Bloom - Hardcover

McCarthy, Wil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345408578 ISBN 13: 9780345408570

Verlag: Ballantine Books Inc., 1998

Inhaltsangabe

A plague of self-replicating organisms, the product of twenty-first-century bioengineering, spreads across the globe and forces humanity to flee to the asteroid belt, where a crew of desperadoes is chosen for a suicidal mission. Tour.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Wil McCarthy, an engineer for the Lockheed Martin Corporation since 1988, is one of the guys who says "Guidance is go  at rocket launches. He lives in Denver with his family. His writing has appeared in Aboriginal SF, Analog, Interzone, Asimov's, Science Fiction Age, and a veritable plethora of short fiction anthologies. Bloom is his fifth novel.

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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 whimpers 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 Escheresque
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 that 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 windowpanes. 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 that 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 preceded 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 v.
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, copyright 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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Ballantine Books Inc.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1998
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0345408578
• ISBN 13: 9780345408570
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 310
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar