Peter Watts - Maelstrom

Except for the ones that were starting to look like her.

She ate a tasteless soy-krill concoction from a convenient vending machine. The phone in her visor beeped occasionally. She ignored it. The crazies, the propositioners, the death threateners—those had stopped calling over the past few days. The puppet masters—whoever or whatever had stolen her name and pasted it onto so many different faces—seemed to have given up on matchmaking across the spectrum. They'd settled on a single type by now: the kicked dogs, desperate for purpose, evidently blind to the fact that their own neediness far outweighed hers. That Sou-Hon woman, for instance.

Her visor beeped again. She muted it.

It was only a matter of time, she supposed, before the puppet masters figured out how to hack the visor the same way they'd hacked her watch. She was actually kind of surprised that they hadn't done so already.

Maybe they have.Maybe they can break in on me any time, but they took the hint when I smashed the watch. Maybe they just don't want to risk losing their last link.

I should toss the fucking thing anyway.

She didn't. The visor was her only connection to Maelstrom, now that her watch was gone. She really missed the back-door access those South-Bend kids had wired into that little gizmo. In contrast, the visor—off-the-shelf and completely legal—was hamstrung by all the usual curfews and access restrictions. Still. The only other way to find out about a late-breaking quarantine or a nest of tornadoes was to run into it.

Besides, the visor hid her eyes.

Only now it seemed to be fucking up. The tactical display, usually invisible but for the little maps and labels and retail logos it laid across her eyeballs, seemed to be shimmering somehow, a faint visual static like water in motion. Hints of outlines, of faces, of—

She squeezed her eyes tight in sheer frustration. Not that it ever helped: the vision persisted behind her lids, showing her—this time—the upper half of her mother's face, brow furrowed in concern. Mom's nose and mouth were covered by one of those filtermasks you wore whenever you visited the hospital, so the superbugs wouldn't get you. They were in a hospital now, Clarke could tell: she, and her mother, and—

Of course. Who else?

— dear old Dad, also masked; on him, it seemed to fit. And she could almost remember, this time, she almost knew what she was seeing—but there was no trace of guilt behind that mask, no sign of worry that this time it would all come out, the doctors would know, some telltale symptom shouting no, no accident this, no mere fall down the stairs …

No. The monster's loving facade was too perfect. It always was. She'd lost count of the times such images had raped her in the past months, how often she'd looked for some hint of the living hell she'd called childhood. All she'd ever seen was this vicious, mocking pretense of normalcy.

After a while, as always, the images shrank away and let the real world back in. By now she was almost used to it; she no longer shouted at apparitions, or reached out to touch things that didn't exist. Her breathing was under control. She knew that to all the world around her, nothing had happened; a visored woman in a food court had paused at her meal for a few moments. That was all. The only person who heard the blood pounding in her ears was Lenie Clarke.

But Lenie Clarke was nowhere near liking it yet.

A row of medbooths across the concourse advertised reasonable rates and path scans updated weekly! She'd avoided such temptations ever since the booth at Calgary had begged her to stay; but that had been a dozen lies ago. Now she abandoned her table and moved through the patchy crowd, navigating the widest spaces. People bumped into her anyway, here and there—somehow, it was getting harder to avoid contact. The crowd seemed to be thickening almost by the minute.

And far too many of them had capped eyes.

The medbooth was almost as spacious as her quarters at Beebe.

"Minor deficiencies in calcium and trace sulfur," it reported. "Elevated serotonin and adrenocorticoid hormones; elevated platelet and antibody counts consistent with moderate physical injury within the past three weeks. Not life-threatening."

Clarke rubbed her shoulder. By now it only ached when reminded to. Even the bruises on her face were fading.

"Anomalously high levels of cellular metabolites." Biomedical details flickered across the main display. "Depressed lactates. Your basal metabolic rate is unusually high. This isn't immediately dangerous, but over time it can increase wear on body parts and significantly reduce lifespan. RNA and serotonin syn—"

"Any diseases?" Clarke said, cutting to the chase.

"All pathogen counts are within safe ranges. Would you like me to run farther tests?"

"Yeah." She took the NMR helmet from its hook and fitted it over her head. "Brain scan."

"Are you experiencing specific symptoms?"

"I'm having—hallucinations," she said. "Vision only—not sound or smell or anything. Picture-in-picture, I can still see around the edges, but…"

The booth waited. When Clarke said nothing farther it began humming quietly to itself. A luminous three-d outline of a human brain began rotating on the screen, filling piecemeal with fragments of color.

"You have difficulty forming social bonds," the medbooth remarked.

"What? Why do you say that?"

"You have a chronic oxytocin deficiency. This is a treatable disorder, however. I can prescribe—"

"Forget it," Clarke said. Since when did personality become a "treatable disorder"?

"Your dopamine receptor sites are abnormally prolific. Do you, on average, use opioids or endorphin-amplifiers more than twice a week?"

"Look, forget that stuff. Just work on the hallucinations."

The booth fell silent. Clarke closed her eyes. All I need. Some bloody machine counting up my masochism molecules…

Beep.

Clarke opened her eyes. On the display, a dusting of violet stars had been sprinkled across the floor of the cerebral hemispheres. A tiny red dot pulsed somewhere near their center.

Anomaly flashed in one corner of the screen.

"What? What is it?"

"Processing. Please be patient."

The booth etched a line along the bottom of the display: VAC Area 19 , it said.

Another beep. Another flashing red pinpoint, farther forward.

Another line: Brodman Area 37 .

"What are those red spots?" Clarke said.

"Those parts of the brain are involved in vision," the booth told her. "May I lower the helmet visor to examine your eyes?"

"I'm wearing eyecaps."

"Corneal overlays will not interfere with the scan. May I proceed?"

"Okay."

The visor slid down. A grid of tiny bumps stippled its inner surface. The humming of the machine resonated deep in her skull. Clarke began counting to herself. She'd endured twenty-two seconds when the visor withdrew into its sheath.

Just under Brodman Area 37: Ret/Mac OK .

The humming stopped.

"You may remove the helmet," the booth advised. "What is your chronological age?"

"Thirty-two." She hung the helmet on its peg.

"Did your visual environment change substantially between eight and sixteen weeks ago?"

A year spent in the photoenhanced twilight of Channer Vent. A blind crawl along the floor of the Pacific. And then, suddenly, bright sky…

"Yes. Maybe."

"Does your family have a history of strokes or embolisms?"

"I–I don't know."

"Has anyone close to you died recently?"

"What?"

"Has anyone close to you died recently?"

Her jaw clenched. " Everyone close to me has died recently."