Dryback

 

 

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Jumpstart

 

 

 

He dreamed of water.

 

He always dreamed of water. He dreamed the smell of dead fish in rotten nets, and rainbow puddles of gasoline shimmering off the Steveston jetty, and a home so close to the shoreline you could barely get insurance. He dreamed of a time when waterfront meant something, even the muddy brown stretch where the Fraser hemorrhaged into the Strait of Georgia. His mother was standing over him, beaming a vital ecological resource, Yves. A staging ground for migrating birds. A filter for the whole world. And little Yves Scanlon smiled back, proud that he alone of all his friends— well, not friends exactly, but maybe they would be now— would grow up appreciating nature first-hand, right here in his new back yard. One and a half meters above the high-tide line.

 

And then, as usual, the real world kicked in the doors and electrocuted his mother in mid-smile.

 

Sometimes he could postpone the inevitable. Sometimes he could fight the jolt from his bedside dreamer, keep it from dragging him back for just a few more seconds. Thirty years of random images would flash across his mind in those moments; falling forests, bloating deserts, ultraviolet fingers reaching ever deeper into barren seas. Oceans creeping up shorelines. Vital ecological resources turning into squatting camps for refugees. Squatting camps turning into intertidal zones.

 

And Yves Scanlon was awake again, sweat-soaked, teeth clenched, jump-started.

 

God, no. I'm back.

 

The real world.

 

Three and a half hours. Only three and a half hours...

 

It was all the dreamer would allow him. Sleep stages one through four got ten minutes each. REM got thirty, in deference to the incompressibility of the dream state. A seventy-minute cycle, run three times nightly.

 

You could freelance. Everyone else does.

 

Freelancers chose their own hours. Employees— those few that remained— got their hours chosen for them. Yves Scanlon was an employee. He frequently reminded himself of the advantages: you didn't have to fight and scramble for a new contract every six months. You had stability, of a sort. If you performed. If you kept on performing. Which meant, of course, that Yves Scanlon couldn't afford the nightly nine-and-a-half-hours that was optimal for his species.

 

Servitude for security, then. No day passed when he didn't hate the choice he'd made. Some day, perhaps, he'd even hate it more than he feared the alternative.

 

"Seventeen items on high priority," said the workstation as his feet hit the floor. "Four broadcast, twelve net, one phone. Broadcast and phone items are clean. Net items were disinfected on entry, with a forty percent chance that encrypted bugs slipped through."

 

"Up the disinfectant," Scanlon said.

 

"That will destroy any encrypted bugs, but might also destroy up to five percent of the legitimate data. I could just dump the risky files."

 

"Disinfect them. What's on midlist?"

 

"Eight hundred and sixty three items. Three hundred twenty seven broad—"

 

"Dump it all." Scanlon headed for the bathroom, stopped. "Wait a minute. Play the phone call."

 

"This is Patricia Rowan," the station said in a cold, clipped voice. "We may be encountering some personnel problems with the deep-sea geothermal program. I'd like to discuss them with you. I'll have your return call routed direct."

 

Shit. Rowan was one of the top corpses on the west coast. She'd barely even acknowledged him since he'd been hired on at the GA. "Is there a priority on that call?" Scanlon asked.

 

"Important but not urgent," the workstation replied

 

He could have breakfast first, maybe go through his mail. He could ignore all those reflexes urging him to drop everything and jump like a trained seal to immediate attention. They needed him for something. About time. About goddamned time.

 

"I'm taking a shower," he told the workstation, hesitantly defiant. "Don't bother me until I come out."

 

His reflexes, though, didn't like it at all.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

"—that 'curing' victims of multiple personality disorder is actually tantamount to serial murder. The issue has remained controversial in the wake of recent findings that the human brain can potentially contain up to one hundred forty fully-sentient personalities without significant sensory/motor impairment. The tribunal will also consider whether encouraging a multiple personality to reintegrate voluntarily — again, a traditionally therapeutic act — should be redefined as assisted suicide. Crosslinked to next item under cognition and legal."

 

The workstation fell silent.

 

Rowan wants to see me. The VP in charge of the GA's whole Northwest franchise wants to see me. Me.

 

He was thinking into sudden silence. Scanlon realised the workstation had stopped talking. "Next," he said.

 

"Fundamentalist acquitted of murder in the destruction of a smart gel," the station recited. "Tagged to—"

 

Didn't she say I'd be working with her, though? Wasn't that the deal when I first came on?

 

"—AI, cognition, and legal."

 

Yeah. That's what they said. Ten years ago.

 

"Ahh— summary, nontechnical," Scanlon told the machine.

 

"Victim was a smart gel on temporary loan to the Ontario Science Center as part of a public exhibit on artificial intelligence. Accused admitted to the act, stating that neuron cultures" —the workstation changed voices, neatly inserting a sound bite— "desecrate the human soul.

 

"Expert defense witnesses, including a smart gel online from Rutgers, testified that neuron cultures lack the primitive midbrain structures necessary to experience pain, fear, or a desire for self-preservation. Defense argued that the concept of a 'right' is intended to protect individuals from unwarranted suffering. Since smart gels are incapable of physical or mental distress of any sort, they have no rights to protect regardless of their level of self-awareness. This reasoning was eloquently summarized during the Defense's closing statement: 'Gels themselves don't care whether they live or die. Why should we?' The verdict is under appeal. Crosslinked to next item under AI and World News."

 

Scanlon swallowed a mouthful of powdered albumin. "List expert defense witnesses, names only."

 

"Phillip Quan. Lily Kozlowski. David Childs—"

 

"Stop." Lily Kozlowski. He knew her, from back at UCLA. An expert witness. Shit. Maybe I should have kissed a few more asses in grad school...

 

Scanlon snorted. "Next."

 

"Net infections down fifteen percent."

 

Problems with the Rifters, she said. I wonder... "Summary, nontechnical."

 

"Viral infections on the Internet have declined fifteen percent in the past six months, due to the ongoing installation of smart gels at critical nodes along the net's backbone. Digital infections find it nearly impossible to infect smart gels, each of which has a unique and flexible system architecture. In light of these most recent results, some experts are predicting a safe return to casual e-mail by the end of—"

 

"Ah, fuck. Cancel."

 

Come on, Yves. You've been waiting for years for those idiots to recognise your abilities. Maybe this is it. Don't blow it by looking too eager.

 

"Waiting," said the station.

 

Only what if she doesn't wait? What if she gets impatient and goes for someone else? What if—

 

"Tag the last phone call and reply." Scanlon stared at the dregs of his breakfast while the connection went up.

 

"Admin," said a voice that sounded real.

 

"Yves Scanlon for Patricia Rowan."

 

"Dr. Rowan is occupied. Her simulator is expecting your call. This conversation is being monitored for quality control purposes." A click, and another voice that sounded real: "Hello, Dr. Scanlon."

 

His Master's voice.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Muckraker

 

 

 

It rumbles up the slope from the abyssal plain, bouncing an echo that registers five hundred meters outside Beebe's official sonar range. It's moving at almost ten meters a second, not remarkable for a submarine but this thing's so close to the bottom it has to be running on treads. Six hundred meters out it crosses a small spreading zone and slews to a stop.

 

"What is it?" wonders Lenie Clarke.

 

Alice Nakata fiddles with the focus. The unknown has started up again at a crawl, edging along the length of the spread at less than one meter a second.

 

"It's feeding," Nakata says. "Polymetallic sulfides, perhaps."

 

Clarke considers. "I want to check it out."

 

"Yes. Shall I notify the GA?"

 

"Why?"

 

"It is probably foreign. It might not be legal."

 

Clarke looks at the other woman.

 

"There are fines for unauthorised incursions into territorial waters," Nakata says.

 

"Alice, really." Clarke shakes her head. "Who cares?"

 

Lubin is off the scope, probably sleeping on the bottom somewhere. They leave him a note. Brander and Caraco are out replacing the bearings on number six; a tremor cracked the casing last shift, jammed two thousand kilograms of mud and grit into the works. Still, the other generators are more than able to take up the slack. Brander and Caraco grab their squids and join the parade.

 

"We should keep our lights down," Nakata buzzes as they leave the Throat. "And stay very close to the bottom. It may frighten easily."

 

They follow the bearing, their lights dimmed to embers, through darkness almost impenetrable even to rifter eyes. Caraco pulls up beside Clarke: "I'm heading into the wild blue yonder after this. Wanna come?"

 

A shiver of second-hand revulsion tickles Clarke's insides; from Nakata, of course. Nakata used to join Caraco on her daily swim up Beebe's transponder line, until about two weeks ago. Something happened up at the deep scattering layer — nothing dangerous, apparently, but it left Alice absolutely cold at the prospect of going anywhere near the surface. Caraco's been pestering the others to pace her ever since.

 

Clarke shakes her head. "Didn't you get enough of a workout slurping all that shit out of number six?"

 

Caraco shrugs. "Different muscle groups."

 

"How far do you go now?"

 

"Up to a thousand. Give me another ten shifts and I'll be lapping all the way to the surface."

 

A sound has been rising around them, so gradually that Clarke can't pin down the moment she first noticed it; a grumbling, mechanical noise, the distant sound of rocks being pulverized between great molars.

 

Flickers of nervousness flash back and forth in the group. Clarke tries to rein herself in. She knows what's coming, they all do, it's not nearly as dangerous as the risks they face every shift. It's not dangerous at all—

 

—unless it's got defenses we don't know about—

 

—but that sound, the sheer size of this thing on the scope— We're all scared. We know there's nothing to be afraid of, but all we can hear are teeth gnashing in the darkness...

 

It's bad enough dealing with her own hardwired apprehension. It doesn't help to be tuned in to everyone else's.

 

A faint pulse of surprise from Brander, in the lead. Then from Nakata, next in line, a split-second before Clarke herself feels a slap of sluggish turbulence. Caraco, forewarned, barely radiates anything when the plume washes over her.

 

The darkness has become fractionally more absolute, the water itself more viscous. They hold station in a stream that's half mud, half seawater.

 

"Exhaust wake," Brander vibrates. He has to raise his voice slightly to be heard over the sound of feeding machinery.

 

They turn and follow the trail upstream, keeping to the plume's edge more by touch than sight. The ambient grumble swells to full-blown cacophony, resolves into a dozen different voices; pile-drivers, muffled explosions, the sounds of cement mixers. Clarke can barely think above the waterborne racket, or the rising apprehension in four separate minds, and suddenly it's right there, just for a moment, a great segmented tread climbing up around a gear wheel two stories high, rolling away in the murk.

