"There's a vector out there. A rifter. Lenie Clarke. It's all just smoke to keep her from getting caught."
"Why, for God's sake? Why would anyone—"
"The gels started it. I mean, they weren't supposed to, they were supposed to contain it, but—"
"They put the gels in charge?"
"What else could they do?" Desjardins suppressed the urge to giggle. "Nobody trusted anyone. They knew there'd be sacrifices, they knew they might have to sterilize—major areas. But when Mercosaur says hey, our stats say Oregon's got to go for the greater good, do you think N'Am's gonna just roll over and take their word on that? They needed something that could decide, and act, andwho wouldn't play favorites…"
"Fuck," Jovellanos whispered.
"They were so busy keeping an eye on each other they never stopped to think what kind of take-home rules a net might develop on its own, after spending a whole lifetime protecting small simple things from big complicated things. And then they tell it to protect a complex of five million species against one pissant nanobe, and they can't understand why it turns around and bites them in the ass."
Jovellanos said nothing.
"Anyway, it doesn't matter. They scrubbed the gels down to the last neuron and it didn't do any good. There's something else out there. I've flushed the fucker four times in the past twenty-four hours, and it keeps slipping through my fingers. We could swap out every gel in Maelstrom and the replacements would be reinfected inside a week."
"But if not the gels, then what?"
"I don't know. For all I know it's a pharm-baby thing, some corporation's got a cure and they're spreading ßehemoth to drive up the price. But how they’re pulling it off—"
"Turing app, maybe?"
"Or berserkers. I thought of that. But those leave footprints—op signatures on the hardware, huge memory demands. And anything that complex attracts wildlife like you wouldn't believe."
"You're not seeing any of that?"
"Lots of wildlife, maybe. Nothing else."
"So maybe it autowipes when it sees you coming."
"Footprints'd still be in the server log."
"Not if it doctors the log before it deletes."
"Then the deletion would be on file. I'm telling you, Alice, this is something else."
"What if the wildlife's gotten brainy?" she said.
He blinked. "What?"
"Why not? It evolves. Maybe it got smart."
He shook his head. "Nets are nets. Doesn't matter if someone coded them or they just evolved; if they're smart enough to think, they're going to have a certain signature. I'm not seeing it, and nobody else is either and I'm just…completely--wasted..."
He leaned forward, let the board take the weight of his forearms. His head weighed a tonne.
"Come on," Jovellanos said after a moment.
"What?"
"We're going to Pickering's Pile. I'm buying you a derm. Or ten."
He shook his head. "Thanks, Alice. I can't."
"I checked the logs, Killjoy. You haven't been out of this building for almost forty hours. Sleep deprivation reduces IQ, did you know that? Yours must be around room temp by now. Take a break."
He looked up at her. "I can't. If I leave—"
Don't worry about it, Lubin had said.
"— I may not be able to come back," he finished.
She frowned. "Why not?"
I'm unchained, he thought. I'm free.
"Lubin—this guy did something to me, and…if the bloodhounds…"
She took his hand, firmly. "Come."
"Alice, you don't know what—"
"Maybe I know more than you think, Killjoy. If you don't think you're up to a blood test, well maybe that's a problem and maybe it isn't, but you're gonna have to bite the bullet eventually. Unless you're planning on spending the rest of your life in this cubicle?"
"The next five days, maybe…" He was so very tired.
"I know what I'm doing, Killjoy. Trust me on this."
Desjardins managed a feeble laugh. "People keep saying that."
"Maybe. But I mean it." She drew him to his feet. "Besides, I have something to tell you."
He couldn't bring himself to enter the Pile, after all; too many ambient ears, and discretion prevailed even without Guilt Trip. For that matter, even walking under the open sky made him a bit queasy. The heavens had eyes.
They walked, letting chance choose the course. Intermittent beds of kudzu4 lined their path; the filamentous blades of windmills turned slowly overhead on the tops of buildings, along pedestrian concourses, anywhere that a bit of fetch could insinuate itself into the local architecture. Alice Jovellanos took all of it in without a word: Lubin, Rowan, Guilt Trip. Autonomy thrust upon the unwilling.
"Are you sure?" she asked at last. A streetlight flickered on overhead. "Maybe he was lying. He lied about Rowan, after all."
"Not about this, Alice. Believe me. He had his hand around my throat and I just sang, I told him stuff the Trip would never've let out."
"That's not what I mean. I believe you're Trip-free, for sure. I just don't believe that Lubin had anything to do with it."
"What?"
"I think he just found out about it, after the fact," Jovellanos continued, "and he used it to his own advantage. I don't know what was in those derms he was giving you, but I'd bet a year's worth of Mandelbrot's kibble that you could walk past those bloodhounds right now and they wouldn't even twitch."
"Yeah? And if you were in my shoes, do you think you'd be quite so optimistic?"
"I'd guarantee it."
"Fuck, Alice, this is serious."
"I know, Killjoy. I'm serious."
"But if Lubin didn't do it to me, then who—"
Her face was fading in the twilight, like the smile of a Cheshire cat.
"Alice?" he said.
"Hey." She shrugged. "You always knew my politics were a bit radical."
"Fuck, Alice." Desjardins put his head in his hands. "How could you?"
"It was easier than you might think. Just build a Trip analog with an extra side-group—"
"That's not what I mean. You know what I mean."
She stepped in front of him, blocking his way.
"Listen, Killjoy. You've got ten times the brains of those felchers, and you let them turn you into a puppet."
"I'm not a puppet."
"Not any more, anyway."
"I never was."
"Sure you were. Just like Lubin."
"I'm nothing like—"
"They turned you into one big reflex arc, my man. Took all that gray matter and hammered it into pure hardwired instinct, through and through."
"Fuck you. You know that isn't true."
She put her hand on Desjardins's shoulder. "Look, I don't blame you for being in denial about—"
He shrugged it off. "I'm not in denial! You think instinct and reflex can handle the decisions I have to make, every hour I'm on the job? You think weighting a thousand variables on the fly doesn't require a certain degree of autonomy? Jesus Christ, I—"
— I may be a slave, but I'm not a robot. He caught it at the back of his throat; no sense giving her any more ammunition than she already had.