Everybody's in pieces…

Lima and Levanzo and Lagos and that's just a few of the L's, folks, lots more where those came from

It's too late it's too late there's nothing I can do…

Her botfly sent out an alarm as soon as she went offline. The Router queried the medchip in Perreault's spine, frowned to itself, and sent a message to the other registered occupant of her apartment. Her husband found her trembling and unresponsive at her terminal, tears bleeding from her eyephones.

Part of Perreault's soul lived on the long arm of Chromosome 13, in a subtly defective gene that coded for serotonin 2A receptors. The resulting propensity for suicidal thoughts had never been an issue before; catalyzers buffered her in life as well as on the job. Certain pharms were rumored to sabotage each other's products. Maybe that was it: someone had tried to undermine the competition, and Sou-Hon Perreault—a defective derm pasted onto her arm—had walked into the aftermath of the Big One without realizing that her feelings were still on.

She was no good on the front lines after that. Once you went that seriously post-traumatic, the cats it took to keep you stable would short out your midbrain. (There were still people in the business who had seizures every time they heard the unzipping of a fly; body bags made the same sound when you sealed them.) But Perreault had eight months left on her contract, and nobody wanted to waste her talents or her paycheck in the meantime. What she needed was something low-intensity, something she could handle with conventional suppressants.

They gave her the refugee strip on the west coast. In a way it was ironic: the death toll there had been a hundred times greater than in the cities. But the ocean cleaned up after itself, for the most part. The bodies had been swept back to sea with the sand and the cobble and any boulder smaller than a boxcar. All that remained was moonscape, scoured and buckled.

For the moment, anyway.

Now Sou-Hon Perreault sat at her link and watched a line of red dots crawling along a map of the N'AmPac coastline. Zoomed to higher rez the line resolved into two; one marching from southern Washington down to NoCal, another tracking north along the same course. An endless loop of automated surveillance, eyes that could see through flesh, ears that could eavesdrop on bats. Brains smart enough to do their job without Perreault's help, most of the time.

She'd tap into them anyway, and watch their world scroll by. Somehow the botflies' enhanced senses seemed more real than her own. Her world, when she took off the headset, seemed subtly wrapped in cotton these days. She knew it was the catalyzers; what eluded her was why things were so much less muted whenever she rode a machine.

They traveled along a gradient of destruction. To the north, the land was laid waste: fissures lacerated the coastline. Industrial lifters hung over gaps in the shattered Wall, rebuilding. To the south refugees still shuffled along the Strip, living in lean-tos and tents and the eroding shells of dwellings from a time when ocean views had actually increased property value.

In between, the Strip bled back up the coast in ragged stages. Portable cliffs twenty meters high formed its northern perimeter, kept the strippers safely contained. N'AmPac machinery patched things up for a few kilometers on the other side—replenishing supplies, filling holes, fixing the more permanent barriers to the east. Other cliffs would eventually descend at the northern edge of the reclaimed area, and their southern counterparts would rise unto heaven—or the belly of an industrial lifter, whichever came first—leapfrogging north, ahead of the mammalian tide. Pacification botflies hovered overhead to keep the migration orderly.

Not that they were really necessary, of course. These days there were far more effective ways of keeping people in line.

She would have been content to watch all day, distant and dispassionate, but her duties left waking gaps between work and sleep. She filled them by wandering alone through the apartment, or watching the way her husband watched her. She found herself increasingly drawn to the aquarium glowing softly in their living room. Perreault had always found it a comfort— the fizzy hiss of the aerator, the luminous interaction of light and water, the peaceful choreography of the fish within. She could get lost in it for hours. A sea anemone, twenty centimeters across, stirred in currents at the back of the tank. Symbiotic algae tinted its flesh a dozen shades of green. A pair of damselfish nested safely in its venomous tentacles. Perreault envied them their security: a predator, miraculously turned to the service of its prey.

What she found really amazing was that the whole crazy alliance—algae, anemone, fish—hadn't even been engineered. It had evolved naturally, a gradual symbiosis spanning millions of years. Not one gene had been tweaked in its construction.

It seemed almost too good to be real.

Sometimes the botflies called for help.

This one had seen something it didn't understand in the transition zone. As far as it could tell, one of the Calvin cyclers was splitting in two. Perreault mounted the line and found herself floating above an ephemeral still-life. Shiny new cyclers sat along the shore, miracles of industrial photosynthesis, ready to braid raw atmosphere into edible protein. They appeared intact. A bank of latrines and a solar crematorium had been freshly installed. Light stands and blankets and piles of self-assembling tents lay on neat rows of plastic skids. Even the cracked bedrock had been repaired to some extent, autofoam resin injected into the fissures, remnants of sand and cobble replenished and raked halfheartedly over the ruined shoreline.

The restoration crews had gone; the refs had not yet come. But there were fresh footprints on the sand, leading into the ocean.

They came from there, too.

She called up the footage that had triggered the alarm. The world reverted to the garish, comforting false color that machines use to communicate their perceptions to the flesh-constrained. To human eyes, a Calvin cycler was a shiny metal coffin built for a minivan: to the botfly it was a muted tangle of EM emissions.

One of which was sprouting a bud—a little cluster of radiating technology separating from the cycler and weaving uncertainly toward the water. There was also a heat signature, inconsistent with pure tech. Perreault narrowed the focus to visible light.

It was a woman, all in black.

She'd been feeding from the cycler. She hadn't noticed the approaching botfly until it was less than a hundred meters away; then she'd startled and turned to face the lens.

Her eyes were completely white. They held no pupils at all.

Jesus, Perreault thought.

The woman had lurched to her feet as the botfly neared, staggered down the rocky incline. She'd seemed unused to the operation of her own body. Twice she'd fallen. Just short of the waterline she'd grabbed something on the beach—swim fins, Perreault saw—and pitched forward into the shallows. A broken wave had rolled uphill and engulfed her. When it receded the shore was empty.

Less than a minute ago, according to the logs.

Perreault flexed her fingers: twelve hundred kilometers away, the botfly panned down. Exhausted water ebbed and flowed in thin foamy sheets, erasing the creature's footprints. Pacific surf pounded a few meters ahead. For a moment Perreault thought she might have glimpsed something in that confusion of spray and swirling green glass—a dark amphibious form, a face almost devoid of topography. But the moment passed, and not even the botfly's enhanced senses could bring it back.

She replayed, and reconstructed: