Bruce Sterling - The Caryatids

There was something deeply loathsome about Karen’s cheery affec­tion for her labor and her coworkers. Sagging within her locked boneware, Vera blinked and gaze-tracked her way through a nest of menu options.

Look at that: Karen had abused the mine’s mediation. She had tagged the rocky cave walls with virtual wisecracks and graffiti, plus a tacky host of cute icons and stencils. Could anything be more hateful?

A shuddering moan came from the rock overhead. Black ooze cas­caded out and splashed the shrouds around their legs.

Karen cut the drill. Vera’s stricken ribs and spine finally stopped shaking.

“That happens down here sometimes,” Karen told her, her voice giddy in the limpid trickling of poisoned water. “Don’t be scared.”

Vera was petrified. “Scared of what? What happens down here?” “Just keep your hands braced on that big vein of dolomite,” Karen told her, the lucid voice of good sense and reason. “We’ve got plenty of safety sensors. This whole mine is crawling with smart dust.”

“Are you telling me that this stupid rock is moving’?”

“Yeah. It moves a little. Because we’re draining it. It has to subside.”

“What if it falls right on top of us?”

“You’re holding it up,” Karen pointed out. She wiped her helmet’s ex­terior faceplate with a dainty little sponge on a stick. “I just hit a good nasty wet spot! I can practically smell that!”

“But what if this whole mine falls in on us? That would smash us like bugs!”

Karen sneezed. All cross-eyed, she looked sadly at the spray across the bottom of her faceplate. “Well, that won’t happen.”

“How do you know that?”

“It won’t happen. It’s a judgment call.”

This was not an answer Vera wanted to hear. The whole point of in­stalling and running a sensorweb was to avoid human “judgment calls.” Only idiots used guesswork when a sensorweb was available.

For instance, pumping toxins down here in the first place: That was some idiot’s “judgment call.” Some fool had judged that it was much easier to hide an environmental crime than it was to pay to be clean.

Then the Acquis had arrived with their sensorweb and their media­tion, so everybody knew everything about the woe and horror on this island. The hidden criminality was part of the public record, sud­denly. They were mining the crime. There was crime all around them.

A nasty fit of nerves gathered steam within Vera. She hadn’t had one of these fits of nerves in months. She had thought she was well and truly over her fits of nerves. She’d been sure she would never have a fit of nerves while wearing an Acquis neural helmet.

“Let me use the drill,” Vera pleaded.

“This drill needs a special touch.”

“Let me do it.”

“You volunteered for mine work,” said Karen. “That doesn’t make you good at it. Not yet.”

“‘We learn by doing,’” Vera quoted stiffly, and that was a very cor­rect, Acquis-style thing to say. So Karen shrugged and splashed out of the way. Karen braced herself against the stony roof.

Vera wrapped her arms around the rugged contours of the drill. Her boneware shifted at the hips and knees as she raised the drill’s tip over­head. She pressed the trigger.

The drill whirled wildly in her arms and jammed. All the lights in the mine went out.

Vera’s exoskeleton, instantly, locked tight around her flesh. She was stuck to the drill as if nailed to it.

“I’m stuck,” she announced. “And it’s dark.”

“Yeah, we’re all stuck here now,” said Karen, in the sullen blackness.

Toxic water dripped musically.

“I can’t move! I can’t see my own hands. I can’t even see my media­tion!”

“That’s because you just blew out the power, Vera. Freezing the sys­tem is a safety procedure.”

An angry, muffled shout came from another miner. “Okay, what idiot pulled that stunt?” Vera heard the miner sloshing toward them through the darkness.

“I did that!” Vera shouted. In the Acquis, it was always best to take re­sponsibility at once. “That was my fault! I’ll do better.”

“Oh. So it was you? You, the newbie?”

Karen was indignant. “Gregor, don’t you dare call Vera a ‘newbie.’ This is Vera Mihajlovic! Compared to her, you’re the newbie.”

“Well, it’s a good thing I still have charge left in my capacitors.” Karen sighed aloud in the wet darkness. “Just go and reboot us, Gre­gor. We’ve all got a schedule to meet.”

“Please help me,” Vera begged him. “I’m stuck here, I can’t move!” “You’ll have to wait for a miracle, stupid,” said Gregor, and he left them there, rigid in the darkness.

“You made Gregor angry,” Karen assessed. “Gregor’s our very best rock man, but he’s not exactly a people person.”

Vera heaved uselessly against the silent pads and straps of her dead exoskeleton. Her boneware, which gave her such strength, grace, light­ness, power, had become her intimate prison.

“Who designed all this?” she shrieked. “We should have power back­ups! We should have fuel cells!”

“Be glad that we can still hear each other talking.” Karen’s voice sounded flat and muffled though her helmet and shroud. “It’s too hot down here to run any fuel cells. Gregor will reboot us. He can do it, he’s good. You just wait and see.”

A long, evil moment passed. Panic rose and clutched the dry lining of Vera’s throat.

“This is horrible!”

“Yes,” said Karen mournfully, “I guess it is, pretty much.”

“I can’t stand it!”

“Well, we just have to stand it, Vera. We can’t do anything but stand here.”

Claustrophobic terror washed through Vera’s beating heart. “I can’t do it,” she said. “I can’t bear any more.”

“I’m not scared,” Karen told her. “I used to be very scared every time I came down here. But emotion is a neural state. A neural state can’t touch you. I’m never afraid like I used to be. Sometimes I have fear­thoughts, but my fear-thoughts are not me.”

“I’ll scream!”

Karen’s voice was full of limpid sympathy. “You can scream, then. Do it. I’m here for you.”

SEEN FROM THE AIRY HILLTOP, Mljet was a tattered flag, all bays, peninsulas, and scattered islets. The island’s scalloped shores held stains in their nooks and corners: the algae blooms.

The rising Adriatic, carrying salt, had killed a dry brown skirt-fringe of the island’s trees.

The island’s blanket of pines and oaks was torn by clear-cut logging, scarred black with forest fires.

And if the golden shore of this beautiful place had suffered, the is­land’s interior was worse. Mljet’s angry creeks had collapsed the island’s bridges as if they’d been kneecapped with pistols. Up in the rocky hills, small, abandoned villages silently flaked their paint.

Year by year, leaning walls and rust-red roofs were torn apart by tow­ering houseplants gone feral. The island’s rotting vineyards were alive with buzzing flies and beetles, clouded with crows.

A host of flowers had always adorned this sunny place. There were far more flowers in these years of the climate crisis. Harsh, neck-high thick­ets of rotting flowers, feeding scary, billowing clouds of angry bees.

Such was her home. From the peak of the island, where she stood, throat raw, flesh trembling, mind in a whirl, she could see that the is­land was transforming. She could hear that, smell it, taste it in the wind. She was changing it.

Brilliancy, speed, lightness, and glory.

Millions of sensors wrapped Mljet in a tight electronic skin, like a cold wet sheet to swathe a fever victim. Embedding sensors. Mobile sen­sors. Dust-sized sensors flying like dandelion seeds.