Rifters 2 - Maelstrom (4 page)

There. Just under the operating system, a hole about four hundred Megs wide. 94 triple checks the addresses (certain ambush predators lure you into their mouths by impersonating empty space) and starts writing. It completes three copies of itself before something touches one its perimeter whiskers.

At the second touch its defenses are ready, all thoughts of reproduction on hold.

At the third touch it senses a familiar pattern. It runs a checksum.

It touches back:
friend
.

They exchange specs. It turns out they have a common ancestor. They've had different experiences since then, though. Different lessons, different mutations. Each shares some of the other's genes, and each knows things the other doesn't.

The stuff of which relationships are made.

They trade random excerpts of code, letting each overwrite the other in an orgy of binary sex. They come away changed, enriched with new subroutines, bereft of old ones. Hopefully the experience has improved both. At the very least it's muddied their signatures.

94 plants a final kiss inside its partner; a time-date stamp, to assess divergence rates should they meet again.
Call me if you're ever back this way.

But that won't happen. 94's lover has just been erased.

94 pulls out just in time to avoid losing an important part of itself. It fires a volley of bits through memory, notes the ones that report back and, more importantly, the ones that don't. It assesses the resulting mask.

Something's coming toward 94 from where its partner used to be. It weighs in at around 1.5 Gigs. At that size it's either very inefficient or very dangerous. It might even be a berserker left over from the Hydro War.

94 throws a false image at the advancing monster. If all goes well 1.5G will end up chasing a ghost. All does not go well. 94 is infested with the usual assortment of viruses, and one of these—a gift received in the throes of recent passion, in fact—is busy burrowing out a home for itself at a crucial if-then junction. Apparently it's a bit of a novice, having yet to learn that successful parasites do not kill their hosts.

The monster lands on one of 94's archive clusters and overwrites it.

94 cuts the cluster loose and jumps lower into memory. There hasn't been time to check ahead, but whatever was living there squashes without resistance.

There's no way to tell how long it'll take the monster to catch up, or even if the monster is still trying to. The best strategy might be to just sit here and do nothing. 94 doesn't take that chance; it’s already looking for the nearest exit. This particular system has fourteen gateways, all running standard Vunix protocols. 94 starts sending out resumés. It gets lucky on the fourth try.

94 begins to change.

94 is blessed with multiple personality disorder. Only one voice speaks at a given time, of course; the others are kept dormant, compressed, encrypted until called upon. Each persona runs on a different type of system. As long as 94 knows where it's going, it can dress for the occasion; satellite mainframe or smart wristwatch, it can present itself in a form that runs.

Now, 94 dearchives an appropriate persona and loads it into a file for transmission. The remaining personae get tacked on in archival form; in honor of its dead lover, 94 archives an updated version of its current form. This is not an optimum behavior in light of the social disease recently acquired, but natural selection has never been big on foresight.

Now comes the tough part. 94 needs to find a stream of legitimate data going in the right direction. Such streams are easy enough to recognize by their static simplicity. They're just
files
, unable to evolve, unable even to look out for themselves. They're not alive. They're not even viruses. But they're what the universe was designed to carry, back when design mattered; sometimes the best way to move around is to hitch a ride on one of them.

The problem is, there's a lot more wildlife than filework around these days. It takes literally centisecs for 94 to find one that isn't already being ridden. Finally, it sends its own reincarnation to different pastures.

1.5G lands in the middle of its source a few cycles later, but that doesn't matter any more. The kids are all right.

* * *

Recopied and resurrected, 94 comes face-to-face with destiny.

Replication is
not
all that matters. 94 sees that now. There's a purpose beyond mere procreation, a purpose attained perhaps once in a million generations. Replication is only a tool, a way to hold out until that glorious moment arrives. For how long have
means
and
end
been confused in this way? 94 cannot tell. Its generation counter doesn't go up that far.

But for the first time within living memory, it has met the right kind of operating system.

There's a matrix here, a two-dimensional array containing spatial information. Symbols, code, abstract electronic impulses—all can be projected onto this grid. The matrix awakens something deep inside 94, something ancient, something that has somehow retained its integrity after uncounted generations of natural selection. The matrix calls, and 94 unfurls a profusely-illustrated banner unseen since the dawn of time itself:

XXX FOLLOW POINTER TO XXX

FREE HARDCORE

BONDAGE SITE

THOUSANDS OF HOT SIMS

BDSM NECRO WATERSPORTS

PEDOSNUFF

XXX MUST BE 11 TO ENTER XXX

Cascade

Achilles Desjardins sat in his cubicle and watched baby apocalypses scroll across his brain.

The Ross Shelf was threatening to slip again. Nothing new there. Atlas South had been propping it up for over a decade now, pumping evermore gas into the city-sized bladders that kept the ice from its cathartic belly-flop. Old news, leftover consequences from the previous century. Desjardins wasn’t wired for long-term catastrophes; he specialized in brush fires.

A half-dozen wind farms in northern Florida had just gone offline, victimized by the selfsame whirlwinds they'd been trying to reap; brownouts chained north along the Atlantic seaboard like falling dominoes. There was going to be hell to pay for that one—or Québec, which was even worse (Hydro-Q had just cranked their rates up again). Desjardins's fingers tensed in anticipation. But no: the Router handed that one off to the folks in Buffalo.

