Rifters 1 - Starfish

by Peter Watts

  "Not any more," Brander reminds her. "Now they've got Judy."

  "They've got us too," Lubin adds. "Quarantined."

  * * *

  "Alice. It's me."

  A soft voice through hard metal: "Come..."

  Clarke pulls the hatch open, steps through.

  Alice Nakata looks up from her pallet as the hatch sighs shut. Almond eyes, dark and startling, reflect in the dimmed light. One hand goes to her face: "Oh. Excuse me, I'll..." She fumbles at the bedhead compartment, where her eyecaps float in plastic vials.

  "Hey. No problem." Clarke reaches out, stops just short of touching Nakata's arm. "I like your eyes, I've always— well..."

  "I should not be sulking in here anyway," Nakata says, rising. "I'm going outside."

  "Alice—"

  "I am not going to just let her disappear out there. Are you coming?"

  Clarke sighs. "Alice, the GA's right. There's just too much volume. If she's still out there, she knows where we are."

  "If? Where else would she be?"

  Clarke looks at the deck, reviewing possibilities.

  "I— I think the drybacks took her," she says at last. "I think they'll take us, too, if we go after her."

  Nakata stares at Clarke with disquieting human eyes. "Why? Why would they do that?"

  "I don't know."

  Nakata sags back on the pallet. Clarke sits down beside her.

  Neither woman speaks for a while.

  "I'm sorry," Clarke says at last. She doesn't know what else to say. "We all are."

  Alice Nakata stares at the floor. Her eyes are bright, but not overflowing. "Not all," she whispers. "Ken seemed more interested in—"

  "Ken had his reasons. They're lying to us, Alice."

  "They always lied to us," Nakata says softly, not looking up. And then: "I should have been there."

  "Why?"

  "I don't know. If there'd been two of us, maybe..."

  "Then we'd have lost both of you."

  "You don't know that. Maybe it wasn't the drybacks at all, maybe she just ran into something... living."

  Clarke doesn't speak. She's heard the same stories Nakata has. Confirmed reports of people getting eaten by Archie date back over a hundred years. Not many, of course; humans and giant squid don't run into each other that often. Even rifters swim too deep for such encounters.

  As a general rule.

  "That's why I stopped going up with her, did you know that?" Nakata shakes her head, remembering. "We ran into something alive, up midwater. It was horrible. Some kind of jellyfish, I think. It pulsed, and it had these thin watery tentacles that stretched out of sight, just hanging there in the water. And it had all these— these stomachs. Like fat squirming slugs. And each one had its own mouth, and they were all opening and closing..."

  Clarke screws up her face. "Sounds lovely."

  "I didn't even see it. It was quite translucent, and I was not looking and I bumped into it and it started ejecting pieces of itself. The main body just went completely dark and pulled into itself and pulsed away and all these shed stomachs and mouths and tentacles were left behind, they were all glowing and writhing as though they were in pain..."

  "I think I'd stop going up there too, after that."

  "The strange thing was, I envied it in a way." Nakata's eyes brim, spill over, but her voice doesn't change. "It must be nice to just be able to— to cut yourself off from the parts that give you away."

  Clarke smiles, imagining. "Yes." She realizes, suddenly, that only a few centimeters separate her from Alice Nakata. They're almost touching.

  How long have I been sitting here? she wonders. She shifts on the pallet, pulls away out of habit.

  "Judy didn't see it that way," Nakata's saying. "She felt sorry for the pieces. I think she was almost angry with the main body, do you believe it? She said it was this blind stupid blob, she said— what did she say— 'fucking typical bureaucracy, first sign of trouble it sacrifices the very parts that keep it fed.' That's what she said."

  Clarke smiles. "That sounds like Judy."

  "She never takes shit from anyone," Nakata says. "She always fights back. I like that about her, I could never do that. When things get bad I just..." She glances at the little black device stuck on the wall beside her pillow. "I dream."

