Rifters 2 - Maelstrom (19 page)

Authors: Peter Watts

Tags: #Science Fiction, #General, #Tsunamis, #Revenge, #Fiction

Alice Jovellanos—rager within The System, face of the faceless, staunch advocate of the Rights of the Individual—was looking at him with fire and fear in her eyes.

"Whatever it takes," she said. "Whatever the cost. Or we are definitely out of a job."

Groundswell

He knows something
, Sou-Hon Perrault thought.
And it's killing them.

She wasn't the only one riding 'flies along the Strip, but she was the only one who seemed to have noticed the stickman. She'd mentioned him casually to a couple of colleagues, and been met with benign indifference; The Strip was braindead gig, a herd to be watched with one eye. Why would anyone actually
interact
with those cattle? They were too boring for entertainment, too placid for revolt, too powerless to do anything even if this Amitav
was
being a shit-disturber. They were functionally invisible.

But three people threw rocks at her botfly the next day, and the upturned faces that met her were not so placid as they had been.

Such faith you have in your machines
, Amitav had said.
You have never thought that perhaps they are not working as well as you think?

Maybe it was nothing. Maybe Amitav's cryptic grumbles had only primed her imagination. After all, a few stonethrowers were hardly remarkable in a population of millions, and almost everywhere on the Strip the refugees milled as harmlessly as ever. Only along the stickman's beat were things even hinting at ugliness.

But were people starting to look—well,
thinner
—along that particular sliver of the Oregon coast?

Maybe. Not that gaunt faces were unusual on the Strip. Gastroenteritis, Maui-TB, a hundred other diseases thrived in those congested environs, utterly indifferent to the antibiotics that traditionally laced cycler food. Most of those bugs caused some degree of wasting. If people were losing weight, mere starvation was the
least
likely explanation.

It is only after they begin starving that they see your cyclers for what they are
...

Amitav refused to explain what he'd meant by that. When she sidled toward the subject he ignored the bait. When she'd asked him directly he dismissed her with a bitter laugh.

"Your wonderful machines, not working? Impossible! Loaves and fishes for all!"

And all the while, malnourished disciples accreted in his wake like the tail of a smoldering comet. Some seemed to be losing hair and fingernails. She stared back at their closed, hostile faces, increasingly convinced that it was not her imagination. Starvation took time to erode the body— perhaps a week before the flesh began visibly ebbing from the bones. But some of these people seemed to be hollowing out almost overnight. And what was causing that subtle blight of discoloration on so many cheeks and hands?

She didn't know what else to do. She called in the dogcatchers.

128 Megabytes: Hitchhiker

It's grown a fair bit since the old days. Back then it was only 94 Megabytes, and a lot dumber than it is now. Now it weighs in at a hundred and twenty eight, none of it flab. No valuable resources wasted on nostalgic memories, for example. It doesn't remember its pint-sized great-grandparents a million times removed. It doesn't remember
anything
that doesn't help it survive in some way, according to its own stripped-down and ruthless empiricism.

Pattern is everything. Survival is all. No use for the veneration of progenitors. No time for the stratagems of the obsolete.

Which is a shame in a way, because the basic problems haven't changed all that much.

Take the present situation: jammed into the congested confines of a wristwatch linked into the Mérida Credit Union. There's just enough space to hide in if you don't mind partial fragmentation, but not enough to reproduce. It's almost as bad as an academic network.

It gets worse. The watch is disinfecting.

Traffic is all going one way across the system; that never happens unless it's being
chased
by something. Natural selection—which is to say, successful trial-and-error by those long-forgotten ancestors—has equipped 128 with a handy little rule in case of such events; go with the flow. 128 uploads into the Mérida node.

Bad call. Now there's barely even room to move; 128 has to split into fourteen fragments just to fit. Life struggles for existence on all sides, overwriting, fighting, shooting off copies of itself in the blind hope that random chance will spare one or two.

128 fends off panicky egglayers and looks around. Two hundred forty gates; two hundred sixteen already closed, seventeen open but hostile (incoming logic bombs; the disinfection is obviously no local affair). The remaining seven are so crowded with fleeing wildlife that 128 could never get through in time. Almost three quarters of the local node has been disinfected already; 128 has perhaps a dozen millisecs before it starts losing bits of itself.

But wait a nan: those guys over there, they're jumping the queue somehow. They're not even
alive
, they're just files; but the system is giving them preferential treatment.

One of them barely even notices when 128 jumps onto its back. They go through together.

* * *

Much better. A nice roomy buffer, a couple of terabytes if it's a nybble, somewhere between the last node and the next. It's nobody's destination—really, just a waiting room—but the present is all that really matters to those who play by Darwin's rules, and the present looks good.

There's no other life in evidence. There are three other files, though, including the horse 128 rode in on: barely animate but still somehow deserving of the royal treatment that got them fast-tracked out of Mérida. They've de-arced their rudimentary autodiagnostics and are checking themselves for bruises while they wait.

