Maelstrom

Originally published by Tor Books

October 2001

ISBN: 0312878060

Some Right Reserved

iii

For Laurie

"Though she be but little, she is fierce."

Behold now behemoth, which I made with thee; he eateth grass as an ox. —Job 40:15

All flesh is grass. —Isaiah 40:6

PRELUDE: MESSIAH

The day after Patricia Rowan saved the world, a man named Elias Murphy brought a piece of her conscience home to roost.

She hardly needed another one. Her tactical contacts already served up an endless stream of death and damage, numbers far too vague to qualify as estimates. It had only been sixteen hours; even orders of magnitude were barely more than guesses. But the machines kept trying to pin it down, this many million lives, that many trillion dollars, as if quantifying the apocalypse would somehow render it harmless.

Maybe it would at that, she reflected. The scariest monsters always knew enough to disappear just before you turned on the lights.

She eyed Murphy through the translucent display in her head: a man eclipsed by data he couldn't even see. His face contained its own information, though. She recognised it instantly.

Elias Murphy hated her. To Elias Murphy, the monster was Patricia Rowan.

She didn't blame him. He'd probably lost someone in the quake. But if Murphy knew the role she'd played, he must also know what the stakes had been. No rational being would blame her for taking the necessary steps.

He probably didn't. Rationally. But his hatred rose from somewhere in the brainstem, and Rowan could not begrudge it.

"There's a loose end," he said evenly.

More than one.

"The ehemoth meme got into Maelstrom," the gel-jockey continued. "Actually it's been in the net for some time, although it only really—impacted—through that one gel that you…"

He stopped before the accusation became explicit.

After a moment he began again. "I don't know how much they've told you about the—glitch. We used a Gaussian feed-forward algorithm to get around local minima—"

"You taught smart gels to protect data from Internet wildlife," Rowan said. "Somehow they generalized that into a preference for simple systems over complex ones. We innocently gave one of them a choice between a microbe and a biosphere and it started working for the wrong side. We pulled the plug just in time. That about right?"

"Just in time," Murphy echoed. Not for everyone, his eyes added. "But it had already spread the meme by then. It was linked into Maelstrom so it could act autonomously, of course."