  Clarke nods and says nothing. She can't remember Alice Nakata ever being so talkative. "It's so much better than VR, you have much more control. In VR you are stuck with someone else's dreams."

  "So I hear."

  "You have never tried it?" Nakata asks.

  "Lucid dreaming? A couple of times. I never got into it."

  "No?"

  Clarke shrugs. "My dreams don't have much... detail." Or too much, sometimes. She nods at Nakata's machine. "Those things wake me up just enough to notice how vague everything is. Or sometimes, when there is any detail it's something really stupid. Worms crawling through your skin or something."

  "But you can control that. That is the whole point. You can change it."

  In your dreams, maybe. "But you have to see it first. Just sort of spoiled the effect for me, I guess. And mostly there were those big, vague gaps."

  "Ah." A flicker of a smile. "For myself that is not a problem. The world is pretty vague to me even when I am awake."

  "Well." Clarke smiles back, tentatively. "Whatever works."

  More silence.

  "I just wish I knew," Nakata says finally.

  "I know."

  "You knew what happened to Karl. It was bad, but you knew."

  "Yes."

  Nakata glances down. Clarke follows, notices that her own hands have somehow clasped around Nakata's. She supposes it's a gesture of support. It feels okay. She squeezes, gently.

  Nakata looks back up. Her dark naked eyes still startle, somehow.

  "Lenie, she did not mind me. I pulled away, and I dreamed, and sometimes I just went crazy and she put up with all of it. She understoo— she understands."

  "We're rifters, Alice." Clarke hesitates, decides to risk it. "We all understand."

  "Except Ken."

  "You know, I think maybe Ken understands more than we give him credit for. I don't think he meant to be insensitive before. He's on our side."

  "He is very strange. He is not here for the same reason we are."

  "And what reason is that?" Clarke asks.

  "They put us here because this is where we belong," Nakata says, almost whispering. "With Ken, I think—they just didn't dare put him anywhere else."

  * * *

  Brander's on his way downstairs when she gets back to the lounge. "How's Alice?"

  "Dreaming," Clarke says. "She's okay."

  "None of us are okay," Brander says. "Borrowed time all around, you ask me."

  She grunts. "Where's Ken?"

  "He left. He's never coming back."

  "What?"

  "He went over. Like Fischer."

  "Bullshit. Ken's not like Fischer. He's the farthest thing from Fischer."

  "We know that." Brander jerks a thumb at the ceiling. "Theydon't. He went over. That's the story he wants us to sell upstairs, anyway."

  "Why?"

  "You think that motherfucker told me? I agreed to play along for now, but I don't mind telling you I'm getting a bit tired of his bullshit." Brander climbs down a rung, looks back. "I'm heading back out myself. Gonna check out the carousel. I think some serious observations are in order."

  "Want some company?"

  Brander shrugs. "Sure."

  "Actually," Clarke remarks, "just company doesn't cut it any more, does it? Maybe we'd better be, what's the word—"

  "Allies," Brander says.

  She nods. "Allies."

  * * *

  Quarantine

  Bubble

  For a week now, Yves Scanlon's world had measured five meters by eight. In all that time he had not seen another living soul.

  There were plenty of ghosts, though. Faces passed across his workstation, full of che
erful concern about his comfort, his diet, whether the latest gastrointestinal tap had made him uncomfortable. There were poltergeists, too. Sometimes they possessed the medical teleoperator that hung from the ceiling, made it dance and stab and steal slivers of flesh from Scanlon's body. They spoke with many voices, but rarely said anything of substance.

  "It's probably nothing, Dr. Scanlon," the teleop said once, a talking exoskeleton. "Just a preliminary report from Rand/Washington, some new pathogen on the rift... probably benign..."

  Or, in a pleasant female voice: "You're obviously in exc— good health, I'm sure there's nothing to worry about. Still, you know how careful we have to be these days, even acne would mutate into a plague if we let it, heh heh heh— now we just another two c.c.'s..."

  After a few days Scanlon had stopped asking.

  Whatever it was, he knew it had to be serious. The world was full of nasty microbes, new ones spawned by accident, old ones set free from dark corners of the world, common ones mutated into novel shapes. Scanlon had been quarantined before a couple of times. Most people had. It usually involved technicians in body condoms, nurses trained to maintain spirits with a well-timed joke. He'd never heard of everything being done by remote control before.

  Maybe it was a security issue. Maybe the GA didn't want the news leaking out, so they'd minimized the personnel involved. Or maybe— maybe the potential danger was so great that they didn't want to risk live techs.

  Every day Scanlon discovered some new symptom. Shortness of breath. Headaches. Nausea. He was astute enough to wonder if any of them were real.

  It occurred to him, with increasing frequency, that he might not get out of there alive.

  * * *

  Something resembling Patricia Rowan haunted his screen every now and then, asking questions about vampires. Not even a ghost, really. A simulation, masquerading as flesh and blood. Its machinery showed through in subtle repetitions, derivative conversational loops, a fixation on keyword over concept. Who was in charge down there, it wanted to know. Did Clarke carry more weight than Lubin? Did Brander carry more weight than Clarke? As if anyone could glean the essence of those twisted, fantastic creatures with a few inept questions. How many years had it taken Scanlon to achieve his level of expertise?

  It was rumored that Rowan didn't like real-time phone conversations. Corpses were always paranoid about security or some such thing. Still, it made Scanlon angry. It was her fault that he was here now, after all. Whatever he'd caught on the rift he'd caught because she'd ordered him down there, and now all she sent to him were puppets? Did she really consider him that inconsequential?

  He never complained, of course. His aggression was too passionately passive. Instead, he toyed with the model she sent. It was easy to fool, programmed to look for certain words and phrases in answers to any given question. Just a trained dog, really, grabbing and fetching at the right set of commands. It was only when it ran back home, eager jaws clamped around some utterly useless bit of trivia, that its master would realize how truly ambiguous certain key phrases could be...

  He lost count of the times he sent it back, sated on junk food. It kept returning, but it never learned.

  He patted the teleop. "You're probably smarter than that döppleganger of hers, you know. Not that that's saying much. But at least you get your pound of flesh on the first try."

  Surely by now Rowan knew what he was doing. Maybe this was some sort of game. Maybe, eventually, she'd admit defeat, come seek an audience in person. That hope kept him playing. Without it he would have given up and cooperated out of sheer boredom.

  * * *

  On the first day of his quarantine he'd asked one of the ghosts for a dreamer, and been refused. Normal circadian metabolism was a prerequisite for one of the tests, it said; they didn't want his tissues cheating. For several days after that Scanlon hadn't been able to sleep at all. Then he'd fallen into a dreamless abyss for twenty-eight hours. When he'd finally awakened his body had ached from an unremembered wave of microsurgical strikes.

  "Impatient little bastard, aren't you?" he'd murmured to the teleop. "Can't even wait until I'm awake? I hope it was good for you." He'd kept his voice low, in case there were any active pickups in the room. None of the workstation ghosts seemed to know anything about psychology; they were all physiologists and tinkertoy jocks. If they'd caught him talking to a machine they might think he was going crazy.

  Now he was sleeping a full nine hours daily. Unpredictable attacks by the poltergeists cost him maybe an hour on top of that. Crew reports and IPD profiles, none of which ever seemed to come from Beebe Station, appeared regularly in his terminal: another four or five hours a day.

  The rest of the time he watched television.

  Strange things happening out there. A mysterious underwater explosion on the MidAtlantic Ridge, big enough for a nuke but no confirmation one way or the other. Israel and Tanaka-Krueger had both recently reactivated their nuclear testing programs, but neither admitted to any knowledge of this particular blast. The usual protests from corps and countries alike. Things were getting even testier than usual. Just the other day, it came out that N'AmPac, several weeks earlier, had responded to a relatively harmless bit of piracy on the part of a Korean muckraker by blowing it out of the water.

