by Peter Watts
“I think he overplayed the empathy card,” Clarke says after a moment.
“No, I mean how do we handle this?”
Clarke shrugs, vaguely irritated. “Why ask me?”
“He better not get in my way. Dumpy little turd.” Brander spares a blank look at the ceiling. “Now why can’t they design a smart gel to replace him?”
Scream
TRANS/OFFI/210850:2132
This is my second night in Beebe. I’ve asked the participants not to alter their behavior in my presence, since I’m here to observe routine station operations. I’m pleased to report that my request is being honored by everyone involved. This is gratifying insofar as it minimizes “observer effects,” but it may present problems given that the rifters do not keep reliable schedules. This makes it difficult to plan one’s time with them, and in fact there’s one employee—Ken Lubin—whom I haven’t seen since I arrived. Still. I have plenty of time.
The rifters tend to be withdrawn and uncommunicative—a layperson might call them sullen—but this is entirely in keeping with the profile. The station itself seems to be well-maintained and is operating smoothly, despite a certain disregard for standard protocols.
When the lights go out in Beebe Station, you can’t hear anything at all.
Yves Scanlon lies on his bunk, not listening. He does not hear any strange sounds filtering in through the hull. There is no reedy, spectral keening from the seabed, no faint sound of howling wind because he knows that, down here, no wind is possible. Imagination, perhaps. A trick of the brain stem, an auditory hallucination. He’s not the slightest bit superstitious; he’s a scientist. He does not hear the ghost of Karl Acton moaning on the seabed.
In fact, concentrating, he’s quite certain he hears nothing at all.
It really doesn’t bother him, being stuck in a dead man’s quarters. After all, where else is there? It’s not as though he’s going to move in with one of the vampires. And besides, Acton’s been gone for months now.
Scanlon remembers the first time he heard the recording. Four lousy words: “We lost Acton. Sorry.” Then she hung up. Cold bitch, Clarke. Scanlon once thought something might happen between her and Acton, it was a jigsaw match from the profiles, but you wouldn’t know it from that phone call.
Maybe it’s her, he muses. Maybe it’s not Lubin after all, maybe it’s Clarke.
“We lost Acton.” So much for eulogy. And Fischer before Acton, and Everitt over at Linke. And Singh before Everitt. And—
And now Yves Scanlon is here, in their place. Sleeping on their bunk, breathing their air. Counting the seconds, in darkness and quiet. In dark—
Jesus Christ, what is—
And quite. Everything’s quiet. Nothing’s moaning out there.
Nothing at all.
TRANS/OFFI/220850:0945
We’re all mammals, of course. We therefore have a circadian rhythm which calibrates itself to ambient photoperiod. It’s been known for some time that when people are denied photoperiodic cues their rhythms tend to lengthen, usually stabilizing between twenty-seven and thirty-six hours. Adherence to a regular twenty-four hour work schedule is usually sufficient to keep this from happening, so we didn’t expect a problem in the deep stations. As an added measure I recommended that a normal photoperiod be built into Beebe’s lighting systems; the lights are programmed to dim slightly between 2200 and 0700 every day.
The participants have apparently chosen to ignore these cues. Even during “daytime” they keep ambient lighting dimmer than my suggested “nocturnal” levels. (They also prefer to leave their eyecaps in at all times, for obvious reasons; although I had not predicted this behavior, it is consistent with the profile.) Work schedules are somewhat flexible, but this is to be expected given that their sleep cycles are always shifting in relation to each other. Rifters do not wake up in time to perform their duties; they perform their duties whenever two or more of them happen to be awake. I suspect that they also work alone sometimes, a safety violation, but I have yet to confirm this.
For the moment, these unorthodox behaviors do not appear to be serious. Necessary work seems to get done on time, even though the station is currently understaffed. However, I believe the situation is potentially problematic. Efficiency could probably be improved by stricter adherence to a twenty-four-hour diel cycle. Should the GA wish to ensure such adherence, I would recommend proteoglycan therapy for the participants. Hypothalamic rewiring is another possibility; it is more invasive, but would be virtually impossible to subvert.
