Limit of Vision

by Linda Nagata

  Ela nodded grimly. Twenty thousand would save her ass. Twenty thousand would get her to Australia with spending money.

  “Go down fast,” Joanie advised. “Get the image, and surface. I’ll be waiting.”

  Ela looked again at the fisherman. “Wait here,” she said. He nodded. She repeated it anyway, twice in English, twice in Vietnamese. The fisherman grinned.

  Ela smiled back. Then she slipped the goggle cups onto her farsights and tumbled over the side.

  Visibility was bad. Even at the surface, she could barely see past the fingertips of her extended arm. As she descended, swirling clouds of silt sucked away the light. She found the bottom fifteen feet below. It was a twilight world, where the dark shapes of broken bottles, rusted shell casings, bicycle tires, and twisted mangrove roots gave texture to the omnipresent mud.

  She did not see anything that looked as if it had recently been part of an orbiting space station. So she began casting about, searching for some sign that this was the right area. She kicked hard, moved quickly. Still she could not outrun a growing fear that she would find nothing at all.

  Time flowed past. Five minutes. Then ten. Then fifteen. She heard a brief flurry of boat traffic, and knew the twenty thousand must surely be slipping away. Tears of frustration started in her eyes. She swam faster, moving in wider swaths to cover more of the seafloor.

  After another five minutes she found a broad, shallow gouge in the ocean bottom. It was several feet across, but only six or eight inches deep at the center, its shape already camouflaged by a veneer of freshly settled silt. She might have missed it if she hadn’t been so desperate to find something. She squeezed her eyes shut, taking a moment to calm her pounding heart. Then she touched her farsights.

  This far underwater she had no direct connection with Kathang or the Australian server on which the AI program ran. The farsights were an interface, supporting only a fragment of the ROSA’s personality—just enough to execute simple commands. Her finger-tap signal was detected; the farsights began to record.

  Ela peered ahead into the murk, anxiously wondering what she would find. There had been LOVs aboard the module. She thought about this as she used swift, determined kicks to follow the gouge. She had only a shallow understanding of what had brought the module down. There hadn’t been time to parse the details, but the headlines had been enough to assure her this story would be big:

  HAMMER SABOTAGED BY ARTIFICIAL LIFE-FORM

  FIERY REENTRY DESTROYS EQUASYA MODULE

  LOVs SMUGGLED TO EARTH—

  PRIMARY COLONY COMMITS SUICIDE

  Surely only an intellect could commit suicide?

  What did it mean?

  The water grew colder and clearer as she followed the track down a steep slope into a channel where a strong current flowed out to sea. The floor of the channel was paved with a collection of relics: car hulks and chemical drums, engines, commercial washing machines, tires, and innumerable plastics. Silted over, they looked as if they were made of old, drowned wood.

  In such a surreal landscape, Ela wondered if she could even recognize the debris from the space station.

  Then she felt a whisper of warm water against her cheek. She turned into the current, following the trace. She had gone only a few meters when a blackened boulder loomed in the murky, twilight water, its upper half disappearing into the silt-laden current that flowed overhead. The water that slipped past the massive object was distinctly warm.

  Fighting the current, Ela drew closer, scanning the find with her farsights. The object’s surface was blackened and cracked. In the cracks she glimpsed a vague, blue-green glow. It was a teasing light, a faint will-o’-the-wisp, visible only from the corner of the eye.

  Remembering Joanie’s warning about toxic chemicals, Ela came close to panic. She wanted to bolt for the surface—but the tug of a half-remembered fact held her back. Weren’t the LOVs supposed to have a blue-green glow?

  Her eyes widened. Could the LOVs have survived?

  Kicking hard to hold her position in the current, she brought her finger and thumb together against her farsights, tapping a quick code to summon the nightvision function. Abruptly, the cracks in the massive fragment were glowing bright green, while the upthrust mud at the base ignited in faint, tangled spiderwebs of light.

