by Peter Watts
It sinks to the bottom, stirring a muddy cloud as it touches down. It crawls forward along the ocean floor.
The beacon shines down from several meters above the seabed. At closer range it resolves into a string of smaller lights stretched in an arc, like photophores on the flank of some enormous fish.
Broca sends down more noise: Sodium floods. The reptile burrows on through the water, panning its face from side to side.
And freezes, suddenly fearful. Something huge looms behind the lights, bloating gray against black. It hangs above the seabed like a great smooth boulder, impossibly buoyant, encircled by lights at its equator. Striated filaments connect it to the bottom.
Something else, changes.
It takes a moment for the reptile to realize what’s happened: the drumming against its chest has stopped. It glances nervously from shadow to light, light to shadow.
“You are approaching Linke Station, Aleutian Geothermal Array. We’re glad you’ve come back.”
The reptile shoots back into the darkness, mud billowing behind it. It retreats a good twenty meters before a dim realization sinks in.
Broca’s area knows those sounds. It doesn’t understand them—Broca’s never much good at anything but mimicry—but it has heard something like them before. The reptile feels an unaccustomed twitch. It’s been a long time since curiosity was any use.
It turns and faces back from where it fled. Distance has smeared the lights into a diffuse, dull glow. A faint staccato rhythm vibrates in its chest.
The reptile edges back towards the beacon. One light divides again into many; that dim, ominous outline still lurks behind them.
Once more the rhythm falls silent at the reptile’s approach. The strange object looms overhead in its girdle of light. It’s smooth in some places, pockmarked in others. Precise rows of circular bumps, sharp-angled protuberances appear at closer range.
“You are approaching Linke Station, Aleutian Geothermal Array. We’re glad you’ve come back.”
The reptile flinches, but stays on course this time.
“We can’t get a definite ID from your sonar profile.” The sound fills the ocean. “You might be Deborah Linden. Deborah Linden. Please respond if you are Deborah Linden.”
Deborah Linden. That brings memory: something with four familiar limbs, but standing upright, moving against gravity and bright light and making strange harsh sounds—
—laughter—
“Please respond—”
It shakes its head, not knowing why.
“—if you are Deborah Linden.”
Judy Caraco, says something else, very close.
“Deborah Linden. If you can’t speak, please wave your arms.”
The lights overhead cast a bright scalloped circle on the ocean floor. There on the mud rests a box, large enough to crawl into. Two green pinpoints sparkle from a panel on one of its sides.
“Please enter the emergency shelter beneath the station. It contains food and medical facilities.”
One end of the box gapes open; delicate jointed things can be seen folded up inside, hiding in shadow.
“Everything is automatic. Enter the shelter and you’ll be all right. A rescue team is on the way.”
Automatic. That noise, too, sticks out from the others. Automatic almost means something. It has personal relevance.
The reptile looks back up at the thing that’s hanging overhead like, like,
—like a fist—
like a fist. The underside of the sphere is a cool shadowy refuge; the equatorial lights can’t reach all the way around its convex surface. In the overlapping shadows on the south pole, something shimmers enticingly.
The reptile pushes up off the bottom, raising another cloud.
“Deborah Linden. The station is locked for your own protection.”
It glides into the cone of shadow beneath the object and sees a bright shiny disk a meter across, facing down, held inside a circular rim. The reptile looks up into it.
Something looks back.
Startled, the reptile twists down and away. The disk writhes in the sudden turbulence.
A bubble. That’s all it is. A pocket of gas, trapped underneath the
—airlock.
The reptile stops. It knows that word. It even understands it, somehow. Broca’s not alone any more, something else is reaching out from the temporal lobe and tapping in. Something up there actually knows what Broca is talking about.
