by Kris Schnee
That was about the same reason he hadn't done much exploring. He'd located a few fragments of titanium plating scattered from the wreck of Titan and used them for scrap, but hadn't done a thorough survey more than a few kilometers from base. There was nothing but water and resource-rich shallows in every direction around here... except east, where the seabed fell sharply into a darkness that felt hungry. Neil shuddered at the thought of it. The automated distress beacon had gone silent before he'd been able to trace its source.
One of these days, there'd be a terrible storm. He had set up a little weather station and stockpiled parts and an especially sheltered undersea room in preparation, but how could he really know how bad it'd be when it came? Worse yet, sooner or later he was bound to get sick, or bitten by some local venomous critter, or otherwise get badly hurt. He did have medicine, and the ottery biomods gave him advantages over any normal human at sea, but he wasn't invincible.
Seek out other survivors, the guidebook said. But as far as he could tell, there weren't any. He had no gold for that boosted antenna. He had to wait here for rescue or for anyone else to get here. If anyone else really had made it to this planet's surface, they were probably hunkered down and thinking the same thing. They might be just over the horizon and he wouldn't know.
The base's computer said, "Is something wrong, Neil? You've been punching the wall for thirty seconds."
His fist hurt now that he paid attention, and his claws dug into his palm. "I have no way to improve the situation without risking everything. Should I be building a boat and sailing off as far as I can go?"
The machine's voice was smooth and calm as always. "I can't tell you what to do, Neil. I can discuss your options if you like."
Neil fretted at the AI for a while. Eventually he must have set off some useful free-association in its database, because it said, "Have you considered exploration using drones?"
His ears perked up. "That's it!" He didn't need to risk himself directly just to find out what was around him. He went to the base's main wallscreen and spent the rest of the day making plans and ordering up electronics and mechanical parts, sometimes going out to restock particular kinds of rocks and corals that had proven useful.
By the next morning he had his first mini-submarine. He floated at the surface to pat it affectionately and watch it head off to the north, waggling its mechanical tail. (Like his own awesome tail, the propulsion system was more efficient than a propeller.) He watched its progress from the comfort of his home. When the signal started to fade, the sub dropped a tethered repeater buoy so it could keep in touch. Ten kilometers out... and no sign of human life. Not even wreckage, just some unusual rock formations that the computer said were probably copper-rich. He had the drone chip a bit off for sampling.
* * *
The next day he sent the drone exploring west and south. There were a few bits of wreckage out there, great for salvage purposes. He tried not to think much about what had happened when these big chunks of titanium and aluminum and steel ripped free. Since he now had a few signal boosters around his base, he had a chance to pick up radio transmissions in a somewhat broader area even without that tall gold antenna... except to the deep east, where he hadn't dared even to risk his drone. Neil sighed and dithered for a few days before sending the little bot off in that direction, saying "Good luck." He knew he could just build another drone if need be — the parts were simple to make — but the mission still felt like sending a pet off to its death.
Neil stared at the camera view from the comfort of his base. Swiftly, the mini-sub picked up underwater skid marks. Something had gouged the seafloor and snapped off chunks of boulders before coming to rest somewhere deep and dark. Reluctantly, Neil coaxed his drone to descend, turn on its headlights, and stick a signal booster on the seafloor. Luminescent things lurked on the fringes of the sub's vision. There! A rounded section of Titan lay there at a crazy angle. It filled his entire view; it was by far the largest piece he'd found. Neil fed images from the broadcast into the base computer, saying, "Can you identify this fragment?"
After exploring a few more angles with the sub, he got his answer. The computer said, "Probable result: It's the embryo bay."
Neil leaned back on his tail. That was a treasure beyond any price. The seeds of ordinary Martian and Earthlife plants, the genetic records of hundreds of species, the equipment even to rapidly stock a new world with human life. If you wanted a colony with a valuable industrial base and plenty of customers for interstellar trade, ExoTech had reasoned, sending a thousand people at a time just wasn't going to produce results quickly enough to turn a good profit. It was better to grow more humans in vats. As the legendary NASA had once put it, a human was the most versatile machine that could be produced by unskilled labor.
The question was whether anything in that wreckage was intact and reachable. Neil brought his drone home, gave it a good cleaning and charging, and let it rest for a day while he worked on upgrades. Eventually he worked out a way to produce a cutting torch that was within his resource budget, along with a robot pack-fish to carry whatever the first drone salvaged.
Neil was giddy to find out what prizes were in store this time. He sent out his minions, watched as they cut into Titan's hull, and shined their headlights into a laboratory that had tumbled but looked more intact than he'd had any right to expect. The north side had apparently burned and been torn to bits, but the south half of this hull fragment was mostly still filled with trapped air. Dark cryo-tubes and countless drawers and sealed crates stood there. The signal kept fuzzing out, making the controls sluggish. Every time they moved and the image jumped around, he imagined monsters lurking just above the waterline.
And then, he smacked his forehead. He had submarine drones, not ones that could walk to explore the dry part of the ship. He risked beaching his minions if they went any farther. "Damn it. Come back." He'd have to make some sort of mechanical crab, next. He began looking through possible robot designs.
