Watermind (18 page)

“The hell. Run your own analysis.” Vaarveen threw the tube at her.

When it bounced off her hands and broke on the concrete dock, Yue screeched. “You're worthless. You didn't even find the pollutants we identified before.”

Peter gave her a sour grin. His white-blond hair looked gluey, and fingerprints smudged his bottle-thick glasses. He'd borrowed a disreputable-looking coverall to keep out the chill, and Deet insect repellent hovered around him like a personal fog.

Yue looked as if she wanted to spit. Her boney frame quaked with cold in her thin lab coat, but she disdained wearing other people's clothes. Her iron-colored braid hung limp down her back, and muddy stains darkened her sleeves where she'd been jerking at the vacuum hose. Fatigue lined both their faces, and they swayed with exhaustion.

Roman Sacony watched them in silence. He had not gone to Miami. He'd let the Brazilian banker slip through his fingers. Perhaps he'd made a mistake, listening to his instincts to stay in Baton Rouge. But after watching his science team brawl like cats, he didn't think so. This battle wasn't over. This enemy had not yet surrendered.

In the shadows at the far end of the dock, he leaned against a forklift and rubbed his grainy eyes. He had swallowed another of Li Qin's capsules to stay awake,
and the stimulant coursed through his bloodstream, exciting his weary nerves. Reflections rocked back and forth in the canal's languorous black ripples, and waves of cold air wafted up from the water. The pump engine fumes gave him a headache. Dawn was coming.

“Christ, it's come back,” Yue hissed.

Roman saw her leaning toward the computer screen as if she were going to dive in. He moved rapidly to see the image. Deep within the collapsed collar, an ink blot diffused like a strange black blossom, darkest at the center, fanning out to a fine intricate fringe. Their hours of pumping had gone for nothing. The EM field had regenerated. His enemy had eluded their hose.

Roman knew he'd expected this outcome. He never trusted easy wins. As he confronted his opponent's portrait on the screen, his fingers slid over the liquid crystal display, almost caressing it. “Can you enlarge this section?”

Yue clicked a command to magnify the peripheral fringe. When it zoomed up to 500x, Peter Vaarveen let out a hoot. “It's a Mandelbrot set.”

“Yes.” Roman recognized the famous image of lacey seahorse-shaped spirals generated by a well-known quadratic recurrence equation.

Yue's neck bones popped. “It's too linear. Liquids don't mix like that.”

“Why is it still there?” Roman glowered at the canal. “We've pumped the collar almost empty.”

“We pumped what it wanted us to pump,” said Vaarveen.

“What it
wanted
?” Yue scowled. “You're starting to believe these ‘creature' stories.”

Vaarveen plopped down in a folding chair, stretched his long legs in front of him and snickered. “Do you have a better explanation?”

Roman was losing patience with both of them. He checked his watch. The gates were closed. The colloid wasn't going anywhere.

“You're thinking like children,” he said. “Get some sleep. Come back when your brains are clear.”

 

Monday, March 14

5:39
AM

 

The abrupt silence after the pumps shut down frightened a screech owl and scattered a pack of coyotes. CJ raised up on one elbow. Covered in cold mud, her wet hair was matted with grass seed, and her clothes crawled with chiggers. She dug through her pockets to find a handkerchief clean enough to wipe her binocular lenses. The crew was going home. Now it was her turn.

She gulped one last syrupy swallow of Coke, crushed the plastic bottle, stowed it in her backpack, then dropped her shorts to pee. Why hadn't she thought to bring some long pants? Her bare legs were milk-blue with cold.

She slogged through the chilly swamp and found her boat lolling among the willows. If only they hadn't closed those stupid gates, she could have motored up the canal. The boat would have made everything easier. But with the canal closed, she would have to carry her gear overland. At least, she found a sweatshirt to wear.

Her phone rang. Max was trying to call, but she didn't answer. She didn't want him to know what she was planning. After loading her equipment in a net bag, she slung it over her shoulder and hiked back through the swamp.

