Peter Watts - Starfish

"It's one of those smart gels," Ray said at last.

"Smart gels?"

"Head cheese. Cultured brain cells on a slab. The same things they've been plugging into the Net to firewall infections."

"I know what they are, Ray. I just can't fucking believe it."

"Well, believe it. They'll be coming for you too, give 'em enough time."

"Yeah. Probably." Joel let it sink in. "I wonder when."

Ray shrugged. "You've got some breathing space. All that unpredictable volcanic shit, things blowing up under you. Nastier than flying a hoover. Harder to replace you."

He looked back at the lifter, and the 'scaphe nestled into its underbelly.

"Won't take long, though."

Joel fished a derm out of his pocket; a tricyclic with a mild lithium chaser. He held it out without a word.

Ray just spat. "Thanks anyway. I want to feel pissed for a while, you know?"

And now, eight days later, Ray Stericker was gone.

He'd disappeared after his last shift, just the day before. Joel had tried to track him down, drag him out, piss him up, but he hadn't been able to find the man on site and Ray wasn't answering his watch. So here was Joel Kita, back on the job, alone except for his cargo; four very strange people in black suits, blank white lenses covering their eyes. They all had identical GA logos stamped onto their shoulders, tags with their surnames printed just below. At least the surnames were different, although the difference seemed trivial; male, female, large or small, they all seemed minor variants of the same make and model. Ah yes, the Mk-5 was always such a nice boy. Kind of quiet, kept to himself. Who would've thought…

Joel had seen rifters before. He'd ferried a couple out to Beebe about a month ago, just after construction had ended. One of them had seemed almost normal, had gone out of her way to chat and joke around as if trying to compensate for the fact that she looked like a zombie. Joel had forgotten her name.

The other one hadn't said a word.

One of the 'scaphe's tactical screens beeped a progress report. "Bottom's rising again," Joel called back. "Thirty five hundred. We're almost there."

"Thanks," one of them — Fischer , according to his shoulder tag — said. Everyone else just sat there.

A pressure hatch separated the 'scaphe's cockpit from the passenger compartment. If you sealed it you could use the aft chamber as an airlock, or even pressurize it for saturation dives if you didn't mind the hassle of decompression. You could also just swing the hatch shut if you wanted a bit of privacy, if you didn't like leaving your back exposed to certain passengers. That would be bad manners, of course. Joel tried idly to think of some socially acceptable excuse for slamming that big metal disk in their faces, but gave up after a few moments.

Now, the dorsal hatch — the one leading up into the lifter's cockpit — that one was closed, and that felt wrong. Usually they kept it open until just before the drop. Ray and Joel would shoot the shit for however long the trip would take — three hours, if you were going to Channer.

Yesterday, without warning, Ray Stericker had dropped the hatch shut fifteen minutes into the flight. He hadn't said an unnecessary word the whole time, had barely even used the intercom. And today — well, today there wasn't anyone up there to talk to any more.

Joel looked out one of the side ports. The skin of the lifter blocked his view just a few centimeters on the other side; metal fabric stretched across carbon-fiber ribs, a gray expanse sucked into concave squares by the hard vacuum inside. The 'scaphe rode tucked into an oval hollow in the lifter's center. The only port that showed anything but gray skin was the one between Joel's feet; ocean, a long way down.

Not so far down now, though. He could hear the hisses and sighs of the lifter's ballast bags deflating overhead. Sharper sounds, more distant, cracked through the hull as electrical arcs heated the air in a couple of trim bags. This was still regular autopilot territory, but Ray used to do it all himself anyway. If it weren't for the closed hatch, Joel couldn't have told the difference.

The head cheese was doing a bang-up job.

He'd actually seen it a few days ago, during a delivery to an undersea rig just out of Gray's Harbor. Ray had hit a stud and the top of the box had slid away like white mercury, slipping back into a little groove at the edge of the casing and revealing a transparent panel underneath.

Beneath that panel, packed in clear fluid, was a ridged layer of goo, a bit too gray to be mozzarella. Dashes of brownish glass perforated the goo in neat parallel rows.

"I'm not supposed to open it up like this," Ray had said. "But fuck 'em. It's not as though the blighter's photosensitive."

"So what are those little brown bits?"

"Indium tin oxide over glass. Semiconductor."

"Jesus. And it's working right now?"

"Even as we speak."

"Jesus," Joel had said again. And then: "I wonder how you program something like this."

Ray had snorted at that. "You don't. You teach it. Learns through positive reinforcement, like a bloody baby."

A sudden, smooth shift in momentum. Joel pulled back to the present; the lifter was hanging stable, five meters over the waves. Right on target. Nothing but empty ocean on the surface, of course; Beebe's transponder was thirty meters straight down. Shallow enough to home in on, too deep to be a navigational hazard. Or to serve as a midwater hitching post for charter boats hunting Channer's legendary sea monsters.

The cheese printed out a word on the 'scaphe's tactical board: Launch?

Joel's finger wavered over the OK key, then came down. Docking latches clanked open; the lifter reeled Joel Kita and his cargo down to the water. Sunlight squinted through viewports for a few seconds as the 'scaphe swung in its harness. A wavetop batted at the forward port.

The world jerked once, slewed sideways, and turned green.

Joel opened the ballast tanks and looked back over his shoulder. "Going down, folks. Your last glimpse of sunlight. Enjoy it while you can."

"Thanks," said Fischer .

Nobody else moved.

Pre-adapted .

Even now, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, Fischer doesn't know what Scanlon meant by that.

He doesn't feel pre-adapted, not if that means he's supposed to be at home here. Nobody even talked to him on the way down. Nobody talked much to anyone else, either, but when they didn't talk to Fisher it seemed especially personal. And one of them, Brander— it's hard to tell with the eyecaps and all, but Fischer thinks Brander keeps looking at him, like they know each other from somewhere. Brander looks mean.

Everything's out in the open down here; pipes and cable bundles and ventilation ducts are all tacked onto the bulkheads in plain sight. He saw it on the vids before he came down, but those somehow left the impression of a brighter place, full of light and mirrors. The wall he's facing now, for instance; there should be a mirror there. But it's just a gray metal bulkhead with a greasy, unfinished sheen to it.

Fischer shifts his weight from one foot to the other. At one end of the lounge Lubin leans against a library pedestal, his capped eyes pointed at them with blank disinterest. Lubin's said only one thing to them in the five minutes they've been here:

"Clarke's still outside. She's coming in."

Something clanks under the floor. Water and nitrox mix, gurgling, nearby. The sound of a hatch swinging open, movement from below.

She climbs up into the lounge, droplets beading across her shoulders. Her diveskin paints her black below the neck, a skinny silhouette, almost sexless. Her hood is undone; blond hair, plastered against her skull, frames a face paler than Fischer's ever seen. Her mouth is a wide thin line. Her eyes, capped like his own, are blank white ovals in a child's face.