“I know one thing it didn’t do,” she went on. “It didn’t give you your murder habit. You had that all along, didn’t you?”
The pince-nez stared back at her like mantis eyes. A green LED ignited on its left lens.
“What’s it like, Ken? Is it cathartic? Is it sexual? Does it get you off?” A part of her looked on, alarmed. The rest couldn’t stop goading him. “Do you have to be right there, watching us die, or is it enough to just plant the bomb and know we’ll be dropping like flies offstage?”
“Lenie.” His voice was very calm. “What exactly are you trying to accomplish?”
“I just want to know what you’re after, that’s all. I don’t see anyone waving pitchforks and torches at you just because Spartacus rewired your brain. If you’re sure about this, if he really did all these things and he’s really some kind of monster, then fine. But if this is just some fucked-up excuse for you to indulge your perverse little fetish, then...”
She shook her head in disgust and glared into the darkness.
“You’d like his perversions somewhat less than mine,” Lubin said quietly.
“Right,” she snorted. “Thanks for the input.”
“Lenie...”
“What?”
“I’m never gratuitous,” he told her.
“Really?” She looked a challenge at him. “Never?”
He looked back. “Well. Hardly ever.”
Expiration Date
Equal parts dead and alive— and hardly caring which way the balance went—Taka Ouellette had figured it out.
She’d never done well under pressure. That had always been her problem. And Achilles the monster hadn’t understood that. Or maybe he’d understood it too well. Whatever. He had put her under the mother of all high-pressure scenarios, and of course she’d fallen apart. She’d proven once again to be the eternal fuck-up. And it was so unfair, because she knew she had a good head on her shoulders, she knew she could figure things out if only people would stop leaning on her. If only Ken hadn’t been there with his biowar canister, expecting answers right now. If only Achilles hadn’t come within a hair of incinerating her alive, and then rushing her through Seppuku’s gene sequence without so much as letting her catch her breath.
If only Dave hadn’t been so impatient. If only she hadn’t hurried on that last crucial diagnostic...
She was a smart lady. She knew it. But she was terrible under pressure. Bad, bad Alice, she chided herself.
But now that the pressure was off, see how well she put everything together?
It had only taken two things to get her over the hump. Achilles had to leave her alone for a bit, give her a chance to think. And she had to die. Well, start dying anyway. Once she knew she was dead, once she felt it in her bones, no reprieves, no last-minute rescue—all the pressure disappeared. For the first time in her life, it seemed, she could think clearly.
She didn’t know how long it had been since Achilles had been by to torture her. She figured at least a day or two. Maybe a week—but no, surely she’d be dead already if he’d left her here for a whole week? Her joints had frozen up in the meantime. Even if she were to be released from the exoskeleton, her body was as rigid as rigor...
Maybe it was rigor. Maybe she’d already finished dying and hadn’t noticed. Certainly things didn’t seem to hurt as much as they had—although maybe she just didn’t notice the pain so much now, on account of the raging thirst. One thing you could say about Achilles, he’d always kept her fed and watered. Didn’t want her too weak to perform, he’d said.
But it had been so very long since he’d come by. Taka would have killed for a glass of water, if she hadn’t already died for want of one.
But wasn’t it nice that nothing mattered any more? And wasn’t it nice that she’d actually figured it out?
She wished that Achilles would come back. Not just for the water, although that would be nice. She wanted to show him. She wanted to prove he was wrong. She wanted him to be proud of her.
It all had to do with that silly little song about the fleas. He must have known that, that’s why he’d serenaded her in the first place. Has smaller fleas that on him prey, and these have smaller still to bite ’em...
Life within life. She could see it now. She was amazed that she’d never seen it before. It wasn’t even a new concept. It was downright old. Mitochondria were littler fleas that lived in every eukaryotic cell. Today they were vital organelles, the biochemical batteries of life itself—but a billion years ago they’d been independent organisms in their own right, little free-living bacteria. A larger cell had engulfed them, had forgotten to chew before it swallowed—and so they’d struck up a deal, the big cell and the little one. The big cell would provide a safe, stable environment; the little one, in turn, would pump out energy for its host. That ancient act of failed predation had turned into the primordial symbiosis...and even today, mitochondria kept their own genes, reproduced on their own schedule, within the flesh of the host.
It was still going on. ßehemoth itself had stuck up a similar relationship within the cells of some of the creatures that shared its deep-sea environment, providing an energy surplus which the host fish used to grow faster. It grew within the cells of things here on land, too—with somewhat less beneficial consequences, true, but then virulence is always high when two radically disparate organisms encounter each other for the first time...
Achilles hadn’t been singing about fleas at all. He’d been singing about endosymbiosis.
Seppuku must carry its own little fleas. There was more than enough room—all those redundant genes could code for any number of viral organisms, as well as merely masking the suicidal recessives. Seppuku not only killed itself off when its job was done—it gave birth to a new symbiont, a viral one probably, that would take up residence inside the host cell. It would fill the niche so effectively that ßehemoth would find nothing but no-vacancy signs if it came sniffing around afterwards, looking to move back in.
There were even precedents, of a sort. Taka remembered some of them from med school. Malaria had been beaten when baseline mosquitoes lost out to a faster-breeding variant that didn’t transmit Plasmodium. AIDS stopped being a threat when benign strains outnumbered lethal ones. Those were nothing, though, diseases that attacked a handful of species at most. ßehemoth threatened everything with a nucleus; you’d never beat the witch by infecting the Human race, or replacing one species of insect with another. The only way to win against ßehemoth would be to counterinfect everything.
Seppuku would have to redesign life itself, from the inside out. And it could do it, too: it had an edge that poor old ßehemoth had never even dreamed of. Achilles had forced her to remember that too, half an eternity ago: TNA could duplex with modern nucleic acids. It could talk to the genes of its host cell, it could join the genes of its host cell. It could change anything and everything.
If she was right—and hovering at the edge of her life, she’d never been more certain of anything—Seppuku was more than a cure for ßehemoth. It was the most profound evolutionary leap since the rise of the eukaryotic cell. It was a solution far too radical for the fiddlers and tweakers who hadn’t been able to see beyond the old paradigm of Life As We Know It. The deep-sea enzymes, the arduous painstaking retrofits that had allowed Taka and others like her to claim immunity—improvised scaffolding, no more. Struts and crutches to keep some teetering body plan alive long after its expiration date. People had grown too attached to the chemical tinkertoys that had defined them for three billion years. The most nostalgia could ever do was postpone the inevitable.