Vampires. That’s a good metaphor. They avoid the light, and they’ve taken out all the mirrors. That could be part of the problem right there. Scanlon had very sound reasons for recommending mirrors in the first place.
Most of Beebe—all of it, except for his cubby—is too dark for uncapped vision. Maybe the vampires are trying to conserve energy. A high priority, sitting here next to eleven thousand megawatts’ worth of generating equipment. Still, these people are all under forty; they probably can’t imagine a world without rationed power.
Bullshit. There’s logic, and there’s vampire logic. Don’t confuse the two.
For the past two days, leaving his cubby has been like creeping out into some dark alleyway. He’s finally given in and capped his eyes like the rest of them. Now Beebe’s bright enough, but so pale. Hardly any color at all. As though the cones have been sucked right out of his eyes.
Clarke and Caraco lean against the ready-room bulkhead, watching with their white, white eyes as he checks out his diving armor. No vampire vivisection for Yves Scanlon, no sirree. Not for this short a tour. Preshmesh and acrylic all the way.
He fingers a gauntlet; chain mail, with links the size of pinheads. He smiles. “Looks okay.”
The vampires just watch and wait.
Come on, Scanlon, you’re the mechanic. They’re machines like everyone else. They just need more of a tune-up. You can handle them.
“Very nice tech,” he remarks, setting the armor back down. “Of course, it’s not much next to the hardware you folks are packing. What’s it like to be able to turn into a fish at will?”
“Wet,” Caraco says, and a moment later looks at Clarke. Checking for approval, maybe.
Clarke just keeps staring at him. At least, he thinks she’s staring. It’s so damn hard to tell.
Relax. She’s only trying to psych you out. The usual stupid dominance games.
But he knows it’s more than that. Deep down, the rifters just don’t like him.
I know what they are. That’s why.
Take a dozen children, any children. Beat and mix thoroughly until some lumps remain. Simmer for two to three decades; bring to a slow, rolling boil. Skim off the full-blown psychotics, the schizoaffectives, the multiple personalities, and discard. (There were doubts about Fischer, actually; but then, who doesn’t have an imaginary friend at some point?)
Let cool. Serve with dopamine garnish.
What do you get? Something bent, not broken. Something that fits into cracks too twisted for the rest of us.
Vampires.
“Well,” Scanlon says into the silence. “Everything checks out. Can’t wait to try it on.” Without waiting for a reply—without exposing himself to the lack of one—he climbs upstairs. At the edge of his vision, Clarke and Caraco exchange looks. Scanlon glances back, rigorously casual, but any smiles have disappeared by the time he scans their faces.
Go ahead, ladies. Indulge yourselves while you can. The lounge is empty. Scanlon passes through it and into the corridor. You’ve got maybe five years before you’re obsolete. His cubby—Acton’s cubby—is third on the left. Five years, before all this can run itself without your help. He opens the hatch; brilliant light spills out, blinding him for a moment while his eyecaps compensate. Scanlon steps inside, swings the hatch shut. Sags against it.
Shit. No locks.
After a while he lies back on his bunk, stares up at a congested ceiling.
Maybe we should have
waited after all. Not let them rush us. If we’d just taken the time to do it right from the start …
But they hadn’t had the time. Total automation at start-up would have delayed the whole program longer than civilized appetites were willing to wait. And the vampires were already there, after all. They’d be so much use in the short run, and then they’d be sent home, and they’d be glad to leave this place. Who wouldn’t be?
The possibility of addiction never even came up.
It seems insane on the face of it. How could anyone get addicted to a place like this? What kind of paranoia has seized the GA, that they’d worry about people refusing to leave? But Yves Scanlon is no mere layperson, he’s not fooled by the merely apparent. He’s beyond anthropomorphism. He’s looked into all those undead eyes, up there in his world, down here in theirs, and he knows: Vampires live by different rules.
Maybe they are too happy here. It’s one of two questions Yves Scanlon has set out to answer. Hopefully they won’t figure that out while he’s still down here. They dislike him enough as it is.
