Starfish

"I mean, look how fast the net changed," Brander says. "It wasn't that long ago you could just sit in your living room and go all over the world, remember? Anywhere could link up with anywhere else, for as long as they liked."

Clarke turns back. She remembers those days. Vaguely.

"What about the bugs?" she asks.

"There weren't any. Or there were, but they were really simple. Couldn't rewrite themselves, couldn't handle different operating systems. Just a minor inconvenience at first, really."

"But there were these laws they taught us in school," Caraco says.

Lenie remembers: "Explosive speciation. Brookes' Laws."

Brander holds up a finger. "Self-replicating information strings evolve as a sigmoid-difference function of replication error rate and generation time." Two fingers. "Evolving information strings are vulnerable to parasitism by competing strings with sigmoid-difference functions of lesser wavelength." Three. "Strings under pressure from parasites develop random substring-exchange protocols as a function of the wavelength ratio of the host and parasite sigmoid functions. Or something like that."

Caraco looks at Clarke, then back at Brander. "What?"

"Life evolves. Parasites evolve. Sex evolves to counter the parasites. Shuffles the genes so they have to shoot for a moving target. Everything else — species diversity, density-dependence, everything — it all follows from those three laws. You get a self-replicating string past a certain threshold, it's like a nuclear reaction."

"Life explodes," Clarke murmurs.

"Actually, information explodes. Organic life's just a really slow example. Happened a lot faster in the net."

Caraco shakes her head. "So what? You're saying you came down here to get away from bugs in the Internet?"

"I came down here to get away from entropy."

"I think," Clarke remarks, "You've got one of those language disorders. Dyslexia or something."

But Brander's going full tilt now. "You've heard the phrase Entropy increases? Everything falls apart eventually. You can postpone it for a while, but that takes energy. The more complicated the system, the more energy it needs to stay in one piece. Back before us everything was sun-powered, all the plants were like these little solar batteries that everything else could build on. Only now we've got this society that's on an exponential complexity curve, and the 'net's on the same curve only a lot steeper, right? So we're all balled up in this runaway machine, it's got so complicated it's always on the verge of flying apart, and the only thing that prevents that is all the energy we feed it."

"Bad news," Caraco says. Clarke doesn't think she's really getting the point, though.

"Good news, actually. They'll always need more energy, so they'll always need us. Even if they ever do get fusion figured out."

"Yeah, but — " Caraco's frowning all of a sudden. "If you say it's exponential, then it hits a wall eventually, right? The curve goes straight up and down."

Brander nods. "Yup."

"But that's infinity. There's no way you could keep things from falling apart, no matter how much power we pump out. It'd never be enough. Sooner or later —»

"Sooner," says Brander, "And that's why I'm staying right here. Like I said, it's safer."

Clarke looks from Brander to Caraco to Brander. "That is just so much bullshit."

"How so?" Brander doesn't seem offended.

"Because we'd have heard about it before now. Especially if it's based on some kind of physical law everyone knows about. They couldn't keep something like that under wraps, people would keep figuring it out for themselves."

"Oh, I think they have," Brander says mildly, smiling from naked brown eyes. "They'd just rather not think about it too much."

"Where do you get all this, Mike?" Clarke asks. "The library?"

He shakes his head. "Got a degree. Systems ecology, artificial life."

Clarke nods. "I always thought you were too smart to be a Rifter."

"Hey. A rifter's the smartest thing to be right now."

"So you chose to come down here? You actually applied?"

Brander frowns. "Sure. Didn't you?"

"I got a phone call. Offered me this new high-paying career, even said I could go back to my old job if it didn't work out."

"What was your old job?" Caraco wonders.

"Public relations. Mostly Honquarium franchises."

"You?"

"Maybe I wasn't very good at it. What about you?"

"Me?" Caraco bites her lip. "It was sort of a deal. One year with an option to renew, in lieu of prosecution." The corner of her mouth twitches. "Price of revenge. It was worth it."