Inside, time stuttered.
It didn't stop completely—without some level of system iteration there'd be no way to copy what was inside. Hopefully that wouldn't matter. A few thousand cycles, a few tens of thousands. Maybe enough for the enemy to lurch in stop-motion increments toward some dim awareness of what was happening, but not enough—if he was lucky—to actually do anything about it.
He ignored the traffic piling up at Timor's gates. He ignored the plaintive queries from other nodes who wondered why their feeds had gone dark. All he saw was the math in the bubble: architecture, operating system, software. Files and executables and wildlife. It was almost a kind of teleportation—each bit fixed and read and reconstructed half a world away, the original left unchanged for all the intimacy of its violation.
He had it.
The Timor node jerked back up to speed. Sudden panic from something inside; wildlife flew like leaves in a tornado, tearing at records, bursting through doorways, disemboweling itself after the fact. It didn't matter. It was too late.
Desjardins smiled. He had an Anemone in a tank.
In the terrarium, he could stop time completely.
It was all laid out before him, flash-frozen: a software emulation of the node itself, copies of every register and address, every spin and every bit. He could set it all running with a single command.
And it would fly apart in seconds. Just like the Timorese original.
So he set up inviolable backups of the logs and registries and placed them outside, with a filtered two-way pipe to the originals. He went through each of the portals leading out of the node—gates into oblivion now, from a bubble suspended in the void—and gave a little half-twist to each.
He regarded his handiwork. Time stood still. Nothing moved.
"Moebius, come forth," he murmered.
Anemone screamed. A thousand unregistered executables leapt forward and clawed the traffic log to shreds; a million more escaped through the portals.
Ten times as many rustled and watched:
As the mutilated logs repaired themselves with barely time to bleed, magically replenished from on high;
As the wildlife which had fled through that portal came plunging back in through this one, wheeling in confusion;
As a channel opened in the midst of the wilderness and a voice rang out from Heaven: "Hey, you. Anemone."
"We don't talk to you." Sexless, neutral. Default.
It was still going after the records, but it was taking a dozen tacks at once: subtle forgery, full frontal assault, everything in between. None of it worked, but Desjardins was impressed anyway. Damn smart.
As smart as an orb-weaving spider, blindly obeying lifetime fitness functions. As smart as a bird, noting wind and distance and optimizing seed load to three decimal places.
"You really should talk to me," Desjardins said mildly. "I'm God." He caught a piece of wildlife at random, tagged it, set it free again.
"You're shitting static. Lenie Clarke is God." A school of fish, a flock of wheeling birds so complex you needed matrix algebra and thinking machines to understand it all. The ascii came from somewhere inside.
"Clarke's not God," Desjardins said. "She's a petri dish."
Wildlife still flew through the wraparound gateways, but less randomly; some sort of systematic exploration, evolving on the fly. Desjardins checked on the piece he'd tagged. It had descendents already, all carrying the Mark of Cain he'd bestowed on their ancestor. And their descendents had had descendents.
Two hundred sixty generations in fourteen seconds. Not bad.
Thank you, Alice. If you hadn't ranted on about dancing bumblebees, who knows when I would've figured this out…
"Maybe you need a demonstration," said the swarm. "Special effects is what you want, yes?"
And she'd been right. Genes have their own intelligence. They can wire an ant for the cultivation of underground farms, the domestication of aphid cattle…even the taking of slaves. Genes can shape behaviors so sophisticated they verge on genius, given time.
"A demonstration," Desjardins said. "Sure. Hit me."
Time's the catch, of course. Genes are slow: a thousand generations to learn some optimal-foraging trick that a real brain could pick up in five minutes. Which is why brains evolved in the first place, of course. But when a hundred generations fit into the space of a yawn, maybe the genes get their edge back. Maybe wildlife learns to talk using only the blind stupid logic of natural selection— and the poor lumbering meat-sack on the other end never suspects that he's having a chat that spans generations.
"I'm waiting," Desjardins said.
"Lenie Clarke is not a demonstration." The swarm swirled in the terrarium. Was it Desjardins imagination, or did it seem to be—fading, somehow?
He smiled. "You're losing it, aren't you?"
"Loaves and fishes for Anemone."
"But you're not Anemone. You're just a tiny piece of it, all alone…"
Time's not enough in and of itself, of course. Evolution needs variance as well. Mutation and shuffling to create new prototypes, variable environments to weed out the unfit and shape the survivors.
"Clarke, Lenie. Water lights up all cool and radium glow…"
Life can survive in a box, for a while at least. But it can't evolve there. And down in Desjardins's terrarium, the population was starting to look pretty inbred.
"Free hardcore pedosnuff," the swarm murmured. "Even to enter."
Countless individuals. Jostling, breeding. Stagnating.
It's all just pattern.
"Sockeye," said the wildlife, and nothing more.
Desjardins realized he'd been holding his breath. He let it out, slowly.
"Well," he whispered, "you're not so smart after all.
"You just act like you are…"
Soul Mate
Someone was pounding on his door. Someone was definitely not taking the hint.
"Killjoy! Open up!"
Go away, Desjardins thought. He flashed his findings to the rest of the Anemone team, a far-flung assemblage of 'lawbreakers he'd never met in the flesh and probably never would. I nailedthe sucker. I figured it out.
"Achilles!"
Grudgingly, he leaned back and thumbed the door open without looking. "What do you want, Alice?"
"Lertzman's dead!"
He spun in his chair. "You're kidding."
"He was pithed." Jovellanos's almond eyes were wide and worried. "They found him this morning. He was braindead, he was just lying there starving to death. Someone stuck a needle up the base of his skull and just shredded his white matter…»
"Jesus." Desjardins stood. "You sure? I mean—"
"Of course I'm sure, you think I'm making it up? It was Lubin. It had to be, that's how he tracked you down, that's how he—"
"Yeah, Alice, I get it." He took a step toward her. "Thanks for—for telling me." He began to close the door.
She stuck her foot in the way. "That's it? That's all you've got to say?"
"Lubin's gone, Alice. He's not our problem any more. And besides" — nudging her foot out of the way with his own—"you didn't like Lertzman any more than I did."
He closed the door in her face.
Lertzman's dead.
Lertzman the bureaucrat. The cyst in «system», too dormant to contribute, too deeply embedded to excise, too ineffective to matter.