At the canal waterline, she dumped her gear and sorted things out. No way did she intend to dive, not again. She wasn't that harebrained. No, she would simply wade out in hip boots and take a few readings from the surface—although the thought of tugging the cold rubber hip boots over her bare legs made her shiver.

From her net bag, she unrolled one of Max's leather belts and strapped it around her waist. Then she carabinered her field finder and a few other necessary items to the belt. The canal exhaled a frosty fust of petroleum and rot. She squatted at the water's edge, scooped up a vial full,
and used a simple field test of litmus paper to check the pH. Her flashlight's beam showed the pH was low, slightly more acidic than vinegar. A short exposure wouldn't hurt her.

She dipped her hand into the frigid water, and slimy cold ribbons tickled her wrist. In the darkness, she couldn't see if they were blades of grass, strands of algae, or Asian water flukes, the parasitic flatworms that were just beginning to infest Louisiana streams. She yanked her hand back.

Sitting on a flat rock, she tugged on the awkward boots. The cold rubber gave her gooseflesh. Then she psyched herself to step into the water. “You won't hurt me,” she murmured, “will you?”

The canal's mucid bank sloped down sharply, and she hadn't expected that. On her first step, her boot slid, and she went deep. Only by batting wildly at the water did she keep upright. Her splashes drew a chorus of crickets, like a hundred chainsaws starting up.

Wet to her midriff, both boots full of freezing cold water, she realized there would be no possibility of wading far enough out to get a clear reading. The canal was too deep, and the collar floated fifty yards away. She would have to swim. “But I won't put my head under,” she said, inciting another explosion of cricket song.

If Max were here, he would stop her. Longing for Max, she struggled out of her heavy boots and slung them onto the bank. Then, she drew a deep breath, kicked off from the bottom and dog-paddled, holding her head erect and keeping her mouth closed tight. The water smelled like a toilet, and the gear swinging from her belt created drag. Harry seemed to be standing on her shoulders, weighing her down. “Daughter, if it's death you want, this is a clumsy choice.”

Her arms pulled at the cold water until her shoulders burned, and yet the collar seemed as far away as ever. Finally, she rolled on her back and floated, letting the corrosive water sluice through her hair. What am I doing
here? The thought washed through her. What the hell am I doing?

Overhead, gray clouds streaked the rose-colored dawn like smoke signals, and a flock of egrets flew low over the water. As CJ floated on her back, an irrational but comforting certainty flooded over her that she and the colloid shared a mutual understanding. He would not hurt her. She kicked her feet and backstroked for the collar.

At last, she made a grab for the PVC boom and hung on, panting. For several minutes, she dangled there, catching her breath and easing her muscles. The air smelled—
good
. By now the collar had puckered inward to a fraction of its former size. Only a few hundred gallons of liquid still sloshed inside, and as she trailed one arm through its fresh pure clarity, she didn't notice at first that her hand was stinging.

Acid? She shrieked and yanked her hand back. In the dawn light, her skin looked red, but it wasn't blistered from acid. It was simply cold.

Cautiously, she dipped her fingers into the water again—and gasped. The water inside the collar felt icy. Frigid waves welled up like an artesian spring tapping straight down to Antarctica. It smelled clean. What a contrast to the rank stew of the canal. She let the droplets spill down her arm like shavings of frost.

As she heaved her chest up onto the boom, the collar sank under her weight, and for an instant, she went completely under. Pure water enfolded her. It rinsed through her hair and tingled her skin, and the sharp cold both hurt and soothed her. When the collar buoyed her up again, she drew a watery breath and tasted perfume. As the rarefied liquid stirred and aroused her, she drifted into a odd reverie. For no clear reason, she felt convinced the colloid recognized her. She straddled the boom.

Beneath the salmon-colored sky, she rocked to and fro, mashing down the collar and letting foamy bubbles spill all around her. The cold intoxicating water entwined her
in achy sweetness. She lost track of where she was. Back and forth she rocked, squeezing the boom between thighs. Her crotch grew creamy. As her pleasure increased, more and more of the milky emulsion seeped out over her thighs. Pangs of orgasm made her grit her teeth as the liquid ice swept her through multiple bucking waves of carnal heat.

