Maelstrom Read online

  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

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  PRELUDE

  VOLVOX

  Mermaid

  Fables of the Reconstruction

  Deathbed

  94 Megabytes: Breeder

  Cascade

  Backflash

  Maps and Legends

  Corpse

  Bang

  Stickman

  An Invitation to Dance

  Pixelpal

  Third-person Limited

  Remora

  Firebug

  Afterburn

  Stockpile

  Icarus

  Jailbreak

  The Next Best Thing

  Beachhead

  Drugstore

  Source Code

  Groundswell

  128 Megabytes: Hitchhiker

  Animal Control

  Ghost

  Blip

  Womb

  Eclipse

  Monster

  Warhorse

  PHYSALIA

  Zeus

  Jiminy Cricket

  Footprints

  An Archetype of Dislocation

  400 Megabytes: Punctuated Equilibrium

  Microstar

  Matchmaker

  Heat Death

  Blind Date

  Necrosis

  Snare

  Complicity

  Vision Quest

  The Algebra of Guilt

  Starfucker

  Mask

  Scalpel

  By a Thousand Cuts

  500 Megabytes: The Generals

  Sparkler

  Decoys

  Crucifixion, with Spiders

  ANTHOPLEURA

  Mug Shot

  Anemone

  Behind the Lines

  Spartacus

  TursiPops

  Terrarium

  Soul Mate

  AWOL

  Scheherezade

  Adaptive Shatter

  A Niche

  EPILOGUE.

  TOR BOOKS BY PETER WATTS

  Praise

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  REFERENCES

  NOTES

  Notes

  Copyright Page

  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 recognized 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 βehemoth 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 feedforward 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 still couldn’t believe 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 anymore, 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 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 seafloor 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 that 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

  Great glittering skyscrapers, shaking themselves like wet dogs. Downpours of shattered glass from fifty floors of windowpanes. Streets turned into killing floors; thousands slickly dismembered in the space of seconds. And then, when the quake was over, the scavenger hunt: a search for jigsaws of flesh and blood with too many missing pieces. Their numbers grew logistically over time.

  Somewhere between the wreckage and the flies and the piles of eyeless bodies, the soul of Sou-Hon Perreault woke up and screamed.

  It wasn’t supposed to happen that way. It wasn’t supposed to happen at all; the catalyzers kept all those obsolete, maladaptive feelings safely preempted, their constituent chemicals split apart before they’d even reached the precursor stage. You don’t go wading through an ocean of corpses, even vicariously, as a fully functional human.

  She was all over the map when it hit her. Her body was safely stored at home in Billings, over a thousand klicks from the wreckage. Her senses hovered four meters above the remains of the Granville Street Bridge in Hongcouver, nestled within a floating bluebottle carapace half a meter long. And her mind was somewhere else again, doing basic addition with a tally of body parts.

  For some reason, the smell of fresh decomposition was bothering her. Perreault frowned: she wasn’t usually so queasy. She couldn’t afford to be—the current body count was nothing compared to what cholera would rack up if all that meat wasn’t cleaned out by the weekend. She tuned down the channel, even though enhanced olfac was the method of choice for nailing buried biologicals.

  But now visual was bugging her, too. She couldn’t exactly put her finger on it. She was seeing in infra, in case any of the bodies were still warm—hell, someone might even be alive down there—but the false color was unsettling her stomach. She dialed through the spectrum, deep infra up to X ray, settled finally on plain old visible EM. It helped a little. Even though she might as well be looking at the world through merely human eyes now, which wouldn’t help her tag rate any.

  And the fucking gulls. Jesus Christ, you can’t hear anything over that racket.

  She hated gulls. You couldn’t shut them up. They flocked to scenes like this, threw feeding frenzies that would scare sharks away. Over on the other side of False Creek, for instance, the bodies lay so thick that the gulls were for fucksake high-grading. Just pecking out the eyes, leaving everything else for the maggots. Perreault hadn’t seen anything like it since the Tongking spill five years before.

  Tongking. Its aftermath bubbled irrelevantly in the back of her mind, distracting with memories of carnage half a decade out-of-date.

  Concentrate, she
told herself.

  Now, for some reason, she couldn’t stop thinking about Sudan. That had been a mess. They really should have seen it coming, too; you don’t dam a river that size without pissing off someone downstream. The real wonder was that Egypt had waited ten years before they’d bombed the bloody thing. The slide had spread a decade’s muddy backlog downstream in an instant; by the time the waters fell it was like picking raisin clusters out of sludgy chocolate.

  Ah. Another torso.

  Except the raisins had arms and legs, of course. And eyes—

  A gull flew past. The eyeball in its beak looked at her for an endless, beseeching instant.

  And then, for the first time—through a billion logic gates, endless kilometers of fiberop, and a microwave bounce off geosynch—Sou-Hon Perreault looked back.

  Brandon. Venesia. Key West.

  My God—everybody’s dead.

  Galveston. Obidos. The Congo Massacre.

  Shut up! Concentrate! Shut up shut up … .

  Madras and Lepreau and Gur’yev, place to place to place the names changing and the ecozones changing and the death toll never sitting still for a fucking instant but always the same song, the same endless procession of body parts buried or burned or torn apart—

  Everybody’s in piecès …

  Lima and Levanzo and Lagos and that’s just a few of the L’s, folks, lots more where those came from

  It’s too late it’s too late there’s nothing I can do …

  Her botfly sent out an alarm as soon as she went off-line. The Router queried the medchip in Perreault’s spine, frowned to itself, and sent a message to the other registered occupant of her apartment. Her husband found her trembling and unresponsive in her office, tears bleeding from her eye-phones.

  Part of Perreault’s soul lived on the long arm of Chromosome 13, in a subtly defective gene that coded for serotonin 2A receptors. The resulting propensity for suicidal thoughts had never been an issue before; catalyzers buffered her in life as well as on the job. Certain pharms were rumored to sabotage each other’s products. Maybe that was it: someone had tried to undermine the competition, and Sou-Hon Perreault—a defective derm pasted onto her arm—had walked into the aftermath of the Big One without realizing that her feelings were still on.