He was not happy now, not even halfway to being happy but the despair and bitterness had abated. His acceptance into the community would be slow, there would be reversals and setbacks as he made mistakes and misjudged situations. But he had no doubt that it would happen eventually. Then he too would be one of the crew, and it would be someone else’s turn to feel like the newcomer. He might not be happy then, but at least he would be settled, ready to play out the rest of his existence. Doing something, no matter how pointless, to prolong the existence of the human species, and indeed the universe it called home. Above all he would have the self-respect of knowing he had chosen the difficult path, rather than the easy one.
Weeks passed, and then the weeks turned into months. Two months had passed since his revival. Slowly he became confident with the work allotted to him. And as his confidence grew, so did Nero’s confidence in his abilities.
“She tells me you’re measuring up,” Clausen said, when he was called to the prefabricated shack where she drew up schedules and dolled out work.
He gave a shrug, too tired to care whether she was impressed or not. “I’ve done my best. I don’t know what more you want from me.”
She looked up from her planning.
“Remorse for what you did?”
“I can’t show remorse for something that wasn’t a crime. We were trying to bring something new into the world, that’s all. You think we had the slightest idea of the consequences?”
“You made a good living.”
“And I’m expected to feel bad about that? I’ve been thinking it over, Clausen, and I’ve decided your argument’s horseshit. I didn’t create the enemy. The original artilects were already out there, already in the Realm.”
“They hadn’t noticed us.”
“And the global population had only just spiked at eight billion. Who’s to say they weren’t about to notice, or they wouldn’t do so in the next hundred years, or the next thousand? At least the artilects I helped create gave us some warning of what we were facing.”
“Your artilects are trying to kill us.”
“Some of them. And some of them are also trying to keep us alive. Sorry, but that’s not an argument.”
She put down her pen and leaned back in her chair. “You’ve got some fight back in you.”
“If you expect me to apologise for myself, you’ve got a long wait coming. I think you brought me back to rub my nose in the world I helped bring about. I agree, it’s a fucked-up, miserable future. It couldn’t get much more fucked-up if it tried. But I didn’t build it. And I’m not responsible for you losing anyone.”
Her face twitched; it was as if he had reached across the desk and slapped her. “Nero told you.”
“I had a right to know why you were treating me the way you were. But you know what? I don’t care. If transferring your anger on to me helps you, go ahead. I was the billionaire CEO of a global company. I was doing something wrong if I didn’t wake up with a million knives in my back.”
She dismissed him from the office, and Gaunt left with the feeling that he’d scored a minor victory but at the possible cost of something larger. He had stood up to Clausen but did that make him more respectable in her eyes, or someone even more deserving of her antipathy?
That evening he was in the commons, sitting at the back of the room as wireless reports filtered in from the other rigs. Most of the news was unexceptional, but there had been three more breaches – sea-dragons being pushed through from the Realm – and one of them had achieved sufficient coherence to attack and damage an OTEC plant, immediately severing power to three rigs. Backup systems had cut in but failures had occurred and as a consequence around 100 sleepers had been lost to unscheduled warming. None of the sleepers had survived the rapid revival, but even if they had, there would have been no option but to euthanize them shortly afterwards. A hundred new minds might not have made much difference to the Realm’s clock speed but it would have established a risky precedent.
One sleeper, however, would soon have to be warmed. The details were sketchy, but Gaunt learned that there had been another accident out on one of the rigs. A man called Steiner had been hurt in some way.
The morning after, Gaunt was engaged in his duties on one of the rig’s high platforms when he saw the helicopter coming in with Steiner aboard. He put down his tools and watched the arrival. Even before the aircraft had touched down on the pad, caretakers were assembling just beyond the painted circle of the rotor hazard area. The helicopter kissed the ground against a breath of crosswind and the caretakers mobbed inward, almost preventing the door from being opened. Gaunt squinted against the wind, trying to pick out faces. A stretchered form emerged from the cabin, borne aloft by many pairs of willing hands. Even from his distant vantage point, it was obvious to Gaunt that Steiner was in a bad way. He had lost a leg below the knee, evidenced by the way the thermal blanket fell flat below the stump. The stretchered figure wore a breathing mask and another caretaker carried a saline drip which ran into Steiner’s arm. But for all the concern the crowd was showing, there was something else, something almost adulatory. More than once Gaunt saw a hand raised to brush against the stretcher, or even to touch Steiner’s own hand. And Steiner was awake, unable to speak, but nodding, turning his face this way and that to make eye contact with the welcoming party. Then the figure was taken inside and the crowd broke up, the workers returning to their tasks.
An hour or so later Nero came up to see him. She was still overseeing his initiation and knew his daily schedule, where he was likely to be at a given hour.
“Poor Steiner,” she said. “I guess you saw him come home.”
“Difficult to miss. It was like they were treating him as a hero.”
“They were, in a way. Not because he’d done anything heroic, or anything they hadn’t all done at some time or other. But because he’d bought his ticket out.”
“He’s going back into the box?”
“He has to. We can patch up a lot of things, but not a missing leg. Just don’t have the medical resources to deal with that kind of injury. Simpler just to freeze him back again and pull out an intact body to take his place.”
“Is Steiner OK 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 grey 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 that was 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 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 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? Dared 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 matters 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 experience 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 on 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 kilometre away, towards 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 si
nuous, 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 under water. 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 impact 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 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.
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