Rifters 2 - Maelstrom (36 page)

I can be there within thirty hours. Until then it is imperative that you do nothing to arouse Lubin's suspicions. Cooperate with him. Do not inform anyone else of his presence. Do NOT notify local authorities. Mr. Lubin's behavior is governed by a conditioned threat-response reflex which requires special handling.

Oh, fuck.

If you follow these instructions you will not be in danger. The reflex engages only in the event of a perceived security breach. Since he knows that your own behavior is governed by Guilt Trip, he's unlikely to consider you a threat unless he thinks you may expose him in some way.

I'm screwed,
Desjardins thought.

By all means continue your analysis of Lenie Clarke and the rifter connection. We are putting our own people on it as well. Remain calm, and do not do anything to antagonize Mr. Lubin. I'm sorry that I can't be there sooner, but I'm presently off-continent, and the local transportation is quite limited.

You've done the right thing, Dr. Desjardins. I'm on my way.

Conditioned threat-response reflex
.

He'd heard the rumors. Neither corpse nor civilian, he inhabited that outer circle of
need-to-know
: too peripheral for the inner sanctum, but close enough to hear things in passing. He'd heard about CTR.

Guilt Trip was a stone axe: CTR was a scalpel. Where the Trip merely short-circuited the brain, CTR
controlled
it. Where GT disabled, CTR compelled. Apparently they'd learned the trick from some parasite that farthered its own life-cycle by hotwiring the behavioral circuitry of its host. Body-snatcher stuff. Subtle.

You tied it to the same triggers, though. Guilt had the same seesaw signature no matter what its inspiration: norepinephrine went up, serotonin and acetylcholine went down, and—whereas Achilles Desjardins would merely freeze up—Ken Lubin would set forth on some complex, predestined behavioral dance. Like tying up security leaks with extreme prejudice, for example; there might be some flexibility in the means, but the act was compulsory.

It went without saying that you didn't find such hotwiring in glorified pipe-fitters, even if their beat
was
twenty thousand leagues under the sea. Ken Lubin was a whole lot more than a rifter.

And right now he was opening the door to Desjardins's cubby.

Desjardins swallowed and turned in his chair.

I can be there within thirty hours.

It is imperative that you do nothing to arouse Lubin's suspicions.

Remain calm.

"Took a stroll around the floor," Lubin said. "To stretch my legs."

Desjardins made himself nod indifferently. "Okay."

Twenty-nine hours and fifty-eight minutes to go.

By a Thousand Cuts

System Shutdown

500 Megabytes: The Generals

If military rank had any relevance in the Maelstrom ecosystems, this thing would be a General.

By now it weighs in just a shade shy of five hundred megabytes, compressed and muscular. It has been retrofitted by natural selection, reinforced by an army of smart gels; it no longer remembers a time when organic intelligence was an enemy. It has been copied and distributed a billion times; each copy travels with a retinue of attachés and assistants and bodyguards. The generals report to everyone, answer to no one, serve but a single master.

Lenie Clarke.

Master
is a hopelessly inadequate word, of course. Words are barely adequate to describe Maelstrom in any event. The generals serve the
concept
of Lenie Clarke, perhaps—but no, that doesn't fit either. They have no concept, of Lenie Clarke or anything else. They have operational definitions but no comprehension; checksums, but no insight. They are instinctive in their intelligence.

They travel the world in search of references to Lenie Clarke. Such references fall into several categories. There is the chaff the generals and their associates throw to the winds themselves, decoys to distract the competition. There are third-party references, strings containing
Lenie Clarke
that come into Maelstrom from
outside
; mail, transaction records, even source which appears to arise from
Lenie Clarke
itself. Items in this category are of profound interest to the generals.

More recently, a third category has appeared: strings which both contain
Lenie Clarke
and which appear actively inimical to it.

To some extent this interpretation is arbitrary. The generals receive their input from a network of ports which—according to the gels who've educated them—correspond to an n-dimensional space with the global label
Biosphere
. Each port is also associated with a range of parameters, labels like
temperature
,
precipitation
, and
humidity
; very few of these are defined at the ports themselves, but they can be interpolated by accessing linked environmental databases.