“Please enter the emergency shelter beneath the station—”
Still nervous, the reptile returns to the airlock. The air pocket shines silver in the reflected light. A black wraith moves into view within it, almost featureless except for two empty white spaces where eyes should be. It reaches out to meet the reptile’s outstretched hand. Two sets of fingertips touch, fuse, disappear. One arm is grafted onto its own reflection at the wrist. Fingers, on the other side of the looking glass, touch metal.
“—locked for your own protection. Deborah Linden.”
It pulls back its hand, fascinated. Inside, forgotten parts are stirring. Other parts, more familiar, try to send them away. The wraith floats overhead, empty and untroubled.
It draws its hand to its face, runs an index finger from one ear to the tip of the jaw. A very long molecule, folded against itself, unzips.
The wraith’s smooth black face splits open a few centimeters; what’s underneath shows pale gray in the filtered light. The reptile feels the familiar dimpling of its cheek in sudden cold.
It continues the motion, slashing its face from ear to ear. A great smiling gash opens below the eyespots. Unzipped, a flap of black membrane floats under its chin, anchored at the throat.
There’s a pucker in the center of the skinned area. The reptile moves its jaw; the pucker opens.
By now most of its teeth are gone. It swallowed some, spat others out if they came loose when its face was unsealed. No matter. Most of the things it eats these days are even softer than it is. When the occasional mollusc or echinoderm proves too tough or too large to swallow whole, there are always hands. Thumbs still oppose.
But this is the first time it’s actually seen that gaping, toothless ruin where a mouth used to be. It knows this isn’t right, somehow.
“—Everything is automatic—”
A sudden muffled buzz cuts into the noise, then fades. Welcome silence returns for a moment. Then different sounds, quieter than before, almost hushed:
“Christ, Judy, is that you?”
It knows that sound.
“Judy Caraco? It’s Jeannette Ballard. Remember? We went through prelim together. Judy? Can you speak?”
That sound comes from a long time ago.
“Can you hear me, Judy? Wave if you can hear me.”
Back when this one was part of something larger, not an it at all, then, but—
“The machine didn’t recognize you, you know? It was only programmed for locals.”
—she.
Clusters of neurons, long dormant, sparkle in the darkness. Old, forgotten subsystems stutter and reboot.
I—
“You’ve come—my God, Judy, do you know where you are? You went missing off Juan de Fuca! You’ve come over three thousand kilometers!”
It knows my name. She can barely think over the sudden murmuring in her head.
“Judy, it’s me. Jeannette. God, Judy, how did you last this long?”
She can’t answer. She’s just barely starting to understand the question. There are parts of her still asleep, parts that won’t talk, still other parts completely washed away. She doesn’t remember why she never gets thirsty. She’s forgotten the tidal rush of human breath. Once, for a little while, she knew words like photoamplification and myoelectric; they were nonsense to her even then.
She shakes her head, trying to clear it. The new parts—no, the old parts, the very old parts that went away and now they’ve come back and won’t shut the fuck up—are all clamoring for attention. She reaches int
o the bubble again, past her own reflection; once again, the ventral airlock pushes back.
“Judy, you can’t get into the station. No one’s there. Everything’s automated now.”
She brings her hand back to her face, tugs at the line between black and gray. More shadow peels back from the wraith, leaving a large pale oval with two smaller ovals, white and utterly featureless, inside. The flesh around her mouth is going prickly and numb.
My face! something screams. What happened to my eyes?
“You don’t want to go inside anyway, you couldn’t even stand up. We’ve seen it in some of the other runaways, you lose your calcium after a while. Your bones go all punky, you know?”
My eyes—
“We’re airlifting a ’scaphe out to you. We’ll have a team down there in fifteen hours, tops. Just go down into the shelter and wait for them. It’s state of the art, Judy, it’ll take care of everything.”
She looks down into the open box. Words appear in her head: Leg. Hold. Trap. She knows what they mean.
“They—they made some mistakes, Judy. But things are different now. We don’t have to change people any more. You just wait there, Judy. We’ll put you back to rights. We’ll bring you home.”
