by Neil Clarke
Lack of imagination hadn’t been a disability in the past. Imagining shit was other peoples’ jobs, makers and rich kids with degrees, people who sat around coming up with fucked-up worst-case scenarios. And not even fucked-up enough, because nobody seemed to have imagined that the descender might implode halfway to the surface and everyone on Elena’s tethercomm would listen to her getting squeezed to death—or squeezed mostly to death, then drowned—over the course of thirty endless, excruciating seconds.
Jens’ cochlear nerves still burned with her scream. Minutes ago she’d been singing as he swung the descender door closed behind her. “So long, farewell—”
“No!”
“Auf Wiedersehen, goodbye!”
“You’re a bad person. You’re cursing me with that song in my head for the rest of my life.”
“Earworm? Why, there’s only one cure, Jens,” Elena had proclaimed, and then burst into an obnoxiously sunny smile. “Sing along with me!”
He’d swung the door shut on her last long, vibrato goodbye! while shouting, “Fuck yourself!” Some last words to his best friend.
Now Jens chewed on the corner of his lip and stared at nothing. Mohammed blipped in the corner of his inviz. Your biometrics are high. UOK?
Jens adjusted the shirt he’d hung over the lab porthole. A glossy sliver of black showed at the bottom where the shirt didn’t reach, black so dark it vibrated. Jens was ready to dart forward and punch that void in the face to keep it on its own side of the acrylic. Another thing he hadn’t imagined: that someone would put portholes in a station at the bottom of the ocean. What did they expect him to look at?
Jens? U there?
Where else would he be? I’m fine, he said. He wasn’t, but would he feel more okay if he were sitting in the Silxen office up on Sozertsaniye Orbital listening to the people around him lose their shit, instead of watching them lose their shit in group chat? He pushed himself off from the porthole and into one of the lab seats, the half-gravity landing him with a satisfying thump, and minimized the chat tiles. HR had already deployed some sort of crisis-management algo that was plastering all Silxen internal communications with soothing colors and soft, pulsing shapes.
U need help managing biometrics?
Jens reached up to swat Mohammed’s question out of his inviz and realized his hand was shaking. Both his hands were, and his mouth was quivering, and he tasted blood from his lip. If he didn’t bring himself down Mo would override him and push a sedative and the idea of that sent a rush of anger through him and Elena was—Elena . . .
He twitched his cochlear control up and put on the tranquility freq. Its drone filled his ears like a physical thing, cobwebs drawing between him and everything that was going on, softening edges. Jens stared at the breath bubble that had appeared in his inviz when his heart rate passed one hundred and forty. Silxen would ding his pay if he let his heart rate stay high for too long. They had his body under contract; no mucking up their equipment, even if Jens had a prior claim on it. He concentrated until the breath bubble went away, then dropped his head into his hands and tried not to imagine anything at all. With his eyes closed he was certain that the shirt had slipped off the porthole and that gaping black eye stared at him. Stared right through him, harpooning him to his seat.
Elena would have been proud.
Bad news first, Mohammed chatted, though what counted as bad news for Jens had recently made a dramatic shift with the implosion of his closest friend. He’d spent a long night in his bunk with his eyes refusing to close, the breath bubble visiting whenever he turned off the tranquility freq to listen to a song or watch a vid, or if he forgot what he wasn’t thinking about. He had to keep reminding himself: Don’t think about Elena. Don’t think about the porthole. Don’t think about the Worm. Morning—what passed for morning—dragged him through a routine. He was stuffing protein loaf between his molars when Mo’s chats arrived.
You’re going to have to get comfortable for a bit. Rad window closes in 20 hrs, surface team has to pull back to Sozert.
That was normal enough. Whenever the moon moved out of Jupiter’s magnetotail the surface radiation on Europa jumped enough to deep-fry DNA in just a few hours. Intraspace policy stated that the only allowable places to be in that case were either beneath the thick buffer of the surface ice, or not on Europa at all. Jens was offended anyway. Offended that the cosmos wouldn’t just pause for a moment out of respect for Elena. That Silxen wouldn’t, either.
