Neptune's Brood

by Charles Stross

  What I’d intended to buy was a set of minor body-mods that would make life in the sunlit surface waters easier for the remainder of my stay: After all, although I hoped to linger in Nova Ploetsk no longer than a few tens of days, experience had taught me that orbital dynamics paid no heed to my travel preferences. I might be stuck here for some time, and webbed fingers and toes, enhanced oxygen storage capacity, and an enhanced orientation sense all seemed to make sense.

  But my abductors were working at the orders of someone who had other plans for me. They went to work on my body, mutilating and resculpting it to fit a design template they’d been given and, on a smaller scale, broadcasting a series of radical firmware updates to my ’cytes, equipping them to function in the abyssal depths.

  First they broke my feet, removed most of the fine bones, and replaced them with radiating weblike fins. Then they split the fleshy inner surface of my legs apart and added shims of new flesh, fusing muscle masses back together to form a seamless, tapering trunk. My pelvic girdle they resectioned, and my hip joints they completely replaced: Buttocks disappeared. Walking upright would be impossible in my new form.

  My skin chromatophores adopted new and oddly toothlike shapes, overlapping, scaly, and iridescent. I was streamlined everywhere, curved and polished to reduce drag.

  Internal organs changed, too. Countercurrent recyclers and feedstock processors were moved; ducts and peristaltic tubes and support webbing were rearranged to make better use of the space between my narrowed hips and my rib cage. My gas-exchange lungs they replaced completely, installing new ones that still worked but that could be sealed off from my throat and collapsed safely under extreme pressure, then reinflated subsequently. They added gills behind cunningly concealed flaps in my neck and upper thorax. They added webbing between my fingers and acoustic sensory lines along my flanks.

  Then they broke my face.

  We are not Fragile, but our minds are based on an emulation of the Fragile neuroanatomy, and the Fragile recognize each other by facial appearance. It underlies our sense of identity at a very deep level, so that damage-induced changes to facial structure cause considerable psychological distress. My abductors changed me, editing my face so that at the end of the process my new form was a barely recognizable parody of Krina.

  Some of the changes were subtle or invisible to me. They resculpted my skull for better hydrodynamic flow. Made subtle changes to hair and skin texture. But other changes were more noticeable. A flatter, smaller button nose with internal pressure flaps to seal it. Point-tipped ears that folded back flush against the sides of my skull. And as for my eyes—

  There is pitifully little light in the Hadean depths of the world-ocean. What light exists is mostly the product of bioluminescent processes, or the dreaded blue smokers that fission and boil as they rise from the ice-clad core of the world. To trap this light, small, jelly-filled capsules are insufficient. And so my abductors broke my facial bones apart, peeled out my cheeks, and resculpted the orbits of my eyes. Then they deglobed me, opened up my eyeballs, and expanded them, adding exotic sensors before they shoved them back inside my face and rebuilt my skin. My new eyes were huge and dark, fist-sized spheres nestling behind eyelids padded with epicanthic folds and lined with nictitating membranes to seal and protect them. My face was distorted around them, narrow-chinned and small-mouthed and pointy. Elfin in a horrible, uncanny parody of my former appearance.

  Probably they thought it wouldn’t matter to me. After all, where I was going, there were no mirrors.

  There were deeper changes, too. Within every mechanocyte in my body, subtle, engineered modifications proceeded to allow the molecular machinery to withstand the crushing pressures and chills of the eternal-midnight depths. Aqueous and hydrophobic fluids expand and contract at different rates when under pressure, introducing subtle distortions into enzymes and replicators and molecular tools. The antipressure toolkit stabilized molecules, armored active centers and receptor sites—at a metabolic cost: I’d need to consume more nutrients or clock my metabolism more slowly. I’d lose resilience at high temperatures and in vacuum. I’d be prone to gout and a condition not unlike arthritis among the Fragile if I spent too long in low-pressure regimes. And, of course, my newly tweaked body would need to pace itself as it descended or ascended, to avoid a messy and agonizing death.

