Starfish

Something charges them from overhead; the dull wet sound of its impact reverberates briefly through the hull. Joel looks up through the dorsal port but sees nothing. Several more impacts, staggered. The 'scaphe whirs implacably onward.

"There."

It looks almost like a lifeboat canister, three meters long. Readouts twinkle from a panel on one rounded end. It's resting on a carpet of giant tubeworms, their feathery crowns extended in full filter-feeding mode. Joel thinks of the baby Moses, nestled in a clump of mutant bulrushes.

"Wait a second," Jarvis says. "Kill the lights first."

"What for?"

"You don't need them, do you?"

"Well, no. I can use instruments if I have to. But why —»

"Just do it, okay?" Jarvis, the chatterbox, is suddenly all business.

Darkness floods the cockpit, retreats a bit before the glow of the readouts. Joel grabs a pair of eyephones off a hook to his left. The sea floor reappears before him courtesy of the ventral photoamps, faded to blue and black.

He coaxes the 'scaphe into position directly above the canister, listens to the clank and creak of grapples flexing beneath the deck; metal claws the color of slate extend across his field of view.

"Spray it before you pick it up," Jarvis says.

Joel reaches out and taps the control codes without looking. The 'phones show him a nozzle extending from Jarvis's tank, taking aim like a skinny cobra.

"Do it."

The nozzle ejaculates gray-blue murk, sprays back and forth along the length of the canister, sweeping the benthos on either side. The tubeworms yank back into their tunnels and shut the doors; the whole featherduster forest vanishes in an instant, leaving a crowd of sealed leathery tubes.

The nozzle spews its venom.

One of the tubes opens, almost hesitantly. Something dark and stringy drifts out, twitching. The gray plume sweeps across it; it sags, lifeless, across the sill of its burrow. Other tubes are opening now. Invertebrate corpses slump back into sight.

"What's in this stuff?" Joel whispers.

"Cyanide. Rotenone. Some other things. Sort of a cocktail."

The nozzle sputters for a few seconds and runs dry. Automatically, Joel retracts it.

"Okay," Jarvis says. "Let's grab it and go home."

Joel doesn't move.

"Hey," Jarvis says.

Joel shakes his head, plays the machinery. The 'scaphe extends its arms in a metal hug, pulls the canister off the bottom. Joel strips the 'phones from his eyes and taps the controls. They begin rising.

"That was a pretty thorough rinse," Joel remarks after a while.

"Yes. Well, the sample's costing us a fair bit. Don't want to contaminate it."

"I see."

"You can turn the lights back on," Jarvis says. "How long before we break the surface?"

Joel trips the floods. "Twenty minutes. Half hour."

"I hope the lifter pilot doesn't get too bored." Jarvis is all chummy again.

"There is no pilot. It's a smart gel."

"Really? You don't say." Jarvis frowns. "Those are scary things, those gels. You know one suffocated a bunch of people in London a while back?"

Yes, Joel's about to say, but Jarvis is back in spew mode. "No shit. It was running the subway system over there, perfect operational record, and then one day it just forgets to crank up the ventilators when it's supposed to. Train slides into station fifteen meters underground, everybody gets out, no air, boom."

Joel's heard this before. The punchline's got something to do with a broken clock, if he remembers it right.

"These things teach themselves from experience, right?" Jarvis continues. "So everyone just assumed it had learned to cue the ventilators on something obvious. Body heat, motion, CO₂ levels, you know. Turns out instead it was watching a clock on the wall. Train arrival correlated with a predictable subset of patterns on the digital display, so it started the fans whenever it saw one of those patterns."

"Yeah. That's right." Joel shakes his head. "And vandals had smashed the clock, or something."

"Hey. You did hear about it."

"Jarvis, that story's ten years old if it's a day. That was way back when they were starting out with these things. Those gels have been debugged from the molecules up since then."

"Yeah? What makes you so sure?"

"Because a gel's been running the lifter for the better part of a year now, and it's had plenty of opportunity to fuck up. It hasn't."

"So you like these things?"

"Fuck no," Joel says, thinking about Ray Stericker. Thinking about himself. "I'd like 'em a lot better if they did screw up sometimes, you know?"

"Well, I don't like 'em or trust 'em. You've got to wonder what they're up to."

Joel nods, distracted by Jarvis' digression. But then his mind returns to dead tube worms, and undeclared no-dive zones, and an anonymous canister drenched with enough poison to kill a fucking city.

I've got to wonder what all of us are.

Ghosts

It's hideous.