The Vital Abyss

by James S. A. Corey

  I responded at once: I would be delighted to talk about work. I told him that, just between the two of us, I’d been in a dry spell, and was even beginning to think that David Artemis Kuhn had led me astray with his professorial charisma and beautiful name. I made a joke of my season in hell, telling him but also not telling him, afraid of what he would think of me. At the time I gave more weight to the opinions of others.

  Aaron’s response came quickly. He’d spoken to the powers that be, and the project lead wanted to speak with me. He would be reaching out in the next few days. His name, so I could expect it, was Antony Dresden.

  * * *

  The others, even Alberto, didn’t really understand what it meant to be research. I do believe that’s true. On Thoth Station, we were treated as different—as dangerous—which we were. But their sense of our monstrosity was misplaced. The changes that we went through to become what we became didn’t blind us to humanity. Our emotional lives didn’t stop. All of us in research suffered the same loves and hopes and jealousies that administration and maintenance and security did. If someone felt flattered or excluded or tired, we saw it just as anyone else might. The difference, and I think it was the only difference, came from not caring anymore.

  The confusion rose from metaphors of mental illness. The others thought of research as a collection of borderline autistics, and while there were several who did participate on that spectrum—Owsley in chemical signaling, Arbrecht in modeling—they were not created. They brought their diagnoses to the table with them. The other pigeonhole, sociopathy, was nearer the truth, though I believe there were still some differences.

  I remembered caring about people. My mother. Samuel, a boy two years my senior, who was my first lover. Aaron. I remembered caring deeply about whether they were well, whether they suffered, what they thought of me. I remember defining myself by the opinions of people around me. My worth had been determined from without, by how I imagined that I appeared to others. That is what being a social animal is, after all. Emotional and definitional interdependence. I remembered it like remembering that I once knew a song, but not the melody itself.

  Quintana broke my nose.

  It was midmorning, as we reckoned such things in the room, and Brown, his precious hand terminal clutched to his breast, had been taken away by the guards again. Alberto and I walked, making a slow circuit of the room for the simple pleasure of feeling my body in motion. I had just reached the corner farthest from the hotel when Quintana walked up to us. The benignity of his expression surprised me at first. I expected rage or sorrow or confusion. Alberto recognized something threatening in Quintana’s demeanor before I did. He shouted and tried to push me out of the way, but Quintana stepped in close, twisting his body from the waist. His elbow hit the bridge of my nose with a sound like a wine glass being stepped on: sharp and deep at the same time.

  I rolled to my side, uncertain how I’d fallen down. My hands guarded my abused face but didn’t touch it. Contact made the pain worse. Blood ran down my cheeks and dampened the collar of my jumpsuit. Shouting voices came at me from a great distance that turned out to be about four meters. Alberto and two of Fong’s men wrestled Quintana, pushing him back and away from me. Half a dozen other prisoners ran toward us, to help keep the peace or to watch it being broken. Quintana’s voice buzzed with rage so badly I couldn’t understand what he was calling me or threatening me with. I rose to my knees and looked up. The Belter guards leaning on the windows above us seemed slightly less bored than usual. One, a woman with short red hair and a tattoo across her chin, smiled at me sympathetically and shrugged. I stood, but the throbbing pain brought me to my knees again.

  Quintana turned away, followed by Fong herself to make certain he wouldn’t circle back. The others watched them go, then Alberto came to my side.

  “I told you war would come out of it.”

  “You’re so very smart,” I said, the sound of my voice like something from a child’s cartoon.

  He took my guarding hands and gently guided them away. “Let’s survey the damage,” he said. And then, “Oh, darling. You poor thing.”

  They stuffed my nose with two tampons donated by women in security before we reset it. Our Belter guards never made an appearance. The politics of the enormous room were our own to work through, and the Belters took no side. Still, when Brown and his escort did come, no one in the room talked about anything but the violence he’d missed.

  The guards didn’t allow us mirrors. The expressions of the others gave me the nearest thing to a reflection, and from that I assumed I looked pretty rough. Albert ripped the sleeve from his jumpsuit and dampened it at the showers. My drying blood grew sticky, adhering my suit and beard to my skin and tugging at me when I moved. I sat with my back to the wall, accepting Alberto’s ministrations with as much grace as I could muster. I saw Brown approach Fong, watched them speak. Brown kept shifting his weight from one foot to the other and glancing behind him, as if expecting to be Quintana’s next target. I waited, still and patient, afraid that any movement on my part would scare him off. Quintana paced at the far end of the room, muttering to himself with several of Fong’s security people and Mellin from imaging. Around me, the narrative of the room changed. With Quintana as the villain, I shifted to being the victim. And as the victim, approachable.

  “Fong told me what happened. You look like shit,” Brown said, establishing dominance before he had to admit weakness.

  “I blame myself,” I replied, then paused, making it a joke. “No, actually, I blame Quintana.”

  Alberto, approaching with a freshly dampened rag, caught sight of us, paused, and angled off to sit by himself. Brown lowered himself to sit beside me. “He’s always been an asshole.”

