Neptune's Brood

by Charles Stross

  Not breathing; panic again.

  I’m unsure how long it went on for. The resumption of my higher cognitive functioning took some time: During their biosculptural activities, my abductors suppressed my central nervous system, presumably to avoid having to deal with my displeasure at their actions. Now it took me some considerable effort to regain full awareness of my condition. Waking up in darkness and free fall, albeit in a liquid environment, with a cargo pod receding above me—well, I’d been in such a pod before, when the Queen had remanded me into the custody of her police officers. And I was obviously deep underwater and getting deeper, but not breathing, not breathless—I had gills. I could feel the flow through my throat and chest, a hollow, crushing sensation in my lungs, distant, as if they were packed with glass-fiber bundles. Legs locked together, but a powerful kick, feeling the pressure of water with my toes, but the toes of which foot? Left, right? It was hard to tell, nebulous, as if the distinction barely mattered. I tried to flex one knee, then the other: got nowhere, nothing but a gentle pushback from the medium. Overthinking, overcontrolling: I tried to relax, to stop worrying about the lack of sensation, and flexed. Flexed again and felt the world rush past around me as my fall slowed and stopped, transitioned smoothly into something like flight.

  Changed. I’ve been changed.

  You might think me slow, but I was still becoming aware of the modifications that I have described. I found that I could hear for an incredible distance. The medium I moved in was full of noises, burbling and twittering and high-pitched clicking and grinding that surely would have been inaudible in air. Some other sense, previously inarticulate or ignored, told me that I was almost half a kilometer down. If I came up too fast, I’d burst. I was, in fact, exiled from the laminar kingdoms, unreachably far above. It would take days for me to make my way back up there: And for all I knew, Nova Ploetsk could be hundreds of kilometers away.

  Who did this to me, and why?

  The anger was building fast when a voice below me said, very distinctly, “Krina.”

  I thought I recognized the voice. “What?” I tried to say, rolling to face the darkness below. I’m not sure what came out: a booming rumble, possibly.

  “Krina,” it said, again. “Can you talk?”

  “Hey,” I attempted. A bit more successfully: “Who. Who are you?”

  “I’m a messenger,” said the voice. Below, in darkness, I could see nothing.

  “What are—” Icy-cold logic cut through my confusion and anger and I stopped. Whoever you are, I thought, you are complicit in this kidnapping. But the voice was eerily familiar. Something about its intonation reminded me of myself. “Explain yourself. What’s going on? Why did you have me abducted?”

  “I’m a messenger,” the voice repeated, intonation exact. My optimism sank: another talking box with a fake personality. “Krina, I am ten meters below you and five meters ahead of you. Retrieve me, and I will guide you to your destination.”

  “What destination?” I demanded, but I was already angling my head down to search for the sound source. I felt as if I could see it with my ears, a dense void in the acoustic medium. “Where is Argos from here?” (I could neither hear nor see the city, but inferred it was behind and impossibly high above me, in the sunlit near vacuum of the upper waters). A kick and a twist, and I felt a knot in the water nearby: I reached out and grabbed, caught and held on to a blocky capsule the size of both my fists. Its surface was tacky, as if primed to adhere to skin.

  “I am to guide you to Ana Graulle-90,” said the capsule, “and provide a briefing along the way.”

  “Where is she!”

  “I am to guide you to Ana Graulle-90,” it repeated placidly. “Waypoints will provide navigation updates along the way. The final destination has been omitted for security reasons at this time. I am to provide a briefing along the way. Commencing briefing.”

  Its voice changed slightly. “Hello, cuz,” it said in my missing-presumed-dead sib’s voice. “Bet you weren’t expecting this . . .”

  * * *

  Here is a curious but little-known fact: After the collapse of Atlantis triggered an interstellar recession in the slow money economy, the rate at which colony starships were launched actually increased.

  One might naively think that the removal of five to ten percent of the entire interstellar money supply via the abrupt bursting of a theoretically impossible bubble (or the bust-out at the end of a confidence trick) might cause investors to panic and shovel their assets into the red end of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, investing for the long term in the most stable assets imaginable. (Red dwarfs: They’re for tomorrow and tomorrow and the day after.) But that’s not what my sisters and I noticed when we began to study the macroeconomic fallout from the Atlantis debacle.

  Prior to Atlantis, over the preceding five hundred standard years, a total of eighty-two colony starships had been financed and dispatched by forty-four star systems. (Most interstellar polities do not have the resources to finance colony schemes: Only those with mature domestic economies become preoccupied by the lure of repaying their foundational debt.) But after Atlantis went black, seventy-one starships were launched by fifty-five star systems during the next three hundred years. This represented a 30-percent increase in the rate of colony formation. The rate was initially low but climbed drastically to peak after nearly a hundred years, dropping back to the previous level three hundred years afterward.

  It was impossible to follow the money trail from our remove, over two millennia after the crisis, but it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the wave of colonization was the outcome of a colossal shell game that effectively hid the debts racked up by the Atlanteans in the foundation of a wave of suspiciously affluent new interstellar colonies . . . Like Dojima System, orbiting a bright G-class star, replete with heavy isotopes and habitable real estate. The surface of the hydrosphere of Shin-Tethys alone covered more than ten times the land area of Old Earth, and was (as I had discovered) inhabitable to depths unimaginable to surface dwellers; and then there were the other moons and planetoids of the system. Over time, Dojima would likely mature into one of the wealthiest territories in Post-human space—and do so with far less foundational debt than any normal colony.

  Do I need to draw you a diagram?

  Well, yes. Yes, I probably do.

  So picture this:

  A group of dedicated criminals hatch a scheme for the most ambitious crime in human history, one that will take a couple of centuries of hard work to execute. The payoff is to be nothing less than fifty or more entire star systems: Every participant will end the game as an emperor or monarch, rich beyond the wildest dreams of avarice, as rich as or richer than my lineage mater Sondra Alizond-1, director and sometime chief executive officer of the systembank of a peripatetic interstellar colony. But first, they have a job to do—a strange and terrible task.

  Their mission is to fake the existence of an entire interstellar colony mission, then, with the collusion of their own sibling-instances (scattered throughout the rest of colonized Post-human space), liquidate it. And there is no easy way to do that without executing the task for real from start to bloody-handed finish.

  Imagine a starship funded and crewed by criminal masterminds. They raise funds, they work, they fly: And finally they arrive in a hitherto-unvisited star system. Here they build the usual infrastructure of a colony, the beacon station and bank and the necessary factories to supply them with raw material . . . and they issue currency and create a slow debt, and solicit immigrants.

  . . . Whom they then slaughter. This latter element is supposition. And in any case, is it murder if you merely fail to download and reinstantiate a person in a body at the far end of an interstellar party line? Quite possibly they assuage their guilt by archiving the incomers on soul chips, with some vague idea of restoring them when it is safe to do so. Or then again, maybe not.

  This is what h
appens: They generate mountains of debt, use the capital produced thereby to buy immigrant labor, and disappear the immigrants in question as they arrive. Accomplices in the systems from which the immigrants departed then unwind the transactions and quietly pocket the slow dollars as they ooze out of Atlantis. The Atlanteans, for their part, keep up a steady stream of media fabrications, vast and brilliant lies and forgeries documenting the progress of their scientific infrastructure. And who is there, in this degenerate age, to call them on it? True scientists are thin on the ground, for much of what we call science is a matter of archival research, of knowing where to look up a finding from a project concluded centuries or millennia ago.

  Viewed from any angle, it was a monstrous crime. Atlantis solicited millions of immigrants over more than a century. There must have been thousands—tens of thousands—in on the conspiracy, at both ends of all the primary banking links. (Atlantis had no less than seven continuous laser links to other star systems by the end.) But there was an inevitable deadline counting down on the scam: Sooner or later, they would be expected to produce something or make good on some of their debt. A mendicant scholar might visit and, when they failed to return, the relatives might be upset and commence further investigations. (Or someone else might really invent an FTL drive and show them up for what they were—but that was probably the least of the conspirators’ worries.)

  And so we come to the bust-out.

  A decision is made to wind up the scam and cash out. Huge amounts of slow money have been generated and exported by the semifictional colony; now it’s time for the perpetrators to take their leave. Quite possibly, there is an inner cabal, a cadre of a few hundred conspirators that includes the team who operate the interstellar communications links and the systembank. The rest, a couple of thousand workers, slave away in early-days-of-a-better-nation conditions, keeping the energy and raw materials side of the colony going. Like many parasites, the false colony is perpetually stuck in a neotenous state, living in badly patched domes on the surface of an asteroid and spending its surplus productivity on the propaganda machinery it needs in order to convincingly portray a flourishing colony. In truth, it is sickly and etiolated, deliberately so—kept that way by an inner cadre intent on ensuring that no survivors remain behind to blab about their activities.

  It’s anybody’s guess how the inner cabal makes its exit. But the members probably laid their plans many decades in advance: Now is the time to execute. Elections are lost, sabbaticals are taken, a careful disengagement from the body politic is carried through to completion. Perhaps false identities are assumed, mindless doppelgängers activated to run through the boring mundane semblance of everyday life while their role models escape. In any event, a blip in outbound uploads begins. The background rate of people leaving Atlantis climbs. Not that it has ever been a closed society—they have carefully maintained the fiction of a high standard of living to explain the low level of emigration, and equally carefully kept trustworthy insiders churning back and forth to give the appearance of free movement. But with hindsight the blip is noticeable, the interstellar lasers blazing away at maximum bandwidth for tens of millions of seconds.

  Then they go dark, and by the time anyone realizes something is wrong, the elusive last travelers from Atlantis have vanished.

