by Jerry
Then I clench my fist gingerly, rejoice at this miracle, and remember.
Up until the last minute, I thought he was going to back out again—but he didn’t. Cathy talked him through his fears. Cathy, after all, has switched, and he loves her more than he’s ever loved anyone before.
So, our roles are reversed now. This body is his strait-jacket, now . . .
I am drenched in sweat. This is hopeless, impossible. I can’t read his mind, I can’t guess what he’s trying to do. Should I move, lie still, call out, keep silent? Even if the computer monitoring us is programmed to ignore a few trivial discrepancies, as soon as he notices that his body won’t carry out his will, he’ll panic just as I did, and I’ll have no chance at all of making the right guesses. Would he be sweating, now? Would his breathing be constricted, like this? No. I’ve been awake for just thirty seconds, and already I have betrayed myself. An optical-fibre cable trails from under my right ear to a panel on the wall. Somewhere, alarm bells must be sounding.
If I made a run for it, what would they do? Use force? I’m a citizen, aren’t I? Jewel-heads have had full legal rights for decades; the surgeons and engineers can’t do anything to me without my consent. I try to recall the clauses on the waiver he signed, but he hardly gave it a second glance. I tug at the cable that holds me prisoner, but it’s firmly anchored, at both ends.
When the door swings open, for a moment I think I’m going to fall to pieces, but from somewhere I find the strength to compose myself. It’s my neurologist, Dr Prem. He smiles and says, “How are you feeling? Not too bad?”
I nod dumbly.
“The biggest shock, for most people, is that they don’t feel different at all! For a while you’ll think, ‘It can’t be this simple! It can’t be this easy! It can’t be this normal!’ But you’ll soon come to accept that it is. And life will go on, unchanged.” He beams, taps my shoulder paternally, then turns and departs.
Hours pass. What are they waiting for? The evidence must be conclusive by now. Perhaps there are procedures to go through, legal and technical experts to be consulted, ethics committees to be assembled to deliberate on my fate. I’m soaked in perspiration, trembling uncontrollably. I grab the cable several times and yank with all my strength, but it seems fixed in concrete at one end, and bolted to my skull at the other.
An orderly brings me a meal. “Cheer up,” he says. “Visiting time soon.”
Afterwards, he brings me a bedpan, but I’m too nervous even to piss.
Cathy frowns when she sees me. “What’s wrong?”
I shrug and smile, shivering, wondering why I’m even trying to go through with the charade. “Nothing. I just . . . feel a bit sick, that’s all.”
She takes my hand, then bends and kisses me on the lips. In spite of everything, I find myself instantly aroused. Still leaning over me, she smiles and says, “It’s over now, okay? There’s nothing left to be afraid of. You’re a little shook up, but you know in your heart you’re still who you’ve always been. And I love you.”
I nod. We make small talk. She leaves. I whisper to myself, hysterically, “I’m still who I’ve always been. I’m still who I’ve always been.”
Yesterday, they scraped my skull clean, and inserted my new, non-sentient, space-filling mock-brain.
I feel calmer now than I have for a long time, and I think at last I’ve pieced together an explanation for my survival.
Why do they deactivate the teacher, for the week between the switch and the destruction of the brain? Well, they can hardly keep it running while the brain is being trashed—but why an entire week? To reassure people that the jewel, unsupervised, can still stay in synch; to persuade them that the life the jewel is going to live will be exactly the life that the organic brain “would have lived”—whatever that could mean.
Why, then, only for a week? Why not a month, or a year? Because the jewel cannot stay in synch for that long—not because of any flaw, but for precisely the reason that makes it worth using in the first place. The jewel is immortal. The brain is decaying. The jewel’s imitation of the brain leaves out—deliberately—the fact that real neurons die. Without the teacher working to contrive, in effect, an identical deterioration of the jewel, small discrepancies must eventually arise. A fraction of a second’s difference in responding to a stimulus is enough to arouse suspicion, and—as I know too well—from that moment on, the process of divergence is irreversible.
