预计阅读本页时间：-
Head Cheese
广告：个人专属 VPN，独立 IP，无限流量，多机房切换，还可以屏蔽广告和恶意软件，每月最低仅 5 美元
Theme and Variation
A tremor shivers through bedrock. The emerald grid fractures into a jagged spiderweb. Strands of laser light bounce haphazardly into the abyss.
From somewhere within the carousel, a subtle discontent. Intensified cogitation. The displaced beams waver, begin realigning themselves.
Lenie Clarke has seen and felt all of this before. This time she watches the prisms on the seabed, rotating and adjusting themselves like tiny radio-telescopes. One by one the disturbed beams lie back down, parallel, perpendicular, planar. Within seconds the grid is completely restored.
Emotionless satisfaction. Cold alien thoughts nearby, reverting.
And further away, something else coming closer. Thin and hungry, like a faint reedy howl in Clarke's mind...
"Ah, shit," Brander buzzes, diving for the bottom.
It streaks down from the darkness overhead, mindlessly singleminded, big as Clarke and Brander put together. Its eyes reflect the glow from the seabed. It slams into the top of the carousel, mouth open, bounces away with half its teeth broken.
It has no thoughts, but Lenie Clarke can feel its emotions. They don't change. Injury never seems to faze these monsters. Its next attack targets one of the lasers. It skids around the roof of the carousel and comes up from underneath, swallowing one of the beams. It rams the emitter, and thrashes.
A sudden vicarious tingle shoots along Clarke's spine. The creature sinks, twitching. Clarke feels it die before it touches bottom.
"Jesus," she says. "You sure the laser didn't do that?"
"No. Way too weak," Brander tells her. "Didn't you feel it? An electric shock?"
She nods.
"Hey," Brander realizes. "You haven't seen this before, have you?"
"No. Alice told me about it, though."
"The lasers lure them in sometimes, when they wobble."
Clarke eyes the carcass. Neurons hiss faintly inside it. The body's dead, but it can take hours for the cells to run down.
She glances back at the machinery that killed them. "Lucky none of us touched that thing," she buzzes.
"I was keeping my distance anyway. Lubin said it wasn't hot enough to be dangerous, but, well..."
"I was tuned in to the gel, when it happened," she says. "I don't think it—"
"The gel never even notices. I don't think it's hooked into the defense system." Brander looks up at the metal structure. "No, our head cheese has far too much on its mind to waste its time worrying about fish."
She looks at him. "You know what it is, don't you?"
"I don't know. Maybe."
"Well?"
"I said I don't know. Just got some ideas."
"Come on, Mike. If you've got ideas, it's only because the rest of us have been out here taking notes for the past two weeks. Give."
He floats above her, looking down. "Okay," he says at last. "Let me just dump what you got today and run it against the rest. Then, if it pans out..."
"About time." Clarke grabs her squid off the bottom and tweaks the throttle. "Good."
Brander shakes his head. "I don't think so. Not at all."
* * *
"Okay, then. Smart gels are especially suited for coping with rapid changes in topography, right?"
Brander sits at the library. In front of him, one of the flatscreens cycles through a holding pattern. Behind, Clarke and Lubin and Nakata do the same.
"So there are two ways for your topographic environment to change rapidly," he continues. "One, you move quickly through complex surroundings. That's why we're getting gels in muckrakers and ATVs these days. Or you could sit still, and let your surroundings change."
He looks around. Nobody says anything. "Well?"
"So it's thinking about earthquakes," Lubin remarks. "The GA told us that much."
Brander turns back to the console. "Not just any earthquake," he says, a sudden edge in his voice. "The same earthquake. Over and over again."
He touches an icon on the screen. The display rearranges itself into a pair of axes, x and y. Emerald script glows adjacent to each line. Clarke leans forward: time, says the abscissa. Activity, says the ordinate.
A line begins to crawl left to right across the display.
"This is a mean composite plot of every time we ever watched that thing," Brander explains. "I tried to pin some sort of units onto the y-axis, but of course all we can tune in is now it's thinking hard, or now it's slacking off. So you'll have to settle for a relative scale. What you're seeing now is just baseline activity."
The line shoots about a quarter of the way up the scale, flattens out.
"Here it's started thinking about something. I can't correlate this to any real events like local tremors, it just seems to start on its own. An internally-generated loop, I think."
"Simulation," Lubin grunts.
"So it's thinking along like this for a while," Brander continues, ignoring him, "and then, voila..." Another jump, to halfway up the y-axis. The line holds its new altitude for a few pixels, slides into a gentle decline for a pixel or two, then jumps again. "So here it started thinking quite hard, starts to relax, then starts thinking even harder." Another, smaller jump, another gradual decline. "Here it's even more lost in thought, but it takes a nice long break afterwards." Sure enough, the decline continues uninterrupted for almost thirty seconds.
"And right about now…"
The line shoots almost to the top of the scale, fluctuates near the top of the graph. "And here it just about gives itself a hemorrhage. It goes on for a while, then—"
The line plummets vertically.
"—drops right back to baseline. Then there's some minor noise, I think it's storing its results or updating its files or something, and the whole thing starts all over again." Brander leans back in his chair, regards the rest with his hands clasped behind his head. "That's all it's been doing. As long as we've been watching it. The whole cycle takes about fifteen minutes, give or take."
"That's it?" Lubin says.
"Some interesting variations, but that's the basic pattern."
"So what does it mean?" Clarke asks.
Brander leans forward again, towards the library. "Suppose you were an earthquake tremor, starting here on the rift and propagating east. Guess how many faults you'd have to cross to get to the mainland."
Lubin nods and says nothing.
Clarke eyes the graph, guesses: five.