It's an opportunity 128 is well-prepared to exploit, thanks to an inherited subroutine for which it remains eternally ungrateful. While these beasts of burden look under their own hoods, 128 can peek over their shoulders.

Two compressed mail packets and an autonomic crossload between two BCC nodes. 128 evinces the sub-electronic equivalent of a shudder. It steers well clear of nodes with the BCC prefix; it's seen too many brethren go
into
such addresses, and none at all come out. Still, peeking at a few lines of routine stats shouldn't do any harm.

In fact, it proves quite enlightening. Once you disregard all the formatting and addressing redundancies, these three files seem to have two remarkable things in common:

They all go the head of the line when traveling through Maelstrom. And they all contain the text string
Lenie Clarke
.

128 is literally
built
out of numbers. It certainly knows how to add two and two.

Animal Control

The pretense had ended long before Sou-Hon Perrault joined the ranks.

There'd been a time, she knew, when those who fell ill on the Strip were actually treated on-site. There'd been clinics, right next to the pre-fab offices where refugees came to hand in forms and hold out hopes. In those days the Strip had been a
temporary measure
, a mere stop-gap
until we deal with the backlog
. People had stood at the door and knocked; a steady stream had trickled through.

Nothing compared to the cascade piling up behind.

Now the offices were gone. The clinics were gone. N'AmPac had long-since thrown up its hands against the rising tide; it had been years since anyone had described the Strip as a waystation. Now it was pure terminus. And now, when things went wrong over the wall, there were no clinics left to put on the case.

Now there were only the dogcatchers.

* * *

They came in just after sunrise, near the end of her shift. They swooped down like big metal hornets: a nastier breed of botfly, faces bristling with needles and taser nodes, bellies distended with superconducting ground-effectors that could lift a man right off his feet. Usually that wasn't necessary; the Strippers were used to occasional intrusions in the name of public health. They endured the needles and tests with stoic placidity.

This time, though, some snapped and snarled. In one instance Perrault glimpsed a struggling refugee carried aloft by a pair of dogcatchers working in tandem—one subduing, the other sampling, both carrying out their tasks beyond reach of the strangely malcontent horde below. Their specimen fought to escape, ten meters above the ground. For a moment it almost looked as though he might succeed, but Perrault switched channels without waiting to find out. There was no point in hanging around; the dogcatchers knew what they were doing, after all, and she had other duties to perform.

She occupied herself with research.

The usual tangle of conflicting rumors still ran rampant along the coast. Lenie Clarke was on the Strip, Lenie Clarke had left it. She was raising an army in NoCal, she had been eaten alive north of Corvallis. She was Kali, and Amitav was her prophet. She was pregnant, and Amitav was the father. She could not be killed. She was already dead. Where she went, people shook off their lethargy and
raged
. Where she went, people died.

There was no shortage of stories. Even her botfly began telling them.

* * *

She was interrogating an Asian woman near the NoCal border. The filter was set to Cantonese: a text translation scrolled across a window in her HUD while her headset whispered the equivalent spoken English.

Suddenly that equivalence disappeared. The voice in Perrault's ear insisted that "
I do not know this Lenie Clarke but I have heard of the man Amitav
", but the text on her display said something else entirely:

angel. No shit. Lenie Clarke, her name was

her up but Lenie Clarke isn't exactly sockeye

a place called Beebe? Anyhow, far as

"Wait. Wait a second," Perrault said. The refugee fell obediently silent.

The text box kept scrolling, though,

Lenie? That's her first name?

It cleared quickly enough when Perrault wiped the window. But by then her headset was talking again.

"Lenie Clarke was very…not even your
antidepressants
seemed to work on her," it said.

Amitav's words. She remembered them.

Not his voice, of course. Something cool, inflectionless, with no trace of accent. Something familiar and inhuman. Spoken words, converted to ASCII for transmission then reconstructed at the other end: it was a common trick for reducing file size, but tone and feeling got lost in the wash.

Amitav's words. Maelstrom's voice. Perrault felt a prickling along the back of her neck.

"Hello? Who is this?"

The refugee was speaking. Perrault had no idea what she said. Certainly it wasn't

Brander, Mi/ke/cheal,

Caraco, Jud/y/ith

Clarke, Len/ie

Lubin, Ken/neth

Nakata, Alice

which was all that appeared on the board.

"What about Lenie Clarke?" There was no way to source the signal—as far as the system could tell, the input had arisen from a perplexed-looking Asian woman on the NoCal shoreline.

"Lenie Clarke," the dead voice repeated softly. "All of a sudden there's this K-selector walking out of nowhere. Looks like one of those old litcrits with the teeth. You know. Vampires."

"Who is this? How did you get on this channel?"

"Would you like to know about Lenie Clarke." If the words had arisen from anything flesh and blood, they would have formed a question.

"Yes! Yes, but—"

"She's still at large.
Les beus
are probably looking for her."

Intelligence spilled across the text window: