Peter Watts - Starfish

"Clarke?"

But it wasn't Clarke that answered him. The lifter's interface was bleating again.

Unregistered contact , it complained.

Bearing 125x87 V1440 6V5.8m1sec -2range 13000m

Collision imminent 12000m

11000m

10000m

Barely visible through the main viewport, a white cloudy dot caught a high-altitude shaft of morning sunlight. It looked like a contrail, seen head-on.

"Ah, shit," Joel said.

One whole wall was window. The city spread out beyond like a galactic arm. Patricia Rowan locked the door behind her, sagged against it with sudden fatigue.

Not yet. Not yet. Soon.

She went through her office and turned out all the lights. City glow spilled in through the window, denied her any refuge in darkness.

Patricia Rowan stared back. A tangled grid of metropolitan nerves stretched to the horizon, every synapse incandescent. Her eyes wandered southwest, selected a bearing. She stared until her eyes watered, almost afraid even to blink for fear of missing something.

That was where it would come from.

Oh God. If only there was another way.

It could have worked. The modellers had put even money on pulling this off without so much as a broken window. All those faults and fractures between here and there would work in their favor, firebreaks to keep the tremor from getting this far. Just wait for the right moment; a week, a month. Timing. That's all it would've taken.

Timing, and a calculating slab of meat that followed human rules instead of making up its own.

But she couldn't blame the gel. It simply didn't know any better, according to the systems people; it was just doing what it thought it was supposed to. And by the time anybody knew differently— after Scanlon's cryptic interview with that fucking thing had looped in her head for the hundredth time, after she'd taken the recording down to CC, after their faces had gone puzzled and confused and then, suddenly, pale and panicky— by then it had been too late. The window was closed. The machine was engaged. And a lone GA shuttle, officially docked securely at Astoria, was somehow showing up on satcams hovering over the Juan de Fuca Rift.

She couldn't blame the gel, so she tried to blame CC. "After all that programming, how could this thing be working for ßehemoth? Why didn't you catch it? Even Scanlon figured it out, for Christ's sake!" But they'd been too scared for intimidation. You gave us the job, they'd said. You didn't tell us what was at stake. You didn't even really tell us what we were doing. Scanlon came at this from a whole different angle, who knew the head cheese had a thing for simple systems? We never taught it that…

Her watch chimed softly. "You asked to be informed, Ms. Rowan. Your family got off okay."

"Thank you," she said, and killed the connection.

A part of her felt guilty for saving them. It hardly seemed fair that the only ones to escape the holocaust would be the beloved of one of its architects. But she was only doing what any mother would. Probably more: she was staying behind.

That wasn't much. It probably wouldn't even kill her. The GA's buildings were built with the Big One in mind. Most of the buildings in this district would probably still be standing this time tomorrow. Of course, the same couldn't be said for much of Hongcouver or SeaTac or Victoria.

Tomorrow, she would help pick up the pieces as best she could.

Maybe we'll get lucky. Maybe the quake won't be so bad. Who knows, that gel down there might even have chosen tonight anyway…

Please…

Patricia Rowan had seen earthquakes before. A strike-slip fault off Peru had rebounded the time she'd been in Lima on the Upwell project; the moment magnitude of that quake had been close to nine. Every window in the city had exploded.

She actually hadn't had a chance to see much of the damage then. She'd been trapped in her hotel when forty-six stories of glass collapsed onto the streets outside. It was a good hotel, five stars all the way; the ground-level windows, at least, had held. Rowan remembered looking out from the lobby into a murky green glacier of broken glass, seven meters deep, packed tight with blood and wreckage and butchered body parts jammed between piecemeal panes. One brown arm was embedded right next to the lobby window, waving, three meters off the ground. It was missing three fingers and a body. She'd spied the fingers a meter away, pressed floating sausages, but she hadn't been able to tell which of the bodies, if any, would have connected to that shoulder.

She remembered wondering how that arm had got so high off the ground. She remembered vomiting into a wastebasket.

It couldn't happen here, of course. This was N'AmPac; there were standards. Every building in the lower mainland had windows designed to break inwards in the event of a quake. It wasn't an ideal solution— especially to those who happened to be inside at the time— but it was the best compromise available. Glass can't get up nearly as much speed in a single room as it can racing down the side of a skyscraper.

Small blessings.

If only there was some other way to sterilize the necessary volume. If only ßehemoth didn't, by it's very nature, live in unstable areas. If only N'AmPac corpses weren't authorized to use nukes.

If only the vote hadn't been unanimous.

Priorities. Billions of people. Life as we know it.

It was hard, though. The decisions were obvious and correct, tactically, but it had been hard to keep Beebe's crew quarantined down there. It had been hard to decide to sacrifice them. And now that they somehow seemed to be getting out anyway, it was—

Hard? Hard to bring at 9.5 moment-magitude quake down on the heads of ten million people? Just hard?

There was no word for it.

But she had done it, somehow. The only moral alternative. It was still just murder in small doses, compared to what might be necessary down the—

No. This is being done so nothing will be necessary down the road.

Maybe that was why she could bring herself to do it. Or maybe, somehow, reality had finally trickled down from her brain to her gut, inspired it to take the necessary steps. Certainly, something had hit her down there.

I wonder what Scanlon would say . It was too late to ask him now. She'd never told him, of course. She was never even tempted. To tell him that they knew, that his secret was out, that once again he just didn't matter that much— somehow, that would have been worse than killing him. She'd had no desire to hurt the poor man.

Her watch chimed again. "Override," it said.

Oh God. Oh God .

It had started, out there beyond the lights, under three black kilometers of seawater. That crazy kamikaze gel, interrupted in the midst of one of its endless imaginary games: forget that shit. Time to blow.

And perhaps, confused, it was saying Not now, it's the wrong time, the damage. But it didn't matter any more. Another computer— a stupid one this time, inorganic and programmable and completely trustworthy— would send the requisite sequence of numbers and the gel would be right out of the loop, no matter what it thought.

Or maybe it just saluted and stood aside. Maybe it didn't care. Who knew what those monsters thought any more?

"Detonation," said the watch.

The city went dark.

The abyss rushed in, black and hungry. One isolated cluster sparkled defiantly in the sudden void; a hospital perhaps, running on batteries. A few private vehicles, self-powered antiques, staggered like fireflies along streets gone suddenly blind. The rapitrans grid was still glowing too, more faintly than usual.