Rifters 2 - Maelstrom (5 page)

All of them white. All on the periphery.

"We're losing alarms." He magged on the nodes where the lights had winked out. "But way out on the edge. Nothing near the core." The abortions couldn't have jumped so far so fast. Desjardins spun down the filters; now he could see more than autonomous alarms and the little programs sent to call them off. He could see file packets and executables. He could see wildlife. He could see—

"We got sharks," he said. "Feeding frenzy at PSN-1433. And spreading."

* * *

Arpanet.

Internet.

The
Net. Not such an arrogant label, back when one was all they had.

The term
cyberspace
lasted a bit longer— but
space
implies great empty vistas, a luminous galaxy of icons and avatars, a hallucinogenic dreamworld in 48-bit color. No sense of the meatgrinder in
cyberspace
. No hint of pestilence or predation, creatures with split-second lifespans tearing endlessly at each others' throats.
Cyberspace
was a wistful fantasy-word, like
hobbit
or
biodiversity
, by the time Achilles Desjardins came onto the scene.

Onion
and
metabase
were more current. New layers were forever being laid atop the old, each free—for a while—from the congestion and static that saturated its predecessors. Orders of magnitude accrued with each generation: more speed, more storage, more power. Information raced down conduits of fiberop, of rotazane, of quantum stuff so sheer its very existence was in doubt. Every decade saw a new backbone grafted onto the beast; then every few years. Every few months. The endless ascent of power and economy proceeded apace, not as steep a climb as during the fabled days of Moore, but steep enough.

And coming up from behind, racing after the expanding frontier, ran the progeny of laws much older than Moore's.

It's the pattern that matters, you see. Not the choice of building materials. Life is information, shaped by natural selection. Carbon's just fashion, nucleic acids mere optional accessories. Electrons can do all that stuff, if they're coded the right way.

It's all just Pattern.

And so viruses begat filters; filters begat polymorphic counteragents; polymorphic counteragents begat an arms race. Not to mention the worms and the 'bots and the single-minded autonomous datahounds—so essential for legitimate commerce, so vital to the well-being of every institution, but so
needy
, so demanding of access to protected memory. And way over there in left field, the Artificial Life geeks were busy with their Core Wars and their Tierra models and their genetic algorithms. It was only a matter of time before everyone got tired of endlessly reprogramming their minions against each other. Why not just build in some genes, a random number generator or two for variation, and let natural selection do the work?

The problem with natural selection, of course, is that it changes things.

The problem with natural selection in networks is that things change
fast
.

By the time Achilles Desjardins became a 'lawbreaker,
Onion
was a name in decline. One look inside would tell you why. If you could watch the fornication and predation and speciation without going
grand mal
from the rate-of-change, you knew there was only one word that really fit:
Maelstrom
.

Of course, people still went there all the time. What else could they do? Civilization's central nervous system had been living inside a Gordian knot for over a century. No one was going to pull the plug over a case of pinworms.

* * *

Now some of CinciGen's alarms were staggering through Maelstrom with their guts hanging out. Naturally the local wildlife had picked up the scent. Desjardins whistled through his teeth.

"You getting this, Alice?"

"Uh-huh."

Sometime in the dim and distant past—maybe five, ten minutes ago— something had taken a swipe at one of the alarms. It had tried to steal code, or hitch a ride, or just grab the memory the alarm was using. Whatever. It had probably screwed up an attempt to fake a shutdown code, leaving its target blind to
all
signals, legit or otherwise. Probably damaged it in other ways, too.

So this poor victimized alarm—wounded, alone, cut off from any hope of recall—had blundered off through Maelstrom, still looking for its destination. Apparently that part of the program still worked: it had bred itself, wounds and all, at the next node. Primary contacts, to secondary, to tertiary—each node a juncture for geometric replication.

By now there were thousands of the little beggars in the neighborhood. Not alarms any more: bait. Every time they passed through a node they rang dinner bells for all and sundry,
corrupted! defenseless! File fodder!
They'd be waking up every dormant parasite and predator in copy range, luring them in, concentrating the killers…

Not that the alarms themselves mattered. They'd been a mistake from the outset, called into existence by a glorified typo. But there were millions of other files in those nodes, healthy, useful files, and although they all had the usual built-in defenses—
nothing
got sent through Maelstrom these days without some kind of armor—how many of them could withstand a billion different attacks from a billion hungry predators, lured together by the scent of fresh blood?

"Alice, I think I'm going to have to shut down some of those nodes."

"Already on it," she told him. "I've sent the alerts. Assuming
those
get through without getting torn to shreds, they should be arcing inside seventy seconds."

On the schematic a conic section swarmed with sharks, worming their way back toward the core.

Even best-case, there was bound to be damage—hell, some bugs
specialized
in infecting files during the archive process—but hopefully most of the vital stuff would be encysted by the time he hit the kill switch. Which didn't mean, of course, that thousands of users wouldn't still be heaping curses on him when their sessions went dark.

"Oh,
shit
," Jovellanos whispered invisibly. "Killjoy, pull back."

Desjardins zoomed back to a low-resolution overview. He could see almost a sixth of Maelstrom now, a riot of incandescent logic rotated down into three dimensions.

