Hyperthought

by M M Buckner

I scrubbed scum off the sphere’s inner wall to see better. The cliffs were ridged with swollen, twisted folds. Slabs of old highways and broken buildings were crushed in layers of sediment. It looked as if centuries of civilizations had been compressed and folded together. Abruptly, the red light faded, leaving me in semi-darkness. The volcanic eruption had ended.

  That first hour passed slowly as the sphere rolled down the gnarly bulge. The convex walls creaked and hummed with the ocean’s mounting pressure, and the deeper I went, the more I thought about my guilt. I’m the one who introduced Jin to Merida. I kept obsessing about that. If only I could take it back. That one wrong choice. If I could just go back in time and change that one little thing.

  But what must Merida have promised, to get her hooks into my Jin so deeply? Why had he fallen for her? It made me want to scream. My beautiful Jin, so discriminating, so appreciative of nuances, forever weighing alternatives, perpetually undecided—why had Jin zeroed in so fast on Merida? This ridiculous brain surgery, she promised it would help him find the truth—as if anyone knew what that was. Jin felt some kind of duty, he said, like noblesse oblige. Because he was born way lucky, he felt this mega-urge to help the starving masses. I could admire that. But then this weird conflict with his father got in his way, and he didn’t know what to do. Join the human race, Jin Sura. Nobody knows what to do.

  “I have to know!” That’s what he’d crowed, sticking up his chin, proud as a peacock. As if he really were the only person in the universe. As if the fate of the world rested on his shoulders alone. Mes dieux, what a prick! What an egotistical, infuriating, dear, precious, screwed-up guy! Doubly screwed-up now, because he had only me to come and save him. Poor Jin.

  To my horror, I noticed a dimple forming in one section of the fabriglass sphere. Thank the Laws, the sphere’s regulator started increasing internal air pressure to help compensate for the extreme forces on the exterior walls. I held my nose and blew hard to clear my ears. But the dimple kept growing. Not good.

  For a little extra peace of mind, I tugged on my duct-taped helmet and sealed the gaskets of my surfsuit. My surfsuit was a Cetus XS™, made in South Africa. A meta-primo surfsuit. Like that Net node, it had cost me a bundle. With its internal recycler system and pressure controls, the Cetus was rated for dives down to 900 meters. I was probably approaching that limit, and I still had a preter-long way to go, not to mention a preter-huge cliff to search for one small sea cave. Normally, I would have flipped open my Net node and asked for advice. Mes dieux, but I missed my friends. The full ramifications of losing that node hit me harder than ever. I’d never been cut off from the Net before.

  Another hour passed, and the ocean current kept nudging my sphere against the cliff. Then I noticed something truly bizarre. The running lights showed I was now rolling under the cliff, into the shadow of a vast overhang. I checked that dimple again. Ça va, a million tiny white lines now branched out from the flaw. The fabriglass was old and brittle. Would it split? I was trying to recall my reasons for doing this when the sphere caught on something sharp sticking down from the overhanging cliff. Quick as light, I threw my weight to the floor and bounced clear. That was all I needed, a puncture.

  Halfway through the third hour, pain stabbed my eardrums. My suit’s regulator had maxxed out. It couldn’t keep up with the increasing air pressure inside the sphere. I swallowed hard, popped my jaw, held my nose, and tried to blow air into my middle ears to stop the pain. I would have traded my soul for a depth gauge, but maybe it was better not to know.

  At that instant, volcanic light flashed again, turning the sea gory red. I looked up through the top of the dive sphere, and the cliff’s bulging mass seemed to press down on me like a monstrous growth. Strange objects were embedded in the overhang. Ancient transport vehicles flattened under broken chunks of aggregate. Seams of melted rubber laced with glittering shards of steel. It was a barbarous formation. A layering of cities and mountains folded together in the Earth’s moving crust.

  I heard a small pop and spun around to check the dimple. Ocean pressure was deepening those tiny white seams into creases. Sacrée Loi, was the sphere about to implode? I could almost taste the sulfuric reek of the sea. Inhaling a careful breath of surfsuit air, I closed my eyes and prayed to the Laws of Physics. The sphere rolled farther under the cliff.

  Sometime during the fourth hour, the sphere wedged against something very solid, and the force of the current held it still. My headlamp barely penetrated the gloom. I couldn’t see anything. I tried using my body weight to heave the sphere loose, but it wouldn’t budge. Every time I tried to move, it, the sphere mired deeper.