  Ela felt her mind recoil. An inner voice screamed at her to retreat, to surface immediately, to upload her vid and to collect what she could of her fee and get away … but there were many kinds of fear. Greater than her fear of contamination was her fear of poverty.

  LOVs were an artificial life-form. The crash of the module should have meant their extinction, but if some had survived … surely there were people who would want to know that? People who might pay a lot of money to know?

  If this light came from surviving LOVs.

  Ela tapped her farsights again, bringing an end to the recording function. In that moment she felt as if her mind was composed of a committee, with every member but one blustering in doubt and fear. That one was a coolly determined, nonverbal entity. It took control. It vanquished her doubts.

  Ela found herself dropping all the way to the bottom. She dug her fingers into the mud to hold her position, then she scraped up a bit of the glowing matter that webbed the mud. Peering at her wrinkled fingertips, she could just make out, at the limit of vision, tiny, gleaming disks, like flattened droplets of glass mixed in with even finer particles of silt. She watched them tremble in the current. Almost, it looked as if they were crawling over one another.

  A little moan of fear escaped her throat. She yanked her hand back, shaking it frantically, sending the little glass disks off into the current. Then the nonverbal entity was in control again. It commanded her to breathe slowly, deeply, three times, while the bubbles of her exhalations rose like silver mushrooms toward the surface.

  With trembling hands she slapped at the pockets of her vest, searching for something to hold the LOVs. In the smallest pocket she found a tiny sample bag of lychee candy. She unsealed it and shook out the last piece. Then once again she scraped up some of the glowing spiderweb, wiping the substance off inside the bag. A few more pinches and the bag was full. She sealed it, then she unzipped her wet suit. Shivering at the sudden touch of cold water, she slipped the packet in beneath the strap of her swimsuit, then zipped up again.

  Now the panicked majority of her selves took over. She tipped her head back and kicked for the surface—not too quickly!—she could not risk a dive injury. On the way up she searched for a shadow that might be the boat’s hull, but in the murky water it was impossible to see far.

  The light brightened, and at last she broke the surface. Kathang sensed her presence; a link opened; the video image uploaded. Ela spit out the mouthpiece of her rebreather and whooped in triumph, kicking hard to lift herself several inches out of the water. She pirouetted, scanning the sea for the boat she had hired. She had expected to find a floating city of boats, but to her surprise, the surface of the ocean was empty. She turned again, searching. She waited for a wave and kicked hard, launching herself half a foot up to see …

  Nothing. The fisherman who had promised to wait was gone. Everyone was gone.

  She settled back into the water, listening to Kathang’s sibilant voice whispering in her ear: You must vacate this area immediately. The local government has claimed salvage rights and forbids trespassing on pain of death.

  So the boat owners had fled. And the engine noise she had heard underwater—it must have been an exodus, not the arrival of competition she had assumed. Her throat felt swollen with salt, or fear. The next engines she heard would belong to government forces come to secure the area.

  She did not linger. She marked the direction of the shore—it looked impossibly far, a low, dirty line on her horizon—but her only chance of sanctuary was to get there before government boats could pick her up. She dropped below the surface and started swimming, hard.

  SUMMER sat in her car, watching cross traffic creep acros
s a flooded intersection while Virgil Copeland asked the question that explained so much:

  “Is it helping? Or is this interchange just an addiction?”

  Randall Panwar answered, his breathless voice almost lost behind the distant drumming of rain upon the car’s insulated roof:

  “You love it, don’t you? Me too. This is more real than anything I’ve ever known.”

  Summer had never meant for her work to move in this direction. She had tried to stop it when she’d still been employed at EquaSys, and after.

  Her gaze shifted briefly to the vid replaying in the lower field of her farsights; these were the last minutes preceding the rebellion of E-3.

  “Is it only a drug, Panwar? Have we only found a new way to get high?”

  “It’s a drug. Straight-up. Everything that goes on in the brain has a chemical root. The question is, does it make us more alive?”

  “God yes.”

  “Then how are we going to hold on to this?”

