Bloom Read online

  BLOOM

  by

  WIL MCCARTHY

  Published by ReAnimus Press

  ~~~

  “An ingenious yarn with challenging ideas, well-handled technical details, and plenty of twists and turns.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “BLOOM is tense, dynamic, intelligent, offering a terrifyingly vivid view of how technology can rocket out of our control”

  —David Brin, Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author of The Uplift War

  “A view of mankind’s future and the universe reminiscent of Arthur C. Clarke.”

  —The Denver Post

  “In nearly every passage, we get another slice of the science of McCarthy’s construction, and a deeper sense of danger and foreboding... McCarthy develops considerable tension.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “The Mycora are an astonishingly original concept, one of the most chilling versions of nanotechnology yet envisioned. McCarthy has a real talent for hard-SF concepts and thriller plotting.”

  —Science Fiction Age

  “Although set in the twenty-second century, this transcendent tale of close encounters with awesome life forms echoes current anxieties over the godlike manipulations of bioengineering.... A wallop of a finale.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “McCarthy combines straightforward SF adventure with a generous dose of speculative science in this simply told story, which pits a few courageous individuals against an unknown (though once familiar) universe.”

  —Library Journal

  ~~~

  © 2011 by Wil McCarthy. All rights reserved.

  http://ReAnimus.com/authors/wilmccarthy

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  ~~~

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book would never have existed without the influence of my agent, Shawna McCarthy, who doggedly persisted in mining my head on the theory that there must be gold in there somewhere, and Stan Schmidt, who planted the nugget in a 1995 letter on nanotechnology, and Charles C. Ryan, who purchased the novelette from which this (quite different) story eventually grew.

  I also owe a debt of thanks to Shelly Shapiro for being more editor than executive, to Kuo-yu Liang, Tim Kochuba, Eleanor Lang and the rest of the staff at Del Rey, who've gone well out of their way to make me feel at home, to Vernor Vinge, Greg Bear, Walter Jon Williams and countless others for literary and conceptual influence, John Conway for his Game of Life, NCWW and the Edge Club for critical and moral support, Kathleen Ann Goonan and Linda Nagata for not pulling punches, and of course my wife, Cathy, who believed in me even when she shouldn't have.

  ~~~

  For Doug and Tomi Lewis

  ~~~

  ZERO:

  Sometimes They Get In

  This much we know: that the Innensburg bloom began with a single spore; that Immune response was sluggish and ineffective; that the first witness on the scene, one Holger Sanchez Mach, broke the nearest emergency glass, dropped two magnums and a witch's tit, and died. Did he suffer? Did it hurt? Conversion must have taken at least four seconds, and we can probably assume it started with the feet. These things usually do.

  By the time the Response teams began arriving, the bloom was some ten meters across, and two meters high at the center—a fractal-jagged bubble of rainbow fog, class two threaded structure almost certainly visible to those unfortunate enough to be standing within fecund radius when the fruiting bodies swelled and popped. Twenty deaths followed almost immediately, and another hundred in the minutes that followed.

  There were cameras and instruments on the scene by this time, windows on what can only seem to be separate events, each holograph showing a different fleeing mob or collapsing building, each soundtrack recording a different cacophony of wimpers and death screams and jarringly irrelevant conversation. I personally have collaged these scenes a dozen times or more, arranging the panic this way and that way, over and over again in the hope that some sense will emerge. But there is no sense in those first few minutes, just the pettiness and blind, stamping fear of the human animal stripped bare. And the heroism, yes; for me the central image is that of Enrico Giselle, Tech Two, pushing his smudged helmet and visor back on his forehead and shouting into a voice phone, while the walls behind him froth and shimmer and disintegrate.

  “Class five! Class five! Drop two hundred and flush on my command!”

  At this point, finally, the city began to awaken. The Immunity isolated samples of the invading mycorum, sequenced them, added them to the catalog of known pathogens. Better late than never, one supposes, but by this time the bloom outmassed the city's Immune system by a factor of several million, and though submicroscopic phages gathered at its sizzling interface, now ropy with tendrils that sputtered outward in Eschereque whorls, the growth was not visibly affected.

  Fortunately, like all living things, technogenic organisms require energy to survive, and where the witch's tits had fallen or been hurled, pools of bitter cold had arrested the replication process. Not unusual, as any Response officer will tell you. And like organic lebenforms, mycora are also vulnerable to excess energy. Backpack UV lasers were proving effective weapons against the bloom, and soon the streets clanged with discarded chem spritzers and paraphage guns as bloomfighters concentrated on the things that worked.

  High above the city, the cavern roof came alive with UV turrets of its own. Machine-guided and wary of the soft humans below, the beams swept back and forth, charring trenches through the rainbow mist, the living dust, the bloom of submicroscopic mycora still eating everything in their reach and converting it to more of themselves. And to other things, as well, a trillion microscopic construction projects all running in parallel, following whatever meaningless program the mycogene codes called out. By now the fecund zone was half a kilometer across, riddled with gaps and voids in the outer regions but much denser at its core, a thickening haze which already blocked the view from one side to the other. Up to four stories tall in places, higher than most of the surrounding buildings, and it had begun to take on structure as well—picks and urchins, mostly, standing out visibly in the haze, their prismatic spines lengthening more than fast enough for the human eye to see.