  So I sat down in the slippery bottom of the sphere to wait for another volcanic flash. The recycled air in my suit stank of sweat. I touched that tape on my helmet again, and I thought of Adrienne and Luc and Jonas, who must be a bit worried by now. And I thought about what Vincente had said: “El principe. Sí, I remember him. The brain-dead one.”

  Jin seemed very near. I felt an almost visceral connection with him. We had shared the bond of sex, yes. But since then, I had fantasized so many intimate conversations, told him so much about my dreams and fears, and watched his image so often in the movies, I felt we were mates. I believed we understood one another, and that our destinies lay together. You may mink I was an idiot to base so much on so little. Call it an addiction if you like. Adrienne did. But waiting there in the dark to see him, hunkering under the weight of hundreds of meters of ocean, I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. Is it possible a fixation as strong as mine could be all on one side? I didn’t believe it. Jin had to be thinking about me, too. If he were still thinking at all.

  Bien sûr, no one would mistake Jolie Blanche Sauvage for a genius, I know that. But I do have a retentive mind. I remembered every word Jin had told me about waking up his latent senses. He said we had old, old ways of knowing. Our lizard brains once guided us through the primordial ooze in ways that had nothing to do with sight or sound or smell. He said we still had those old senses, but we no longer recognized our perceptions for what they were. We mislabeled them as instinct or luck. Sometimes, clairvoyance. Sometimes, lunacy. I understood what Jin meant. That’s why I knew he would feel me approaching.

  Finally, the volcano erupted again. Its brief flash revealed that my sphere had lodged between the huge cliff above and another smaller bulge below. In the bloody light, this lower bulge looked older, more deeply eroded and pitted with age. Fossils stuck out from its crusted face like fragments of memory.

  The red light strobed twice more before fading, but among the rough furrows of the lower cliff, I saw the cave. It lay about ten meters south and maybe a dozen meters down. That opening couldn’t be natural. Too perfectly round. It had to be a laser bore.

  My sphere made another popping noise. I held my breath, listening for the first hint of seepage. I wouldn’t last long if the sphere imploded. I had to move into that sea cave fast. Vincente had said I’d find an airlock just inside. That would mean safety. But how could I maneuver the sphere?

  I wasted half an hour throwing myself against the walls trying to dislodge the sphere, but when one whole quadrant suddenly puckered inward, I froze. This would never work. I had to leave the sphere. I had to trust myself to the Cetus surfsuit for whatever time it took to get inside that cave. First, I had to find a way to poke a little hole in the sphere and let ocean fluid slowly fill it. Then I could open the hatch and swim out. Sacred Angels of Physics!

  No reason to wait here letting my fears build up. I pressed that duct tape firmer to my helmet, sucked a breath of pungent recycled air, and prayed to Newton. Then I used the tip of my diamond-edged field knife to punch a little hole. Right, you know what happened. Pressure split the hull like a soap bubble, and the escaping gas launched me straight up. I bashed against the underside of the cliff so hard, my ears rang, and the gases began dragging me rapidly under the overhang, rushing toward the surface.

  If I hadn’t whacked into a flange p
rotruding from the cliff, I might have ridden that gas burble all the way to the top—and had the pleasure of feeling my lungs explode. But the flange caught me fast, and I clung to it for dear life. The flange turned out to be a petrified tree stump.

  After the initial excitement, I stopped trembling and collected my wits. Pain throbbed in my ears, and my surfsuit was squeezing me like it was six sizes too small. In seconds, the liner began to feel clammy. Was it sweat, or had a seam started to leak? The Cetus XS™ surfsuit was made of Para-Thinsulate® bonded to Kevtex® and reinforced with woven polymer-germanium. Fire-retardant plasticene coating. And silicon seals. Besides, everyone knows those depth ratings always leave a wide safety margin, right? I kept telling myself those things as I dragged my way along the cliff with one gloved hand and pressed the duct tape flat to my helmet with the other.

  For five long minutes, I worked toward that cave, plowing through the glutinous pollution that had collected at the bottom of the ocean. Inside my surfsuit, moisture spread down my ribs and legs, and I imagined I could taste sulfur. But it had to be sweat. Sea fluid was so toxic, it would burn my skin like acid, right? Just then a drop ran off the tip of my nose, and the inside of my helmet started fogging. I pressed the duct tape harder. Just sweat. It had to be.