 

"Jesus. It's fucking huge." Brander, his vocoder cranked.

 

They move together, aiming their squids high and cruising up at an angle. Clarke tastes the thrill from three other sets of adrenals, adds her own and sends it back, a vicarious feedback loop. With their lamps on minimum the viz can't be more than three meters; even in front of Clarke's face the world is barely more than shadows on shadows, dimly lit by headlights bobbing to either side.

 

The top of the tread slides below them for a moment, a jointed moving road several meters across. Then a plain of jumbled metal shapes, fading into view barely ahead, fading out again almost instantly; exhaust ports, sonar domes, flow-meter ducts. The din fades a little as they move towards the center of the hull.

 

Most of the protuberances are smoothed back into hydrodynamic teardrops. Close up, though, there's no shortage of handholds. Caraco's smoldering headlight is the first to settle down onto the machine; her squid paces along above her. Clarke sets her own squid to heel and joins the others on the hull. So far there's been no obvious reaction to their presence.

 

They huddle together, heads close to converse above the ambient noise.

 

"Where's it from?" Brander wonders.

 

"Probably Korea." Nakata buzzes back. "I did not see any registry markings, but it would take a long time to check the whole hull."

 

Caraco: "Bet you wouldn't find anything anyway. If they were going to risk sneaking it this far into foreign territory they wouldn't be stupid enough to leave a return address."

 

The rumbling metal landscape pulls them along. A couple of meters up, barely visible, their riderless squids trail patiently behind.

 

"Does it know we're here?" asks Clarke.

 

Alice shakes her head. "It kicks up a lot of shit from the bottom so it ignores close contacts. Bright light might scare it, though. It is trespassing. It might associate light with discovery."

 

"Really." Brander lets go for a moment, drifts back a few meters before catching another handhold. "Hey Judy, want to go exploring?"

 

Caraco's vocoder emits static; Lenie feels the other woman's laughter from inside. Caraco and Brander leap away into the murk like black gremlins.

 

"It moved very fast," Nakata says. There's a sudden small blot of insecurity radiating from inside her, but she talks over it. "When it first showed up on sonar. It was moving way too fast. It wasn't safe."

 

"Safe?" Lenie frowns to herself. "It's a machine, right? No one inside."

 

Nakata shakes her head. "Too fast for a machine in complex terrain. A person could do it."

 

"Come on, Alice. These things are robots. Besides, if there was anyone inside we'd be able to feel them, right? You feel anyone other than the four of us?" Nakata tends to be a bit more sensitive than the others in matters of fine-tuning.

 

"I— don't think so," Nakata says, but Clarke senses uncertainty. "Maybe I — it's a big machine, Lenie. Maybe the pilot is just too far aw—"

 

Brander and Caraco are plotting something. They're both out of sight — even their squids have left to keep them in range — but they're easily close enough for Clarke to sense a rising anticipation. She and Nakata exchange looks.

 

"We better see what they're up to," Clarke says. The two of them head off across the muckraker.

 

A few moments later, Brander and Caraco materialize in front of them. They're crouched to either side of a metal dome about thirty centimeters across. Several dark fisheyes stare out from its surface.

 

"Cameras?" Clarke asks.

 

"Nope," Caraco says.

 

"Photocells," Brander adds.

 

Lenie feels the beat before a punchline. "Are you sure this is a good—"

 

"Let there be light!" cries Judy Caraco. Beams stab out from her headlamp and Brander's, bathing the fisheyes at full intensity.

 

The muckraker stops dead. Inertia pushes Clarke forward; she grabs and regains her balance, unexpected silence ringing in her ears. In the wake of that incessant noise, she feels almost deaf.

 

"Whoa," Brander buzzes into the stillness. Something ticks through the hull once, twice, three times.

 

The world lurches back into motion. The landscape rotates around them, throws them together in a tangle of limbs. By the time they've sorted themselves out they're accelerating. The muckraker is grumbling again, but with a different voice; no lazy munching on polymetallics now, just a straight beeline for international waters. Within seconds Clarke is hanging on for dear life.

 

"Yee-haw!" Caraco shouts.

 

"Bright light might scare it?" Brander calls from somewhere behind. "I would say so!"

 

Strong feelings on all sides. Lenie Clarke tightens her grip and tries to sort out which ones are hers. Exultation spiked with primal, giddy fear; that's Brander and Caraco. Alice Nakata's excited almost despite herself, but with more worry in the mix; and here, buried somewhere down deep, almost a sense of — she can't tell, really.

 

Discontent? Unhappiness?

 

Not really.

 

Is that me? But that doesn't feel right either.

 

Bright light pins Clarke's shadow to the hull, disappears an instant later. She looks back; Brander's up above her somehow, swinging back and forth on a line trailing up into the water — could've sworn that wasn't there before — his beam waving around like a demented lighthouse. Ribbons of muddy water stream past just above the deck, their edges writhing in textbook illustrations of turbulent flow.

 

Caraco pushes off the hull and flies back up into the water. Her silhouette vanishes into the murk, but her headlamp comes to rest and starts dipping around just behind Brander's. Clarke looks over at Nakata, still plastered against the hull. Nakata's feeling a little sick now, and even more worried about something...

 

"It is not happy!" Nakata shouts.

 

"Hey; come on, groundhogs!" Caraco's voice buzzes faintly. "Fly!"

 

Discontent. Something not expected.

 

Who is that? Clark wonders.

 

"Come on!" Caraco calls again.

 

What the hell. Can't hang on much longer anyway. Clarke lets go, pushes off; the top of the muckraker races on beneath. Heavy water drags the momentum from her. She kicks for altitude, feels sudden expectation from behind — and in the next second something slams against her back, pushing her forward again. Implants lurch against her ribcage.

 

"Jesus Christ!" Brander buzzes in her ear. "Get a grip, Lenie!"

 

He's caught her on his way past. Clarke reaches out and grabs the line that he and Caraco are attached to. It's only as thick as her finger, and too slippery to hang on to. She looks back and sees that the other two have looped it around their chests and under their arms, leaving their hands more or less free. She tries the same trick, drag arching her back, while Caraco calls out to Nakata.

 

Nakata is not eager to let go. They can feel that, even though they can't see her. Brander angles back and forth, tacking his body like a rudder; the three of them swing in a grand, barely controlled arc, knotted into the middle of their tether. "Come on, Alice! Join the human kite! We'll catch you!"

 

And Nakata's coming, she's coming, but she's doing it her own way. She's climbed sideways against the current, hand over hand, until she found the place where the line joins the deck. Now she's letting drag push her back along the filament to them.

 

Clarke has finally secured herself in a loop. Speed digs the line into her flesh; it's already starting to hurt. She doesn't feel much like a human kite. Bait on a hook is more like it. She twists around to Brander, points at the line: "What is this, anyway?"

 

"VLF antennae. Unspooled when we scared it. Probably crying for help."

 

"It won't get any, will it?"

 

"Not on this side of the ocean. It's probably just making a last call so its owners'll know what happened. Sort of a suicide note."

 

Caraco, entangled a bit further back, twists around at that. "Suicide? You don't suppose these things self-destruct?"

 

Sudden concern settles over the human kite. Alice Nakata tumbles into them.

 

"Maybe we ought to let it go," Clarke says.

 

Nakata nods emphatically. "It is not happy." Her disquiet radiates through the others like a warning light.

 

It takes a few moments to disentangle themselves from the antennae. It whips past and away, trailing a small float like a traffic cone. Clarke tumbles, lets the water brake her. Machine roars recede into grumbles, into mere tremors.

 

The rifters hang in empty midwater, silence on all sides.

 

Caraco points a sonar pistol straight down, fires. "Jeez. We're almost thirty meters off the bottom."

 

"We lose the squids?" Brander says. "That thing was really moving."

 

Caraco raises her pistol, takes a few more readings. "Got 'em. They're not all that far off, actually, I — hey."

 

"What?"

 

"There's five of them. Closing fast."

 

"Ken?"

 

"Uh huh."

 

"Well. He's saving us a swim, anyway," Brander says.

 

"Did anyone—"

 

They turn. Alice Nakata starts again: "Did anyone else feel it?"

 

"Feel what?" Brander begins, but Clarke is nodding.

 

"Judy?" Nakata says.

 

Caraco radiates reluctance. "I — there was something, maybe. Didn't get a good fix on it. I assumed it was one of you guys."

 

"What," Brander says. "The muckraker? I thought—"

 

A black cipher rises in their midst. His squid cruises straight up from underneath like a slow missile. It hovers overhead when he releases it. A couple of meters below, four other squids bob restlessly at station-keeping, noses up.

 

"You lost these," Lubin buzzes.

 

"Thanks," Brander replies.

 

Clarke concentrates, tries to tune Lubin in. She's only going through the motions, of course. He's dark to them. He's always been dark, fine-tuning didn't change him a bit. Nobody knows why.

 

"So what's going on?" he asks. "Your note said something about a muckraker."

 

"It got away from us," Caraco says.

 

"It was not happy," Nakata repeats.

 

"Yeah?"

 

"Alice got some sort of feeling off of it," Caraco says. "Lenie and me too, sort of."

 

"Muckrakers are unmanned," Lubin remarks.

 

"Not a man," Nakata says. "Not a person. But—" She trails off.

 

"I felt it," Clarke says. "It was alive."

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Lenie Clarke lies on her bunk, alone again. Really alone. She can remember a time, not so long ago, when she reveled in this kind of isolation. Who would have thought that she'd miss feelings?

 

Even if they are someone else's.

 

And yet it's true. Every time Beebe takes her in, some vital part of her falls away like a half-remembered dream. The airlock clears, her body reinflates, and her awareness turns flat and muddy. The others just vanish. It's strange; she can see them, hear them the way she always could. But if they don't move and she closes her eyes, she's got no way of knowing they're here.

 

Now her only company is herself. Just one set of signals to process in here. Nothing jamming her.

 

Shit.

 

Blind, or naked. That was the choice. It nearly killed her. My own damn fault, of course. I was just asking for it.

 

She was, too. She could have just left everything the way it was, quietly deleted Acton's file before anyone else found out about it. But there'd been this debt. Something owed to the ghost of the Thing Outside, the thing that didn't snarl or blame or lash out, the thing that, finally, took the Thing Inside away where it couldn't hurt her any more. Part of Lenie Clarke still hates Acton for that, on some sick level where conditioned reflex runs the show; but even down there, she thinks maybe he did it for her. Like it or not, she owed him.

 

So she paid up. She called the others inside and played the file. She told them what he'd said, that last time, and she didn't ask them to turn their backs on his offering even though she desperately hoped they would. If she had asked, perhaps, they might have listened. But one by one, they split themselves open and made the changes. Mike Brander, out of curiosity. Judy Caraco, out of skepticism. Alice Nakata, afraid of being left behind. Ken Lubin, unsuccessfully, for reasons he kept to himself.

 

She clenches her eyelids, remembers rules changing overnight. Careful appearances suddenly meant nothing; blank eyes and ninja masks were just cosmetic affectations, useless as armor. How are you feeling, Lenie Clarke? Horny, bored, upset? So easy to tell, though your eyes are hidden behind those corneal opacities. You could be terrified. You could be pissing in your 'skin and everyone would know.

 

Why did you tell them? Why did you tell them? Why did you tell them?

 

Outside, she watched the others change. They moved around her without speaking, one connecting smoothly with another to lend a hand or a piece of equipment. When she needed something from one of them, it was there before she could speak. When they needed something from her they had to ask aloud, and the choreography would falter. She felt like the token cripple in a dance troupe. She wondered how much of her they could see, and was afraid to ask.

 

Inside, sometimes, she would try. It was safer there; the thread that connected the rest of them fell apart in atmosphere, put everyone back on equal terms. Brander spoke of a heightened awareness of the presence of others; Caraco compared it to body language. "Just sort of makes up for the eyecaps," she said, apparently expecting Clarke to feel reassured at that.

 

But it was Alice Nakata who finally remarked, almost offhandedly, that other people's feelings could be... distracting...

 

Lenie Clarke's been tuned for a while now. It's not so bad. No precise telepathic insights, no sudden betrayals. It's more like the sensation from a ghost limb, the ancestral memory of a tail you can almost feel behind you. And Clarke knows now that Nakata was right. Outside, the feelings of the others trickle into her, masking, diluting. Sometimes she can even forget she has any of her own.

 

There's something else, too, a familiar core in each of them, dark and writhing and angry. That doesn't surprise her. They don't even talk about it. Might as well discuss the fact that they all have five fingers on each hand.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Brander's busy at the library; Clarke can hear Nakata in Comm, on the phone.

 

"According to this," Brander says, "They've started putting smart gels in muckrakers."

 

"Mmm?"

 

"It's a pretty old file," he admits. "It'd be nice if the GA would download a bit more often, infections or no infections. I mean, we are single-handedly keeping the western world safe from brownouts, it wouldn't kill them to—"

 

"Gels," Clarke prompts.

 

"Right. Well, they've always needed neural nets in those things, you know, they wander around some pretty hairy topography — you hear about those two muckrakers that got caught up in the Aleutian Trench? — anyway, navigation through complex environments generally needs a net of some sort. Usually it's gallium-arsenide based, but even those don't come close to matching a human brain for spatial stuff. They still just crawled when it came to figuring seamounts, that sort of thing. So they've started replacing them with smart gels."

 

Clarke grunts. "Alice said it was moving too fast for a machine."

 

"Probably was. And smart gels are made out of real neurons, so I guess we tune in to them the same way we tune in to each other. At least, judging by what you guys felt — Alice said it wasn't happy."

 

"It wasn't." Clarke frowns. "It wasn't unhappy either, actually, it wasn't really an emotion at all, it was just — well, surprised, I guess. Like, like a sense of — divergence. From what was expected."

 

"Hell, I did feel that," Brander says. "I thought it was me."

 

Nakata emerges from Comm. "Still no word on Karl's replacement. They say the new recruits still are not through training. Cutbacks, they say."

 

By now it's a running joke. The GA's new recruits have to be the slowest learners since the eradication of Down's Syndrome. Almost four months now and Acton's replacement still hasn't materialized.

 

Brander waves one hand dismissively. "We've been doing okay with five." He shuts down the library and stretches. "Anyone seen Ken, by the way?"

 

"He is just outside," Nakata says. "Why?"

 

"I'm with him next shift; got to set up a time. His rhythm's been a bit wonky the past couple of days."

 

"How far out is he?" Clarke asks suddenly.

 

Nakata shrugs. "Maybe ten meters, when I last checked."

 

He's in range. There are limits to fine-tuning. You can't feel someone in Beebe from as far as the Throat, for example. But ten meters, easy.

 

"He's usually further out, isn't he?" Clarke speaks softly, as if afraid of being overheard. "Almost off the scope, most times. Working on that weird contraption of his."

 

They don't know why they can't tune Lubin in. He says they're all dark to him too. Once, about a month ago, Brander suggested doing an exploratory NMR; Lubin said he'd rather not. He sounded pleasant enough, but there was something about his tone and Brander hasn't brought the subject up since.

 

Now Brander points his eyecaps at Clarke, a half-smile on his face. "I dunno, Len. Do you want to call him a liar to his face?"

 

She doesn't answer.

 

"Oh." Nakata breaks the silence before it can get too awkward. "There is something else. Until our replacement arrives they are sending someone down for, they called it routine evaluation. That doctor, the one who—you know—"

 

"Scanlon." Lenie is careful not to spit out the word.

 

Nakata nods.

 

"What the hell for?" Brander growls. "It's not enough we're already shorthanded, we've got to sit still while Scanlon has another go at us?"

 

"It's not like before, they say. He's just going to observe. While we work." Nakata shrugs. "They say it is completely routine. No interviews or sessions or anything."

 

Caraco snorts. "There better not be. I'd let them cut out my other lung before I'd take another session with that prick."

 

"'So, you were repeatedly buggered by a trained Dobermans while your mom charged admission'," Brander recites in a fair imitation of Scanlon's voice. "'And how did that make you feel, exactly?'"

 

"'Actually I'm more of a mechanic,'" Caraco chimes in. "Did he give you that line?"

 

"He seemed nice enough to me," Nakata says hesitantly.

 

"Well, that's his job: to seem nice." Caraco grimaces. "he's just no fucking good at it." She looks over at Clarke. "So what do you think, Len?"

 

"I think he overplayed the empathy card," Clarke says after a moment.

 

"No, I mean how do we handle this?"

 

Clarke shrugs, vaguely irritated. "Why ask me?"

 

"He better not get in my way. Dumpy little turd." Brander spares a blank look at the ceiling. "Now why can't they design a smart gel to replace him?"

 

 

 

 

 

 

Scream

 

 

 

TRAN/OFFI/210850:2132

 

This is my second night in Beebe. I've asked the participants not to alter their behavior in my presence, since I'm here to observe routine station operations. I'm pleased to report that my request is being honored by everyone involved. This is gratifying insofar as it minimizes "observer effects", but it may present problems given that the rifters do not keep reliable schedules. This makes it difficult to plan one's time with them, and in fact there's one employee — Ken Lubin — whom I haven't seen since I arrived. Still. I have plenty of time.

 

The rifters tend to be withdrawn and uncommunicative — a layperson might call them sullen — but this is entirely in keeping with the profile. The Station itself seems to be well-maintained and is operating smoothly, despite a certain disregard for standard protocols.

 

 

 

* * *

 

When the lights go out in Beebe Station, you can't hear anything at all.

 

Yves Scanlon lies on his bunk, not listening. He does not hear any strange sounds filtering in through the hull. There is no reedy, spectral keening from the seabed, no faint sound of howling wind because he knows that, down here, no wind is possible. Imagination, perhaps. A trick of the brain stem, an auditory hallucination. He's not the slightest bit superstitious; he's a scientist. He does not hear the ghost of Karl Acton moaning on the seabed.

 

And now, concentrating, he's quite certain he hears nothing at all.

 

It really doesn't bother him, being stuck in a dead man's quarters. After all, where else is there? It's not as though he's going to move in with one of the vampires. And besides, Acton's been gone for months now.

 

Scanlon remembers the first time he heard the recording. Four lousy words: "We lost Acton. Sorry." Then she hung up. Cold bitch, Clarke. Scanlon once thought something might happen between her and Acton, it was a jigsaw match from the profiles, but you wouldn't know it from that phone call.

 

Maybe it's her, he muses. Maybe it's not Lubin after all, maybe it's Clarke.

 

"We lost Acton." So much for eulogy. And Fischer before Acton, and Everitt over at Linke. And Singh before Everitt. And—

 

And now Yves Scanlon is here, in their place. Sleeping on their bunk, breathing their air. Counting the seconds, in darkness and quiet. In dark—

 

Jesus Christ, what is—

 

And quiet. Everything's quiet. Nothing's moaning out there.

 

Nothing at all.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

TRANS/OFFI/220850:0945

 

We're all mammals, of course. We therefore have a Circadian rhythm which calibrates itself to ambient photoperiod. It's been known for some time that when people are denied photoperiodic cues their rhythms tend to lengthen, usually stabilizing between twenty-seven and thirty-six hours. Adherence to a regular twenty-four hour work schedule is usually sufficient to keep this from happening, so we didn't expect a problem in the deep stations. As an added measure I recommended that a normal photoperiod be built into Beebe's lighting systems; the lights are programmed to dim slightly between twenty-two hundred and oh seven hundred every day.

 

The participants have apparently chosen to ignore these cues. Even during 'daytime' they keep ambient lighting dimmer than my suggested 'nocturnal' levels. (They also prefer to leave their eyecaps in at all times, for obvious reasons; although I had not predicted this behavior, it is consistent with the profile.) Work schedules are somewhat — flexible, but this is to be expected given that their sleep cycles are always shifting in relation to each other. Rifters do not wake up in time to perform their duties; they perform their duties whenever two or more of them happen to be awake. I suspect that they also work alone sometimes, a safety violation, but I have yet to confirm this.

 

For the moment, these unorthodox behaviors do not appear to be serious. Necessary work seems to get done on time, even though the station is currently understaffed. However, I believe the situation is potentially problematic. Efficiency could probably be improved by stricter adherence to a twenty-four hour diel cycle. Should the GA wish to ensure such adherence, I would recommend proteoglycan therapy for the participants. Hypothalamic rewiring is another possibility; it is more invasive, but would be virtually impossible to subvert.

 

 

 

* * *

 

Vampires. That's a good metaphor. They avoid the light, and they've taken out all the mirrors. That could be part of the problem right there. Scanlon had very sound reasons for recommending mirrors in the first place.

 

Most of Beebe— all of it, except for his cubby— is too dark for uncapped vision. Maybe the vampires are trying to conserve energy. A high priority, sitting here next to eleven thousand megawatts' worth of generating equipment. Still, these people are all under forty; they probably can't imagine a world without rationed power.

 

Bullshit. There's logic, and there's vampire logic. Don't confuse the two.

 

For the past two days, leaving his cubby has been like creeping out into some dark alleyway. He's finally given in and capped his eyes like the rest of them. Now Beebe's bright enough, but so pale. Hardly any color at all. As though the cones have been sucked right out of his eyes.

 

Clarke and Caraco lean against the ready room bulkhead, watching with their white, white eyes as he checks out his diving armor. No vampire vivisection for Yves Scanlon, no sirree. Not for this short a tour. Preshmesh and acrylic all the way.

 

He fingers a gauntlet; chain mail, with links the size of pinheads. He smiles. "Looks okay."

 

The vampires just watch and wait.

 

Come on, Scanlon, you're the mechanic. They're machines like everyone else; they just need more of a tune-up. You can handle them.

 

"Very nice tech," he remarks, setting the armor back down. "Of course, it's not much next to the hardware you folks are packing. What's it like to be able to turn into a fish at will?"

 

"Wet," Caraco says, and a moment later looks at Clarke. Checking for approval, maybe.

 

Clarke just keeps staring at him. At least, he thinks she's staring. It's so damn hard to tell.

 

Relax. She's only trying to psyche you out. The usual stupid dominance games.

 

But he knows it's more than that. Deep down, the rifters just don't like him.

 

I know what they are. That's why.

 

Take a dozen children, any children. Beat and mix thoroughly until some lumps remain. Simmer for two to three decades; bring to a slow, rolling boil. Skim off the full-blown psychotics, the schizoaffectives, the multiple personalities, and discard. (There were doubts about Fischer, actually; but then, who doesn't have an imaginary friend at some point?)

 

Let cool. Serve with dopamine garnish.

 

What do you get? Something bent, not broken. Something that fits into cracks too twisted for the rest of us.

 

Vampires.

 

"Well," Scanlon says into the silence. "Everything checks out. Can't wait to try it on." Without waiting for a reply— without exposing himself to the lack of one— he climbs upstairs. At the edge of his vision, Clarke and Caraco exchange looks. Scanlon glances back, rigorously casual, but any smiles have disappeared by the time he scans their faces.

 

Go ahead, ladies. Indulge yourselves while you can. The lounge is empty. Scanlon passes through it and into the corridor. You've got maybe five years before you're obsolete. His cubby— Acton's cubby— is third on the left. Five years before all this can run itself without your help. He opens the hatch; brilliant light spills out, blinding him for a moment while his eyecaps compensate. Scanlon steps inside, swings the hatch shut. Sags against it.

 

Shit. No locks.

 

After a while he lies back on his bunk, stares up at a congested ceiling.

 

Maybe we should have waited after all. Not let them rush us. If we'd just taken the time to do it right from the start...

 

But they hadn't had the time. Total automation at start-up would have delayed the whole program longer than civilized appetites were willing to wait. And the vampires were already there, after all. They'd be so much use in the short run, and then they'd be sent home, and they'd be glad to leave this place. Who wouldn't be?

 

The possibility of addiction never even came up.

 

It seems insane on the face of it. How could anyone get addicted to a place like this? What kind of paranoia has seized the GA, that they'd worry about people refusing to leave? But Yves Scanlon is no mere layperson, he's not fooled by the merely apparent. He's beyond anthropomorphism. He's looked into all those undead eyes, up there in his world, down here in theirs, and he knows: vampires live by different rules.

 

Maybe they are too happy here. It's one of two questions Yves Scanlon has set out to answer. Hopefully they won't figure that out while he's still down here. They dislike him enough as it is.

 

It's not their fault, of course. It's just the way they're programmed. They can't help hating him, any more than he can help the reverse.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Preshmesh is better than surgery. That's about the most he can say for it.

 

The pressure jams all those tiny interlocking plates together, and they don't seem to stop clenching until they're a micron away from grinding his body to pulp. There's a stiffness in the joints. It's perfectly safe, of course. Perfectly. And Scanlon can breathe unpressurised air when he goes outside, and nobody's had to carve out half his chest in the meantime.

 

He's been out now for about fifteen minutes. Beebe's just a few meters away. Clarke and Brander escort him on his maiden voyage, keeping their distance. Scanlon kicks, rises clumsily from the bottom; the mesh lets him swim like a man with splinted limbs. Vampires skim the edge of his vision like effortless shadows.

 

His helmet seems like the center of the universe. Wherever he looks, an infinite weight of black ocean presses in against the acrylic. A tiny flaw down by the neck seal catches his eye; he stares, horrified, as a hairline crack grows across his field of vision.

 

"Help! Get me in!" He kicks furiously towards Beebe.

 

Nobody answers.

 

"My helmet! My hel—" The crack isn't just growing now: it's squirming, twitching laterally across the corner of the helmet bubble like— like—

 

Yellow featureless eyes staring in from the ocean. A black hand, silhouetted in Beebe's halo, reaching for his face—

 

"Ahhh—"

 

A thumb grinds down on the crack in Scanlon's helmet. The crack smears, bursts; fine gory filaments smudge against the acrylic. The back half of the hairline peels off and writhes loose into the water, coiling, uncoiling—

 

Dying. Scanlon pants with relief. A worm. Some stupid fucking roundworm on my faceplate and I thought I was going to die, I thought—

 

Oh Christ. I've made a complete fool of myself.

 

He looks around. Brander, hanging off his right shoulder, points to the gory remnants sticking to the helmet. "If it ever really cracked you wouldn't have time to complain. You'd look just like that."

 

Scanlon clears his throat. "Thanks. Sorry, I— well, you know I'm new here. Thanks."

 

"By the way."

 

Clarke's voice. Or what's left of it, after the machinery does its job. Scanlon flails around until she comes into view overhead.

 

"How long are you going to be checking up on us?" she asks

 

Neutral question. Perfectly reasonable.

 

In fact, you've got to wonder why nobody asked it before...

 

"A week at least." His heart is slowing down again. "Maybe two. As long as it takes to make sure things are running smoothly."

 

She's silent for a second. Then: "You're lying." It doesn't sound like an accusation, somehow; just a simple observation. Maybe it's the vocoder.

 

"Why do you say that?"

 

She doesn't answer. Something else does; not quite a moan, not quite a voice. Not quite faint enough to ignore.

 

Scanlon feels the abyss trickling down his back. "Did you hear that?"

 

Clarke slips down past him to the seabed, rotating to keep him in view. "Hear? What?"

 

"It was— " Scanlon listens. A faint tectonic rumble. That's all. "Nothing."

 

She pushes off the bottom at an angle, slides up through the water to Brander. "We're on shift," she buzzes at Scanlon. "You know how the 'lock works."

 

The vampires vanish into the night.

 

Beebe shines invitingly. Alone and suddenly nervous, Scanlon retreats to the airlock.

 

But I wasn't lying. I wasn't. He hasn't had to, yet. Nobody's asked the right questions.

 

Still. It seems odd that he has to remind himself.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

TRANS/OFFI/230850:0830

 

I'm about to embark on my first extended dive. Apparently, the participants have been asked to catch a fish for one of the Pharm consortiums. Washington/Rand, I believe. I find this a bit puzzling— usually Pharms are only interested in bacteria, and they use their own people for collecting— but it provides the participants with a change from the usual routine, and it provides me an opportunity to watch them in action. I expect to learn a great deal.

 

 

 

* * *

 

Brander is slouched at the library when Scanlon comes through the lounge. His fingers rest unmoving on the keypad. Eyephones hang unused in their hooks. Brander's empty eyes point at the flatscreen. The screen is dark.

 

Scanlon hesitates. "I'm heading out now. With Clarke and Caraco."

 

Brander's shoulders rise and fall, almost indiscernibly. A sigh, perhaps. A shrug.

 

"The others are at the Throat. You'll be the only— I mean, will you be running tender from Comm?"

 

"You told us not to change the routine," Brander says, not looking up.

 

"That's true, Michael. But—"

 

Brander stands. "So make up your mind." He disappears down the corridor. Scanlon watches him go. Naturally this has to go into my report. Not that you care.

 

You might, though. Soon enough.

 

Scanlon drops into the wet room and finds it empty. He struggles into his armor single-handed, taking an extra few moments to ensure that the helmet bubble is spotless. He catches up with Clarke and Caraco just outside; Clarke is checking out a quartet of squids hovering over the seabed. One of them is tethered to a specimen canister resting on the bottom, a pressure-proof coffin over two meters long. Caraco sets it for neutral buoyancy; it rises a few centimeters.

 

They set off without a word. The squids tow them into the abyss; the women in the lead, Scanlon and the canister following behind. Scanlon looks back over his shoulder. Beebe's comforting lights wash down from yellow to gray, then disappear entirely. Feeling a sudden need for reassurance, he trips through the channels on his acoustic modem. There: the homing beacon. You're never really lost down here as long as you can hear that.

 

Clarke and Caraco are running dark. Not even their squids are shining.

 

Don't say anything. You don't want them to change their routine, remember?

 

Not that they would anyway.

 

Occasional dim lights flash briefly at the corner of his eye, but they always vanish when he looks at them. After an endless few minutes a bright smear fades into view directly ahead, resolves into a collection of copper beacons and dark angular skyscrapers. The vampires avoid the light, head around it at an angle. Scanlon and cargo follow helplessly.

 

They set up just off the Throat, at the borderline between light and dark. Caraco unlatches the canister as Clarke rises into the column above them; she's got something in her right hand, but Scanlon can't see what it is. She holds it up as though displaying it to an invisible crowd.

 

It gibbers.

 

It sounds like a very loud mosquito at first. Then it dopplers down to a low growl, slides back up into erratic high frequency.

 

And now, finally, Lenie Clarke turns her headlight on.

 

She hangs up there like some crucified ascendant, her hand whining at the abyss, the light from her head sweeping the water like, like—

 

—a dinner bell, Scanlon realizes as something charges out of the darkness at her, almost as big as she is and Jesus the teeth on it—

 

It swallows her leg up to the crotch. Lenie Clarke takes it all in stride. She jabs down with a billy that's magically appeared in her left hand. The creature bloats and bursts in a couple of places; clumps of bubbles erupt like silvery mushrooms through flesh, shudder off into the sky. The creature thrashes, its gullet a monstrous scabbard around Clarke's leg. The vampire reaches down and dismembers it with her bare hands.

 

Caraco, still fiddling with the canister, looks up. "Hey, Len. They wanted it intact."

