Starfish

by Peter Watts

  They float between Beebe and the sea floor. Clarke reaches out to him. Acton reaches back.

  “How long has it been?” The words come out as faint, metallic sighs.

  “Six days. Maybe seven. I’ve been putting off—calling up for a replacement—”

  He doesn’t react.

  “We saw you on sonar sometimes,” she adds. “For a while. Then you disappeared.”

  Silence.

  “Did you get lost?” she asks after a while.

  “Yeah.”

  “But you’re back now.”

  “No.”

  “Karl—”

  “I need you to promise me something, Lenie.”

  “What?”

  “Promise me you’ll do what I did. The others too. They’ll listen to you.”

  “You know I can’t—”

  “Five percent, Lenie. Maybe ten. If you keep it that low you’ll do okay. Promise.”

  “Why, Karl?”

  “Because I wasn’t wrong about everything. Because sooner or later they’re going to have to get rid of you, and you need every edge you can get.”

  “Come inside. We can talk about it inside, everyone’s there.”

  “There’s strange things happening out there, Len. Out past sonar range, they’re— I don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t tell us.…”

  “Come inside, Karl.”

  He shakes his head. He seems almost unused to the gesture.

  “—can’t—”

  “Then don’t expect me—”

  “I left a file in the library. It explains things. As much as I could, when I was in there. Promise me, Len.”

  “No. You promise. Come inside. Promise we’ll work it out.”

  “It kills too much of me,” he sighs. “I pushed it too far. Something burned out, I’m not even completely whole out here anymore. But you’ll be okay. Five or ten percent, no more.”

  “I need you,” she buzzes, very quietly.

  “No,” he says. “You need Karl Acton.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You need what he did to you.”

  All the warmth goes out of her then. What’s left is a slow, freezing boil.

  “What is this, Karl? Some grand insight you got while spirit-walking around in the mud? You think you know me better than I do?”

  “You know—”

  “Because you don’t, you know. You don’t know shit about me, you never did. And you don’t really have the balls to find out, so you run off into the dark and come back spouting all this pretentious bullshit.” She’s goading him, she knows she’s goading him but he’s just not reacting. Even one of his outbursts would be better than this.

  “It’s saved under ‘Shadow’,” he says.

  She stares at him without speaking.

  “The file,” he adds.

  “What’s wrong with you?” She’s beating at him now, pounding as hard as she can but he’s not hitting back, he’s not even defending himself for Christ’s sake why don’t you fight back asshole why don’t you just get it over with, just beat the shit out of me until the guilt covers us both and we’ll promise never to do it again and—

  But even anger deserts her now. The inertia of her attack pushes them away from each other. She catches herself on an anchor cable. A starfish, wrapped around the line, reaches blindly out to touch her with the tip of one arm.

  Acton continues to drift.

  “Stay,” she says.

  He brakes and holds position without answering, dim and gray and distant.

  There are so many things denied her out here. She can’t cry. She can’t even close her eyes. So she stares at the seabed, watches her own shadow stretch off into the darkness. “Why are you doing this?” she asks, exhausted, and wonders who she meant the question for.

  His shadow flows across her own. A mechanical voice answers:

  “This is what you do when you really love someone.”

  She jerks her head up in time to see him disappear.

  * * *

  Beebe’s quiet when she returns. The wet slap of her feet on the deck is the only sound. She climbs into the lounge and finds it empty. She takes a step toward the corridor that leads to her cubby.

  Stops.

  In Comm, a luminous icon inches toward the Throat. The display lies for effect; in reality Acton is dark and unreflective, no more luminous than she is.

  She wonders again if she should try and stop him. She could never overpower him by force, but perhaps she just hasn’t thought of the right thing to say. Perhaps if she just gets it right she can call him back, compel his return through words alone. Not a victim anymore, he said once. Perhaps she’s a siren instead.

  She can’t think of anything to say.

  He’s almost there now. She can see him gliding between great bronze pillars, bacterial nebulae swirling in his wake. She imagines his face aimed down, scanning, relentless, hungry. She can see him homing in on the north end of Main Street.

  She shuts off the display.

  She doesn’t have to watch this. She knows what’s going on, and the machines will tell her when it’s over. She couldn’t stop them if she tried, not unless she smashed them into junk. That, in fact, is exactly what she wants to do. But she controls herself. Quiet as stone, Lenie Clarke sits in the Command cubby staring at a blank screen, waiting for the alarm.

  NEKTON

  DRYBACK

  JUMP-START

  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 firsthand, right here in his new backyard. 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. Someday, 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 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. Cross-linked 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 primitive evolved 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. Cross-linked 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 recognize 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 per 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 unauthorized 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 secondhand 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 up do you go now?”

  “Almost to a thousand. Another month 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, 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 toward the center of the hull.