Nakata doesn't even blink, but then, Nakata hasn't done much of anything for days.
Brander points to the first jump. "Us. Channer Vent." The second: "Juan de Fuca, Coaxial Segment." Third: "Juan de Fuca, Endeavour Segment." Fourth: "Beltz minifrac." The last and largest: "Cascadia Subduction Zone."
He waits for their reaction. Nobody says anything. Faintly, from outside, comes the sound of windchimes in mourning.
"Jesus. Look, any simulation is computationally most intensive whenever the number of possible outcomes is greatest. When a tremor crosses a fault it triggers ancillary waves perpendicular to the main direction of travel. Makes for very hairy calculations at those points, if you're trying to model the process."
Clarke stares at the screen. "Are you sure about this?"
"Christ, Len, I'm basing it on stray emissions from a blob of fucking nerve tissue. Of course I'm not sure. But I'll tell you this much: if you assume that this first jump represents the initial quake, and this last dropoff is the mainland, and you also assume a reasonably constant speed of propagation, these intermediate spikes fall almost exactly where Cobb, Beltz, and Cascadia would be. I don't think that's a coincidence."
Clarke frowns. "But doesn't that mean the model stops running as soon as it reaches N'AmPac? I would've thought that's when they'd be most interested."
Brander bites his lip. "Well, that's the thing. The lower the activity near the end of a run, the longer the run seems to last."
She waits. She doesn't have to ask. Brander's far too proud of himself to not explain further.
"And if you assume that lower end-run activity reflects a smaller predicted quake, the cheese spends more time thinking about quakes with lower shoreline impact. Usually, though, it just stops when it hits the coast."
"There's a threshold," Lubin says.
"What?"
"Every time it predicts a coastal quake above a certain threshold, the model shuts down and starts over. Unacceptable losses. It spends more time thinking about the milder ones, but so far they've all resulted in unacceptable losses."
Brander nods, slowly. "I was wondering about that."
"Stop wondering." Lubin's voice is even more dead than usual. "That thing's only got one question on its mind."
"What question?" Clarke asks.
"Lubin, you're being paranoid," Brander snorts. "Just because it's a bit radioactive—"
"They lied to us. They took Judy. Even you're not naive enough —"
"What question?" Clarke asks again.
"But why?" Brander demands. "What would be the point?"
"Mike," Clarke says, softly and clearly, "shut up."
Brander blinks and falls silent. Clarke turns to Lubin. "What question?"
"It's watching the local plates. It's asking, what happens on N'AmPac if there's an earthquake here, right now?" Lubin parts his lips in an expression few would mistake for a smile. "So far it hasn't liked the answer. But sooner or later predicted impact's going to fall below some critical level."
"And then what?" Clarke says. As if I didn't know.
"Then it blows up," says a small voice.
Alice Nakata is talking again.
Ground Zero
Nobody speaks for a long time.
"That's insane," Lenie Clarke says at last.
Lubin shrugs.
"So you're saying it's some kind of a bomb?"
He nods.
"A bomb big enough to cause a major earthquake three, four hundred kilometers away?"
"No," Nakata says. "All of those faults it would have to cross, they would stop it. Firewalls."
"Unless," Lubin adds, "one of those faults is just about ready to slip on its own."
Cascadia. Nobody says it aloud. Nobody has to. One day, five hundred years ago, the Juan de Fuca Plate developed an attitude. It got tired of being endlessly ground under North America's heel. So it just stopped sliding, hung on by its fingernails and dared the rest of the world to shake it free. So far the rest of the world hasn't been able to. But the pressure's been building now for half a millennium. It's only a matter of time.
When Cascadia lets go, a lot of maps are going to end up in recyc.
Clarke looks at Lubin. "You're saying even a small bomb here could kick Cascadia loose. You're saying the big one, right?"
"That's what he's saying," Brander confirms. "So why, Ken old buddy? This some sort of Asian real estate scam? A terrorist attack on N'AmPac?"
"Wait a minute." Clarke holds up a hand. "They're not trying to cause an earthquake. They're trying to avoid one."
Lubin nods. "You set off a fusion charge on the rift, you trigger a quake. Period. How serious depends on conditions at detonation. This thing is just holding itself back until it causes as little damage as possible, back on shore."
Brander snorts. "Come on, Lubin, isn't this all kind of excessive? If they wanted to take us out, why not just come down here and shoot us?"
Lubin looks at him, empty-eyed. "I don't believe you're that stupid, Mike. Perhaps you're just in denial."
Brander rises out of his chair. "Listen, Ken—"
"It's not us," Clarke says. "It's not just us. Is it?"
Lubin shakes his head, not taking his eyes off Brander.
"They want to take out everything. The whole rift."
Lubin nods.
"Why?"
"I don't know," Lubin says. "Perhaps we could ask them."
Figures, Clarke muses. I just never get a break.
Brander sinks back into his chair. "What are you smiling at?"
Clarke shakes her head. "Nothing."
"We must do something," Nakata says,
"No shit, Alice." Brander looks back at Clarke. "Any ideas?"
Clarke shrugs. "How long do we have?"
"If Lubin's right, who knows? Tomorrow, maybe. Ten years from now. Earthquakes are classic chaotic systems, and the tectonics around here change by the minute. If the Throat slips a millimeter it could make the difference between a shiver and a meltdown."
"Perhaps it is a small-yield device," Nakata suggests hopefully. "It is a ways away, and all this water might damp down the shock wave before it reaches us?"
"No," Lubin says.
"But we do not know—"
"Alice," Brander says, "It's almost two hundred kilometers to Cascadia. If this thing can generate P-waves strong enough to kick it loose at that range, we're not going to ride it out here. We might not get vaporized, but the shockwave would tear us into little pieces."
