Starfish (10 page)

They wanted to give him a job.

"Think of it as community service," Scanlon said. "Restitution to all of society. You'd be underwater most of the time, but you'd be well-equipped."

"Underwater where?"

"Channer Vent. About forty kilometers north of the Axial Volcano, on the Juan de Fuca Rift. Do you know where that is, Gerry?"

"How long?"

"One year minimum. You could extend that if you wanted to."

Fischer couldn't think of any reason why he would, but it didn't matter. If he didn't take this deal they'd stick a governor in his head for the rest of his life. Which might not be that long, when you thought about it.

"One year," he said. "Underwater."

Scanlon patted his arm. "Take your time, Gerry. Think about it. You don't have to decide until this afternoon."

Do it, Shadow urged. Do it or they'll cut into you and you'll
change
...

But Fischer wasn't going to be rushed. "So what do I do for one year, underwater?"

Scanlon showed him a vid.

"Geez," Fischer said. "I can't do any of that."

"No problem." Scanlon smiled. "You'll learn."

* * *

He did, too.

A lot of it happened while he was sleeping. Every night they'd give him an injection, to help him learn, Scanlon said. Afterwards a machine beside his bed would feed him dreams. He could never exactly remember them but something must have stuck, because every morning he'd sit at the console with his tutor — a real person, though, not a program — and all the text and diagrams she showed him would be strangely familiar. Like he'd known it all years ago, and had just forgotten. Now he remembered everything: plate tectonics and subduction zones, Archimedes Principle, the thermal conductivity of two percent hydrox. Aldosterone.

Alloplasty.

He remembered his left lung after they cut it out, and the technical specs on the machines they put in its place.

Afternoons, they'd attach leads to his body and saturate his striated muscles with low-amp current. He was starting to understand what was going on, now; the term was
induced isometrics
, and its meaning had come to him in a dream.

A week after the operation he woke up with a fever.

"Nothing to worry about," Scanlon told him. "That's just the last stage of your infection."

"Infection?"

"We shot you up with a retrovirus the day you came here. Didn't you know?"

Fischer grabbed Scanlon's arm. "Like a disease? You—"

"It's perfectly safe, Gerry." Scanlon smiled patiently, disentangling himself. "In fact, you wouldn't last very long down there without it; human enzymes don't work well at high pressure. So we loaded some extra genes into a tame virus and sent it in. It's been rewriting you from the inside out. Judging by your fever I'd say it's nearly finished. You should be feeling better in a day or so."

"Rewriting?"

"Half your enzymes come in two flavors now. They got the genes from one of those deep-water fish. Rattails, I think they're called." Scanlon patted Fischer on the shoulder. "So how does it feel to be part fish, Gerry?"

"
Coryphaenoides armatus
," Fischer said slowly.

Scanlon frowned. "What was that?"

"Rattails." Fischer concentrated. "Mostly dehydrogenases, right?"

Scanlon glanced at the machine by the bed. "I'm, um, not sure."

"That's it. Dehydrogenases. But they tweaked them to reduce the activation energy." He tapped his temple. "It's all here. Only I haven't done the tutorial yet."

"That's great," Scanlon said; but he didn't sound like he meant it.

* * *

One day they put him in a tank built like a piston, five stories tall: its roof could press down like a giant hand, squeezing whatever was inside. They sealed the hatch and flooded the tank with seawater.

Scanlon had warned him about the change. "We flood your trachea and your head cavities, but your lung and intestines aren't rigid so they just squeeze down. We're immunizing you against pressure, you see? They say it's a bit like drowning, but you get used to it."

It wasn't that bad, actually. Fischer's guts twisted in on themselves, and his sinuses burned like hell, but he'd take that over another bout with Kevin any day.

He floated there in the tank, seawater sliding through the tubes in his chest, and reflected on the queasy sensation of not breathing.

"They're getting some turbulence." Scanlon's voice came at him from all directions, as if the walls themselves were talking. "From your exhaust port."

A fine trail of bubbles was trickling from Fischer's chest. His eyecaps made everything seem marvelously clear, like a hallucination. "Just a bit of—"

Not his voice. His words, but spoken by something else, some cheap machine that didn't know about harmonics. One hand went automatically to the disk embedded in his throat.

"—hydrogen," he tried again. "No problem. Pressure'll squeeze them down when I get deep enough."

"Yeah. Still." Other words, muffled, as Scanlon spoke to someone else. Fischer felt something vibrate softly in his chest. The bubbles grew larger, then smaller. Then disappeared.

Scanlon was back. "Better?"

