Rifters 1 - Starfish

by Peter Watts

  Joel raises his eyebrows.

  Jarvis holds up his hands. "I know, I know. Your baby finger is bigger than your average deepsea fish. But that just means they're short of fuel; when they do gas up, believe me, they use it for growth. Why waste calories just swimming around when you can't see anything anyway? In dark environments it makes more sense for predators to sit-and-wait. Whereas if you grow big enough, maybe you'll get too big for other predators, you see?"

  "Mmm."

  "Of course, we're basing the whole theory on a couple of samples that got dragged up without any protection against temperature or pressure changes." Jarvis snorts. "Might as well have sent them in a paper bag. But this time we're doing it right— hey, is that light I see down there?"

  There's a vague yellow glow smudging the darkness directly below. Joel calls up a topographic display: Beebe. The geothermal array over at the rift proper lays out a sequence of hard green echoes bearing 340°. And just to the left of that, about a hundred meters off the east-most generator, something squirts a unique acoustic signature at four-second intervals.

  Joel taps commands to the dive planes. The 'scaphe pulls out of its spiral and coasts off to the northeast. Beebe Station, never more than a bright stain, fades to stern.

  The ocean floor resolves suddenly in the 'scaphe's headlights; bone-gray ooze slides past, occasional outcroppings, great squashed marshmallows of lava and pumice. In the cockpit a flashing point of light slo-mo's towards the center of the topographic display.

  Something charges them from overhead; the dull wet sound of its impact reverberates briefly through the hull. Joel looks up through the dorsal port but sees nothing. Several more impacts, staggered. The 'scaphe whirs implacably onward.

  "There."

  It looks almost like a lifeboat canister, three meters long. Readouts twinkle from a panel on one rounded end. It's resting on a carpet of giant tubeworms, their feathery crowns extended in full filter-feeding mode. Joel thinks of the baby Moses, nestled in a clump of mutant bulrushes.

  "Wait a second," Jarvis says. "Kill the lights first."

  "What for?"

  "You don't need them, do you?"

  "Well, no. I can use instruments if I have to. But why—"

  "Just do it, okay?" Jarvis, the chatterbox, is suddenly all business.

  Darkness floods the cockpit, retreats a bit before the glow of the readouts. Joel grabs a pair of eyephones off a hook to his left. The sea floor reappears before him courtesy of the ventral photoamps, faded to blue and black.

  He coaxes the 'scaphe into position directly above the canister, listens to the clank and creak of grapples flexing beneath the deck; metal claws the color of slate extend across his field of view.

  "Spray it before you pick it up," Jarvis says.

  Joel reaches out and taps the control codes without looking. The 'phones show him a nozzle extending from Jarvis's tank, taking aim like a skinny cobra.

  "Do it."

  The nozzle ejaculates gray-blue murk, sprays back and forth along the length of the canister, sweeping the benthos on either side. The tubeworms yank back into their tunnels and shut the doors; the whole featherduster forest vanishes in an instant, leaving a crowd of sealed leathery tubes.

  The nozzle spews its venom.

  One of the tubes opens, almost hesitantly. Something dark and stringy drifts out, twitching. The gray plume sweeps across it; it sags, lifeless, across the sill of its burrow. Other tubes are opening now. Invertebrate corpses slump back into sight.

  "What's in this stuff?" Joel whispers.

  "Cyanide. Rotenone. Some other things. Sort of a cocktail."

  The nozzle sputters for a few seconds and runs dry. Automatically, Joel retracts it.

  "Okay," Jarvis says. "Let's grab it and go home."

  Joel doesn't move.

  "Hey," Jarvis says.

  Joel shakes his head, plays the machinery. The 'scaphe extends its arms in a metal hug, pulls the canister off the bottom. Joel strips the 'phones from his eyes and taps the controls. They begin rising.

  "That was a pretty thorough rinse," Joel remarks after a while.

  "Yes. Well, the sample's costing us a fair bit. Don't want to contaminate it."

  "I see."

  "You can turn the lights back on," Jarvis says. "How long before we break the surface?"

  Joel trips the floods. "Twenty minutes. Half hour."

  "I hope the lifter pilot doesn't get too bored." Jarvis is all chummy again.

  "There is no pilot. It's a smart gel."

  "Really? You don't say." Jarvis frowns. "Those are scary things, those gels. You know one suffocated a bunch of people in London a while back?"

  Yes, Joel's about to say, but Jarvis is back in spew mode. "No shit. It was running the subway system over there, perfect operational record, and then one day it just forgets to crank up the ventilators when it's supposed to. Train slides into station fifteen meters underground, everybody gets out, no air, boom."

  Joel's heard this before. The punchline's got something to do with a broken clock, if he remembers it right.

  "These things teach themselves from experience, right?," Jarvis continues. "So everyone just assumed it had learned to cue the ventilators on something obvious. Body heat, motion, CO2 levels, you know. Turns out instead it was watching a clock on the wall. Train arrival correlated with a predictable subset of patterns on the digital display, so it started the fans whenever it saw one of those patterns."

  "Yeah. That's right." Joel shakes his head. "And vandals had smashed the clock, or something."

  "Hey. You did hear about it."

  "Jarvis, that story's ten years old if it's a day. That was way back when they were starting out with these things. Those gels have been debugged from the molecules up since then."

  "Yeah? What makes you so sure?"

  "Because a gel's been running the lifter for the better part of a year now, and it's had plenty of opportunity to fuck up. It hasn't."

  "So you like these things?"

  "Fuck no," Joel says, thinking about Ray Stericker. Thinking about himself. "I'd like 'em a lot better if they did screw up sometimes, you know?"

  "Well, I don't like 'em or trust 'em. You've got to wonder what they're up to."

  Joel nods, distracted by Jarvis' digression. But then his mind returns to dead tube worms, and undeclared no-dive zones, and an anonymous canister drenched with enough poison to kill a fucking city.

  I've got to wonder what all of us are.

  Ghosts

  It's hideous.

  Nearly a meter across. Probably smaller when Clarke started working on it, but it's a real monster now. Scanlon thinks back to his v-school days, and remembers: starfish are supposed to be all in one plane. Flat disks with arms. Not this one. Clarke has grafted bits and pieces together at all angles and produced a crawling Gordian knot, some pieces red, some purple, some white. Scanlon thinks the original body may have been orange, before.

  "They regenerate," she buzzes at his shoulder. "And they've got really primitive immune systems, so there's no tissue rejection problems to speak of. It makes them easier to fix if something goes wrong with them."

  Fix. As if this is actually some sort of improvement. "So, it was broken?" Scanlon asks. "What was wrong with it, exactly?"

  "It was scratched. It had this cut on its back. And there was another starfish nearby, all torn up. Way too far gone for even me to help, but I figured I could use some of the pieces to patch this little guy together."

  This little guy. This little guy drags itself around between them in slow pathetic circles, leaving tangled tracks in the mud. Filaments of parasitic fungus trail from ragged seams, not quite healed. Extra limbs, asymmetrically grafted, catch on rocks; the body lurches, perpetually unstable.

  Lenie Clarke doesn't seem to notice.

  "How long ago— I mean, how long have you been doing this?"

  Scanlon's voice is admirably level; he's certain it conveys nothing but friendly inter
est. But somehow she knows. She’s silent for a second, and then she points her undead eyes at him and she says, “Of course. It makes you sick.”

  “No, I’m just— well, fascinated, I—”

  "You're disgusted," she buzzes. "You shouldn't be. Isn't this exactly the sort of thing you'd expect from a rifter? Isn't that why you sent us down here in the first place?"

  “I know what you think, Lenie,” Scanlon tries, going for the light touch. "You think we get up every morning and ask ourselves, How can we best fuck over our employees today?"

  She looks down at the starfish. "We?"

  "The GA.”

  She floats there while her pet monster squirms in slow motion, trying to right itself.

  "We're not evil, Lenie," Scanlon says after a while. If only she’d look at him, see the earnest expression on his helmeted face. He’s practiced it for years.

