This is very strange, he thought.
"We looking out for Kenny and Lenie," the voice continued. "We intent on translocating and disseminating both parties into novel environments with acceptable salinity range varies directly with temperature, within the environments considered. Do you relate to rhyme?"
It's a neural net, he realized. A Turing app. Maybe a gel. Whatever was talking to him, it wasn't programmed: it had learned to speak through trial-and-error, had worked out its own rules of grammar and syntax. Lubin had seen such devices—or organisms, or whatever they were—demonstrated. They picked up the rules easily enough, but they always seemed to throw in a few stylistic quirks of their own. It was hard to track down exactly how that happened. The logic evolved, synapse by synapse. It was opaque to conventional analysis.
"No," he said, experimentally. "For one, I don't relate to rhyme. Although that's not true all the time."
A brief silence. Then: "Excellent. I would've paid, you know?"
"Mediocre at best. What are you?"
"I am telling you about Lenie and Kenny. You don't want to fuck with them, friend. You wanna know what side you're on, right?"
"Tell me, then."
Nothing.
"Hello?"
Nothing. To make things worse, his trace failed—return address blocked at source.
He waited for a good five minutes in case the voice started talking again. It didn't. Lubin disconnected from his terminal, logged in on a different one farther along the row. This time he left Lenie Clarke and Ken Lubin strictly alone. Instead he stored the results of his worrisome blood tests in an open file, tagged to certain keywords that would hopefully attract attention from the right sources. Someone out there was paralleling his investigation; it was time to lure them in.
He logged off, distracted by an obvious and uncomfortable coincidence:
A smart gel had been running the nuke that vaporized Beebe Station.
Matchmaker
Cleared for Travel.
"Are you sure? No—no ergots, or psychoactives?"
Cleared for travel. Please proceed to check-in.
"Are you equipped for NMR?"
This booth is designed to scan for communicable parasites and diseases. You may visit a commercial medbooth if you wish to be tested for other disorders.
"Where's the nearest commercial medbooth, then?"
Please don't leave me.
"I—what?"
Stay, Lenie. We can work it out.
Besides. There's someone you should meet.
The screen went dark. The bead in her ear emitted a tiny belch of static.
"It's me," said a sudden voice. "Sou-Hon. From the bus station."
She grabbed her visor and fled into the tame green jungle of Concourse D. Startled pedestrian eyes, barely noticed, met her own. She slid the visor onto her face, not slowing.
"You don't understand." The voice was a small pleading thing in her ear. "I'm on your side. I'm—"
Glass doors, leading outside. Clarke pushed through. Sudden icy wind reduced global warming to a weak abstraction. The concourse arced around from behind her like a horseshoe-shaped canyon.
"I'm here to help—"
Clarke tapped her watch twice in succession. "Command mode," the device replied.
"Off" she told it.
"Amitav's de—"
"Off," the watch acknowledged, and fell instantly asleep.
She was alone.
The sidewalk was empty. Light spilled from the warren of habitrail tubes that shielded McCall's patrons from winter. The whine of distant turbines drifted down from the rooftops.
Two taps. "On."
A soft fuzz of static from the earpiece, although her watch was well within its operational two-meter radius.
"Are you there?" she said.
"Yes."
"What about Amitav?"
"Just before it—I mean—" The voice caught on itself. "They just burned everything. Everyone. He must have been…"
A passing gust of wind snapped at her face. The mermaid took a bitterly cold breath.
"I'm sorry," the stranger whispered in her head.
Clarke turned and went back inside.
Heat Death
It was an impoverished display, sparse informatics against a dark background: lats and longs, a tiny GPS overlay centered on Calgary International Airport, a no-visual icon blinking the obvious at two-second intervals.
"How do you know?" breathed a disembodied voice in Perreault's ear.
"I saw it. The start of it, anyway." Hard-edged airport ambience echoed in the background. "I'm sorry."
"It was his own fault," Clarke said after a moment. "He made too much noise. He was just—asking for it…"
"I don't think that was it," Perreault said. "They slagged eight whole kilometers."
"What?"
"Some kind of biohazard, I think. Amitav just got—caught in the sweep…"
"No." Words so soft they were almost static. "Can't be."
"I'm sorry."
No visual. No visual.
"Who are you?" Clarke asked at last.
"I ride botflies," Perreault said. "Mop-ups, mainly. I saw you when you came out of the ocean. I saw how you affected the people on the Strip, I saw you when you had one of those—visions—"
"Aren't you the faithful little stalker," Clarke said.
"That wasn't me," she continued after a while. "Back on the Strip. That was Amitav."
"He ran with it. You were the insp—"
"It wasn't me."
"Okay. Fine."
No visual.
"Why are you following me?" Clarke said.
"Someone's—linked us up. And at the bus station, earlier."
"Who?"
"I don't know. Probably one of your friends."
Something between a cough and a laugh. "I don't think so."
Perreault took a breath. "You're—getting known, you know. People are noticing. Some of them must be protecting you."
"From what, exactly?"
"I don't know. Maybe from the people who started the quake."
"What do you know about that?" Clarke's voice almost pounced down the link.
"Millions died," Perreault said. "You know why. That makes you dangerous to all the wrong people."
"Is that what you think."
"It's one of the rumors. I don't know."
"Don't know much, do you?"
"I—"
"You don't know who I am. You don't know what I want or what I've d— you don't know who they are or what they want. You just sit there and let them use you."
"What do you want?"
"None of your fucking business."
Perreault shook her head. "I'm just trying to help, you know."
"Lady, I don't know if you even exist. For all I know that kid in South Bend is playing some kind of sick joke."
"Something's happening because of you. Something real. You can check the threads yourself if you don't believe me. You're some kind of catalyst. Whether you know it or not."
"And here you are, jumping in with no questions asked."
"I've got questions."
"No answers, then. I could be planting bombs. I could be spit-roasting babies. You don't know, but here you are with your tongue hanging out anyway."