It’s not their fault, of course. It’s just the way they’re programmed. They can’t help hating him, any more than he can help the reverse.
* * *
Preshmesh is better than surgery. That’s about the most he can say for it.
The pressure jams all those tiny interlocking plates together, and they don’t seem to stop clenching until they’re a micron away from grinding his body to pulp. There’s a stiffness in the joints. It’s perfectly safe, of course. Perfectly. And Scanlon can breathe unpressurized air when he goes outside, and nobody’s had to carve out half his chest in the meantime.
He’s been out now for about fifteen minutes. Beebe’s just a few meters away. Clarke and Brander escort him on his maiden voyage, keeping their distance. Scanlon kicks, rises clumsily from the bottom; the mesh lets him swim like a man with splinted limbs. Vampires skim the edge of his vision like effortless shadows.
His helmet seems like the center of the universe. Wherever he looks, an infinite weight of black ocean presses in against the acrylic. A tiny flaw down by the neck seal catches his eye; he stares, horrified, as a hairline crack grows across his field of vision.
“Help! Get me in!” He kicks furiously toward Beebe.
Nobody answers.
“My helmet! My hel—” The crack isn’t just growing now: it’s squirming, twitching laterally across the corner of the helmet bubble like—like—
Yellow featureless eyes staring in from the ocean. A black hand, silhouetted in Beebe’s halo, reaching for his face—
“Ahhh—”
A thumb grinds down on the crack in Scanlon’s helmet. The crack smears, bursts; fine gory filaments smudge against the acrylic. The back half of the hairline peels off and writhes loose into the water, coiling, uncoiling—
Dying. Scanlon pants with relief. A worm. Some stupid fucking roundworm on my faceplate and I thought I was going to die, I thought—
Oh Christ. I’ve made a complete fool of myself.
He looks around. Brander, hanging off his right shoulder, points to the gory remnants sticking to the helmet. “If it ever really cracked, you wouldn’t have time to complain. You’d look just like that.”
Scanlon clears his throat. “Thanks. Sorry, I— Well, you know I’m new here. Thanks.”
“By the way.”
Clarke’s voice. Or what’s left of it, after the machinery does its job. Scanlon flails around until she comes into view overhead.
“How long are you going to be checking up on us?” she asks
Neutral question. Perfectly reasonable.
In fact, you’ve got to wonder why nobody asked it before …
“A week at least.” His heart is slowing down again. “Maybe two. As long as it takes to make sure things are running smoothly.”
She’s silent for a second. Then: “You’re lying.” It doesn’t sound like an accusation, somehow; just a simple observation. Maybe it’s the vocoder.
“Why do you say that?”
She doesn’t answer. Something else does; not quite a moan, not quite a voice. Not quite faint enough to ignore.
Scanlon feels the abyss trickling down his back. “Did you hear that?”
Clarke slips down past him to the seabed, rotating to keep him in view. “Hear? What?”
“It was…” Scanlon listens. A faint tectonic rumble. That’s all. “Nothing.”
She pushes off the bottom at an angle, slides up through the water to Brander. “We’re on shift,” she buzzes at Scanlon. “You know how the ’lock works.”
The vampires vanish into the night.
Beebe shines invitingly. Alone and suddenly nervous, Scanlon retreats to the airlock.
But I wasn’t lying. I wasn’t. He hasn’t had to, yet. Nobody’s asked the right questions.
Still. It seems odd that he has to remind himself.
TRANS/OFFI/230850:0830
I’m about to embark on my first extended dive. Apparently, the participants have been asked to catch a fish for one of the Pharm consortiums. Washington/Rand, I believe. I find this a bit puzzling—usually Pharms are only interested in bacteria, and they use their own people for collecting—but it provides the participants with a change from the usual routine, and it provides me an opportunity to watch them in action. I expect to learn a great deal.
Brander is slouched at the library when Scanlon comes through the lounge. His fingers rest unmoving on the keypad. Eyephones hang unused in their hooks. Brander’s empty eyes point at the flatscreen. The screen is dark.
Scanlon hesitates. “I’m heading out now. With Clarke and Caraco.”
