Rifters 1 - Starfish Read online

  Kevin's clothes were filthy. Caked mud clung to his pants. Fischer reached over and began picking it off. "We should get you out of these clothes. Get you cleaned up. We can only take showers on even days here, but you could always take a sponge bath..."

  Kevin just sat there. One hand gripped his drink, bony fingers denting the plastic; the other rested motionless on the couch.

  Fischer smiled. "It's okay. This is what you do when you really—"

  Kevin stared at the floor, trembling.

  Fischer found a zipper, pulled. Pressed, gently. "It's okay. It's okay. Don't worry."

  Kevin stopped shaking. Kevin looked up.

  Kevin smiled.

  "I'm not the one who should be worried here, asshole," he said in his whistling child's voice.

  The jolt threw Fischer to the floor. Suddenly he was staring at the ceiling, fingers twitching at the ends of arms that had turned, magically, into dead weights. His whole nervous system sang like a tracery of high-tension wires embedded in flesh.

  His bladder let go. Wet warmth spread out from his crotch.

  Kevin stepped over him and looked down, all trace of awkwardness gone from his movements. One hand still held the plastic cup. The other held a shockprod.

  Very deliberately, Kevin upended his drink. Fischer watched the liquid snake down, almost casually, and splash across his face. His eyes stung; Kevin was a spindly blur in a wash of weak acid. Fischer tried to blink, tried again, finally succeeded.

  One of Kevin's legs was swinging back at the knee.

  "Gerald Fischer, you are under arrest—"

  It swung forward. Pain erupted in Fischer's side.

  "—for indecent assault of a minor—"

  Back. Forward. Pain.

  "—under sections 151 and 152 of the N'Am Pacific Criminal Code."

  The child knelt down and glared into his face. Up close the telltales were obvious; the depth of the eyes, the size of the pores in the skin, the plastic resilience of adult flesh soaked in androgen suppressants.

  "Not to mention violation of yet another restraining order," Kevin added.

  How long, Fischer wondered absently. Neural aftershock draped the whole world in gauze. How many months did it take to stunt back down from man to child?

  "You have the right to— ah, fuck."

  And how long to reverse the reversal? Could Kevin ever grow up again?

  "You know your fucking rights better than I do."

  This wasn't happening. The police wouldn't go this far, they didn't have the money, and anyway, why? How could anyone be willing to change themselves like that? Just to get Gerry Fischer? Why?

  "I suppose I should call you in, shouldn't I? Then again, maybe I'll just let you lie here in your own piss for a while..."

  Somehow, he got the feeling that Kevin was hurting more than he was. It didn't make sense.

  It's okay, Shadow told him softly. It's not your fault. They just don't understand.

  Kevin was kicking him again, but Fischer could hardly feel it. He tried to say something, anything, that would make his tormentor feel a little better, but his motor nerves were still fried.

  He could still cry, though. Different wiring.

  * * *

  It was different this time. It started out the same, the scans and the samples and the beatings, but then they took him out of the line and cleaned him up, and put him in a side room. Two guards sat him down at a table, across from a dumpy little man with brown moles all over his face.

  "Hello, Gerry," he said, pretending not to notice Fischer's injuries. "I'm Dr. Scanlon."

  "You're a shrink."

  "Actually, I'm more of a mechanic." He smiled, a prissy little smile that said I've just been very clever but you're probably too stupid to get the joke. Fischer decided he didn't like Scanlon much.

  Still, his type had been useful before, with all their talk about competence and criminal responsibility. It's not so much what you did, Fischer had learned, as why you did it. If you did things because you were evil, you were in real trouble. If you did the same things because you were sick, though, the doctors would sometimes cover for you. Fischer had learned to be sick.

  Scanlon pulled a headband out of his breast pocket. "I'd like to talk to you for a little while, Gerry. Would you mind putting this on for me?"

  The inside of the band was studded with sensor pads. It felt cool across his forehead. Fischer looked around the room, but he couldn't see any monitors or readouts.

  "Great." Scanlon nodded to the guards. He waited until they'd left before he spoke again.

  "You're a strange one, Gerry Fischer. We don't run into too many like you."