  I’m not sure how long the “hotel doctor” and his assistants worked on my flesh. Certainly, the changes were drastic, even radical: Turning a surface-dwelling orthohumanoid into a free-swimming Hadean was an extreme process. But eventually the job was finished, and they transferred me, still in a state of deep unconsciousness maintained by a metabolic debugger chip, back into a cargo pod. They attached a small outboard motor to the capsule and dumped it into the waters below the city, to slowly sink through the thermoclinal frontier below the Kingdom of Argos and into the savage darkness below—the home of the squid-people, the wild mermaid tribes, and my shadowy captor who had paid to remake me in their form.

  * * *

  Slow money doesn’t grow on trees. It is a bitcoinage, generated algorithmically, the twist in the tale being that it is countersigned by banks orbiting other stars to authenticate the system where it is minted. It is no accident that a single slow dollar is roughly equal in value to the productive labor of a skilled worker over a period of a hundred standard years. Or that for the first decades of any new colony, a debt of slow money would be incurred in order to acquire the services of colonists willing to accept the risks of serialization and transfer across interstellar distances via beacon laser, a debt which would later be paid off by the establishment of daughter colonies. Debt is the economic engine that spreads humanity to the stars. But what happens if a colony racks up so much debt that it cannot repay it through ordinary means?

  Involuntary autarky is a possibility. It is not as if there exist any physical commodities that can justify the cost of shipping between the stars—we trade in bits, not atoms, and a hermit kingdom is in principle capable of surviving for centuries or millennia without input. They might be reduced to eating one another toward the end, but some would say: If that’s the price of freedom . . .

  We—those of us who are of Post Humanity descended from the Fragile—are accustomed to being part of a greater economy. We expect to participate in a greater culture, vicariously abstracting the arts, amusements, insights, and personalities of hundreds of star systems. Autarky sucks for everyone except the reigning monarch or other tyrant who ordered it. It’s the systemic equivalent of locking yourself in your home and pretending you’re not in to avoid your creditors.

  There are other strategies. Some enlightened governances cultivate the production of amusements and distractions of art, or research and development and design, or even practice the dusty sciences, as if probing the limits of the physical universe can tell us anything new at this late stage. Others work on terraforming, the production of biospheres aesthetically attractive and comfortable for our kind of life. (We may not be Fragile, but we inherited their body plan and psychology, and with them a preference for environments suffused with self-replicating fractal structures powered by entropic energy gradients and exhibiting complex behavior.) Successful systems with pleasing biomes and a viable local economy can actually charge would-be immigrants a landing fee. A modest interstellar tourism industry exists, catering to the independently wealthy.

  But despite these options, in general the best way to pay off a system-wide debt is to pass it off onto another system. And thus has it ever been, until Atlantis colony tried to be different. One of my assignments, as I grew up working as an indentured child researcher in Sondra’s bank aboard the generation ship New California, was to hunt for failed slow money exchanges, identify what had gone wrong, then buy title to the escrow accounts at each end, or to the uncountersigned carnets, allowing us to neatly claim the funds floating in limbo—or to identify the heirs to the original recipient in the exchang
e, in order to charge them a commission in return for providing proof and completion of their good fortune. Legacy-hunting and heir-matching is an old and specialized profession. And as it happens, it is a profession through which I was exposed to various kinds of fraud, for nothing brings out the worst in human psychology like an opportunity to profit from someone else’s accidental misfortune.

  As I have mentioned, I have had many opportunities over the decades to study the FTL scam in great detail. Usually, all advance-fee frauds, such as the Spanish Prisoner scam, end with a destitute victim and a vanished grifter. But—this is an important twist—in the case of the FTL scam, the payment doesn’t go directly to the con artist who convinces the mark into parting with their slow money. It can’t, by definition; it has to go to another star system. And this means it has to go to an accomplice whom the grifter trusts implicitly.

