Rifters 2 - Maelstrom (50 page)

"Dr. Desjardins, this is not your concern."

"Yeah? You’re confident making that kind of call, after the last time?"

"I'm sure I don't know what you mean."

"
ßehemoth
wasn't my concern either, remember? You were so worried about some other
corpse
getting a leg up when it got out, but there was no way you were going to come to
us
, were you? No ma'am. You handed the reins to a
head cheese
."

"Dr.—"

"Why do you think CSIRA even
exists
? Why chain us all to Guilt Trip
if you aren't going to use us anyway?
"

"I'm sorry, Doctor—were you under the impression that Guilt Trip made you
infallible
?" Rowan's voice was laced with frostbite. "It does not. It simply keeps you from being
deliberately
corrupt, and it does that by linking to your own gut feelings. And believe it or not, being especially tied to one's gut is
not
the best qualification for long-term problem-solving."

"That's not—"

"You're like any other mammal, Doctor. Your sense of reality is anchored in the present. You'll naturally inflate the near term and sell the long term short, tomorrow's disaster will always feel less real than today's inconvenience. You may be unbeatable at putting out brush fires, but I shudder to think of how you'd handle issues that extend into the next
decade
, let alone the next century. Guilt Trip would herd you toward the short-term payoff every time."

Her voice gentled a bit. "Surely, if we've learned
anything
from recent history, it's that sometimes the short term must be sacrificed for the long."

She waited, as if challenging him to disagree. The silence stretched.

"It wasn't such a radical technique, really," she said at last.

"What wasn't?"

"They're a lot more common than you might think. Even
real
memories are just—cobbled together out of bits and pieces, mostly. After the fact. Doesn't take much to coax the brain into cobbling those pieces together in some other way. Power of suggestion, more than anything. People even do it by accident."

She's defending herself
, Desjardins realized.
Patricia Rowan is actually trying to justify her actions. To
me
.

"So what others did by accident, you did on purpose," he said.

"We were more sophisticated. Drugs, hypnosis. Some deep ganglionic tweaks to keep real memories from surfacing."

"You fucked her in the head."

"Do you know what it is, to be
fucked in the head
? Do you know what that colorful little phrase actually
means
? It means a proliferation of certain receptor sites and stress hormones. It means triggers set at increased firing thresholds. It's
chemistry
, Doctor, and when you believe you've been abused—well, belief's just another set of chemicals in the mix, isn't it? You get a—a sort of cascade effect, your brain rewires itself, and suddenly you can survive things that would leave the rest of us pissing in our boots. Yes, we faked Lenie Clarke's childhood. Yes, she was never really abused—"

"By her
parents
," Desjardins interjected.

"—but the fact that she
believes
she was abused is what made her strong enough to survive the rift.
Fucking her in the head
probably saved her life a dozen times over."

"And now," Desjardins pointed out, "she's heading back to a home she never had, gunning for parents who don't exist, driven by abuses that never happened. Her whole definition of herself is a lie."

"And I thank God for that," Rowan said.

"
What
?"

"Have you forgotten the woman's a living brood sac for the end of the
world
? At least we know where she's going. Ken can head her off. That—that
definition
of herself makes her predictable, Doctor. It means we might still be able to save the earth."

* * *

Random intelligence from around the world scrolled on all sides. He didn't see it.

Ken can head her off.

Ken Lubin was Guilt-Tripped for tight security. Lubin kept slipping up, just so he could prove that again and again.

Someone got away, once
, he'd said. And then:
It's a shame. She really deserved a fighting chance…

Lenie Clarke had had more than a fighting chance: she had legions of followers watching her back. But they'd never really been following
her
. They'd been chasing some blue-shifted evolutionary distortion, racing past at lightspeed. Unless Anemone knew where she was and sounded the alarm—and whatever else it was, Anemone was no clairvoyant—how would anyone even
know
about the lone black figure crawling past them in the night?

Lenie Clarke was just one woman. And Ken Lubin was hunting her down.

There was no great need to kill her. She could be cleansed. She could be neutralized without being erased. But that wouldn't matter, not to Lubin.

She's the only security breach he ever left unsealed. That's what he said.

Achilles Desjardins had never met Lenie Clarke. By rights, she should be one of the far-off millions. And yet, somehow, he
knew
her: someone driven entirely by other people's motives. Everything she did, everything she felt, was the result of surgical and biochemical lies placed within her for the service of others.

Oh yes. I know her all right.

Suddenly, the fact that she was also a vector for global apocalypse barely even mattered any more. Lenie Clarke had a
face
. He could feel her in his gut, another human being, far more real than the distant abstraction of an eight-digit death toll.

I'm going to get to her first.