The voices inside grow quiet, suddenly attentive. They don’t like the sound of that word. Home. She wonders what it means. She wonders why it makes her feel so cold.
More words scroll through her mind: The lights are on. Nobody’s home.
The lights come on, flickering.
She can catch glimpses of sick, rotten things squirming in her head. Old memories grind screeching against years of corrosion. Something lurches into sudden focus: worms, clusters of twitching, eyeless, pulpy snouts reaching out for her across the space of two decades. She stares, horrified, and remembers what the worms were called. They were called “fingers.”
Something gives way with a snap. There’s a big room and a hand puppet clenched in one small fist. Something smells like mints and worms are surging up between her legs and they hurt and they’re whispering shhh it’s not really that bad is it, and it is but she doesn’t want to let him down after all I’ve done for you so she shakes her head and squeezes her eyes shut and just waits. It’s years and years before she opens her eyes again and when she does he’s back, so much smaller now, he doesn’t remember he doesn’t even fucking remember it’s all my dear how you’ve grown how long has it been?So she tells him as the taser wires hit and he goes over, she tells him as his muscles lock tight in a twelve-thousand-volt orgasm; she shows him the blade, shows him up real close and his left eye deflates with a wet tired sigh but she leaves the other one, jiggling hilariously in frantic little arcs, so he can watch but shit for once there really is a cop around when you need one and here come the worms again, a hard clenched knot of them driving into her kidney like a piston, worms grabbing her hair, and they take her not to the nearest precinct but to some strange clinic where voices in the next room murmur about optimal post-traumatic environments and endogenous dopamine addiction. And then someone says There’s an alternative Ms. Caraco, a place you could go that’s a little bit dangerous but then you’d be right at home there, wouldn’t you? And you could make a real contribution, we need people who can live under a certain kind of stress without going, you know...
And she says okay, okay, just fucking do it.
And the worms burrow into her chest, devour her soft parts and replace them with hard-edged geometries of plastic and metal that cut her insides.
And then dark cold, life without breath, four thousand meters of black water pressing down like a massive sheltering womb...
“Judy, will you just for God’s sake talk to me? Is your vocoder broken? Can’t you answer?”
Her whole body is shaking. She can’t do anything except watch her hand rise, an autonomous savior, to take the black skin floating around her face. The reptile presses edges together, here, and here. Hydrophobic side chains embrace; a slippery black caul stitches itself back together over rotten flesh. Muffled voices rage faintly inside.
“Judy, please just wave or something! Judy, what are you—where are you going?”
It doesn’t know. All it’s ever done is travel to this place. It’s forgotten why.
“Judy, you can’t wander too far away... Don’t you remember, our instruments can’t see very well this close to an active rift—”
All it wants is to get away from the noise and the light. All it wants is to be alone again.
“Judy, wait—we just want to help—”
The harsh artificial glare fades behind it. Ahead there is only the sparse twinkle of living flashlights.
A faint realization teeters on the edge of awareness and washes away forever:
She knew this was home years before she ever saw an ocean.
THE EYES OF GOD
I am not a criminal. I have done nothing wrong. They’ve just caught a woman at the front of the line, mocha-skinned, mid-thirties, eyes wide and innocent beneath the brim of her La Senza beret. She dosed herself with oxytocin from the sound of it, tried to subvert the meat in the system—a smile, a wink, that extra chemical nudge that bypasses logic and whispers right to the brainstem: This one’s a friend, no need to put her through the machines...
But I guess she forgot: we’re all machines here, tweaked and tuned and retrofitted down to the molecules. The guards have been immunised against argument and aerosols. They lead her away, indifferent to her protests. I try to follow their example, harden myself against whatever awaits her on the other side of the white door. What was she thinking, to try a stunt like that? Whatever hides in her head must be more than mere inclination. They don’t yank paying passengers for evil fantasies, not yet anyway, not yet. She must have done something. She must have acted.
