Peter Watts - Starfish

"I need you," she buzzes, very quietly.

"No," he says. "You need Karl Acton."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You need what he did to you."

All the warmth goes out of her then. What's left is a slow, freezing boil.

"What is this, Karl? Some grand insight you got while spirit-walking around in the mud? You think you know me better than I do?"

"You know—"

"Because you don't, you know. You don't know shit about me, you never did. And you don't really have the balls to find out, so you run off into the dark and come back spouting all this pretentious bullshit." She's goading him, she knows she's goading him but he's just not reacting. Even one of his outbursts would be better than this.

"It's saved under Shadow," he says.

She stares at him without speaking.

"The file," he adds.

" What's wrong with you? " She's beating at him now, pounding as hard as she can but he's not hitting back, he's not even defending himself for Chrissakes why don't you fight back asshole why don't you just get it over with, just beat the shit out of me until the guilt covers us both and we'll promise never to do it again and—

But even anger deserts her now. The inertia of her attack pushes them away from each other. She catches herself on an anchor cable. A starfish, wrapped around the line, reaches blindly out to touch her with the tip of one arm.

Acton continues to drift.

"Stay," she says.

He brakes and holds position without answering, dim and gray and distant.

There are so many things denied her out here. She can't cry. She can't even close her eyes. So she stares at the sea bed, watches her own shadow stretch off into the darkness. "Why are you doing this?" she asks, exhausted, and wonders who she meant the question for.

His shadow flows across her own. A mechanical voice answers:

"This is what you do when you really love someone."

She jerks her head up in time to see him disappear.

Beebe's quiet when she returns. The wet slap of her feet on the deck is the only sound. She climbs into the lounge and finds it empty. She takes a step towards the corridor that leads to her cubby.

Stops.

In Comm, a luminous icon inches towards the Throat. The display lies for effect; in reality Acton is dark and unreflective, no more luminous than she is.

She wonders again if she should try and stop him. She could never overpower him by force, but perhaps she just hasn't thought of the right thing to say. Perhaps if she just gets it right she can call him back, compel his return through words alone. Not a victim any more, he said once. Perhaps she's a siren instead.

She can't think of anything to say.

He's almost there now. She can see him gliding between great bronze pillars, bacterial nebulae swirling in his wake. She imagines his face aimed down, scanning, relentless, hungry. She can see him homing in on the north end of Main Street.

She shuts off the display.

She doesn't have to watch this. She knows what's going on, and the machines will tell her when it's over. She couldn't stop them if she tried, not unless she smashed them into junk. That, in fact, is exactly what she wants to do. But she controls herself. Quiet as stone, Lenie Clarke sits in the command cubby staring at a blank screen, waiting for the alarm.

He dreamed of water.

He always dreamed of water. He dreamed the smell of dead fish in rotten nets, and rainbow puddles of gasoline shimmering off the Steveston jetty, and a home so close to the shoreline you could barely get insurance. He dreamed of a time when waterfront meant something, even the muddy brown stretch where the Fraser hemorrhaged into the Strait of Georgia. His mother was standing over him, beaming a vital ecological resource, Yves. A staging ground for migrating birds. A filter for the whole world. And little Yves Scanlon smiled back, proud that he alone of all his friends— well, not friends exactly, but maybe they would be now — would grow up appreciating nature first-hand, right here in his new back yard. One and a half meters above the high-tide line.

And then, as usual, the real world kicked in the doors and electrocuted his mother in mid-smile.

Sometimes he could postpone the inevitable. Sometimes he could fight the jolt from his bedside dreamer, keep it from dragging him back for just a few more seconds. Thirty years of random images would flash across his mind in those moments; falling forests, bloating deserts, ultraviolet fingers reaching ever deeper into barren seas. Oceans creeping up shorelines. Vital ecological resources turning into squatting camps for refugees. Squatting camps turning into intertidal zones.

And Yves Scanlon was awake again, sweat-soaked, teeth clenched, jump-started.

God, no. I'm back .

The real world.

Three and a half hours. Only three and a half hours…

It was all the dreamer would allow him. Sleep stages one through four got ten minutes each. REM got thirty, in deference to the incompressibility of the dream state. A seventy-minute cycle, run three times nightly.

You could freelance. Everyone else does.

Freelancers chose their own hours. Employees— those few that remained— got their hours chosen for them. Yves Scanlon was an employee. He frequently reminded himself of the advantages: you didn't have to fight and scramble for a new contract every six months. You had stability, of a sort. If you performed. If you kept on performing. Which meant, of course, that Yves Scanlon couldn't afford the nightly nine-and-a-half-hours that was optimal for his species.

Servitude for security, then. No day passed when he didn't hate the choice he'd made. Some day, perhaps, he'd even hate it more than he feared the alternative.

"Seventeen items on high priority," said the workstation as his feet hit the floor. "Four broadcast, twelve net, one phone. Broadcast and phone items are clean. Net items were disinfected on entry, with a forty percent chance that encrypted bugs slipped through."

"Up the disinfectant," Scanlon said.

"That will destroy any encrypted bugs, but might also destroy up to five percent of the legitimate data. I could just dump the risky files."

"Disinfect them. What's on midlist?"

"Eight hundred and sixty three items. Three hundred twenty seven broad—"

"Dump it all." Scanlon headed for the bathroom, stopped. "Wait a minute. Play the phone call."

"This is Patricia Rowan," the station said in a cold, clipped voice. "We may be encountering some personnel problems with the deep-sea geothermal program. I'd like to discuss them with you. I'll have your return call routed direct."

Shit. Rowan was one of the top corpses on the west coast. She'd barely even acknowledged him since he'd been hired on at the GA. "Is there a priority on that call?" Scanlon asked.

"Important but not urgent," the workstation replied

He could have breakfast first, maybe go through his mail. He could ignore all those reflexes urging him to drop everything and jump like a trained seal to immediate attention. They needed him for something. About time. About goddamned time.

"I'm taking a shower," he told the workstation, hesitantly defiant. "Don't bother me until I come out."

His reflexes, though, didn't like it at all.

"— that 'curing' victims of multiple personality disorder is actually tantamount to serial murder. The issue has remained controversial in the wake of recent findings that the human brain can potentially contain up to one hundred forty fully-sentient personalities without significant sensory/motor impairment. The tribunal will also consider whether encouraging a multiple personality to reintegrate voluntarily — again, a traditionally therapeutic act — should be redefined as assisted suicide. Crosslinked to next item under cognition and legal."