  Things can go wrong with the scam, between the grifter skipping town and receiving their payoff. The accomplice at the other end may die, or defect, or (in one memorable case) even fall victim to a different FTL scam themselves. My specialty at the bank, tracking down dead transactions, led me over time to focus on the victims of FTL scams, to identify the recipients of the payment. I discovered that the proportion of slow money transfers that fail to complete is an order of magnitude higher in advance-fee frauds than in regular exchanges. And because I was on commission (my debt of instantiation having been long since redeemed), this in turn allowed me to turn a hobby into a lucrative little sideline.

  Back to the topic at hand:

  Atlantis went dark nearly two thousand years ago, after having solicited substantial inward investments that by some estimates totaled the almost unimaginable sum of five billion slow dollars.

  That’s roughly the economic productivity of an entire mature, heavily populated star system—such as old Sol system—over five centuries. More realistically, it’s the productivity of ten new colonies over their first thousand years. On the order of fifty quadrillion or more in fast money. It’s an almost incomprehensible sum of cash, made even more incomprehensible by the fact that this was not some sort of strange derivative instrument but actual primary debt of the most raw and immediate kind.

  Fraud is seldom bloodless; but the violence and turmoil that follows in its wake is random and incoherent compared to that associated with war or robbery. The Atlantis blackout caused several billion personal bankruptcies, millions of suicides, economic recessions in dozens of star systems, revolutions and civil wars and much raising of heads of heads of state on sharp pointy spikes when said rulers were found to have invested entire national insurance funds in the Atlantis project. The hubbub took centuries to die down.

  The significance of Atlantis’s disappearance cannot be overemphasized. Some people—a sizable minority—clung to the delusion that Atlantis had in fact discovered something truly wonderful, and the Atlanteans had decamped for parts unknown at a high multiple of the speed of light. Others were convinced that they had screwed up and somehow unleashed a force that had scrambled the tiny minds of every neurocyte in the star system, and that consequently Atlantis should be left well alone. But other, more cynical, souls assumed that the Atlanteans, accustomed to living high on the hog thanks to their fat pipeline of incoming investments, had seen the end approaching and decided to mew themselves up for a millennium.

  Starships were launched—three of them to my knowledge. It’s almost the only time in recorded history when starships were deliberately sent to an already-settled star system, and the only time when more than one took flight. One of the vehicles, named the Vengeance, even carried a brace of fast breeders, a few kilotons of unenriched uranium to process into plutonium along the way, and a nuclear weapons factory. No, I am not making this up: It had a military command structure—some of the investors were so crazed that they were actually thinking in terms of launching an interstellar invasion by force!

  However, contact was lost with every one of the ships before they even finished the boost stage of their flight. My money is on sabotage by sleeper agents left behind by the Atlanteans, specifically to address such a reaction to their planned disappearance. And after five centuries had elapsed, nobody still in business felt like throwing away a couple of million in slow money on yet another feral-golden-goose chase.

  Doubts remained, but only historians have the energy to get worked up over it these days.

  As you may have guessed by now, given my specialty, it was probably inevitable that I and my long-haul pen pals would be drawn into investigating the possibility that the Atlantis blackout was the climax of the grandest fraud in recorded human history—and the biggest FTL scam ever, of course.

  This is not exactly a new idea. Right from the outset, it has been a minority opinion among those who investigated the event. Evidence for it is thin on the ground, and all too often those who give public voice to the theory are dismissed as conspiracy theorists—how is it possible, skeptics ask, to found an interstellar colony mission (involving tens of thousands of minds), then run it for a century on the basis of a conspiracy? All it takes is a single leak, and the entire thing can be blown wide open. Also, where’s the evidence?

