Darwin's Bastards

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  OLIVER KELLHAMMER

  CRUSH

  “H-E-E-EY, WILLEE BOY!”

  I was back in that dream again; the one where I’m standing on deck, watching my disembodied stomach get tossed like a vomit-filled handbag over an endless expanse of waves.

  “Will-ee!”

  My inflamed eyelids cracked open to an assault of fluorescent light. “Cool-White.” Whoever invented that colour? It makes everything look so dingy and sick. But then again I was so dingy and sick. Perpetually nauseated, sick of the world and sick of myself. The ghost of that barf purse still hung on my retinas like a bad hologram. The thrum of the ship’s engines seemed louder than ever; boring through my pillow, jiggling into my brain. The bedclothes reeked of diesel and intestinal fermentation. A wretched night at its wretched end. I reared up onto my elbows. Through the salt-splattered Plexi of the porthole, a sallow dawn making its way across a graphite horizon. Another tedious day yawning out in front of me.

  “Will-ee! Way-kee, way-kee.”

  That little Filipino birdman fuck. I hated being called Willy, especially by the crew. The name’s Williamson. Stefan Williamson. But I let it go. Besides, Rodger was a sweet old creature; a kind of mechanical intuitive who basically kept the Tethys going when the remote diagnostics didn’t—which was most of the time. He did so entirely by ear, sensing the nuances the computers had missed, always tweaking potentiometers with his tiny screwdrivers. It was amazing he was still on the payroll. Head office had no idea he’d gone blind.

  In the interstices between crashing waves, I heard him down the corridor, clattering the breakfast dishes in the galley. Maybe the weather had calmed down a bit. That was about all I could have hoped for. The warm, armpit smell of his coffee soon suffused the cabin’s chill, then the heaviness of pyrolizing animal fats. I forced the bile down my throat and pressed my feet to the humming steel floor. It was time to get up.

  We’d left the Strait of Juan de Fuca almost eight days before. The pummelling had begun as soon as we’d entered the open ocean, a conveyor belt of gargantuan waves that had been building unimpeded across the width of the Pacific. Nausea and delirium had once again confined me to my cabin. I felt worse every time I signed on for one of these fish-stick trips and now it was getting so I could hardly stand it any more. Pretty embarrassing for a marine biologist. But I wasn’t here to do any actual science. Drone trawlers didn’t need captains, let alone biologists. Maybe that was what was twisting my gut. I was on board so C-Corp could call what they were doing “research.” To the rest of the crew, I was just a dickhead.

  I wobbled down the shifting corridor, steadying myself against the bulkheads like some glue-sniffer coming down off a toot.

  “Will-ee, You’re up!”

  “Yes, I am,” I sighed bitterly. I could barely see Rodger through the aerosolized grease that hung over him like a cloud of blue ectoplasm. He was scraping something viscera-like off a skillet. The fluorescents were really buzzing now, drilling into my temples. My stomach started to tremble again and I thought I’d better try to tame it before it did the full-on loop-de-loop. I grabbed my chipped blue mug and poured myself a coffee from the battered aluminum urn. I had an odd nostalgia for that thing, its worn Bakelite spigot—old and comforting, a traveller through time from the dawn of plastic.

  “So we’re almost there, hey Will-ee Boy?”

  “Maybe so, Rodge.” I was hedging, noncommittal. I didn’t have a clue if what he was saying was true. But I should have known. It was annoying how the crew always knew stuff way before I did. Even old Rodge. He was blind for fuck sake. Our destination was supposed to be secret. Nobody but me was supposed to know where we were headed. That way the competition wasn’t going to get tipped off. Those were the C-Corp rules. “Total Quality Assurance,” they called it. I hadn’t been given any activation updates. Not that I’d paid much attention.

  The coffee was oily, scalding, with a hint of reheated decay, and immediately it triggered a spasm just below my sternum. Maybe I was taking things a little too quick. Clunking the mug down on the wood-grain Formica table, I gazed bleary-eyed across the ladder that lead up to the bridge’s port side. It was like I’d never seen it before. It’s true, I’d hardly been up there lately, though technically I should have been, as the guy who was somewhat in charge. But I wasn’t inclined to play pretend-captain. The Tethys was tethered completely through her satellite link to the C-Corp headquarters over in Taipei; her navigation systems, engine revolutions, trawl deployment, and haul processing systems were all remotely controlled. The crew was just there to clean up the messes. And there were always messes.

  C-Corp’s headquarters glowered at us from every e-pad and computer display that we had on board. A giant, oven-mitt-like tower, clad in a titanium skin that reflected the viridian, subtropical hills around it like a funhouse mirror or a surrealist terrarium. I had no idea if the building, or even C-Corp, actually existed. For all I knew, we could have been being controlled by some buzzed-out geek-for-hire pubescent squeezing us in between rounds of Pony Play Porn and Slime Mould Apocalypse. I wouldn’t have known the difference—nor did I care, as long as my pay credits kept on rolling in.

  I don’t know what it was that came over me, but I found myself heading over to the ladder and hauling myself up, gripping hard on the handrails to compensate for the ship’s lurching and the maddening morning weakness of my legs. It was only eight rungs up, but by the time I reached the top, I badly needed to sit down. Pushing through the bridge door, I was hit by a curtain of stale smoke, like from a recently extinguished garbage fire but with notes of old sweat and melted styrene. A swarm of Cheeze Kurls lay strewn over the instrument panel and onto the floor. I brushed off the Naugahyde captain’s chair and fell into it, my life force spent as if sucked by invisible vampires.

  The debris of many nights’ partying crammed every available surface with bottles, cans and plastic cups, cigarette butts leaching their amber exudate into the drinks’ dregs, scrunched-up packages of Mild 7s, a riot of gutted chip bags—it all made a perversely cheery contrast to the panorama of monochrome ocean that heaved ceaselessly beyond the expanse of rain-spattered windows. Looking down, I noticed a crack pipe, its scorched glass tube with the little wad of Chore Boy still jammed into the end of it, lying forlornly on the console in front of me. I slipped it like a bad little friend into my shirt pocket. Maybe it would come in handy again, I reasoned; it could help with my nausea, maybe even cheer me up. I’d missed out on the nightly revelries so far, locking myself in my sour-smelling cabin, watching the walls spin from my dishevelled bunk. Drinking and bumping with the crew might have helped me pass the time. Not that long ago, that would have been a lot of fun. But lately I’d been trying to prove something, only I’d forgotten exactly what.

  Besides, I’d got the feeling the others didn’t much like having me around anymore. Maybe I was tainted by the hopelessness all over my face. I’d stopped trying to hide it, stopped trying to pretend that everything was okay. Who’d want to be around that all the time?

  I tilted up the grease-smeared screen of the GPS:

  latitude 50 degrees 21 minutes north

  longitude 130 degrees 44 minutes west

  Still off the northwest coast of Vancouver Island. Somewhere beyond yesterday, obviously, but outside the window it looked exactly the same as everywhere else we’d been on this godforsaken stretch of North Pacific—the roiling waves, the leaden sky, an occasional seabird skimming its way across the spray. A restless, endless surface of churning possibilities. No place and everyplace all wrapped up in one. Yet a little red blip was throbbing in the middle of the screen; a new blip, the blip we’d been waiting for since the beginning of the trip. C-Corp had made its move. It was time to get ready. It now seemed so sudden and yet it hadn’t come soon enough. The momentum that had somehow propelled me up that ladder had vanished into a sucking tiredness. All I wanted now was to get back to my bunk. I felt my chest tighten, the panic enzymes rising into it like p
oison sap. Clicking closed the bridge door, I started back down. There wouldn’t be much for me to do. My job was just to stand out there on deck, supervising the rape of the ocean. A mere formality. I’d click a few boxes on my e-pad and call it done. Nothing more was required. I used to be a biologist, a guardian of marine biodiversity, a keeper of this goddamned blue planet. Now I was just a stooge.

  Rodger had been waiting for me down in the galley. He’d laid out a plate of breakfast—a glistening, greasy expanse of violated animal rights, the acid-green reflections of the Cool-Whites dancing crazily in the pale yolks. I pushed the plate away.

  “I’m sorry, Rodge. I’m gonna have to take my time.”

  Rodge was really making an effort. It wasn’t his fault I’d been acting like a dead man, not talking to anyone for days. Poor old Rodge. He sighed and went back to his Braille edition of Playboy, its grimy manila cover flaunting nothing but a black bunny logo in a sea of raised nubs—well worn, I noticed. A few moments passed and he started to snuffle, his milky, rheumy eyes twitching beneath their drooping lids, his fingers caressing the pages—left to right, left to right—as if he were stroking a kitten. For a second there, I thought he was crying. Maybe he was, but he remained engrossed. The great thing about Rodge was that, though he’d be sitting right there in front of me, he never made me feel scrutinized or compelled to make conversation. Each of us could drift privately through our own thoughts, yet still keep each other company. Something had changed with him, though, in the past little while. Something in the tone of his sighs. He seemed a little irritated. Maybe it was me.

  I scooped a little milk simulacrum into the lukewarm coffee, absent-mindedly tracking the von Kármán trails of white powder as they spiralled off the back of my spoon, first clumping then disintegrating into the sludgy brown continuum. What the hell was I doing? Once upon a time, I had wanted so badly to make a difference. I wanted to save the whales. But whales were long gone. Now I was here. Monitoring a fish-stick expedition.

  Fish sticks. The world was just jonesing for them. And every marine biologist I knew, at least the ones still working, the ones who hadn’t yet given up in disgust, were being hired to find more fish to make them with. Trouble was, the world’s supplies had already been pretty much wiped out. Along with a lot of other things. Sea turtles, of course, which had vanished ages ago. Corals, more recently. But the sea was vast and the sea was deep and here and there, hidden in the blackness of the abyssal trenches, were pockets of sea life, as yet unexterminated. Protein was protein and pretty much anything could be ground up and pressed into the golden breaded goodness of a fish stick. So standards got dropped as well as the nets. But lately, as the trawls got ever deeper, some strange, hideous, and unbidden things had been brought up in the hauls. Head office was concerned. Lawsuits had to be avoided. Quality is number one, they kept telling us. After profits, anyway. So I’d been detailed to keep an eye out on deck to make sure nothing too libellous got sucked into the hoppers. Even fish sticks had their limits.

  Zee, the main deckhand, stuck her head around the corner. Well, not “her,” exactly. Zee was only a few paycheques away from completing her transition. These days, Zee had kind of an Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice thing going on, the fuzzy little beard, the Ray-Bans, a short, tight ’fro.

  “I’ve told the guys to get ready,” Zee said, to no one in particular. She looked way over my head, avoiding my gaze, then quickly ducked away. Zee’d been kind of distant with me lately. We’d never had a thing or anything, but on past trips we’d hung out together in my cabin, reading our favourite passages from Samuel Delany to each other, or maybe listening to a little Schnauss and laughing over the clips of Japanese model-railroad porn I’d been archiving on the company server. And yeah, we smoked a bit of crack. But we did it ironically.

  Now Zee was all, “When I became a man, I did away with childish things,” in her stuck-up, Jamaican lilt, like she barely remembered who I was. I missed her though, just the same.

  Rodger sniffed again, then snapped closed his Playboy, pushing himself back from the table, the black leatherette seat-cushion hissing a bit as his bony little bird-man frame rose up out of it.

  “Well, Willee Boy. . . eet’s time to go to work.”

  A statement, not an invocation. With that he shuffled down the corridor, patting the wall from time to time, reassuring himself of his well-worn route back to the engine room. His head bobbed like a little grey mushroom on a jerking blue armature of coveralls, the Playboy rolled up tight in his saggy back pocket. He seemed to have become much more stooped since I’d last paid any attention to him.

  Back in the dead of the previous night, some intern over at C-Corp or whoever the fuck they had running the Tethys at that point (or maybe even an algorithm designed to replace any last vestige of human intelligence) had uploaded an encrypted message to the pinprick of light that was locked in synchronous orbit high above the ship. The satellite dutifully responded by booting up our multi-beam finding module, which in turn lowered its transducers from a bulge in the hull. From then on, every topological nuance, every stone, every crenellation, every mound of benthic mud beneath us was being scanned, geo-tagged, and streamed back to the C-Corp headquarters, without, I might add, the slightest need for my scientific ministrations. Software had replaced me—in tiny, bite-sized pieces. But I was okay with that. I wasn’t exactly on top of my game and I really needed this job. My credentials were all that mattered now. With a biologist on every C-Corp drone, they could beat the restrictions. They could call what they were carrying out a “research fishery.” This was the great old scam going back to the days of “scientific” Japanese whaling. And look how that ended up. Fish sticks were an unavoidable by-product of marine research.

