She looked into the darkness, past the telemetry panel, past the faint shimmer of reflecting membrane. Ricketts's head was a dim crescent, its edges rough and smooth in equal measure: outlined hints of disheveled hair and contoured plastic. She couldn't see his face. The headset would have covered his eyes even if her caps had been in. His body was an invisible suggestion of dark mass, too distant for the meager light of the display. It did not move.
She continued: "The shredders try to crash everything they can get their teeth into, so we just assume that whoever bred them wants them to succeed. But I think they're counting on the firewalls and the—exorcists, right…?"
"Right."
"Maybe they're counting on those defenses to hold. Maybe they don't want the network to collapse because they use it themselves. Maybe they just send the—the shredders out to kick up mud and noise, and keep everyone busy so they can sneak around and do their own thing without getting noticed."
She waited for him to take the bait.
Finally: "Big twisted story."
"Yeah. It is."
"But Shredders still shred everything. And breeders not here to ask. So no way to tell."
Leave him alone. He's just a kid with a crush, he's so sick he can barely move. The only reason he hasn't told you to fuck off is because he thinks you might care.
"I think there is a way," she said.
"Why?"
"If they'd really wanted to crash the whole system, they could have done that long before now."
"How you know?"
Because I know where the demons come from. I know how they started, I know how they work.
And just maybe, I know how to set them free.
"Because we can do it ourselves," Clarke told him.
Ricketts said nothing. Perhaps he was thinking. Perhaps he was unconscious. Clarke felt her fingers in motion, glanced down at the new window she'd just opened on the bedside board. The Palliative Submenu, she saw. A minimalist buffet of default settings: nutrients. painkillers. stimulants. Euthanasia.
She remembered a voice from the past: You're so sick of the blood on your hands you'd barely notice if you had to wash it off with even more.
"Crash N'AmNet," Ricketts said.
"That's right."
"Don't know. I'm…tired…"
Look at him, she told herself. But it was dark, and her caps weren't in.
And he was dying anyway.
One finger slid across stimulants.
Ricketts spoke again. "Crash N'AmNet? Really?" Something rustled in the darkness behind the membrane. "How?"
She closed her eyes.
Lenie Clarke. It had all started with that name.
Ricketts didn't really remember where the Witch first came from. He'd just been a kid then, he said. But he'd heard the stories; according to legend and the M&M's, the Meltdown Madonna had started the whole thing.
That was close enough. She'd released it, anyway, spread ßehemoth across N'Am like some kind of vindictive crop-duster. And of course people had tried to stop her, but there'd been a—a glitch. Deep in the seething virtual jungles of Maelstrom, passing wildlife had noticed a flock of high-priority messages shooting back and forth, messages about something called Lenie Clarke. They'd learned to hitch a ride. It was reproductive strategy, or a dispersal strategy, or something like that. She had never really understood the details. But traffic about Lenie Clarke was a free ticket to all kinds of habitat that wildlife had never gotten into before. Natural selection took over from there; it wasn't long before wildlife stopped merely riding messages about Lenie Clarke and started writing their own. Memes leaked into the real world, reinforced those already proliferating through the virtual one. Positive feedback built both into myth. Half the planet ended up worshipping a woman who never existed, while the other half tried desperately to kill the one who did.
Neither side caught her, though.
"So where'd she go?" Ricketts asked. He was using his own vocal cords again, and Clarke could see his hands in vague motion on the handpad. An incandescent filament, flickering towards extinction, suddenly bright and steady in the grip of a voltage spike inflicted without his knowledge or consent. Burning out.
"I said—"
"She—disappeared," Clarke told him. "And I guess most of the wildlife that used her died off, but some of it didn't. Some of it claimed to speak for her even when she was still around. I guess the whole imposter thing really took off afterwards. It helped spread the meme or something."
Ricketts's hands stopped moving. "You never told me your name," he said after a few moments.
Clarke smiled faintly.
Whatever they were facing now had sprung from that original seed. It had been twisted almost beyond recognition. It no longer served its own interests; it served the aesthetics of those who valued chaos and propaganda. But it had all started with Lenie Clarke, with the driving imperative to promote and protect anything in possession of that secret password. New imperatives had since been bred into the code, older ones forgotten—but maybe not entirely eliminated. Maybe the old code still existed, short-circuited, bypassed, dormant but still intact, like the ancient bacterial genes infesting the DNA of placental mammals. Maybe all that was needed was a judicious tweak to wake the fucker with a kiss.
Natural selection had shaped this creature's ancestors for a billion generations; selective breeding had tortured and twisted it for a million more. There was no clear-cut design in the genotype snarling at the end of that lineage. There was only a tangled morass of genes and junk, an overgrown wilderness of redundancies and dead ends. Even those who'd shaped the monster's later evolution probably had no idea of the specific changes they'd been making, any more than a nineteenth-century dog breeder would have known which base pairs his carefully-crossbred sires and bitches were reinforcing. To even begin to decipher such source was far beyond Ricketts's modest abilities.
But to simply scan the code in search of a specific text string— that was trivially easy. As easy as it was to edit the code around such a string, whether or not you knew what it did.
Ricketts ran a search. Their captive shredder contained eighty-seven occurrences of the text string Lenie Clarke and its hex, ASCII, and phonetic equivalents. Six of them slept just a few megs downstream of a stop codon that aborted transcription along that pathway and redirected it to some other.
"So you snip out that codon," Clarke said, "and all that downstream source wakes up again?"
He nodded by the glow of the readouts. "But we still don't know what any of it does."
"We can guess."
"Make Lenie like Lenie," Ricketts said, and smiled. Clarke watched another one of his vitals edge into the red.
Maybe someday, she thought.
It was a simple enough insight if you knew where the monsters came from. It was a simple enough splice if you knew how to code. Once those two elements came together, the whole revolution took about fifteen minutes.
Ricketts crashed at sixteen point five.
"I—ahhh…" A rattling sigh, more breath than voice. His hand hit the pallet with a soft slap; the handpad tumbled from his fingers. His telemetry staggered along half a dozen axes and fell towards luminous asymptotes. Clarke watched helplessly for ten minutes as rudimentary machines struggled to turn his crash into a controlled descent.
They almost succeeded, eventually. Ricketts leveled off just short of unconsciousness.
"We… did it," Phocoena translated. Ricketts had never taken the headset off.