  Well, for one thing, there would be no point to such a conspiracy if there were no way to launder the proceeds effectively—to profit from it afterward, in other words. For another, anyone who is on the inside and knows what was going on has a huge vested interest in staying quiet. Even outsiders like myself and my peers, stealthily tracing the financial evidence, can’t quite bring ourselves to talk too loudly for fear that someone else will claim-jump our uncommitted transactions. Only cranks, paranoids, and lunatics prate loudly about the possibility that the Atlantis blackout was the payoff to a gigantic financial conspiracy; and so the theory receives little critical examination in the public gaze.

  But if you know how such frauds work, you also know that the key to unraveling one is ideally to work along the chain of financial transactions: to establish where the money came from, where it was sent, and who ultimately received it. Frequently, this is a matter of learning who laundered it onward to its ultimate destination (usually a systembank willing to turn a blind eye to large volumes of trade in return for a percentage off the top), and to do this, one searches for patterns in the traffic from that bank which cannot be accounted for by more mundane businesses . . .

  More than fifty years ago, we (myself, Ana, a handful of sibs and half-sibs and interested correspondents) established some ground rules and began investigating the Atlantis disappearance. And we started out by working on the assumption that it was an instance of the FTL scam.

  Our first question—cui buono?—has a number of possible answers. Our obvious initial suspects were those founders of Atlantis colony who came from established wealthy lineages—which turned out to be most of them, for to buy shares in a starship venture is not the undertaking of a pauper.

  But the surviving relatives of the founders of Atlantis had come under instant suspicion, back in the day; at best, they had lived out their subsequent lives under a perpetual cloud of surveillance, subjected to frequent audits. They must have rued their missing sibs’ activities! Certainly, none of them had received significant sums of slow money from Atlanteans desperate to hide their ill-gotten loot. (At worst, they disappeared—presumably kidnapped and interrogated destructively by those who wouldn’t take a mere audit for an exculpatory answer.)

  Moving forward, we examined the banks and the bourses and the share gambling casinos and the insurance brokers who had been heavily implicated in transferring money to Atlantis Beacon. In particular, we looked at the public records of those banks that had declared bankruptcy in the wake of the crisis—for those were the ones that had been heaviest hit.

  And that’s when we began to suspect that, despite centuries of highly motivated inquisitors finding nothing, we were right and there had been a fraud of monumental proportions. Because the boulders
of evidence lying around were so enormous that we had mistaken it for the geography of the interstellar financial landscape.

  The evidence was written in the stars.

  * * *

  Put yourself in my skin:

  Distracted and somewhat bemused, you’re in a hotel room, thinking about the wreckage of your long-term strategy while a member of the staff you asked for is poking you with questions. “If you’d like to sit down and plug in this diagnostic cable I can dump your body’s structural layout and ask them to tender—”

  You sit down and take the fiber-optic cable. “Where does this go?” you ask, holding up the free end, still freewheeling through possibilities: the need to send an advance message back to Andrea acknowledging receipt and confirming that you’ll be returning as soon as possible, solicitations for a fast physical berth back up to Taj Beacon, wondering how much the security detail you need is going to cost.

  “Right here. If you’ll allow me—” You nod. Something touches the back of your neck. And the next thing you know:

  Falling in darkness, head down, pressure rising.

  You try to kick, but your legs are trussed together. You try to move your arms, but they’re not responding properly. Panicking, you open your eyes, then open them again—eyelids open within eyelids, like waking inside a nightmarish lucid dream. You feel as if your legs are wrapped tightly in a sleeping cocoon—but there is no fabric in contact with your skin: You are naked. Fingers flex apart, slowly, then stop, a sense of tension dragging between them. You feel your arms begin to move, but something keeps dragging them back against your body. You kick again, both legs simultaneously. You have the strangest sensation, as if you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins: But your inertial sense tells you something just happened, you’re not falling straight down anymore. There is stuff around you: not air, but a thicker and denser medium. Your legs are hobbled, but your feet feel the flow, and as you twist your prehensile toes, you roll onto your back. There is a faint glow of light far above you, punctuated by the silhouette of a cargo cylinder floating like a hole in your night vision. Kick again, and you feel the surge of water across your skin.