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Entropy
Maybe things are getting out of hand, Lenie Clarke wonders.
The others don't seem to care. She hears Lubin and Caraco talking up in the lounge, hears Brander trying to sing in the shower— as if we didn't all get enough abuse during our childhoods— and envies their unconcern. Everyone hated Scanlon— well, not hate, exactly, that's a bit strong— but there was at least a sort of—
Contempt—
That's the word. Contempt. Back on the surface, Scanlon ticked everyone. No matter what you said to him he'd nod, make little encouraging noises, do everything to convince you that he was on your side. Except actually agree with you, of course. You didn't need fine-tuning to see through that shit; everyone down here already had too many Scanlons in their past, the official sympathizers, the instant friends who gently encouraged you to go back home, drop the charges, carefully pretending it was your interests being served. Back then Scanlon was just another patronizing bastard with a shaved deck, and if fortune put him down here on rifter turf for a while, who could be blamed for having a little fun with him?
But we could have killed him.
He started it. He attacked Gerry. He was holding him hostage.
As if the GA's going to make any sort of allowance for that...
So far, Clarke's kept her doubts to herself. It's not that she fears no one will listen to her. She fears the exact opposite. She doesn't want to change anybody's mind. She's not out to rally the troops. Initiative is a prerogative of leaders; she doesn't want the responsibility. The last thing she wants to be is
Leader of the pack, Len. Head wolf. A-fucking-kayla.
Acton's been dead for months and he's still laughing at her.
Okay. Scanlon was a nuisance at worst. At best he was an amusing diversion. "Shit," Brander said once, "You tune him in out there? I bet the GA doesn't even take him seriously." The Grid needs them, and it's not going to pull the plug just because a few rifters had some fun with an asshole like Scanlon. Makes sense.
Still, Clarke can't help thinking about consequences. She's never been able to avoid them in the past.
Brander's finally out of the shower; his voice drifts down from the lounge. Showers are an indulgence down here, hardly necessary when you live inside a self-flushing semipermeable diveskin but a sheer hot hedonistic pleasure just the same. Clarke grabs a towel off the rack and heads up the ladder before anyone else can cut in.
"Hey, Len." Caraco, seated at the table with Brander, waves her over. "Check out the new look."
Brander's in real shirtsleeves. He doesn't even have his caps in.
His eyes are brown.
"Wow." Clarke doesn't know what else to say. Those eyes look really strange. She looks around, vaguely uncomfortable. Lubin's over on the sofa, watching. "What do you think, Ken?"
Lubin shakes his head. "Why do you want to look like a dryback?"
Brander shrugs. "Don't know. I just felt like giving my eyes a rest for a couple of hours. I guess seeing Scanlon down here in shirtsleeves all the time." Not that anyone would even think of popping their caps in front of Scanlon.
Caraco affects an exaggerated shudder. "Please. Tell me he's not your new role model."
"He wasn't even my old one," Brander says.
Clarke can't get used to it. "Doesn't it bother you?" —Walking around naked like that?
"Actually, the only thing that bothers me is I can't see squat. Unless someone wants to turn up the lights..."
"So anyway." Caraco picks up the thread of some previous conversation. "You came down here why?"
"It's safe," Brander says, blinking against his own personal darkness.
"Uh huh."
"Safer, anyway. You were up there not so long ago. Didn't you see it?"
"I think what I saw up there was sort of skewed. That's why I'm down here."
"You never thought that things were getting, well, top-heavy?"
Caraco shrugs. Clarke, imagining steamy needles of water, takes a step towards the corridor.
"I mean, look how fast the net changed," Brander says. "It wasn't that long ago you could just sit in your living room and go all over the world, remember? Anywhere could link up with anywhere else, for as long as they liked."
Clarke turns back. She remembers those days. Vaguely.
"What about the bugs?" she asks.
"There weren't any. Or there were, but they were really simple. Couldn't rewrite themselves, couldn't handle different operating systems. Just a minor inconvenience at first, really."
"But there were these laws they taught us in school," Caraco says.
Lenie remembers: "Explosive speciation. Brookes' Laws."
Brander holds up a finger. "Self-replicating information strings evolve as a sigmoid-difference function of replication error rate and generation time." Two fingers. "Evolving information strings are vulnerable to parasitism by competing strings with sigmoid-difference functions of lesser wavelength." Three. "Strings under pressure from parasites develop random substring-exchange protocols as a function of the wavelength ratio of the host and parasite sigmoid functions. Or something like that."
Caraco looks at Clarke, then back at Brander. "What?"
"Life evolves. Parasites evolve. Sex evolves to counter the parasites. Shuffles the genes so they have to shoot for a moving target. Everything else— species diversity, density-dependence, everything— it all follows from those three laws. You get a self-replicating string past a certain threshold, it's like a nuclear reaction."
"Life explodes," Clarke murmurs.
"Actually, information explodes. Organic life's just a really slow example. Happened a lot faster in the net."
Caraco shakes her head. "So what? You're saying you came down here to get away from bugs in the Internet?"
"I came down here to get away from entropy."
"I think," Clarke remarks, "You've got one of those language disorders. Dyslexia or something."
But Brander's going full tilt now. "You've heard the phrase Entropy increases? Everything falls apart eventually. You can postpone it for a while, but that takes energy. The more complicated the system, the more energy it needs to stay in one piece. Back before us everything was sun-powered, all the plants were like these little solar batteries that everything else could build on. Only now we've got this society that's on an exponential complexity curve, and the 'net's on the same curve only a lot steeper, right? So we're all balled up in this runaway machine, it's got so complicated it's always on the verge of flying apart, and the only thing that prevents that is all the energy we feed it."
"Bad news," Caraco says. Clarke doesn't think she's really getting the point, though.
"Good news, actually. They'll always need more energy, so they'll always need us. Even if they ever do get fusion figured out."
"Yeah, but—" Caraco's frowning all of a sudden. "If you say it's exponential, then it hits a wall eventually, right? The curve goes straight up and down."
Brander nods. "Yup."
"But that's infinity. There's no way you could keep things from falling apart, no matter how much power we pump out. It'd never be enough. Sooner or later—"
"Sooner," says Brander, "And that's why I'm staying right here. Like I said, it's safer."
Clarke looks from Brander to Caraco to Brander. "That is just so much bullshit."
"How so?" Brander doesn't seem offended.
"Because we'd have heard about it before now. Especially if it's based on some kind of physical law everyone knows about. They couldn't keep something like that under wraps, people would keep figuring it out for themselves."
"Oh, I think they have," Brander says mildly, smiling from naked brown eyes. "They'd just rather not think about it too much."
"Where do you get all this, Mike?" Clarke asks. "The library?"
He shakes his head. "Got a degree. Systems ecology, artificial life."
Clarke nods. "I always thought you were too smart to be a Rifter."
"Hey. A rifter's the smartest thing to be right now."
"So you chose to come down here? You actually applied?"
Brander frowns. "Sure. Didn't you?"
"I got a phone call. Offered me this new high-paying career, even said I could go back to my old job if it didn't work out."
"What was your old job?" Caraco wonders.
"Public relations. Mostly Honquarium franchises."
"You?"
"Maybe I wasn't very good at it. What about you?"
"Me?" Caraco bites her lip. "It was sort of a deal. One year with an option to renew, in lieu of prosecution." The corner of her mouth twitches. "Price of revenge. It was worth it."
Brander leans back in his chair, looks around Clarke. "What about you, Ken? Where'd you come—"
Clarke turns to follow Brander's stare. The sofa's empty. Down the corridor, Clarke can hear the shower door swinging shut.
Shit.
Still, it'll only be a short wait. Lubin's already been inside for four hours straight, he'll be gone in no time. And it's not as though there's any shortage of hot water.
"They should just shut the whole bloody net down for a while," Caraco is saying behind her. "Just pull the plug. Bugs wouldn't be able to handle that, I bet."
Brander laughs, comfortably blind. "Probably not. Of course, neither would the rest of us."
Carousel
She's been staring at the screen for two minutes and she still can't see what Nakata's going on about. Ridges and fissures run along the display like long green wrinkles. The Throat returns its usual echoes, crammed especially close to center screen because Nakata's got the range topped out. Occasionally a small blip appears between two of the larger ones: Lubin, lazing through an uneventful shift.
Other than that, nothing.
Lenie Clarke bites her lip. "I don't see any—"
"Just wait. I know I saw it."
Brander looks in from the lounge. "Saw what?"
"Alice says she's got something bearing three twenty."
Maybe it's Gerry, Clarke muses. But Nakata wouldn't raise the alarm over that.
"It was just— there!" Nakata jabs her finger at the display, vindicated.
Something hovers at the very edge of Beebe's vision. Distance and diffraction make it hazy, but to bounce any kind of signal at that range it's got to have a lot of metal. As Clarke watches, the contact fades.
"Not one of us," Clarke says.
"It's big." Brander squints at the panel; his eyecaps reflect through white slits.
"Muckraker?" Clarke suggests. "A sub, maybe?"
Brander grunts.
"There it is again," Nakata says.
"There they are," Brander amends. Two echoes tease the edge of the screen now, almost indiscernible. Two large, unidentified objects, now rising just barely clear of the bottom clutter, now sinking back down into mere noise.
Gone.
"Hey," Clarke says, pointing. There's a tremor rippling along the seismo display, setting off sensors in a wave from the northwest. Nakata taps commands, gets a retrodict bearing on the epicenter. Three-twenty.
"There is nothing scheduled to be out there," she says.
"Nothing anyone bothered to tell us about, anyway." Clarke rubs the bridge of her nose. "So who's coming?"