"If I may make a suggestion?" asked the computer. "It would be a more efficient use of your resources to go to the wreck site in person."
Neil shuddered. "It's dangerous to go alone."
"There seems to be interference with the signal inside the wreck that makes remote operation difficult. Also, there has been no sign of aggressive life. Nothing has attacked your probes."
"They don't look fuzzy and edible like me! And what if something in there explodes? What if I get pinned under shifting rubble and there's no one to save me?"
"I detect elevated stress levels. Please take deep breaths, Neil. Would you like a soothing beverage?"
Neil paced. "Yes. Yes I would."
He had three soothing beverages before deciding to swim out there in person. As easy to synthesize as ethyl alcohol was, that was probably unwise.
* * *
He used his scuba gear and powerful tail to swim a few kilometers along the surface, then down, down to where the world was the blue of a cloudless dusk. Then out along the wreckage trail for a few minutes until the chunk of fallen Titan loomed ahead like a cave. It was smaller in person than his little drones had made it seem. The robots were waiting down here to chirp in his radio headset that they were ready to help. Meanwhile, the glowing-bodied alien creatures kept their distance. He began to hope he'd make it back alive.
He entered the hole cut by his drones and hauled himself into the dry part of the wreckage. He pulled off his breathing mask and sniffed the air. The oxygen had replenished after the fire. Damp, stale, cold. No scent of life, which was probably better than some overpowering mutant mold infestation. He shuddered. Neil shined a flashlight everywhere, then unlatched several of the crates. Jackpot! Most of the ones in this area were intact and still chilly, fuming with dry-ice vapor when he opened them. He scanned the crate tags with his computer tablet and managed to get a local terminal powered up so he could download an inventory. (The crash had set off a security deactivation protocol called SUE, nicknamed "Screw it, U
nlock Everything".) Neil whistled. He really did have treasure here, even some spare omniprinter parts. He carefully eased two sealed, waterproof containers close to the water where they'd be easier to retrieve later, and lowered another down to the pack robot to send it scooting back home with the cargo.
It was quiet here inside the ship. He'd never been to this part of it before. The remains of a scientist lay at the edge of the ruined section, still clutching a computer. He took it from the body and sat down to rest and read it. The alcohol had begun to wear off, making him less eager to head back into the potentially doomful depths. Besides, he could stay here and supervise a few more trips for his salvage drone.
The tablet he'd found was the personal stash of a biotech expert. In her personal photo she was posing on a rocky beach with a red bikini, wearing a flower in her hair. There was a shy smile on her face. Neil found it entrancing enough to make him go over to the dead body and crouch silently for a moment to touch her. He murmured, "You deserved better." There wasn't a good way to bury her on an ocean world, so what could he do with her?
His robots loaded some valuable equipment and took it home, and some seeds and other material that was in no danger of spoiling quickly. Neil then went back to base, personally carrying the scientist. The sense of duty it gave him helped distract him from the sense of dangerous things looming somewhere just out of sight.
At home, he fed the body into the lifepod's biomass converter. He designated that load of matter as the raw material for the first potting soil that he laid out on a floating greenhouse. In time, once the various algae and bacteria he'd added took root, she'd become part of a new Earthlife ecosystem.
While he worked on that project over a period of weeks, he kept looking at the twist of hair he'd saved from the scientist. That and her personal files were his only links to another human. After all, he'd salvaged a little gold from some of the bio-lab's equipment, built the long-range signal antenna... and detected no other survivors. It was possible that there was nobody out there at all, not on the planet, not even for light-years in any direction. Sure, he could power up his signal equipment a little more and beam out a distress call once a month. In theory, that signal could reach inhabited space, years from now. He could hope that someone cared enough to look, or that a second expedition came along the same route Titan took.
He had to face it: he was alone, and would stay that way for a long time at best.
Though nothing terrible had happened to him on this planet, yet, there was a frightening storm that lasted for days and damaged the above-water part of his base. He'd been right to keep most of it submerged. He was lucky, he kept telling himself, but that only reminded him his luck could run out. He needed help! He checked the computer. "Can I build a humanoid robot to perform medical care?"
"Do you require medical help, Neil?"
"No. I mean, I will someday."
The machine thought. "There are blueprints for a general-purpose work robot, and for a surgical pod."
"I should build both, then, for whatever your genetic infusions can't handle. I just wish there were people around. No offense."
"The bio-lab inventory contains embryos of several sapient species."
"We discussed this. There's no rubidium except in the omniprinter, and I'm not cannibalizing that just to get a gestation tank working." He'd had a nightmare about pulling out the crucial parts with their hard-to-find elements, then being unable to reinstall them in the printer.
Again, something he'd said triggered a new response from the conversation system. The computer said, "You could install a biological gestation system."
"Huh?"
The main screen flashed a medical schematic of himself, listing his biomods... and showing a proposed modification. The new Neil was still ottery, but rounder-looking, marked as female.
Neil said, "You can't be serious."
"Rephrase?"
"You already changed my species. You want me to turn into a girl, too, just so I can produce more humans?"
