The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

by Joe Hill

  The military figured it out. They hired the right sociologists, they taught their people the right way to deal with conflicts and handle stress, they found ways of picking out that early programming and replacing it with fierce loyalty to the navy, to the program, to the crew.

  Maybe it was one of those men—and they were all men, I’ve seen the records; man after man, walking into our spaces, our submarines with their safe and narrow halls, and telling the women who had to live there to make themselves over into a new image, a better image, an image that wouldn’t fight, or gossip, or bully. An image that would do the navy proud. Maybe it was one of those men who first started calling the all-female submarine crews the military’s “mermaids.”

  Maybe that was where they got the idea.

  Within fifty years of the launch of the female submariners, the sea had become the most valuable real estate in the world. Oh, space exploration continued—mostly in the hands of the wealthy, tech firms that decided a rocket would be a better investment than a Ping-Pong table in the break room, and now had their eyes set on building an office on Jupiter, a summer home on Mars. It wasn’t viable. Not for the teeming masses of Earth, the people displaced from their communities by the superstorms and tornadoes, the people who just needed a place to live and eat and work and flourish. Two thirds of the planet’s surface is water. Much of it remains unexplored, even today . . . and that was why, when Dr. Bustos stood up and said he had a solution, people listened.

  There were resources, down there in the sea. Medicines and minerals and oil deposits and food sources. Places where the bedrock never shifted, suitable for anchoring bubble communities (art deco’s resurgence around the time of the launch was not a coincidence). Secrets and wonders and miracles of science, and all we had to do was find a way to escape our steel shells, to dive deeper, to find them.

  Women in the military had always been a bit of a sore spot, even when all the research said that our presence hurt nothing, endangered nothing; even when we had our own class of ships to sail beneath the waves, and recruits who aimed for other branches often found themselves quietly redirected to the navy. There was recruiter logic behind it all, of course—reduced instances of sexual assault (even if it would never drop to full zero), fewer unplanned pregnancies, the camaraderie of people who really understood what you were going through as a woman in the military. Never mind the transmen who found themselves assigned to submarines, the transwomen who couldn’t get a berth, the women who came from Marine or air force or army families and now couldn’t convince the recruiters that what they wanted was to serve as their fathers had served, on the land. The submarines began to fill.

  And then they told us why.

  I drag myself up the short flight of stairs between the hallway and the front of the ship (and why do they still build these things with staggered hearts, knowing what’s been done to us, knowing what is yet to be done?) and join my crew. A hundred and twenty of us, all told, and less than half standing on our feet. The rest sit compacted in wheelchairs, or bob gently as the water beneath the chamber shifts, their heads and shoulders protruding through the holes cut in the floor. There is something strange and profoundly unprofessional about seeing the captain speak with the heads and shoulders of wet-suited women sticking up around her feet like mushrooms growing from the omnipresent damp.

  “At eighteen hundred hours, Seaman Wells encountered an unidentified bogey in our waters.” The captain speaks clearly and slowly, enunciating each word like she’s afraid we will all have forgotten the English language while her back was turned, trading in for some strange language of clicks and whistles and hums. She has read the studies about the psychological effects of going deep; she knows what to watch for.

  We terrify her. I can’t imagine how the navy thinks this is a good use of their best people, locking them away in tin cans that are always damp and smell of fish, and watching them go slowly, inexorably insane. You need to be damn good to get assigned to submarine command, and you need to be willing to stay a drysider. Only drysiders can be shown in public; only drysiders can testify to the efficacy of the program. The rest of us have been compromised.

  It’s such a polite, sterile little word. Compromised. Like we were swayed by the enemy, or blown off course by the gale-force winds of our delicate emotions. Nothing could be further from the truth. We’re a necessary part of public safety, an unavoidable face of war . . . and we’re an embarrassment that must be kept out at sea, where we can be safely forgotten.

  “The bogey approached our ship but did not make contact. It avoided all cameras and did not pass by any open ports, which leads us to believe that it was either a deserter or an enemy combatant. The few sonar pictures we were able to get do not match any known design configuration.” That doesn’t have to mean anything. There are new models taking to the sea every day. I have my eye on a lovely frilled shark mod that’s just clearing the testing process. Everyone who’s seen the lab samples says it’s a dream come true, and I’m about due for a few dreams.

  One of the seamen raises her hand. She’s new to the ship; her boots still fit, her throat still works. The captain nods in her direction, and she asks, in a voice that squeaks and shakes with the effort of pushing sound through air instead of water, “Didn’t we have anyone on patrol when the bogey came by?”

  It’s a good question, especially for a newbie. The captain shakes her head. “We’re here to chart the seafloor and bring back information about the resources here.” What we can exploit, in other words. “All of our seagoing sailors were at bottom level or in transit when the bogey passed near our vessel.”

  One of the servicewomen floating near the captain’s feet whistles long and low, a tiny foghorn of a sound. An electronic voice from one of the speakers asks, robotic and stiff, “What are our orders, captain?”