After the sharpest peak had passed, she rested, lying on the collar like a hammock and letting cool water bathe her face. She barely noticed the sudsy white emulsion drifting down the canal.

All at once she sat up and glanced around to see if anyone was watching. She'd never behaved that way in public before. She felt ashamed and frightened. Perhaps she'd imagined the whole episode. When she checked her field finder, she found herself at the edge of a powerful energy field that was slowly moving away to the West. She thought the magnetism must be affecting her brain.

With a little shake to clear her mind, she unclipped another piece of gear, a small water-resistant MP3 player made for use in the shower. She'd already cued it to play Max's zydeco. When she slipped on the headset to make sure it was working, the romping beat surrounded her, and Max's sonorous baritone lilted loud and merry.

“Max,” she whispered.

She lowered the player on a fishing line into the collar, and as music propagated through the water, she watched her field finder for a response. This was a crazy idea. Harry would have taunted her for days. But hadn't the pond mimicked the zydeco rhythms before?

Music was a kind of a numeric code, she reasoned, like computer language. It made sense that an active neural net would try to interact. If she got any response at all, it would prove the microelectronic trash was active. Her experiment wasn't so loony. It might yield results.

In fact, she was hoping for an epiphany, a sudden blinding flash of revelation. The colloid had to be more
than a fluke accident. She wanted it to pulse a deliberate answer to her zydeco, to prove it was capable of intelligent exchange. CJ craved the big leap, the huge discovery. She wanted her watery chameleon to say hello.

“Harry, don't give me that look,” she muttered.

Half-submerged on the sunken boom, she gripped her field finder and waited for a sign—until the night watchman spotted her with his flashlight and she had to bail.

 

Monday, March 14

8:12
AM

 

A storm front moved through the heartland, drenching Arkansas's red clay and soaking Kentucky's black coal fields. Along the Gulf Coast, misty rain hung suspended, refusing to fall. People breathed it. Birds caught it in their wings. Unseen above this hazy floating impossible rain, the moon waxed toward full.

But CJ didn't notice the weather. Hunkered on the floor of her Roach Motel bedroom, naked except for a towel, with the drapes drawn, with the glow of her laptop illuminating her astonished face, CJ read about an evil new life-form called the “Watermind.”

She'd been researching definitions of life, and two standards had popped up: 1) any system capable of eating, metabolizing, excreting, moving, reproducing, and responding to stimuli; and 2) any system containing reproducible code that evolved through natural selection. Then she found another, from Carl Sagan of all people. Sagan called life “a localized region where order constantly increased”—in contrast to the universe as a whole, which was moving steadily toward chaos.

She was surfing for more definitions when she came across a memo describing a new sentient life-form made
of water and electronic trash. Her flesh went cold. Her shoulders locked up. Her stiff fingers could barely scroll the mouse as she read her own report, published online for all the world to see.

Buzz about the stolen memo was streaming all over the Internet. The more she looked, the more she found, although no one seemed to know who came up with the name, “Watermind.” The anonymous memo—thank God they'd deleted her name—had first emerged in a Catholic discussion forum, and numerous bloggers had “annotated” its contents. One pundit described how a shape-shifting liquid robot was stalking through a Louisiana swamp, throwing off sparks, pissing clear water, and freeze-drying any humans in its way.

CJ pounded the floor with her fist. She laughed to keep from bawling. She barely recognized the twisted mutations of her report. Her goal had always been to publish her findings and make the colloidal process free to all. Open source—she had faith in that principle. But now someone had published for her, and the only people who cared were lunatics!

She got up and drank a handful of water from the bathroom tap. Traces of mud still daubed the side of her neck, leftover from her hasty shower. When she'd straggled in from the swamp, she'd been too sleepy for a thorough scrub, but too wired for sleep. Now she moistened a washcloth and washed her neck, wishing she'd never looked at her laptop. When her cell phone rang, she jerked like a live wire.

The caller's ID was blocked. She answered the fifth ring.

A male voice said, “I read your report about the liquid computer in Devil's Swamp.”