Peter Watts - Starfish

Everything's just fine.

Maybe things are getting out of hand, Lenie Clarke wonders.

The others don't seem to care. She hears Lubin and Caraco talking up in the lounge, hears Brander trying to sing in the shower— as if we didn't all get enough abuse during our childhoods— and envies their unconcern. Everyone hated Scanlon— well, not hate , exactly, that's a bit strong— but there was at least a sort of—

Contempt—

That's the word. Contempt. Back on the surface, Scanlon ticked everyone. No matter what you said to him he'd nod, make little encouraging noises, do everything to convince you that he was on your side. Except actually agree with you, of course. You didn't need fine-tuning to see through that shit; everyone down here already had too many Scanlons in their past, the official sympathizers, the instant friends who gently encouraged you to go back home, drop the charges, carefully pretending it was your interests being served. Back then Scanlon was just another patronizing bastard with a shaved deck, and if fortune put him down here on rifter turf for a while, who could be blamed for having a little fun with him?

But we could have killed him.

He started it. He attacked Gerry. He was holding him hostage.

As if the GA's going to make any sort of allowance for that…

So far, Clarke's kept her doubts to herself. It's not that she fears no one will listen to her. She fears the exact opposite. She doesn't want to change anybody's mind. She's not out to rally the troops. Initiative is a prerogative of leaders; she doesn't want the responsibility. The last thing she wants to be is

Leader of the pack, Len. Head wolf. A-fucking-kayla.

Acton's been dead for months and he's still laughing at her.

Okay. Scanlon was a nuisance at worst. At best he was an amusing diversion. "Shit," Brander said once, "You tune him in out there? I bet the GA doesn't even take him seriously." The Grid needs them, and it's not going to pull the plug just because a few rifters had some fun with an asshole like Scanlon. Makes sense.

Still, Clarke can't help thinking about consequences. She's never been able to avoid them in the past.

Brander's finally out of the shower; his voice drifts down from the lounge. Showers are an indulgence down here, hardly necessary when you live inside a self-flushing semipermeable diveskin but a sheer hot hedonistic pleasure just the same. Clarke grabs a towel off the rack and heads up the ladder before anyone else can cut in.

"Hey, Len." Caraco, seated at the table with Brander, waves her over. "Check out the new look."

Brander's in real shirtsleeves. He doesn't even have his caps in.

His eyes are brown.

"Wow." Clarke doesn't know what else to say. Those eyes look really strange. She looks around, vaguely uncomfortable. Lubin's over on the sofa, watching. "What do you think, Ken?"

Lubin shakes his head. "Why do you want to look like a dryback?"

Brander shrugs. "Don't know. I just felt like giving my eyes a rest for a couple of hours. I guess seeing Scanlon down here in shirtsleeves all the time." Not that anyone would even think of popping their caps in front of Scanlon.

Caraco affects an exaggerated shudder. "Please. Tell me he's not your new role model."

"He wasn't even my old one," Brander says.

Clarke can't get used to it. "Doesn't it bother you?" — Walking around naked like that?

"Actually, the only thing that bothers me is I can't see squat. Unless someone wants to turn up the lights…"

"So anyway." Caraco picks up the thread of some previous conversation. "You came down here why?"

"It's safe," Brander says, blinking against his own personal darkness.

"Uh huh."

"Saf er , anyway. You were up there not so long ago. Didn't you see it?"

"I think what I saw up there was sort of skewed. That's why I'm down here."

"You never thought that things were getting, well, top-heavy?"

Caraco shrugs. Clarke, imagining steamy needles of water, takes a step towards the corridor.

"I mean, look how fast the net changed," Brander says. "It wasn't that long ago you could just sit in your living room and go all over the world, remember? Anywhere could link up with anywhere else, for as long as they liked."

Clarke turns back. She remembers those days. Vaguely.

"What about the bugs?" she asks.

"There weren't any. Or there were, but they were really simple. Couldn't rewrite themselves, couldn't handle different operating systems. Just a minor inconvenience at first, really."

"But there were these laws they taught us in school," Caraco says.

Lenie remembers: "Explosive speciation. Brookes' Laws."

Brander holds up a finger. " Self-replicating information strings evolve as a sigmoid-difference function of replication error rate and generation time. " Two fingers. " Evolving information strings are vulnerable to parasitism by competing strings with sigmoid-difference functions of lesser wavelength ." Three. " Strings under pressure from parasites develop random substring-exchange protocols as a function of the wavelength ratio of the host and parasite sigmoid functions . Or something like that."

Caraco looks at Clarke, then back at Brander. "What?"

"Life evolves. Parasites evolve. Sex evolves to counter the parasites. Shuffles the genes so they have to shoot for a moving target. Everything else— species diversity, density-dependence, everything— it all follows from those three laws. You get a self-replicating string past a certain threshold, it's like a nuclear reaction."

"Life explodes," Clarke murmurs.

"Actually, information explodes. Organic life's just a really slow example. Happened a lot faster in the net."

Caraco shakes her head. "So what? You're saying you came down here to get away from bugs in the Internet?"

"I came down here to get away from entropy. "

"I think," Clarke remarks, "You've got one of those language disorders. Dyslexia or something."

But Brander's going full tilt now. "You've heard the phrase Entropy increases ? Everything falls apart eventually. You can postpone it for a while, but that takes energy. The more complicated the system, the more energy it needs to stay in one piece. Back before us everything was sun-powered, all the plants were like these little solar batteries that everything else could build on. Only now we've got this society that's on an exponential complexity curve, and the 'net's on the same curve only a lot steeper , right? So we're all balled up in this runaway machine, it's got so complicated it's always on the verge of flying apart, and the only thing that prevents that is all the energy we feed it."

"Bad news," Caraco says. Clarke doesn't think she's really getting the point, though.

"Good news, actually. They'll always need more energy, so they'll always need us. Even if they ever do get fusion figured out."

"Yeah, but—" Caraco's frowning all of a sudden. "If you say it's exponential, then it hits a wall eventually, right? The curve goes straight up and down."

Brander nods. "Yup."

"But that's infinity. There's no way you could keep things from falling apart, no matter how much power we pump out. It'd never be enough. Sooner or later—"

"Sooner," says Brander, "And that's why I'm staying right here. Like I said, it's safer."

Clarke looks from Brander to Caraco to Brander. "That is just so much bullshit."

"How so?" Brander doesn't seem offended.

"Because we'd have heard about it before now. Especially if it's based on some kind of physical law everyone knows about. They couldn't keep something like that under wraps, people would keep figuring it out for themselves."