The Rig

by Roger Levy

  After a moment, his feet caught in something and he flailed in panic, trying to shake free, forgetting the sims, but it was suddenly dark as death all around him and whatever had snagged him was sliding up his legs and had his arms too and it was, he realised, the catch-net.

  He was in the catch-net. The rig had caught him.

  Shaking, but remembering the training now, he felt along the webbing for the nearest lock and clicked it to his harness, and it was suddenly almost like in the sims. He checked the harness, felt for and found two more locks and secured himself to them, and heard a sudden voice in his helmet, crisp despite the booming wind.

  ‘Welcome to the rig, Mr Tallen. Please detach your drop-cable and I will swing you aboard.’

  The voice was soft, genderless and immensely reassuring. Tallen released the line and watched it reel up and vanish. He searched the sky for the thrummer, suddenly wanting to say something to the pilot, but there was no way to do that and in any case he didn’t know what he might have said.

  The net drew itself up and enveloped him. This was quite a different sensation from that of the harness securing him back on the ship. He felt hugged tight by this, muffled and protected. He couldn’t see anything. The wind dulled and quietened to a distant murmur, and Tallen closed his eyes and started to cry.

  * * *

  ‘Are you awake?’

  Tallen felt himself drifting, though he was unsure if the sensation were physical. He opened his eyes but couldn’t make them focus. Two figures, little more than stocky, frosted blurs, shimmered at the end of the bed – a hard bed – on which he was lying. He took a sharp breath and abruptly froze, afraid he’d find himself locked in the hospital’s bodycage again. He closed his eyes and listened to what he assumed were two medicians talking to each other.

  ‘It is an odd question. If he is awake, there is no sensible answer. If he is not, one feels ridiculous.’

  ‘We cannot feel ridiculous. We cannot feel anything.’

  ‘You sound ridiculous. He is awake. The question woke him.’

  Keeping his eyes closed, Tallen moved his fingers, then his toes. There was no restriction, though his intention and the consequent movement felt detached from each other. Something was wrong. Something neurological. The surgery he’d had on Bleak was failing.

  ‘My voice woke him, not the question.’

  Tallen cautiously raised a hand to his face to feel his nose and cheeks. This time the movement was fine, and there was no cage. And no pain. Still, he felt unsynchronised. He wondered vaguely if he ought to be panicking. He thought he heard himself laugh. Why?

  He squeezed his eyes open but they wouldn’t focus in the bright ambient light. Everything about him seemed slow.

  The voices were comforting, though, like the catch-net had been. His eyes began to hold focus at last.

  One of the pair said, ‘Good morning, Tallen. We hope you had a comfortable flight.’

  The other added, ‘We thought you would appreciate some rest.’

  Before he had the chance to take in anything beyond the fact that they were humechs, their visual presentations began to shift. Faces came and were replaced seemingly at random, their features ranging from the familiar to the astonishing. He saw himself in one of them for a moment, and then beside it he recognised a childhood friend, a boy he’d forgotten about altogether until now. The faces shifted on, changing as swiftly as he responded to them, and he wondered if he were somehow in control of it.

  After a few minutes, the process slowed down. Faces held for a second or two. There was the cynical Paxer from hospital, the one who’d saved Tallen’s life, and at his side, one after the other, the two women who had come to visit the Paxer.

  There was someone else he recognised, but this one vanished too quickly for him to register anything beyond a thin smile, though it drew a moment’s sheer terror from him. The presentations continued. Here was the Holoman, and here the psych from the rig assessment, Veale. Earlier faces returned, with eyes or smiles altered subtly, and Tallen was aware of different pairings suggesting themselves.

  As the scrolling slowed, the room settled into perfect focus.

  ‘There,’ said one of the humechs, tilting its head to the side.

  The other said, ‘How do I look?’

  Only they weren’t humechs at all any more. At least, not like any humechs he’d ever seen. They were looking at him, but he wasn’t sure if they were talking to him. They seemed entirely self-involved.

  Tallen said, ‘Who are you?’

  They looked at him, waiting. Tallen felt himself guessing at their names, as if he knew them already.

  ‘I am Lode.’

  ‘And I am Beata.’

  The names fixed them for Tallen, and at the same time the room came so sharply into focus that he was aware of every stipple in the sprayed emerald green of the walls. He could hear the faint, powdery background hiss of a sound-damping system and he could feel the movement of the bed against the sea, and distinguish that perfectly from the resistance of the rig’s anchors.

  He examined the humechs. They were as precisely detailed as the walls. Lode was solidly built, an unshaven, shadow-jawed man with hooded eyes and a wide smile. His thick brown hair shone. His jacket and trousers were slightly too small. Beata, the woman, was as tall as Lode but lightly framed, her features etched and delicate. Her eyes were startlingly green. She had cropped black hair and long fingers.

  ‘Do we seem your kind of people?’ Lode asked.

  Beata laughed.

  Tallen said, ‘Are you holos?’

  Beata said, ‘Not entirely, but in part. Nothing is everything.’

  ‘What if I touch you?’

  ‘You may try to. We are your interface. We are part of the rig,’ Lode said.

  ‘And so are you, now,’ said Beata.

  The humechs, he realised, had linked to him via his tech.

  Lode said, ‘You are hungry. Would you like something to eat? There is a nutrition unit by the door. There are clothes too.’

  They left him. Tallen sat on the side of the bed for a minute, savouring the almost silence, then stood up and examined himself in the full-length mirror on the wall.

  Not bad, he thought. His head looked a little distorted, the titanium skullplates puckering his scalp where the hair was never entirely going to conceal the casing, his forehead asymmetrical, his nose smashed and squashed to the left, his left eyesocket tilted and depressed. Metal shone through. And as he turned sideways, he noticed the faint scoliosis where the neural insertions in his spine hadn’t seated perfectly.

  No matter. There was no one but the humechs to see him here.

  What about afterwards, though?

  He didn’t want to think about that. This was bad enough, but the idea of afterwards was worse. Was that why he was here? He had been desperate to come here, but now that he had arrived, he felt at a loss.

  He nilled the mirror.

  Afterwards was a long way away. He didn’t need to think about it. He sat at the small metal table and ate like he hadn’t eaten for weeks. Turnips, fishmeal, chilli porridge. After washing a beer down his throat he held the glass up to the light and examined it, decided it wouldn’t shatter and tossed it into the meltshaft after the bowl and the fork. He wiped the knife clean and slipped it into his pocket.

  The humechs weren’t waiting in the corridor. There was nothing to choose between right and left, just the narrow passage extending both ways from the small sharp pool of light in which he stood, into dimness. Tallen went right, and with his first step the overhead tracklighting spooled out ahead of him. He glanced back and saw that the dim light in his wake had faded to darkness. No power wasted here, he thought.

  For the first few metres, his boots boomed unpleasantly on the dimpled steel flooring, but by the time he’d come to the first branch in the corridor, his footsteps sounded like he was treading quietly on packed earth. The metal of the floor was unchanged. His ears tingled, whined and settled. The tech
was mediating his experience.

  Without consciously making a decision, he took left and right turns, getting used to the way the lighting reacted to his gaze. After ten minutes, he wasn’t even noticing it. There were floor-level mech-comms grilles every ten metres, bulkhead indicators and slamdown ramgates every twenty. The only signs were on the ramgate housings and they all read the same thing: THIS RAMGATE STRESS-GUARANTEED ONE MINUTE ONLY. They were flood barriers, Tallen realised. And they wouldn’t be much use here.

  He walked for hours. Corridors broadened and narrowed, changed tack and angle. Tallen felt himself automatically mapping it. While he could have found his way back to his original room without any problem, he had little sense of his location within the rig. The room in which he had awoken was his only fixed point, and he had no idea where in the rig it was. There was no context; he needed the sea. He could occasionally smell it, and was increasingly aware that every surface was damp or wet, but he had no idea whether he was undersea or above, at the rig’s heart or in its shell.

