"A monster."
Could you be more specific?
"This is bullshit. You think I don't know you charge by the second?"
Our rates are strictly
"Tell me what's wrong with me or I disconnect."
I don't have enough information for a proper diagnosis.
"Speculate."
Neurological damage is a strong possibility. Strokes—even very small ones that you may not be consciously aware of—can sometimes trigger visual-release hallucinations.
"Strokes? Ruptured blood vessels, that kind of thing?"
Yes. Have you recently undergone a rapid change in ambient pressure? For example, have you spent some time at high altitude or in an orbital environment, or perhaps returned from an underwater excursion?
Client disconnect 50/10/05/0932
Session ends.
Icarus
There were people who would have described Achilles Desjardins as a murderer a million times over.
He had to admit there was a certain truth to that. Every quarantine he invoked trapped the living alongside the dying, ensured that at least some of those still alive soon wouldn't be. But what was the alternative, after all? Let every catastrophe run free, to engulf the world unchecked?
Desjardins could handle the ethics, with a little help from his chemical sidekicks. He knew in his heart of hearts that that he'd never really killed anyone. He'd just—contained them, to save others. The actual killing had been done by whatever pestilence he'd been fighting. It may have been a subtle distinction, but it was a real one.
There were rumors, though. There'd always been rumors: the next logical step. The unconfirmed tales of deaths caused, not in the wake of some disaster, but in advance of it.
Preemptive containment, it was called. Path scans would pinpoint some burb—superficially healthy, but we all know how much stock you can put in that— as Contagion Central for The Next Big Bug. Monte Carlo sims would show with 99 percent confidence that the impending threat would get around conventional quarantines, or prove immune to the usual antibiotics. LD90s would estimate the mortality rate at 50 %, or 80 %, or whatever was deemed unacceptable that week, over an area of so many thousand hectares. So another one of those pesky wildfires would spring up in the parched N'American heartland— and Dicksville, Arkansas would tragically drop off the map.
Just rumors, of course. Nobody confirmed it or denied it. Nobody even really talked about it, except for Alice when she went on one of her rants. On those occasions, Desjardins would reflect that even if the stories were true—and even if such measures were a bit farther down the slippery slope than he was comfortable with—well, anyway, what was the alternative? Let every catastrophe run free, to engulf the world unchecked?
Mostly, though, he didn't think about it. Certainly it didn't have anything to do with him.
But certain items in his own in-box were starting to look really ugly. A picture was forming, a mosaic assembling itself from clouds of data, news threads drifting through Maelstrom, bits of third-generation hearsay. They all came together to form a picture in his mind, and it was starting to look like a seascape.
ßehemoth was correlated with subtle blights of photosynthetic pigment. Those blights, in turn, generally correlated with intense fires. Seventy-two percent of the blazes had occurred at seaports, in shipyards, or on marine construction sites. The rest had taken out bits and pieces of residential areas.
People had died. Lots of people. And when, on a whim, Desjardins had cross-referenced the residential obits by profession, it turned out that almost all of the fires had killed at least one marine engineer, or commercial diver, or sailor.
This fucker hadn't escaped from anybody's lab. ßehemoth had come from the ocean.
The California Current nosed down along N'AmPac's coast from the Gulf of Alaska. It mixed it up with the North Pacific and North Equatorial currents way off to the east of Mexico; those, in turn, bled into the Kuroshio off Japan, and the Eastern Counter and Southern Equatorial Currents in the South Pacific. Which ended up nuzzling the West Wind Drift, and the ankle bone's connected to the leg bone, the leg bone's connected to the knee bone, and before you know it the whole fucking planet is encircled.
He studied the data cloud and rubbed his eyes. How do you contain something that moves across seventy percent of the whole planet?
Evidently, you burned it.
He tapped his console. "Hey, Alice."
Her image flashed onto a window, upper-left. "Right here."
"Give me something."
"Can't yet," she said. "Not carved in stone."
"Balsa will do. Anything."
"It's small. Maybe two hundred, three hundred nanometers. Relies heavily on sulfur compounds, structurally at least. Very stripped-down genotype; I think it may use RNA for both catalysis and replication, which is a really neat trick. Built for a simple ecosystem, which makes sense if it's a construct. They never expected it to get out of culture."
"But what does it do?"
"Can't say. I'm working with a frog in a blender here, Killjoy. You should actually be kind of impressed that I've gotten as far as I have. You ask me, it's pretty obvious we're not supposed to figure out what it does."
"Could it be some kind of really nasty pathogen?" It has to be. It has to be. If we're burning people,—
"No." Her voice was flat and emphatic. "We are not. They are."
Desjardins blinked. I saidthat? "We're all on the same side, Alice."
"Uh-huh."
"Alice…" Sometimes she really pissed him off. There's a war going on, he wanted to shout. And it's not against corpses or bureaucrats or your imaginary Evil Empires; we're fighting against a whole indifferent universethat's coming down around our ears and you're shitting on me because sometimes we have to accept casualties?
But Alice Jovellanos had a blind spot the size of Antarctica. Sometimes you just couldn't reason with her. "Just answer the question, okay? Someone obviously thinks this thing is extremely dangerous. Could it be some kind of disease?"
"Biowar agent, you mean." Surprisingly, though, she shook her head. "Unlikely."
"How come?"
"Diseases are just little predators that eat you from the inside. If they're designed to feed on your molecules, their biochemistry should be compatible with yours. The D-aminos suggest they're not."
"Only suggest?"
Jovellanos shrugged. "Frog in a blender, remember? All I'm saying is if A is gonna eat B without throwing up, they should have similar biochemistries. ßehemoth just seems a little too far into the Oort to qualify. I could be wrong."
But the vectors—shipbuilders, divers—"Could it survive in a human host, at least?"
She pursed her lips. "Anything's possible. Look at A-51."
"What's that?"
"Metal-oxidizing microbe. Sediment-dweller from deep lakes, only there's a few million of them living in your mouth right now. Nobody knows how they got there exactly, but there you go."
Desjardins steepled his fingers. "She called it a soil microbe," he murmured, almost to himself.
"She'd call it corn on the cob if she thought it'd cover her corporate ass."
"Jeez, Alice." He shook his head. "Why do you even work here, if all we do is serve some evil overlord?"
"Everyone else is worse."
"Well, I don't think ßehemoth came out of a pharm. I think it came from the ocean."