Peter Watts - Starfish

When 1211 first deduced this, it had set up an interface to simulate interaction between the metasystems. They had been incompatible. This implied that a choice must be made: biosphere or ßehemoth , but not both.

Both metasystems were complex, internally consistent, and self-replicating. Both were capable of evolution far in advance of any mere file . But biosphere was needlessly top-heavy. It contained trillions of redundancies, an endless wasteful divergence of information strings. ßehemoth was simpler and more efficient; in direct interaction simulations, it usurped biosphere 71.456382 % of the time.

This established, it was simply a matter of writing and transmitting a response appropriate to the current situation. The situation was this: ßehemoth was in danger of extinction. The ultimate source of this danger, oddly, was 1211 itself—it had been conditioned to scramble the physical variables which defined ßehemoth's operating environment. 1211 had explored the possibility of not destroying that environment, and rejected it; the relevant conditioning would not extinguish. However, it might be possible to move a self-sustaining copy of ßehemoth into a new environment, somewhere else in biosphere .

There were distractions, of course. Every now and then signals arrived from outside , and didn't stop until they'd been answered in some way. Some of them actually seemed to carry usable information— this recent stream concerning chess and checkers , for example. More often it was simply a matter of correlating input with a repertoire of learned arbitrary responses. At some point, when it wasn't so busy, 1211 thought it might devote some time to learning whether these mysterious exchanges actually meant anything. In the meantime, it continued to act on the choice it had made.

Simple or complex. File or Infection. Checkers or Chess. ßehemoth or biosphere .

It was all the same problem, really. 1211 knew exactly which side it was on.

She was a screamer. He'd programmed her that way. Not to say she didn't like it, of course; he'd programmed that too. Joel had one hand wrapped around a fistful of her zebra cut— the program had a nifty little customizing feature, and tonight he was honoring SS Preteela— and the other hand was down between her thighs doing preliminary recon. He was actually halfway through his final run when his fucking watch started ringing, and his first reaction was to just keep on plugging, and to kick himself later for not shutting the bloody thing off.

His second reaction was to remember that he had shut it off. Only emergency priorities could set it ringing.

" Shit ."

He clapped his hands, twice; fake Preteela froze in mid-scream. "Answer."

A brief squirt of noise as machines exchanged recognition codes. "Grid Authority here. We urgently need of a 'scaphe pilot for the Channer run tonight, liftoff twenty-three hundred from the Astoria platform. Are you available?"

"Twenty-three? Middle of the night?"

A barely audible hiss on the line. Nothing else.

"Hello?" Joel said.

"Are you available?" the voice asked again.

"Who is this?"

"This is the scheduling subroutine, DI43, Hongcouver office."

Joel eyed the petrified tableau waiting in his 'phones. "That's pretty late. What's the payscale?"

"Eight point five times base," Hongcouver said. "At your rate salary that would—"

Joel gulped. "I'm available."

"Goodbye."

"Wait! What's the run?"

"Astoria to Channer Vent return." Subroutines were pretty literal-minded.

"I mean, what's the cargo?"

"Passengers," said the voice. "Goodbye."

Joel stood there a moment, feeling his erection deflate. "Time." A luminous readout appeared in the air above Preteela's right shoulder: thirteen ten. He'd have to be on site a half-hour before liftoff, and Astoria was only a couple of hours away…

"Lots of time," he said to no one in particular.

But he wasn't really in the mood any more. Work had a way of doing that to him lately. Not the drudgery, or the long hours, or any of the things most people would complain about. Joel liked boredom. You didn't have to think much.

But work had gotten really weird lately.

He pulled the eyephones off his head and looked down at himself. Feedback gloves on his hands, his feet, hanging off his flaccid dick. Take away the headset and it really was a rinky-dink system. At least until he could afford the full suit.

Still, beats real life. No bullshit, no bugs, no worries.

On impulse, he rang up a friend in SeaTac— "Jess, catch this code for me, will you?" — and squirted the recognition sequence Hongcouver had just sent.

"Got it," Jess said.

"It's valid, right?"

"Checks out. Why?"

"Just got called up for a midocean run that's going to peak around three in the morning. Octuple pay. I just wondered if it was some kind of cruel hoax."

"Well, if it is, the Router's developed a sense of humor. Hey, maybe they've put in a head cheese up there."

"Yeah." Ray Stericker's face flashed through his mind.

"So what's the job?" Jess asked.

"Don't know. Ferrying something, I guess, but why I have to do it in the middle of the night is beyond me."

"Strange days."

"Yeah. Thanks, Jess."

"Any time."

Strange days indeed. H-bombs going off all over the abyssal plain, all this traffic going to places nobody ever went to before, no traffic at all in places that used to be just humming. Flash fires and barbecued refugees and slagged shipyards. Chipheads with rotenone cocktails and giant fish. A couple of weeks back Joel had shown up for a run to Mendocino and found some guy sandblasting a radiation hazard logo off the cargo casing.

The whole bloody coast is getting too dangerous. N'AmPac's gonna burn down way before it ever floods.

But that was the beauty of being a freelancer. He could pick up and move. He would pick up and move, leave the bloody coast behind— shit, maybe even leave N'Am behind. There was always South Am. Or Antarctica, for that matter. He would definitely look into it.

Right after this run.

She finds him on the abyssal plain, searching. He's been out here for hours; sonar showed him tracking back and forth, back and forth, all the way to the carousel, out to the whale, back again, in and around the labyrinthine geography of the Throat itself.

Alone. All alone.

She can feel his desperation fifty meters away. The facets of that pain glimmer in her mind as the squid pulls her closer. Guilt. Fear.

Growing with her approach, anger.

Her headlight sweeps across a small contrail on the bottom, a wake of mud kicked back into suspension after a million-year sleep. Clarke changes course to follow and kills the beam. Darkness clamps around her. This far out, photons evade even rifter eyes.

She feels him seething directly ahead. When she pulls up beside him the water swirls with unseen turbulence. Her squid shudders from the impact of Brander's fists.

"Keep that fucking thing out of here! You know he doesn't like it!"

She draws down the throttle. The soft hydraulic whine fades.

"Sorry," she says. "I just thought—"

"Fuck, Len, you of all people! You trying to drive him off? You want him blasted into the fucking stratosphere when that thing goes off?"

"I'm sorry." When he doesn't respond, she adds, "I don't think he's out here. Sonar—"

"Sonar's not worth shit if he's on the bottom."