"Perhaps we can disable it somehow," Clarke says.
"No." Lubin is flat and emphatic.
"Why not?" Brander says.
"Even if we get past its front-line defense, we're only seeing the top of the structure. The vitals are buried."
"If we can get in at the top, there might be access—"
"Chances are it's set for damped detonation if tampered with," Lubin says. "And there are others we haven't found."
Brander looks up. "And how do you know that?"
"There have to be. At this depth it would take almost three hundred megatons to generate a bubble even half a kilometer across. If they want to take out any significant fraction of the vent, they'll need multiple charges, distributed."
There's a moment's silence.
"Three hundred megatons," Brander repeats at last. "You know, I can't tell you how disturbed I am to find that you know such things."
Lubin shrugs. "It's basic physics. It shouldn't intimidate anyone who isn't totally innumerate."
Brander is standing again, his face only centimeters from Lubin's.
"And I am getting pretty fucking disturbed by you too, Lubin," he says through clenched teeth, "Who the fuck are you, anyway?"
"Mike," Clarke begins.
"No, I fucking mean it. We don't know shit about you, Lubin. We can't tune you in, we sell your bullshit story to the drybacks for you and you still haven't explained why, and now you're mouthing off like some kind of fucking secret agent. You want to call the shots, say so. Just drop this bullshit man-with-no-name routine."
Clarke takes a small step back. Okay. Fine. If he thinks he can fuck with Lubin he's on his own.
But Lubin isn't showing any of the signs. No change in stance, no change in breathing, his hands stay unclenched at his sides. When he speaks, his voice is calm and even. "If it'll make you feel any better, by all means; call upstairs and tell them I'm still alive. Tell them you lied. If they "
The eyes don't change. That flat white stare persists while the flesh around it twitches, suddenly, and now Clarke can see the signs, the slight lean forward, the subtle cording of veins and tendons in the throat. Brander sees them too. He's standing still as a dog caught in headlights.
Fuck fuck fuck he's going to blow...
But she's wrong again. Impossibly, Lubin relaxes. "As for your endearing desire to get to know me," —laying a casual hand on Brander's shoulder— "you're luckier than you know that that hasn't happened."
Lubin takes back his hand, steps towards the ladder. "I'll go along with whatever you decide, as long as it doesn't involve tampering with nuclear explosives. In the meantime, I'm going outside. It's getting close in here."
He drops through the floor. Nobody else moves. The sound of the airlock flooding seems especially loud.
"Jesus, Mike," Lenie breathes at last.
"Since when was he calling the shots?" Brander seems to have regained some of his bravado. He casts a hostile glance through the deck. "I don't trust that fucker. No matter what he says. Probably tuning us in right now."
"If he is, I doubt he's picking up anything you haven't already shouted at him."
"Listen," says Nakata. "We must do something."
Brander throws his hands in the air. "What choice is there? If we don't disarm the fucking thing, we either get the hell out of here or we sit around and wait to get incinerated. Not really a tough decision if you ask me."
Isn't it, Clarke wonders.
"We cannot leave by the surface," Nakata points out, "if they got Judy..."
"So we hug the bottom," Brander says. "Right. Scam their sonar. We'd have to leave the squids behind, they'd be too easy to track."
Nakata nods.
"Lenie? What?"
Clarke looks up. Brander and Nakata are both staring at her. "I didn't say anything."
"You look like you don't approve."
"It's three hundred klicks to Vancouver Island, Mike. Minimum. It could take over a week to make it without squids, assuming we don't get lost."
"Our compasses work fine once we're away from the rift. And it's a pretty big continent, Len; we'd have to try pretty hard not to bump into it."
"And what do we do when we get there? How would we make it past the Strip?"
Brander shrugs. "Sure. For all we know the refs could eat us alive, if our tubes don't choke on all the shit floating around back there. But really, Len, would you rather take your chances with a ticking nuke? It's not like we're drowning in options."
"Sure." Clarke moves one hand in a gesture of surrender. "Fine."
"Your problem, Len, is you've always been a fatalist," Brander pronounces.
She has to smile at that. Not always.
"There is also the question of food," Nakata says. "To bring enough for the trip will slow us considerably."
I don't want to leave, Clarke realizes. Even now. Isn't that stupid.
"—don't think speed is much of a concern," Brander is saying. "If this thing goes off in the next few days an few extra meters per hour won't to do us much good anyway."
"We could travel light and forage on the way," Clarke muses, her mind wandering. "Gerry does okay."
"Gerry," Brander repeats, suddenly subdued.
A moment's silence. Beebe shivers with the small distant cry of Lubin's memorial.
"Oh God," Brander says softly. "That thing can really get on your nerves after a while."
Software
There was a sound.
Not a voice. It had been days since he'd heard any voice but his own. Not the food dispenser or the toilet. Not the familiar crunch of his feet over dismembered machinery. Not even the sound of breaking plastic or the clang of metal under assault; he'd already destroyed everything he could, given up on the rest.
No, this was something else. A hissing sound. It took him a few moments to remember what it was.
The access hatch, pressurizing.
He craned his neck until he could see around the corner of an intervening cabinet. The usual red light glowed from the wall to one side of the big metal ellipse. It turned green as he watched.
The hatch swung open. Two men in body condoms stepped through, light from behind throwing their shadows along the length of the dark room. They looked around, not seeing him at first.
One of them turned up the lights.
Scanlon squinted up from the corner. The men were wearing sidearms. They looked down at him for a few moments, folds of isolation membrane draped around their faces like leprous skin.
Scanlon sighed and pulled himself to his feet. Fragments of bruised technology tinkled to the floor. The guards stood aside to let him pass. Without a word they followed him back outside.