  He carried on. Minutes passed, or hours. Mostly, he kept a steady pace. There were sequences of vertical stair-rungs and repetitive sections of long, drooping chainbridges. He discovered that if he stopped at a door, it would open for him; he found putery and machinery, storage chambers and repair workshops alive with floormechs. Occasionally he’d be looking at something and its name would come to him. Dark storerooms would light up to show him stocks of engine generator sets, racks of chokes and choke manifolds. He had no idea what they did, but he identified them perfectly.

  No – that was wrong. He did know. The sight brought the word, and the word brought more. But the knowledge was somehow detached from wherever it had come. It was like a suddenly remembered dream, contextless and perfect. Abruptly dizzy, he staggered against the corridor wall. There was no sense of physical contact as he struck it, and he received a sharp smell of purple. He rubbed his shoulder and the smell faded to green.

  And then his shoulder was ordinarily hurting, and he massaged it again and had a memory of the blurred forms of Beata and Lode fixing themselves before him.

  All of this, he knew, was the rig being calibrated for him, and he for the rig. There was a warmth running up the length of his spine, like a cramp or a chord of music.

  With a little more confidence, he walked on. Stenches of oil and smoke came and faded away. He guessed they were real. Jet bridges extended for him and hissed back as he stepped off them. Once a corridor opened out and he stopped at a lookdown over a seemingly bottomless pipestack, the vast five-metre diameter tubes racked vertically. Gazing out, he counted two hundred.

  He left the lookdown and carried on, grateful to be back in passages whose walls he could touch. He was developing a headache, probably some reaction to the thrummer flight.

  Small mechs, simple-minders and fixers, tracked constantly along the corridors, slowing for instructions at their comms points, carrying on or turning back. Tallen noticed them, had gradually been aware of more of them, but it took him a while to realise that he’d gathered a tail of a dozen at his heels, and as he registered the fact, he felt an abrupt lurch of nausea that stopped him, retching, by a door.

  As the door opened, the fixers surged past him and tracked inside to the bank of putery. From across the room, Tallen was caught by the complex screenery with its arrays of ostents and scan patterns.

  The headache was pulsing from the nape of his neck to his temples. He couldn’t look away from the screenery. The fixers were crawling like motes at the fringes of his vision. One area of the screenery seemed brighter than the rest. Staring into it, Tallen felt his entire head throbbing. He saw rain and ghosting on the display and almost vomited.

  Most of the fixers withdrew from the screenery and swarmed from the room, while the remaining machines threw out power lines, cobwebbing with each other and the wall.

  Tallen’s head was almost exploding. The room faded until all he could see was the brilliance of the migraine. The swirl of light in his skull tightened and focused and he made out a detailed geometrical design within it.

  And he recognised it. He’d never seen one before, but he knew he was looking at the rig’s body plan, with all the waterlines and decklines detailed, the planes and curves and intersections. He could see the subsea shaft outlet, the pipeline, the cascade of tributary pipes and the generators thundering in the squat ballast towers.

  Tallen’s legs failed him and he slid down the wall, and as he slumped to the ground the body plan turned over, swung and telescoped until the hard core of his nausea finally came into view, shining and clear on the plan.

  ‘The bilge,’ he croaked.

  The bilge? Which one?

  He struggled to answer, not knowing where either questions or answers were coming from. How, in such pain, was he thinking so clearly?

  Number four. Not the main bracket, though, and not the strake either. The shell plating was intact. His head felt as if it was on fire.

  Where then?

  He was almost sobbing. He shook his head, but the pain and brilliance only grew more precise.

  There! It was the keel, he saw. The long fin of the number four bilge keel had developed a hairline fracture. There.

  He squeezed his eyes closed and the pain began slowly to unstitch itself from his skull.

  There.

  And unconsciousness came to rescue him.

  * * *

  And consciousness once more.

