Behemoth by Peter Watts

culture with—”
    â€œI know what it is, Lex. I just—I guess I’m surprised to see one here, after…”
    â€œWanna see it?” Alyx taps a brief tattoo on the top of the cabinet. The nacreous surface swirls briefly and clears: beneath the newly-transparent facade, a slab of pinkish-gray tissue sits within its circular rim like a bowl of fleshy oatmeal. Flecks of brown glass punctuate the pudding in neat perforated lines.
    â€œIt’s not very big,” Alyx says. “Way smaller than the ones they had back in the old days. Kelly says it’s about the same as a cat.”
    So it’s evil at least, if not hugely intelligent. “What’s it for?” Clarke wonders. Surely they wouldn’t be stupid enough to use these things after —
    â€œIt’s kind of a pet,” Alyx says apologetically. “She calls it Rumble.”
    â€œA pet ?”
    â€œSure. It thinks, sort of. It learns to do stuff. Even if no one really knows how, exactly.”
    â€œOh, so you heard about that, did you?”
    â€œIt’s a lot smaller than the ones that, you know, worked for you.”
    â€œThey didn’t w—”
    â€œIt’s really harmless. It’s not hooked into life support or anything.”
    â€œSo what does it do? You teach it tricks?” The porridge of brains glistens like an oozing sore.
    â€œKind of. It talks back if you say stuff to it. Doesn’t always make a lot of sense, but that’s what makes it fun. And if you tweak the audio feed right it plays these really cool color patterns in time to music.” Alyx grabs her flute off the couch, gestures at the eyephones. “Wanna see?”
    â€œA pet,” Clarke murmurs. You bloody corpses  …
    â€œWe’re not, you know,” Alyx says sharply. “Not all of us.”
    â€œSorry? Not what?”
    â€œCorpses. What does that mean, anyway? My mom? Me? ”
    Did I say that out loud? “Just—corporate types, I guess.” She’s never spent much time pondering the origin of the term, any more than she’s lost sleep over the etiology of chair or fumarole .
    â€œWell in case you didn’t notice, there’s a lot of other people in here. Crunchers and doctors and just families .”
    â€œYeah, I know. Of course I know—”
    â€œBut you just lump us all together, you know? If we don’t have a bunch of pipes in our chest we’re all just corpses as far as you’re concerned.”
    â€œWell—sorry.” And then, belatedly defensive: “I’m not slagging you, you know. It’s just a word.”
    â€œYeah, well it’s not just a word to all you fish-heads.”
    â€œSorry.” Clarke says again. A distance seems to open between them, although neither has moved.
    â€œAnyway,” she says after a while, “I just wanted you to know I won’t be inside for a while. We can still talk, of course, but—”
    Movement from the hatchway. A large stocky man steps into the compartment, dark hair combed back, eyebrows knotted together, his whole body a telegraph of leashed hostility. Kelly’s father.
    â€œMs. Clarke,” he says evenly.
    Her guts tighten into a hard, angry knot. She knows that look. She knows that stance, she saw it herself more times than she could count when she was Kelly’s age. She knows what fathers do, she knows what hers did, but she’s not a little girl any more and Kelly’s dad looks very much in need of a lesson  …
    But she has to keep reminding herself. None of it happened.

PORTRAIT OF THE SADIST AS AN ADOLESCENT
    A CHILLES Desjardins learned to spoof the skeeters eventually, of course. Even as a child he knew the score. In a world kept under constant surveillance for its own protection there were only watched and watchers, and he knew which side of the lens he wanted to be on. Beating off was not the kind of thing he could do in front