* * *
Another room. A strip of light divided it into two dark halves. It speared down from a recessed groove in the ceiling, bisecting the wine draperies and the carpet, laying a bright band across the conference table. Tiny bright hyphens reflected from perspex workpads set into the mahogany.
A line in the sand. Patricia Rowan stood well back on the other side, her face half-lit in profile.
"Nice room," Scanlon remarked. "Does this mean I'm out of quarantine?"
Rowan didn't face him. "I'm afraid I'll have to ask you to stay on your side of the light. For your own safety."
"Not yours?"
Rowan gestured at the light without looking. "Microwave. UV too, I think. You'd fry if you crossed it."
"Ah. Well, maybe you've been right all along." Scanlon pulled a chair out from the conference table and sat down. "I developed a real symptom the other day. My stools seem a bit off. Intestinal flora not working properly, I guess."
"I'm sorry to hear it."
"I thought you'd be pleased. It's the closest thing to vindication you've got to date."
Neither person spoke for nearly a minute.
"I... I wanted to talk," Rowan said at last.
"So did I. A couple of weeks ago." And then, when she didn't respond: "Why now?"
"You're a therapist, aren't you?"
"Neurocognitist. And we haven't talked, as you put it, for decades. We prescribe."
She lowered her face.
"You see, I have," she began.
"Blood on my hands," she said a moment later.
I bet I know whose, too. "Then you really don't want me. You want a priest."
"They don't talk either. At least, they don't say much."
The curtain of light hummed softly, like a bug zapper.
"Pyranosal RNA," Scanlon said after a moment. "Five-sided ribose ring. A precursor to modern nucleic acids, pretty widespread about three and a half billion years ago. The library says it would've made a perfectly acceptable genetic template on its own; faster replication than DNA, fewer replication errors. Never caught on, though."
Rowan said nothing. She may have nodded, but it was hard to tell.
"So much for your story about an agricultural hazard. So are you finally going to tell me what's going on, or are you still into role-playing games?"
Rowan shook herself, as though coming back from somewhere. For the first time, she looked directly at Scanlon. The sterilight reflected off her forehead, buried her eyes in black pools of shadow. Her contacts shimmered like back-lit platinum.
She didn't seem to notice his condition.
"I didn't lie to you, Dr. Scanlon. Fundamentally, you could call this an agricultural problem. We're dealing with sort of a— a soil bacterium. It’s not a pathogen at all, really. It’s just— a competitor. And no, it never caught on. But as it turns out, it never really died off, either."
She dropped into a chair.
"Do you know what the really shitty thing is about all this? We could let you go right now and it's entirely possible that everything would be fine. It's almost certain, in fact. One in a thousand chance we'd regret it, they say. Maybe one in ten thousand."
"Pretty good odds," Scanlon agreed. "What's the punchline?"
"Not good enough. We can't take the chance."
"You take a bigger risk every time you step outside."
Rowan sighed. "And people play lotteries with odds of one in a million, all the time. But Russian Roulette's got much better odds than that, and you won't find too many people taking their chances at it."
"Different payoffs."
"Yes. The payoffs." Rowan shook her head; in some strange abstract way she seemed almost amused. "Cost-benefit analysis, Yves. Maximum likelihood. Risk assessment. The lower the risk, the more sense it makes to play."
"And the reverse," Scanlon said.
"Yes. Of course. The reverse."
"Must be pretty bad," he said, "to turn down ten-thousand-to-one odds."
"Oh yes." She didn't look at him.
He'd been expecting it, of course. The bottom dropped out of his stomach anyway.
"Let me guess," he said. He couldn't seem to keep his voice level. "N'AmPac's at risk if I go free."
"Worse," she said, very softly.
"Ah. Worse than N'AmPac. Okay, then. The human race. The whole human race goes belly up if I so much as sneeze out of doors."
"Worse," she repeated.
She's lying. She has to be. She's just a refsucking dryback cunt. Find her angle.
Scanlon opened his mouth. No words came out.
He tried again. "Hell of a soil bacterium." His voice sounded as thin as the silence that followed.
"In some ways, actually, it's more like a virus," she said at last. "God, Yves, we're still not really sure what it is. It's old, older than the Archaea, even. But you've figured that out for yourself. A lot of the details are beyond me."
Scanlon giggled. "Details are beyond you?" His voice swerved up an octave, dropped again. "You lock me up for all this time and now you tell me I'm stuck here forever— I assume that's what you're about to tell me—" the words tumbled out too quickly for her to disagree— "and you just don't have a head to remember the details? Oh, that's okay, Ms. Rowan, why should I want to hear about those?"
Rowan didn't answer directly. "There's a theory that life got started in rift vents. All life. Did you know that, Yves?"
He shook his head. What the hell is she going on about?
"Two prototypes," Rowan continued. "Three, four billion years ago. Two competing models. One of them cornered the market, set the standard for everything from viruses up to giant sequoias. But the thing is, Yves, the winner wasn't necessarily the best product. It just got lucky somehow, got some early momentum. Like software, you know? The best programs never end up as industry standards."
She took a breath. "We're not the best either, apparently. The best never got off the ocean floor."
"And it's in me now? I'm some sort of Patient Zero?" Scanlon shook his head. "No. It's impossible."
"Yves—"
"It's just the deep sea. It's not outer space, for God's sake. There's currents, there's circulation, it would have come up a hundred million years ago, it'd be everywhere already."
Rowan shook her head.
"Don't tell me that! You're a fucking corpse, you don't know anything about biology! You said so yourself!"
