Peter Watts - Maelstrom

The front hall receded in front of her, barren and unfurnished; its walls glistened strangely, as if freshly lacquered. An archway cut into the left wall: the living room, where Indira Clarke used to sit and do nothing. Past that, the staircase. An empty gray throat leading up into hell.

She wouldn't be going up there just yet. She sighed and turned the corner into the living room.

"Ken," she said.

The living room, too, was an unfurnished shell. The windows had been blacked out, but the faint street light leaking in through the hall was more than enough for rifter vision. Lubin stood in the middle of that stark space; he wore dryback clothes, but his eyes were capped. Just behind him, the room's only furniture: a chair, with a man tied into it. He appeared to be merely unconscious.

"You shouldn't have come," Lubin said.

"Where else was I going to go?"

Lubin shook his head. He seemed suddenly agitated. "It was a stupid move. Easy to anticipate. You must've known that."

"Where else was there?" she said again.

"This isn't even what you think it is. This isn't what you remember."

"I know," said Clarke.

Lubin looked at her, frowning.

"They fucked me over, Ken. I know that. I guess I knew it ever since I started having the—visions, although it took me a while to…"

" Then why did you come here ?" Ken Lubin was nowhere to be found. This thing in his place seemed almost human.

"I must have had a real childhood somewhere ," Clarke said after a moment. "They can't have faked all of it. This seemed like the best place to start looking."

"And you think they'll let you? You think I can let you?"

She looked at him. His flat, empty eyes looked back from a face in unexpected torment.

"I guess not," she sighed at last. "But you know something, Ken? It was almost worth it. Just— learning this much. Knowing what they did to me…"

Behind Lubin, the man in the chair stirred briefly.

"So what happens now?" Clarke asked. "You kill me for playing Typhoid Mary? They need me as a lab rat?"

"I don't know how much that matters any more. It's all over the place now."

"What kind of plague is this, anyway?" With mild surprise she noted the weakness of her own curiosity. "I mean, it's been almost a year and I'm not dead. I don't even have any symptoms…"

"Takes longer with rifters," Lubin said. "And it's not even a disease, strictly speaking. More of a soil nanobe. Locks up sulfates or something."

"That's it ?" Clarke shook her head. "I let all those losers fuck me and it's not even going to kill them?"

"It'll kill most everyone," Lubin said softly. "It's just going to take a while."

"Oh."

She tried to summon some sort of reaction to that news, some gut-level feeling of appropriate scale. She was still trying when Lubin said, "You gave us a good run, anyway. No one can believe you got as far as you did."

"I had help," Clarke said.

"You heard."

"I heard a lot of things," Clarke told him. "I don't know what to make of any of it."

"I do," said the man in the chair.

"I'm sorry, Lenie," the man said. "I tried to stop him."

I don't know you. Clarke looked back at Lubin. "He did?"

Lubin nodded.

"But he's still alive."

"I didn't even break anything."

"Wow." She looked back at the bound man. "So who is he?"

"Guy called Achilles Desjardins," Lubin said. "Lawbreaker with the Entropy Patrol. Big fan of yours, actually."

"Yeah? Why's he tied up like that?"

"For the greater good."

She wondered briefly whether to pursue it. Instead she turned to Desjardins, squatted down in front of him. "You actually tried to stop him?"

Desjardins nodded.

"For me?"

"Sort of. Not exactly," he said. "It's—kind of hard to explain." He wriggled against the elastic filaments binding him to the chair; they tightened visibly in response. "Think maybe you could cut me loose?"

She glanced over her shoulder; Lubin stared back in shades of gray. "I don't think so," she said. "Not yet." Probably not ever.

"Come on, you don't need his permission ," Desjardins said.

"You can see?" It should have been too dark for mortal eyes to have registered her movements.

"He's a 'lawbreaker," Lubin reminded her.

"So what?"

"Enhanced pattern-matching. He doesn't actually see any better than your average dryback, but he's better at interpolating weak input."

Clarke turned back to Desjardins, leaned close. "You said you knew."

"Yeah," he said.

"Tell me," she whispered.

"Look, this is not the time . Your friend is seriously unbalanced, and in case you haven't figured it out yet we are both —"

"Actually," Clarke said, "I don't think Ken's himself today. Or we'd both be dead already."

Desjardins shook his head and swallowed.

"Okay, then," Clarke said. "Do you know the story of Scheherezade? Do you remember why she told her stories?"

"Oh, Jesus ," Desjardins said weakly.

The mermaid smiled. "Tell us a story, Achilles…"

Lubin listened while Desjardins laid it out. The 'lawbreaker had obviously been reading up since their last encounter.

"The first mutations must have been really simple," he was saying. "The gels were trying to spread ßehemoth, and this Lenie Clarke variable had been tagged as a carrier in some personnel file. So any bug that even had your name in its source would've had an edge, at least to start with—the gels would think it was important information so they'd let it pass. And even when they caught on that'd just pressure the wildlife to come up with something new, and wildlife's way faster than meat. We're like ice ages and continental drift to them; we drive their evolution but we're slow . They've got all the time they need to come up with countermeasures.

"So now a bunch of them have gone symbiotic, some kind of — Lenie Clarke interdiction network. In exchange for protection from the gels. It's like, like being a mackeral with a bunch of sharks for bodyguards, it's a huge competitive edge. So everyone's jumping on the bandwagon."

He looked through the darkness at Clarke. "You really catalyzed something amazing, you know. Group selection's rare enough, but you actually inspired a bunch of separate life-forms to make—well, a colonial superorganism, really. Individuals acting as body parts. Some of them don't do anything but shuttle messages around, like—living neurotransmitters, I guess. Whole lineages evolved just to handle conversation with humans. That's why nobody could track the fucker down—we were all looking for Turing apps and neural net code and there wasn't any. It was all genetic. Nobody made the connection."

He fell silent.

"No." Clarke shook her head. "That doesn't explain anything." She'd grown far too still during his recitation.

"It explains everything ," Desjardins said. "It—"

"So I'm just some kind of password, is that it?" She leaned in close. "Just a, a key to get through those fucking head cheeses. What about Yankton , you fucker? What about that Apocalypse Mermaid shit, and all those people with their fake eyecaps trying to suck me dry every time I turn around? Where'd they come from?"

"S-same thing," Desjardins stammered. "Anemone was just spreading the meme any way it could."

"Not good enough. Say something else."

"But I don't—"

" Say something else. "

"It happens all the time , for Chrissakes! People strap bombs onto their backs or they release sarin in the passenger lounge or they go to school one day and just start shooting and they know they're gonna die, but it's worth it, you know? As long as they get the bastards who victimized them."