Питер Уоттс - Gut Feelings

“Uh…”

“ — maybe widen the focus,” Hancock’s saying.

Ghazali crouches, puts one eye to point of impact. It’s no longer like trying to see through wax paper; it’s like staring into a strobe light. He can make out vague shapes through the flicker, though. The green blur of the lawn. Something yellow, maybe the size of a bowling ball, off to the left. Motion in the middle distance; a forest of legs, on the wrong side of the barrier. Closer than they should be. He hears a sound like the roar of an ocean a continent away.

“We’re talking way more than twenty cases,” he says.

“Yeah, well. Takes a while for the data sets to refresh.” Fingers still in motion, eyes still on fire, hot on some trail. She doesn’t seem to have noticed the rock.

He tries again. “You know that giant Google sign you’ve got up on the roof?”

“Shhh.”

“I think it might be — drawing them in — ”

“ Shhh! ”

The next missile hits above and to the left of the first: another web of cracks, another fractured flickering aperture. Ghazali’s almost certain he can hear sirens, now.

Fuck this. He heads for the door.

Hancock’s hand claps down on his shoulder as his hand grasps the knob. “You don’t want to do that.”

He tries anyway. “Still locked.”

“Just as well.”

He puts his ear against the door. “I can’t hear anything out there.”

“Even so.”

Her eyes have died.

“Network’s down,” she says. “All over, I think.”

“Selma. There’s a mob out there.”

She doesn’t answer. She holds up the tablet that used to hold his brain; now it shows a frame grab from a security camera somewhere.

“Do you know where this is?” she asks.

It looks almost staged: attacker and defender facing each other on a tiled floor. The defender’s hands thrown wide against his assailant; staggered, off-balance, he collides with the shoulder of some armoured machine bolted to the floor. Blood courses down his face onto his navy-blue mall-cop uniform.

His attacker stands with back to camera, right fist arcing toward his face. Black denim pants, white cotton tee with a vaguely familiar command stencilled across the shoulder blades. Ghazali reads it aloud: “Don’t Be Evil.”

“Used to be Google’s corporate motto,” Hancock says. “Until it wasn’t.”

“Where’s the logo?”

“That’s not a victim, Marius. That’s the fucking perpetrator.” She jabs the tablet with one finger. “But I only got a time stamp and an IP address before the network went down. This happened five days ago. Do you know where? ”

It’s maddeningly familiar: the way the shadows dice the sunlight on the polished red tiles, the retro-deco struts and pylons that speak of high ceilings and quaint architecture. The curve of that squat gray-green machine, that hulking…

Pump head.

“Harris treatment plant,” he tells her. “End of the Boardwalk. Supplies drinking water to half the GTA.” He sucks in breath. “We gotta tell someone.”

“I told you. Network’s down.” Hancock turns away. She doesn’t even glance at the damaged window.

“There have to be other networks.” She regards him as though he’s retarded. “You’re Google for fuck’s sake! You’ve got satellites! Solar drones! You run a whole separate Internet off weather balloons!”

“Marius. Google knows already.”

She sags to the floor. Leans her back against a table leg.

“I squeezed that signal out of the noise in, what. Ten minutes? Once I knew what to look for. You really think no one else did? You think eight billion lines of code wouldn’t have figured it out a gajillion times faster?”

“Then — wait, you’re saying someone let — ”

“Someone. Something.” Her shoulders rise, fall. “Maybe even started it.”

“ Why? ”

She looks up at him: Weary. Disillusioned.

Empty, somehow.

“Because you hate us, Marius. Because we steal your secret lives and sell them to the highest bidder. We’re the bad guys in every screed anyone ever wrote about the Panopticon, we’re the one thing the Libtards and the Altzis agree on. Only not any more, right? We’ve just gone from villain to victim. The brutalized innocents. It’s actually pretty fucking brilliant, as Hail-Mary PR strategies go.” She stares down at the floor. “With any luck we’ll be running this burg when the dust clears. If only we’d had a bit more data we could have seen this coming. I f only we’d had in-ground sensors and automatic face recognition throughout the GTA like we do in Quayside. Think of the lives we could have saved if your antiquated notions of privacy hadn’t held us back… ”

“No.” He shakes his head. “There’s got to be something we can do.”

A row of bullet holes hemstitches across the window in a jagged diagonal. The pane flickers, fails, falls under the onslaught; a thousand shards drop like icicles. Outside bursts In like a pile driver, a deafening blast of shouts and crashes and sirens. Black smoke and burning rubber. Bullets and bullhorns. A colony creature with a thousand limbs, tearing itself to pieces on the road. A self-driving Tesla hurtles across the lawn, straight as an arrow, flames guttering and leaping from its bright shiny carbon-neutral grille.

“You could always take off that stupid helmet,” she says before it reaches them. “It makes you look like an idiot.”