by Peter Watts
* * *
She’s outside. This isn’t part of the plan. The plan is to stay inside, like they told her to. The plan is to sit there, just asking for it.
But here she is at the Throat, swimming along Main Street. The generators loom over her like sheltering giants. She bathes in their warm sodium glow, passes through clouds of flickering microbes, barely noticed. Beneath her, monstrous benthos filter life from the water, as oblivious to her as she is to them. She passes a multicolored starfish, beautifully twisted, stitched together from leftovers. It lies folded back against itself, two arms facing upward; a few remaining tube feet wave feebly in the current. Cottony fungus thrives in a jagged patchwork of seams.
At the edge of the smoker her thermistor reads 54°C.
It tells her nothing. The smoker could sleep for a hundred years or go off in the next second. She tries to tune in to the bottom-dwellers, glean whatever instinctive insights Acton could steal, but she’s never been sensitive to invertebrate minds. Perhaps that skill comes only to those who’ve crossed the ten-percent threshold.
She’s never risked going down this one before.
It’s a tight fit. The inside of the chimney grabs her before she gets three meters. She twists and squirms; soft chunks of sulfur and calcium break free from the walls. She inches down, headfirst. Her arms are pinned over her head like black jointed antenna. There’s no room to keep them at her sides.
She’s plugging the vent so tightly that no light can filter in from Main Street. She trips her headlight on. A flocculent snowstorm swirls in the beam.
A meter farther down, the tunnel zigs right. She doesn’t think she’ll be able to navigate the turn. Even if she can, she knows the passage is blocked. She knows, because a lime-encrusted skeletal foot protrudes around the corner.
She wriggles forward. There’s a sudden roaring, and for one paralyzed moment she thinks the smoker is starting to blow. But the roar is in her head; something’s plugging her electrolyzer intake, depriving her of oxygen. It’s only Lenie Clarke, passing out.
She shakes back and forth, a spasm centimeters in amplitude. It’s enough; her intake is clear again. And as an added bonus, she’s gotten far enough to see around the corner.
Acton’s boiled skeleton clogs the passageway, crusty with mineral deposits. Blobs of melted copolymer stick to the remains like old candle wax. Somewhere in there, at least one piece of human technology is still working, screaming back to Beebe’s deafened sensors.
She can’t reach him. She can barely even touch him. But somehow, even through the encrustations, she can see that his neck has been neatly snapped.
Reptile
It has forgotten what it was.
Not that that matters, down here. What good is a name when there’s nothing around to use it? This one doesn’t remember where it comes from. It doesn’t remember the ones that drove it out so long ago. It doesn’t remember the overlord that once sat atop its spinal cord, a gelatinous veneer of language and culture and denied origins. It doesn’t even remember the slow deterioration of that oppressor, its final dissolution into dozens of autonomous, squabbling subroutines. Now even those have fallen silent.
Not much comes down from the cortex anymore. Low-level impulses flicker in from the parietal and occipital lobes. The motor strip hums in the background. Occasionally, Broca’s area mutters to itself. The rest is mostly dead and dark, worn smooth by a black ocean hot and mercurial as live steam, cold and sluggish as antifreeze. All that’s left now is pure reptile.
It pushes on, blind and unthinking, oblivious to the weight of four hundred liquid atmospheres. It eats whatever it can find, somehow knowing what to avoid and what to consume. Desalinators and recyclers keep it hydrated. Sometimes, old mammalian skin grows sticky with secreted residues; newer skin, laid on top, opens pores to the ocean and washes everything clean with aliquots of distilled seawater.
It’s dying, of course, but slowly. It wouldn’t care much about that, even if it knew.
* * *
Like all living things, it has a purpose. It is a guardian. It forgets, sometimes, exactly what it is supposed to be protecting. No matter. It knows it when it sees it.
It sees her now, crawling from a hole in the bottom of the world. She looks much like the others, but it has always been able to tell the difference. Why protect her, and not the others? It doesn’t care. Reptiles never question motives. They only act on them.