  But when she does look up, finally, she doesn’t even seem to notice. "Don't flatter yourself, Scanlon,” she says. “You don't have the slightest control over what you are."

  * * *

  TRANS/OFFI/280850:1043

  There's no doubt that the ability to function down here stems from attributes which would, under other conditions, qualify as "dysfunctional". These attributes not only permit long-term exposure to the rift; they may also intensify as a result of that exposure. Lenie Clarke, for example, has developed a mutilation neurosis which she could not have had prior to her arrival here. Her fascination with an animal which can be easily "fixed" when broken has fairly obvious roots, notwithstanding a number of horribly botched attempts at "repair". Judith Caraco, who used to run indoor marathons prior to her arrest, compulsively swims up and down Beebe's transponder line. The other participants have probably developed corresponding habits.

  Whether these behaviors are indicative of a physiological addiction I can not yet say. If they are, I suspect that Kenneth Lubin may be the furthest along. During conversation with some of the other participants I have learned that Lubin may actually sleep outside on occasion, which can not be considered healthy by anyone's standards. I would be better able to understand the reason for this if I had more particulars about Lubin's background. Of course, his file as provided is missing certain relevant details.

  On the job, the participants work unexpectedly well together, given the psychological baggage each of them carries. Duty shifts carry an almost uncanny sense of coordination. They seem choreographed. It's almost as if—

  This is a subjective impression, of course, but I believe that rifters do in fact share some heightened awareness of each other, at least when they're outside. They may also have a heightened awareness of me— either that, or they've made some remarkably shrewd guesses about my state of mind.

  No. Too, too—

  Too easy to misinterpret. If the haploids back on shore read that, they might think the vampires have the upper hand. Scanlon deletes the last few lines, considers alternatives.

  There's a word for his suspicions. It's a word that describes your experience in an isolation tank, or in VR with all the inputs blanked, or— in extreme cases— when someone cuts the sensory cables of your central nervous system. It describes that state of sensory deprivation in which whole sections of the brain go dark for want of input. The word is Ganzfeld.

  It's very quiet in a Ganzfeld. Usually the temporal and occipital lobes seethe with input, signals strong enough to swamp any competition. When those fall silent, though, the mind can sometimes make out faint whispers in the darkness. It imagines scenes that have a curious likeness to those glowing on a television in some distant room, perhaps. Or it feels a faint emotional echo, familiar but not, somehow, first-hand.

  Statistics suggest that these sensations are not entirely imaginary. Experts of an earlier decade— people much like Yves Scanlon, except for their luck in being in the right place at the right time— have even found out where the whispers come from.

  It turns out that protein microtubules, permeating each and every neuron, act as receivers for certain weak signals at the quantum level. It turns out that consciousness itself is a quantum phenomenon. It turns out that under certain conditions conscious systems can interact directly, bypassing the usual sensory middlemen.

  Not a bad payoff for something that started a hundred years ago with halved ping-pong balls taped over someone's eyes.

  Ganzfeld. That's the ticket. Don't talk about the ease with which these creatures stare through you. Forget the endpoint: dissect the process.

  Take control.

  I believe some sort of Ganzfeld Effect may be at work here. The dark, weightless abyssal environment might impoverish the senses enough to push the signal-to-noise ratio past threshold. My observations suggest that the women may be more sensitive than the men, which is consistent given their larger corpus callosa and consequent advantage in intercortical processing speed..

  Whatever the cause of this phenomenon, it has yet to affect me. Perhaps it just takes a little time.

  Oh, one other thing. I was unable to find any record of Karl Acton using the medical scanner. I've asked Clarke and Brander about this, neither could remember Acton actually using the machine. Given the number of injuries on record for everyone else, I find this surprising.

  * * *

  Yves Scanlon sits at the table and forces himself to eat with a mouth gone utterly dry. He hears the vampires moving downstairs, moving along the corridor, moving just behind him. He doesn’t turn around. He mustn’t show any weakness. He can’t betray any lack of confidence.

  Vampires, he knows now, are like dogs. They can smell fear.

