by Peter Watts
“You still wouldn’t be able to work for a week. More than twice that before you’d fully healed.”
“They planned for accidents. When they set up the schedules.”
“And how are you going to keep clear of Brander until then?”
“I’ll stay outside more,” he says. “Please, Lenie.”
She shakes her head. “You’re crazy, Fischer.” She turns to the hatch, undogs it. “None of my business, of course. I just don’t think—”
Turns back.
“Do you like it down here?” she asks.
“What?”
“Do you get off, being down here?”
It should be a stupid question. Especially now. Somehow it isn’t.
“Sort of,” he says at last, realizing it for the first time.
She nods, blinking over white space. “Dopamine rush.”
“Dopa—?”
“They say we get hooked on it. Being down here. Being—scared, I guess.” She smiles faintly. “That’s the rumor, anyway.”
Fischer thinks about that. “Not so much I get off on it. More like, just used to it. You know?”
“Yeah.” She turns and pushes the hatch open. “For sure.”
* * *
There’s this praying mantis a meter long, all black with chrome trim, hanging upside down from the ceiling of the Medical cubby. It’s been sleeping up there ever since Fischer first arrived. Now it hovers over his face, jointed arms clicking and dipping like crazy articulated chopsticks. Every now and then one of its feelers winks red light, and Fischer can smell the scent of his own flesh cauterizing. It kind of bothers him. What’s even worse is, he can’t move his head. The neuroinduction field in the Med table has got him paralyzed from the neck up. He keeps wondering what would happen if the focus slipped, if that damping energy ended up pointing at his lung. At his heart.
The mantis stops in midmotion, its antennae quivering. It keeps completely still for a few seconds. “Hello, er—Gerry, isn’t it?” it says at last. “I’m Dr. Troyka.”
It sounds like a woman.
“How are we doing here?” Fischer tries to answer, but his head and neck are still just so much dead meat. “No, don’t try to answer,” the mantis says. “Rhetorical question. I’m checking your readouts now.”
Fischer remembers: the medical equipment can’t always do everything on its own. Sometimes, when things get too complicated, it calls up the line to a human backup.
“Wow,” says the mantis. “What happened to you? No, don’t answer that, either. I don’t want to know.” An accessory arm springs into sight and passes back and forth across Fischer’s line of sight. “I’m going to override the damping field for a moment. It might hurt a bit. Try not to move when that happens, except to answer my questions.”
Pain floods across Fischer’s face. It’s not too bad. Familiar, even. His eyelids feel scratchy, and his tongue is dry. He tries blinking; it works. He closes his mouth, rubs his tongue against swollen cheeks. Better.
“I don’t suppose you want to come back up?” Dr. Troyka asks, hundreds of kilometers away. “You know these injuries are bad enough to warrant a recall.”
Fischer shakes his head. “That’s okay. I can stay here.”
“Uh-huh.” The mantis doesn’t sound surprised. “I’ve been hearing that a fair bit lately. Okay, I’m going to wire your cheekbone back together, and I’ll be planting a little battery under your skin. Just below the right eye. It’ll basically kick your bone cells into overdrive, speed up the healing process. It’s just a couple of millimeters across, you’ll feel like you’ve got sort of a hard pimple. It may itch, but try not to pick at it. When you’re healed up you can just squeeze it out like a zit. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“All right, Gerry. I’m going to turn the field back on and get to work.” The mantis whirs in anticipation.
Fischer holds up a hand. “Wait.”
“What is it, Gerry?”
“What … what time is it, up there?” he asks.
“It’s oh-five-ten. Pacific daylight. Why?”
“It’s early.”
“Sure is.”
“I guess I got you up,” Fischer says. “Sorry.”
“Nonsense.” Digits on the end of mechanical arms wiggle absently. “I’ve been up for hours. Graveyard shift.”
“Graveyard?”
“We’re on duty around the clock, Gerry. There’s a lot of geothermal stations out there, you know. You—you keep us pretty busy, as a rule.”