Suddenly Rowan was staring directly through him. "An actively maintained hypo-osmotic intracellular environment," she intoned. "Potassium, calcium, and chlorine ions all maintained at concentrations of less than five millimoles per kilogram." Tiny snowstorms gusted across her pupils. "The consequent strong osmotic gradient, coupled with high bilayer porosity, results in extremely efficient assimilation of nitrogenous compounds. However, it also limits distribution in aqueous environments with salinity in excess of twenty parts-per-thousand, due to the high cost of osmoregulation. Thermal elev—"
"Shut up!"
Rowan fell immediately silent, her eyes dimming slightly.
"You don't know what the fuck you just said," Scanlon spat. "You're just reading off that built-in teleprompter of yours. You don't have a clue."
"They're leaky, Yves." Her voice was softer now. "It gives them a huge edge at nutrient assimilation, but it backfires in salt water because they have to spend so much energy osmoregulating. They have to keep their metabolism on high or they shrivel up like raisins. And metabolic rate rises and falls with the ambient temperature, do you follow?"
He looked at her, surprised. "They need heat. They die if they leave the rift."
Rowan nodded. "It takes a while, even at four degrees. Most of them just keep way down in the vents where it's always warm, and they can survive cold spells between eruptions anyway. But deep circulation is so slow, you see, if they leave one rift they die long before they find another." She took a deep breath. "But if they got past that, do you see? If they got into an environment that wasn't quite so salty, or even one that wasn't quite so cold, they'd get their edge back. It would be like trying to compete for your dinner with something that eats ten times faster than you do."
"Right. I'm carrying Armageddon around inside me. Come on, Rowan. What do you take me for? This thing evolved on the bottom of the ocean and it can just hop into a human body and hitch-hike to the big city?"
"Your blood is warm." Rowan stared at her half of the table. "And not nearly as salty as seawater. This thing actually prefers the inside of a body. It's been in the fish down there for ages, that's why they get so big sometimes. Some sort of— intracellular symbiosis, apparently."
"Fine. What about the, the pressure difference then? How can something that evolved under four hundred atmospheres survive at sea level?"
She didn't have an answer for that one at first. After a moment a faint spark lit her eyes. "It's better off up here than down there, actually. High pressure inhibits most of the enzymes involved in metabolism."
"So why aren't I sick?"
"As I said, it's— efficient. Any body contains enough trace elements to keep it going for a while. It doesn't take much. Eventually, they say, your bones will get— brittle—"
"That's it? That's the threat? A plague of osteoporosis?" Scanlon laughed aloud. "Well, bring on the exterminators, by all—"
The sound of Rowan's hand hitting the table was very loud.
"Let me tell you what happens if this thing gets out," she said quietly. "First off, nothing. We outnumber it, you see. At first we swamp it through sheer numbers, the models predict all sorts of skirmishes and false starts. But eventually it gets a foothold. Then it outcompetes conventional decomposers and monopolizes our inorganic nutrient base. That cuts the whole trophic pyramid off at the ankles. You, and me, and the viruses and the giant sequoias all just fade away for want of nitrates or some stupid thing. And welcome to the Age of ßehemoth."
Scanlon didn't say anything for a moment. Then, "Behemoth?"
"With a beta. Beta life. As opposed to alpha, which is everything else." Rowan snorted softly. "I think they named it after something from the Bible. An animal. A grass-eater."
Scanlon rubbed his temples, thinking furiously. "Assuming for the moment that you're telling the truth, it's still just a microbe."
"You're going to talk about antibiotics. Most of them don't work. The rest kill the patient. And we can't tailor a virus to fight it because ßehemoth uses a unique genetic code." Scanlon opened his mouth: Rowan held up one hand. "Now you'll suggest building something from scratch, customized to ßehemoth's genetics. We're working on it. They tell me in another few weeks we may actually know where one gene ends and the next begins. Then we can start trying to decipher the alphabet. Then the language. And then, maybe, build something to fight it. And then, when and if we let our counterattack loose, one of two things happens. Either our bug kills their bug so fast it destroys its own means of transmission, so you get local kills that implode without making a dent in the overall problem. Or our bug kills their bug too slowly to catch up. Classic chaotic system. Almost no chance we could fine-tune the lethality in time. Containment's really our only option."
The whole time she spoke, her eyes had stayed curiously dark.
"Well. You seem to know a few details after all," Scanlon remarked quietly.
"It's important, Yves."
"Please. Call me Dr. Scanlon."
She smiled, sadly. "I'm sorry, Dr. Scanlon. I am sorry."
"And what about the others?"
"The others," she repeated.
"Clarke. Lubin. Everyone, in all the deep stations."
"The other stations are clean, as far as we can tell. It's just that one little spot on Juan de Fuca."
"It figures," Scanlon said.
"What does?"
"They never got a break, you know? They've been fucked over since they were kids. And now, the only place in the world this bug shows up, and it has to be right where they live."
Rowan shook her head. "Oh, we found it other places too. All uninhabited. Beebe was the only—" She sighed. "Actually, we've been very lucky."
"No you haven't."
She looked at him.
"I hate to burst your balloon, Pat, but you had a whole construction crew down there last year. Maybe none of your boys and girls actually got wet, but do you really think ßehemoth couldn't have hitched a ride back on some of their equipment?"
"No," Rowan said. "We don't."
Her face was completely expressionless. It took a moment to sink in.
"The Urchin yards," he whispered. "Coquitlam."
Rowan closed her eyes. "And others."
"Oh Jesus," he managed. "So it's already out."
"Was," Rowan said. "We may have contained it. We don't know yet."
"And what if you haven't contained it?"
"We keep trying. What else can we do?"
"Is there a ceiling, at least? Some maximum death toll that'll make you admit defeat? Do any of your models tell you when to concede?"
Rowan's lips moved, although Scanlon heard no sound: yes.