She doesn’t seem to know that it is here, watching.
The reptile is privy to certain insights that should, by rights, be denied it. It was exiled before the others tweaked their neurochemistry into more sensitive modes. And yet all that those changes did, in the end, was to make certain weak signals more easily discernible against a loud and chaotic background. Since the reptile’s cortex shut down, background noise has been all but silenced. The signals are as weak as ever, but the static has disappeared. And so the reptile has, without realizing it, absorbed a certain muddy awareness of distant attitudes.
It feels, somehow, that this place has become dangerous, although it doesn’t know how. It feels that the other creatures have disappeared. And yet, the one it protects is still here. With far less comprehension than a mother cat relocating her endangered kittens, the reptile tries to take its charge to safety.
It’s easier when she stops struggling. Eventually she even allows it to pull her away from the bright lights, back toward the place she belongs. She makes sounds, strange and familiar; the reptile listens at first, but they make its head hurt. After a while she stops. Silently, the reptile draws her through sightless nightscapes.
Dim light dawns ahead. And sound; faint at first, but growing. A soft whine. Gurgles. And something else, a pinging noise—metallic, Broca murmurs, although it doesn’t know what that means.
A copper beacon glares out from the darkness ahead—too coarse, too steady, far brighter than the bioluminescent embers that usually light the way. It turns the rest of the world stark black. The reptile usually avoids this place. But this is where she comes from. This is safety for her, even though to the reptile, it represents something completely—
From the cortex, a shiver of remembrance.
The beacon shines down from several meters above the seabed. At closer range it resolves into a string of smaller lights stretched in an arc, like photophores on the flank of some enormous fish.
Broca sends down more noise: sodium floods.
Something huge looms behind those lights, bloating gray against black. It hangs above the seabed like a great smooth boulder, impossibly buoyant, encircled by lights at its equator. Striated filaments connect it to the bottom.
And something else, smaller but even more painfully bright, is coming down out of the sky.
“ThisisCSSForcipigeroutofAstoriaAnybodyhome?”
The reptile shoots back into the darkness, mud billowing behind it. It retreats a good twenty meters before a dim realization sinks in.
Broca’s area knows those sounds. It doesn’t understand them—Broca’s never much good at anything but mimicry—but it’s heard something like them before. The reptile feels an unaccustomed twitch. It’s been a long time since curiosity was any use.
It turns and faces back from whence it fled. Distance has smeared the lights into a diffuse, dull glow. She’s back there somewhere, unprotected.
It edges back toward the beacon. One light divides again into many; that dim, ominous outline still lurks behind them. And the thing from the sky is settling down on top of it, making noises at once frightening and familiar.
She floats in the light, waiting. Dedicated, afraid, the reptile comes to her.
“Heylook.”
The reptile flinches, but holds its ground this time.
“Ididn’tmeentoostartlyou, butnobodysanseringinside. Imsupposdtopickyouguysup.”
She glides up toward the thing from the sky, comes to rest in front of the shiny round part on its front. The reptile can’t see what she’s doing th
ere. Hesitantly, its eyes aching with the unaccustomed brightness, it starts after her.
But she turns and meets it, coming back. She reaches out, guides it down along the bulging surface, past the lights that ring its middle (too bright, too bright), down toward—
Broca’s area is gibbering nonstop, eeeebbeeebeebebeebe beebe, and now there’s something else, too, something inside the reptile, stirring. Instinct. Feeling. Not so much memory as reflex—
It pulls back, suddenly frightened.
She tugs at it. She makes strange noises: togetinsydjerrycumminsiditsallrite— The reptile resists, uncertainly at first, then vigorously. It slides along the gray wall, now a cliff, now an overhang; it scrabbles for purchase, catches hold of some protuberance, clings against this strange hard surface. Its head darts back and forth, back and forth, between light and shadow.
“—onGerryyouvgaw toocome inside—”
The reptile freezes. Inside. It knows that word. It even understands it, somehow. Broca’s not alone anymore, something else is reaching out from the temporal lobe and tapping in. Something up there actually knows what Broca is talking about.
What she’s talking about.
“Gerry—”
It knows that sound, too.
“—please—”
That sound comes from a long time ago.
“—trust me—is there any of you left in there? Anything at all?”
Back when the reptile was part of something larger, not an it at all, then, but—
—he.
Clusters of neurons, long dormant, sparkle in the darkness. Old, forgotten subsystems stutter and reboot.
I—
“Gerry?”
My name. That’s my name. He can barely think over the sudden murmuring in his head. There are parts of him still asleep, parts that won’t talk, still other parts completely washed away. He shakes his head, trying to clear it. The new parts—no, the old parts, the very old parts that went away and now they’ve come back and won’t shut the fuck up—are all clamoring for attention.
Everywhere is so bright. Everywhere hurts. Everywhere …
Words scroll through his mind: The lights are on. Nobody’s home.
The lights come on, flickering.
He can catch glimpses of sick, rotten things squirming in his head. Old memories grind screeching against thick layers of corrosion. Something lurches into sudden focus: a fist. The feel of bones, breaking in his face. The ocean in his mouth, warm and somehow brackish. A boy with a shockprod. A girl covered in bruises.
Other boys.
Other girls.
Other fists.
Everything hurts, everywhere.
Something’s trying to pry his fingers free. Something’s trying to drag him inside. Something wants to bring all this back. Something wants to take him home.
Words come to him, and he lets them out: “Don’t you fucking TOUCH ME!”
He pushes his tormentor away, makes a desperate grab for empty water. The darkness is too far away; he can see his shadow stretching along the bottom, black and solid and squirming against the light. He kicks as hard as he can. Nothing grabs him. After a while the light fades away.
But the voices shout as loud as ever.
Skyhop
Beebe yawns like a black pit between his feet. Something rustles down there; he catches hints of movement, darkness shifting against darkness. Suddenly something glints up at him; two ivory smudges of reflected light, all but lost against that black background. They hover there a moment, then begin to rise. A pale face resolves around them.
She climbs out of Beebe, dripping, and seems to bring some of the darkness with her. It follows her to the corner of the passenger compartment and hangs around her like a blanket. She doesn’t say anything.
Joel glances into the pit, back at the rifter. “Is anyone else, er…”
She shakes her head, a gesture so subtle he nearly misses it.
“There was— I mean, the other one.…” This has to be the rifter who was hanging off his viewport a few minutes ago: CLARKE, her shoulder patch says. But the other one, the one that shot off like a refugee on the wrong side of the fence—that one’s still close by, according to sonar. Hugging the bottom, thirty meters beyond the light. Just sitting there.
“There’s no one else coming,” she says. Her voice sounds small and dead.
“No one?” Two accounted for, out of a max complement of six? He cranks up the range on his display; nobody farther out, either. Unless they’re all hiding behind rocks or something.
He looks back down Beebe’s throat. Or they could all be hiding right down there, like trolls, waiting.…
He abruptly drops the hatch, spins it tight. “Clarke, right? What’s going on down here?”
She blinks at him. “You think I know?” She seems almost surprised. “I thought you’d be able to tell me.”
“All I know is, the GA’s paying me a shitload to do graveyard on short notice.” Joel climbs forward, drops into the pilot’s couch. Checks sonar. That weird fucker is still out there.
“I don’t think I’m supposed to leave anyone behind,” he says.
“You won’t be,” Clarke says.
“Will too. Got him right there in my sights.”
She doesn’t answer. He turns around and looks at her.
“Fine,” she says at last. “You go out and get him.”
Joel stares at her for a few seconds. I don’t really want to know, he decides at last.