  An addict would do anything to hold on; give up anything. Gabrielle Villanti was dead, and now Randall Panwar; and despite Daniel’s assertion that no one on the ground had died reports were beginning to surface that several fishermen had been drowned when the module came down (and the world had been oh-so-lucky that thousands more had not been killed). While Virgil Copeland was gone.

  The light changed to green. Summer eased the car forward, waiting for the last of the cross traffic to clear before scooting through the intersection. Then she scanned her farsights once again, willing Daniel Simkin’s icon to appear. Why didn’t he call? She longed to hear that Copeland had been found. It made her sick to think he might have gotten away.

  He might have though.

  He might have planned his escape even before the LOVs were smuggled.

  He might have planned this whole disaster. An addict would do anything, after all.

  “Bring all the Lovs down,” Copeland growled. “Free them.”

  How had the LOVs escaped their tank? How had they come to change their structure so they could survive in the open air? Had Virgil Copeland planned that too? Summer wanted to believe it—his own words seemed to damn him—but Copeland himself would not let her.

  She slipped past the next light before traffic forced her to stop again. A heavy rain, and the city snarled. Would she ever get home? It was stop and go all the way to the freeway. As she waited out red lights, she watched the bloom of shock on Copeland’s face as he learned about the feral LOVs. She watched his horror as the Hammer tore apart. She watched until she could no longer deny that the most likely designer of the new LOVs was E-3 itself. E-3 had sent the EquaSys module down. At first glance it appeared to be a stupid decision, suicidal …

  But the LOVs had proved themselves capable of survival in strikingly different habitats. Was it possible they could survive reentry too?

  She spoke to her ROSA. She sent it out seeking news of the crash site. A report popped back almost immediately: Local authorities had ordered the area cleared; troops were arriving on the scene to secure the site for the IBC… .

  Summer breathed a sigh of relief. Even if there were LOVs in the water, they could be contained. Simkin would see to it; he would be good at things like that.

  At last she was able to ease the car onto the freeway, though her Makakilo home was still miles away. She promised herself she would not go out again today, whether Simkin called or not.

  Then her ROSA buzzed. It had the shape of a dragonfly, and it rattled its wings to draw her attention. Archived reference found … display?

  She frowned. She was driving too fast now to take her eyes off the traffic for long … but curiosity got the better of caution. “Display. Lower field.”

  A new window opened at the base of her screen.

  The ROSA had found an advertisement, withdrawn only a few minutes after its original posting, but it had been up long enough to be archived by a twenty-four-hour service. Summer scanned the header while a voice-over read the words aloud: LOV Crash Alert - Reporter On-Site: See the First Underwater Images on SEA-AN. The ad was embedded in a video glimpse of a shoreline made familiar by the endless pictures of the impact … only this video was taken from at least half a mile offshore.

  So someone had reached the crash site.

  Summer’s heart raced as she whispered to the ROSA to open a link to Simkin. When he did not pick up, she prepped a terse text message instead:

  ♦ Found evidence for a diver at the crash site. Must intercept! Not sure anymore that all Lovs were destroyed.

  She appended the archived ad, and sent it.

  Simkin surprised her with a reply as she maneuvered through traffic on the rain-drenched freeway.

  → Grim findings, sister. Lovs confirmed on-site. Diver too. Tracking now. I owe you.

  chapter

  11

  ELA KICKED HARD for shore, though she hardly cared anymore about her destination. All she could think of was air: The rebreather was not giving her enough air. Not nearly enough. Her chest ached with the effort of sucking against the resistance of the respirator, fighting to force more oxygen from the unit than it was designed to produce. Her lungs burned. She wanted the surface so badly, but she forced herself to stay down. Only the silt, the turbid water, could hide her from the spying eyes of government authority. But it hurt!

  It came as a bitter relief when she finally found the edge of the ocean. She felt the gentle push of a swell lift her from the bottom. When it set her down again the water drained away from her face. She found herself lying in the shallows, on the margin of the mudflat. The shore was deserted: no fisherfolk, no children, no dogs.