  In the lightless infinity, a mile below our thrumming hull, we’d passed over the lip of a deep and sinuous canyon. It plunged like an enormous ass crack into the dimpled expanse of continental sediment. At the very bottom of it, where the pressure was so intense it would crush a human being into a mass of primate jerky, the sonar had already registered the presence of fish flesh as yet unexploited. But C-Corp was on it. Here is where we would lower the trawls.

  I knew this was probably going to be another freak show. It’d been that way most other times we’d fished that deep. The benthic zone, they called it. What lived down there wasn’t good looking. These creatures were extremophiles that thrived in perpetual darkness, on a diet of, well, each other. They weren’t exactly the kind of thing most people had in mind when they thought of how a fish should look, especially one they were eating. That’s where the fish stick came in. The great equalizer. It could make even “ugly” taste pretty good.

  Mostly we hauled up bristlemouths—slimy, jet-black things with demonic, pin-prick eyes and mouths that gaped like wind socks, full of black, bristly teeth. Their scaleless, jellyish flesh and soft, cartilaginous bones made them the perfect fish-stick feed stock. Still swarming in the deepest ocean trenches, the bristlemouths formed the mainstay of the business. Unprocessed, nobody could stand to look at them. Yet mashed up and deep fried into golden breaded fingers, they got schnarfled up like there was no tomorrow. Kids in particular liked their sweet, amorphous taste. C-Corp fish sticks had become the pride of public school lunch programs right across North America. Prison management corporations, too, bought all they could get their hands on. Supermarkets were rebranding them into three different price points: Value Meal, Weight-Minders, and Grand Gourmet. Same stuff, different packages. It was a miracle, really. Our industry could hardly keep up with the demand.

  Though we were after the bristlemouths, C-Corp hadn’t been too choosy about what got minced up and extruded. The machinery would take care of it, make it all look the same. But lately there’d been some “incidents.” Employees having psychotic episodes because of stuff they’d come across. Being out there on deck during a benthic haul could feel like wading around in the hell section of a Hieronymus Bosch painting— a mucousy, black conglomeratio
n of umbrage, writhing and snapping and lashing all over the place, while the deckhands scrambled in their rubber overalls, gaffing the big stuff and zapping anything else that looked too ornery with their electric stunners. Some of the creatures would be locked in death grips, trying to swallow each other, even as they were getting pulled from the ocean.

  Creatures. Well, yes. They were creatures, all right. Along with the bristlemouths there’d be the viper fishes, gnashing their needly fangs, the gulper eels, which were basically all mouth, the vampire squids, the bulbous dreamers, and lots of other species I couldn’t even begin to identify, some of them most likely new to science. Not that science mattered. I just stood there giving my blessing, watching it all get dragged, flopping and bleeding, into the processor’s churning maw.

  Worst of all were the twisting balls of hagfish. Eyeless, finless, the colour of faeces, they didn’t even have mouths. What they did have was something much more primitive, designed for simultaneous boring and devouring. They’d eat anything, dead or alive, swarming over their prey like leeches then drilling into it through the eyes and anus, ripping through the insides, the skin jerking and twitching as they went on with their repulsive business. Sometimes they’d come bursting out through the side of a fish already on the conveyor belt. Then we’d really have to get busy with the stunners.

  But even the rape of the sea could have its beautiful moments. During the night hauls, I would stand out there, gazing at the myriad seething creatures, gasping and dying all over the deck, many of them flashing bioluminescent pores as the life force seeped out of them, bathing everything in a cold goblin glow like the Cherenkov radiation emitted by nuclear fuel rods. Maybe I’d be listening to a little Schnauss on my headset and thinking about how strange life was, how ephemeral.

  That’s how it was all supposed to go. That’s what I anticipated, sitting in that galley at that grubby little Formica table, its edges chipped like a poor kid’s fever-scarred teeth—staring, just staring into the murk of my coffee, searching for something, some sign, that might help me imagine myself as anyone but a puppet scientist stuck on a clockwork ship, a man who’d sold his soul for fish sticks. I wouldn’t be needed for a while. The crew knew exactly what to do. They always knew: Rodger, Zee, and the Vietnamese deckhands who’d turn away whenever I came by. I’d just wait. Wait like I always waited and wonder how I’d got so cold inside.