No doubt, a team of pioneering neurologists sat huddled around a computer screen, fifty years ago, and contemplated a graph of the probability of this radical divergence, versus time. How would they have chosen one week? What probability would have been acceptable? A tenth of a percent? A hundredth? A thousandth? However safe they decided to be, it’s hard to imagine them choosing a value low enough to make the phenomenon rare on a global scale, once a quarter of a million people were being switched every day.
In any given hospital, it might happen only once a decade, or once a century, but every institution would still need to have a policy for dealing with the eventuality.
What would their choices be?
They could honour their contractual obligations and turn the teacher on again, erasing their satisfied customer, and giving the traumatized organic brain the chance to rant about its ordeal to the media and the legal profession.
Or, they could quietly erase the computer records of the discrepancy, and calmly remove the only witness.
So, this is it. Eternity.
I’ll need transplants in fifty or sixty years’ time, and eventually a whole new body, but that prospect shouldn’t worry me—I can’t die on the operating table. In a thousand years or so, I’ll need extra hardware tacked on to cope with my memory storage requirements, but I’m sure the process will be uneventful. On a time scale of millions of years, the structure of the jewel is subject to cosmic-ray damage, but error-free transcription to a fresh crystal at regular intervals will circumvent that problem.
In theory, at least, I’m now guaranteed either a seat at the Big Crunch, or participation in the heat death of the universe.
I ditched Cathy, of course. I might have learnt to like her, but she made me nervous, and I was thoroughly sick of feeling that I had to play a role.
As for the man who claimed that he loved her—the man who spent the last week of his life helpless, terrified, suffocated by the knowledge of his impending death—I can’t yet decide how I feel. I ought to be able to empathize—considering that I once expected to suffer the very same fate myself—yet somehow he simply isn’t real to me. I know my brain was modelled on his—giving him a kind of causal primacy—but in spite of that, I think of him now as a pale, insubstantial shadow.
After all, I have no way of knowing if his sense of himself, his deepest inner life, his experience of being, was in any way comparable to my own.
A NICHE
Peter Watts
When the lights go out in Beebe Station, you can hear the metal groan.
Lenie Clarke lies on her bunk, listening. Overhead, past pipes and wires and eggshell plating, three kilometres of black ocean try to crush her. She feels the rift underneath, tearing open the seabed with strength enough to move a continent. She lies there in that fragile refuge and she hears Beebe’s armor shifting by microns, hears its seams creak not quite below the threshold of human hearing. God is a sadist on the Juan de Fuca Rift, and His name is Physics.
How did they talk me into this? she wonders. Why did I come down here? But she already knows the answer.
She hears Ballard moving out in the corridor. Clarke envies Ballard. Ballard never screws up, always seems to have her life under control. She almost seems happy down here.
Clarke rolls off her bunk and fumbles for a switch. Her cubby floods with dismal light. Pipes and access panels crowd the wall beside her; aesthetics run a distant second to functionality when you’re three thousand meters down. She turns and catches sight of a slick black amphibian in the bulkhead mirror.
&
nbsp; It still happens, occasionally. She can sometimes forget what they’ve done to her. It takes a conscious effort to feel the machines lurking where her left lung used to be. She’s so acclimated to the chronic ache in her chest, to that subtle inertia of plastic and metal as she moves, that she’s scarcely aware of them any more. She can still feel the memory of what it was to be fully human, and mistake that ghost for honest sensation.
Such respites never last. There are mirrors everywhere in Beebe; they’re supposed to increase the apparent size of one’s personal space. Sometimes Clarke shuts her eyes to hide from the reflections forever being thrown back at her. It doesn’t help. She clenches her lids and feels the corneal caps beneath them, covering her eyes like smooth white cataracts.
She climbs out of her cubby and moves along the corridor to the lounge. Ballard is waiting there, dressed in a diveskin and the usual air of confidence.
Ballard stands up. “Ready to go?”
“You’re in charge,” Clarke says.
“Only on paper.” Ballard smiles. “No pecking order down here, Lenie. As far as I’m concerned, we’re equals.” After two days on the rift Clarke is still surprised by the frequency with which Ballard smiles. Ballard smiles at the slightest provocation. It doesn’t always seem real.
Something hits Beebe from the outside.
Ballard’s smile falters. They hear it again; a wet, muffled thud through the station’s titanium skin.
“It takes a while to get used to,” Ballard says, “doesn’t it?”
And again.
“I mean, that sounds big—”
“Maybe we should turn the lights off,” Clarke suggests. She knows they won’t. Beebe’s exterior floodlights burn around the clock, an electric campfire pushing back the darkness. They can’t see it from inside—Beebe has no windows—but somehow they draw comfort from the knowledge of that unseen fire—
Thud!
—most of the time.
“Remember back in training?” Ballard says over the sound, “When they told us that the fish were usually so—small . . .”
Her voice trails off. Beebe creaks slightly. They listen for a while. There’s no other sound.
“It must’ve gotten tired,” Ballard says. “You’d think they’d figure it out.” She moves to the ladder and climbs downstairs.
Clarke follows her, a bit impatiently. There are sounds in Beebe that worry her far more than the futile attack of some misguided fish. Clarke can hear tired alloys negotiating surrender. She can feel the ocean looking for a way in. What if it finds one? The whole weight of the Pacific could drop down and turn her into jelly. Any time.
Better to face it outside, where she knows what’s coming. All she can do in here is wait for it to happen.
Going outside is like drowning, once a day.
Clarke stands facing Ballard, diveskin sealed, in an airlock that barely holds both of them. She has learned to tolerate the forced proximity; the glassy armor on her eyes helps a bit. Fuse seals, check headlamp, test injector; the ritual takes her, step by reflexive step, to that horrible moment when she awakens the machines sleeping within her, and changes.
When she catches her breath, and loses it.
When a vacuum opens, somewhere in her chest, that swallows the air she holds. When her remaining lung shrivels in its cage, and her guts collapse; when myoelectric demons flood her sinuses and middle ears with isotonic saline. When every pocket of internal gas disappears in the time it takes to draw a breath.
It always feels the same. The sudden, overwhelming nausea; the narrow confines of the airlock holding her erect when she tries to fall; seawater churning on all sides. Her face goes under; vision blurs, then clears as her corneal caps adjust.
She collapses against the walls and wishes she could scream. The floor of the airlock drops away like a gallows. Lenie Clarke falls writhing into the abyss.
They come out of the freezing darkness, headlights blazing, into an oasis of sodium luminosity. Machines grow everywhere at the Throat, like metal weeds. Cables and conduits spiderweb across the seabed in a dozen directions. The main pumps stand over twenty meters high, a regiment of submarine monoliths fading from sight on either side. Overhead floodlights bathe the jumbled structures in perpetual twilight.
They stop for a moment, hands resting on the line that guided them here.
“I’ll never get used to it,” Ballard grates in a caricature of her usual voice.
Clarke glances at her wrist thermistor. “Thirty-four Centigrade.” The words buzz, metallic, from her larynx. It feels so wrong to talk without breathing.
Ballard lets go of the rope and launches herself into the light. After a moment, breathless, Clarke follows.
There’s so much power here, so much wasted strength. Here the continents themselves do ponderous battle. Magma freezes; seawater boils; the very floor of the ocean is born by painful centimeters each year. Human machinery does not make energy, here at Dragon’s Throat; it merely hangs on and steals some insignificant fraction of it back to the mainland.
Clarke flies through canyons of metal and rock, and knows what it is to be a parasite. She looks down. Shellfish the size of boulders, crimson worms three meters long crowd the seabed between the machines. Legions of bacteria, hungry for sulfur, lace the water with milky veils.
The water fills with a sudden terrible cry.
It doesn’t sound like a scream. It sounds as though a great harp string is vibrating in slow motion. But Ballard is screaming, through some reluctant interface of flesh and metal:
“LENIE—”
Clarke turns in time to see her own arm disappear into a mouth that seems impossibly huge.
