Starfish

Relax. She's only trying to psyche you out. The usual stupid dominance games.

But he knows it's more than that. Deep down, the rifters just don't like him.

I know what they are. That's why.

Take a dozen children, any children. Beat and mix thoroughly until some lumps remain. Simmer for two to three decades; bring to a slow, rolling boil. Skim off the full-blown psychotics, the schizoaffectives, the multiple personalities, and discard. (There were doubts about Fischer, actually; but then, who doesn't have an imaginary friend at some point?)

Let cool. Serve with dopamine garnish.

What do you get? Something bent, not broken. Something that fits into cracks too twisted for the rest of us.

Vampires.

"Well," Scanlon says into the silence. "Everything checks out. Can't wait to try it on." Without waiting for a reply — without exposing himself to the lack of one — he climbs upstairs. At the edge of his vision, Clarke and Caraco exchange looks. Scanlon glances back, rigorously casual, but any smiles have disappeared by the time he scans their faces.

Go ahead, ladies. Indulge yourselves while you can. The lounge is empty. Scanlon passes through it and into the corridor. You've got maybe five years before you're obsolete. His cubby — Acton's cubby — is third on the left. Five years before all this can run itself without your help. He opens the hatch; brilliant light spills out, blinding him for a moment while his eyecaps compensate. Scanlon steps inside, swings the hatch shut. Sags against it.

Shit. No locks.

After a while he lies back on his bunk, stares up at a congested ceiling.

Maybe we should have waited after all. Not let them rush us. If we'd just taken the time to do it right from the start…

But they hadn't had the time. Total automation at start-up would have delayed the whole program longer than civilized appetites were willing to wait. And the vampires were already there, after all. They'd be so much use in the short run, and then they'd be sent home, and they'd be glad to leave this place. Who wouldn't be?

The possibility of addiction never even came up.

It seems insane on the face of it. How could anyone get addicted to a place like this? What kind of paranoia has seized the GA, that they'd worry about people refusing to leave? But Yves Scanlon is no mere layperson, he's not fooled by the merely apparent. He's beyond anthropomorphism. He's looked into all those undead eyes, up there in his world, down here in theirs, and he knows: vampires live by different rules.

Maybe they are too happy here. It's one of two questions Yves Scanlon has set out to answer. Hopefully they won't figure that out while he's still down here. They dislike him enough as it is.

It's not their fault, of course. It's just the way they're programmed. They can't help hating him, any more than he can help the reverse.

* * *

Preshmesh is better than surgery. That's about the most he can say for it.

The pressure jams all those tiny interlocking plates together, and they don't seem to stop clenching until they're a micron away from grinding his body to pulp. There's a stiffness in the joints. It's perfectly safe, of course. Perfectly. And Scanlon can breathe unpressurised air when he goes outside, and nobody's had to carve out half his chest in the meantime.

He's been out now for about fifteen minutes. Beebe's just a few meters away. Clarke and Brander escort him on his maiden voyage, keeping their distance. Scanlon kicks, rises clumsily from the bottom; the mesh lets him swim like a man with splinted limbs. Vampires skim the edge of his vision like effortless shadows.

His helmet seems like the center of the universe. Wherever he looks, an infinite weight of black ocean presses in against the acrylic. A tiny flaw down by the neck seal catches his eye; he stares, horrified, as a hairline crack grows across his field of vision.

"Help! Get me in!" He kicks furiously towards Beebe.

Nobody answers.

"My helmet! My hel — " The crack isn't just growing now: it's squirming, twitching laterally across the corner of the helmet bubble like — like —

Yellow featureless eyes staring in from the ocean. A black hand, silhouetted in Beebe's halo, reaching for his face —

"Ahhh — "

A thumb grinds down on the crack in Scanlon's helmet. The crack smears, bursts; fine gory filaments smudge against the acrylic. The back half of the hairline peels off and writhes loose into the water, coiling, uncoiling —