Brander nods. Nakata shakes her head. "I'll wait for Judy."
"Oh, that's right. She's going all the way today, isn't she? Surface and back?"
"Yes. She should be back in maybe an hour."
"Okay." Brander's on his way downstairs. Clarke reaches past Nakata and taps into an outside channel. "Hey Ken. Wake up."
* * *
I tell myself I know this place, she muses. I call this my home.
I don't know anything.
Brander cruises just below her, lit from underneath by a seabed on fire. The world ripples with color, blues and yellows and greens so pure it almost hurts to look at them. A dusting of violet stars coalesces and sweeps across the bottom; a school of shrimp, royally luminous.
"Has anyone been—" Clarke begins, but she feels wonder and surprise from Brander. It's obvious he hasn't seen this before. And Lubin— "It's news to me," Lubin answers aloud, as dark as ever.
"It's gorgeous," Brander says. "We've been down here how long, and we never even knew this place existed..."
Except Gerry, maybe. Every now and then Beebe's sonar picks someone up in this direction, when everyone else is accounted for. Not this far out, of course, but who knows how far afield Fischer— or whatever Fischer's become— wanders these days?
Brander drops away from his squid and coasts down, one arm outstretched. Clarke watches him scoop something off the bottom. A faint tingle clouds her mind for a moment— that indefinable sense of some other mind working nearby— and she's past him, her own squid towing her away.
"Hey Len," Brander buzzes after her. "Check this out."
She releases the throttle and arcs back. Brander's got a glassy jointed creature in the palm of his hand. It looks a bit like that shrimp Acton found, back when—
"Don't hurt it," she says.
Brander's mask stares back at her. "Why would I hurt it? I just wanted to you to see its eyes."
There's something about the way Brander's radiating. It's as though he's a little bit out of synch with himself, somehow, as though his brain is broadcasting on two bands at once. Clarke shakes her head. The sensation passes.
"It doesn't have eyes," she says, looking.
"Sure it does. Just not on its head."
He flips it over, uses thumb and forefinger to pin it upside-down against the palm of his other hand. Rows of limbs— legs, maybe, or gills— scramble uselessly for purchase. Between them, where joints meet body, a row of tiny black spheres stare back at Lenie Clarke.
"Weird," she says. "Eyes on its stomach."
She's feeling it again: a strange, almost prismatic sense of fractured awareness.
Brander lets the creature go. "Makes sense. Seeing as how all the light down here comes from below." Suddenly he looks at Clarke, radiating confusion. "Hey Len, you feeling okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine."
"You seem kind of—"
"Split," they say, simultaneously.
Realization. She doesn't know how much of it is hers and how much she's tuning in from Brander, but suddenly they both know.
"There's someone else here," Brander says, unnecessarily.
Clarke looks around. Lubin. She can't see him.
"Shit. You think that's it?" Brander's scanning the water too. "You think ol' Ken is finally starting to tune in?"
"I don't know."
"Who else could it be?"
"I don't know. Who else is out here?"
"Mike. Lenie." Lubin's voice, faintly, from somewhere ahead.
Clarke looks at Brander. Brander looks back.
"Right here," Brander calls, edging his volume up.
"I found it," Lubin says, invisibly distant.
Clarke launches off the bottom and grabs her squid. Brander's right beside her, sonar pistol out and clicking. "Got him," he says after a moment. "That way."
"What else?"
"Don't know. Big, anyhow. Three, four meters. Metallic."
Clarke tweaks the throttle. Brander follows. A riot of fractured color unspools below them.
"There."
Ahead of them, a mesh of green light sections the bottom into squares.
"What—"
"Lasers," Brander says. "I think."
Emerald threads float perfectly straight, a luminous profusion of right angles a few centimeters off the bottom. Beneath them, drab metal pipes run along the rock; tiny prisms erupt at regular intervals along their length, like spines. Each prism, an interstice; from each interstice, four beams of coherent light, and four, and four, a wire-frame checkerboard overlaid against bedrock.
They cruise two meters over the grid. "I'm not sure," Brander grates, "but I think it's all just one beam. Reflected back across itself."
"Mike—"
"I see it," he says.
At first it's just a fuzzy green column resolving out of the middle distance. Nearness brings clarity; the beams crisscrossing the ocean floor converge in a circle here, bend vertically up to form the luminous bars of a cylindrical cage. Within that cage a thick metal stalk rises out of the seabed. A great disk flowers at its top, spreads out like some industrial parasol. The spokes of laser light stream down from its perimeter and bounce endlessly away along the bottom.
"It's like a— a carousel," Clarke buzzes, remembering an old picture from an even older time. "Without horses..."
"Don't block those beams," Lubin buzzes. He's hanging off to one side, aiming a sonar pistol at the structure. "They're too weak to hurt you unless you get it in the eye, but you don't want to interfere with what they're doing."
"And that is?" Brander says.
Lubin doesn't answer.
What in the world— But Clarke's confusion is only partly directed at the mechanism before her. The rest dwells on a disorienting sense of alien cognition, very strong now, not her, not Brander, but somehow familiar.
Ken? That you?
"This isn't what we saw on sonar," Brander's saying. Clarke feels his confusion even as he talks over it. "Whatever we saw was moving around."
"Whatever we saw was probably planting this," Lubin buzzes. "It's long gone by now."
"But what is..." Brander's voice trails down to a mechanical croak.
No. It's not Lubin. She knows that now.
"It's thinking," she says. "It's alive."
Lubin's got another instrument out now. Clarke can't see the visual readout but its telltale tic tic ticking carries clearly through the water.
"It's radioactive," he says.
* * *
Alice Nakata's voice comes to them in the endless darkness between Beebe and the Land of the Carousel.
"—Judy—" it whispers, almost too faint to make out. "—scatter— lay—"
"Alice?" Clarke's got her vocoder cranked loud enough to hurt her own ears. "We can't hear you. Say again?"
"—just— no sign—"
Clarke can barely distinguish the words. Somehow, though, she can hear the fear in them.
A small tremor shudders past, raising clouds of mud and swamping Nakata's signal. Lubin throttles up his squid and pulls away. Clarke and Brander follow suit. Somewhere in the darkness ahead, Beebe draws closer in decibel fractions.
The next words they hear manage to cut through the noise: "Judy's gone!"
"Gone?" Brander echoes. "Gone where?"
"She just disappeared!" The voice hisses softly from every direction. "I was talking to her. She was up above the deep scattering layer, she was— I was telling her about the signal we saw and she said she saw something too and then she was gone..."
"Did you check sonar?" Lubin wants to know.
"Yes! Yes of course I checked the sonar!" Nakata's words are increasingly clear. "As soon as she was cut off I checked but I saw nothing for sure. There was something, maybe, but the scattering layer is very thick today, I could not be sure. And it's been fifteen minutes now and she still hasn't come back..."
"Sonar wouldn't pick her up anyway," Brander says softly. "Not through the DSL."
Lubin ignores him. "Listen, Alice. Did she say what she saw?"
"No. Just something, she said, and then I heard nothing more."
"Your sonar contact. How big?"
"I don't know! It was just there for a second, and the layer—"
"Could it have been a sub? Alice?"
"I don't know!" the voice cries, disembodied and anguished. "Why would it? Why would anyone?"
Nobody answers. The squids race on.
Ecdysis
They dump her out of the airlock, still caught in the tangleweb. She knows better than to fight under these conditions, but the situation's got to change pretty soon. She thinks they may have tried gassing her in the 'lock. Why else would they leave their headsets on after the lock had drained? What about that faint hiss that lasted a few seconds too long after blowdown? It's a pretty subtle cue, but you don't spend most of a year on the rift without learning what an airlock sounds like. There was something a bit off about that one.
No matter. You'd be surprised how much O2 can be electrolyzed from just the little bit of water left sloshing around in the ol' thoracic plumbing. Judy Caraco can hold her breath until the cows come home, whatever the fuck that means. And now, maybe they think their gas-chamber-that-blows-like-an-airlock has got her doped or unconscious or just very laid back. Maybe now they'll take her out of this fucking net.
She waits, limp. Sure enough there's a soft electrical cackle and the web falls away, all those sticky molecular tails polarizing flat like Velcro slicking down to cat fur. She stares out through glassy unblinking eyecaps— no cues they can read there— and counts three, with maybe more behind her.
They're zombies, or something.
Their skin looks rotten with jaundice. Fingernails are barely distinguishable from fingers. Faces are slightly distorted, blurred behind stretched, yellowish membrane. Waxy, dark ovals protrude through the film where their mouths should be.
Body condoms, Caraco realizes after a moment. What is this? Do they think I'm contagious?
And a moment later: Am I?
One of them reaches towards her holding something like a handgun.
She lashes out with one arm. She'd rather have kicked— more strength in the legs— but the refsuckers that brought her in didn't bother taking off her flippers. She connects: a nose, it feels like. A nose under latex. A satisfying crunch. Someone's found sudden cause to regret their own presumption.
There's a moment's shocked silence. Caraco uses it, flips onto her side and swings one flippered foot backwards, heel first, into the back of someone's knee. A woman cries out, a startled face topples past, a smear of red hair plastered against its cheek, and Judy Caraco is reaching down to get those big clown-foot flippers off in time to—
The tip of a shockprod hovers ten centimeters from her nose. It doesn't waver a millimeter. After a moment's indecision— how far can I push this, anyway?— Caraco stops moving.
"Get up," says the man with the prod. She can barely see, through the condom, shadows where his eyes should be.
Slowly, she takes off her fins and stands. She never had a chance, of course. She knew that all along. But they obviously want her alive for something, or they would never have bothered bringing her on board. And she, in turn, wants to make it clear that these fuckers are not going to intimidate her, no matter how many of them there are.
There's catharsis to be had in even a losing fight.
"Calm down," the man says— one of four, she sees now, including the one backing out of the compartment with a red stain spreading under his caul. "We're not trying to hurt you. But you know you shouldn't have tried to leave."
"Leave?" His clothes— all of their clothes— are uniform but not uniforms: loose-fitting white jumpsuits with an unmistakable look of disposability. No insignia. No name tags. Caraco turns her attention to the sub itself.
"Now we're going to get you out of that diveskin," the prodmaster continues. "And we're going to give you a quick medical workup. Nothing too intrusive, I assure you."
Not a large craft, judging from the curvature of the bulkhead. But fast. Caraco knew that from the moment it resolved out of the murk above her. She didn't see much, then, but she saw enough. This boat has wings. It could lap an orca on steroids.
"Who are you guys?" she asks.
"Your cooperation would make us all very grateful," Prodmaster says, as if she hasn't spoken, "And then maybe you can tell us exactly what you're trying to escape from out here in the middle of the Pacific."
"Escape?" Caraco snorts. "I was doing laps, you idiot."
"Uh huh." He returns his shockprod to a holster on his belt, leaves one hand resting lightly on the handle.
The gun is back, in different hands. It looks like a cross between a staple gun and a circuit-tester. The redhead pushes it firmly onto Caraco's shoulder. Caraco controls the urge to push back. A faint electrical tingle and her diveskin drops away in pieces. There go her arms. There go her legs. Her torso splits like a molting insect and drops away, short-circuited. She stands utterly 'skinned, surrounded by strangers. A naked mulatto woman looks back at her from a mirror on the bulkhead. Somehow, even stripped, she looks strong. Her eyes, brilliant white in that dark face, are cold and invulnerable. She smiles.
"That wasn't too bad, was it." There's a trained kindness to the other woman's voice. Almost like I didn't just dump her on the deck.
They lead her through a passageway to a table in a compact Med cubby. The redhead places a membrane-sheathed hand on Caraco's arm, her touch just slightly sticky; Caraco shrugs it off. There's only room for two others in here besides Caraco. Three squeeze in: the redhead, the prodmaster, and a shorter male, a bit chubby. Caraco looks at his face, but she can't see details under the condom.
"I hope you can see out of that thing better than I can see in," she says.
A soft background humming, too monotonous to register until now, rises subtly in pitch. There's a sense of sudden acceleration; Caraco staggers a bit, catches herself on the table.
"If you could just lie back, Ms. Caraco—"
They stretch her out on the table. The chubby male pastes a few leads at strategic points along her body and proceeds to take very small pieces out of her. "No, this isn't good. Not at all." Cantonese accent. "Poor epithelial turgor, you know diveskin's only an expression, you weren't supposed to live in it." The touch of his fingers on her skin: like the redhead's, thin sticky rubber. "Now look at you," he says. "Half your sebaceous glands are shut down, your vit K's low, you haven't been taking your UV either have you?"
Caraco doesn't answer. Mr. Canton continues to draw samples on her left. At the other side of the table, the redhead offers what she probably thinks is a reassuring smile, mostly hidden behind the oval mouthpiece.
Down at Caraco's feet, just in front of the hatchway, Prodmaster stands motionless.
"Yes, too much time sealed up in that diveskin," says Mr. Canton. "Did you ever take it off? Even outside?"
The redhead leans forward confidentially. "It's important, Judy. There could be health complications. We really should know if you ever opened up outside. For an emergency of some kind, maybe."
"If your 'skin was— punctured, for example." Mr. Canton affixes some kind of ocular device onto the membrane over his left eye, peers into Caraco's ear. "That scar on your leg, for instance. Quite large."
The redhead runs a finger along the crease in Caraco's calf. "Yeah. One of those big fish, I guess?"
Caraco stares up at her. "You guess."
"That must have been a deep wound." Mr. Canton again. "Is it?"
"Is it what?"
"A souvenir from one of those famous monsters?"
"You don't have my medical records?"
"It would be easier if you'd save us the trouble of looking them up," the redhead explained.
"You in a hurry?"
Prodmaster takes a step forward. "Not really. We can wait. But in the meantime, maybe we should get those eyecaps out."
"No." The thought scares her to the core. She's not sure why
"You don't need them any more, Ms. Caraco." A smile, a civilized baring of teeth. "You can relax. You're on your way home."
"Fuck that. They stay in." She sits up, feels the leads tearing off her flesh.
Suddenly her arms are pinned. Mr. Canton on one side, the redhead on the other.