  I grunted my agreement and waited. Brown shifted, fidgeted. A tightness filled my gut, and the certainty that he would offer me his sympathy and walk away filled my throat. I took hold of his arm as if I could keep him there by force, but spoke calmly. “He’s been talking to you a lot?”

  “They have,” he said. “The Martian officer hasn’t been there. It’s just the Belter guards.”

  “What do they say?”

  “They ask me what it is.”

  “And what do you tell them?” I asked. When he didn’t respond, I tried again. “What is it?”

  “It’s an elaboration of the original protomolecule sample. You saw that much, didn’t you? Before you gave back the terminal?”

  “I did,” I said. Candor about that cost me nothing.

  “The thing is, they know. I’m sure of it. This isn’t a problem they need to solve. It’s a test. They want to see if we can solve a puzzle they’ve already cracked. They don’t say it, but I can hear them laughing at me.”

  That piqued me, but this wasn’t the moment to sit with it. Brown’s open shell gave me my opportunity, and I drove my knife in to keep him from closing again. “Tell them they need two. Tell them to take both of us, and I’ll help.”

  I saw the spark of greed in his eyes, his moment of bovine cunning. Once I helped him, I would have no way to enforce any agreement, and so his betrayal of me carried no price. I fought to keep my expression innocent. My wounds and my beard helped with that, I think.

  “Thank you, Cortázar,” he said, and drew the hand terminal from his jumpsuit.

  I took it from him gently, forcing myself not to grab at it. Under my fingertips, the files bloomed like roses, measurements and images and analytic summaries opening one after the next like diving into an ocean of data. The surface I had skimmed before lay over an abyss, and I fell joyfully into it. Some of the large-scale structures boasted an organic origin: lipid bilayers, proton pumps, something that might once have been a ribosome now altered almost past recognition. That, I believed, had led Brown astray.

  He assumed that a cell membrane would be acting as a cell membrane, rather than considering what cell membranes did and how they might be used to some purpose other than simply creating a boundary between things
. They could just as easily provide highways for molecules vulnerable to the partial charge of water molecules. Or any polar solvent. Like the optical illusion of faces and vases, the bilayers could define either the volumes separating them or the web of pathways they created. And these were only massive, macro-scale expressions of the information in the initial particles.

  I paged through, going deeper, my mind sailing across seas of inference and assumption. Time did not stop so much as become irrelevant. I forgot that Brown was beside me until he touched my shoulder.

  “It’s…interesting. Let me see what I can find.”

  “Just understand,” he said. “I’m lead.”

  “Of course,” I said. As if I could have forgotten.

  It took me longer than I would have liked, sitting with the data and dredging up what I could remember of the experiments before. Time had eaten some of my memory and likely falsified some as well. The core of it remained, though. And the sense of wonder so deep it sucked my lungs empty from time to time. But slowly, I found a pattern. The thing at the center. What I thought of as the Queen Bee. While a great many of the structures I was looking at were beyond my understanding—beyond, I thought, any human understanding—there were others that did make some sense. Lattices that mimicked the beta sheets and expanded on them. Complex control and pattern-matching systems that were still just recognizable as brain tissues, two-stage pumps adapted from hearts. And at the center, a particle that nothing led to. A particle that both required and provided a massive amount of energy.

  When I realized that the physical dimensions of the structure-particle were macroscopic, the knowledge rushed through me like a flood. I was seeing a stabilizing network that could bring subquantum effects up to a classical scale. A signaling device that ignored the speed of light by shrugging off locality, or possibly a stable wormhole. If I wept, I wept quietly. No one could know what I’d found. Especially not Brown.

  Not until I had time to make my alternate.

  “There’s no doubt we’re seeing the ruins of Eros,” I said.

  “Obviously,” he said, impatient and rightly so.

  “But look at these tertiary structures,” I said, pulling up the graphic I’d prepared. “The connection between networks follows the same graph as embryonic profusion.”

  “It’s making…”

  “An egg,” I said.

  Brown snatched the hand terminal from me, his eyes jerking back and forth as he compared my graphs. It was a plausible lie, backed by fascinating and evocative correlations that didn’t share a shred of cause. It built on his prejudices of biological structures being used for biological uses. I watched his face as he followed along the arguments I’d constructed to mislead him. He had been desperate for a narrative, and now that I’d given him one, it seemed unlikely that he would see anything else. I don’t know whether relief or awe set his hands to trembling, only that they trembled.

  “This is it,” he said. “This is what gets us out of here.”

  I appreciated his use of the plural, and I didn’t for a moment consider it sincere. I clapped him on the shoulder, levered myself up, and left him to convince himself of what he already wanted to believe. The others stood scattered about the room in groups of two and three and four. Whatever they pretended, all attention focused on Brown, and because of him, on me. I reached an open space and considered the observation windows. The Belters looked down on us. On me. Their weirdly large heads, their thin, elongated bodies. Chromosomally, they were as human as I was. What separated each of us—them and me—from the rest of humanity happened at much later stages than the genetic. I caught the eye of a greasy-haired man I recognized as one who had taken Brown to and from his sessions. I lifted my arms in a kind of boast. I know your secret. I solved your puzzle.