  His eyes squeezed closed against the memory of the pain, Tallen felt the slam and suck of the wind around him before he was aware of anything else. Then he smelt it, the extraordinary saffron brine and the scorching, caustic pungency of the sea.

  Now he opened his eyes, and the sight of it so vast and close, rearing and breaking, made him yell with joy. The ice-hard spray flayed his face, and the sea deafened him. Between the water’s thundering rush and its sieving away, he could make out the fretted metal of the deck.

  He tried to look down but couldn’t, couldn’t move at all beyond a tiny flexing of his chin.

  He was back in a cage.

  Twenty-four

  ALEF

  SigEv 29 To the house

  Ethan Drame was sitting in his office, relaxed.

  ‘I’m ready to go,’ I told him. The flycykle’s waiting.’

  He waved me to a chair. ‘No hurry.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘There’s a change, Alef,’ Drame said. ‘Don’t look so worried. I know you don’t like change. Such a strange boyman, you are. We’re bringing Madelene along today. It’ll be a surprise for her.’

  ‘Madelene?’ This was bad. Pellonhorc wasn’t expecting her to be there. I’d told him it would be just the two of us arriving. I didn’t know what to do. I said, ‘Oh. Oh. Are you sure?’

  ‘She’ll want to plan. Choose colours, carpets. The house is just about at that stage. She has to know about it some time, and now’s the time. Don’t say anything to her, though. I want it to be a surprise.’

  My heart was thudding and I felt a little nauseous. I had no idea what I should do. Pellonhorc had told me to behave exactly as I normally would, but I couldn’t think how I would normally react to this. I said, ‘There’s eight hundred and fifty thousand square metres of floor space, and –’

  Ethan Drame laughed. ‘Alef, you’re still just like your father.’

  I steadied, fractionally. I didn’t mind him saying that. It may seem odd, but there was some form of bond between us. He trusted me, and he’d be proud of me by the end of the day, I knew. I comforted myself by thinking that Madelene coming along was just an algorithm variation.

  Madelene came into the room in a swirl of perfume. She looked irritated. Drame caught my eye and shook his head for me to keep quiet.

  ‘What is it?’ she said tersely. ‘I have things to do.’

  ‘We’re going out,’ he told her.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘A surprise. A nice one.’

  She eyed
me. ‘With him?’

  ‘Yes,’ Drame said, his voice sharpening.

  She looked at him and clearly thought better of starting an argument. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘I said it’s a surprise. Get ready and we’ll see you in the flycykle.’

  Drame and I went down to the departure gate. Madelene took a long time to join us, and I started to get anxious.

  ‘Calm down, Alef,’ Drame said. His temper was short, and that made me worse.

  ‘Maybe we should go by ourselves this time,’ I said. ‘Maybe we should take her next time.’

  With no warning, he swept his hand out and cut the edge of it into my neck. I collapsed, choking, and I was still retching when Madelene stepped into the cabin and sat down. She ignored both of us.

  ‘Go,’ Drame told the pilot.

  We travelled in silence. I had recovered by the time we were crossing to the outland, the flycykle juddering, its engine whining. Madelene caught my eye and smiled at me in mock sympathy, and squeezed Drame’s knee. Drame breathed out and was calm, as if entering the outland had drawn the mood from him.

  As we dropped down, I searched the periphery for Pellonhorc’s flycykle, but couldn’t see it among the construction machinery. There was just the usual scattering of mixers and diggers and generators.

  ‘You’re twitchy, Alef. Why are you so twitchy today?’

  ‘I’m thinking of Ligate,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing you can do now. What’s set is set. We’re here now, so be here.’

  Yet again it amazed me that Drame could shut everything away like this. When he was attending to something, his energy was engaged totally with it, and then he could forget it all in an instant.

  We came in smoothly and the outer doors of the hangar opened for us. The pilot set us down in the midlock and the outer doors closed again.

  We climbed out of the flycykle and stood in the hum of filtered air. Drame stretched his arms and said, ‘Where’s Mackel?’