His six-month station rotation was over, but there was no descender to return Jens to the surface. And even if there were a backup, he wouldn’t go near it now. So he’d be stuck there, and without anyone at the surface base. Nobody even in this sector. Jens would be alone. Except for the Worm.
Good news is that the drop is proceeding. It’s hitting the ice now.
In his peripheral vision the drop’s location showed as an orange dot. Another failure of imagination: it hadn’t occurred to Jens that the drop might not happen. Like he should be grateful Silxen was sending the shit he needed to survive. That was, apparently, good news.
“The fuck,” Jens muttered aloud. His voice hit the wall panels, flat against the freq playing through his cochlear.
Jens flicked open the Eel’s controls and locked it on to the drop. A rumble added to the station’s ambient hum as it launched from its bay.
Beyond the lab’s porthole, in the sliver of night that Jens’ makeshift curtain did not cover, there might have been a quick, brilliant flash of light. Jens froze, unfocused his eyes. Not looking, not looking. Some tricky reflection. Nothing to see out there.
He had to get out of this place. There had to be some way out of his contract.
In the meanwhile, what could he do? He followed his routine. He spent an hour in the hamster wheel on the station’s lower level, took a tepid shower. Usually he’d have a coffee while Elena ate a late dinner, and they’d laugh and shoot the shit and maybe Jens would play her part of a song he was working on, until it was time for her to crawl into her bunk and for Jens to keep an eye on things. There wasn’t a whole lot that the station techs had to do except be there. Drones probably could’ve done their jobs, but Intraspace would only lease Mug Ruith Vent Station for human occupancy, part of some stupid make-work policy that was supposed to create jobs, even though nobody wanted the jobs it created.
Jens listened to the low hiss of the station, felt it vibrate in his bowels. The station wasn’t ever actually quiet, but it was still too quiet.
Only fifteen yards away, the Worm was coiled around Mug Ruith’s slaggy spires like a poorly rolled, unbaked cinnamon bun. The long, fat spiral of it was as thick around as Jens’ thigh, and off that main body grew the skinny pale whips of its tentacles, bristling with tiny hairs, always moving, flapping over the belching vent. If Jens turned on the station floodlights—another stupid idea, who’d thought of those?—he could look out the porthole and see the Worm right now, a giant white spaghetti shit dropped on the smoking spires of Mug Ruith Hydrothermal Vent.
Mug Ruith itself was a range of nasty, melting candelabras belching dark cauliflowers of gas into the water, the pimple-end of a system that extended nearly to the moon’s core. The water just beyond the vent zone was close to freezing, and the water over the vents was 300 Celsius. The fucking maniac monster-worm balanced right at the edge of the spume, waving its hairy tentacles through it and getting buffeted back into the cold. Waving its arms through the belching smoke was the Worm’s job. It had evolved on Europa’s hydrothermal vents doing just this, and now it did it for Silxen—an employee, just like Jens. Well, not just like.
Nasty things lived on Earth’s hydrothermal vents, too, but the Worm was worse. For one, it wasn’t actually one thing, but a colony of thousands of tiny worm clones amalgamated into one giant Worm, sucking bacteria out of the ocean and siphoning the DNA out of that and fucking with and assimilating those genes for its own biologic diversity and, Jens didn’t know, maybe for fun. The clones and their off
spring grew into each other, sharing organ systems, indivisible, except for when they suddenly decided they did want to divide and then shot a rogue tentacle out into the ocean to fend for itself. That’s how all the Europan worms did it, but this particular Worm was fucked-with in more ways, modified to mine silica and some specific bacteria from the vent for Silxen instead of for its own food. Jens fed the Worm. He didn’t haul it buckets of slop or anything, there was an interface and it was all done remotely, but still: he had to feed the awful thing, and monitor its biometrics, and make sure it didn’t self-destruct or wander off into the void.
And all this smothered in the pitch-black swallowing silence of ten miles of ocean. Jens could feel that silence pressing up against the station’s hull. He switched to a focus freq.
A red light appeared in his inviz. The Eel was low on battery.