“Oh,” Fischer says. “Sorry.”
“Forget it. It’s my job.” There’s a humming, somewhere in the back of his head; for a moment Fischer can feel the muscles of his face going slack. Then everything goes numb, and the mantis swoops down on him like a predator.
* * *
He knows better than to open up outside.
It doesn’t kill you, not right away. But seawater’s a lot saltier than blood; let it inside and osmosis sucks the water from the epithelial cells, shrivels them down to viscous little blobs. Rifter kidneys are modified to speed up water reclamation when that happens, but it’s not a long-term solution, and it costs. Organs wear out faster, urine turns to oil. It’s best to just keep sealed up. Your insides soak in seawater too long, they sort of corrode, implants or no implants.
But that’s another one of Fischer’s problems. He never takes the long view.
The face seal is a single macromolecule fifty centimeters long. It wraps back and forth along the line of the jaw like the two sides of a zipper, with hydrophobic side-chains for teeth. A little blade on the index of Fischer’s left glove can split them apart. He runs it along the seal and the ’skin opens neatly around his mouth.
He doesn’t feel much of anything at first. He was half expecting the ocean to charge up his nose and burn his sinuses, but of course all his body cavities are already packed with isotonic saline. The only immediate change is that his face gets cold, numbing the chronic ache of torn flesh a bit. Deeper pain pulses under one eye, where Dr. Troyka’s wires hold the bones of his face together; microelectricity tingles along those lines, press-gangs bonebuilding osteoblasts into high gear.
After a couple of moments he tries to gargle. That doesn’t work, so he settles for gaping like a fish and wriggling his tongue around. That does it. He gets his first taste of raw ocean, coarse and saltier than the stuff that pumps him up inside.
On the seabed in front of him, a swarm of blind shrimp feeds in the current from a nearby vent. Fischer can see right through them. They’re like little chunks of glass with blobs of organs jiggling around inside.
It must be fourteen hours since he’s eaten, but there’s no fucking way he’s going back to Beebe with Brander still inside. The last time he tried, Brander was actually standing guard in the lounge, waiting for him.
What the hell. It’s just like krill. People eat this stuff all the time.
They have a strange taste. Fischer’s mouth is going numb from the cold, but there’s still a faint sense of rotten eggs, dilute and barely detectable. Not bad other than that, though. Better than Brander by a long shot.
When the convulsions hit fifteen minutes later, he’s not so sure.
* * *
“You look like shit,” Lenie says.
Fischer hangs on to the railing, looks around the lounge. “Where—”
“At the Throat. On shift with Lubin and Caraco.”
He makes it to the couch.
“Haven’t seen you for a while,” Lenie remarks. “How’s your face doing?”
Fischer squints at her through a haze of nausea. Lenie Clarke is actually making small talk. She’s never done that before. He’s still trying to figure out why when his stomach clamps down again and he pitches onto the floor. By now nothing comes up but a few dribbles of sour fluid.
His eyes trace the pipes tangling along the ceiling. After a while Lenie’s face blocks the view, looking down from a great height.
“What’s
wrong?” She seems to be asking out of idle curiosity, no more.
“Ate some shrimp,” he says, and retches again.
“You ate—from outside?” She bends down and pulls him up. His arms drag along behind on the deck. Something hard bumps his head; the railing around the downstairs ladder.
“Fuck,” Lenie says.
He’s on the floor again, alone. Receding footsteps. Dizziness. Something presses against his neck, pricks him with a soft hiss.
His head clears almost instantly.
Lenie’s leaning in, closer than she’s ever been. She’s even touching him, she’s got one hand on his shoulder. He stares down at that hand, feeling a stupid sort of wonder, but then she pulls it away.
She’s holding a hypo. Fischer’s stomach begins to settle.
“Why,” she says softly, “would you do a stupid thing like that?”
“I was hungry.”
“So what’s wrong with the dispenser?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Oh,” Lenie says. “Right.”