Half an hour before the plane boards. There are at least fifty law-abiding citizens ahead of me and they haven’t started processing us yet. The buzz box looms dormant at the front of the line like a great armoured crab, newly installed, mouth agape. One of the guards in its shadow starts working her way up the line, spot-checking some passengers, bypassing others, feeling lucky after the first catch of the day. In a just universe I would have nothing to fear from her. I’m not a criminal, I have done nothing wrong. The words cycle in my head like a defensive affirmation.
I am not a criminal. I have done nothing wrong.
But I know that fucking machine is going to tag me anyway.
At the head of the queue, the Chamber of Secrets lights up. A canned female voice announces the dawning of preboard security, echoing through the harsh acoustics of the terminal. The guards slouch to attention. We gave up everything to join this line: smart tags, jewellery, my pocket office, all confiscated until the far side of redemption. The buzz box needs a clear view into our heads; even an earring can throw it off. People with medical implants and antique mercury fillings aren’t welcome here. There’s a side queue for those types, a special room where old-fashioned interrogations and cavity searches are still the order of the day.
The omnipresent voice orders all Westjet passengers with epilepsy, cochlear dysfunction, or Grey syndrome to identify themselves to Security prior to entering the scanner. Other passengers who do not wish to be scanned may opt to forfeit their passage. Westjet regrets that it cannot offer refunds in such cases. Westjet is not responsible for neurological side effects, temporary or otherwise, that may result from use of the scanner. Use of the scanner constitutes acceptance of these conditions.
There have been side effects. A few garden-variety epileptics had minor fits in the early days. A famous Oxford atheist—you remember, the guy who wrote all the books—caught a devout and abiding faith in the Christian God from a checkpoint at Heathrow, although some responsibility was ultimately laid at the feet of the pre-existing tumour that killed him two months later. One widowed grandmother from St. Paul’s was all over the news last year when she emerged from a courthouse buzz box with an insatiable sexual fetish for run
ning shoes. That could have cost Sony a lot, if she hadn’t been a forgiving soul who chose not to litigate. Rumours that she’d used SWank just prior to making that decision were never confirmed.
“Destination?”
The guard has arrived while I wasn’t looking. Her laser licks my face with biometric taste buds. I blink away the afterimages.
“Destination,” she says again.
“Uh, Yellowknife.”
She scans her handpad. “Business or pleasure?” There’s no point to these questions, they’re not even according to script. SWank has taken us beyond the need for petty interrogation. She just doesn’t like the look of me, I bet. Maybe she just knows somehow, even if she can’t put her finger on it.
“Neither,” I say. She looks up sharply. Whatever her initial suspicions, my obvious evasiveness has cemented them. “I’m attending a funeral,” I explain.
She moves along without a word.
I know you’re not here, Father. I left my faith back in childhood. Let others hold to their feeble-minded superstitions, let them run bleating to the supernatural for comfort and excuses. Let the cowardly and the weak-minded deny the darkness with the promise of some imagined afterlife. I have no need for invisible friends. I know I’m only talking to myself. If only I could stop.
I wonder if that machine will be able to eavesdrop on our conversation.
I stood with you at your trial, as you stood with me years before when I had no other friend in the world. I swore on your sacred book of fairy tales that you’d never touched me, not once in all those years. Were the others lying, I wonder? I don’t know. Judge not, I guess.
But you were judged, and found wanting. It wasn’t even newsworthy—child-fondling priests are more cliché than criminal these days, have been for years, and no one cares what happens in some dickass town up in the Territories anyway. If they’d quietly transferred you just one more time, if you’d managed to lay low just a little longer, it might not have even come to this. They could have fixed you.
Or not, now that I think of it. The Vatican came down on SWank like it came down on cloning and the Copernican solar system before it. Mustn’t fuck with the way God built you. Mustn’t compromise free choice, no matter how freely you’d choose to do so.