  Near the cave, I encountered heat. Even through my surfsuit, I could feel it. For a moment, the ocean cleared, and my headlamp penetrated to reveal a geyser of fizzing gases boiling up from the opening. Almost at once, a red volcanic flash illuminated the cave’s laser-cut entrance. When the geyser subsided, I swam in.

  Vincente hadn’t bed about the airlock. Not far down the passage, I came to a steel wall with a hulking metal door. The odd thing was, as I approached, the door began to slide open. Maybe there was an automatic motion sensor. Bien, I wanted inside, didn’t I? So I swam into the lock.

  10

  Matji

  WITH A HEAVY clank, the outer door of the airlock sealed, and air jetted through a nozzle, forcing the ocean fluid out through a floor drain. When the liquid had drained to my chest level, my sensors read breathable air, so I tugged off my helmet and looked at the duct tape. Mes dieux, a comer of that tape had lifted, exposing the gash. The inner lining was saturated with ocean fluid. In another minute, that helmet might have completely failed! I stared at it stupidly. Then I dropped it. The thing was useless, damaged beyond repair. I wiped my damp face with the back of my hand, drew several deep breaths and tried to ease the pounding in my ears.

  Slowly, air filled the lock. When the last ocean fluid vortexed through the floor drain, the lock’s inner door grated open. Floodlights blinded me. The airlock echoed with dripping.

  “Jolie?” I recognized the Spanic drawl.

  “Merida.” I drew a quick breath. How did she know I was coming? That stupid call I’d made to Jin’s father? Or had Vincente betrayed me?

  “We’ve been tracking you by GPSNS,” she said.

  I felt hyper-lame for not guessing that.

  “Where’s Jin?” I said.

  “You think you’ve rushed in to rescue him? Jolie, he’s achieving everything he hoped for. Come in, pet. You’ll soon discover which one of us he prefers.”

  Her voice vibrated through a cheap amplification system. Oh no, Merida hadn’t come to greet me in person. My eyes were adjusting to the floodlights, and when I held up my hand as a shield, I could just make out three tall figures moving toward me. Merida’s amplified voice buzzed, “Please allow my staff to escort you, Jolie. We’ll meet soon. I promise.”

  Her “staff” consisted of three featureless cybergoons with gleaming platinum skin and dark gray uniforms void of insignia. They grabbed me, stripped me to my purple paisley bodysuit, confiscated my gear, and marched me double-time through one of the strangest corridors I’d ever seen. The first part seemed new, cheap and plain, but we soon dropped off into an old, dank cellar, then climbed spiral stairs and passed through a grand hall with crystal chandeliers and musty carpet. Apparently to save money, Merida had assimilated random parts of the old city ruins into her habitat.

  The goons prodded me into a small, unpainted cell without furnishings of any kind. One of them handed me a basket of moist towels. I put the towels to use. The guards’ presence didn’t bother me. I’d learned to forgo the conventions of physical modesty. I dropped my filthy bodysuit on the floor and scrubbed my skin, scouring away that putrid moisture that might have been toxic sea fluid or maybe just nervous sweat. When I’d finished, Merida’s towels were stained beyond redemption.

  As soon as the three goons left, I checked the place out. Steel walls as thick as a vault, recessed light-strips in the ceiling, probably hidden cam-eyes, too. The door was electronically sealed. No way to escape. All I could do was wait for Merida to keep her promise. Adrienne, you don’t have to say a word. I know I should have planned, but how’s a person supposed to plan for the unknown?

  After a short while, a middle-aged Japanese woman brought me a tray of food and a thread-bare kimono. She was human, not cyborg. Fine lines webbed her face, and wiry silver threads grizzled her raven hair. But she had a sweet, wide, motherly smile. She placed the tray on the floor and crossed her hands over her round belly. “The noodles are good. Sorry, no table.”

  I wrapped myself in the kimono, and the woman helped me tie the plastic belt in back. The cloth felt stiff and cheap. When I sat on the floor, she knelt beside me and poured my cup full of piping hot green tea. Then she smiled and made an eating motion with her hands and mouth. The noodles smelled savory, and believe me, I was famished, so I picked up the chopsticks and dug in.

  “Who are you?” the woman asked when I paused to gulp tea.