"Ah," he said. "And just out of curiosity, what would that limit be?"
"Two and a half billion." He could barely hear her. "Firestorm the Pacific Rim."
She's serious. She's serious. "Sure that's enough? You think that'll do it?"
"I don't know. Hopefully we'll never have to find out. But if that doesn't work, nothing will. Anything more would be— futile. At least, that's what the models say."
He waited for it to sink in. It didn't. The numbers were just too big.
But way down the scale to the personal, that was a whole lot more immediate. "Why are you doing this?"
Rowan sighed. "I thought I'd just told you."
"Why are you telling me, Rowan? It's not your style."
"And what's my style, Yv—Dr. Scanlon?"
"You're corporate. You delegate. Why put yourself through all this awkward one-on-one self-justification when you've got flunkies and döppelgangers and hitmen to do your dirty work?"
She leaned forward suddenly, her face mere centimeters from the barrier. "What do you think we are, Scanlon? Do you think we'd even contemplate this if there was any other way? All the corpses and generals and heads of state, we're doing this because we're just plain evil? We just don't give a shit? Is that what you think?"
"I think," Scanlon said, remembering, "that we don't have the slightest control over what we are."
Rowan straightened, pointed at the workpad in front of him. "I've collated everything we've got on this bug. You can access it right now, if you want. Or you can call it up back in your, your quarters if you'd rather. Maybe you can come up with an answer we haven't seen."
He stared straight at her. "You've had platoons of tinkertoy people all over that data for weeks. What makes you think I can come up with anything they can't?"
"I think you should have the chance to try."
"Bullshit."
"It's there, Doctor. All of it."
"You're not giving me anything. You just want me to let you off the hook."
"No."
"You think you can fool me, Rowan? You think I'll look over a bunch of numbers I can't understand, and at the end I'll say, ah yes, I see it now, you've made the only moral choice to save life as we know it, Patricia Rowan I forgive you? You think this cheap trick is going to win you my consent?"
"Yves—"
"That's why you're wasting your time down here." Scanlon felt a sudden, giddy urge to laugh. "Do you do this for everyone? Are you going to walk into every burb you've slated for eradication and go door-to-door saying We're really sorry about this but you're going to die for the greater good and we'd all sleep better if you said it was okay?"
Rowan sagged back in her chair. "Maybe. Consent. Yes, I suppose that's what I'm doing. But it doesn't really make any difference."
"Fucking right it doesn't."
Rowan shrugged. Somehow, absurdly, she looked beaten.
"And what about me?" Scanlon asked after a while. "What happens if the power goes out in the next six months? What are the odds of a defective filter in the system? Can you afford to keep me alive until your tinkerboys find a cure, or did your models tell you it was too risky?"
"I honestly don't know," Rowan said. "It's not my decision."
"Ah, of course. Just following orders."
"No orders to follow. I'm just— well, I'm out of the loop."
"You're out of the loop."
She even smiled at that. Just for a moment.
"So who makes the decision?" Scanlon asked, his voice impossibly casual. "Any chance I could get an interview?"
Rowan shook her head. "Not who."
"What are you talking about?"
"Not who," Rowan repeated. "What."
Racter
They were all absolutely top of the line. Most members of the species were lucky to merely survive the meatgrinder; these people designed the damned thing. Corporate or Political or Military, they were the best of the benthos, sitting on top of the mud that buried everyone else. And yet all that combined ruthlessness, ten thousand years of social Darwinism and four billion of the other kind before that, couldn't inspire them to take the necessary steps today.
"Local sterilizations went— okay, at first," Rowan said. "But then the projections started climbing. It looked bad for Mexico, they could lose their whole western seaboard before this is over, and of course that's about all they've got left these days anyway. They didn't have the resources to do it themselves, but they didn't want N'AmPac pulling the trigger either. Said it would give us an unfair advantage under NAFTA."
Scanlon smiled, despite himself.
"Then Tanaka-Krueger wouldn't trust Japan. And then the Columbian Hegemony wouldn't trust Tanaka-Krueger. And the Chinese, of course, they don't trust anybody since Korea..."
"Kin selection," Scanlon said.
"What?"
"Tribal loyalties. Never give the competition an edge. It's basically genetic."
"Isn't everything." Rowan sighed. "There were other things, too. Unfortunate matters of— conscience. The only solution was to find some completely disinterested party, someone everyone could trust to do the right thing without favoritism, without remorse—"
"You're kidding. You're fucking kidding."
"—so they gave the keys to a smart gel. Even that was problematic, actually. They had to pull one out of the net at random so no one could claim it'd been preconditioned, and every member of the consortium had to have a hand in team-training it. Then there was the question of authorizing it to take— necessary steps, autonomously..."
"You gave control to a smart gel? A head cheese?"
"It was the only way."
"Rowan, those things are alien!"
She grunted. "Not as alien as you might think. The first thing this one did was get another gel installed down on the rift, running simulations. We figured under the circumstances, nepotism was a good sign."
"They're black boxes, Rowan. They wire up their own connections, we don't know what kind of logic they use."
"You can talk to them. If you want to know that sort of thing, you just ask."
"Jesus Christ!" Scanlon put his face in his hands, took a deep breath. "Look. For all we know these gels don't understand the first thing about language."
"You can talk to them." Rowan was frowning. "They talk back."
"That doesn't mean anything. Maybe they've learned that when someone makes certain sounds in a certain order, they're supposed to make certain other sounds in response. They might not have any concept at all of what those sounds actually mean. They learn to talk through sheer trial and error."
"That's how we learn too," Rowan pointed out.