Unexpected. Not your-friend-just-imploded unexpected, but still unlikely. The Eel recharged fast, docking into a fusion charging port used by all the station’s remote tools. The only reason it might be low is if it hadn’t docked correctly—but that would’ve brought up another red dot.
Jens scrolled back through his past alerts and yeah, there it was: it’d come up on both Jens and Elena’s screens, but Elena had been distracted by the sudden crunching, pinging, shrieking disintegration of the machine that was carrying her to the surface, and Jens had been distracted by his friend dying. So they hadn’t noticed.
The Eel didn’t have enough battery to get to the drop and back. Jens recalled it so it could recharge. He did a couple more chores. Then sat, doing nothing.
He was alone. Except for the Worm.
Elena had tried to point Jens’ nascent imagination at the monster. “Think about it,” she’d said approximately a thousand times. “Think about it doing its thing out there, all those weird little connected selves. Can you imagine what it’s like? What it’s like to, like, have a little genetics laboratory in your brain and build yourself however you want? It’s insane. And Silxen has basically made it into a slave.”
“It’s weird enough just knowing it’s out there,” Jens said.
This is where Elena would erupt, her delight and amazement too big not to grab Jens by the shoulders or the arm, or shake her fists in the air. “But wouldn’t it be weirder for it to know we’re here?”
According to Silxen, the Worm didn’t know they were there. According to Silxen, it wasn’t smart enough. And even if it was, it probably wouldn’t realize its situation was abnormal. It was Silxen-created, or bred, really, tweaked and trained to its novel situation. Wild Europan vent worm colonies lived in similar environments, but they mined the vent gasses for food, not profit. And they were, horrifically, dozens of times larger.
He was still staring blankly into his inviz when the alert that the Eel was back appeared. Something to do, at least. He watched the dot move closer and closer to the station, and then a quiet thunk from below. An alert from the docking port: connection failure.
Jens cycled the connection, but it still didn’t take. Hard to tell what was going on with just the sensor; easier to see it. He pulled up the drone’s interface, ignored its blinking battery warnings. He toggled on its headlight and found the camera.
Officially, there was nothing but bacteria living around Mug Ruith. Intraspace didn’t allow tampering with existing ecosystems; the hydrothermal vent and its Worm were technically artificial, in that they’d been created by Silxen and not by Europa. Vent worms were the most complex life discovered on Europa. Everything else was similar to what had lived in Earth’s primordial soup some four billion years ago, evolving in fits and starts, popping up and dying off along with the short-lived hydrothermal vents. But large swaths of Europa’s deep hadn’t been explored—barely even surveyed. It was assumed that nothing could live in the pressure at 150 kilometers down, but evolution might have other ideas. And Jens had already found reason to doubt the people with the what-if jobs.
He wished Elena had never infected him with this stupid imagination.
He had to turn on the camera. There wouldn’t be much to look at. Definitely nothing unexpected, so he could just chill the fuck out right now.
Jens turned on the feed.
The world was black-and-chalk white, save for a streak of yellow on the Eel’s belly. The station’s hull was dull gray. Sediment whorled. Jens did not look into the fluctuating black that lay behind everything.
Something was stuck in the charging dock, pale tendrils like tattered cloth. Jens zoomed in.
White and long and finely bristled, tapering to a delicate whip-point at one end: there was a severed tentacle jammed into the dock.
Mohammed was not nearly as concerned about the tentacle as he should have been, and his focus kept shifting away from their chat, name going from active/bold to busy/fade in Jens’ inviz. Jens watched it bold and fade and bold and fade and wanted to yell. Usually Jens’ boss was a meticulous tight-ass. The hell was going on?
Mo come on, help me out here.
A long pause, and then Mohammed said, sorry, lot going on, brb.
Jens hissed between clenched teeth and waited.
Okay so here’s what I think, Mo said. The Worm can’t leave the temperate zone around the vent, so perhaps when U recalled the Eel it passed close to Mug Ruith and picked up some debris that got stuck.
Jens had thought of that possibility—imagined it, Elena would’ve been proud, and the thought of her socked him in the gut—but the Eel had already been low on battery. Why hadn’t it charged? The Worm arm must have been stuck in there before the Eel deployed. Mohammed didn’t catch that, which meant he wasn’t paying attention.
