Rifters 2 - Maelstrom

For Laurie

"Though she be but little, she is fierce."

Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox.

—Job 40:15

All flesh is grass.

—Isaiah 40:6

Prelude: Messiah

The day after Patricia Rowan saved the world, a man named Elias Murphy brought a piece of her conscience home to roost.

She hardly needed another one. Her tactical contacts already served up an endless stream of death and damage, numbers far too vague to qualify as estimates. It had only been sixteen hours; even orders of magnitude were barely more than guesses. But the machines kept trying to pin it down, this many million lives, that many trillion dollars, as if quantifying the apocalypse would somehow render it harmless.

Maybe it would at that
, she reflected. The scariest monsters always knew enough to disappear just before you turned on the lights.

She eyed Murphy through the translucent display in her head: a man eclipsed by data he couldn't even see. His face contained its own information, though. She recognised it instantly.

Elias Murphy hated her. To Elias Murphy, the monster was Patricia Rowan.

She didn't blame him. He'd probably lost someone in the quake. But if Murphy knew the role she'd played, he must also know what the stakes had been. No rational being would blame her for taking the necessary steps.

He probably didn't. Rationally. But his hatred rose from somewhere in the brainstem, and Rowan could not begrudge it.

"There's a loose end," he said evenly.

More than one
.

"The ßehemoth meme got into Maelstrom," the gel-jockey continued. "Actually it's been in the net for some time, although it only really—impacted—through that one gel that you…"

He stopped before the accusation became explicit.

After a moment he began again. "I don't know how much they've told you about the—glitch. We used a Gaussian feed-forward algorithm to get around local minima—"

"You taught smart gels to protect data from Internet wildlife," Rowan said. "Somehow they generalized that into a preference for simple systems over complex ones. We innocently gave one of them a choice between a microbe and a biosphere and it started working for the wrong side. We pulled the plug just in time. That about right?"

"Just in time," Murphy echoed.
Not for everyone
, his eyes added. "But it had already spread the meme by then. It was linked into Maelstrom so it could act autonomously, of course."

Rowan translated:
So it could immolate people without restraint.
She was still vaguely amazed that the Consortium had ever agreed to give that kind of power to a head cheese. Granted there was no such thing as a human without bias. Granted no one was going to trust anyone
else
to decide what cities should burn for the
greater good
, even in the face of a microbe that could end the world. Still: give absolute authority to a two-kilogram slab of cultured neurons? She'd actually been impressed that all the kings and corpses had really agreed to it.

Of course, the thought that smart gels might have their
own
biases hadn't occurred to anyone.

"You asked to be kept informed," Murphy told her, "but it's really not a problem. It's just a junk meme now, it'll burn itself out in a week or two."

"A week or two." Rowan took a breath. "Are you aware of how much damage your
junk meme
's caused in the past fifteen
hours
?"

"I—"

"It hijacked a lifter, Dr. Murphy. It was two hours away from letting half a dozen vectors loose in the general population, in which case all
this
might have only been the beginning instead of—" —
instead of, oh please God, the end of the matter…

"It could hijack a lifter because it had
command authority
. It doesn't have that any more, and the other gels never
did
. We're talking about a bunch of code that's useless to anything without real-world autonomy and which, barring some external impetus, will eventually extinguish anyway for lack of reinforcement. And as for
all this—
" Murphy's voice had acquired a sudden, insubordinate edge—"from what I hear, it wasn't the gels that pulled that particular trigger."

Well. Can't get much more explicit than that
.

She decided to let it pass. "Forgive me, but I'm not entirely reassured. There's a plan for world destruction percolating through the net, and you're telling me not to
worry
about it?"

"That's what I'm telling you."

"Unfort—"

"Ms. Rowan, gels are like big gooey autopilots. Just because something can monitor altitude and weather and put down landing gear at the right time, that doesn't mean it's
aware
of any of those things. The gels aren't plotting to destroy the world, they don't even know the real world exists. They're just manipulating variables. And that's only dangerous if one of their output registers happens to be hooked up to a bomb on a fault line."

"Thank you for your assessment. Now if you were instructed to purge this meme, how would you go about it?"

He shrugged. "We can find perverted gels through simple interrogation, now that we know what to look for. We'd swap out tainted gels for fresh ones—we were scheduled to go to phase four anyway, so the next crop's already ripe."

"Good," Rowan. said. "Get started."

Murphy stared at her.

"Is there some problem?" Rowan asked.

"We could
do
it, all right, but it'd be a complete waste of—I mean, my
God
! Half the Pacific coast just dropped into the sea, surely there's more—"

"Not for you, sir. You have your assignment."