  "That's not what the other doctors said."

  "Oh? What did they say?"

  "They said I was typical. They said, they said lots of the one-fifty-one's used the same rationale."

  Scanlon leaned forward. "Well you know, that's true. It's a classic line: 'I was teaching her about her awakening sexuality, doctor.' 'It's the parents' job to instruct their children, doctor.' 'They don't like school either, but it's for their own good.'"

  "I never said those things. I don't even have kids."

  "No you don't. But the point is, pedophiles often claim to be acting in the best interests of the children. They turn sexual abuse into an act of altruism, if you will."

  "It's not abuse. It's what you do if you really love someone."

  Scanlon leaned back in his chair and studied Fischer for a few moments.

  "That's what's so interesting about you, Gerry."

  "What?"

  "Everyone uses that line. You're the only person I've met who might actually believe it."

  * * *

  In the end, they said they could take care of the charges. He knew there had to be more to it than that, of course; they'd make him volunteer for some sort of experiment, or donate some of his organs, or submit to voluntary castration first. But the catch, when it came, wasn't any of those things. He almost couldn't believe it.

  They wanted to give him a job.

  "Think of it as community service," Scanlon said. "Restitution to all of society. You'd be underwater most of the time, but you'd be well-equipped."

  "Underwater where?"

  "Channer Vent. About forty kilometers north of the Axial Volcano, on the Juan de Fuca Rift. Do you know where that is, Gerry?"

  "How long?"

  "One year minimum. You could extend that if you wanted to."

  Fischer couldn't think of any reason why he would, but it didn't matter. If he didn't take this deal they'd stick a governor in his head for the rest of his life. Which might not be that long, when you thought about it.

  "One year," he said. "Underwater."

  Scanlon patted his arm. "Take your time, Gerry. Think about it. You don't have to decide until this afternoon."

  Do it, Shadow urged. Do it or they'll cut into you and you'll change...

  But Fischer wasn't going to be rushed. "So what do I do for one year, underwater?"

  Scanlon showed him a vid.

  "Geez," Fischer said. "I can't do any of that."

  "No problem." Scanlon smiled. "You'll learn."

  * * *

  He did, too.

  A lot of it happened while he was sleeping. Every night they'd give him an injection, to help him learn, Scanlon said. Afterwards a machine beside his bed would feed him dreams. He could never exactly remember them but something must have stuck, because every morning he'd sit at the console with his tutor — a real person, though, not a program — and all the text and diagrams she showed him would be strangely familiar. Like he'd known it all years ago, and had just forgotten. Now he remembered everything: plate tectonics and subduction zones, Archimedes Principle, the thermal conductivity of two percent hydrox. Aldosterone.

  Alloplasty.

  He remembered his left lung after they cut it out, and the technical specs on the machines they put in its place.

  Afternoons, they'd attach leads to his body
and saturate his striated muscles with low-amp current. He was starting to understand what was going on, now; the term was induced isometrics, and its meaning had come to him in a dream.

  A week after the operation he woke up with a fever.

  "Nothing to worry about," Scanlon told him. "That's just the last stage of your infection."

  "Infection?"

  "We shot you up with a retrovirus the day you came here. Didn't you know?"

  Fischer grabbed Scanlon's arm. "Like a disease? You—"

  "It's perfectly safe, Gerry." Scanlon smiled patiently, disentangling himself. "In fact, you wouldn't last very long down there without it; human enzymes don't work well at high pressure. So we loaded some extra genes into a tame virus and sent it in. It's been rewriting you from the inside out. Judging by your fever I'd say it's nearly finished. You should be feeling better in a day or so."

  "Rewriting?"

  "Half your enzymes come in two flavors now. They got the genes from one of those deep-water fish. Rattails, I think they're called." Scanlon patted Fischer on the shoulder. "So how does it feel to be part fish, Gerry?"

  "Coryphaenoides armatus," Fischer said slowly.

  Scanlon frowned. "What was that?"

  "Rattails." Fischer concentrated. "Mostly dehydrogenases, right?"

  Scanlon glanced at the machine by the bed. "I'm, um, not sure."