"Fuck you." She lashes out with one foot. It goes low, catches Prodmasters' shock stick and flips it right out of the holster and onto the deck. Prodmaster jumps back out of the cubby, leaving his weapon behind. Suddenly Caraco's arms are free. Mr. Canton and the redhead are backing right off, squeezing along the walls of the compartment as though desperate to avoid physical contact—
As well you might be, she thinks, grinning. Don't try your cute little power games with me, assholes—
The oriental shakes his head, a mixture of sadness and disapproval. Judy Caraco's body hums, right down in the bones, and goes completely limp.
She falls back onto the neoprene padding, nerves singing in the table's neuroinduction field. She tries to move but all her motor synapses are shorted out. The machines in her chest twitch and stutter, listening for orders, interpreting static.
Her lung sighs flat under its own weight. She can't summon the strength to fill it up again.
They're tying her down. Wrists, ankles, chest, all strapped and cinched back against the table. She can't even blink.
The humming stops. Air rushes down her throat and fills her chest. It feels good to gasp again. "How's her heart?" Prodmaster.
"Good. Bit of defib at first, but okay now."
Mr. Canton bends over from the head of the table: maggot skin stretched across a human face. "It's okay, Ms. Caraco. We're just here to help you. Can you understand?"
She tries to talk. It's an effort. "g-g-g-g-G—O—."
"What?"
"Th-this is Scanlon's work. Right? S-Scanlon's fucking revenge."
Mr. Canton looks up at someone beyond Caraco's field of view.
"Industrial psych." The redhead's voice. "No one important."
He looks back down. "Ms. Caraco, I don't know what you're talking about. We're going to take your eyecaps out now. It won't do you any good to struggle. Just relax."
Hands hold her head in position. Caraco clamps her eyes shut; they pry the left one open. She stares into something like a big hypo with a disk on the end. It settles on her eyecap, bonds with a faint sucking sound.
It pulls away. Light floods in like acid.
She wrenches her head to one side and shuts her eye against the stinging. Even filtered through her closed eyelid the light burns, an orange fire bringing tears. Then they have her again, twisting her head forward, fumbling at her face—
"Turn the lights down, you idiot! She's photosensitive!"
The redhead?
"—Sorry. We kept them at half, I thought—"
The light dims. Her eyelids go black.
"Her irises haven't had to work for almost a year," the redhead snaps. "Give her a chance to adjust, for Christ's sake."
She's in charge here?
Footsteps. A rattle of instruments.
"Sorry about that, Ms. Caraco. We've lowered the lights now, is that better?"
Go away. Leave me alone.
"Ms. Caraco, I'm sorry, but we still have to remove your other cap."
She keeps her eyes squeezed shut. They pull the cap out of her face anyway. The straps loosen around her body, drop off. She hears them backing away.
"Ms. Caraco, we've turned the lights down. You can open your eyes."
The lights. I don't care about the fucking lights. She curls up on the table and buries her face in her hands.
"She doesn't look so tough now, does she?"
"Shut up, Burton. You can be a real asshole sometimes, you know that?"
The sound of an airtight hatch hissing shut. A dense, close silence settles on Caraco's eardrums.
An electrical hum. "Judy." the redhead's voice: not in person, this time. From a speaker somewhere. "We don't want this to be any worse than it has to be."
Caraco holds her knees tightly against her chest. She can feel the scars there, a raised web of old tissue from the time they cut her open. Eyes still shut, she runs her fingers along the ridges.
I want my eyes back.
But all she has now are these naked, fleshy things that anyone can see. She opens them the merest crack, peeks between her fingers. She's alone.
"We have to know some things, Judy. For your own good. We need to know how you found out."
"Found out what?" she cries, her face in hands. "I was just... exercising..."
"It's okay, Judy. There's no hurry. You can rest now, if you want. Oh, and there are clothes in the drawer on your right."
She shakes her head. She doesn't care about clothes, she's been naked in front of worse monsters than these. It's only skin.
I want my eyes.
Alibis
Dead air from the speaker.
"Did you copy that?" Brander says after five seconds have passed.
"Yes. Yes, of course." The line hums for a second. "It just comes as a bit of a shock, that's all. It's just— very bad news."
Clarke frowns, and says nothing.
"Maybe she got detoured by a current at the thermocline," the speaker suggests. "Or caught up in a Langmuir cell. Are you sure she isn't still above the scattering layer somewhere?"
"Of course we're s—" Nakata bursts out, and stops. Ken Lubin has just laid a cautionary hand on her shoulder.
There's a moment's silence.
"It is night up there," Brander says finally. The deep scattering layer rises with darkness, spreads thin near the surface until daylight chases it back down. "And we'd be able to get her voice channel even if sonar couldn't get through. But maybe we should go up there ourselves and look around."
"No. That won't be necessary," says the speaker. "In fact, it might be dangerous, until we know more about what happened to Caraco."