  Regional news was just as troubling. An estimated three hundred dead after a firebomb took out most of the Urchin Shipyards outside Portland. It was a fairly hefty death toll for two a.m., but Urchin property abutted the Strip and a number of refs had been caught in the firestorm. No known motive. Certain similarities to a much smaller explosion a few weeks earlier and a few hundred kilometers further north, in the Coquitlam Burb. That one had been attributed to gang warfare.

  And speaking of the Strip: more unrest among refugees forever hemmed in along the coastline. The usual rationale from the usual municipal entities. Waterfront's the only available real estate these days, and besides, can you imagine what it would cost to install sewer systems for seven million if we let them come inland?

  Another quarantine, this time over some nematode recently escaped from the headwaters of the Ivindo. No news of anything from the North Pacific. Nothing from Juan de Fuca.

  Two weeks into his sentence Scanlon realized that the symptoms he'd imagined earlier had all disappeared. In fact, in a strange way he actually felt better than he had in years. Still they kept him locked up. There were more tests to be done.

  Over time his initial sharp fears subsided to a chronic dull ache in the stomach, so diffuse he barely felt it any more. One day he awoke with a sense of almost frantic relief. Had he really ever thought that the GA might wall him away forever? Had he really been so paranoid? They were taking good care of him. Naturally: he was important to them. He'd lost sight of that at first. But the vampires were still problematic, or Rowan wouldn't be trolling her puppet through his workstation. And the GA had chosen Yves Scanlon to study that problem because they knew he was the best man for the job. Now they were just protecting their investment, making sure he was healthy. He laughed out loud at that earlier panicky self. There was really nothing to worry about.

  Besides, he kept up with the news. It was safer in here.

  Enema

  He only spoke to it at night, of course.

  After the day's samples and scans, when it was folded up against the ceiling with its lights doused. He didn't want the ghosts listening in. Not that it embarrassed him to confide in a machine. Scanlon knew far too much about human behavior to worry over such a harmless quirk. Lonely end-users were always falling in love with VR simulations. Programmers bonded with their own creations, instilling imaginary life into every utterly predictable response. Hell, people even talked to their pillows if they were really short of alternatives. The brain wasn't fooled, but the heart took comfort in the pretense. It was perfectly natural, especially during periods of prolonged isolation. Nothing to worry about at all.

  "They need me," Scanlon told it now, the ambient lighting damped d
own until he could barely see. "I know vampires, I know them better than anyone. I've lived with them. I've survived them. These, these drybacks up here only use them." He looked up. The teleop hung above him like a bat in the dim light, and didn't interact, and somehow that was the most comforting thing of all.

  "I think Rowan's giving in. Her puppet said she was going to try and find some time."

  No answer.

  Scanlon shook his head at the sleeping machine. "I'm losing it, you know? I'm turning into a complete brainstem, is what I'm doing."

  He didn't admit it often these days. Certainly not with the same sense of horror and uncertainty that he'd felt even a week before. But after all he'd been through lately, it was only natural that he'd have some adjustments to make. Here he was, quarantined, possibly infected by some unknown germ. Before that he'd been through a gauntlet that would have driven most people right over the brink. And before that...

  Yes, he'd been through a lot. But he was a professional. He could still turn around, take a good hard look at himself. More than most people could do. Everyone had doubts and insecurities, after all. The fact that he was strong enough to admit to his didn't make him a freak. Quite the contrary.

  Scanlon stared across to the far end of the room. A window of isolation membrane stretched across the upper half of that wall, looked through to a small dark chamber that had been empty since his arrival. Patricia Rowan would be there soon. She would get first-hand benefit of Scanlon's new insights, and if she didn't already know how valuable he was, she'd be convinced after he spoke to her. The long wait for recognition was almost over. Things were about to make a huge change for the better.

  Yves Scanlon reached up and touched a dormant metal claw. "I like you better like this," he remarked. "You're less... hostile.

  "I wonder who you'll sound like tomorrow..."