Nobody that mattered, anyway. The official news threads, jam-packed with the latest on this terrorist group or that arboviral outbreak, had nothing to say about her at all. The intel channels listed a few scattered acts of violence or sabotage, backtracked to anarchists and malcontents who'd cited the name as inspiration. But bad times bred dime-store messiahs like roaches, and there were thousands with more of a profile than Lenie Clarke.
Hell, none of the official outlets had even bothered to issue a denial on the subject.
It didn't make sense. Even the wildest rumors had to come out of the gate somewhere—how could all these people have started trumpeting the same thing at the same time? There'd been no media coverage, and there was way too much traffic for mere word-of-mouth to account for.
There was so much stuff on Lenie Clarke, in fact, that he almost didn't notice Ken Lubin and Mike Brander peeping over the lower edge of the scope. There wasn't much on them—a few hundred threads, all starting within the past couple of days. But they, too, seemed strangely susceptible to corrupted address headers and blocked-sender syndrome. And they, too, were proliferating.
What about the rifters? That whole scene seems to be fashionable these days…
Lubin's words. Achilles Desjardins was the one with the optimised wetware, and still Lubin had had to connect the dots for him. All Desjardins had seen was a bunch of sick tragic fucks in the news, slick uniforms—a fashion thing, he'd thought. A fad. It had never occurred to him that there might be individuals at the center of it all.
Okay. Now you know. Where does that get you?
He leaned back in Jovellanos's seat, ran his fingers along his scalp. No obvious correlation between rifter sightings and ßehemoth outbreaks, as far as he could tell. Unless—
His feet hit the floor with a thump. That's it.
His hands danced across the panel, almost autonomously. Axes rose from the swampy baseline, stretched to credible limits, sank back into the mud. Variables clustered together, fell apart like swarms of starlings. Desjardins grabbed them, shook them out, stretched them along a single thread called time.
That's it. The sightings cluster in time.
Now, take the first sighting from each cluster and throw away the rest. GPS them on a map.
"Will you look at that," he murmured.
A rough zigzag, trending east to west across temperate North America, then veering south. ßehemoth bloomed along the same trajectory.
Someone was watching Maelstrom for sightings of Lenie Clarke. And whenever they found one, they dropped a whole cluster of fake sightings into the system to muddy the waters. Someone was trying to hide her tracks and make her famous at the same time.
Why, for God's sake?
In the back of his head, synapses fired.
Something else lurked in that data, something that coalesced along the same axis. The homegrown parts of Achilles Desjardins glimpsed that shape and recoiled, refusing the insight. The optimized parts couldn't look away.
Maybe a coincidence, he thought, inanely. Maybe—
Someone knocked on the door. Desjardins froze.
It's him.
He didn't why he was so certain. Could've been anyone, really.
It's him. He knows where I am. Of course he knows, he's probably got me radiotagged, I bet he's got me pegged to the centimeter—
— And he knows I lied to him.
Lubin had to know. Lenie Clarke was all over Maelstrom; there was no way on Earth Desjardins could have run a check and found nothing at all since the quake.
Knock. Knock.
The door wouldn't unlock for anyone who didn't have CSIRA clearance. The door wasn't unlocking.
Oh yeah. It's him all right.
He didn't speak. God knew what kind of snoops Lubin might have pressed up against the door. He opened an outside line and began tapping. It only took a few seconds.
Send.
Someone grunted softly on the other side of the door. Footsteps faded down the hall.
Desjardins checked his watch: he'd been away from his office for almost six minutes. Much longer and it would start to look suspicious.
Look suspicious? He knows, you idiot! That's why he was at the door, just to—let you know. You didn't fool him for a second.
And yet…if Lubin had known, he hadn't said anything. He'd played along. For whatever cold-blooded fucked-in-the-head rifter reason, he'd maintained the pretense.
Maybe—oh please God—he'd continue to do so.
Desjardins waited another thirty seconds on the chance that his message might net an immediate reply. It didn't. He crept back into an empty corridor.
Patricia Rowan must have been otherwise engaged.
Scalpel
The door to Desjardins's cubby was closed.
Hey there, Ken—er, Colin—
Yeah, I used the upstairs john, the stalls play better ads up there for some reason—
Alice's office? She asked me to check her mail, they don't let us link in from outside—
He took a breath. No point in getting ahead of himself. Lubin might not even bring it up. That might not even have been Lubin.
Yeah, right.
He opened the door. The cubby was empty.
Desjardins didn't know whether to be relieved or terrified. He closed the door behind himself and locked it.
Unlocked it again.
What was the point, anyway? Lubin would come back or he wouldn't. He'd raise a challenge or he wouldn't. But whoever Lubin was, he already had Achilles Desjardins by the balls; breaking the routine now would only make things uglier.
And it wasn't as though he was really alone anyway. There was another kind of monster in the cubby with him. He'd already glimpsed it lurking behind Jovellanos's panel. He'd briefly been able to deny it then; that knock on the door had almost been a relief.
But it was here, too. He could hear it snuffling in the data like a monster in the closet. He could see that closet doorknob turn slowly back and forth, taunting him. He'd seen frightening outlines, at least; he'd looked away before any details had registered. But now, waiting for Lubin's return, there was nothing else to do.
He opened the closet door and looked it in the face.
The thousand faces of Lenie Clarke.
It seemed innocent enough at first; a cloud of points congealing in a roughly Euclidean volume. Time ran through its center like a spinal cord. Where the cloud was thickest, rumors of Lenie Clarke grew in a wild profusion of hearsay and contradiction. Where it narrowed, the tales were less diverse, more consistent.
But Achilles Desjardins had built a career out of seeing shapes in the clouds. The thing he saw now was beyond his experience.
Rumors had their own classic epidemiology. Each started with a single germinating event. Information spread from that point, mutating and interbreeding— a conical mass of threads, expanding into the future from the apex of their common birthplace. Eventually, of course, they'd wither and die; the cone would simply dissipate at its wide end, its permutations senescent and exhausted.
There were exceptions, of course. Every now and then a single thread persisted, grew thick and gnarled and unkillable: conspiracy theories and urban legends, the hooks embedded in popular songs, the comforting Easter-bunny lies of religious doctrine. These were the memes: viral concepts, infections of conscious thought. Some flared and died like mayflies. Others lasted a thousand years or more, tricked billions into the endless propagation of parasitic half-truths.
Lenie Clarke was a meme, but a meme unlike any other. She had not extruded slowly from a birth point, as far as Desjardins could tell; she'd simply appeared, all over the datascape, wearing a thousand faces. There'd been no smooth divergence, no monotonic branching of informational variants. The variation had exploded too quickly to trace back to any single point.