  I don’t recognize this sailor. She has the dark gray hair and flattened facial features common to the blue shark mods. There are fourteen blues currently serving on this vessel. I can’t be blamed if I can’t tell them apart. Sometimes I’m not even sure they can tell themselves apart. Blues have a strong schooling instinct, strong enough that the labs considered recalling them shortly after they were deployed. The brass stepped in before anything permanent could happen. Blues are good for morale. They fight like demons, and they fuck like angels, and they have no room left in their narrow predators’ brains for morals. If not for the service, they’d be a danger to us all, but thankfully, they have a very pronounced sense of loyalty.

  The captain manages not to shy away from the woman at her feet: no small trick, given how much we clearly distress her. “All sailors are to be on a state of high alert whenever leaving the vessel. High-water patrols will begin tonight and will continue for the duration of our voyage. Any creature larger than an eel is to be reported to your superior officer immediately. We don’t know what the Chinese have been doing since they closed the communication channels between their research divisions and ours. They may have progressed further than we had guessed.”

  A low murmur breaks out among the sailors who can use words. Others whistle and hum, communicating faster via the private languages of their mods. Rumor keeps saying command is going to ban anything on the ships that can’t be translated into traditional English by our computers, and rumor keeps getting slapped down as fast as it can spread, because the speech is hard-coded in some of the most popular, most functional mods, and without it our sailors couldn’t communicate in the open sea. So people like our poor captain just have to grit their teeth and endure.

  I feel bad for her, I really do. I envy her, too. Did they show her the same studies they’d once shown me, offer her the same concessions if she’d just serve as an example to her yearmates? Was she one of the rare individuals who saw everything the sea could give her and still chose to remain career track, remain land-bound, remain capable of leaving the service when her tour was up? Oh, they said and said that everything was reversible, but since no one ever chose r
eversal, we still didn’t know if that was true, and no one wanted to be the test case. Too much to lose, not enough to gain.

  The captain begins to talk again, and the buzz of conversation dies down to respectful silence, giving her the floor as she describes our assignments for the days to come. They’re standard enough; except for the bogey or bogeys we’ll be watching for, we’ll be doing the normal patrols of the seabed and the associated trenches, looking for minerals, looking for species of fish we’ve never encountered before, taking samples. Deepening our understanding of the Pacific. Other crews have the Atlantic, mapping it out one square meter at a time; one day we’ll meet on the other side of the world, a mile down and a universe away from where we started, and our understanding will be complete, and the human race can continue in its conquest of this strange and timeless new frontier. One day.

  The captain finishes her speech, snapping off her words with the tight tonelessness of a woman who desperately wants to be anywhere else. We salute her, those in the water doing their best not to splash as they pull their arms out of the water and snap their webbed fingers to their foreheads. She returns the salute and we’re dismissed, back to our quarters or onward to our duties.

  I linger on the stairs while those who are newer to this command than I scatter, moving with a quick, dryland efficiency toward other parts of the submarine. The captain is the first to go, all but running from the bridge in her need to get away from us. The heads in the water vanish one by one, the sailors going back to whatever tasks had them outside the ship—those who aren’t currently off-duty and seeking the simple peace of weightlessness and separation from the dry. Not all the seamen serving with this vessel are capable of doing what I’m doing, standing on their own two feet and walking among the drylander crew. Every ship has to have a few in transition. It’s meant to be a temptation and a warning at the same time. “Mind your choices; there but for the grace of God and the United States government go you.”

  It only takes a few minutes before I’m standing alone on the stairs. I walk over to the lockers set in the far wall (one more concession to what they’ve made of us; in transition, we don’t always have time to get to quarters, to get to privacy, and so they arrange the ships to let us strip down wherever we need, and hold it up as one more bit of proof that single-sex vessels are a requirement for the smooth operation of the navy). My boots are the first thing to go, and I have to blink back tears when I pull them off and my feet untwist, relaxing back into the natural shape the scientists have worked so hard to give them. All this work, all these changes to the sailors, and they still can’t change our required uniforms—not when we still have things that can be called “feet” or “legs” and shoved into the standard-issue boots or trousers.

  Piece by piece, I strip down to my swim trunks and thermal sports bra, both designed to expose as much skin as possible while still leaving me with a modicum of modesty. The blues especially have a tendency to remove their tops once they’re in the water, buzzing past the cameras and laughing. That footage goes for a pretty penny on some corners of the Internet, the ones frequented by soft-skinned civilians who murmur to themselves about the military mermaids, and how beautiful we are, and how much they’d like to fuck us.

  They’d flense themselves bloody on the sharkskins of the blues, they’d sting themselves into oblivion on the spines of the lionfish and the trailing jellied arms of the moonies and the men-o’-war, but still they talk, and still they see us as fantasies given flesh, and not as the military women that we are. Perhaps that, too, is a part of the navy’s design. How easy is it to fear something that you’ve been seeing in cartoons and coloring books since you were born?