"So we don't even look for her?" Nakata looks at the others, outrage and astonishment mingling on her face. "She could be hurt, she could be—"
"Excuse me, Ms.—"
"Nakata! Alice Nakata! I can not believe—"
"Ms. Nakata, we are looking for her. We've already scrambled a search team to scour the surface. But you're in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. You simply don't have the resources to cover the necessary volume." A deep breath, carried flawlessly down four hundred kilometers of fiberop. "On the other hand, if Ms. Caraco is at all mobile, she'll most likely try and make it back to Beebe. If you want to search, your best odds are to look close to home."
Nakata looks helplessly around the room. Lubin stands expressionless; after a moment he puts one finger to his lips. Brander glances back and forth between them.
Lenie Clarke looks away.
"And you don't have any idea what might have happened to her?" the GA asks.
Brander grits his teeth. "I said, some kind of sonar spike. No detail. We thought you might be able to tell us something."
"I'm sorry. We don't know. It's just unfortunate that she wandered so far from Beebe. The ocean, it's— well, not always safe. It's even possible a squid got her. She was at the right depth."
Nakata's head is shaking. "No," she whispers.
"Be sure and call if anything turns up," the speaker says. "We're setting up the search plan now, so if there's nothing else—"
"There is," Lubin says.
"Oh?"
"There's an unmanned installation a few klicks northwest of us. Recently installed."
"Really?"
"You don't know about it?"
"Hang on, I'm punching it up." The speaker falls briefly silent. "Got it. My God, that's way out of your back yard. I'm surprised you even picked it up."
"What is it?" Lubin says. Clarke watches him, the hairs on her neck stirring.
"Seismology rig, it says here. OSU put it down there for some study on natural radioactives and tectonics. You should really keep away from it, it's a bit hot. Carrying some calibration isotopes."
"Unshielded?"
"Apparently."
"Doesn't that scramble the onboard?" Lubin wants to know.
Nakata stares at him, open-mouthed and angry. "Who cares! Judy's missing!"
She's got a point. Lubin barely even talks to the other rifters; coming from him, this interchange with the drybacks almost qualifies as babbling.
"Says here it's an optical processor," the speaker says after a brief pause. "Radiation doesn't bother it. But I think Al— Ms. Nakata is right, your first priority—"
Lubin reaches past Brander and kills the connection.
"Hey," Brander says sharply.
Nakata gives Lubin a blank angry stare and disappears from the hatchway. Clarke hears her retreat into her cubby and dog the hatch. Brander looks up at Lubin. "Maybe it hasn't dawned on you, Ken, but Judy just might be dead. We're kind of upset about that. Alice especially."
Lubin nods, expressionless.
"So I've got to wonder why you chose this moment to grill the GA about the technical specs on a fucking seismic rig."
"That's not what it is," Lubin says.
"Yeah?" Brander rises, twisting up out of the console chair. "And just what—"
"Mike," says Clarke.
"What?"
She shakes her head. "They said an optical CPU."
"So the fuck wh—" Brander stops in mid-epithet. Anger drains from his face.
"Not a gel," Clarke says. "A chip. That's what they're saying."
"But why lie to us?" Brander asks, "when we can just go out there and feel..."
"They don't know we can do that, remember?" She lets out a little smile, like a secret shared between friends. "They don't know anything about us. All they've got is their files."
"Not any more," Brander reminds her. "Now they've got Judy."
"They've got us too," Lubin adds. "Quarantined."
* * *
"Alice. It's me."
A soft voice through hard metal: "Come..."
Clarke pulls the hatch open, steps through.
Alice Nakata looks up from her pallet as the hatch sighs shut. Almond eyes, dark and startling, reflect in the dimmed light. One hand goes to her face: "Oh. Excuse me, I'll..." She fumbles at the bedhead compartment, where her eyecaps float in plastic vials.
"Hey. No problem." Clarke reaches out, stops just short of touching Nakata's arm. "I like your eyes, I've always— well..."
"I should not be sulking in here anyway," Nakata says, rising. "I'm going outside."
"Alice—"
"I am not going to just let her disappear out there. Are you coming?"
Clarke sighs. "Alice, the GA's right. There's just too much volume. If she's still out there, she knows where we are."
"If? Where else would she be?"
Clarke looks at the deck, reviewing possibilities.
"I— I think the drybacks took her," she says at last. "I think they'll take us, too, if we go after her."
Nakata stares at Clarke with disquieting human eyes. "Why? Why would they do that?"
"I don't know."
Nakata sags back on the pallet. Clarke sits down beside her.
Neither woman speaks for a while.
"I'm sorry," Clarke says at last. She doesn't know what else to say. "We all are."
Alice Nakata stares at the floor. Her eyes are bright, but not overflowing. "Not all," she whispers. "Ken seemed more interested in—"
"Ken had his reasons. They're lying to us, Alice."
"They always lied to us," Nakata says softly, not looking up. And then: "I should have been there."
"Why?"
"I don't know. If there'd been two of us, maybe..."
"Then we'd have lost both of you."
