“Is Steiner okay about that?”
“Steiner doesn’t have a choice, unfortunately. There isn’t really any kind of effective work he could do like that, and we can’t afford to carry the deadweight of an unproductive mind. You’ve seen how stretched we are: it’s all hands on deck around here. We work you until you drop, and if you can’t work, you go back in the box. That’s the deal.”
“I’m glad for Steiner, then.”
Nero shook her head emphatically. “Don’t be. Steiner would much rather stay with us. He fitted in well, after his adjustment. Popular guy.”
“I could tell. But then why are they treating him like he’s won the lottery, if that’s not what he wanted?”
“Because what else are you going to do? Feel miserable about it? Hold a wake? Steiner goes back in the box with dignity. He held his end up. Didn’t let any of us down. Now he gets to take it easy. If we can’t celebrate that, what can we celebrate?”
“They’ll be bringing someone else out, then.”
“As soon as Clausen identifies a suitable replacement. He or she’ll need to be trained up, though, and in the meantime there’s a man-sized gap where Steiner used to be.” She lifted off her hard hat to scratch her scalp. “That’s kind of the reason I dropped by, actually. You’re fitting in well, Gaunt, but sooner or later we all have to handle solitary duties away from the ops rig. Where Steiner was is currently unmanned. It’s a low-maintenance unit that doesn’t need more than one warm body, most of the time. The thinking is this would be a good chance to try you out.”
It wasn’t a total surprise; he had known enough of the work patterns to know that, sooner or later, he would be shipped out to one of the other rigs for an extended tour of duty. He just hadn’t expected it to happen quite so soon, when he was only just beginning to find his feet, only just beginning to feel that he had a future.
“I don’t feel ready.”
“No one ever does. But the chopper’s waiting. Clausen’s already redrawing the schedule so someone else can take up the slack here.”
“I don’t get a choice in this, do I?”
Nero looked sympathetic. “Not really. But, you know, sometimes it’s easier not having a choice.”
“How long?”
“Hard to say. Figure on at least three weeks, maybe longer. I’m afraid Clausen won’t make the decision to pull you back until she’s good and ready.”
“I think I pissed her off,” Gaunt said.
“Not the hardest thing to do,” Nero answered.
They helicoptered him out to the other rig. He had been given just enough time to gather his few personal effects, such as they were. He did not need to take any tools or parts with him because he would find all that he needed when he arrived, as well as ample rations and medical supplies. Nero, for her part, tried to reassure him that all would be well. The robots he would be tending were all types that he had already serviced, and it was unlikely that any would suffer catastrophic breakdowns during his tour. No one was expecting miracles, she said: if something arose that he couldn’t reasonably deal with, then help would be sent. And if he cracked out there, then he’d be brought back.
What she didn’t say was what would happen then. But he didn’t think it would involve going back into the box. Maybe he’d be assigned something at the bottom of the food chain, but that didn’t seem very likely either.
But it wasn’t the possibility of cracking, or even failing in his duties, that was bothering him. It was something else, the seed of an idea that he wished Steiner had not planted in his mind. Gaunt had been adjusting, slowly coming to terms with his new life. He had been recalibrating his hopes and fears, forcing his expectations into line with what the world now had on offer. No riches, no prestige, no luxury, and most certainly not immortality and eternal youth. The best it could give was twenty or thirty years of hard graft. Ten thousand days, if he was very lucky. And most of those days would be spent doing hard, backbreaking work, until the work took its ultimate toll. He’d be cold and wet a lot of the time, and when he wasn’t cold and wet he’d be toiling under an uncaring sun, his eyes salt-stung, his hands ripped to shreds from work that would have been too demeaning for the lowliest wage slave in the old world. He’d be high in the air, vertigo never quite leaving him, with only metal and concrete and too much gray ocean under his feet. He’d be hungry and dry-mouthed, because the seaweed-derived food never filled his belly and there was never enough drinking water to sate his thirst. In the best of outcomes, he’d be doing well to see more than a hundred other human faces before he died. Maybe there’d be friends in those hundred faces, friends as well as enemies, and maybe, just maybe, there’d be at least one person who could be more than a friend. He didn’t know, and he knew better than to expect guarantees or hollow promises. But this much at least was true. He had been adjusting.
And then Steiner had shown him that there was another way out.
He could keep his dignity. He could return to the boxes with the assurance that he had done his part.
As a hero, one of the Few.
All he had to do was have an accident.
He had been on the new rig, alone, for two weeks. It was only then that he satisfied himself that the means lay at hand. Nero had impressed on him many times the safety procedures that needed to be adhered to when working with powerful items of moving machinery, such as robots. Especially when those robots were not powered down. All it would take, she told him, was a moment of inattention. Forgetting to clamp down on that safety lock, forgetting to ensure that such-and-such an override was not enabled. Putting his hand onto the service rail for balance, when the robot was about to move back along it. “Don’t think it can’t happen,” she said, holding up her mittened hand. “I was lucky. Got off with burns, which heal. I can still do useful shit, even now. Even more so when I get these bandages off, and I can work my fingers again. But try getting by without any fingers at all.”
“I’ll be careful,” Gaunt had assured her, and he had believed it, truly, because he had always been squeamish.
But that was before he saw injury as a means to an end.
His planning, of necessity, had to be meticulous. He wanted to survive, not be pulled off the rig as a brain-dead corpse, not fit to be frozen again. It would be no good lying unconscious, bleeding to death. He would have to save himself, make his way back to the communications room, issue an emergency distress signal. Steiner had been lucky, but he would have to be cunning and single-minded. Above all, it must not look as if he had planned it.
When the criteria were established, he saw that there was really only one possibility. One of the robots on his inspection cycle was large and dim enough to cause injury to the careless. It moved along a service rail, sometimes without warning. Even without his trying, it had caught him off guard a couple of times, as its task scheduler suddenly decided to propel it to a new inspection point. He’d snatched his hand out of the way in time, but he would only have needed to hesitate, or to have his clothing catch on something, for the machine to roll over him. No matter what happened, whether the machine sliced or crushed, he was in no doubt that it would hurt worse than anything he had ever known. But at the same time the pain would herald the possibility of blessed release, and that would make it bearable. They could always fix him a new hand, in the new world on the other side of sleep.
It took him days to build up to it. Time after time he almost had the nerve, before pulling away. Too many factors jostled for consideration. What clothing to wear, to increase his chances of surviving the accident? Dare he prepare the first-aid equipment in advance, so that he could use it one-handed? Should he wait until the weather was perfect for flying, or would that risk matters appearing too stage-managed?
He didn’t know. He couldn’t decide.
In the end the weather settled the issue for him.
A storm hit, coming down hard and fast like an iron heel. He listened to the reports from the other rigs, as each felt the full
fury of the waves and the wind and the lightning. It was worse than any weather he had experienced since his revival, and at first it was almost too perfectly in accord with his needs. Real accidents were happening out there, but there wasn’t much that anyone could do about it until the helicopters could get airborne. Now was not the time to have his accident, not if he wanted to be rescued.
So he waited, listening to the reports. Out on the observation deck, he watched the lightning strobe from horizon to horizon, picking out the distant sentinels of other rigs, stark and white like thunderstruck trees on a flat black plain.
Not now, he thought. When the storm turns, when the possibility of accident is still there, but when rescue is again feasible.
He thought of Nero. She had been as kind to him as anyone, but he wasn’t sure if that had much to do with friendship. She needed an able-bodied worker, that was all.
Maybe. But she also knew him better than anyone, better even than Clausen. Would she see through his plan, and realize what he had done?
He was still thinking it through when the storm began to ease, the waves turning leaden and sluggish, and the eastern sky gained a band of salmon pink.
He climbed to the waiting robot and sat there. The rig creaked and groaned around him, affronted by the battering it had taken. It was only then that he realized that it was much too early in the day to have his accident. He would have to wait until sunrise if anyone was going to believe that he had been engaged in his normal duties. No one went out to fix a broken service robot in the middle of a storm.
That was when he saw the sea-glow.
It was happening perhaps a kilometer away, toward the west. A foreshortened circle of fizzing yellow-green, a luminous cauldron just beneath the waves. Almost beautiful, if he didn’t know what it signified. A sea-dragon was coming through, a sinuous, living weapon from the artilect wars. It was achieving coherence, taking solid form in base reality.
Gaunt forgot all about his planned accident. For long moments he could only stare at that circular glow, mesmerized at the shape assuming existence underwater. He had seen a sea-dragon from the helicopter on the first day of his revival, but he had not come close to grasping its scale. Now, as the size of the forming creature became apparent, he understood why such things were capable of havoc. Something between a tentacle and a barb broke the surface, still imbued with a kind of glowing translucence, as if its hold on reality was not yet secure, and from his vantage point it clearly reached higher into the sky than the rig itself.
Then it was gone. Not because the sea-dragon had failed in its bid to achieve coherence, but because the creature had withdrawn into the depths. The yellow-green glow had by now all but dissipated, like some vivid chemical slick breaking up into its constituent elements. The sea, still being stirred around by the tail end of the storm, appeared normal enough. Moments passed, then what must have been a minute or more. He had not drawn a breath since first seeing the sea-glow, but he started breathing again, daring to hope that the life-form had swum away to some other objective or had perhaps lost coherence in the depths.
He felt it slam into the rig.
The entire structure lurched with the impact; he doubted the force would have been any less violent if a submarine had just collided with it. He remained on his feet, while all around, pieces of unsecured metal broke away, dropping to the decks or the sea. From somewhere out of sight came a tortured groan, heralding some awful structural failure. A sequence of booming crashes followed, as if boulders were being dropped into the waves. Then the sea-dragon rammed the rig again, and this time the jolt was sufficient to unfoot him. To his right, one of the cranes began to sway in an alarming fashion, the scaffolding of its tower buckling.
The sea-dragon was holding coherence. From the ferocity of its attacks, Gaunt thought it quite possible that it could take down the whole rig, given time.