Brander’s shoulders rise and fall, almost indiscernibly. A sigh, perhaps. A shrug.
“The others are at the Throat. You’ll be the only— I mean, will you be running tender from Comm?”
“You told us not to change the routine,” Brander says, not looking up.
“That’s true, Michael. But—”
Brander stands. “So make up your mind.” He disappears down the corridor. Scanlon watches him go. Naturally this has to go into my report. Not that you care.
You might, though. Soon enough.
Scanlon drops into the wetroom and finds it empty. He struggles into his armor single-handed, taking an extra few moments to ensure that the helmet bubble is spotless. He catches up with Clarke and Caraco just outside; Clarke is checking out a quartet of squids hovering over the seabed. One of them is tethered to a specimen canister resting on the bottom, a pressure-proof coffin over two meters long. Caraco sets it for neutral buoyancy; it rises a few centimeters.
They set off without a word. The squids tow them into the abyss; the women in the lead, Scanlon and the canister following behind. Scanlon looks back over his shoulder. Beebe’s comforting lights wash down from yellow to gray, then disappear entirely. Feeling a sudden need for reassurance, he trips through the channels on his acoustic modem. There: the homing beacon. You’re never really lost down here as long as you can hear that.
Clarke and Caraco are running dark. Not even their squids are shining.
Don’t say anything. You don’t want them to change their routine, remember?
Not that they would anyway.
Occasional dim lights flash briefly at the corner of his eye, but they always vanish when he looks at them. After an endless few minutes a bright smear fades into view directly ahead, resolves into a collection of copper beacons and dark angular skyscrapers. The vampires avoid the light, head around it at an angle. Scanlon and cargo follow helplessly.
They set up just off the Throat, at the borderline between light and dark. Caraco unlatches the canister as Clarke rises into the column above them; she’s got something in her right hand, but Scanlon can’t see what it is. She holds it up as though displaying it to an invisible crowd.
It gibbers.
It sounds like a very loud mosquito at first. Then it Dopplers down to a low growl, slides back up into erratic hi
gh frequency.
And now, finally, Lenie Clarke turns her headlight on.
She hangs up there like some crucified ascendant, her hand whining at the abyss, the light from her head sweeping the water like, like—
—a dinner bell, Scanlon realizes as something charges out of the darkness at her, almost as big as she is, and Jesus, the teeth on it—
It swallows her leg up to the crotch. Lenie Clarke takes it all in stride. She jabs down with a billy that’s magically appeared in her left hand. The creature bloats and bursts in a couple of places; clumps of bubbles erupt like silvery mushrooms through flesh, shudder off into the sky. The creature thrashes, its gullet a monstrous scabbard around Clarke’s leg. The vampire reaches down and dismembers it with her bare hands.
Caraco, still fiddling with the canister, looks up. “Hey, Len. They wanted it intact.”
“Wrong kind,” Clarke buzzes. The water around her is full of torn flesh and flashing scavengers. Clarke ignores them, turning slowly, scanning the abyss.
Caraco: “Behind you; four o’clock.”
“Got it,” Clarke says, spinning to a new bearing.
Nothing happens. The shredded carcass, still twitching, drifts toward the bottom, scavengers sparkling on all sides. Clarke’s handheld voicebox gurgles and whines.
How— Scanlon moves his tongue in his mouth, ready to ask aloud.
“Not now,” Caraco buzzes at him, before he can.
There’s nothing there. What are they keying on?
It comes in fast, unswerving, from the precise direction Lenie Clarke is facing. “That’ll do,” she says.
A muffled explosion to Scanlon’s left. A thin contrail of bubbles streaks from Caraco to monster, connecting the two in an instant. The thing jerks at a sudden impact. Clarke slips to one side as it thrashes past, Caraco’s dart embedded in its flank.
Clarke’s headlight goes out, her voicebox falls silent. Caraco stows the dart gun and swims up to join her. The two women maneuver their quarry down toward the canister. It snaps at them, weak and spastic. They push it down into the coffin, seal the top.
“Shooting fish for a barrel,” Caraco buzzes.