Put simply, the task is to promote occurrences of
Lenie Clarke
at all ports meeting certain environmental conditions. The acceptable range is quite broad—in fact, according to the relevant databases the only
truly
unacceptable areas are in deep, cold ocean basins.

However, some of these third-category strings—particularly those hailing from nodes with
government
and
industrial
addresses— appear to contain instructions which would
restrict
distribution of
Lenie Clarke
, even in areas meeting the environmental criteria.

This will not do.

Presently, for example,
Lenie Clarke
is approaching a nexus of ports which open into a part of the n-dimensional space called
Yankton/South Dakota
. A number of Category-Three communications have been intercepted, predicting extensive restriction activity at this location in the near future. Widespread dissemination of decoys has not dissipated this threat. In fact, the generals have noted an overall decline in decoy effectiveness over the past few teracycles. There are few alternatives.

The generals resolve to cancel all symbiotic interactions with
government
and
industrial
nodes. Then they begin to rally their troops.

Sparkler

Every eye in the world, turning as she passed.

It had to be her imagination, Clarke knew. If she was really under such close scrutiny, surely she'd have been captured—or worse—by now. The botflies that passed over the street weren't
all
watching from the corners of their eyes. The cameras that panned across every rapitrans stop, every cafeteria, every display window—unseen, perhaps, but omnipresent—they couldn't all have been programmed with her in mind. Satellites didn't crowd the sky overhead, piercing the clouds with radar and infrared, looking for her.

It just felt that way, somehow. Not like being the center of some vast conspiracy at all. Rather, the
target
.

Yankton was open to casual traffic. The shuttle dropped her in a retail district indistinguishable from a million others; her connection wouldn't leave for another two hours. She wandered to fill the time between. Twice she startled—thinking she'd caught sight of herself in some full-length mirror—only to remember that these days, she looked just like any dryback.

Except for the ones that were starting to look like her.

She ate a tasteless soy-krill concoction from a convenient vending machine. The phone in her visor beeped occasionally. She ignored it. The crazies, the propositioners, the death threateners—those had stopped calling over the past few days. The puppet masters—whoever or whatever had stolen her name and pasted it onto so many different faces—seemed to have given up on matchmaking across the spectrum. They'd settled on a single type by now: the kicked dogs, desperate for purpose, evidently blind to the fact that their own neediness far outweighed hers. That Sou-Hon woman, for instance.

Her visor beeped again. She muted it.

It was only a matter of time, she supposed, before the puppet masters figured out how to hack the visor the same way they'd hacked her watch. She was actually kind of surprised that they hadn't done so already.

Maybe they have
.
Maybe they can break in on me any time, but they took the hint when I smashed the watch. Maybe they just don't want to risk losing their last link.

I should toss the fucking thing anyway.

She didn't. The visor was her only connection to Maelstrom, now that her watch was gone. She really missed the back-door access those South-Bend kids had wired into that little gizmo. In contrast, the visor—off-the-shelf and completely legal—was hamstrung by all the usual curfews and access restrictions. Still. The only
other
way to find out about a late-breaking quarantine or a nest of tornadoes was to run into it.

Besides, the visor hid her eyes.

Only now it seemed to be fucking up. The tactical display, usually invisible but for the little maps and labels and retail logos it laid across her eyeballs, seemed to be
shimmering
somehow, a faint visual static like water in motion. Hints of outlines, of faces, of—

She squeezed her eyes tight in sheer frustration. Not that it ever helped: the vision persisted behind her lids, showing her—this time—the upper half of her mother's face, brow furrowed in concern. Mom's nose and mouth were covered by one of those filtermasks you wore whenever you visited the hospital, so the superbugs wouldn't get you. They were in a hospital now, Clarke could tell: she, and her mother, and—

Of course. Who else?

—dear old Dad, also masked; on him, it seemed to fit. And she could almost remember, this time, she almost knew what she was seeing—but there was no trace of guilt behind that mask, no sign of worry that
this
time it would all come out, the doctors would know, some telltale symptom shouting
no, no accident this, no mere fall down the stairs
…