by Jeff Carlson
My next thought was of my marriage vows, and guilt arrived late. But my first reaction was the honest one. I was basically a cripple here, and the idea of being manipulated did not excite me at all. I'd much rather masturbate, caressed and tumbled by the sea, alone with favorite memories of my wife.
"Someone to read," I repeated.
Stenstrom nodded. "What do you like, oceanography and biology, right?" Standing up, he patted the table rather than jarring me. "I'll have someone come in."
It was awfully cynical, but I couldn't help but think that he was improving at trying to make himself my friend.
#
I contacted Andrea days ahead of the schedule we'd set, despite an earlier decision not to worry her. Stenstrom was right. I needed friendly, female attention, and I didn't have to tell her that I'd been hurt.
She wasn't home, even though it was dinnertime. Brent answered and said she was substituting at the community college. That made me angry. I didn't understand why she'd bother with such a low-paying job, especially since she must be incredibly busy, settling into the new house, helping the boys adjust to new schools — but of course Andrea enjoyed teaching, and maybe the fact that we were rich didn't seem real to her yet.
Maybe it was good I'd missed her. Our exchanges had not been going well and I might have said something stupid. Maybe communicating over such a distance, through typed words alone, was impossible.
The boys didn't think so. During my recuperation, they peppered me with messages full of abbreviations and icons that my computer and I puzzled over. They were obviously spending more time online than they had with me around, learning new languages and modes of thought. I was pleased that they remained excited about my accomplishments, but Roberto seemed overly attached to a new interactive he'd discovered, and Brent confessed — maybe bragged? — that he had been caught in two stim sites. I admonished them both to finish their schoolwork as soon as possible each day, put the keyboard away and get outside. Go play in the mud, I said.
Returning to the ocean was unspeakably good, but my days grew more complicated as I coordinated with surface traffic, massive barges that probed the quiet dark with fat, long, phallic drills, blundering through ancient beds of sediment, polluting vast stretches of water with their shrieking as they powered down into the detritus and carbonate. New voices sprang out of my cheekbone, crowding my skull – and four new mods had come through surgery and would join me soon.
This was ultimately what I'd signed on for, and I took close note of each shift's accomplishments, but the joy that it gave me was purely intellectual and I clocked out with the surface crews rather than working overtime.
The best part of each day was making my way to and from my shelter, by myself, letting the currents and whim dictate my course, always discovering new beauty, new peace.
I think I knew what was happening back home.
#
Most of Brent's chatter washed over me like a familiar, soothing tide: "Club VR opened a new place downtown and I got to virt Gladiator and I could have done it twice except Uncle Mark is a bracket colon equal sign."
The computer had grown better at recognizing icons, but Brent used so many. This one meant flathead, I guessed, or chicken neck or whatever. What concerned me was his tone. Brent had once directed this same mean jealousy at me.
"Who is Uncle Mark?" I croaked, the elongated fingers of my hand tightening into a ball.
I hit the send button with a fist.
#
"What the hell's going on!" I shouted, six hours later when I finally got Andrea online. "After all I'm doing for you ..."
Her response was immediate: "You did it for yourself."
I stared at the shape of the computer as if it were another squid, my thoughts layered and conflicting.
"For the fame," she continued. "The adventure."
"For the money, Andrea! I'm doing it for the money!"
"Would you have let them cut you up if they were going to turn you into a desk, Carlos? You did it for the chance to finally be a fish."
#
Its prow into the wind and waves, the barge lowered two turbines on cables, one off of each side. Just hoisting the house-sized cylinders from the deck and hitting the water had taken two slow, exacting hours. The descent itself required five more. During snags and rest breaks, I inspected the squat towers that would cradle the turbines, darting under and around their angled beams, even though we'd already completed our structural tests.
But there was no escaping my thoughts.
Leaving now — quitting now — would be crazy. Reverse surgery and rehab would take almost a quarter of the time left in my contract, and I'd forfeit everything but the signing bonus. We'd lose the home, our future, and find ourselves back in the city scrambling for wages.... And I would never work for Aro Corp. again in any capacity. Even their competitors would have no reason to rely on me, a hard truth that always led me back to the same worry:
Can I ever trust her again?
The weather had been cooperating, but even nineteen-ton hunks of metal will act like sails in deep currents, and close to sundown we realized there had been a miscalculation. Some pendulum swinging had been accounted for — it was a drop of four hundred feet — but instead of a near-simultaneous mounting, we had a double miss.
Each elevator platform had jets which I could use for final adjustments, but they weren't powerful enough to muscle the turbines twenty meters against the current.
"We're twenty east," I said. "Let's elevate forty. Bring 'em back up."
The nearest turbine was a smooth sculpture caught in a web of cables that led upward as far as my sonar reached. ROVs, remote operated vehicles, scooted about or hovered patiently nearby. And when I switched briefly to my fuzzy, nearsighted normal vision, the busy sea became busier, shot through with the ROVs' beams of light. All of this generated surprisingly little noise: the whirring of ROV props, the harp vibrations of the current against the cables.
The first explosion sounded like God had slapped the surface, a bass thunder that reached me an instant after the VLF net surged with voices.
"Was that the engine?"
"Fire! Fire!"
"Number two crane's lost all exterior cables—"
The last bit of information I personally witnessed as the turbine sagged in its web. If it fell, it would roll into the cradle tower and ruin weeks of hard labor.
I swam closer, thinking I might use the platform jets to keep it afloat or ease it to the bottom, but two ROVs tumbled into my path as their operators lost contact. I kicked left. One struck my scarred shoulder and numbed my arm.
I had been assigned an emergency frequency to connect me directly to Stenstrom. Would he be there? The way the ROVs had shut down, the comm room might have been destroyed. I said, "This is Garcia—"
He was near panic. "Can you stabilize number two?"
"I'm on it. What's happening?"
"We're under attack, speedboats, they're widecasting some Animal Earth crap!"
Three small cylinders lanced into the far range of my sonar, moving fast. Smart torps. They were beautiful in the way that sharks can be, sleek and purposeful, a hard swarm of warheads chased by their own turbulence.
I probably wouldn't attract their attention, not being a power source or made of metal — not much metal — but the concussive force of a detonation anywhere nearby would kill me.
I dug and kicked down, down—
Tightness in my bad arm made my effort lopsided, slowing me. The buzzing torpedoes grew very loud.
The rift was not deep compared to the plunging valley where I'd encountered the squid, but at its edge was a thick bulge of carbonate. I ducked past, scraping my hip.
That rock saved me by taking the brunt of the explosions, then nearly killed me as parts of it broke away. I was stunned and slow to move.
Animal Earth. The rant-and-slants they'd posted during our efforts here had been based on a refusal to accept our stated purpose. They wer
e Greens. They should have supported us, but frothed instead about the blatant destruction of ocean habitats...
I stayed in the rift for two hours, watching, listening, afraid to broadcast on any channel in case there were more hunter-killers waiting to acquire targets. The attack had stopped after five minutes, but our radio communications remained incoherent. Stenstrom tried miserably to raise me on the emergency link again and again.
He tried the general frequencies, too, even sharecasting his public response to the attack. One of the speedboats had been apprehended by Japanese military aircraft, and suspects were in custody. Given the armament involved and the coordination of the assault, Stenstrom suggested that the whole thing was a cover for our competitors in the nuclear or oil industries, and already there were conflicting denials and claims of solidarity from Animal Earth spokespeople.
Finally I began my ascent, goaded by the constant dig of the voices in my cheekbone. At one hundred feet I saw a man, a body, deformed by violence and twisting loosely in the current. We hesitated together in the dim, penetrating glow of the sun.
Then I turned my back on him.
