Peter Watts - Maelstrom

They're not letting it die, he realizes. The fire burns on endless life-support, from Oakland to Kitimat, and Martin Perreault knows with sudden dull certainty that a course has been set for it to follow.

East.

He leaves the office for a few moments, returning with a toolbox from his hobby room. He unlatches every access panel he can, smashes open the rest. He calmly dismembers each and every piece of equipment remaining in the room, cutting fiberop, pouring acid into computational organics, smashing crystals with a pneumatic hammer. Then he pads down the hall to the bedroom. Sou Hon is asleep at last, curled into a fetal ball. He cocoons her from behind, wrapping her flesh in his, and stares off into darkness while the real world falls asleep around him.

Thanks first for the forebearance: to Mike Brander, one of the nicest guys you could hope to meet, for not sueing me after I inadvertently named a psychopath after him in the last book.

Thanks next for the help: Laurie Channer, Nalo Hopkinson, Brent Hayward, and Bob Boyczuk all poked and prodded an embryonic stage of the first few chapters. Laurie also endured my endless stream-of-consciousness rambling as I tried to fit all the pieces together; hopefully her sacrifice has spared the rest of you from a similar fate. My agent, Don Maass, made a vital criticism of opening chapters which resulted in a whole new plot thread (and hopefully, less "straining for effect"). David Hartwell edited with his usual renowned acumen, even if he did force me to cut the exploding daddy scene. (In hindsight, I think that was a wise decision.)

I also got diverse technical assistance from other folks with postgraduate degrees like mine, the difference being that theirs were in subjects that actually proved to be good for something. Prof. Denis Lynn, of the University of Guelph, provided not answers but questions , and lines of enquiry for me to pursue. (It's been twenty years since I took a course from the man and he's still forcing me to think for myself.) He also donated a copy of Lodish et al. 's "Molecular Cell Biology" to the cause, a text which easily outweighs the yellow pages for the GTA. Isaac "Buckaroo Banzai" Szpindel—an MD, neurologist, sf-writer, screenwriter, and (no shit) electrical engineer —helped me out with the chemistry of guilt, and suggested plausible field strengths for rifter implants. He also kept me from slipping into steroid psychosis during a massive poison-ivy infection while I was writing this book. Drs. Alison Sinclair and Fran Terry offered insights, suggestions, and/or overheads on matters microbial. Colin Bamsey told me what kind of alpine trees would be likely to survive the great warming.

Given a world in which Quebec has become the predominant economic power, I figured various Quebecisms would have worked their way into casual N'Am conversation—hence all those italicised expletives that left most of you scratching your heads. For a crash course in how to be foul-mouthed in Canada's Other Official Language, I thank Joel Champetier, Glenn Grant, Daniel Sernine, and Jean-Louis Trudel, even though they couldn't come up with an alliterative translation for "blood-spewing semen-sucking sickle-celled savior". (They did, however, dissuade me from turning "Celine Dion" into a swear word. Just barely.)

Once again, the music of Ian Anderson and the inestimable Jethro Tull kept me company during the many long nights it took to lay this puppy to rest. As did the music of REM, from whom I stole a couple of chapter titles.

My thanks to all of these for their efforts and/or inspiration, and apologies for all the stuff I probably got wrong anyway.

The following references helped me beat Maelstrom into a shape that's (hopefully) more plausible than if I'd just made everything up myself. This is in addition to the references I cited two years ago in Starfish , which I won't bother repeating here: go buy the damn book if you’re so interested.

When I started writing this book, strange claims had just started surfacing in the scientific literature: a new kind of extremely primitive microbe freshly discovered, something inconceivably small [1] Unwins, P.J.R. et al. 1998. Novel nano-organisms from Australian sandstones. American Minerologist 83: 1541–1550. . So small, in fact—less than 100 nanometers in some cases—that many argued they couldn't possibly be alive [2] Broad, W.J. 2000. Scientists find smallest form of life, if it lives. NY Times , Jan. 18. . Believers dubbed them nanobes . (Formal taxonomy- Nanobacterium sanguineum —has been suggested, but not yet formally adopted [3] Euzéby, J.P. March 2001. List of bacterial names with standing in nomenclature. http://www.bacterio.cict.fr/index.html .)

Now, a couple of years later, nanobes have been found not only in hotsprings and Triassic sandstone, but in the blood of mammals (including humans) [4] Kajander, E.O., et al. 1999. Suggestions from observations on nanobacteria isolated from blood. In Size Limits of Very Small Microorganisms: Proceedings of a Workshop. National Academy Press, Washington. 164 pp. . Evidently they find us comfortably reminiscent of the primordial soup in which life originally evolved some 3.5 billion years ago; they feed off the phosphorus and calcium in our blood.

ßehemoth is not N. sanguineum , of course. It's more sophisticated in some ways, more primitive in others. Its genome is encoded in p-RNA, not DNA; it snarfs sulfur, not phosphorus and calcium; it can't survive in cold saline environments (real nanobes probably can't metabolise under such conditions either, but they can withstand them in a dormant state); it has advanced adaptations for cell penetration that are way out of Nanobacterium 's league. It's larger, as large as conventional mycoplasmas and marine bacterioplankton. It is also much nastier, and—last but not least— it doesn't actually exist.

I have, however, tried to make this bug reasonably plausible, given the dramatic constraint of a global apocalypse in a crunchy coating. As a result, ßehemoth is like one of those "composite serial killers" you read about in True-Crime books—bits and pieces of various real-world bugs, thrown together with lots of dramatic license. «A-51» really exists, both in deep lake sediments and the human mouth [5] Kroes et al. 1999. Bacterial diversity within the human subgingival crevice. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 796(25): 14547-14552. . Pseudomonas aeruginosa is another bacterium that lives quite happily in soil, water, worms, and people [6] Rainy, P.B., and E.R. Moxon. 2000. When being hyper keeps you fit. Science 288: 1186–1188. ; like ßehemoth, it has genes which allow it to speed up and slow down its own rate of mutation so it can quick-adapt to novel environments. (I've called them "Blachford genes" here, in the hopes that one Alistair Blachford will get off his ass and publish his thesis on genetic metavariation as an evolutionary strategy [7] Blachford, A. 1984. Metavariation and long term evolutionary patterns. M.Sc. thesis, Zoology, University of British Columbia, 140pp. .) March and McMahon's 1999 review of receptor-mediated endocytosis [8] Marsh, M., and H.T. McMahon. 1999. The structural era of endocytosis. Science 285(5425): 215–220. told me how ßehemoth would be most likely to get inside a host cell, and Decatur and Portnoy [9] Decatur, A.L., and D.A. Portnoy. 2000. A PEST-like sequence in Listeriolysin O essential for Listeria monocytogenes pathogenicity. Science 290: 992–995. told me how it could avoid getting digested afterward. And once again, a nod to Denis Lynn of the University of Guelph for forcing me to worry about such things in the first place.