  Some mycora eat lightly, sucking up building blocks like carbon and hydrogen while leaving the heavier elements alone, but this one was pulling the gold right off the streets, the steel right off the shingled walls, the zirconium right out of the window panes. You've seen the pictures: a giant bite out of Innensburg's south side, gingerbread houses dissolving like a dream.

  The UV lasers, while no doubt satisfying for those employing them, were if anything adding to the problem by throwing waste heat into the bloom, giving it that much more energy to work with, to feed on.

  Finally, Innensburg's central processor sought permission from the mayor and city council to move to Final Alert. Permission was granted, the overhead lights and household power grid were shut off, the ladderdown reactors stopped, and the air system reconfigured to pipe through cooling radiators closer to the surface. The cold, the dark. How we humans hate these things, and how very much we need them!

  Like all Jupiter's moons, like all the moons of the outer system, Ganymede's surface is cold enough to liquefy both oxygen and nitrogen, and while the spore-fouled air was not cooled quite tha
t far, Innensburg's ground temperature quickly dropped below the freezing point of water, and then below that of carbon dioxide. A seconds-brief rain fell and froze. Mycoric replication slowed to a crawl. A sigh of mingled fear and relief went up all over the city, visible as columns of white steam in the flashlight beams of the Response. The emergency far from over, but now survivable, now something that could be dealt with in a reasoned, methodical manner.

  Some thirty-one deaths were later attributed to the cold, to the darkness, to the lack of domestic power and computing, and while some of the families did attempt to bring suit against the authorities responsible, public and judicial outrage squashed the move before it had gotten very far. One hundred and eighty-seven deaths preceeded the chilldown, after all, and most of Innensburg's fifty thousand residents came out of it with only minor injuries.

  Throughout the Immunity, our problems are the same: so far from the places of our birth, so far from the sun's warm rays, so far from the lives we once expected to lead. Eaten by the Mycosystem, those lives, and billions of others as well. And yet out here in the cold and dark we hang on, even thrive, because we're brave enough to believe we can. If the space around us is lousy with mycoric spores blown upward by solar wind, well, at least we can do what's necessary to keep them outside.

  I think the Honorable Klaus Pensbruck, in closing the book on Glazer vs. Cholm, speaks for us all with his immortal words, “Shut up, lady. We don't want to end up like the Earth.”

  —from Innensburg and the Fear of Failure

  (c) 2101 by John Strasheim

  ONE:

  Destination Where?

  That my first meeting with Vaclav Lottick went poorly goes without saying. The most powerful man in the solar system, yes, you can believe he had better things to do than exchange small talk with me. And yet, certain business can be conducted in no other way.

  He looked up and smiled when his secretary, a quiet, efficient man, ushered me inside the office. Everything beige and cream and shiny, not quite sterile in appearance but compact, and clean. Very clean. The windows' light was from behind Lottick, highlighting every stray hair, and the desk lamp seemed designed to show off the lines in his face. A pale man, nearly bald, his rumpled smock no longer white. Even his zee-spec was an older model, blocky, folding his ears back, weighing on the bridge of his nose, leaving his features to sag that much more.

  “John Strasheim, Hi,” he said, rising from his chair and extending a hand. “Thanks for coming on such short notice. You're a few minutes early, actually.”

  Shaking the proffered appendage, I shrugged. “Just eager to oblige, I guess. What can I—”

  “Take a seat, then. Set to receive a flash?”

  “Sure.” Who wasn't?

  His thick fingers danced in the space between us. My RECEIVING light went on, and the air before me came alive with information, image windows and text windows and schematic windows rastering in and then shrinking to icons as my spec compressed them in working memory. Too quick to see much in the way of detail. Pictures of blooms, I thought. Pictures of mycora. Well, what to expect from the Immunity's head of research?

  I sat.

  “I've seen your work,” he said to me, his voice vaguely approving. “And read it. Funny, how nobody seems to be doing that sort of thing anymore.”

  “You're talking about Innensburg?”

  He nodded. Behind the zee-spec, his eyes were bright green. “Yes, Innensburg. I survey your net channels from time to time, but it was that piece that really caught my eye. About as close as we have to a regional history, and plaintext was a... curiously appropriate choice of medium. Very astute. I stayed up all night reading it.”

  “Thank you,” I said, nodding once to accept the compliment. Then I smiled politely, waiting. Whatever he'd invited me here to discuss, this wasn't it.

  He studied me for a moment, then relaxed, turning off the charm like a lamp he no longer needed. “All right, then.”