Sure, Lubin was a trained killer; but Desjardins had his own set of enhancements. All 'lawbreakers did. His system was awash in chemicals that could crank his reflexes into overdrive in an instant. And with luck—if he moved fast enough—he might just beat Lubin to the target. He might, just barely, have half a chance.

It wasn't his job. It wasn't the greater good.

Fuck both those things.

AWOL

"There's been a breach," the corpse said. "We were hoping you could fill in some relevant details."

Half of Alice Jovellanos's facial muscles tried to go into spasm right there. She clamped a tight lid on their aspirations and presented what she hoped was a look of
oh please God let it be
innocent and concerned curiosity.

Then again
,
what's the point?
whispered some smart-ass inner voice.
They must know already. Why else would they even call you in?

She clamped down on that one, too.

They're just toying with you. No one gets to be a corpse without developing a taste for sadism.

And that…just barely.

There were four of them, gender-balanced, ringed around the far side of the conference table up in the stratosphere of Admin-14. Slijper was the only one Jovellanos recognized—she'd just been brought in as Lertzman's replacement. The corpses all sat arrayed on the far side of the table, backlit by little halogen spots, their faces lost in the shadow of that glare. Except for the eyes. All four sets of eyes twinkled intermittently with corporate intel.

They'd be monitoring her vitals, of course. They'd know she was stressed. Of course, anyone would be stressed under these conditions. Hopefully subtleties like
guilt
and
innocence
were beyond the scope of the remotes.

"You're aware of the recent attack on Don Lertzman," Slijper said.

Jovellanos nodded.

"We think it may have been connected with a colleague of yours. Achilles Desjardins."

Okay, just the right amount of surprise here
… "Achilles? Why?"

"We were hoping you could tell us," one of the other corpses replied.

"But I don't know any—I mean, why not ask him directly?"
They already have, you idiot. That's what led them to you, he sold you out, after all this he sold—

"—disappeared," Slijper finished.

Jovellanos straightened in her chair. "Excuse me?"

"I said, Dr. Desjardins seems to have gone AWOL. When he didn't show up for his shift we were concerned that he might have run into the same complications as Don, but the evidence suggests he disappeared of his own volition."

"Evidence?"

"He wants you to feed his cat," Slijper said.

"He—what do—"

Slijper held up one hand: "I know, and I hope you'll forgive the intrusion. He left the message on your queue. He said he didn't know how long he was going to be gone, but he'd be grateful if you took care of —Mandelbot, is it?— and he'd keyed the door to let you in. At any rate"—the hand dropped back below table level—"this kind of behavior is frankly unprecedented from anyone on the Trip. He seems to have simply abandoned his post, with no apology, no explanation, no advance warning. It's—impulsive, to say the least."

Oh, man. Killjoy, you were
covered
. Why'd you have to blow it?

"I didn't know that was even possible," Jovellanos said. "He had his shots years ago."

"Nonetheless, here we are." Slijper leaned back in her chair. "We were wondering if you had noticed anything unusual in his behavior lately. Anything which, looking back, might have suggested—"

"No. Nothing. Although—" Jovellanos took a breath. "Actually, he
has
been kind of—I don't know,
withdrawn
lately."
Well, it's true enough, and they probably know already; it'd look suspicious if I
didn't
mention it…

"Any idea why?" asked another corpse.

"Not really." She shrugged. "I've seen it happen before—it's bound to wear on you, having to deal with high-level crises all the time. And Tripped people can't always talk about what's on their minds, you know? So I just let him be."

Please, please, please don't let them have high-level telemetry on me now…

"I see," Slijper said. "Well, thank you anyway, Dr. Jovellanos."

"Is that all?" She started to rise.

"Not quite," said one of the other corpses. "There's one other thing. Concerning—"

—
Oh please no—

"—your
own
involvement in all this."

Jovellanos slumped back into her chair and waited for the axe to fall.

"Dr. Desjardins's disappearance leaves—well, a vacancy we really can't afford at this time," the corpse continued.

Jovellanos looked at the backlit tribunal. A tiny part of her dared to hope.

"You worked closely with him through a great deal of this. We understand that your own contribution to date hasn't been negligible—in fact, you've been working below your own potential for some time now. And you're certainly farther up the learning curve than anyone else we could bring in at this point. On the usual scales you're overdue for a promotion. But apparently...that is, according to Psych you have certain objections to taking Guilt Trip…"

I. Can't. Believe. It.

"Now please understand, we don't hold this against you," said the corpse. "Your issues concerning invasive technology are— very understandable, after what happened to your brother. I can't honestly say I'd feel any differently in your shoes. That whole nanotech thing was such a debacle…"

A sudden, familiar lump rose in Jovellanos's throat.

"So you see, we understand your objections. But perhaps
you
could understand that Guilt Trip hails from a whole different arena, there's certainly nothing
dangerous—
"

"I do know the difference between bio and nano," Jovellanos said mildly.