Jens clenched his fists and tried to think of a professional way to say all the furious things that needed saying while Mohammed’s name went bold and fade, bold and fade. Jens did yell, then, a little monkey screech that sounded ridiculous in the close space of the station.
Don’t worry about it right now, Mohammed said. We’re working on extraction plans for U so just hold tight. Catch U later.
Mohammed attached a vid to the chat, a meeting at HQ brainstorming ways to get him off of Mug Ruith. Jens hated all their suggestions, like leaving him until they could get a descender from the opposite side of Europa—that’d take months—or having the Eel drag him to the surface in a pressure suit. The thought of hanging from the skinny body of the Eel through ten miles of blackness was so overwhelmingly terrible that it made him light-headed. They hadn’t come to any conclusions, really, and Jens felt worse after watching the vid even though Mohammed had probably thought it’d cheer him up knowing the important selves at Earth HQ were worried about him. Parts of the vid were rough-edited out, too. Jens imagined those were the places where they weighed the pros and cons of abandoning him.
He wished he could talk to Elena.
His anxiety and anger did not crowd out his boredom. He’d been alone only two days—how was that only yesterday? Elena’s scream as her tethercomm cut off . . . Jens flicked on the tranquility freq. Boredom had a different quality when someone else was nearby. Someone had his back while he messed around in chat or read conspiracy threads and avoided working on music.
He wanted to talk to someone. Anybody.
His message to Valery bounced back, as if the contact info was wrong. He tried Soshanna, but her autoresponder was set to “unavailable.” He tried Morgan.
Nobody’s telling you anything? they said. That’s so wrong. Ok so don’t freak out.
Jens’ heart skipped.
You know everyone’s been talking about restructuring for however long, we all knew something bad was coming? Well I guess Elena was the final fuck-up in a long string of fuck-ups. I saw Val and Carl earlier and they said they’ve been laid off, all the vent teams are, so you too I guess? But there’s something worse going on because HR are like . . . gone. I mean if they were around the auditor algos would’ve already caught this conversation and redacted it, right?
Jens stared into his inviz. Mo
rgan continued.
Everyone on Sozert thinks Silxen is, like, done. Over. But they can’t leave you down there much longer. Intraspace has got to have laws, right? No matter what Silxen’s contracts say.
Morgan’s name faded abruptly, like they’d been pulled away from the conversation. They didn’t come back.
Jens ran in the hamster wheel until he was exhausted, but it didn’t help him sleep. He switched on the deep-relaxation freq and lay in his bunk.
Elena had thought his cochlear was stupid. She didn’t like any vamps, really, though she had an inviz like everyone else. They argued about vamps a lot, but Jens didn’t mind. When Elena disagreed with him she didn’t make him feel stupid and he didn’t get angry, just curious what she’d say. Sometimes they talked each other out of opinions. It never felt like a fight.
Elena called his cochlear “a gratuitous toy-boy mod,” but that didn’t seem to alter her opinion of Jens. The cochlear was supposed to fine-tune hearing, though you could do other things with it too. People experimented with frequencies to modify and control their moods. It wasn’t supposed to work, studies said it didn’t do anything, but it worked for Jens. He set a freq and he felt different. Wasn’t that proof?
Elena called it an “emotional sedative crutch.” If she found him staring, thinking, she’d shout “you’re freqing out, Jens!” and he would jolt out of the trance. She thought that was hilarious.
He must have slept, because his alarm went off. He got up and ran in the hamster wheel some more. He had to do something. The empty space where Elena had been was loomingly, threateningly silent.
He thought about working on music, but he’d have to turn off the tranquility freq. When he’d been assigned to the vent station he’d thought he’d have nothing to distract him from making music, but the station still had media feeds, and you could still dick around online, though the load time was bullshit. It turned out that even at the bottom of the ocean, Jens could find other shit to do.
Elena was dead and everything was wrong, but none of the station’s normal problems had gone away. The air filtration system was bugging out, and he was almost out of the good rations. He needed the stuff from the drop to solve those problems.