  I walk to the nearest hole and exhale, blowing every bit of air out of my lungs. Then I step over the edge and plunge down, down, down, dragged under by the weight of my scientifically reengineered musculature, into the arms of the waiting sea.

  Project Amphitrite—otherwise known as “Mermaids for the Military”—started attracting public attention when I was in my senior year of high school and beginning to really consider the navy as a career option. I wanted to see the world. This new form of service promised me a world no one else had ever seen. They swore we could go back. They swore we would still be human, that every possible form of support would be offered to keep us connected to our roots. They said we’d all be fairy tales, a thousand Little Mermaids rising from the sea and walking on new legs into the future that our sacrifice had helped them to ensure.

  They didn’t mention the pain. Maybe they thought we’d all see the writing on the wall, the endless gene treatments, the surgeries to cut away inconvenient bits of bone—both original issue and grown during the process of preparing our bodies for the depths—the trauma of learning to breathe in when submerged, suppressing the millennia of instinct that shrieked no, no, you will drown, you will die, no.

  And maybe we did drown; maybe we did die. Every submersion felt a bit less like a betrayal of my species and a bit more like coming home. As I fall into the water my gills open, and the small fins on my legs spread, catching the water and holding me in place, keeping me from descending all the way to the bottom. The blues I saw before rush back to my side, attracted by the sound of something moving. They whirl around me in an undifferentiated tornado of fins and flukes and grasping hands, caressing my flank, touching my arms and hair before they whirl away again, off to do whatever a school of blues does when they are not working, when they are not slaved to the commands of a species they have willingly abandoned. Their clicks and whistles drift back to me, welcoming me, inviting me along.

  I do not try to follow. Until my next shore leave, my next trip to the lab, I can’t keep up; they’re too fast for me, their legs fully sacrificed on the altar of being all that they can be. The navy claims they’re turning these women into better soldiers. From where I hang suspended in the sea, my lungs filled with saltwater like amniotic fluid, these women are becoming better myths.

  Other sailors flash by, most of them carrying bags or wearing floodlights strapped to their foreheads or chests; some holding spearguns, which work better at these depths than traditional rifles. We’d be defenseless if someone were to fire a torpedo into our midst, but thus far, all the troubles we’ve encountered have either been native—squid and sharks who see our altered silhouettes and think we look like prey—or our own kind, mermaids from rival militaries, trying to chart and claim our seabeds before we can secure them for the United States of America. We might have been the first ones into the sea, but we weren’t the last, and we’re not even the most efficient anymore. The American mods focus too much on form and not enough on functionality. Our lionfish, eels, even our jellies still look like women before they look like marine creatures. Some sailors say—although there’s been no proof yet, and that’s the mantra of the news outlets, who don’t want to criticize the program more than they have to, don’t want to risk losing access to the stream of beautifully staged official photos and the weekly reports on the amazing scientific advancements coming out of what we do here—some sailors say that they chose streamlined mods, beautiful, sleek creatures that would cut through the water like knives, minimal drag, minimal reminders of their mammalian origins, and yet somehow came out of the treatment tanks with breasts that ached like it was puberty all over again. Ached and then grew bigger, ascending a cup size or even two, making a more marketable silhouette.

  Here in the depths we’re soldiers, military machines remade to suit the needs of our country and our government. But when we surface, we’re living advertisements for the world yet to come, when we start shifting more of the population to the bubble cities being constructed on the ground we’ve charted for them, when the military gene mods become available to the public. I’ve seen the plans. We all have. Civilians will be limited to “gentler” forms, goldfish and angelfish and bettas, all trailing fins and soft Disney elegance. Veterans will be allowed to keep our mods as recognition of our service, should we choo
se to stay in the wet—and again, no one knows whether reversal is possible, especially not for the more esoteric designs. Can you put the bones back into a jelly’s feet, just because you think they ought to be there? Questions better left unanswered, if you ask me.

  Adjustment is done: my gills are open, and my chest is rising smooth and easy, lungs filling with seawater without so much as a bubble of protest. I jackknife down and swim toward the current patrol, feeling the drag from my weight belt as it pulls me toward the bottom. One more reason to dream of that coming return to the labs, when they’ll take me one step deeper, and this will be just a little more like home.

  The blues return to join me; two of them grab my hands and pull me deeper, their webbed fingers slipping on my slick mammalian skin, and the captain and her bogeys are forgotten for a time, before the glorious majesty of the never-ending sea.

  We’re deep—about 100, 150 feet below the waiting submarine, our passage lit by the soft luminescent glow of the anglers and the lanterns—when something flashes past in the gloom just past the reach of the light. Whatever it is, it’s moving fast, all dart and dazzle, and there isn’t time to see it properly before it’s gone.

  The formation forms without anyone saying a word, the hard-coded schooling instinct slamming into our military training and forming an instant barricade against the waiting dark. Anglers and lanterns in the middle, blues, makos, and lionfish and undecideds on the outside. The five of us who have yet to commit to a full mod look like aberrations as we hang in the water, almost human, almost helpless against the empty sea.