Andrea and the boys were well provided for, and she obviously didn't need me. Brent had never needed me, and Roberto... Roberto was young enough to forget and move on. Let them think I was dead, lost to the tide. The insurance payouts alone would be a fortune.
Four miles proved to be the radio's range.
I kept going into the beautiful dark and never let anyone intrude on my world again.
END
Afterword
"Pressure" is one instance where the afterword might be as much fun to write as the story itself. That’s because the basic concept for this story came from a nightmare. I remember opening my eyes, scribbling happily on my notepad and thinking, Holy cow, I am a sick puppy.
First of all, I’m a light sleeper and sometime insomniac. Maybe worse, in the middle of the night I often think I’m awake when I’m really asleep. Then I wake up. There’s a weird transition from worrying about things that only make sense in the dream state to realizing I wasn’t consciously brooding about my projects, chores, and bills, I was analyzing problems and situations that aren’t mine and don’t actually exist.
What I brought out of this nightmare was the impression of being lost and horribly disfigured. I remembered fighting through my confusion, but I couldn’t quite recall the reason for the machines that had been inserted into my face.
At the time, I had a minor head cold, so my sinuses felt raw and weird. Because I’m a light sleeper, I wear ear plugs. Because I was working a clerical job while writing my first novel in my spare hours, my wrists were shot, so I wore braces, too. Because I grind my teeth, I also pop a night guard between my teeth.
My subconscious is a war zone, man!
The head cold combined with various levels of body armor tricked my brain into imagining I was an altered man in a dark place. Changed how? Why? That sense of fear and chaos became the opening paragraphs of the story, and over the next few days I developed it more.
Here’s a final secret. You probably noticed some similarity in the climatic decisions of the heroes of "Long Eyes" and "Pressure." They both choose to seek out their individual destinies instead of helping or rejoining their own kind. Partly that’s because I’m not much of a joiner myself. All writers are loners to one degree or another. That’s a necessary part of sitting with your thoughts hour after hour, day after day.
But in the original version of "Pressure," Carlos Garcia opted out to the Aro Corp. program long before his contract was up, forfeiting all payment in exchange for the necessary surgeries to restore him. The big reveal at the end was Andrea opening the door of their home to find him pledging to dedicate himself to their marriage and their family even if they were poor, in debt, out of work, and unfulfilled.
The story wouldn’t sell. I felt like this was the only commercial ending, but editors kept rejecting it.
One of my pre-readers finally convinced me that the problem was the sheer falsehood of forcing the plot in the direction he called the "Disneyland ending." It wasn’t true to the character. So I tried rewriting the story the way my friend suggested, and Jed Hartman at Strange Horizons bought the piece. Since then, it’s been translated into four languages and has played twice on the popular podcasts Escape Pod and Starshipsofa, so that was a lesson learned.
Let the characters be themselves.
PLANET OF THE SEALIES
Professor Michaud had set up camp on the northern slope, which was typically upwind of the site. They wore respirators down inside the excavation — sometimes armor, too — and it was a relief not to wear any gear in their off hours. There was some risk of contaminants if the wind shifted or if an eruption surprised their ferrets, but everyone on the team had been given Level IV gene-mods. They could handle small doses of the gases, dusts, and bacteria that regularly belched up from the pits.
Today the sea wind was thick with the hot, chalk smell of the shore. A woman in orange strode away from the brown prefab camp structures. The land was also brown and the sky, too, was a muddy haze.
Her name was Joanna Mary Löw. She stretched out both arms as she walked, orange sleeves ruffling, as if to snare or fight the hard gusts. The blasting wind felt similar to the conflict alive inside her.
This was a short trail but it was one Joanna took often because there wasn't anywhere else to go. The eroding shore cliffs were strictly forbidden, the excavation site dangerous for its own reasons, and Joanna was young enough to need to stretch her legs even after a day's work. Since earning her job, she'd taken to spending much of her free time among the field of non-hazardous artifacts Professor Michaud allowed them to remove as the search continued for the real treasure. They knew the purpose of only a few of these items and made a game of guessing the names of the rest — the 10,000 Pound Paperweight, the Hyperdrive, and, among Joanna's favorites, the Make-Me-Blind.
