Kris Schnee - Everyone's Island

She couldn’t tell anyone, but it was a thrill to move through the water — to have it rippling over her through the dive skin she wore. It was one of the few times she felt like she had a body, like she wasn’t a hovering spirit that interfaced with an ugly, buggy viewpoint on the world, helpless against its limits. Here she could feel physical, real, even sexy.

Not that Garrett ever noticed, of course. With his up-close experience with a truck, then a wheelchair, then surgery, certainly he needed no reminder that he was only human. Or cyborg, though he didn’t like her calling him that. And having Alexis around made him think of Tess as just a kid.

Tess descended past Alexis with a dirty look, and Alexis followed her down to the jacks. Since Castor was exposed to ocean currents, they’d scattered spiky, chemically-treated concrete blocks on the seafloor to disrupt the flow and calm the waves a bit. There were so many details involved in such simple things! Tess wanted to understand it all. These practical things were way more interesting than school. Even if that meant hanging around with Alexis; Garrett insisted that nobody dive alone. Studying this stuff made Tess feel like there was a point to what she did, like it mattered whether she got the damn computer nodes working right.

After a while of poking at the jacks and checking the various cables and nets, she surfaced. That meant a slow drift, or in her case a yo-yo of overcorrections, to keep the gases in her lungs from killing her. Garrett had made her learn to use old plastic charts for calculating safe dive times and depths even though a computer could do it better.

“Having fun?” asked Alexis, surfacing too close to Tess. Alexis pulled off her goggles and fiddled with her hair.

Tess shrugged, thinking, Some of us are here to work, not to have fun glomming onto the boss! Aloud she said, “It’s all right.”

Alexis said, “Yeah, I know, he’s pushing us all too hard. Don’t take it personally though. We need to follow instructions and trust that he knows what he’s doing.”

“Is that what they taught you in pre-med classes? Follow instructions?” Tess was already looking forward to getting a shower, then some peace and quiet.

Alexis looked down into the water as they bobbed there. “No. That’s kind of why I quit.”

Curious now, Tess said, “Huh?”

“I was thinking, what if I make a mistake? What if I get sued, or somebody dies because I made the wrong decision? I couldn’t handle that stress. Nobody should have to deal with that. So I did plants instead.”

“What, do you not actually like plants?”

“Oh? I like them. I like working with them.” Alexis shook her head and grinned. “Never mind me. I want to work on something and not have to worry about distractions. How about you?”

Tess frowned; she didn’t want to do this pointless girl-talk. At least Alexis wasn’t one of her worthless classmates or teachers. “I want to make stuff.”

“Why?”

Tess thought, then said, “I don’t know. I’m tired. Let’s go back.”

Her room was a little fortress in South Tower: a set of thin walls carving out a space from the empty sea. So far they’d only built bedrooms, a bathroom, and a makeshift galley by their big freezer. Garrett tried to be optimistic, saying that the station’s plainness made it flexible. Standing outside her room, Tess saw some lights, the carved-out rooms, spare Chinese-style partitions, stairs, and little else. They could play dodgeball in here. Even inside, it felt like the gleam and whisper of the sea reached everywhere.

Tess showered, first with saltwater and then with a quick freshwater rinse. She padded back to her room, still feeling salt-tinged. Bleh. Every muscle ached and for a while she sprawled on her cot, face on the pillow. All day, every day, it seemed like there were sensors to check, plants to tend, fish to feed. As much as she was learning, there was still a lot of grunt work. There were no restaurants, either. Somehow she’d come here with the impression that teachers would be around to give her grades and bullies would whisper about her in the halls, so she could resent them both.

She lay there in bed, blinking. Did she actually miss being resentful? Kinda, in a stupid and perverse way; those other people had given her someone to push back against. Well, it was stupid. Here, she was being judged only for whether she could make herself useful with honest work. She’d hardly uttered a word of complaint so far, since coming here, and damned if she’d start.

Tess rolled out of bed, stretched, yawned, and felt nearly recovered. It was amazing what you could get used to. She could still get stuff done today.

Tess found Garrett in his office, which was in the deckhouse. The little bunker stood like a hut atop the main deck. She wore her shapeless jacket, already starting to feel sweaty and gross again from the humidity. Just as well. She was tempted sometimes to get a bikini like Alexis’ and see if she could get that look from him… but the thought made her shudder too. That just wasn’t her. She was the computer geek; that was all.

She had worthwhile reasons to come here and hang around the boss. “The sensors are back up.”

“Good.” Garrett hunched over, his big frame looking small and spooked.

“What’s wrong?”

“Got a message from my uncle. Words of encouragement.”

Tess leaned against the door, seeing how well the encouragement had worked. “Your uncle is weird.”

Garrett said, “He told me there was another reason he pushed me to do this, to come here. He’d been up in the sky, looking down on the Earth. You know those maps of the planet at night, lights in the blackness?” Tess nodded. “Haskell said” — Garrett’s voice took on an odd accent — “’In those days I saw the light of the world starting to dim’.”

Tess thought. “Creepy, but it doesn’t mean anything, does it? We’ve got more efficient lighting now, so the planet’s not a giant disco ball.”

There was an edge to Garrett’s voice. “I don’t know quite what he’s afraid of. I can’t name it. That bothers me.”

“Then what do we do about it?”

“That’s what Alexis said.”

Oh, so you told her first. “Getting more energy isn’t our department. We’ve barely got power for ourselves even with the pneumatic generators.”

He glanced at a computer screen. “Well, there is one specific problem to worry about besides our work. Been following the secession news?”

On the screen, a headline proclaimed, “3 Killed As Texas Independence Rally Clashes With Vigilantes”. To Tess that was just typical noise. She’d grown up hearing about assorted shootings, bombings, racially charged riots, and so on, leading to repeated calls for some US states to up and leave — and which ones, depended on who was in charge lately. She said, “Nothing’s coming of it. Same junk, different day.”

Garrett stared into his charts and notes as though he could find the future there. “It spooks me, but it’s not my business. I’m focused on Castor; I can’t change the world.”

Many parts of the platform and its farming operation still didn’t work right, but the scope of what did work was expanding. Today Garrett stood on the deck in a breeze that whipped at his jacket. The farm-squares were looking good. Staring down, he saw how they tiled a patch of ocean with their netting and the green, red and brown of the young seaweed. So far the green seemed best. A few days ago Tess had pulled up the latest satellite image. From overhead it all looked insignificant, but things were growing. They had more sensor data now than any pre-21st-century farmer could’ve dreamed of.