He turned away, crowded by invisible statistics.

"What kind of external impetus, Doctor?" She said to his back.

He stopped. "What?"

"You said it would extinguish
barring some external impetus
. What did you mean?"

"Something to pump up the replication rate. New input to reinforce the meme."

"What kind of input?"

He turned to face her. "There is none, Ms. Rowan. That's my point. You've purged the records, you've broken the correlations, and you've eliminated the vectors, right?"

Rowan nodded. "We—"

—
killed our people—

"eliminated the vectors," she said.

"Well there you go."

She deliberately softened her voice. "Please carry out my instructions, Dr. Murphy. I know they seem trivial to you, but I'd rather take the precautions than the risk."

His face conveyed exactly what he thought of the
precautions
she'd already undertaken. He nodded and left without another word.

Rowan sighed and sagged back in her chair. A banner of text scrolled across her field of view: another four hundred botflies successfully requisitioned for the SeaTac mop-up. That made over five thousand of the little teleops between SeaTac and Hongcouver, racing to sniff out the bodies before typhus and cholera beat them to the trough.

Millions dead. Trillions in damages. Preferable to the alternative, she knew. It didn't help much.

Saving the world had come with a price tag attached.

Volvox

Mermaid

The Pacific Ocean stood on her back. She ignored it.

It crushed the bodies of her friends. She forgot them.

It drank the light, blinding even her miraculous eyes. It dared her to give in, to use her headlamp like some crippled dryback.

She kept going, in darkness.

Eventually the sea floor tilted into a great escarpment, leading into light. The bottom changed. Mud disappeared under viscous clumps of half-digested petroleum: a century of oil spills, a great global rug to sweep them beneath. Generations of sunken barges and fishing trawlers haunted the bottom, each a corpse and crypt and epitaph unto itself. She explored the first one she found, slid through shattered windowpanes and upended corridors, and remembered, vaguely, that fish were supposed to congregate in such places.

A long time ago. Now there were only worms, and suffocating bivalves, and a woman turned amphibious by some abstract convergence of technology and economics.

She kept going.

It was growing almost bright enough to see without eyecaps. The bottom twitched with sluggish eutrophiles, creatures so black with hemoglobin they could squeeze oxygen from the rocks themselves. She flashed her headlamp at them, briefly: they shone crimson in the unexpected light.

She kept going.

Sometimes, now, the water was so murky she could barely see her own hands in front of her. The slimy rocks passing beneath took on ominous shapes, grasping hands, twisted limbs, hollow death's heads with things squirming in their eyes. Sometimes the slime assumed an almost fleshy appearance.

By the time she felt the tug of the surf, the bottom was completely covered in bodies. They, too, seemed to span generations. Some were little more than symmetrical patches of algae. Others were fresh enough to bloat, obscenely buoyant, straining against the detritus holding them down.

But it wasn't the bodies that really bothered her. What bothered her was the light. Even filtered through centuries of suspended effluvium, there seemed far too much of it.

The ocean pushed her up, pulled her down, with a rhythm both heard and felt. A dead gull spun past in the current, tangled in monofilament. The universe was roaring.

For one brief moment, the water disappeared in front of her. For the first time in a year she saw the sky. Then a great wet hand slapped the back of her head, put her under again.

She stopped swimming, uncertain what to do next. But the decision wasn't hers anyway. The waves, marching endlessly shoreward in gray, seething rows, pushed her the rest of the way.

* * *

She lay gasping on her belly, water draining from the machinery in her chest: gills shutting down, guts and airways inflating, fifty million years of vertebrate evolution jammed into thirty seconds with a little help from the biotech industry. Her stomach clenched against its own chronic emptiness. Starvation had become a friend, so faithful she could scarcely imagine its absence. She pulled the fins from her feet, rose, staggered as gravity reasserted itself. A shaky step forward.

The hazy outlines of guard towers leaned against the eastern horizon, a gap-toothed line of broken spires. Fat tick-like shapes hovered above them, enormous by inference: lifters, tending the remains of a border than had always kept refugees and citizens discreetly segregated. There were no refugees here. There were no citizens. There was only a humanoid accretion of mud and oil with machinery at its heart, an ominous mermaid dragging itself back from the abyss. Undiscardable.

And all this endless chaos—the shattered landscape, the bodies smashed and sucked into the ocean, the devastation reaching God knew how far in every direction—it was all just collateral. The hammer, she knew, had been aimed at
her
.

It made her smile.

Fables of the Reconstruction,