He turns without another word and blows the tanks. The ’scaphe, suddenly buoyant, strains against the docking clamps. Joel frees it with a tap on his panel. The ’scaphe leaps away from Beebe like something living, wobbles against viscous resistance, and begins climbing.
“You…” From behind him.
Joel turns.
“You really don’t know what’s going on?” Clarke asks.
“They called me about twelve hours ago. Midnight run to Beebe, they said. When I got to Astoria, they told me to evacuate everyone. They said you’d all be ready and waiting.”
Her lips curve up a bit. Not exactly a smile, but probably as close as these psychos ever come. It looks good on her, in a cold, distant sort of way. Get rid of the eyecaps and he could easily see himself putting her into his VR program.
“What happened to everyone else?” he risks.
“Nothing,” she says. “We just got—a bit paranoid.”
Joel grunts. “Don’t blame you. Put me down there for a year, paranoia’d be the least of my problems.”
That brief, ghostly smile again.
“But really,” he says, pushing it. “Why’s everyone staying behind? This some kind of a labor action? One of those”—what did they used to call them?—“strike thingies?”
“Something like that” Clarke looks up at the overhead bulkhead. “How long to the surface?”
“A good twenty minutes, I’m afraid. These GA ’scaphes are fucking dirigibles. Everyone else is out there racing with dolphins, and the most I can manage with this thing is a fast wallow. Still”—he tries a disarming grin—“there’s an upside. They’re paying me by the hour.”
“Hooray for you,” she says.
Floodlight
It’s almost silent again.
Little by little, the voices have stopped screaming. Now they converse among themselves in whispers, discussing things that mean nothing to him. It’s okay, though. He’s used to being ignored. He’s glad to be ignored.
You’re safe, Gerry. They can’t hurt you.
What— Who—
They’ve all gone. It’s just us now.
You—
It’s me, Gerry. Shadow. I was wondering when you’d come back.
He shakes his head. The faintest light still leaks over his shoulder. He turns, not so much toward light as toward a subtle lessening of darkness.
She was trying to help you, Gerry. She was only trying to help.
She—
Lenie. You’re he
r guardian angel. Remember?
I’m not sure. I think—
But you left her back there. You ran away.
She wanted— I— Not inside …
He feels his legs moving. Water pushes against his face. He moves forward. A soft hole opens in the darkness ahead. He can see shapes inside it.
That’s where she lives, Shadow says. Remember?
He creeps back into the light. There were noises before, loud and painful. There was something big and dark, that moved. Now there is only this great ball hanging overhead, like, like,
—like a fist—
He stops, frightened. But everything’s quiet, so quiet he can hear faint cries drifting across the seabed. He remembers: There’s a hole in the ocean, a little ways from here, that talks to him sometimes. He’s never understood what it says.
Go on, Shadow urges. She went inside.
She’s gone—
You can’t tell from out here. You have to get in close.
The underside of the sphere is a cool, shadowy refuge; the equatorial lights can’t reach all the way around its convex surface. In the overlapping shadows on the south pole, something shimmers enticingly.
Go on.
He pushes off the bottom, glides into the cone of shadow beneath the object. A bright shiny disk a meter across, facing down, wriggles inside a circular rim. He looks up into it.
Something looks back.
Startled, he twists down and away. The disk writhes in the sudden turbulence. He stops, turns back.
A bubble. That’s all it is. A pocket of gas, trapped underneath the
—the airlock.
That’s nothing to be scared of, Shadow tells him. That’s how you get in.
Still nervous, he swims back underneath the sphere. The air pocket shines silver in the reflected light. A black wraith moves into view within it, almost featureless except for two empty white spaces where eyes should be. It reaches out to meet his outstretched hand. Two sets of fingertips touch, fuse, disappear. One arm is grafted onto its own reflection at the wrist. Fingers, on the other side of the looking glass, touch metal.
He pulls back his hand, fascinated. The wraith floats overhead, empty and untroubled.