Peter Watts - Starfish

As a general rule.

"That's why I stopped going up with her, did you know that?" Nakata shakes her head, remembering. "We ran into something alive, up midwater. It was horrible. Some kind of jellyfish, I think. It pulsed , and it had these thin watery tentacles that stretched out of sight, just hanging there in the water. And it had all these— these stomachs. Like fat squirming slugs. And each one had its own mouth, and they were all opening and closing…"

Clarke screws up her face. "Sounds lovely."

"I didn't even see it. It was quite translucent, and I was not looking and I bumped into it and it started ejecting pieces of itself. The main body just went completely dark and pulled into itself and pulsed away and all these shed stomachs and mouths and tentacles were left behind, they were all glowing and writhing as though they were in pain…"

"I think I'd stop going up there too, after that."

"The strange thing was, I envied it in a way." Nakata's eyes brim, spill over, but her voice doesn't change. "It must be nice to just be able to— to cut yourself off from the parts that give you away."

Clarke smiles, imagining. "Yes." She realizes, suddenly, that only a few centimeters separate her from Alice Nakata. They're almost touching.

How long have I been sitting here? she wonders. She shifts on the pallet, pulls away out of habit.

"Judy didn't see it that way," Nakata's saying. "She felt sorry for the pieces . I think she was almost angry with the main body, do you believe it? She said it was this blind stupid blob, she said— what did she say— 'fucking typical bureaucracy, first sign of trouble it sacrifices the very parts that keep it fed. That's what she said."

Clarke smiles. "That sounds like Judy."

"She never takes shit from anyone," Nakata says. "She always fights back. I like that about her, I could never do that. When things get bad I just…" She glances at the little black device stuck on the wall beside her pillow. "I dream."

Clarke nods and says nothing. She can't remember Alice Nakata ever being so talkative. "It's so much better than VR, you have much more control. In VR you are stuck with someone else's dreams."

"So I hear."

"You have never tried it?" Nakata asks.

"Lucid dreaming? A couple of times. I never got into it."

"No?"

Clarke shrugs. "My dreams don't have much… detail." Or too much, sometimes . She nods at Nakata's machine. "Those things wake me up just enough to notice how vague everything is. Or sometimes, when there is any detail it's something really stupid. Worms crawling through your skin or something."

"But you can control that. That is the whole point. You can change it."

In your dreams, maybe. "But you have to see it first. Just sort of spoiled the effect for me, I guess. And mostly there were those big, vague gaps."

"Ah." A flicker of a smile. "For myself that is not a problem. The world is pretty vague to me even when I am awake."

"Well." Clarke smiles back, tentatively. "Whatever works."

More silence.

"I just wish I knew ," Nakata says finally.

"I know."

"You knew what happened to Karl. It was bad, but you knew ."

"Yes."

Nakata glances down. Clarke follows, notices that her own hands have somehow clasped around Nakata's. She supposes it's a gesture of support. It feels okay. She squeezes, gently.

Nakata looks back up. Her dark naked eyes still startle, somehow.

"Lenie, she did not mind me. I pulled away, and I dreamed, and sometimes I just went crazy and she put up with all of it. She understoo— she under stands ."

"We're rifters, Alice." Clarke hesitates, decides to risk it. "We all understand."

"Except Ken."

"You know, I think maybe Ken understands more than we give him credit for. I don't think he meant to be insensitive before. He's on our side."

"He is very strange. He is not here for the same reason we are."

"And what reason is that?" Clarke asks.

"They put us here because this is where we belong," Nakata says, almost whispering. "With Ken, I think—they just didn't dare put him anywhere else ."

Brander's on his way downstairs when she gets back to the lounge. "How's Alice?"

"Dreaming," Clarke says. "She's okay."

"None of us are okay," Brander says. "Borrowed time all around, you ask me."

She grunts. "Where's Ken?"

"He left. He's never coming back."

"What?"

"He went over. Like Fischer."

"Bullshit. Ken's not like Fischer. He's the farthest thing from Fischer."

"We know that." Brander jerks a thumb at the ceiling. " They don't. He went over. That's the story he wants us to sell upstairs, anyway."

"Why?"

"You think that motherfucker told me ? I agreed to play along for now, but I don't mind telling you I'm getting a bit tired of his bullshit." Brander climbs down a rung, looks back. "I'm heading back out myself. Gonna check out the carousel. I think some serious observations are in order."

"Want some company?"

Brander shrugs. "Sure."

"Actually," Clarke remarks, "just company doesn't cut it any more, does it? Maybe we'd better be, what's the word—"

"Allies," Brander says.

She nods. "Allies."

For a week now, Yves Scanlon's world had measured five meters by eight. In all that time he had not seen another living soul.

There were plenty of ghosts, though. Faces passed across his workstation, full of cheerful concern about his comfort, his diet, whether the latest gastrointestinal tap had made him uncomfortable. There were poltergeists, too. Sometimes they possessed the medical teleoperator that hung from the ceiling, made it dance and stab and steal slivers of flesh from Scanlon's body. They spoke with many voices, but rarely said anything of substance.

"It's probably nothing, Dr. Scanlon," the teleop said once, a talking exoskeleton. "Just a preliminary report from Rand/Washington, some new pathogen on the rift… probably benign…"

Or, in a pleasant female voice: "You're obviously in exc— good health, I'm sure there's nothing to worry about. Still, you know how careful we have to be these days, even acne would mutate into a plague if we let it, heh heh heh— now we just another two c.c.'s…"

After a few days Scanlon had stopped asking.

Whatever it was, he knew it had to be serious. The world was full of nasty microbes, new ones spawned by accident, old ones set free from dark corners of the world, common ones mutated into novel shapes. Scanlon had been quarantined before a couple of times. Most people had. It usually involved technicians in body condoms, nurses trained to maintain spirits with a well-timed joke. He'd never heard of everything being done by remote control before.

Maybe it was a security issue. Maybe the GA didn't want the news leaking out, so they'd minimized the personnel involved. Or maybe— maybe the potential danger was so great that they didn't want to risk live techs.

Every day Scanlon discovered some new symptom. Shortness of breath. Headaches. Nausea. He was astute enough to wonder if any of them were real.

It occurred to him, with increasing frequency, that he might not get out of there alive.

Something resembling Patricia Rowan haunted his screen every now and then, asking questions about vampires. Not even a ghost, really. A simulation, masquerading as flesh and blood. Its machinery showed through in subtle repetitions, derivative conversational loops, a fixation on keyword over concept. Who was in charge down there, it wanted to know. Did Clarke carry more weight than Lubin? Did Brander carry more weight than Clarke? As if anyone could glean the essence of those twisted, fantastic creatures with a few inept questions. How many years had it taken Scanlon to achieve his level of expertise?