  His fingers stroked the air, manipulating symbols and menus I couldn't see. One of my image icons began to flicker. I touched and expanded it, moved the resulting window to the lower right corner of my vision. It was a video loop, false-color, depicting a complex mycorum which replicated itself in slow motion, over and over again. Not quite crablike, not quite urchinlike, not quite organic in appearance. A tiny machine, like a digger/constructor but smaller than the smallest bacterium, putting copies of itself together with cool precision, building them up out of nothing, out of pieces too small for the micrograph to capture. In short, a pretty typical piece of technogenic life. At the bottom of the window scrolled a horizontal code ribbon showing, in a series of brightly colored blocks, what was presumably the data gene sequence which dictated both the mycorum's structure and behavior.

  “This,” Lottick said, “is Io Sengen 3a, a sulphurated mycorum with unknown environmental tolerance. Gave us a scare a while back when we thought it could replicate in the volcanic flows on Io, but that turned out to be a false alarm. Now we're concerned again, for different reasons.”

  “Okay.” I nodded, waiting for more, not yet sure why he was telling me this.

  Another image icon flickered. Summoned, expanded, and formatted, it depicted a macrophage of some sort, immediately recognizable to any Immunity citizen as one of the good guys, though the configuration was not a familiar one. Rather like a mechanized coral polyp, I'll say, though close inspection revealed details inconsistent with that tag. At any rate, it was the same apparent size as the mycorum, though of course the scale must have been ten or twenty times less fine. Indeed, the yellow tick marks along the top and side of the image probably marked out a grid of 1/10th micrometer squares. Again, a data gene sequence scrolled by underneath.

  “The Philusburg Optima phage,” Lottick said, “Release one-point-four. Thermal IR power coupler, has to be within six meters of a mini-lad or other major heat source to function. Note the gene sequences, please. This may duplicate some of the information you've already got, but I wanted to impress upon you the potential significance of this finding.”

  “Finding?” I paused, blinked. “Doctor, I'm afraid we're speaking different languages. Why, exactly, am I here?”

  Lottick seemed surprised at that, looking up, his brow furrowing. “You didn't get the information packet,” he said. Not a question.

  “I don't think so, no. I got a message with a meeting date and time, that's all.”

  He was out of his chair, grumbling. “My apologies, Mr. Strasheim. In their current task loading my staff may have... overlooked it. There was no intention of wasting your time.”

  “You people have a lot on your minds,” I said, diplomatically. In fact, my trip here had been rather a welcome break from the factory, and if I had to linger a little longer than expected, well, that was more job time I could justify missing.

  “I have a few things to attend to,” Lottick said, ignoring my attempt at mollification. He gestured at the sliding glass door behind his desk. “If you'd like to wait out on the balcony, I'll come join you in a few minutes. Right now there's an ear that needs twisting before it goes off shift. Several ears, actually.”

  “Oh,” I said, rising, “sure. By all means.” I wanted to get involved in that about as much as I wanted to go back to work at the factory, which was not very much. But Lottick's balcony would afford fresher air, a view of the city, a rare moment of quiet. “Take as long as you need; it's really no trouble.”

  Cursing softly, he brushed past me, went out the door. Behind his desk, the sliding glass door did indeed appear to have a balcony behind it. I moved to it, touched the handle. It slid open, powered but silent, looking heavy. Glass? It was zirconium, of course; much stronger and heavier and, in these ladderdown days, just as free for the taking. But in language, as in life, the old habits linger.

  Lottick's office was on the top floor of the tallest building in Ansharton, ten stories high and right up against the side of the cavern, so that essentially every part of the city
was visible, a pool of tiny, picturesque houses and and factories spilling out across the broad cavern floor. A magnificent view, but it probably owed as much to logic as to politics. Even here there were blooms, probably a few small ones every week, and Research certainly needed to keep an eye out. Vaclav Lottick was no prince, no president, no corporate bureaucrat from times gone by, but simply a harried worker like everyone else, the contents of his head and the work of his hands outvaluing all the golden streets of Ganymede.

  He even had a small telescope mounted on the railing, pointing down at the city. I peered through it, saw only a street corner, not particularly busy. Whisper-quiet, the zirconium door slid closed behind me.

  There were no chairs out here, no furniture of any sort, the balcony really only large enough for standing, large enough for maybe four or five people at the very most. I put my elbows on the railing, leaned out. I'd long ago lost my fear of heights; we cling to architectural styles meant for ten times the gravity we actually experience, deep in the mantles of the Jovian moons. In fact, there was no height from which I could fall that was likely to injure me, except possibly the cavern roof itself.

  But neither was I going to jump — for some reason, we don't do that, either. So I simply waited, looking down on the cars and trucks rolling along on their egg-beater wheels, at the fat-tired bicycles and occasional pedestrians that hurried through the Ansharton streets. Looking up at the cavern roof, stony but clotted densely with light sources that simulated, on this day, a diffuse sun shining through streaky clouds, with hints of blue breaking through here and there. And the cranes and work gantries and laser turrets poking down from this erzatz sky, completely ruining the effect. I sometimes wonder who we think we're fooling.