Peter Watts - Starfish

"I didn't lie to you, Dr. Scanlon. Fundamentally, you could call this an agricultural problem. We're dealing with sort of a— a soil bacterium. It’s not a pathogen at all, really. It’s just— a competitor. And no, it never caught on. But as it turns out, it never really died off, either."

She dropped into a chair.

"Do you know what the really shitty thing is about all this? We could let you go right now and it's entirely possible that everything would be fine. It's almost certain, in fact. One in a thousand chance we'd regret it, they say. Maybe one in ten thousand."

"Pretty good odds," Scanlon agreed. "What's the punchline?"

"Not good enough. We can't take the chance."

"You take a bigger risk every time you step outside."

Rowan sighed. "And people play lotteries with odds of one in a million , all the time. But Russian Roulette's got much better odds than that, and you won't find too many people taking their chances at it."

"Different payoffs."

"Yes. The payoffs." Rowan shook her head; in some strange abstract way she seemed almost amused. "Cost-benefit analysis, Yves. Maximum likelihood. Risk assessment. The lower the risk, the more sense it makes to play."

"And the reverse," Scanlon said.

"Yes. Of course. The reverse."

"Must be pretty bad," he said, "to turn down ten-thousand-to-one odds."

"Oh yes." She didn't look at him.

He'd been expecting it, of course. The bottom dropped out of his stomach anyway.

"Let me guess," he said. He couldn't seem to keep his voice level. "N'AmPac's at risk if I go free."

"Worse," she said, very softly.

"Ah. Worse than N'AmPac. Okay, then. The human race. The whole human race goes belly up if I so much as sneeze out of doors."

"Worse," she repeated.

She's lying. She has to be. She's just a refsucking dryback cunt. Find her angle.

Scanlon opened his mouth. No words came out.

He tried again. "Hell of a soil bacterium." His voice sounded as thin as the silence that followed.

"In some ways, actually, it's more like a virus," she said at last. "God, Yves, we're still not really sure what it is. It's old, older than the Archaea, even. But you've figured that out for yourself. A lot of the details are beyond me."

Scanlon giggled. "Details are beyond you?" His voice swerved up an octave, dropped again. "You lock me up for all this time and now you tell me I'm stuck here forever— I assume that's what you're about to tell me—" the words tumbled out too quickly for her to disagree— "and you just don't have a head to remember the details? Oh, that's okay, Ms. Rowan, why should I want to hear about those ?"

Rowan didn't answer directly. "There's a theory that life got started in rift vents. All life. Did you know that, Yves?"

He shook his head. What the hell is she going on about?

"Two prototypes," Rowan continued. "Three, four billion years ago. Two competing models. One of them cornered the market, set the standard for everything from viruses up to giant sequoias. But the thing is, Yves, the winner wasn't necessarily the best product. It just got lucky somehow, got some early momentum. Like software, you know? The best programs never end up as industry standards."

She took a breath. "We're not the best either, apparently. The best never got off the ocean floor."

"And it's in me now? I'm some sort of Patient Zero?" Scanlon shook his head. "No. It's impossible."

"Yves—"

"It's just the deep sea. It's not outer space, for God's sake. There's currents, there's circulation, it would have come up a hundred million years ago, it'd be everywhere already."

Rowan shook her head.

" Don't tell me that! You're a fucking corpse, you don't know anything about biology! You said so yourself!"

Suddenly Rowan was staring directly through him. "An actively maintained hypo-osmotic intracellular environment," she intoned. "Potassium, calcium, and chlorine ions all maintained at concentrations of less than five millimoles per kilogram." Tiny snowstorms gusted across her pupils. "The consequent strong osmotic gradient, coupled with high bilayer porosity, results in extremely efficient assimilation of nitrogenous compounds. However, it also limits distribution in aqueous environments with salinity in excess of twenty parts-per-thousand, due to the high cost of osmoregulation. Thermal elev—"

" Shut up !"

Rowan fell immediately silent, her eyes dimming slightly.

"You don't know what the fuck you just said," Scanlon spat. "You're just reading off that built-in teleprompter of yours. You don't have a clue."

"They're leaky, Yves." Her voice was softer now. "It gives them a huge edge at nutrient assimilation, but it backfires in salt water because they have to spend so much energy osmoregulating. They have to keep their metabolism on high or they shrivel up like raisins. And metabolic rate rises and falls with the ambient temperature, do you follow?"

He looked at her, surprised. "They need heat. They die if they leave the rift."

Rowan nodded. "It takes a while, even at four degrees. Most of them just keep way down in the vents where it's always warm, and they can survive cold spells between eruptions anyway. But deep circulation is so slow, you see, if they leave one rift they die long before they find another." She took a deep breath. "But if they got past that, do you see? If they got into an environment that wasn't quite so salty, or even one that wasn't quite so cold, they'd get their edge back. It would be like trying to compete for your dinner with something that eats ten times faster than you do."

"Right. I'm carrying Armageddon around inside me. Come on, Rowan. What do you take me for? This thing evolved on the bottom of the ocean and it can just hop into a human body and hitch-hike to the big city?"

"Your blood is warm." Rowan stared at her half of the table. "And not nearly as salty as seawater. This thing actually prefers the inside of a body. It's been in the fish down there for ages, that's why they get so big sometimes. Some sort of— intracellular symbiosis, apparently."

"Fine. What about the, the pressure difference then? How can something that evolved under four hundred atmospheres survive at sea level?"

She didn't have an answer for that one at first. After a moment a faint spark lit her eyes. "It's better off up here than down there, actually. High pressure inhibits most of the enzymes involved in metabolism."

"So why aren't I sick?"

"As I said, it's— efficient. Any body contains enough trace elements to keep it going for a while. It doesn't take much. Eventually, they say, your bones will get— brittle—"

"That's it? That's the threat? A plague of osteoporosis?" Scanlon laughed aloud. "Well, bring on the exterminators, by all—"

The sound of Rowan's hand hitting the table was very loud.

"Let me tell you what happens if this thing gets out," she said quietly. "First off, nothing. We outnumber it, you see. At first we swamp it through sheer numbers, the models predict all sorts of skirmishes and false starts. But eventually it gets a foothold. Then it outcompetes conventional decomposers and monopolizes our inorganic nutrient base. That cuts the whole trophic pyramid off at the ankles. You, and me, and the viruses and the giant sequoias all just fade away for want of nitrates or some stupid thing. And welcome to the Age of ßehemoth."

Scanlon didn't say anything for a moment. Then, "Behemoth?"

"With a beta. Beta life. As opposed to alpha, which is everything else." Rowan snorted softly. "I think they named it after something from the Bible. An animal. A grass-eater."

Scanlon rubbed his temples, thinking furiously. "Assuming for the moment that you're telling the truth, it's still just a microbe."