He realized, with a sharp and surprising clarity, that he did not want to die. More than that: he realized that life in this world, with all its hardships and disappointments, was going to be infinitely preferable to death beyond it.
He wanted to survive.
As the sea-dragon came in again, he started down the ladders and stairwells, grateful for having a full set of fingers and hands, terrified on one level and almost drunkenly, deliriously glad on the other. He had not done the thing he had been planning, and now he might die anyway, but there was a chance, and if he survived this, he would have nothing in the world to be ashamed of.
He had reached the operations deck, the room where he had planned to administer first aid and issue his distress call, when the sea-dragon began the second phase of its assault. He could see it plainly visible through the rig’s open middle as it hauled its way out of the sea, using one of the legs to assist its progress. There was nothing translucent or tentative about it now. And it was indeed a dragon, or rather a chimera of dragon and snake and squid and every scaled, barbed, tentacled, clawed horror ever committed to a bestiary. It was a lustrous slate green in color and the water ran off it in thunderous curtains. Its head, or what he chose to think of as its head, had reached the level of the operations deck. And still the sea-dragon produced more of itself, uncoiling out of the dark waters like some conjurer’s trick. Tentacles whipped out and found purchase, and it snapped and wrenched away parts of the rig’s superstructure as if they were made of biscuit or brittle toffee. It was making a noise while it attacked, an awful, slowly rising and falling foghorn proclamation. It’s a weapon, Gaunt reminded himself. It had been engineered to be terrible.
The sea-dragon was pythoning its lower anatomy around one of the support legs, crushing and grinding. Scabs of concrete came away, hitting the sea like chunks of melting glacier. The floor under his feet surged, and when it stopped surging the angle was all wrong. Gaunt knew then that the rig could not be saved, and that if he wished to live he would have to take his chances in the water. The thought of it was almost enough to make him laugh. Leave the rig, leave the one thing that passed for solid ground, and enter the same seas that now held the dragon?
Yet it had to be done.
He issued the distress call, but didn’t wait for a possible response. He gave the rig a few minutes at the most. If they couldn’t find him in the water, it wouldn’t help him to know their plans. Then he looked around for the nearest orange-painted survival cabinet. He had been shown the emergency equipment during his training, never once imagining that he would have cause to use it. The insulated survival clothing, the life jacket, the egress procedure …
A staircase ran down the interior of one of the legs, emerging just above the water line; it was how they came and went from the rig on the odd occasions when they were using boats rather than helicopters. But even as he remembered how to reach the staircase, he realized that it was inside the same leg that the sea-dragon was wrapped around. That left him with only one other option. There was a ladder that led down to the water, with an extensible lower portion. It wouldn’t get him all the way, but his chances of surviving the drop were a lot better than his chances of surviving the sea-dragon.
It was worse than he had been expecting. The fall into the surging waters seemed to last forever, the superstructure of the rig rising slowly above him, the iron-gray sea hovering below until what felt like the very last instant, when it suddenly accelerated, and then he hit the surface with such force that he blacked out. He must have submerged and bobbed to the surface, because when he came around he was coughing cold salt water from his lungs, and it was in his eyes and ears and nostrils as well, colder than water had any right to be, and then a wave was curling over him, and he blacked out again.
He came around again, what must have been minutes later. He was still in the water, cold around the neck, but his body snug in the insulation suit. The life jacket was keeping his head out of the water, except when the waves crashed onto him. A light on his jacket was blinking on and off, impossibly bright and blue.
To his right, hundreds of
meters away, and a little farther with each bob of the waters, the rig was going down with the sea-dragon still wrapped around its lower extremities. He heard the foghorn call, saw one of the legs crumble away, and then an immense tidal weariness closed over him.
He didn’t remember the helicopter finding him. He didn’t remember the thud of its rotors or being hauled out of the water on a winch line. There was just a long period of unconsciousness, and then the noise and vibration of the cabin, the sun coming in through the windows, the sky clear and blue and the sea unruffled. It took a few moments for it all to click in. Some part of his brain had skipped over the events since his arrival and was still working on the assumption that it had all worked out, that he had slept into a better future, a future where the world was new and clean and death just a fading memory.
“We got your signal,” Clausen said. “Took us a while to find you, even with the transponder on your jacket.”
It all came back to him. The rigs, the sleepers, the artilects, the sea-dragons. The absolute certainty that this was the only world he would know, followed by the realization—or, rather, the memory of having already come to the realization—that this was still better than dying. He thought back to what he had been planning to do before the sea-dragon came, and wanted to crush the memory and bury it where he buried every other shameful thing he had ever done.
“What about the rig?”
“Gone,” Clausen said. “Along with all the sleepers inside it. The dragon broke up shortly afterward. It’s a bad sign, that it held coherence for as long as it did. Means they’re getting better.”
“Our machines will just have to get better as well, won’t they.”
He thought she might spit the observation back at him, mock him for its easy triteness, when he knew so little of the war and the toll it had taken. But instead she nodded. “That’s all they can do. All we can hope for. And they will, of course. They always do. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here.” She looked down at his blanketed form. “Sorry you agreed to stay awake now?”
Robot Uprisings Page 24