  "That's it. Dehydrogenases. But they tweaked them to reduce the activation energy." He tapped his temple. "It's all here. Only I haven't done the tutorial yet."

  "That's great," Scanlon said; but he didn't sound like he meant it.

  * * *

  One day they put him in a tank built like a piston, five stories tall: its roof could press down like a giant hand, squeezing whatever was inside. They sealed the hatch and flooded the tank with seawater.

  Scanlon had warned him about the change. "We flood your trachea and your head cavities, but your lung and intestines aren't rigid so they just squeeze down. We're immunizing you against pressure, you see? They say it's a bit like drowning, but you get used to it."

  It wasn't that bad, actually. Fischer's guts twisted in on themselves, and his sinuses burned like hell, but he'd take that over another bout with Kevin any day.

  He floated there in the tank, seawater sliding through the tubes in his chest, and reflected on the queasy sensation of not breathing.

  "They're getting some turbulence." Scanlon's voice came at him from all directions, as if the walls themselves were talking. "From your exhaust port."

  A fine trail of bubbles was trickling from Fischer's chest. His eyecaps made everything seem marvelously clear, like a hallucination. "Just a bit of—"

  Not his voice. His words, but spoken by something else, some cheap machine that didn't know about harmonics. One hand went automatically to the disk embedded in his throat.

  "—hydrogen," he tried again. "No problem. Pressure'll squeeze them down when I get deep enough."

  "Yeah. Still." Other words, muffled, as Scanlon spoke to someone else. Fischer felt something vibrate softly in his chest. The bubbles grew larger, then smaller. Then disappeared.

  Scanlon was back. "Better?"

  "Yeah." Fischer didn't know how he felt about this, though. He didn't really like having a chest full of machinery. He didn't really like having to breathe by chopping water into chunks of hydrogen and oxygen. But he really didn't like the idea of some tech he'd never even met fiddling with his insides by remote control, reaching into his body and messing around in there without even asking. It made him feel—

  Violated, right?

  Sometimes Shadow was just a bitch. As if she hadn't been the one to put him up to it in the first place.

  "We're going to kill the lights now, Gerry."

  Darkness. The water hummed with the sound of vast machinery.

  After a few moments he noticed a cold blue spark winking at him from somewhere overhead. It seemed to cast a lot more light than it should. As he watched, the inside of the tank reappeared in hazy shades of blue-on-black.

  "Photoamps working okay?" Scanlon wanted to know.

  "Uh huh."

  "What can you see?"

  "Everything. The inside of the tank. The hatch. Sort of bluish."

  "Right. Luciferin light source."

  "It's not very bright," Fischer said. "Everything's sort of like, dusk."

  "Well, it'd be pitch black without your eyecaps."

  And suddenly, it was.

  "Hey."

  "Don't worry, Gerry. Everything's fine. We just shut the light off."

  He lay there in utter darkness. Floaters wriggled at the corner of his eye.

  "How are you feeling, Gerry? Any sensation of falling? Claustrophobia?"

  He felt almost peaceful.

  "Gerry?"

  "No. Nothing. I feel—fine—"

  "Pressure's at two thousand meters."

  "I can't feel it."

  This might not be so bad after all. One year. One year...

  "Doctor Scanlon," he said after a while. He was even getting used to the metallic buzz of his new voice.

  "Right here."

  "Why me?"

  "What do you mean, Gerry?"

  "I wasn't, you know, qualified. Even after all this training I bet there's lots of people who'd be better at this than me. Real engineers."

  "It's not so much what you know," Scanlon said. "It's what you are."

  He knew what he was. People had been telling him for as long as he could remember. He didn't see what the fuck that had to do with anything. "What's that, then?"

  At first he thought he wasn't going to get an answer. But Scanlon finally spoke, and when he did there was something in his voice that Fischer had never heard before.

  "Pre-adapted," was what he said.

  Elevator Boy

  The Pacific Ocean slopped two kilometers under his feet. He had a cargo of blank-eyed psychotics sitting behind him. And the lifter was being piloted by a large pizza with extra cheese. Joel Kita liked it all about as much as could be expected.

