Starfish

"I feel a conspiracy theory coming on," Brander remarks. "So go on, Karl. Why's the GA going out of its way to make us bump our heads all the time? They breeding us for short height, maybe? So we'll eat less?"

Lenie Clarke feels Acton tensing; it's like a small shockwave pushed out by his clenching muscles, a pulse of tension that ripples through the air and breaks against her 'skin. She rests one calming hand casually on his thigh, under the table. It's a calculated risk, of course. It would piss him off even more if Acton thought he was being patronized.

This time he relaxes a little. "I think they're trying to keep us off balance. I think they deliberately designed Beebe to stress us out."

"Why?" Caraco again, tense but civil.

"Because it gives them an advantage. The more time we spend being on edge, the less time we have to think about what we could do to them if we really wanted to."

"And what's that?"

"Use your head, Judy. We could black out the grid from the Charlottes down to Portland."

"They'd just switch feeds," Brander says. "There are other deep stations."

"Yeah. And they're all staffed by people just like us." Acton slaps the table with one hand. "Come on, you guys. They don't want us down here. They hate us, we're sickos that beat up our wives and eat our babies for breakfast. If it weren't for the fact that anyone else would flip out down here —»

Clarke shakes her head. "But they could get us out of the loop completely if they wanted. Just automate everything."

"Hallelujah." Acton brings his hands together in sarcastic applause. "The woman's got it at last."

Brander leans back in his chair. "Give it a rest, Acton. Haven't you ever worked for the GA before? You ever work for any sort of bureaucracy?"

Acton's gaze swivels, locks on to the other man. "What's your point?"

Brander looks back with a hint of a sneer on his face. "My point, Karl, is that you're reading way too much into this. So they made the ceilings too low. So their interior decorator's not worth shit. So what else is new? The GA just isn't that scared of you." He takes in Beebe with a wave of his arm. "This isn't some subtle psychological war. Beebe was just designed by incompetent bozos." Brander stands up, takes his plate to the galley. "If you don't like the headroom, stay outside."

Acton looks at Lenie Clarke, his face utterly devoid of expression. "Oh, I'd like to. Believe me."

* * *

He's hunched over the library terminal, 'phones on his ears, 'phones on his eyes, the flatscreen blanked as usual to hide his litsearch from view. As if anything in the database could really be personal. As if the GA would ever ration out any fact worth hiding.

She's learned not to bother him when he's like this. He's hunting in there, he resents any distraction as though the files he's after might somehow escape if he looks the other way. She doesn't touch him. She doesn't run a gentle finger along his arm or try to work the knots from his shoulders. Not any more. There are some mistakes that Lenie Clarke can learn from.

He's actually helpless in a strange way; cut off from the rest of Beebe, deaf and blind to the presence of people who are by no means friends. Brander could come up behind him right now and plant a knife in his back. And yet everyone leaves him alone. It's as though his sensory exile, this self-imposed vulnerability is some sort of brazen dare that no one has the guts to take him up on. So Acton sits at the keyboard — tapping at first, now stabbing — in his own private datasphere, and his deaf blind presence somehow dominates the lounge out of all proportion to his physical size.

"FUCK!"

He tears the 'phones from his face and slams his fist down on the console. Nothing even cracks. He glares around the lounge, white eyes blazing, and settles on Nakata over in the galley. Lenie Clarke, wisely, has avoided eye contact.

"This database is fucking ancient! They stick us down this fucking black anus for months at a time and they don't even give us a link to the net!"

Nakata spreads her hands. "The net's infected," she says, nervously. "They send us scrubbed downloads every month or s —»

"I fucking know that." Acton's voice is suddenly, ominously calm. Nakata takes the hint and falls silent.

He stands up. The whole room seems to shrink down around him. "I've got to get out of here," he says at last. He takes a step towards the ladder, glances at Clarke. "Coming?"

She shakes her head.

"Suit yourself."

* * *

Caraco, maybe. She's made overtures in the past.

Not that Clarke ever took them. But things are changing. There aren't just two Karl Actons any more. There used to be; all of her partners have been twosomes, in fact. There's always been a host, some magnetic chassis whose face and name never mattered because it would change without warning. And providing continuity, riding along behind each twinkling pair of eyes, there's always been the thing inside, and it never changes. Nor, to be honest, would Lenie Clarke know what to do if it did.