 

"Wrong kind," Clarke buzzes. The water around her is full of torn flesh and flashing scavengers. Clarke ignores them, turning slowly, scanning the abyss.

 

Caraco: "Behind you; four o'clock."

 

"Got it," Clarke says, spinning to a new bearing.

 

Nothing happens. The shredded carcass, still twitching, drifts toward the bottom, scavengers sparkling on all sides. Clarke's hand-held voicebox gurgles and whines.

 

How— Scanlon moves his tongue in his mouth, ready to ask aloud.

 

"Not now," Caraco buzzes at him, before he can.

 

There's nothing there. What are they keying on?

 

It comes in fast, unswerving, from the precise direction Lenie Clarke is facing. "That'll do," she says.

 

A muffled explosion to Scanlon's left. A thin contrail of bubbles streaks from Caraco to monster, connecting the two in an instant. The thing jerks at a sudden impact. Clarke slips to one side as it thrashes past, Caraco's dart embedded in its flank.

 

Clarke's headlight goes out, her voicebox falls silent. Caraco stows the dart gun and swims up to join her. The two women maneuver their quarry down towards the canister. It snaps at them, weak and spastic. They push it down into the coffin, seal the top.

 

"Like shooting fish for a barrel," Caraco buzzes.

 

"How did you know it was coming?" Scanlon asks.

 

"They always come," Caraco says. "The sound fools them. And the light."

 

"I mean, how did you know which direction? In advance?"

 

A moment's silence.

 

"You just get a feel for it after a while," Clarke says finally.

 

"That," Caraco adds, "and this." She holds up a sonar pistol, tucks it back under her belt.

 

The convoy reforms. There's a prescribed drop-off point for monsters, a hundred meters away from the Throat. (The GA has never been keen on letting outsiders wander too far into its home turf.) Once again the vampires leave light for darkness, Scanlon in tow. They travel through a world utterly without form, save for the scrolling circle of mud in his headlight. Suddenly Clarke turns to Caraco.

 

"I'll go," she buzzes, and peels away into the void.

 

Scanlon throttles his squid, edges up beside Caraco.

 

"Where's she off to?"

 

"Here we are," Caraco says. They coast to a halt. Caraco fins back to the droned squid and touches a control; buckles disengage, straps retract. The canister floats free. Caraco cranks down the buoyancy and it settles down on a clump of tubeworms.

 

"Len— uh, Clarke," Scanlon prods.

 

"They need an extra hand back at the Throat. She went to help out."

 

Scanlon checks his modem channel. Of course it's the right one, if it wasn't he wouldn't be able to hear Caraco. Which means that Clarke and the vampires at the Throat must have been using a different frequency. Another safety violation.

 

But he's not a fool, he knows the story. They've only switched channels because he's here. They're just trying to keep him out of the loop.

 

Par for the course. First the fucking GA, now the hired help—

 

A sound, from behind. A faint electrical whine. The sound of a squid starting up.

 

Scanlon turns around. "Caraco?"

 

His headlamp sweeps across canister, squid, seabed, water.

 

"Caraco? You there?"

 

Canister. Squid. Mud.

 

"Hello?"

 

Empty water.

 

"Hey! Caraco! What the hell—"

 

A faint thumping, very close by.

 

He tries to look everywhere at once. One leg presses against the coffin.

 

The coffin is rocking.

 

He lays his helmet against its surface. Yes. Something inside, muffled, wet. Thumping. Trying to get out.

 

It can't. No way. It's just dying in there, that's all.

 

He pushes away, drifts up into the water column. He feels very exposed. A few stiff-legged kicks take him back to the bottom. Slightly better.

 

"Caraco? Come on, Judy—"

 

Oh Jesus. She left me here. She just fucking left me out here.

 

He hears something moaning, very close by.

 

Inside his helmet, in fact.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

TRANS/OFFI/230850:2026

 

I accompanied Judy Caraco and Lenie Clarke outside today, and witnessed several events that concern me. Both participants swam through unlit areas without headlamps and spent significant periods of time isolated from dive buddies; at one point, Caraco simply left me on the seabed without warning. This is potentially life-threatening behavior, although of course I was able to find my way back to Beebe using the homing beacon.

 

I have yet to receive an explanation for all this. The v— the other personnel are presently gone from the station. I can find two or three of them on sonar; I suppose the rest are just hidden in the bottom clutter. Once again, this is extremely unsafe behavior.

 

Such recklessness appears to be typical here. It implies a relative indifference to personal welfare, an attitude entirely consistent with the profile I developed at the onset of the rifter program. (The only alternative is that they simply do not appreciate the dangers involved in this environment, which is unlikely.)

 

It is also consistent with a generalized post-traumatic addiction to hostile environments. This doesn't constitute evidence per sé, of course, but I have noted one or two other things which, taken together, may be cause for concern. Michael Brander, for example, has a history which ranges from caffeine and sympathomimetic abuse to limbic hot-wiring. He's known to have brought a substantial supply of phencyclidine derms with him to Beebe; I've just located it in his cubby and I was surprised to find that it has barely been touched. Phencyclidine is not, physiologically speaking, addictive— exogenous-drug addicts are screened out of the program— but the fact remains that Brander had a habit when he came down here, a habit which he has since abandoned. I have to wonder what he's replaced it with.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

The wet room.

 

"There you are. Where did you go?"

 

"Had to recover this cartridge. Bad sulfide head."

 

"You could have told me. I was supposed to come along on your rounds anyway, remember? You just left me out there."

 

"You got back."

 

"That's— that's not the point, Judy. You don't leave someone alone at the bottom of the ocean without a word. What if something had happened to me?"

 

"We go out alone all the time. It's part of the job. Watch that, it's slippery."

 

"Safety procedures are also part of the job. Even for you. And especially for me, Judy, I'm a complete fish out of water here, heh heh. You can't expect me to know my way around."

 

"...."

 

"Excuse me?"

 

"We're short-handed, remember? We can't always afford to buddy up. And you're a big strong man— well, you're a man, anyway. I didn't think you needed baby-sit—"

 

"Shit! My hand!"

 

"I told you to be careful."

 

"Ow. How much does the fucking thing weigh?"

 

"About ten kilos, without all the mud. I guess I should've rinsed it off."

 

"I guess so. I think one of the heads gouged me on the way down. Shit, I'm bleeding."

 

"Sorry about that."

 

"Yeah. Well, look, Caraco. I'm sorry if baby-sitting rubs you the wrong way, but a little more baby-sitting and Acton and Fischer might still be alive, you know? A little more baby-sitting and— did you hear that?"

 

"What?"

 

"From outside. That— moaning, sort of—"

 

...

 

"Come on, C— Judy. You must've heard it!"

 

"Maybe the hull shifted."

 

"No. I heard something. And this isn't the first time, either."

 

"I didn't hear anything."

 

"You d— where are you going? You just came in! Judy..."

 

Clank. Hiss.

 

"...don't go..."

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

TRANS/OFFI/250850:2120

 

I've asked each of the participants to submit to a routine sweep under the medical scanner— or rather, I've asked most of them directly, and asked them to pass the word on to Ken Lubin, whom I've seen a few times now but haven't actually spoken to yet. (I have twice attempted to engage Mr. Lubin in conversation, without success.) The participants know, of course, that medical scans do not require physical contact on my part, and they're well able to run them at their own convenience without me even being present. Still, although no one has explicitly refused my request, there has been a notable lack of enthusiasm in terms of actual compliance. It's fairly obvious (and entirely consistent with my profile) that they consider it something of an intrusion, and will avoid it if possible. To date I've managed to get rundowns on only Alice Nakata and Judy Caraco. I've appended their binaries to this entry; both show elevated production of dopamine and norepinephrine, but I can't establish whether this began before or after their present tour of duty. GABA and other inhibitor levels were slightly up, too, left over from their previous dive (less than an hour before the scan).

 

The others, so far, haven't been able to "find the time" for an exam. In the meantime I've resorted to going over stored scanner records of old injuries. Not surprisingly, physical injuries are common down here, although they've become much less frequent as of late. There are no cases of head trauma on record, however— at least, nothing that would warrant an NMR. This effectively limits my brain chemistry data to what the participants are willing to provide on request— not much, so far. If this doesn't change, the bulk of my analysis will have to be based on behavioral observations. As medieval as that sounds.

 

 

 

* * *

 

Who could it be? Who?

 

When Yves Scanlon first sank into the abyss he had two questions on his mind. He's chasing the second one now, lying in his cubby, shielded from Beebe by a pair of eyephones and the personal database in his shirt pocket. For now, he's gone mercifully blind to plumbing and condensation.

 

He's not deaf, though. Unfortunately. Every now and then he hears footsteps, or low voices, or— just maybe— the distant cry of something unimaginable in pain; but then he speaks a little louder into the pickup, drowns unwelcome sounds with barked commands to scroll up, link files, search for keywords. Personnel records dance across the inside of his eyes, and he can almost forget where he is.

 

His interest in this particular question has not been sanctioned by his employers. They know about it, though, yes sirree they know. They just don't think I do.

 

Rowan and her cronies are such assholes. They've been lying to him from the start. Scanlon doesn't know why. He'd have been okay with it, if they'd just leveled with him. But they kept it under wraps. As though he wouldn't be able to figure it out for himself.

 

It's bloody obvious. There's more than one way to make a vampire. Usually you take someone who's fucked in the head, and you train them. But why couldn't you take someone who's already trained, and then fuck them in the head? It might even be cheaper.

 

You can learn a lot from a witch hunt. All that repressed-memory hysteria back in the nineties, for example: so many people suddenly remembering abuse, or alien abduction, or dear old grandma stirring a cauldron of stewed babies. It didn't take much, no one had to go in and physically rewire the synapses; the brain's gullible enough to rewire itself if you coax it. Most of those poor bozos didn't even know they were doing it. These days it only takes a few weeks worth of hypnotherapy. The right suggestions, delivered just the right way, can inspire memories to build themselves out of bits and pieces. Sort of a neurological cascade effect. And once you think you've been abused, well, why wouldn't your psyche shift to match?

 

It's a good idea. Someone else thought so too, at least that's what Scanlon heard from Mezzich a couple of weeks ago. Nothing official, of course, but there may already be a few prototypes in the system. Someone right here in Beebe, maybe, a walking testament to Induced False Memory Syndrome. Maybe Lubin. Maybe Clarke. Could be anyone, really.

 

They should have told me.