There was a cyclone on the horizon. It whirled across the display at over sixty-eight nodes per second. The Cincinnati bubble was directly in its path.

* * *

A storm convected from ice and air. A storm constructed of pure information. Beyond the superficial details, is there any significant difference between the two?

There's at least one. In Maelstrom, a weather system can sweep the globe in fourteen minutes flat.

They start out pretty much the same way inside as out: high-pressure zones, low-pressure zones, conflict. Several million people log on to a node that's too busy to support them all; or a swarm of file packets, sniffing step-by-step to myriad destinations, happen to converge on too few servers at once. A piece of the universe stops dead; the nodes around it screech to a crawl.

The word goes out: fellow packet, Node 5213 is an absolute
zoo
. Route through 5611 instead, it's
so
much faster. Meanwhile an angry horde of gridlocked users logs off in disgust. 5213 clears like Lake Vostok.

5611, on the other hand, is suddenly jam-packed. Gridlock epicenter leaps 488 nodes to the left, and the storm is up and moving.

This particular blizzard was about to shut down the links between Achilles Desjardins and the Cincinnati bubble. It was going to do so, according to tactical, in less than ten seconds.

His throat went tight. "Alice."

"Fifty seconds," she reported. "Eighty percent arced in fifty—"

Kill the nodes. Feed the swarm. Either. Or.

"Forty-eight…forty-seven…"

Isolate. Contaminate. Either. Or.

An obvious call. He didn't even need Guilt Trip to tell him.

"
I can't wait
," he said.

Desjardins laid his hands on a control pad. He tapped commands with his fingers, drew boundaries with eye movement. Machines assessed his desires, raised obligatory protests—
you're kidding, right? You're sure about this?
—and relayed his commands to the machinery under them.

A fragment of Maelstrom went black, a tiny blot of darkness hemorrhaging into the collective consciousness. Desjardins caught a glimpse of implosion before the storm snowed out his display.

He closed his eyes. Not that it made any difference, of course; his inlays projected the same images onto line-of-sight whether or not his eyelids were in the way.

A few more years. A few more years and they'll have smart gels at every node and the sharks and anemones and trojans will all just be a bad memory. A few years. They keep promising.

It hadn't happened yet. It wasn't even happening as fast as it had been. Desjardins didn't know why. He only knew, with statistical certainty, that he had killed people today. The victims were still walking around, of course—no planes had fallen from the sky, no hearts had stopped just because Achilles Desjardins had squashed a few terabytes of data. Nothing
that
vital relied upon Maelstrom any more.

But even old-fashioned economics had its impacts. Data had been lost, vital transactions voided. Industrial secrets had been corrupted or destroyed. There would be consequences: bankruptcies, lost contracts, people staggering home in sudden destitution. Domestic violence and suicide rates would spike a month or two down the road in a hundred different communities, geographically unconnected but all within forty or fifty nodes of the CinciGen Pathfinder. Desjardins knew all about cascade effects; he tripped over them every day of the job. It'd be enough to drive anyone over the edge after a while.

Fortunately there were chemicals for that too.

Backflash

She woke to the sight of an airborne behemoth with wreckage in its jaws. It covered half the sky.

Cranes. Armatures. Grasping tearing mouthparts sufficient to dismember a city. An arsenal of deconstruction, hanging from a monstrous bladder of hard vacuum; the skin between its ribs sucked inward like the flesh of something starved.

It passed, majestic, unmindful of the insect screaming in its shadow.

"It is nothing, Ms. Clarke," someone said. "It does not care about us."

English, with a Hindian accent. And behind it, a soft murmur of other words in other tongues. A quiet electrical hum. The steady
drip-drip-drip
of a field desalinator.

A gaunt brown face, somewhere between middle-aged and Methuselan, leaned into her field of view. Clarke turned her head. Other refugees, better fed, stood about her in a ragged circle. Vaguely mechanical shapes teased the corner of her eye.

Daylight. She must have passed out. She remembered gorging herself at the cycler, late at night. She remembered some tenuous cease-fire breaking down in her belly. She remembered hitting the ground and vomiting an acid stew onto fresh sand.

And now there was daylight, and she was surrounded. They hadn’t killed her. Someone had even brought her fins; they lay on the cobble at her side.

"…
tupu jicho…
" someone whispered.

"Right—" her voice rusty with disuse "—my eyes. Don't let them throw you, they're just…"

The Hindian reached toward her face. She rolled weakly away and fell into a fit of coughing. A squeezebulb appeared at her side. She waved it off. "Not thirsty."

"You came from the sea. You cannot drink the sea."

"I can. Got—" She struggled up on her elbows, turned her head; the desalinator came into view. "I've got one of those, in my chest. An implant. You know?"

The skinny refugee nodded. "Like your eyes. Mechanical."

Close enough
. She was too weak to explain.

She looked out to sea. Distance had bled the lifter of detail, reduced it to a vague gibbous silhouette. Wreckage dropped from its belly as she watched, raising a silent gray plume on the horizon.

"They clean house as they always have," the Hindian remarked. "We are lucky they don't drop their garbage on
us
, yes?"

Clarke weathered another cough. "How did you know my name?"