"This is it? You're sure?" Desjardins asked.

"I checked the ancillaries: no detectable toxins, proteins, nothing. The system was just playing it safe—figured anything that bred that fast had to be a threat, and there you go."

"And Cinci doesn't know?"

"Oh, sure. They figured it out almost immediately. They'd already sent the abortions when I called 'em."

Desjardins eyed the schematic. Pinpoints continued to blossom at the periphery.

"Alarms are still going off, far as I can see," he said. "Doublecheck, will you?" They could always short-circuit the quarantine through a media broadcast— they could even phone around if they had to—but that would take hours; dozens, hundreds of facilities would be paralyzed in the meantime. Cinci had already sent out counteragents to call off the alarms. So why wasn't the core of Desjardins's schematic going green by now with successful aborts?

"They sent them out," Jovellanos confirmed after a moment. "The alarms just aren't responding. You don't suppose…"

"Wait a second." A star had just gone out on the schematic. Another one. Three more. Twenty. A hundred.

All of them white. All on the periphery.

"We're losing alarms." He magged on the nodes where the lights had winked out. "But way out on the edge. Nothing near the core." The abortions couldn't have jumped so far so fast. Desjardins spun down the filters; now he could see more than autonomous alarms and the little programs sent to call them off. He could see file packets and executables. He could see wildlife. He could see—

"We got sharks," he said. "Feeding frenzy at PSN-1433. And spreading."

*

Arpanet.

Internet.

The Net. Not such an arrogant label, back when one was all they had.

The term cyberspace lasted a bit longer— but space implies great empty vistas, a luminous galaxy of icons and avatars, a hallucinogenic dreamworld in 48-bit color. No sense of the meatgrinder in cyberspace. No hint of pestilence or predation, creatures with split-second lifespans tearing endlessly at each others' throats. Cyberspace was a wistful fantasy-word, like hobbit or biodiversity, by the time Achilles Desjardins came onto the scene.

Onion and metabase were more current. New layers were forever being laid atop the old, each free—for a while—from the congestion and static that saturated its predecessors. Orders of magnitude accrued with each generation: more speed, more storage, more power. Information raced down conduits of fiberop, of rotazane, of quantum stuff so sheer its very existence was in doubt. Every decade saw a new backbone grafted onto the beast; then every few years. Every few months. The endless ascent of power and economy proceeded apace, not as steep a climb as during the fabled days of Moore, but steep enough.

And coming up from behind, racing after the expanding frontier, ran the progeny of laws much older than Moore's.

It's the pattern that matters, you see. Not the choice of building materials. Life is information, shaped by natural selection.

Carbon's just fashion, nucleic acids mere optional accessories.