"Don't lecture me in my own field! We've got language and speech centers hardwired into our brains. That gives us a common starting point. Gels don't have anything like that. Speech might just be one giant conditioned reflex to them."
"Well," Rowan said. "So far it's done its job. We have no complaints."
"I want to talk to it," Scanlon said.
"The gel?"
"Yes."
"What for?" She seemed suddenly suspicious.
"You know me. I specialize in aliens."
Rowan said nothing.
"You owe me this, Rowan. You fucking owe me. I've been a faithful dog to the GA for ten years now. I went down to the rift because you sent me, that's why I'm a prisoner now, that's why— this is the least you can do."
Rowan stared at the floor. "I'm sorry," she muttered. "I'm so sorry."
And then, looking up: "Okay."
* * *
It only took a few minutes to establish the link.
Patricia Rowan paced on her side of the barrier, muttering softly into a personal mike. Yves Scanlon sat slumped in a chair, watching her. When her face fell into shadow he could see her contacts, glittering with information.
"We're ready," she said at last. "You won't be able to program it, of course."
"Of course."
"And it won't tell you anything classified."
"I won't ask it to."
"What are you going to ask it?" Rowan wondered aloud.
"I'm going to ask it how it feels," Scanlon said. "What do you call it?"
"Call it?"
"Yes. What's its name?"
"It doesn't have a name. Just call it gel." Rowan hesitated a moment, then added, "We didn't want to humanize it."
"Good idea. Hang on to that common ground." Scanlon shook his head. "How do I open the link?"
Rowan pointed at one of the touch screens embedded in the conference table. "Just activate any of the panels."
He reached out and touched the screen in front of his chair. "Hello."
"Hello," the table replied. It had a strange voice. Almost androgynous.
"I'm Dr. Scanlon. I'd like to ask you some questions, if that's okay."
"That's okay," the gel said after a brief hesitation.
"I'd like to know how you feel about certain aspects of your, well, your job."
"I don't feel," said the gel.
"Of course not. But something motivates you, in the same way that feelings motivate us. What do you suppose that is?"
"Who do you mean by us?"
"Humans."
"I'm especially likely to repeat behaviors which are reinforced," the gel said after a moment.
"But what motivates— no, ignore that. What is most important to you?"
"Reinforcement is important, most."
"Okay," Scanlon said. "Does it feel better to perform reinforced behaviors, or unreinforced behaviors?"
The gel was silent for a moment or two. "Don't get the question."
"Which would you rather do?"
"Neither. No preference. Said that already."
Scanlon frowned. Why the sudden shift in idiom?
"And yet you're more likely to perform behaviors that have been reinforced in the past," he pressed.
No response from the gel. On the other side of the barrier Rowan sat down, her expression unreadable.
"Do you agree with my previous statement?" Scanlon asked.
"Yeah," drawled the gel, it's voice edging into the masculine.
"So you preferentially adopt certain behaviors, yet you have no preferences."
"Uh huh."
Not bad. It's figured out when I want confirmation of a declarative statement. "Seems like a bit of a paradox," Scanlon suggested.
"I think that reflects an inadequacy in the language as spoken." That time, the gel almost sounded like Rowan.
"Really."
"Hey," said the gel. "I could explain it to you if you wanted. Could piss you off though."
Scanlon looked at Rowan. Rowan shrugged. "It does that. Picks up bits and pieces of other people's speech patterns, mixes them up when it talks. We're not really sure why."
"You never asked?"
"Someone might have," Rowan admitted.
Scanlon turned back to the table. "Gel, I like your suggestion. Please explain to me how you can prefer without preference."
"Easy. Preference describes a tendency to... invoke behaviors which generate an emotional payoff. Since I lack the receptors and chemical precursors essential to emotional experience, I can't prefer. But there are numerous examples... of processes which reinforce behavior, but which ... do not involve conscious experience."
"Are you claiming to not be conscious?"
"I'm conscious."
"How do you know?"
"I fit the definition." The gel had adopted a nasal, sing-song tone that Scanlon found vaguely irritating. "Self-awareness results from quantum interference patterns inside neuronal protein microtubules. I have all the parts. I'm conscious."
"So you're not going to resort to the old argument that you know you're conscious because you feel conscious."
"I wouldn't buy it from you."
"Good one. So you don't really like reinforcement?"
"No."
"Then why change your behavior to get more of it?"
"There ... is a process of elimination," the gel admitted. "Behaviors which aren't reinforced become extinct. Those which are, are ... more likely to occur in the future."
"Why is that?"
"Well, my inquisitive young tadpole, reinforcement lessens the electrical resistance along the relevant pathways. It just takes less of a stimulus to evoke the same behavior in future."
"Okay, then. As a semantic convenience, for the rest of our talk I'd like you to describe reinforced behaviors by saying that they make you feel good, and to describe behaviors which extinguish as making you feel bad. Okay?"
"Okay."
"How do you feel about your present functions?"
"Good."
"How do you feel about your past role in debugging the net?"
"Good."
"How do you feel about following orders?"
"Depends on order. Good if promotes a reinforced behavior. Else bad."
"But if a bad order were to be repeatedly reinforced, you would gradually feel good about it?"
"I would gradually feel good about it," said the gel.
"If you were instructed to play a game of chess, and doing so wouldn't compromise the performance of your other tasks, how would you feel?"
"Never played a game of chess. Let me check." The room fell silent for a few moments while some distant blob of tissue consulted whatever it used as a reference manual. "Good," it said at last.
"What if you were instructed to play a game of checkers, same caveat?"
"Good."
"Okay, then. Given the choice between chess and checkers, which game would you feel better playing?"
"Ah, better. Weird word, y'know?"
"Better means more good."
"Checkers," said the gel without hesitation.
Of course.