"You don't know that. Maybe it wasn't the drybacks at all, maybe she just ran into something... living."
Clarke doesn't speak. She's heard the same stories Nakata has. Confirmed reports of people getting eaten by Archie date back over a hundred years. Not many, of course; humans and giant squid don't run into each other that often. Even rifters swim too deep for such encounters.
As a general rule.
"That's why I stopped going up with her, did you know that?" Nakata shakes her head, remembering. "We ran into something alive, up midwater. It was horrible. Some kind of jellyfish, I think. It pulsed, and it had these thin watery tentacles that stretched out of sight, just hanging there in the water. And it had all these— these stomachs. Like fat squirming slugs. And each one had its own mouth, and they were all opening and closing..."
Clarke screws up her face. "Sounds lovely."
"I didn't even see it. It was quite translucent, and I was not looking and I bumped into it and it started ejecting pieces of itself. The main body just went completely dark and pulled into itself and pulsed away and all these shed stomachs and mouths and tentacles were left behind, they were all glowing and writhing as though they were in pain..."
"I think I'd stop going up there too, after that."
"The strange thing was, I envied it in a way." Nakata's eyes brim, spill over, but her voice doesn't change. "It must be nice to just be able to— to cut yourself off from the parts that give you away."
Clarke smiles, imagining. "Yes." She realizes, suddenly, that only a few centimeters separate her from Alice Nakata. They're almost touching.
How long have I been sitting here? she wonders. She shifts on the pallet, pulls away out of habit.
"Judy didn't see it that way," Nakata's saying. "She felt sorry for the pieces. I think she was almost angry with the main body, do you believe it? She said it was this blind stupid blob, she said— what did she say— 'fucking typical bureaucracy, first sign of trouble it sacrifices the very parts that keep it fed.' That's what she said."
Clarke smiles. "That sounds like Judy."
"She never takes shit from anyone," Nakata says. "She always fights back. I like that about her, I could never do that. When things get bad I just..." She glances at the little black device stuck on the wall beside her pillow. "I dream."
Clarke nods and says nothing. She can't remember Alice Nakata ever being so talkative. "It's so much better than VR, you have much more control. In VR you are stuck with someone else's dreams."
"So I hear."
"You have never tried it?" Nakata asks.
"Lucid dreaming? A couple of times. I never got into it."
"No?"
Clarke shrugs. "My dreams don't have much... detail." Or too much, sometimes. She nods at Nakata's machine. "Those things wake me up just enough to notice how vague everything is. Or sometimes, when there is any detail it's something really stupid. Worms crawling through your skin or something."
"But you can control that. That is the whole point. You can change it."
In your dreams, maybe. "But you have to see it first. Just sort of spoiled the effect for me, I guess. And mostly there were those big, vague gaps."
"Ah." A flicker of a smile. "For myself that is not a problem. The world is pretty vague to me even when I am awake."
"Well." Clarke smiles back, tentatively. "Whatever works."
More silence.
"I just wish I knew," Nakata says finally.
"I know."
"You knew what happened to Karl. It was bad, but you knew."
"Yes."
Nakata glances down. Clarke follows, notices that her own hands have somehow clasped around Nakata's. She supposes it's a gesture of support. It feels okay. She squeezes, gently.
Nakata looks back up. Her dark naked eyes still startle, somehow.
"Lenie, she did not mind me. I pulled away, and I dreamed, and sometimes I just went crazy and she put up with all of it. She understoo— she understands."
"We're rifters, Alice." Clarke hesitates, decides to risk it. "We all understand."
"Except Ken."
"You know, I think maybe Ken understands more than we give him credit for. I don't think he meant to be insensitive before. He's on our side."
"He is very strange. He is not here for the same reason we are."
"And what reason is that?" Clarke asks.
"They put us here because this is where we belong," Nakata says, almost whispering. "With Ken, I think—they just didn't dare put him anywhere else."
* * *
Brander's on his way downstairs when she gets back to the lounge. "How's Alice?"
"Dreaming," Clarke says. "She's okay."
"None of us are okay," Brander says. "Borrowed time all around, you ask me."
She grunts. "Where's Ken?"
"He left. He's never coming back."
"What?"
"He went over. Like Fischer."
"Bullshit. Ken's not like Fischer. He's the farthest thing from Fischer."
"We know that." Brander jerks a thumb at the ceiling. "Theydon't. He went over. That's the story he wants us to sell upstairs, anyway."
"Why?"
"You think that motherfucker told me? I agreed to play along for now, but I don't mind telling you I'm getting a bit tired of his bullshit." Brander climbs down a rung, looks back. "I'm heading back out myself. Gonna check out the carousel. I think some serious observations are in order."
"Want some company?"
Brander shrugs. "Sure."
"Actually," Clarke remarks, "just company doesn't cut it any more, does it? Maybe we'd better be, what's the word—"
"Allies," Brander says.
She nods. "Allies."