She stands up and snaps the spent cartridge out of the hypo. “This can’t go on, Fischer. You know that.”
“He hasn’t got me in two weeks.”
“He hasn’t seen you in two weeks. You only come in when he’s on shift. And you’re missing your own shifts more and more. Doesn’t make you too popular with the rest of us.” She cocks her head as Beebe creaks around them. “Why don’t you just call up and get them to take you home?”
Because I do things to children, and if I leave here they’ll cut me open and change me into something else.…
Because there are things outside that almost make it worthwhile …
Because of you …
He doesn’t know if she’d understand any of those reasons. He decides not to risk it.
“Maybe you could talk to him,” he manages.
Lenie sighs. “He wouldn’t listen.”
“Maybe if you tried, at least—”
Her face hardens. “I have tried. I—”
She catches herself.
“I can’t get involved,” she whispers. “It’s none of my business.”
Fischer closes his eyes. He feels as if he’s going to cry. “He just doesn’t let up. He really hates me.”
“It’s not you. You’re just—filling in.”
“Why did they put us together? It doesn’t make sense!”
“Sure it does. Statistically.”
Fischer opens his eyes. “What?”
Lenie’s pulling one hand down across her face. She seems very tired.
“We’re not people here, Fischer. We’re a cloud of data points. Doesn’t matter what happens to you or me or Brander, just as long as the mean stays where it’s supposed to and the standard deviation doesn’t get too big.”
Tell her, Shadow says.
“Lenie—”
“Anyway.” Lenie shrugs the mood away. “You’re crazy to eat anything that near a rift zone. Didn’t you learn about hydrogen sulfide?”
He nods. “Basic training. The vents spit it out.”
“And it builds up in the benthos. They’re toxic. Which I guess you know now anyway.”
She starts down the ladder, stops on the second rung.
“If you really want to go native, try feeding farther from the rift. Or go for the fish.”
“The fish?”
“They move around more. Don’t spend all their time soaking in the hot springs. Maybe they’re safe.”
“The fish,” he says again. He hadn’t thought of that.
“I said maybe.”
* * *
Shadow, I’m so sorry …
Shush. Just look at all the pretty lights.
So he looks. He knows this place. He’s on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. He’s back in fairyland. He thinks he comes here a lot now, watches the lights and bubbles, listens to the deep rocks grinding against each other.
Maybe he’ll stay this time, watch the whole thing working, but then he remembers he’s supposed to be somewhere else. He waits, but nothing specific comes to him. Just a feeling that he should be doing something somewhere else. Soon.
It’s getting harder to stay here anyway. There’s a vague pain hanging around his upper body somewhere, fading in and out. After a while he realizes what it is. His face hurts.
Maybe this beautiful light is hurting his eyes.
That can’t be right. His caps should take care of all that. Maybe they’re not working. He seems to remember something that happened to his eyes a while back, but it doesn’t really matter. He can always just leave. Suddenly, wonderfully, all of his problems have easy answers.
If the light hurts, all he has to do is stay in the dark.
Feral
“Hey,” Caraco buzzes as they come around the corner. “Number five.”
Clarke looks. Five’s fifteen meters away and the water’s a bit murky this shift. Still, she can see something big and dark sticking to the intake vent. Its shadow twitches down along the casing like an absurdly stretched black spider.
Clarke fins forward a few meters, Cacaro at her side. The two women exchange looks.
Fischer, hanging upside down against the mesh. It’s been eight days since anyone’s seen him.
Clarke gently sets down her carry bag; Caraco follows her lead. Two or three kicks bring them to within five meters of the intake. Machinery hums omnipresently, makes a sound deep enough to feel.
He’s facing away from them, drifting from side to side, tugged by the gentle suction of the intake vent. The vent’s grillwork is fuzzy with rooted growing things; small clams, tubeworms, shadow crabs. Fischer pulls squirming clumps from the intake, leaves them to drift or to fall to the street below. He’s cleaned maybe two meters square so far.
It’s nice to see he still takes some duties seriously.
