"In fact, given that I still seem to be some kind of honorary prisoner, you could even say you owe me an explanation."
"We were hiding," Clarke blurted out.
"Hiding." Ouellette didn't seem surprised. "Where is there to hide?"
"Nowhere, as it turns out. That's why we came back."
"Are you a corpse?" Ouellette asked.
"Do I look like one?"
"You look like some kind of deep-sea diver." She gestured at the vent on Clarke's chest. "Electrolysis intake, right?"
Clarke nodded.
"So I guess you've been underwater all this time. Huh." Ouellette shook her head. "I'd have guessed geosynch, myself."
"Why?"
"It was just one of the rumors going around. Back when the witch was just getting started, and the riots were taking off—this thread started growing, that a few hundred high-powered corpses had vanished off the face of the earth. I don't know how you'd ever prove something like that, nobody ever saw those people in the flesh anyway. They could've all been sims for all we knew. Anyway, you know how these things get around. The word was they'd all jumped offworld from Australia, and they were all nice and comfy up in geosynch watching the world come down."
"I'm not a corpse," Clarke said.
"But you work for them," Ouellette guessed.
"Who didn't?"
"I mean recently."
"Recently?" Clarke shook her head. "I think I can honestly say that neither Ken nor I—Christ!"
It jumped out from some hiding place under the dash, all segments and clicking mandibles. It clung to her knee with far too many jointed limbs, a grotesque hybrid of grasshopper and centipede the size of her little finger. Her hand came down of its own accord; the little creature splattered under her palm.
"Fuck," she breathed. "What was that?"
"Whatever it was, it wasn't doing you any harm."
"I've never seen anything like—" Clarke broke off, looked at the other woman. Ouellette actually looked pissed.
"That wasn't—that wasn't a pet or anything, was it?" It seemed absurd. Then again, it wouldn't be any crazier than keeping a head cheese.
I wonder how she's doing…
"It was just a bug," Ouellette said. "It wasn't hurting anybody."
Clarke wiped her palm against her thigh; chitin and yellow goop smeared across the diveskin. "That just—that was wrong. That wasn't like any bug I've ever seen."
"I keep telling you. You're behind the times."
"So these things are old news?"
Ouellette shrugged, her irritation apparently subsiding. "They're starting to show up here and there. Basically, regular bugs with too many segments. Some kind of Hox mutation, I'd guess, but I don't know if anybody's looked at them all that closely."
Clarke looked at the sodden, withering landscape scrolling past the window. "You seem pretty invested in a—a bug."
"What, things aren't dying fast enough for you? You have to help them along?" Ouellette took a breath, started over. "Sorry. You're right. I just—you kind of empathize with things after a while, you know? Spend enough time out here, everything seems—valuable…"
Clarke didn't answer. The vehicle navigated a fissure in the road, wobbling on its ground-effect shocks.
"I know it doesn't make much sense," Ouellette admitted after a while. "It's not like ßehemoth changed much of anything."
"What? Look out the window, Tak. Everything's dying."
"That was happening anyway. Not as fast, maybe."
"Huh." Clarke regarded the other woman. "And you really think someone's throwing a cure over the transom."
"For Human stupidity? No such thing, I suspect. But for ßehemoth, who knows?"
"How would that work? I mean, what haven't they already tried?"
Ouellette shook her head, laughing softly. "Laurie, you give me way too much credit. I don't have a clue." She thought a moment. "Could be a Silverback Solution, I suppose."
"Never heard of it."
"Few decades ago, in Africa. Hardly any gorillas left, and the natives were eating up the few that remained. So some conservation group got the bright idea of making the gorillas inedible."
"Yeah? How?"
"Engineered Ebola variant. Didn't harm the gorillas, but any human who ate one would bleed out inside seventy-two hours."
Clarke smiled, faintly impressed. "Would that work for us?"
"It'd be tough. Germs evolve countermeasures a lot faster than mammals."
"I guess it didn’t work for the gorillas either.”
Ouellette snorted. "It worked way too well."
"So how come they’re extinct?"
"We wiped them out. Unacceptable risk to Human health."
Rain pelted against the roof of the cab and streaked along the side windows. Up front, the drops hurtled at the windshield and veered impossibly off-target, centimeters from impact.
"Taka," Clarke said after a few minutes.
Ouellette looked at her.
"Why don't people call it Maelstrom any more?"
The doctor smiled faintly. "You do know why they called it that in the first place, right?"
"It got…crowded. User storms, e-life."
Ouellette nodded. "Most of that's gone now. So much of the actual network has degraded, physically, that most of the wildlife went extinct from habitat loss. This side of the wall, anyway—they partitioned N'amNet off years ago. For all I know it's still boiling along everywhere else, but around here—"
She looked out the window.
"Here, the Maelstrom just moved outside."
Karma
Achilles Desjardins woke to the sound of a scream.
It had died by the time he was fully awake. He lay in the darkness and wondered for a moment if he had dreamt it; there had been a time, not so long ago, when his sleep had been filled with screams. He wondered if perhaps the scream had been his, if he had awakened himself—but again, that hadn't happened in years. Not since he'd become a new man.
Or rather, not since Alice had let the old one out of the cellar.
Awake, alert, he knew the truth. The scream had not risen from his mind or his throat; it had risen from machinery. An alarm, raised in one instant and cut off the next.
Odd.
He brought up his inlays. Outside his skull, the darkness persisted; inside, a half-dozen bright windows opened in his occipital cortex. He scrolled through the major feeds, then the minor ones; he sought threats from the other side of the world, from orbit, from any foolhardy civilian who might have blundered against the fence that guarded his perimeter. He checked the impoverished cluster of rooms and hallways that his skeletal day staff had access to, although it was barely 0400 and none of them would be in so early. Nothing in the lobby, the Welcome Center, the kennels. Loading bays and the physical plant were nominal. No incoming missiles. Not so much as a plugged sewer line.
He had heard something, though. He was sure of that. And he was sure of something else, too: he had never heard this particular alarm before. After all these years, the machines that surrounded him had become more than tools; they were friends, protectors, advisers and trusted servants. He knew their voices intimately: the soft beeping of his inlays, the reassuring hum of Building Security, the subtle, multi-octave harmonics of the threat stack. This alarm hadn't come from any of them.
Desjardins threw back the sheet and rose from his pallet. Stonehenge loomed a few meters away, a rough horseshoe of workstations and tactical boards glowing dimly in the darkness. Desjardins had a more official workspace, many floors above; he had official live-in quarters too, not luxurious but far more comfortable than the mattress he'd dragged down here. He still used those accommodations now and then, for official business or other occasions when appearances mattered. But this was the place he preferred: secret, safe, an improvised nerve center rising from a gnarled convergence of fiber optic roots growing in from the walls. This was his throne room and his keep and his bunker. He knew how absurd that was, given the scope of his powers, the strength of his fortifications—but it was here, in the windowless subterranean dark, where he felt safest.