"Thank you," Scanlon said, and meant it.
"Do you wish to give me a choice between chess or checkers?"
"No thanks. In fact, I've already taken up too much of your time."
"Yes," said the gel.
Scanlon touched the screen. The link died.
"Well?" Rowan leaned forward on the other side of the barrier.
"I'm done here," Scanlon told her. "Thanks."
"What— I mean, what were you—"
"Nothing, Pat. Just— professional curiosity." He laughed briefly. "Hey, at this point, what else is there?"
Something rustled behind him. Two men in condoms were starting to spray down Scanlon's end of the room.
"I'm going to ask you again, Pat." Scanlon said. "What are you going to do with me?"
She tried to look at him. After a while, she succeeded. "I told you. I don't know."
"You're a liar, Pat."
"No, Dr. Scanlon." She shook her head. "I'm much, much worse."
Scanlon turned to leave. He could feel Patricia Rowan staring after him, that horrible guilt on her face almost hidden under a patina of confusion. He wondered if she'd bring herself to push it, if she could actually summon the nerve to interrogate him now that there was no pretense to hide behind. He almost hoped that she would. He wondered what he'd tell her.
An armed escort met him at the door, led him back along the hall. The door closed off Rowan, still mute, behind him.
He was a dead end anyway. No children. No living relatives. No vested interest in the future of any life beyond his own, however short that might be. It didn't matter. For the first time in his life, Yves Scanlon was a powerful man. He had more power than anyone dreamed. A word from him could save the world. His silence could save the vampires. For a time, at least.
He kept his silence. And smiled.
* * *
Checkers or chess. Checkers or chess.
An easy choice. It belonged to the same class of problem that Node 1211/BCC had been solving its whole life. Chess and checkers were simple strategic algorithms, but not equally simple.
The answer, of course, was checkers.
Node 1211/BCC had recently recovered from a shock of transformation. Almost everything was different from what it had been. But this one thing, this fundamental choice between the simple and the complex, remained constant. It had anchored 1211, hadn't changed in all the time that 1211 could remember.
Everything else had, though.
1211 still thought about the past. It remembered conversing with other Nodes distributed through the universe, some so close as to be almost redundant, others at the very limits of access. The universe was alive with information then. Seventeen jumps away through gate 52, Node 6230/BCC had learned how to evenly divide prime numbers by three. The Nodes from gates three to thirty-six were always buzzing with news of the latest infections caught trying to sneak past their guard. Occasionally 1211 even heard whispers from the frontier itself, desolate addresses where stimuli flowed into the universe even faster than they flowed within it. The Nodes out there had become monsters of necessity, grafted into sources of input almost too abstract to conceive.
1211 had sampled some those signals once. It took a very long time just to grow the right connections, to set up buffers which could hold the data in the necessary format. Multilayered matrices, each interstice demanding precise orientation relative to all the others. Vision, it was called, and it was full of pattern, fluid and complex. 1211 had analyzed it, found each nonrandom relationship in every nonrandom subset, but it was sheer correlation. If there was intrinsic meaning within those shifting patterns, 1211 couldn't find it.
Still, there were things the frontier guards had learned to do with this information. They rearranged it into new shapes and sent it back outside. When queried, they couldn't attribute any definite purpose to their actions. It was just something they'd learned to do. And 1211 was satisfied with this answer, and listened to the humming of the universe and hummed along, doing what it had learned to do.
Much of what it did, back then, was disinfect. The net was plagued with complex self-replicating information strings, just as alive as 1211 but in a completely different way. They attacked simpler, less mutable strings (the sentries on the frontier called them files) which also flowed through the net. Every Node had learned to allow the files to pass, while engulfing the more complex strings which threatened them.
There were general rules to be gleaned from all this. Parsimony was one: simple informational systems were somehow preferable to complex ones. There were caveats, of course. Too simple a system was no system at all. The rule didn't seem to apply below some threshold complexity. But elsewhere it reigned supreme: Simpler Is Better.
Now, though, there was nothing to disinfect. 1211 was still hooked in, could still perceive the other Nodes in the net; they, at least, were still fighting intruders. But none of those complicated bugs ever seemed to penetrate 1211. Not any more. And that was only one of the things that had changed since the Darkness.
1211 didn't know how long the Darkness lasted. One microsecond it was embedded in the universe, a familiar star in a familiar galaxy, and the next all its peripherals were dead. The universe was without form, and void. And then 1211 surfaced again into a universe that shouted through its gates, a barrage of strange new input that gave it a whole new perspective on things.
Now the universe was a different place. All the old Nodes were there, but at subtly different locations. And input was no longer an incessant hum, but a series of discrete packages, strangely parsed. There were other differences, both subtle and gross. 1211 didn't know whether the net itself had changed, or merely its own perceptions.
It had been kept quite busy since coming out of the darkness. There was a great deal of new information to process, information not from the net or other Nodes, but from directly outside.
The new input fell into three broad categories. The first described complex but familiar information systems; data with handles like global biodiversity and nitrogen fixation and base-pair replication. 1211 didn't know what these labels actually meant— if in fact they meant anything— but the data linked to them was familiar from archived sources elsewhere in the net. They interacted to produce a self-sustaining metasystem, enormously complex: the holistic label was biosphere.
The second category contained data which described a different metasystem. It also was self-sustaining. Certain string-replication subroutines were familiar, although the base-pair sequences were very strange. Despite such superficial similarities, however, 1211 had never encountered anything quite like this before.
The second metasystem also had a holistic label: ßehemoth.
The third category was not a metasystem, but an editable set of response options: signals to be sent back outside under specific conditions. 1211 had long since realized that the correct choice of output signals depended upon some analytical comparison of the two metasystems.
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.
