations to learn some optimal-foraging trick that a real brain could pick up in five minutes. Which is why brains evolved in the first place, of course. But when a hundred generations fit into the space of a yawn, maybe the genes get their edge back. Maybe wildlife learns to talk using only the blind stupid logic of natural selection— and the poor lumbering meat-sack on the other end never suspects that he's having a chat that spans generations.

"I'm waiting," Desjardins said.

"Lenie Clarke is not a demonstration." The swarm swirled in the terrarium. Was it Desjardins imagination, or did it seem to be—fading, somehow?

He smiled. "You're losing it, aren't you?"

"Loaves and fishes for Anemone."

"But you're not Anemone. You're just a tiny piece of it, all alone…"

Time's not enough in and of itself, of course. Evolution needs variance as well. Mutation and shuffling to create new prototypes, variable environments to weed out the unfit and shape the survivors.