 

They told him, all right. They told him, when he first started, that he was coming in on the ground floor. You'll have input on pretty much everything, was what Rowan had promised. The design work, the follow-ups. They even offered him automatic coauthorship on all unclassified publications. Yves Scanlon was supposed to be a fucking equal. And then they shut him off in a little room, mumbling to recruits while they made all the decisions up on the thirty-fifth fucking floor.

 

Standard corporate mentality. Knowledge was power. Corpses never told anybody anything.

 

I was an idiot to believe them as long as I did. Sending up my recommendations, waiting for them to honor a promise or two. And this is the bone they throw me. Stick me at the bottom of the fucking ocean with these post-traumatic head cases because no one else wants to get shit on their hands.

 

I mean, fuck. I'm so far out of the loop I have to coax rumors from a has-been hack like Mezzich?

 

Still. He wonders who it might be. Brander or Nakata, maybe. Her record shows a background in geothermal engineering and high-pressure tech, and he's got a Masters in systems ecology with a minor in genomics. Too much education for your average vampire. Assuming there is such a thing.

 

Wait a second. Why should I trust these files? After all, if Rowan's keeping this thing under wraps she might not be stupid enough to leave clues lying around in the GA personnel records.

 

Scanlon ponders the question. Suppose the files have been modified. Maybe he should check out the least likely candidates. He orders an ascending sort by educational background.

 

Lenie Clarke. Premed dropout, basic virtual-tech ed. The GA hired her away from the Hongcouver Aquarium. PR department.

 

Hmm. Someone with Lenie Clarke's social skills, in public relations? Not likely. I wonder if—

 

Jesus. There it is again.

 

Yves Scanlon strips the phones from his eyes and stares at the ceiling. The sound seeps in through the hull, barely audible.

 

I'm almost getting used to it, actually.

 

It sighs through the bulkhead, recedes, dies. Scanlon waits. He realizes he's holding his breath.

 

There. Something very far away. Something very—

 

Lonely. It sounds so lonely.

 

He knows how it feels.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

The lounge is empty, but something casts a faint shadow through the Communications hatchway. A soft voice from inside: Clarke, it sounds like. Scanlon evesdrops for a few seconds. She's reciting supply consumption rates, listing the latest bits of equipment to break down. A routine call up to the GA, from the sound of it. She hangs up just before he steps into view.

 

She's sitting slumped in her chair, a cup of coffee within easy reach.

 

They eye each other for a moment, without speaking.

 

"Anyone else around?" Scanlon wonders.

 

She shakes her head.

 

"I thought I heard something, a few minutes ago."

 

She turns back to face the console. A couple of icons flash on the main display.

 

"What are you doing?"

 

She makes a vague gesture to the console. "Running tender. Thought you'd like that, for a change."

 

"Oh, but I said—"

 

"Not to change the routine," Clarke cuts in. She seems tired. "Do you always expect everyone to do everything you say?"

 

"Is that what you think I meant?"

 

She snorts softly, still not looking back.

 

"Look," Scanlon says, "Are you sure you didn't hear something, like— like—" like a ghost, Clarke? A sound like poor dead Acton might make, watching his own remains rotting out there on the rift?

 

"Don't worry about it," she says.

 

Aha. "So you did hear something." She knows what it is, too. They all do.

 

"What I hear," she says, "is my own concern."

 

Take a hint, Scanlon. But there's nowhere else to go, except back to his cubby. And the prospect of being alone, right now— somehow, even the company of a vampire seems preferable.

 

She turns around to face him again. "Something else?"

 

"Not really. Just can't seem to sleep." Scanlon dons a disarming smile. "Just not used to the pressure, I guess." That's right. Put her at ease. Acknowledge her superiority.

 

She just stares at him

 

"I don't know how you take it, month after month," he adds.

 

"Yes you do. You're a psychiatrist. You chose us."

 

"Actually, I'm more of a mechanic."

 

"Of course," she says, expressionless. "It's your job to keep things broken."

 

Scanlon looks away.

 

She stands up and takes a step towards the hatchway, her tending duties apparently forgotten. Scanlon stands aside. She brushes past, somehow avoiding physical contact in the cramped space.

 

"Look," he blurts out, "how about a quick review of the tending procedure? I'm not all that familiar with this equipment."

 

It's too obvious. He knows she sees through it before the words are even out of his mouth. But it's also a perfectly reasonable request from someone in his role. Routine evaluation, after all.

 

She watches him for a moment, her head cocked a bit to one side. Her face, expressionless as usual, somehow conveys the impression of a slight smile. Finally she sits down again.

 

She taps on a menu. "This is the Throat." A cluster of luminous rectangles nested in a background of contour lines. "Thermal readout." The image erupts into psychedelic false color, red and yellow hot spots pulsing at irregular intervals along the main fissure. "You don't usually bother with thermal when you're tending," Clarke explains. "When you're out there you find that stuff out sooner first-hand anyway." The psychedelia fades back to green and gray.

 

And what happens if someone gets taken by surprise out there and you don't have the readings in here to know they're in trouble? Scanlon doesn't ask aloud. Just another cut corner.

 

Clarke pans, finds a pair of alphanumeric icons. "Alice and Ken." Another red hot-spot slides into view in the upper left corner of the display.

 

No, wait a minute; she turned thermal off...

 

"Hey," Scanlon says, "that's a deadman switch—"

 

No audio alarm. Why isn't there an alarm— His eyes dart across the half-familiar console. Where is it, where—shit—

 

The alarm's been disabled.

 

"Look!" Scanlon points at the display. "Can't you—"

 

Clarke looks up at him, almost lazily. She doesn't seem to understand.

 

He jabs his thumb down. "Somebody just died out there!"

 

She looks at the screen, slowly shakes her head. "No—"

 

"You stupid bitch, you cut off the alarm!"

 

He hits a control icon. The station starts howling. Scanlon jumps back, startled, bumps the bulkhead. Clarke watches him, frowning slightly.

 

"What's wrong with you?" He reaches out and grabs her by the shoulders. "Do something! Call Lubin, call—" The alarm is deafening. He shakes her, hard, pulls her up out of the chair—

 

And remembers, too late: you don't touch Lenie Clarke.

 

Something happens in her face. It almost crumples, right there in front of him. Lenie Clarke the ice queen is suddenly nowhere to be seen. In her place there's only a beaten, blind little kid, body shaking, mouth moving in the same pattern over and over, he can't hear over the alarm but her lips shape the words, I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry—

 

All in the few scant seconds before she crystallizes.

 

She seems to harden against the sound, against Scanlon's assault. Her face goes completely blank. She rises out of the chair, centimeters taller than she should be. One hand comes up, grabs Yves Scanlon by the throat. Pushes.

 

He staggers backwards into the lounge, flailing. The table appears to one side; he reaches out, steadies himself.

 

Suddenly, Beebe falls silent again.

 

Scanlon takes a deep breath. Another vampire has appeared in his peripheral vision, standing impassively at the mouth of the corridor; he ignores it. Directly ahead, Lenie Clarke is sitting down again in Communications, her back turned. Scanlon steps forward.

 

"It's Karl," she says before he can speak.

 

It takes a moment to register: Acton.

 

"But— that was months ago," Scanlon says. "You lost him."

 

"We lost him." She breathes, slowly. "He went down a smoker. It erupted."

 

"I'm sorry," Scanlon says. "I— didn't know."

 

"Yeah." Her voice is tight with controlled indifference. "He's too far down to— we can't get him back. Too dangerous." She turns to face him, impossibly calm. "Deadman switch still works, though. It'll keep screaming until the battery runs down." She shrugs. "So we keep the alarm off."

 

"I don't blame you," Scanlon says softly.

 

"Imagine," Clarke tells him, "how much your approval comforts me."

 

He turns to leave.

 

"Wait," she says. "I can zoom in for you. I can show you exactly where he died, maximum res."

 

"That's not necessary."

 

She stabs controls. "No problem. Naturally you're interested. What kind of mechanic wouldn't want to know the performance specs on his own creation?" She reshapes the display like a sculptor, hones it down and down until there's nothing left but a tangle of faint green lines and a red pulsing dot.

 

"He got wedged into an ancillary crevice," she says. "Looks like a tight fit even now, when all the flesh has been boiled away. Don't know how he managed to get down there when he was all in one piece." There's no stress in her voice at all. She could be talking about a friend's vacation.

 

Scanlon can feel her eyes on him; he keeps his on the screen.

 

"Fischer," he says. "What happened to him?"

 

From the corner of his eye: she starts to tense, turns it into a shrug. "Who knows? Maybe Archie got him."

 

"Archie?"

 

"Archie Toothis." Scanlon doesn't recognize the name; it's not in any of his files, as far as he knows. He considers, decides not to push it.

 

"Did Fischer's deadman go off, at least?"

 

"He didn't have one." She shrugs. "The abyss can kill you any number of ways, Scanlon. It doesn't always leave traces."

 

"I'm— I'm sorry if I upset you, Lenie."

 

One corner of her mouth barely twitches.

 

And he is sorry. Even though it's not his fault. I didn't make you what you are, he wants to say. I didn't smash you into junk, that was someone else. I just came along afterwards and found a use for you. I gave you a purpose, more of a purpose than you ever had back there.

 

Is that really so bad?

 

He doesn't dare ask aloud, so he turns to leave. And when Lenie Clarke lays one finger, very briefly, on the screen where Acton's icon flashes, he pretends not to notice.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

TRANS/OFFI/260850:1352

 

I recently had an interesting conversation with Lenie Clarke. Although she didn't admit so openly— she is very well defended, and quite expert at hiding her feelings from laypeople— I believe that she and Karl Acton were sexually involved. This is a heartening discovery, insofar as my original profiles strongly suggested that such a relationship would develop. (Clarke has a history of relationships with Intermittent Explosives.) This adds a measure of empirical confidence to other, related predictions regarding rifter behavior.

 

I have also learned that Karl Acton, rather than simply disappearing, was actually killed by an erupting smoker. I don't know what he was doing down there— I'll continue to investigate— but the behavior itself seems foolish at best and quite possibly suicidal. Suicide is not consistent either with Karl Acton's DSM or ECM profiles, which must have been accurate when first derived. Suicide, therefore, would imply a degree of basic personality change. This is consistent with the trauma-addiction scenario. However, some sort of physical brain injury can not be ruled out. My search of the medical logs didn't turn up any head injuries, but was limited to living participants. Perhaps Acton was... different...

 

Oh. I found out who Archie Toothis is. Not in the personnel files at all. The library. Architeuthis: giant squid.