The Make-Me-Blind was probably just a kitchen utensil or mechanic's device, a saw-edged set of tongs that opened to the exact spacing of a person's eyes, but the civilization that had made these tools and trinkets was both alien and unmistakably aggressive. Joanna and her line-mates tried to keep things fun during the meticulous, often tedious dig by inventing ghost stories full of conquest, torture, and weird sex.
She liked the Make-Me-Blind because she could chase her sisters around with it. Most of the other artifacts collected here were impressive hulks they'd lifted in via robot, a Stonehenge of metals and plastics.
Joanna preferred small and intimate things, not unusual for a créche-raised clone.
The wind sang queerly through the crushed alloy pipework of the Hyperdrive, which they assumed had been an industrial pumping mechanism although it did, with some imagination, resemble an old-fashioned reaction engine.
Joanna rested her fingertips against its bulk, frowning. Then she hurried across the field to a trio of orange bins where the smallest artifacts were kept. From there she continued on to the 10,000 Pound Paperweight. Within a crevice of this deteriorating stone-work, Joanna had hidden a tiny, shiny object she called the Diamond.
Why feel guilty? None of these artifacts were coming back with them. None would be studied or even catalogued. Of the twenty-six members on the team, just four had training in archeology, which they used only as another method of predictive analysis. Their sole interest here, the real prize, was any trace of biological material.
Joanna didn't question their mission, but she worried at herself. She was committing deceit and true selfishness, and for what? For nothing. Her so-called Diamond was only a rust-eaten band of iron crushed around a translucent plastic nub. It was garbage — ultimately useless.
Could the deepening change in her be what the matriarch
wanted? Her line-mother must have anticipated the influences of this environment, the effects of separation and competition. Why else the system of individual bonuses for each find?
"I wonder," she w
hispered, holding the Diamond up to catch the murky evening light.
Joanna felt stronger for her new independence. The senior members of the team were an example of what she might become — accomplished, opinionated, self-reliant.
But she wanted to be allowed home again.
"Löw, Löw." Her implant spoke while she held the Diamond at arm's length and she brought it in close to her chest, reacting with shame. Then she understood she was still alone and felt a sharper fear at the emergency call. "Full crew to the pits. Löw, Löw. Full crew to the pits."
Joanna stepped toward the 10,000 Pound Paperweight and tucked her Diamond away again before running back to camp.
#
The ferrets were in defensive mode and altered their hunt pattern as she approached. Worming over the ground, the lithe, furry cyborgs were briefly attracted to the tremors of her footfalls. One lifted its concave face to her as if doubtful.
Joanna's own uncertainty rose into a blood scream before her implant spoke again. The hardware they'd threaded through her cerebrum before she left the creche was a communications device on many levels, helping line-mates maintain emotional balance, but this subtle, mostly subconscious process could also be a handicap. Powerful feelings like fear and pain tended to echo between them. Joanna knew there were many wounded, and she imagined the worst before her line-senior explained: "Quake, there was a minor quake, Michaud's reporting casualties inside the dig—"
Joanna hadn't noticed a tremor, but this coast was riddled with faults. It was constantly settling.
Eight figures emerged as she reached camp, tall giants in mechanized armor. Katarine raised one steel glove to Joanna as the knot of them pounded by.
Inside the barracks she found Hel in her underwear, prepping one suit, a second outfit hot with the feeds laid down in order.
"Jump," Hel said. "I'll finish this one."
"No." Joanna shoved her toward the ready armor. If a stronger quake hit, if there were dust or gas eruptions, the suits would be their best protection. Joanna couldn't bear to see Hel at risk. The two of them were laterals, closer than most, and Hel had already delayed too long because of her.