Starfish

"The Urchin yards," he whispered. "Coquitlam."

Rowan closed her eyes. "And others."

"Oh Jesus," he managed. "So it's already out."

"Was," Rowan said. "We may have contained it. We don't know yet."

"And what if you haven't contained it?"

"We keep trying. What else can we do?"

"Is there a ceiling, at least? Some maximum death toll that'll make you admit defeat? Do any of your models tell you when to concede?"

Rowan's lips moved, although Scanlon heard no sound: yes.

"Ah," he said. "And just out of curiosity, what would that limit be?"

"Two and a half billion." He could barely hear her. "Firestorm the Pacific Rim."

She's serious. She's serious. "Sure that's enough? You think that'll do it?"

"I don't know. Hopefully we'll never have to find out. But if that doesn't work, nothing will. Anything more would be — futile. At least, that's what the models say."

He waited for it to sink in. It didn't. The numbers were just too big.

But way down the scale to the personal, that was a whole lot more immediate. "Why are you doing this?"

Rowan sighed. "I thought I'd just told you."

"Why are you telling me, Rowan? It's not your style."

"And what's my style, Yv — Dr. Scanlon?"

"You're corporate. You delegate. Why put yourself through all this awkward one-on-one self-justification when you've got flunkies and döppelgangers and hitmen to do your dirty work?"

She leaned forward suddenly, her face mere centimeters from the barrier. "What do you think we are, Scanlon? Do you think we'd even contemplate this if there was any other way? All the corpses and generals and heads of state, we're doing this because we're just plain evil? We just don't give a shit? Is that what you think?"

"I think," Scanlon said, remembering, "that we don't have the slightest control over what we are."

Rowan straightened, pointed at the workpad in front of him. "I've collated everything we've got on this bug. You can access it right now, if you want. Or you can call it up back in your, your quarters if you'd rather. Maybe you can come up with an answer we haven't seen."

He stared straight at her. "You've had platoons of tinkertoy people all over that data for weeks. What makes you think I can come up with anything they can't?"

"I think you should have the chance to try."

"Bullshit."

"It's there, Doctor. All of it."

"You're not giving me anything. You just want me to let you off the hook."

"No."

"You think you can fool me, Rowan? You think I'll look over a bunch of numbers I can't understand, and at the end I'll say, ah yes, I see it now, you've made the only moral choice to save life as we know it, Patricia Rowan I forgive you? You think this cheap trick is going to win you my consent?"

"Yves —»

"That's why you're wasting your time down here." Scanlon felt a sudden, giddy urge to laugh. "Do you do this for everyone? Are you going to walk into every burb you've slated for eradication and go door-to-door saying We're really sorry about this but you're going to die for the greater good and we'd all sleep better if you said it was okay?"

Rowan sagged back in her chair. "Maybe. Consent. Yes, I suppose that's what I'm doing. But it doesn't really make any difference."

"Fucking right it doesn't."

Rowan shrugged. Somehow, absurdly, she looked beaten.

"And what about me?" Scanlon asked after a while. "What happens if the power goes out in the next six months? What are the odds of a defective filter in the system? Can you afford to keep me alive until your tinkerboys find a cure, or did your models tell you it was too risky?"

"I honestly don't know," Rowan said. "It's not my decision."

"Ah, of course. Just following orders."

"No orders to follow. I'm just — well, I'm out of the loop."

"You're out of the loop."

She even smiled at that. Just for a moment.

"So who makes the decision?" Scanlon asked, his voice impossibly casual. "Any chance I could get an interview?"

Rowan shook her head. "Not who."

"What are you talking about?"

"Not who," Rowan repeated. "What."

Racter

They were all absolutely top of the line. Most members of the species were lucky to merely survive the meatgrinder; these people designed the damned thing. Corporate or Political or Military, they were the best of the benthos, sitting on top of the mud that buried everyone else. And yet all that combined ruthlessness, ten thousand years of social Darwinism and four billion of the other kind before that, couldn't inspire them to take the necessary steps today.