“Hey. Fischer,” Caraco says.
He spins around as if shot. His forearm flails toward Clarke’s face; she raises her own just in time. In the next instant he’s bowled past her. She kicks, steadies herself. Fischer’s heading for the darkness without looking back.
“Fischer,” Clarke calls out. “Stop. It’s okay.”
He stops kicking for a moment, looks back over his shoulder.
“It’s me,” she buzzes. “And Judy. We won’t hurt you.”
Barely visible now, he rotates to a stop and turns to face them. Clarke risks a wave.
“Come on, Fischer. Give us a hand.”
Caraco comes up behind her. “Lenie, what are you doing?” She’s turned her vocoder down to a hiss. “He’s too far gone, he’s—”
Clarke cranks her own vocoder down. “Shut up, Judy.” Up again. “What do you say, Fischer? Earn your pay.”
He’s coming back into the light, hesitantly, like a wild animal lured by the promise of food. Closer, Clarke can see the line of his jaw moving up and down under his hood. The motions are jerky, erratic, as though he’s learning them for the first time.
Finally a noise comes out. “Oh—kay—”
Caraco goes back and retrieves their gear. Clarke offers a scraper to Fischer. After a moment he takes it, clumsily, and follows them back to number five.
“Jussst like,” Fischer buzzes. “Old. T-times.”
Caraco looks at Clarke. Clarke says nothing.
* * *
Near the end of the shift she looks around. “Fischer?”
Caraco pokes her head out from an access tunnel. “He’s gone?”
“When did you see him last?”
Caraco’s vocoder ticks a couple of times; the machinery always misinterprets “hmmm.” “Half hour ago, maybe.”
Clarke puts her own vocoder on high. “Hey Fischer! You still around?”
No answer.
“Fischer, we’re heading back in a bit. If you want to come along…”
Caraco just shakes her head.
Shadow
It’s a nightmare.
There’s light everywhere, bli
nding, painful. He can barely move. Everything has such hard edges, and everywhere he looks the boundaries are too sharp. Sounds are like that too, clanks and shouts, every noise an exclamation of pain. He barely knows where he is. He doesn’t know why he’s there.
He’s drowning.
“UNNNNNSEEEEELLLLLHHHHHIZZZZZMMMMOOUUUUUTH…”
The tubes in his chest suck at emptiness. The rest of his insides strain to inflate, but there’s nothing there to fill them. He thrashes, panicky. Something gives with a snap. Sudden pain resonates in some faraway limb, floods the rest of his body a moment later. He tries to scream, but there’s nothing inside to push out.
“HHIZZMMMOUTHFORRRKKRRIISSAAAAAKHEEEZSSUFFUKKATE—”
Someone pulls part of his face off. His insides fill with a rush; not the cold saline he’s used to, but it helps. The burning in his chest eases.
“BIGGFFUKKINNGGMMISSTTAAKE—”
Pressure, painful and uneven. Things are holding him down, holding him up, banging into him. The noise is tinny, deafening. He remembers a sound—
—gravity—
—that applies somehow, but he doesn’t know what it means. And then everything’s spinning, and everything’s familiar and horrible except for one thing, one glimpse of a face that calms him somehow—
Shadow?
—and the weight’s gone, the pressure’s gone, icewater calms his insides as he spirals back with her, outside again, where she used to be years ago—
She’s showing him how to do it. She creeps into his room after the shouting stops, she crawls under the covers with him and she starts stroking his penis.
“Dad says this is what you do when you really love somebody,” she whispers. And that scares him because they don’t even like each other, he just wants her to go away and leave them all alone.
“Go away. I hate you,” he says, but he’s too afraid to move.
“That’s okay, then you don’t have to do it for me.” She’s trying to laugh, trying to pretend he was just kidding.
And then, still stroking: “Why are you always so mean to me?”
“I’m not mean.”
“Are too.”
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
“Can’t we just be friends?” She rubs up against him. “I can do this whenever you want—”