 

I think she was kidding.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bulrushes

 

At times like this it seems as if the world has always been black.

 

It hasn't, of course. Joel Kita caught a hint of ambient blue out the dorsal port just ten minutes ago. Right before they dropped through the deep scattering layer; pretty thin stuff compared to the old days, he's been told, but still impressive. Glowing siphonophores and flashlight fish and all. Still beautiful.

 

That's a thousand meters above them now. Right here there's nothing but the thin vertical slash of Beebe's transponder line. Joel has put the 'scaphe into a lazy spin during the drop, forward floods sweeping the water in a descending corkscrew. The transponder line swings past the main viewport every thirty seconds or so, keeping time, a bright vertical line against the dark.

 

Other than that, blackness.

 

A tiny monster bumps the port. Needle teeth so long the mouth can't close, an eel-like body studded with glowing photophores— fifteen, twenty centimeters long, tops. It's not even big enough to make a sound when it hits and then it's gone, spinning away above them.

 

"Viperfish," Jarvis says.

 

Joel glances around at his passenger, hunched up beside him to take advantage of what might laughingly be called "the view". Jarvis is some sort of cellular physiologist out of Rand/Washington U., here to collect a mysterious package in a plain brown wrapper.

 

"See many of those?" he asks now.

 

Joel shakes his head. "Not this far down. Kind of unusual."

 

"Yeah, well, this whole area is unusual. That's why I'm here."

 

Joel checks tactical, nudges a trim tab.

 

"Now viperfish, they're not supposed to get any bigger than the one you just saw," Jarvis remarks. "But there was a guy, oh, back in the 1930s— Beebe his name was, the same guy they named— anyway, he swore he saw one that was over two meters long."

 

Joel grunts. "Didn't know people came down here back then."

 

"Yeah, well, they were just starting out. And everyone had always thought deepwater fish were these puny little midgets, because that's all they ever brought up in their trawls. But then Beebe sees this big ripping viperfish, and people start thinking hey, maybe we only caught little ones because all the big ones could outswim the trawls. Maybe the deep sea really is teeming with giant monsters."

 

"It's not," Joel says. "At least, not that I've seen."

 

"Yeah, well, that's what most people think. Every now and then you get pieces of something weird washing up, though. And of course there's Megamouth. And your garden-variety giant squid."

 

"They never get down this far. I bet none of your other giants do either. Not enough food."

 

"Except for the vents," Jarvis says.

 

"Except for the vents."

 

"Actually," Jarvis amends, "except for this vent."

 

The transponder line swings past, a silent metronome.

 

"Yeah," says Joel after a moment. "Why is that?"

 

"Well, we're not sure. We're working on it, though. That's what I'm doing here. Gonna bag one of those scaly mothers."

 

"You're kidding. We going to butt it to death with the hull?"

 

"Actually, it's already been bagged. The rifters got it for us a couple of days ago. All we do is pick it up."

 

"I could do that solo. Why'd you come along?"

 

"Got to check to make sure they did it right. Don't want the canister blowing up on the surface."

 

"And that extra tank you strapped onto my 'scaphe? The one with the biohazard stickers all over it?"

 

"Oh," Jarvis says. "That's just to sterilize the sample."

 

"Uh huh." Joel lets his eyes run over the panels. "You must pull a lot of weight back on shore."

 

"Oh? Why's that?"

 

"I used to make the Channer run a lot. Pharmaceutical dives, supply trips to Beebe, ecotourism. A while back I shuttled some corpse type out to Beebe; he said he was staying for a month or so. The GA calls me three days later and tells me to go pick him up. I show up for the run and they tell me it's cancelled. No explanation."

 

"Pretty strange," Jarvis remarks.

 

"You're the first run I've had to Channer in six weeks. You're the first run anyone's had, from what I can tell. So, you pull some weight."

 

"Not really." Jarvis shrugs in the half-light. "I'm just a research associate. I go where they tell me, just like you. Today they told me to go and pick up an order of fish to go."

 

Joel looks at him.

 

"You were asking why they got so big," Jarvis says, deking to the right. "We figure it's some kind of endosymbiotic infection."

 

"No shit."

 

"Say it's easier for some microbe to live inside a fish than out in the ocean — less osmotic stress — so once inside it's pumping out more ATP than it needs."

 

"ATP," Joel says.

 

"High-energy phosphate compound. Cellular battery. Anyway, it spits out this surplus ATP, and the host fish can use it as extra growth energy. So maybe Channer Vent's got some sort of unique bug that infects teleost fishes and gives 'em a growth spurt."

 

"Pretty weird."

 

"Actually, happens all the time. Every one of your own cells is a colony, for that matter. You know, nucleus, mitochondria, chloroplasts if you're a plant—"

 

"I'm not." More than I can say for some folks...

 

"—those all used to be free-living microbes in their own right. A few billion years ago something ate them, but it couldn't digest them properly so they all just kept living inside the cytoplasm. Eventually they struck up a deal with the host cell, took over housecleaning tasks and suchlike in lieu of rent. Voila: your modern eukaryotic cell."

 

"So what happens if this Channer bug gets into a person? We all grow three meters high?"

 

A polite laugh. "Nope. People stop growing when they reach adulthood. So do most vertebrates, actually. Fish, on the other hand, keep growing their whole lives. And deepwater fish—those don't do anything except grow, if you know what I mean."

 

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 interest. 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.

 

Now he hits the call stud without a moment’s hesitation. “This is Scanlon, Human Resources. I’ve got a bit of a—”

 

The line stays dark.

 

He tries again. Dead.

 

Shit shit shit. Somehow, though, he isn’t surprised.

 

I could call the vampires. I could order them to come back in. I have the authority. It’s an amusing thought for a few moments.

 

At least the Voice seems to have faded. He thinks he can hear it, if he concentrates, but it’s so faint it could even be his imagination.

 

Beebe squeezes down on him. He looks back at the tactical display, hopefully. One, two, three, f—

 

Oh shit.

 

* * *

 

 

 

He doesn’t remember going outside. He remembers struggling into his preshmesh, and picking up a sonar pistol, and now he’s on the seabed, under Beebe. He takes a bearing, checks it, checks it again. It doesn’t change.

 

He creeps away from the light, towards the Throat. He fights with himself for endless moments, wins; his headlamp stays doused. No sense in broadcasting his presence.

 

He swims blind, hugging the bottom. Every now and then he takes a bearing, resets his course. Scanlon zigzags across the sea floor. Eventually the abyss begins to lighten before him.

 

Something moans, directly ahead.

 

It doesn’t sound lonely any more. It sounds cold and hungry and utterly inhuman. Scanlon freezes like a night creature caught in headlights.

 

After a while the sound goes away.

 

The Throat glimmers half-resolved, maybe twenty meters ahead. It looks like a spectral collection of buildings and derricks set down on the moon. Murky copper lights spills down from floods set half-way up the generators. Scanlon circles, just beyond the light.

 

Something moves, off to the left.

 

An alien sigh.

 

He flattens down onto the bottom, eyes closed. Grow up, Scanlon. Whatever it is, it can’t hurt you. Nothing can bite through preshmesh.

 

Nothing flesh and blood...

 

He refuses to finish the thought. He opens his eyes.

 

When it moves again, Scanlon is staring right at it.

 

A black plume, jetting from a chimney of rock on the seabed. And this time it doesn’t just sigh; it moans.

 

A smoker. That’s all it is. Acton went down one of those.

 

Maybe this one—

 

The eruption peters out. The sound whispers away.

 

Smokers aren’t supposed to make sounds. Not like that, anyway.

 

Scanlon edges up to the lip of the chimney. 501C. Inside, anchored about two meters down, is some sort of machine. It’s been built out of things that were never meant to fit together; rotary blades spinning in the vestigial current, perforated tubes, pipes anchored at haphazard angles. The smoker is crammed with junk.

 

And somehow, the water jets through it and comes out singing. Not a ghost. Not an alien predator, after all. Just— windchimes. Relief sweeps through Scanlon’s body in a chemical wave. He relaxes, soaking in the sensation, until he remembers:

 

Six contacts. Six.

 

And here he is, floodlit, in full view.

 

Scanlon retreats back into darkness. The machinery behind his nightmares, exposed and almost pedestrian, has bolstered his confidence. He resumes his patrol. The Throat rotates slowly to his right, a murky monochrome graphic.

 

Something fades into view ahead, floating above an outcropping of featherworms. Scanlon slips closer, hides behind a convenient piece of rock

 

Vampires. Two of them.

 

They don't look the same.

 

Vampires usually look alike out here, it's almost impossible to tell them apart. But Scanlon’s sure he’s never seen one of these two before. It’s facing away from him, but there’s still something— it’s too tall and thin, somehow. It moves in furtive starts and twitches, almost birdlike. Reptilian. It carries something under one arm.

 

Scanlon can’t tell what sex it is. The other vampire, though, looks female. The two of them hang in the water a few meters apart, facing each other. Every now and then the female gestures with her hands; sometimes she moves too suddenly and the other one jumps a little, as if startled.

 

He clicks through the voice channels. Nothing. After a while the female reaches out, almost tentatively, and touches the reptile. There’s something almost gentle— in an alien way— about the way she does that. Then she turns and swims off into the darkness. The reptile stays behind, drifting slowly on its axis. Its face comes into view.

 

Its hood seal is open. Its face is so pale that Scanlon can barely tell where skin ends and eyecaps begin; it almost looks as if this creature has no eyes.

 

The thing under its arm is the shredded remains of one of Channer’s monster fish. As Scanlon watches, the reptile brings it up to its mouth and tears off a chunk. Swallows.

 

The voice in the Throat moans in the distance, but the reptile doesn’t seem to notice.

 

Its uniform has the usual GA logo stamped onto the shoulders. The usual name tag underneath.

 

Who—?

 

Its blank empty face sweeps right past Scanlon’s hiding place without pausing. A moment later it’s facing away again.

 

It’s all alone out there. It doesn’t look dangerous.

 

Scanlon braces against his rock, pushes off. Water pushes back, slowing him instantly. The reptile doesn’t see him. Scanlon kicks. He’s only a few meters away when he remembers.

 

Ganzfeld Effect. What if there’s some Ganzfeld Effect down h—

 

The reptile spins suddenly, staring directly at him.

 

Scanlon lunges. Another split-second and he wouldn’t even have come close, but fortune smiles; he catches onto one of the creature’s fins as it dives away. Its other foot lashes back, bounces off the helmet. Again, lower down; Scanlon’s sonar pistol spins away from his belt.

