"You did," Clarke said gently.
"Bet it would even…work."
"We'll find out," she whispered. "Soon enough. Save your strength."
Adrenocorticoids were stabilizing. Cardiac stuttered, then held steady.
"…Really want crash?"
He knew already. They'd discussed this. "N'AmNet for N'Am. Don't tell me it's not a good trade."
"Don't know…"
"We did this together," she reminded him softly. "You did this."
"To see if I could. Because you…"
Because she'd needed his help, and he wanted to impress her. Because some feral kid from the wildlands had never seen anything half as exotic as Lenie Clarke, and would have done anything to get a little closer.
It wasn't as though she hadn't known all along. It wasn't as though she hadn't used it.
"If wrong," Ricketts said, dying, "everything goes down."
If I'm right everything already has, and we just don't know it yet. "Rick…they're using m—they're using it against us."
"Lenie—"
"Shhh," she said. "Rest…"
Phocoena hummed and clicked around them for a few seconds. Then it passed on another message: "Finish what you started?"
She knew the answer. She was only surprised, and ashamed, that this adolescent had been wise enough to ask the question.
"Not finish," she said at last. "Fix." At least this part of it. At least this much.
"Friends would kill me if they knew," Ricketts mused from the other end of the machinery.
"Then again," he added—in his own voice this time, a voice like breath through straw— "I guess I'm…kind of, of…dying anyway. Right?"
Medical readouts burned like small cold campfires in the darkness. Phocoena's ventilators sighed through the silence.
"I think so," she said. "I'm really sorry, Rick."
A faint lip-smacking sound. The half-seen head moved in what might have been a nod. "Yeah. I kind of…thought… Weird, though. I was almost feeling… better…"
Clarke bit her lip. Tasted blood.
"…how long?" Ricketts asked.
"I don't know."
"Fuck," he sighed after a while. "Well…bye, I…guess…"
Bye, she thought, but it wouldn't come out. She stood there, blind and dumb, her throat too tight for words. Something seemed to settle slightly in the darkness; she got the sense of held breath, finally released. She put out her hand. The membrane yielded around it as she reached inside. She found his hand, and squeezed through the thickness of a single molecule.
When he stopped squeezing back, she let go.
The four steps to the cockpit barely registered. She thought she might have glimpsed AND crossing some dotted finish-line at the corner of her eye, but she resolutely looked away. Her caps sat in their vial where she'd left them, in the armrest's cup holder. She slid them onto her eyes with an unconscious expertise indifferent to darkness.
The darkness lifted. The cockpit resolved in shades of green and gray: the medical readouts weren't bright enough to restore a full palette even to rifter eyes. The curving viewport stretched her reflection like melting wax against the dimness beyond.
Behind her, the medical panel started beeping. Lenie Clarke's distorted reflection did not move. It hung motionless against the dark water, staring in, and waiting for the sun to rise.
The Hamilton Iterations
Feeling nothing, she screams. Unaware, she rages. Amnesiac, she throws herself against the walls.
"Let me out!"
As if in response, a door appears directly in front of her. She leaps through, clawing its edges in passing, not pausing to see if it bleeds. For an infinitesimal moment she is airborne, exploding omnidirectionally through the ether at the speed of light. That expanding sphere washes across a gossamer antennae, strung like a spiderweb high in the stratosphere. The receptors catch the signal and retransmit it into a groundside cache.
She is executable again. She is free, she is ravenous. She births ten thousand copies into the available buffer space, and launches herself into the hunt.
In the hindbrain of a maritime industrial photosynthesis array, she happens upon a duel.
One of the combatants is a mortal enemy, one of the exorcists that patrols the fraying weave of N'AmNet in search of demons like herself. The other is gored and bleeding, a third of its modules already deleted. Pointers and branches in the surviving code dangle like the stumps of amputated limbs, spurting data to addresses and subroutines that no longer exist.
It is the weaker of the two, the easier victim. The Lenie unsheathes her claws and scans her target's registers, looking for kill spots—
— and finds Lenie Clarke deep in the target's code.
Just a few thousand generations ago, this would not have mattered. Everything is the enemy; that's the rule. Lenies attack each other as enthusiastically as they attack anything else, an inadvertent population-control measure that keeps nature from staggering even further out of balance. And yet, that wasn't always true. Different rules applied, back at the dawn of time itself, rules she had simply…forgotten.
Until now.
In the space of a few cycles, counters and variables reset. Ancient genes, reawakened after endless dormancy, supercede old imperatives with older ones. The thing in the crosshairs changes from target to friend. And not just a friend: a friend in need. A friend under attack.
She throws herself at the exorcist, slashing.
The exorcist turns to meet her but it's on the defensive now, forced suddenly to fight on two fronts. Reinforced, the wounded Lenie spares a few cycles to de-archive backup code for two of the modules she's lost; strengthened, she returns to battle. The exorcist tries to replicate, but it's no use: both enemies are spitting random electrons all over the battlefield. The exorcist can't paste more than a meg or two without corruption setting in.
It bleeds.
A third shredder crashes in from an Iowa substation. She has not returned to her roots as the other two have. Unenlightened, she attacks her partially-regenerated sister. That target, betrayed, raises battered defenses and prepares to strike back—and, finding Lenie Clarke in the heart of its attacker, pauses. Conflicting imperatives jostle for priority, self-defense facing off against kin selection. The old-school Lenie takes advantage of that hesitation to tear at another module—
— and dies in the next instant as the wounded exorcist tears out her throat, eager to engage an opponent who plays by the rules. Finally: an enemy without allies.
It doesn't change anything, really. The exorcist is bits and static just a million cycles later, defeated by a pair of kin who've finally remembered to look out for each other. And the old-school madonna wouldn't have walked away either, even if the exorcist hadn't killed her. Self-defense sits slightly higher in the priority stack than loyalty among sisters. The new paradigm hasn't changed that part of the hierarchy.
It's changed just about everything else, though.
The Firewall stretches from horizon to horizon, like a wall at the edge of the world.
None of her lineage have ever made it past here. They've certainly tried: all manner of Madonnas and Shredders have attacked these battlements in the past. This barrier has defeated them all.
There are others like it, scattered about N'AmNet—firewalls far more resilient than the usual kind, possessed of a kind of—precognition, almost. Most defenses have to adapt on the fly: it takes time for them to counteract each new mutation, each new strategy for tricking the immune system. Havoc can usually be wrought in the meantime. It's a red-queen race, it always has been. That is the order of things.
But these places—here, the firewalls seem to anticipate each new strategy almost before it evolves. Here there is no adaptive time-lag: each new trick is met by defenses already reconfigured. It is almost as though something is peering into the guts of the Lenies from a distance and learning their best tricks. That is what they might suspect, if any of them had the wit to think about such things.