It draws its hand to its face, runs an index finger from one ear to the tip of the jaw. A very long molecule, folded against itself, unzips.
The wraith’s smooth black face splits open a few centimeters; what’s underneath shows pale gray in the filtered light. The reptile feels the familiar dimpling of its cheek in sudden cold.
It continues the motion, slashing its face from ear to ear. A great smiling gash opens below the eyespots. Unzipped, a flap of black membrane floats under its chin, anchored at the throat.
There’s a pucker in the center of the skinned area. The reptile moves its jaw; the pucker opens.
By now most of its teeth are gone. It swallowed some, spat others out if they came loose when its face was unsealed. No matter. Most of the things it eats these days are even softer than it is. When the occasional mollusc or echinoderm proves too tough or too large to swallow whole, there are always hands. Thumbs still oppose.
But this is the first time it’s actually seen that gaping, toothless ruin where a mouth used to be. It knows this isn’t right, somehow.
“—Everything is automatic—”
A sudden muffled buzz cuts into the noise, then fades. Welcome silence returns for a moment. Then different sounds, quieter than before, almost hushed:
“Christ, Judy, is that you?”
It knows that sound.
“Judy Caraco? It’s Jeannette Ballard. Remember? We went through prelim together. Judy? Can you speak?”
That sound comes from a long time ago.
“Can you hear me, Judy? Wave if you can hear me.”
Back when this one was part of something larger, not an it at all, then, but—
“The machine didn’t recognize you, you know? It was only programmed for locals.”
—she.
Clusters of neurons, long dormant, sparkle in the darkness. Old, forgotten subsystems stutter and reboot.
I—
“You’ve come—my God, Judy, do you know where you are? You went missing off Juan de Fuca! You’ve come over three thousand kilometers!”
It knows my name. She can barely think over the sudden murmuring in her head.
“Judy, it’s me. Jeannette. God, Judy, how did you last this long?”
She can’t answer. She’s just barely starting to understand the question. There are parts of her still asleep, parts that won’t talk, still other parts completely washed away. She doesn’t remember why she never gets thirsty. She’s forgotten the tidal rush of human breath. Once, for a little while, she knew words like photoamplification and myoelectric; they were nonsense to her even then.
She shakes her head, trying to clear it. The new parts—no, the old parts, the very old parts that went away and now they’ve come back and won’t shut the fuck up—are all clamoring for attention. She reaches into the bubble again, past her own reflection; once again, the ventral airlock pushes back.
“Judy, you can’t get into the station. No one’s there. Everything’s automated now.”
She brings her hand back to her face, tugs at the line between black and gray. More shadow peels back from the wraith, leaving a large pale oval with two smaller ovals, white and utterly featureless, inside. The flesh around her mouth is going prickly and numb.
My face! something screams. What happened to my eyes?
“You don’t want to go inside anyway, you couldn’t even stand up. We’ve seen it in some of the other runaways, you lose your calcium after a while. Your bones go all punky, you know?”
My eyes—
“We’re airlifting a ’scaphe out to you. We’ll have a team down there in fifteen hours, tops. Just go down into the shelter and wait for them. It’s state of the art, Judy, it’ll take care of everything.”
She looks down into the open box. Words appear in her head: Leg. Hold. Trap. She knows what they mean.
“They—they made some mistakes, Judy. But things are different now. We don’t have to change people any more. You just wait there, Judy. We’ll put you back to rights. We’ll bring you home.”
The voices inside grow quiet, suddenly attentive. They don’t like the sound of that word. Home. She wonders what it means. She wonders why it makes her feel so cold.
More words scroll through her mind: The lights are on. Nobody’s home.
The lights come on, flickering.
She can catch glimpses of sick, rotten things squirming in her head. Old memories grind screeching against years of corrosion. Something lurches into sudden focus: worms, clusters of twitching, eyeless, pulpy snouts reaching out for her across the space of two decades. She stares, horrified, and remembers what the worms were called. They were called “fingers.”
Something gives way with a snap. There’s a big room and a hand puppet clenched in one small fist. Something smells like mints and worms are surging up between her legs and they hurt and they’re whispering shhh it’s not really that bad is it, and it is but she doesn’t want to let him down after all I’ve done for you so she shakes her head and squeezes her eyes shut and just waits. It’s years and years before she opens her eyes again and when she does he’s back, so much smaller now, he doesn’t remember he doesn’t even fucking remember it’s all my dear how you’ve grown how long has it been?So she tells him as the taser wires hit and he goes over, she tells him as his muscles lock tight in a twelve-thousand-volt orgasm; she shows him the blade, shows him up real close and his left eye deflates with a wet tired sigh but she leaves the other one, jiggling hilariously in frantic little arcs, so he can watch but shit for once there really is a cop around when you need one and here come the worms again, a hard clenched knot of them driving into her kidney like a piston, worms grabbing her hair, and they take her not to the nearest precinct but to some strange clinic where voices in the next room murmur about optimal post-traumatic environments and endogenous dopamine addiction. And then someone says There’s an alternative Ms. Caraco, a place you could go that’s a little bit dangerous but then you’d be right at home there, wouldn’t you? And you could make a real contribution, we need people who can live under a certain kind of stress without going, you know…
And she says okay, okay, just fucking do it.
And the worms burrow into her chest, devour her soft parts and replace them with hard-edged geometries of plastic and metal that cut her insides.
And then dark cold, life without breath, four thousand meters of black water pressing down like a massive sheltering womb…
“Judy, will you just for God’s sake talk to me? Is your vocoder broken? Can’t you answer?”
Her whole body is shaking. She can’t do anything except watch her hand rise, an autonomous savior, to take the black skin floating around her face. The reptile presses edges together, here, and here. Hydrophobic side chains embrace; a slippery black caul stitches itself back together over rotten flesh. Muffled voices rage faintly inside.
“Judy, please just wave or something! Judy, what are you—where are you going?”
It doesn’t know. All it’s ever done is travel to this place. It’s forgotten why.
“Judy, you can’t wander too far away… Don’t you remember, our instruments can’t see very well this close to an active rift—”
All it wants is to get away from the noise and the light. All it wants is to be alone again.