  She had to be a prote, a maid or cook or something. I studied her as I upended the chipped teacup. She wore a faded kimono like mine and funny sandals. No makeup or jewelry, no indication of status. She peered at me with kind, blinking eyes. I decided I liked her.

  “I’m Jolie. Jin’s friend. Do you know Jin Sura?”

  She smiled and shook her head apologetically. “I do not have that honor.”

  “What about Suradon Sura? Have you heard that name?” I asked.

  Her eyes widened, and she spoke solemnly, “He is my lord.”

  I said, “Huh?”

  “I belong to him.” She lowered her eyelids. “Lord Suradon sent me here to serve the doctor.”

  “Suradon and Merida are in league together?” I nearly choked on a mouthful of noodles. Then I remembered. Jin said they’d formed a partnership.

  The serving woman was blinking her eyes and biting her lip. My question had upset her. Right. No point quizzing this simple lady. I invited her to sit down beside me, and we began to chat. She said her name was Matji. She told me about her duties in the kitchen and the daughters she’d left back in Japan. I told her about Jin. Of course, she knew of her boss’s only son, but she’d never seen him. She never watched movies, she said. That luxury wasn’t allowed to kitchen staff.

  When I told her how handsome Jin was and how fans idolized him, she fluttered her eyelashes with pleasure. Matji seemed to think Jin’s status reflected well on her own, since she belonged to his family. I declare, the woman accepted her slavery without a notion of protest. I didn’t want to upset her by arguing.

  So I asked her what Suradon Sura was like.

  “He is my lord,” she repeated, as if that should explain everything. “He guards the people’s welfare,” she said, and “He loads our table with bounty,” along with other trite drivel that sounded like verbatims from a propaganda ROM.

  Naturellement. I kept asking for more. Jin’s meta-magnate father intrigued me. What was he like close up? How did he treat his servants? Did Matji like him? Finally, she gave me this cryptic reply: “He is a man who seeks to gather the wind in his fist.”

  When I said, “Huh?” Matji’s face crinkled in a merry grin that squeezed her eyes almost shut. She rocked silently on her haunches, obviously enjoying my confusion. I couldn’t get her to say anythin
g more about the mighty Lord Suradon.

  Pots of tea materialized as if by magic. Matji told me the tea contained a medicine to cleanse my body of any ocean toxins that might have penetrated my surfsuit. That was great news to me, and I thanked her. We talked for a long time. I’m not usually so voluble, but Matji drew me out.

  People always loved my scary trip stories, and the more I told them, the more hair they grew. So I told Matji about “Jolie’s Trip to Tierra del Fuego.” We’d copter-jetted six clients in for an afternoon picnic—only to find a bunch of Cartel pharmacy lords already parked there, negotiating a profit split under a big green flapping tent. Lots of jet-black cyborgs were strolling around with weapons. Wouldn’t you know, my numbhead Commie clients starting shooting video. The Cartel took my whole group hostage on the spot, and they sent me back to Greenland to arrange this mega-ransom. They kept my clients locked up for five days, but the loopy execs thought the whole thing was staged for their entertainment. That trip earned me my biggest tip ever.

  Matji didn’t seem all that interested in Jolie’s Trips. She asked about my family. I explained about being a leftover kid, but incredible as it sounds, Matji had never heard of the big toxic die-off that hit Euro when Earth’s climate changed. Matji had even less education than me. I told her about growing up in the Paris tunnels with a pack of righteous thieves led by ten-year-old Uncle Qués. Then I described the mystical surfsuit that had changed the course of my life.

  Talking about friends in Euro made me sad. That led to the war and the rescue project and my friends in Palmertown. Not surprisingly, Matji hadn’t heard anything about the war. Mes dieux, but I babbled. I told her about Adrienne and Jonas, but that just made me miss them more. I grew sentimental about Luc. I told Matji how I’d raised him, and how he’d fallen in love and didn’t need me anymore. When I starting getting weepy, Matji patted my shoulder.

  At some point, my head began to spin. I lost track of up and down. Then I slumped forward and realized I couldn’t see. My eyelids had closed. I must have fallen asleep in mid-sentence. When I jerked awake, Matji smiled. Her face had changed. Her mouth looked wider man before, and her black eyes had grown rounder. She didn’t even look Japanese. “Sleep, pet,” she crooned in a voice like syrup, as I rolled over and fell into the dark.