 

He hangs on. The reptile comes at him with both fists, utterly silent. Scanlon barely feels the blows through his preshmesh. He hits back with the familiar desperation of a childhood punching bag, cornered again, feeble self-defense his only option.

 

Until it dawns on him that this time, somehow, it’s working.

 

He’s not facing the neighborhood bully here. He’s not paying the price for careless eye contact with some australopithecine at the local drink’n’drug. He fighting a spindly little freak that’s trying to get away. From him. This guy is downright feeble.

 

For the first time in his life, Yves Scanlon is winning a fight.

 

His fist connects, a chain-mail mace. The enemy jerks and struggles. Scanlon grabs, twists, wrestles his quarry into an armlock. His victim flails around, utterly helpless.

 

“You’re not going anywhere, friend.” Finally, a chance to try out that tone of easy contempt he’s been practicing since the age of seven. It sounds good. It sounds confident, in control. “Not until I find out just what the fuck is—”

 

The lights go out.

 

The whole Throat goes dark, suddenly and without fuss. It takes a few seconds to blink away the afterimages; finally, in the extreme distance, Scanlon makes out a very faint gray glow. Beebe.

 

It dies as he watches. The creature in his arms has grown very still.

 

"Let him go, Scanlon."

 

"Clarke?" It might be Clarke. The vocoders don't mask everything, there are subtle differences that Scanlon's just beginning to recognize. "Is that you?" He gets his headlamp on, but no matter where he points it there's nothing to see.

 

"You'll break his arms," the voice says. Clarke. Got to be.

 

"I'm not that—" strong— "clumsy," Scanlon says to the abyss.

 

"You don't have to be. His bones have decalcified." A momentary silence. "He's fragile."

 

Scanlon loosens his grip a bit. He twists back and forth, trying to catch sight of something. Anything. All that comes into view is his prisoner's shoulder patch.

 

Fischer.

 

But he went missing— Scanlon counts back— seven months ago!

 

"Let him go, cocksucker." A different voice, this time. Brander's.

 

"Now," it buzzes. "Or I'll fucking kill you."

 

Brander? Brander actually defending a pedophile? How the hell did that happen?

 

It doesn't matter now. There are other things to worry about.

 

"Where are you?" Scanlon calls out. "What are you so afraid of?" He doesn't expect such an obvious goad to work. He's just buying time, trying to delay the inevitable. He can't just let Fischer go; he's out of options the moment that happens.

 

Something moves, just to the left. Scanlon spins; a flurry of motion out there, maybe a hint of limbs caught in the beam. Too many for one person. Then nothing.

 

He tried to do it, Scanlon realizes. Brander just tried to kill me, and they held him back.

 

For now.

 

"Last chance, Scanlon." Clarke again, close and invisible, as though she's humming in his ear. "We don't have to lay a hand on you, you know? We can just leave you here. You don't let him go in ten seconds and I swear you'll never find your way back. One."

 

"And even if you did," adds another voice— Scanlon doesn't know who— "we'd be waiting for you there."

 

"Two."

 

He checks the helmet dashboard laid out around his chin. The vampires have shut off Beebe's homing beacon.

 

"Three."

 

He checks his compass. The readout won't settle. No surprise there; magnetic navigation is a joke on the rift.

 

"Four."

 

"Fine," Scanlon tries. "Leave me here. I don't care. I'll—"

 

"Five."

 

"—just head for the surface. I can last for days in this suit." Sure. As if they'll just let you float away with their— what is Fischer to them, anyway? Pet? Mascot?

 

"Six."

 

Role model?

 

"Seven."

 

Oh God. Oh God.

 

"Eight."

 

"Please," he whispers.

 

"Nine."

 

He opens his arms. Fischer dives away into the dark.

 

Stops.

 

Turns back and hangs there in the water, five meters away.

 

"Fischer?" Scanlon looks around. For all he can tell, they are the only two particles in the universe. "Can you understand me?"

 

He extends his arm. Fischer starts, like a nervous fish, but doesn't bolt.

 

Scanlon scans the abyss. "Is this how you want to end up?" he calls out.

 

Nobody answers.

 

"You have any idea what seven months of sensory deprivation does to your mind? You think he's even close to being human any more? Are you going to spend the rest of your lives rooting around here in the mud, eating worms? Is that what you want?"

 

"What we want," something buzzes from the darkness, "is to be left alone."

 

"That's not going to happen. No matter what you do to me. You can't stay down here forever."

 

Nobody bothers to disagree. Fischer continues to float before him, his head cocked to one side.

 

"Listen, C— Lenie. Mike. All of you." The headlight beam sweeps back and forth, empty. "It's just a job. It's not a lifestyle." But Scanlon knows that's a lie. All these people were rifters long before the job existed.

 

"They'll come for you," he says softly, and he doesn't know whether it's a threat or a warning.

 

"Maybe we won't be here," the abyss replies at last.

 

Oh, God. "Look, I don't know what's happening down here, but you can't want to stay here, nobody in their— I mean— Jesus, where are you?"

 

No answer. Only Fischer.

 

"This wasn't how it was supposed to go," Scanlon says, pleading.

 

And then, "I never meant for— I mean I didn't—"

 

And then only "I'm sorry. I'm sorry..."

 

And then nothing at all, except the darkness.

 

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Eventually the lights come back on, and Beebe beeps reassuringly on its designated channel. Gerry Fischer is gone by then; Scanlon isn't sure when he left.

 

He's not sure the others were ever there. He swims back to Beebe, alone.

 

They probably didn't even hear me. Not really. Which is a shame, because there at the end he was actually telling the truth.

 

He wishes he could pity them. It should be easy; they hide in the dark, they hide behind their eyecaps as though photocollagen is some sort of general anesthetic. They warrant the pity of real people. But how can you pity someone who's somehow better off than you are? How can you pity someone who, in some sick way, seems to be happy?

 

How can you pity someone who scares you to death?

 

And besides, they walked all over me. I couldn't control them at all. Have I made a single real choice since I came down?

 

Sure. I gave them Fischer, and they let me live.

 

Yves Scanlon wonders, briefly, how to put that into the official record without making himself look like a complete screwup.

 

In the end, he doesn't really care.

 

 

 

* * *

 

TRANS/OFFI/300850:1043

 

I have recently encountered evidence of... that is, I believe...

 

The behavior of Beebe Station personnel is distinctively...

 

I have recently participated in a telling exchange with station personnel. I managed to avoid outright confrontation, although...

 

Ah, fuck it.

 

 

 

* * *

 

T minus twenty minutes, and except for Yves Scanlon, Beebe is deserted.

 

It's been like this for the past couple of days. The vampires just don't come inside much any more. Maybe they're deliberately excluding him. Maybe they're just reverting to their natural state. He can't tell.

 

It's just as well. By now, the two sides have very little left to say to each other.

 

The shuttle should be almost here. Scanlon summons his resolve: when they come, they're not going to find him hiding in his cubby. He's going to be in the lounge, in plain view.

 

He takes a breath, holds it, listens. Beebe creaks and drips around him. No other sounds of life.

 

He gets off the pallet and presses an ear against the bulkhead. Nothing. He undogs the cubby hatch, opens it a few centimeters, peers out.

 

Nothing.

 

His suitcase has been packed for hours. He grabs it off the deck, swings the hatch all the way open, and strides purposefully down the corridor.

 

He sees the shadow just before he enters the lounge, a dim silhouette against the bulkhead. A part of him wants to turn and run back to his cubby, but it's a much smaller part than it used to be. Most of him is just tired. He steps forward.

 

Lubin is waiting there, standing motionless beside the ladder. He stares through Scanlon with eyes of solid ivory.

 

"I wanted to say goodbye," he says.

 

Scanlon laughs. He can't help it.

 

Lubin watches impassively.

 

"I'm sorry," Scanlon says. He doesn't feel even slightly amused. "It's just— you never even said hello, you know?"

 

"Yes," Lubin says. "Well."

 

Somehow, there's no sense of threat about him this time. Scanlon can't quite understand why; Lubin's background file is still full of holes, the rumors are still festering over Galápagos; even the other vampires keep their distance from this one. But none of that shows through right now. Lubin just stands there, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He looks almost vulnerable.

 

"So they're going to be bringing us back early," he says.

 

"I honestly don't know. It's not my decision."

 

"But they sent you down to— prepare the way. Like John the Baptist."

 

It's a very strange analogy, coming from Lubin. Scanlon says nothing.

 

"Did you— didn't they know we wouldn't want to come back? Didn't they count on it?"

 

"It wasn't like that." But he wonders, more than ever, what the GA knew.

 

Lubin clears his throat. He seems very much to want to say something, but doesn't.

 

"I found the windchimes," Scanlon says at last.

 

"Yes."

 

"They scared the hell out of me."

 

Lubin shakes his head. "That's not what they were for."

 

"What were they for?"

 

"Just— a hobby, really. We've all got hobbies here. Lenie does her starfish. Alice— dreams. This place has a way of taking ugly things and lighting them in a certain way, so they almost look beautiful." A shrug. "I build memorials."

 

"Memorials."

 

Lubin nods. "The windchimes were for Acton."

 

"I see."

 

Something drops onto Beebe with a clank. Scanlon jumps.

 

Lubin doesn't react. "I'm thinking of building another set," he says. "For Fischer, maybe."

 

"Memorials are for dead people. Fischer's still alive." Technically, anyway.

 

"Okay then. I'll make them for you."

 

The overhead hatch drops open. Scanlon grips his suitcase and starts to climb, one-handed.

 

"Sir—"

 

Scanlon looks down, surprised.

 

"I—" Lubin stops himself. "We could have treated you better," he says at last.

 

Scanlon knows, somehow, that this is not what Lubin intended to say. He waits. But Lubin offers nothing more.

 

"Thanks," Scanlon says, and climbs out of Beebe forever.

 

The chamber he rises into is wrong. He looks around, disoriented; this isn't the usual shuttle. The passenger compartment is too small, the walls studded with an array of nozzles. Forward, the cockpit hatch is sealed. A strange face looks back through the porthole as the ventral hatch swings shut.

 

"Hey..."

 

The face disappears. The compartment resonates with the sound of metal mouths disengaging. A slight lurch and the 'scaphe is rising free.

 

A fine aerosol mist hisses from the nozzles. It stings Scanlon's eyes. An unfamiliar voice reassures him from the cabin speaker. Nothing to worry about, it says. Just a routine precaution.

 

Everything's just fine.