  What actually happened in Atlantis System is unknown at this time. Pushed to speculate I would say this: They kept their colony small and sickly because that way it would be easier to destroy. Interstellar communications beacons operating in the freezing depths of near-interstellar space require fusion reactors, and fusion reactors make it easy to breed plutonium. Systembanks are likewise vulnerable targets. Small colonies limited to a handful of hollowed-out asteroids . . . blink and nobody will miss them. If the plotters did their job carefully, there would have been numerous single points of failure in the Atlantean economy—communications hubs, factories specializing in unique and irreplaceable services, and so on. More speculatively: If everyone who knows how to build and operate a beacon station is dead or exiled, no beacon system will be rebuilt for many centuries or even millennia. It is my belief that human life is extinct in Atlantis System, and the loss of the starships sent to investigate is no coincidence: Someone is, to this day, intent on concealing the murderous, genocidal foundations of the grandest fraud in history.

  * * *

  “Save me the lecture, sis.” I oriented myself facedown and resumed flexing from thorax to tail, arms wrapped around the briefing box. “How far down do I have to go to see you?”

  “Current range to next waypoint: thirteen kilometers horizontal on bearing two six six, eleven thousand two hundred meters vertically down.”

  “Eleven kilometers”—I confess my voice cracked—“you expect me to dive?”

  “Confirmed. A pressure-gradient upgrade pack has been applied to your marrow techné: You should pause for one hour after each two-kilometer depth change to allow your ’cytes to reequilibrate their hydrophobic-phase vesicles, but your body is now warranted for operation down to depths under up to two gigapascals pressure. Beyond two gPa, you may experience impaired metabolic functioning and should apply a further approved upgrade pack immediately. Warning: Deep operations below two gPa requires extensive intracyte modification and may result in fatal impairment in event of ascent above 1.8 gPa without commutation and depressurization.”

  The briefing box was almost as loquacious as my annoying taskmaster aboard the chapel. I tried to roll my eyes—discovered to my discomfort that their range of motion was severely restricted—and kicked on. “Box. How deep can I go before the pressure effects become problematic? How deep is two gigapascals?”

  “Approximately one hundred and ninety kilometers of liquid-phase water.”

  I shuddered briefly, then oriented myself head down and flexed my tail, hard. I felt the rush of water over my skin but no sensation of internal pressure building. Whatever else they’d done to me, this mermaid body-mod certainly seemed to be at home in the crushing darkness.

  “Box. If I turn round and go up, what happens?”

  “Your metabolic viability will be compromised if the ambient pressure drops below fifty megapascals.” Ana’s purloined tone was bland and precise: I shuddered, trying to work it out.

  “And would I be right in thinking that the laminar republics don’t reach this deep?”

  “The Kingdom of Argos lays claim to surface waters to a depth of five hundred meters. The Republic of Persephone claims the strata from five five zero to two thousand meters. Below the Republic of Persephone lie the Unclaimed Deeps. Your current location is four thousand three hundred meters below the ventral frontier of the Republic of Persephone.”

  How wonderful: I was lost in a wilderness below inhabited waters, with only this treacherous box for a guide! Worse, my kidnappers had (seemingly with Ana’s collusion) modified me for pressure resistance in such a way that if I turned tail and rose to within five kilometers of the surface, I’d explode messily. The intricate nanoscale structures in my ’cytes, modified for depth resistance, would simply puff up and stop working if they weren’t under enormous ambient pressure. Neither vision appealed. So: I could do as I was told and join Ana, and hope to talk her into letting me return to the surface. Or . . . my imagination met a rolling fogbank of uncertainty and recoiled.

  I used a rare scatological phrase in the privacy of my skull, and stroked downward—straight into a field of floating parasitic worms.

  I didn’t know what they were at the time, of course. What I knew was that I’d rammed something soft and rubbery that twisted around me and stuck to my skin. The quiet waters were filled with a hissing, boiling sibilance. Disoriented, I lost my sense of direction. “Krina! Attention!” the box called out. “Attention! Krina! Dive, dive, dive!”

  “Which way?” I tried to shout. Whatever was sticking to the small of my back felt as if it was burning. Another loop of it rolled against my left fla
nk, sticking and itching painfully where it touched me. I felt my chromatophores spiking up at my unseen attacker, forming hollow tubes through which nematocytes stabbed out—exuding something they’d been programmed with. The worms writhed, and the one on my back pulled away, but I could feel it take a layer of skin with it. I kicked hard, trying to dive deeper. Worms grabbed at my hair and my fins, and I kicked harder, suddenly panicking, wondering if I was fighting for my life.

  Abruptly I was free of the mat, diving through clear water with half my skin on fire. I rolled, running my hands across my conjoined legs—no, my tail, I forced myself to acknowledge—feeling broken scales, sore and painful ’phores. “What was that?” I demanded.

  “Bezos worms,” said the box. “Named for their characteristic acoustic signature, they form free-floating colonies between depths of two and eighty kilometers down. Morphologically, they are simple pseudonematoidea, with a tubular digestive system and no skeleton. Individual worms are a colony organism, composed of an ensemble of feral, depth-adapted mechanocytes running a parasitic metaprogram that is believed to have evolved from a weaponized virus. They are saprophytic mechanovores, directly metabolizing dead tissues falling from above and reprogramming living mechanocytes harvested from other organisms to join the ensemble—”

  “You mean they’re going to reprogram the skin ’cytes they stripped off my back and make them into more worms?”