  His head is full of sampled sounds, looping endlessly. You’re not among friends here, Scanlon. Don’t make us into enemies. That was Brander, five minutes ago, whispering in Scanlon’s ear before dropping down into the wetroom. And Caraco click click clicking her bread knife against the table until he could barely hear himself think. And Nakata and that stupid giggle of hers. And Patricia Rowan, sometime in the imagined future, sneering Well if you can't even handle a routine assignment without starting a revolt it's no wonder we didn't trust you...

  Or perhaps, echoing back along a different timeline, a terse call to the GA: We lost Scanlon. Sorry.

  And underlying it all, that long, hollow, icy sound, slithering along the floor of his brain. That thing. That thing that nobody mentions. The voice in the abyss. It sounds nearby tonight, whatever it is.

  Not that that matters to the vampires. They’re sealing their ‘skins while Scanlon sits frozen at the end of his meal, they’re grabbing their fins, dropping outside in ones and twos, deserting him. They’re going out there, with the moaning thing.

  Scanlon wonders, over the voices in his head, if it can get inside. If this is the night they bring it back with them.

  * * *

  The vampires are all gone. After a while, even the voices in Scanlon’s head start to fade. Most of them.

  This is insane. I can't just sit here.

  There’s one voice he didn’t hear tonight. Lenie Clarke just sat there through the whole fiasco, watching. Clarke’s the one they look to, all right. She doesn't talk much, but they pay attention when she does. Scanlon wonders what she tells them, when he’s not around.

  Can’t just sit here. And it’s not that bad. It’s not as though they really threatened me—

  You’re not among friends here, Scanlon.

  —not explicitly.

  He tries to figure out exactly where he lost them. It seemed like a reasonable enough proposition. The prospect of shorter tours shouldn't have put them off like that. Even if they are addicted to this godawful place, it was just a suggestion. Scanlon went out of his way to be completely nonthreatening. Unless they took exception to his mention of their carelessness in the safety department. But that should have been old news; they not only knew the chances they were taking, they flaunted them.

  Who am I kidding? That's not when I lost them. I shouldn't have mentioned Lubin, shouldn't have
used him as an example.

  It made so much sense at the time, though. Scanlon knows Lubin’s an outsider, even down here. Scanlon’s not an idiot, he can read the signs even behind the eyecaps. Lubin's different from the other vampires. Using him as an example should have been the safest thing in the world. Scapegoats have been a respected part of the therapeutic arsenal for hundreds of years.

  Look, you want to end up like Lubin? He sleeps outside, for Christ’s sake!

  Scanlon puts his head in his hands. How was I supposed to know they all did?

  Maybe he should have. He could have monitored sonar more closely. Or timed them when they went into their cubbies, seen how long they stayed inside. There were things he could have done, he knows.

  Maybe I really did fuck up. Maybe. If only I’d—

  Jesus, that sounds close. What is—

  Shut up! Just shut the fuck up!

  * * *

  Maybe it shows up on sonar.

  Scanlon takes a breath and ducks into Comm. He’s had basic training on the gear, of course; it’s all pretty intuitive anyway. He didn’t really need Clarke’s grudging tutorial. A few seconds’ effort elicits a tactical overview: vampires, strung like beads on an invisible line between Beebe and the Throat. Another one off to the west, heading for the Throat; probably Lubin. Random topography. Nothing else.

  As he watches, the four icons closest to Beebe edge a pixel or two closer to Main Street. The fifth in line is way out ahead, almost as far out as Lubin. Nearly at the Throat already.

  Wait a second.

  Vampires: Brander, Caraco, Clarke, Lubin, Nakata. Right.

  Icons: one, two, three, four, five—

  Six.

  Scanlon stares at the screen. Oh shit.

  Beebe’s phone link is very old-school; a direct line, not even routed through the telemetry and comm servers. It’s almost Victorian in its simplicity, guaranteed to stay on-line through any systems crash short of an implosion. Scanlon has never used it before. Why should he? The moment he calls home he’s admitting he can’t do the job by himself.