  Brown bonded with the wrong answer. Quintana hadn’t so much as been allowed a glimpse of the dataset. All I needed was for the Martian to ask me as well as Brown, and I would be the one they took. The prisoner they exchanged.

  If something still nagged at my hindbrain—the guards hadn’t come when Quintana stole the terminal, the Martian hadn’t been there during Brown’s questioning—it had no form, and so I pushed it away. But there was a moment, that hypnagogic shift where the thoughts of the day faded into dream and the guards of rationality fell.

  The poisoned thought crept in upon me then, and I went from my half doze to a cold terror in less than a heartbeat.

  “It’s okay,” Alberto said. “It’s a nightmare. They’re watching him.” I looked down at him, my heart beating so violently I thought it might fail. In the shadows, Alberto rolled his eyes and turned his back to me, his head pillowed by his arm. It took me a moment to understand his assumption. He thought I feared Quintana. He was mistaken.

  The filthy thought that had slipped into me was this: If the Belters were negotiating a trade of prisoners with Mars then they might well still be enemies. If they were enemies, the Belters would want to give over whatever they had with the least intrinsic value. The Belter guards had questioned Brown twice now, without the Martian present. They might very well be probing not to see whether he had divined the secrets the data held, but to determine that he couldn’t.

  By trotting out my idiotic egg hypothesis, Brown might prove to our guards that he would be of the least use to their enemies. Or Quintana, by his violence and ham-handed duplicity, might convince them that Mars wouldn’t be able to work with such a fragile and volatile ego.

  I’d plotted my course assuming that being competent, insightful, and easy to work with would bring reward.

  I astonished myself. To have come so far, through so much, and still be so naïve…

  * * *

  “Say I’m developing a veterinary protocol for…I don’t know. For horses. Should I start by trying it in pigeons?” Antony Dresden asked. He was a handsome man, and radiated charisma like a fire shedding heat. Protogen’s intake facility looked more like a high-end medical clinic than an administrative office. Small, individual rooms with medical bays, autodocs, and a glass wall facing a nurses’ station outside able to look in on them all, panopticon style. The company logo and motto—First. Fastest. Furthest.—were in green inlay on the walls.

  The language in my contract mentioned a properly supervised medical performance regimen, and I assumed this had to do with that, but it still felt odd.

  “I’d probably recommend trying it in horses,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because that’s the animal you’re trying to develop a protocol for,” I said, my voice turning up at the end of the sentence as if it were a question.

  Dresden’s smile encouraged me. “The pigeon data wouldn’t tell me just as much?”

  “No, sir. Pigeons and horses are very different animals. They don’t work the same ways.”

  “I agree. So do you think animal testing is ethical?”

  “Of course it is,” I said.

  “Why?” The sharpness of the word unnerved me. My belly tightened and I found myself plucking at my hands.

  “We need to know that drugs and treatments are safe before we start human testing,” I said. “The amount of human suffering that animal testing prevents is massive.”

  “So the ends justify the means?”

  “That seems a provocative way to phrase it, but yes.”

  “Why not for horses?”

  I shifted. The wax paper on the examination table crinkled under me. I had the sense that this was a trick, that I was in some kind of danger, but I couldn’t imagine any other answer. “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “That’s okay,” Dresden said. “This is an intake conversation. Purely routine. Do you think a rat is the same as a human being?”

  “I think it’s often close enough for preliminary data,” I said.

  “Do you think rats are capable of suffering?”

  “I think there is absolutely an ethical obligation to avoid any unnecessary suffering—”

  “Not the
question. Are they capable of suffering?”

  I crossed my arms. “I suppose they are.”

  “But their suffering doesn’t matter as much as ours,” Dresden said. “You seem uncomfortable. Did I say something to make you uncomfortable?”

  At the nurses’ station, a man glanced up, catching my gaze, and then looked away. The autodoc in the wall chimed in a calm tritone. “I don’t see the point of the question, sir.”

  “You will,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. We’re just getting a baseline for some things. Pupil dilation, eye movement, respiration. You’re not in any danger. Let me make a suggestion. Just see how you respond to it?”

  “All right.”

  “The idea that animal suffering is less important that human suffering is a religious one. It assumes a special creation, and that we—you and I—are different in kind than other animals. We are morally separate from rats or horses or chimps, not based on any particular physical difference between us, but just because we claim that we’re sacred by our nature and have dominion over them. It’s a story we tell that lets us do what we do. Consider the question without that filter, and it looks very different.

  “You said there’s an ethical obligation to avoid unnecessary suffering. I agree. That’s why getting good data is our primary responsibility. Good experimental design, deep datasets, parallel studies whenever they don’t interfere. Bad data is just another way of saying needless suffering. And torturing rats to see how humans would respond? It’s terrible data because rats aren’t humans any more than pigeons are horses.”