Seppuku’s architects were more radical. They’d thrown away the old cellular specs entirely and started from scratch, they were rewriting the very chemistry of life. Every eukaryotic species would be changed at the molecular scale. No wonder Seppuku’s creators had kept it under wraps; you didn’t have to be an M&M to be terrified by such an extreme solution. People always chose the devils they knew, even if that devil was ßehemoth. People just wouldn’t accept that success couldn’t be achieved through just a little more tinkering...
Taka could barely imagine the shape of the success that was unfolding now. Perhaps the strange new insects she’d been seeing were the start of it, fast short lives that evolved through dozens of generations in a season. Achilles hadn’t been able to keep it out after alclass="underline" those joyful, monstrous bugs proved it. He had only been able to keep it from infecting Humanity.
And even there, he was doomed to fail. Salvation would take root in everything eventually, as it had taken root in the arthropods. It would just take more time for creatures who lived at a slower pace. Our turn will come, Taka thought.
How would it work? she wondered. How to outcompete the hypercompetitor? Brute force, perhaps? Sheer cellular voracity, the same scramble-competition strategy that ßehemoth had used to beat Life 1.0, turned back upon itself? Would life burn twice as bright and half as long, would the whole biosphere move faster, think faster, live furiously and briefly as mayflies?
But that was the old paradigm, to transform yourself into your enemy and then claim victory. There were other options, once you gave up on reinforcing and turned to redesign instead. Taka Ouellette, mediocre progeny of the Old Guard, couldn’t begin to guess at what they were. She doubted anyone could. What simulation could predict the behavior of a multimillion-species system when every living variable was perturbed at once? How many carefully-selected experimental treatments would it take to model a billion simultaneous mutations? Seppuku—whatever Seppuku was poised to become—threw the very concept of a controlled experiment out the window.
North America was the experiment—unannounced, uncontrolled, an inconceivably tangled matrix of multiway ANOVAs and Hyperniche tables. Even if it failed, the world would hardly be worse off. ßehemoth would have suffered a major setback, Seppuku would have fallen on its sword, and whatever came after would at least—unlike ßehemoth— be limited to the inside of a host cell.
And maybe it wouldn’t fail. Maybe everything would change for the better. There would be monsters, some hopeful. Mitochondria themselves might finally be driven to extinction, their ancient lease expired at last. Maybe people would change from the inside out, the old breed gone, replaced by something that looked the same but acted better.
Maybe it was about fucking time.
A little man nattered at her from a great distance. He stood in front of her, an irritating homunculus in ultrasharp focus, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. He paced back and forth, gesticulating madly. Taka gathered that he was afraid of something, or someone. Yes, that was it: someone was coming for him. He spoke as if his head was full of voices, as if he had lost control of a great many things at once. He threatened her—she thought he was threatening her, although his efforts seemed almost comical. He sounded like a lost little boy trying to act brave while looking for a place to hide.
“I figured it out,” Taka told him. Her voice cracked like cheap brittle plastic. She wondered why that was. “It wasn’t so hard.”
But he was too caught up in his own little world. It didn’t matter. He didn’t seem like the kind of person who’d really appreciate the dawn of a new age anyway.
So many things were about to happen. The end of Life As We Knew It. The beginning of Life As We Don’t. It had already started. Her biggest regret was that she wouldn’t be around to see how it all turned out.
Dave, honey, she thought. I did it. I got it right at last.
You’d be proud of me.
Bastille
Sudbury rose in the night like a luminous tumor.
Its core glowed from within, faintly by dryback standards but bright as day to Lenie Clarke: a walled, claustrophobic cluster of refitted skyscrapers in an abandoned wasteland of suburbs and commercial zones. The static field was obvious by inference. The new buildings and the grafted retrofits, the galls of living space wedged into the gaps between buildings—all extended to the inner edge of the field and no further. Like metastasis constrained under glass, Sudbury had grown into a hemisphere.
They cut through from the east. Clarke’s diveskin squirmed in the field like a slug in a flame. Charged air transformed the rotors into whirling vortices of brilliant blue sparks. She found the effect oddly nostalgic; it seemed almost bioluminescent, like microbes fluorescing in the heat of a deep-sea vent. For a moment she could pretend that some airborne variant of Saint Elmo’s Fire trailed from those spinning blades.
But only for a moment. There was only one microorganism up here worth mentioning, and it was anything but luminous.
Then they were through, sniffing westward through the upper reaches of the Sudbury core. City canyon walls loomed close on either side. Sheet lightning sparked and flickered along the strip of sky overhead. Far below, intermittently eclipsed by new construction, some vestigial rapitrans line ran along the canyon floor like a taut copper thread.
She resumed loading clips from the open backpack at her feet. Lubin had toured her through the procedure somewhere over Georgian Bay. Each clip contained a dozen slug grenades, color-coded by function: flash, gas, shipworm, clusterfuck. They went into the belt-and-holster arrangement draped over her thigh.
Lubin spared a prosthetic glance. “Don’t forget to seal that pack when you’re done. How’s your tape?”
She undid her top and checked the diveskin beneath. A broad X of semipermeable tape blocked off the electrolysis intake. “Still sticking.” She zipped the dryback disguise back into place. “Doesn’t this low-altitude stuff bother the local authorities?”
“Not those authorities.” His tone evoked the image of blind eyes, turning. Evidently derms and antidotes and gutted bodies bought more than mere transportation. Clarke didn’t push the issue. She slid one last cartridge home and turned her attention forward.
A couple of blocks ahead, the canyon ended in open space.
“So that’s where he is,” she murmured. Lubin throttled back so that they were barely drifting forward.
It spread out before their approach like a great dark coliseum, a clear zone carved from the claustrophobic architecture. Lubin brought the Sikorsky-Bell to a dead stop three hundred meters up, just short of that perimeter.
It was a walled moat, two blocks on a side. A lone skyscraper—a fluted, multifaceted tower—rose from its center. A ghostly crown of blue lights glowed dimly from the roof; everything else was dead and dark, sixty-five floors with not so much as a pane alight. Patchwork foundations scarred the empty ground on all sides, the footprints of demolished buildings that had crowded the neighborhood back in happier times.