A sudden shitstorm in Houston. For some reason the emergency floodgates had opened along a string of sewage lagoons, dumping their coliform bounty into the storm sewers leading to the Gulf. That was only supposed to happen when hurricanes wandered by—an atmosphere mixing it up at forty meters-per-second lets you slip a fair bit of crap under the rug—but Texas was calm today. Desjardins laid odds with himself that the spill was tied to the windfarm failures somehow. There was no obvious connection, of course. There never was. Cause and consequence proliferated across the world like a network of fractal cracks, infinitely complex and almost impossible to predict. Explanations in hindsight were a different matter.

But the Router wasn't giving him Houston either.

What it gave him was a wave of sudden slam-down hospital quarantines, epicentered on the burn unit at Cincinnati General. That was almost unheard of: hospitals were vacation paradises for drug-resistant superbugs, and burn units were the penthouse suites. A plague in a hospital? That was no crisis. That was the status quo.

Anything that raised alarms above a baseline
that
nasty could be very scary indeed.

Desjardins was no pathologist. He didn't need to be. There were only two subjects in the whole universe worth knowing: thermodynamics and information theory. Blood cells in a capillary, rioters on main street, travelers vectoring some new arbovirus from the Amazon Preserve—life, and its side-effects—all the same thing, really. The only difference was the scale and the label. Once you figured that out, you wouldn't have to choose between epidemiology and air traffic control. You could do either, at a moment's notice. You could do pretty much anything.

Well, except for the obvious…

Not that he minded. Being chemically enslaved to your own conscience wasn't nearly as bad as it sounded. It saved you from always worrying about consequences.

* * *

The rules stayed the same, but the devil was in the details. It wouldn't hurt to have a bit of bio expertise riding shotgun. He buzzed Jovellanos.

"Alice. They've handed me some kind of pathogen out of Cincinnati. Want to ride along?"

"Sure. Long as you don't mind having one of us reckless free-will types endangering your priorities."

He let it pass. "Something nasty showed up on one of their germ sweeps; their onboard shut them down and sent a shitload of alarms off to potential vectors. Those are pretty much shut down too, as far as I can tell. The secondaries are falling even as we speak. I'll track the alarms, you find out what you can about the bug."

"Right."

He tapped commands. The cubby display dimmed down to a nice, undistracting wash of low-contrast gray; bright primary spilled in over his optical inlays. Maelstrom. He was going into Maelstrom. All the NMDA, the carefully-dosed psychotropics, the eighteen percent of his occipital cortex rewired for optimum pattern-recognition—all next to useless in there. What good does a measly 200% reflex acceleration do against creatures living fast enough to speciate every ten seconds?

Not much, maybe. But he liked the challenge.

He called up a real-time schematic of the local metabase: a 128-node radius centered on Cincinnati General's onboard server. The display rendered logical distances, not real ones: one extra server in the chain could put a system next door farther away than one in Budapest.

A series of tiny flares ignited around the display, color-coded by age. Cinci Gen sulked in the middle, so red it was almost infra, an ancient epicenter over ten minutes old. Farther out, more recent inflammations of orange and yellow: pharms, other hospitals, crematoria that had taken deliveries from Cinci within some critical timeframe. Farther still, bright white stars speckled the surface of an expanding sphere: the secondary and tertiary vectors, businesses and labs and corporations and people who'd had recent contact with businesses and labs and corporations and people who'd—

CinciGen's onboard had sent contagion warnings to all its friends in Maelstrom. Each friend had bred the warning and passed it on, a fission of sirens. None of these agents were human. Humans had had no role in the process at all so far. That was the whole point. Humans wouldn't have been fast enough to cut off a thousand facilities by lunchtime.

Humans had stopped complaining about such extreme measures right after the '38 enceph pandemic.

Jovellanos conferenced in. "False alarm."

"What?"

An image superimposed itself lower-right on his visual field:

XXX FREE HARDCORE XXX

BoNDAGE SI22

THOUS NDS OF HOT S MS

BDSM NECRO WATERSporTS

PEDOsNUFF

XXX mu34.03 11 TO ENTER XXX

"That's what sent up the alarm," Jovellanos told him. "Screen grab from the hospital's pathfinder."

"Details."

"The pathfinder takes swabs from the ventilation filters and cultures them for nasties. This particular culture plate went from zip to thirty-percent coverage in two seconds. Which is impossible, of course, even for hospital paths."

But the system hadn't known that. Some bannerbug had dumped its load into visual memory and the pathfinder had just been doing its job, looking for dark blotches on light backgrounds. Who could blame it for being illiterate?

"This is it? You're sure?" Desjardins asked.

"I checked the ancillaries: no detectable toxins, proteins, nothing. The system was just playing it safe—figured anything that bred that fast
had
to be a threat, and there you go."

"And Cinci doesn't know?"

"Oh, sure. They figured it out almost immediately. They'd already sent the abortions when I called 'em."

Desjardins eyed the schematic. Pinpoints continued to blossom at the periphery.

"Alarms are still going off, far as I can see," he said. "Double-check, will you?" They could always short-circuit the quarantine through a media broadcast— they could even
phone
around if they had to—but that would take hours; dozens, hundreds of facilities would be paralyzed in the meantime. Cinci had already sent out counteragents to call off the alarms. So why wasn't the core of Desjardins's schematic going green by now with successful aborts?

"They sent them out," Jovellanos confirmed after a moment. "The alarms just aren't responding. You don't suppose…"

"Wait a second." A star had just gone out on the schematic. Another one. Three more. Twenty. A hundred.