  No patrolling soldiers.

  Ela spit out the respirator and drew in a sweet lungful of real, unlimited air. Behind her she could hear the growl of helicopters over the water, but she did not waste time looking around. She peeled off her fins, and staggered to her feet. Her legs felt wobbly and weak as she set off at a gallop through the shallows, the rebreather pack banging against the small of her back.

  A stand of brush had grown up beyond the mudflat. She raced for it, slipping in the steaming mud, going down once, while clouds of tiny flies pinged against her arms, her face. From somewhere up the beach a dog barked. She did not look around. The brush was only five meters away. Then two. Then one.

  She ducked under its shelter, scrambling past the slap and jab of unfriendly branches until she reached the dense center of the stand. Then, with a tiny cry, she peeled off the rebreather pack and collapsed on her back, her chest heaving, burning, her heart beating so hard it must surely implode, collapsing into a tiny spot of infinite pain.

  She stared wide-eyed at the sky, waiting to die. Amorphous gray spots swam across that blue vault. Sunlight refracted between fanning twigs. A rumble in her ears became the engine noise of a helicopter drawing swiftly nearer. What device did they have to see her through the brush? She couldn’t think. Did infrared work in the heat of the day? She curled up, to make her profile smaller.

  Something warm and wet touched her bare foot. She jumped, scrambling back as far as she could before the branches stopped her. A large dog sat where her foot had been. It was leashed, with the leash held by a brawny teenage boy who crouched under the foliage, studying her with a puzzled expression. He wore a faded T-shirt and ragged shorts, with a frayed pack strapped around his waist, but he also had the shiny new farsights and confident demeanor of the Roi Nuoc.

  Ela did not take her eyes off him as she groped for a rock, a stick. Anything. Her fingers touched a human hand. She gasped, flinching back against the tangled branches. Another farsighted boy crouched beside her. She glanced around, spotting two more farther back in the brush. They all looked to be around sixteen or seventeen years old, well fed and muscular … significantly stronger than she.

  Ela stifled a little scream. Pulling her bare knees up against her chest, she hugged herself, horribly conscious of her own exposure. She wore only a wetsuit vest and quick-dry runnin
g shorts over a swimsuit—which left her legs and arms bare. But shame quickly followed her first rush of panic as the boys made no move against her. Instead they turned their attention toward the ocean, and the black bee-shape of a helicopter cruising toward them.

  What were they doing here?

  Had they been waiting for something? Watching the activity at sea? Had she given their position away with her sudden, panicked flight from the water?

  The helicopter did not waver in its course. Ela crouched, ready to flee on all fours if she had to. It was impossible actually to stand under the jabbing twigs.

  The boy beside her touched her shoulder. She jumped, twisting around to face him. He was the largest of them all, with an attractive rounded face, and long black hair, tied in a ponytail behind his neck. With dismay Ela noted that he outweighed her by at least fifty pounds. He withdrew his hand, saying something in a gentle voice that Kathang translated as, You must wait, please. Don’t move yet.

  She nodded, settling back against the ground.

  The boy with the dog whispered to the animal: sharp, exciting commands that caused it to raise its ears. Its tail wagged, stirring dead leaves.

  Ela stole the moment to slip off her farsights. She popped off the eye cups—a move that drew a surprised murmur from the boy at her side. Throwing him a wary glance, she stuffed the pliant cups into the pocket of her shorts. Then she frowned down at her farsights. She had no way to clean the lens.

  The boy lifted them from her hand, murmuring something she could not understand without Kathang to translate; but his meaning became clear when he pulled a soft cloth from his waist pack and began to clean them.

  The helicopter was almost onshore. The boy with the dog slipped its leash off. Then, with his hand on the animal’s neck, he commanded, Di! Di! The dog took off, running toward the helicopter and barking wildly. Another dog raced down the beach to join it. The helicopter turned in a wide circle over the two cavorting animals, but it was not distracted for long. It swept back toward the brush.