Teeth like scimitars clamp down on her shoulder. Clarke stares into a scaly black face half a meter across. Some tiny dispassionate part of her searches for eyes in that monstrous fusion of spines and teeth and gnarled flesh, and fails. How can it see me? she wonders.
Then the pain reaches her.
She feels her arm being wrenched from its socket. The creature thrashes, shaking its head back and forth, trying to tear her into chunks. Every tug sets her nerves screaming.
She goes limp. Please get it over with if you’re going to kill me just please God make it quick—She feels the urge to vomit, but the ’skin over her mouth and her own collapsed insides won’t let her.
She shuts out the pain. She’s had plenty of practice. She pulls inside, abandoning her body to ravenous vivisection; and from far away she feels the twisting of her attacker grow suddenly erratic. There’s another creature at her side, with arms and legs and a knife—you know, a knife, like the one you’ve got strapped to your leg and completely forgot about—and suddenly the monster is gone, its grip broken.
Clarke tells her neck muscles to work. It’s like operating a marionette. Her head turns. She sees Ballard locked in combat with something as big as she is. Only—Ballard is tearing it to pieces, with her bare hands. Its icicle teeth splinter and snap. Dark icewater courses from its wounds, tracing mortal convulsions with smoke-trails of suspended gore.
The creature spasms weakly. Ballard pushes it away. A dozen smaller fish dart into the light and begin tearing at the carcass. Photophores along their sides flash like frantic rainbows.
Clarke watches from the other side of the world. The pain in her side keeps its distance, a steady, pulsing ache. She looks; her arm is still there. She can even move her fingers without any trouble. I’ve had worse, she thinks.
Then: Why am I still alive?
Ballard appears at her side; her lens-covered eyes shine like photophores themselves.
“Jesus Christ,” Ballard says in a distorted whisper. “Lenie? You okay?”
Clarke dwells on the inanity of the question for a moment. But surprisingly, she feels intact. “Yeah.”
And if not, she knows, it’s her own damn fault. She just lay there. She just waited to die. She was asking for it.
She’s always asking for it.
Back in th
e airlock, the water recedes around them. And within them; Clarke’s stolen breath, released at last, races back along visceral channels, reinflating lung and gut and spirit.
Ballard splits the face seal on her ’skin and her words tumble into the wetroom. “Jesus. Jesus! I don’t believe it! My God, did you see that thing! They get so huge around here!” She passes her hands across her face; her corneal caps come off, milky hemispheres dropping from enormous hazel eyes. “And to think they’re usually just a few centimeters long . . .”
She starts to strip down, unzipping her ’skin along the forearms, talking the whole time. “And yet it was almost fragile, you know? Hit it hard enough and it just came apart! Jesus!” Ballard always removes her uniform indoors. Clarke suspects she’d rip the recycler out of her own thorax if she could, throw it in a corner with the ’skin and the eyecaps until the next time it was needed.
Maybe she’s got her other lung in her cabin, Clarke muses. Maybe she keeps it in a jar, and she stuffs it back into her chest at night . . . She feels a bit dopey; probably just an aftereffect of the neuroinhibitors her implants put out whenever she’s outside. Small price to pay to keep my brain from shorting out—I really shouldn’t mind . . .
Ballard peels her ’skin down to the waist. Just under her left breast, the electrolyser intake pokes out through her ribcage.
Clarke stares vaguely at that perforated disk in Ballard’s flesh. The ocean goes into us there, she thinks. The old knowledge seems newly significant, somehow. We suck it into us and steal its oxygen and spit it out again.
Prickly numbness leaks through her shoulder into her chest and neck. Clarke shakes her head, once, to clear it.
She sags suddenly, against the hatchway.
Am I in shock? Am I fainting?
“I mean—” Ballard stops, looks at Clarke with an expression of sudden concern. “Jesus, Lenie. You look terrible. You shouldn’t have told me you were okay if—”
The tingling reaches the base of Clarke’s skull. “I’m—okay,” she says. “Nothing broke. I’m just bruised.”