"Yeah." Fischer didn't know how he felt about this, though. He didn't really like having a chest full of machinery. He didn't really like having to breathe by chopping water into chunks of hydrogen and oxygen. But he
really
didn't like the idea of some tech he'd never even met fiddling with his insides by remote control, reaching into his body and messing around in there without even asking. It made him feel—

Violated, right?

Sometimes Shadow was just a bitch. As if
she
hadn't been the one to put him up to it in the first place.

"We're going to kill the lights now, Gerry."

Darkness. The water hummed with the sound of vast machinery.

After a few moments he noticed a cold blue spark winking at him from somewhere overhead. It seemed to cast a lot more light than it should. As he watched, the inside of the tank reappeared in hazy shades of blue-on-black.

"Photoamps working okay?" Scanlon wanted to know.

"Uh huh."

"What can you see?"

"Everything. The inside of the tank. The hatch. Sort of bluish."

"Right. Luciferin light source."

"It's not very bright," Fischer said. "Everything's sort of like, dusk."

"Well, it'd be pitch black without your eyecaps."

And suddenly, it was.

"Hey."

"Don't worry, Gerry. Everything's fine. We just shut the light off."

He lay there in utter darkness. Floaters wriggled at the corner of his eye.

"How are you feeling, Gerry? Any sensation of falling? Claustrophobia?"

He felt almost peaceful.

"Gerry?"

"No. Nothing. I feel—fine—"

"Pressure's at two thousand meters."

"I can't feel it."

This might not be so bad after all. One year. One year...

"Doctor Scanlon," he said after a while. He was even getting used to the metallic buzz of his new voice.

"Right here."

"Why me?"

"What do you mean, Gerry?"

"I wasn't, you know, qualified. Even after all this training I bet there's lots of people who'd be better at this than me. Real engineers."

"It's not so much what you know," Scanlon said. "It's what you are."

He knew what he was. People had been telling him for as long as he could remember. He didn't see what the fuck that had to do with anything. "What's that, then?"

At first he thought he wasn't going to get an answer. But Scanlon finally spoke, and when he did there was something in his voice that Fischer had never heard before.

"Pre-adapted," was what he said.

The Pacific Ocean slopped two kilometers under his feet. He had a cargo of blank-eyed psychotics sitting behind him. And the lifter was being piloted by a large pizza with extra cheese. Joel Kita liked it all about as much as could be expected.

At least he
had
been expecting it, this time. For once the GA hadn't sprung one of their exercises in chaos theory onto his life without warning. He'd seen it coming almost a week in advance, when they'd sprung one onto Ray Stericker instead. Ray had been in this very cockpit, watching the pizza being installed and no doubt wondering when the term "job security" had become an oxymoron.

"I'm supposed to baby-sit it for a week," he had said then. Joel had climbed up into the 'scaphe for the usual preflight check and found his friend waiting by the controls. Ray had gestured up through the open hatchway to the lifter's cockpit, where a couple of techs were busy interfacing something to the controls. "Just in case it screws up in the field. Then I'm gone."

"Gone where?" Joel couldn't believe it. Ray had been on the Juan de Fuca run forever, even before the geothermal program. He’d even been an
employee
, back when such things were commonplace.

"Probably the Gorda circuit for a while. After that, who knows? They'll be upgrading everything before long."

Joel glanced up through the hatch. The techs were playing with a square vanilla box, half a meter on a side and about twice as thick as Kita's wrist. "What
is
the fucking thing? Some kind of autopilot?"

"With a difference. This takes off and lands. And all sorts of lovely things in between."

This was not good news. Humans had always been able to integrate three-D spatial information better than the machines that kept trying to replace them. Not that machines couldn't recognize a tree or a building when such objects were pointed out to them, but they got real confused whenever you rotated any of those objects a few degrees. The shapes changed, contrast and shadow shifted, and it always took way too long for any of those arsenide pretenders to update its spatial maps and recognize that yes, it's still a tree, and no, it didn't morph into something else, dummy, you just changed your point of view.

In some places that wasn't a problem. Ocean surfaces, for example. Or controlled-access highways where the cars had their own ID transponders. Or even lashed to the underside of a giant squashed doughnut filled with buoyant vacuum, floating in mid-air. These had been respected and venerable environments for autopilots since well before the turn of the century.

Take-offs and landings were a different scene altogether, though. Too many real objects going by too fast, too many things to keep an eye on. A few billion years of natural selection still had the edge when the fast lane got that crowded.

Until now, apparently.

"Let's get out of here." Ray dropped down onto the landing pad. Joel followed him out to the edge of the roof. Green tangled blankets of kudzu
₄
spread out around them, shrouding the roofs of surrounding buildings. It always made Joel think post-apocalypse — weeds and ivy crawling back in from the wilderness to strangle the residue of some fallen civilization. Except, of course, these particular weeds were supposed to
save
civilization.