  At least he had been expecting it, this time. For once the GA hadn't sprung one of their exercises in chaos theory onto his life without warning. He'd seen it coming almost a week in advance, when they'd sprung one onto Ray Stericker instead. Ray had been in this very cockpit, watching the pizza being installed and no doubt wondering when the term "job security" had become an oxymoron.

  "I'm supposed to baby-sit it for a week," he had said then. Joel had climbed up into the 'scaphe for the usual preflight check and found his friend waiting by the controls. Ray had gestured up through the open hatchway to the lifter's cockpit, where a couple of techs were busy interfacing something to the controls. "Just in case it screws up in the field. Then I'm gone."

  "Gone where?" Joel couldn't believe it. Ray had been on the Juan de Fuca run forever, even before the geothermal program. He’d even been an employee, back when such things were commonplace.

  "Probably the Gorda circuit for a while. After that, who knows? They'll be upgrading everything before long."

  Joel glanced up through the hatch. The techs were playing with a square vanilla box, half a meter on a side and about twice as thick as Kita's wrist. "What is the fucking thing? Some kind of autopilot?"

  "With a difference. This takes off and lands. And all sorts of lovely things in between."

  This was not good news. Humans had always been able to integrate three-D spatial information better than the machines that kept trying to replace them. Not that machines couldn't recognize a tree or a building when such objects were pointed out to them, but they got real confused whenever you rotated any of those objects a few degrees. The shapes changed, contrast and shadow shifted, and it always took way too long for any of those arsenide pretenders to update its spatial maps and recognize that yes, it's still a tree, and no, it didn't morph into something else, dummy, you just changed your point of view.

  In some places that wasn't a problem. Ocean surfaces, for
example. Or controlled-access highways where the cars had their own ID transponders. Or even lashed to the underside of a giant squashed doughnut filled with buoyant vacuum, floating in mid-air. These had been respected and venerable environments for autopilots since well before the turn of the century.

  Take-offs and landings were a different scene altogether, though. Too many real objects going by too fast, too many things to keep an eye on. A few billion years of natural selection still had the edge when the fast lane got that crowded.

  Until now, apparently.

  "Let's get out of here." Ray dropped down onto the landing pad. Joel followed him out to the edge of the roof. Green tangled blankets of kudzu4 spread out around them, shrouding the roofs of surrounding buildings. It always made Joel think post-apocalypse — weeds and ivy crawling back in from the wilderness to strangle the residue of some fallen civilization. Except, of course, these particular weeds were supposed to save civilization.

  Way out by the coast, barely visible, streamers of smoke dribbled into the sky from the refugee strip. So much for civilization.

  "It's one of those smart gels," Ray said at last.

  "Smart gels?"

  "Head cheese. Cultured brain cells on a slab. The same things they've been plugging into the Net to firewall infections."

  "I know what they are, Ray. I just can't fucking believe it."

  "Well, believe it. They'll be coming for you too, give 'em enough time."

  "Yeah. Probably." Joel let it sink in. "I wonder when."

  Ray shrugged. "You've got some breathing space. All that unpredictable volcanic shit, things blowing up under you. Nastier than flying a hoover. Harder to replace you."

  He looked back at the lifter, and the 'scaphe nestled into its underbelly.

  "Won't take long, though."

  Joel fished a derm out of his pocket; a tricyclic with a mild lithium chaser. He held it out without a word.

  Ray just spat. "Thanks anyway. I want to feel pissed for a while, you know?"

  * * *

  And now, eight days later, Ray Stericker was gone.

  He'd disappeared after his last shift, just the day before. Joel had tried to track him down, drag him out, piss him up, but he hadn't been able to find the man on site and Ray wasn't answering his watch. So here was Joel Kita, back on the job, alone except for his cargo; four very strange people in black suits, blank white lenses covering their eyes. They all had identical GA logos stamped onto their shoulders, tags with their surnames printed just below. At least the surnames were different, although the difference seemed trivial; male, female, large or small, they all seemed minor variants of the same make and model. Ah yes, the Mk-5 was always such a nice boy. Kind of quiet, kept to himself. Who would've thought...