"No," the machine patiently explained. "You will be able to give birth to any compatible species."
He didn't need to be completely alone and at the mercy of the lifepod AI to save him in a crisis. He could... he could raise kids who could care for him one day. The thought stunned him into silence. Eventually he said, "How? Run proposal details."
The AI offered a whole suite of options for getting this done. Neil told himself he wasn't at all serious, only morbidly curious. The more he saw, though, the more he knew it was the closest thing to a practical option. The thought of changing again scared him, but so did the always-present threat of his machines failing, his body breaking. What really sold him on the idea, though, was when he looked at the researcher's hair sample and worked out a way to use its DNA. He'd need a second X chromosome, after all, and it could be healthy to add some genetic diversity to his own cells instead of duplicating his existing X. The lock of hair trembled in his hand.
"Do it," he said to the computer, and gave the hair to its analysis tools. "Use this, and make me her — her daughter."
* * *
The post-injection effects weren't as severe as the ones that had ottered him. He was feverish for the first day as the serum began changing his cells from the genes up, and ravenously hungry after that, but he'd prepared. He rode it out in his undersea living room where there were seaweed salads, fish and three flavors of Nutrition Brick.
The first obvious changes were all low in his belly, giving him cramps and then shifting his mass around, filling out around his hips. Neil listened to calming music for hours as his bones and muscles slowly tugged inward and out and around, all according to plan. What he didn't count on was how distracting it all was for its slowness. He tried to read but kept looking away from the screen, running his webbed hands down along his belly to his increasingly girlish groin, or along his hips to feel how they were gradually swelling wider. For a while he shut his eyes and pressed gently down on his chest to feel his breasts starting to grow. Every few minutes it felt like the pressure against his palms was a little stronger, and that he breathed with a faintly greater bounce.
He got the idea that he should go outside. The sunlight warmed him through his fur, so nice that the full light of this alien day was like being thoroughly fluffed with a towel. Neil arched his back and gasped with surprising pleasure. With his skin so sensitive, it was a perfect time to swim. He climbed down to the waves and swam in great twisting loops around his home to feel the water sliding all over him, tickling his fur, easing the growing warmth under his tail.
When Neil climbed back out of the water and into the patio to bask in the sun again, she was well on the way to being soft and curvy and convinced that this body was a great trade.
* * *
Wanting to get used to the new form, Neil ordered up a swimsuit like the one her new genetic "mother" had been wearing in the photo. Everything felt unfamiliar as she stood there nude and struggled to figure out how to dress. She lay on a towel and basked in the sunlight, reading the dead woman's journal. It felt like a way to be in contact with someone without it being filtered through ExoTech corporate-speak or an AI.
She turned on her computer pad's camera and used it like a mirror, then laughed nervously. She'd never expected to look this good in a bikini, or to have an enforced vacation on an ocean planet. But hey, she was alive, and she'd even have company soon. Oh wow, she was not eager to think about that part yet. It could wait.
When she got hungry again, Neil stretched and headed back underwater. The main computer beeped. "Greetings, Neil. I hope your changes are proceeding smoothly. It's recommended that you provide a blood sample."
Neil took out the blood testing kit and after a minute's squeamishness, nicked one finger. Somehow, shedding a few drops of blood on purpose was tougher than getting major body parts transformed. She wiggled her webbed hands and said, "Tell me, doc; will I be able to play the piano?"
"Resources are available to
produce a basic synthetic music keyboard."
"Never mind."
The computer whirred. "Initial tests complete. You appear to be in good health, Neil. Congratulations as well on your pregnancy."
Neil chuckled. "I'm going to put it off for a little while."
"You have approximately three months given your current gestation rate."
Neil's muzzle fell open. "Do you mean it's already started!? This was supposed to just set me up so I could have kids later!"
The digital piano schematics that had appeared onscreen vanished, replaced by medical charts. There were elevated hormone levels marked as indicating that more had happened to him than becoming an ottergal. The computer said, "There was a slight genetic irregularity. The most likely cause was that in editing your chromosomes, the serum created a new zygote based on your discarded Y."
Neil pressed one hand against her lower belly, trying not to panic. "Already? And... I'm going to have a son? Genetically mine, even, not just pulled from the ship's frozen colonist supply?"
"Most likely."
She shivered and her fur prickled all over. There was hardly time to get used to being female! She'd arranged for the accelerated gestation for safety's sake, rather than spend the next nine months increasingly helpless, but to start right away was overwhelming. "There's so much to do," she said.
"I can prepare a to-do list," said the ever-helpful computer. "Would you prefer to discuss next steps or receive emotional counseling?"
Neil's mind spun. She was going to be a mother, something she'd planned for in an academic sense but never intimately grasped. Now, well, she was going to learn all about it, ready or not. The next few months, and then the years after them, were going to be frightening and dangerous. All for the sake of her plan to stop being alone, to have company that could one day protect her. She was going to be the one doing most of the protection for a long time!
Still, it beat the alternative of waiting for something to kill her. Neil cleared her throat and said, "Let's start preparing."