Except once, when she'd been shot out of the sky.
On that day Forcipiger had fallen slowly through a dark spectrum, green to blue to final lightless black, bleeding atmosphere from a thousand cuts. With each meter a little more of the ocean had forced its way in, squeezed the atmosphere into a single high-pressure pocket.
Joel hadn't liked the sound of her vocoder. I don't want to spend my last few minutes listening to a machine voice, he'd said. So she'd stayed with him, breathing. They must have been at thirty atmospheres by the time he'd popped the hatch, cold and scared and sick of waiting to die.
And she had come ashore, raging.
It had taken days. Her ascent along the seabed would have been gradual enough to decompress naturally, the gas in her blood easing gently across the alveolar membranes—if her remaining lung had been in use at the time. It hadn't been: so what had happened to those last high-pressure remnants of Forcipiger's atmosphere in her bloodstream? The fact that she was still alive proved that they weren't still within her.
Gas exchange isn't limited to the lungs, she remembered. The skin breathes. The GI tract breathes. Not as fast as a set of lungs would, of course. Not as efficiently.
Maybe not quite efficiently enough…
"What's wrong with me?" she asked quietly.
"You have recently suffered two small embolisms in your brain which intermittently impair your vision," the medbooth said. "Your brain likely compensates for these gaps with stored images, although I would have to observe an episode in progress to be certain. You have also recently lost someone close to you; bereavement can be a factor in triggering visual-release hall—"
"What do you mean, stored images? Are you saying these are memories?"
"Yes," the machine replied.
"That's bullshit."
"We're sorry you feel that way."
"But they neverhappened, okay?" Shit-for-brains machine, why am I even arguing with it? "I remember my own childhood, for fuck's sake. I couldn't forget it if I tried. And these visions, they were someone else's, they were—"
— happy—
"— they were different. Completely different."
"Long-term memories are frequently unreliable. They—"
"Shut up," she snapped. "Just fix it."
"This booth is not equipped for microsurgery. I can give you Ondansetron to suppress the symptoms. You should be aware, though, that patients with extensive synaptic rewiring may experience side effects such as mild dizziness —"
She froze. Rewiring?
"— double vision, halo effects—"
"Stop," she said. The booth fell silent.
On the display, that cloud of violet stars sparkled enigmatically along the floor of her brain.
She touched it. "What are these?"
"A series of surgical lesions and associated infarctions," the booth replied.
"How many?"
"Seven thousand four hundred eighty three."
She took a breath, felt distant amazement at how steady it felt. "You're saying someone cut into my brain seven thousand four hundred and eighty-three times?"
"There's no evidence of physical penetration. The lesions are consistent with deep-focus microwave bursts."
"Why didn't you tell me before?"
"You asked me to ignore subjects irrelevant to your hallucinations."
"And these—these lesions don't have anything to do with that?"
"They do not."
"How do you know?"
"Most of the lesions are not located within the visual pathways. The others act to block the transmission of images, not generate them."
"Where are the lesions located?"
"The lesions lie along pathways connecting the limbic system and the neocortex."
"What are those pathways used for?"
"Those pathways are inactive. They have been interrupted by the surgical—"
"What would they be used for if they were active?"
"The activation of long-term memories," said the booth.
Oh God. Oh God.
"Is there any other way we can be of service?" the booth asked after a while.
Clarke swallowed. "How—how long ago were the lesions induced?"
"Between ten and thirty-six months, depending on your mean metabolic rate since the procedure. This is an approximation based upon subsequent scarring and capillary growth."
"Could such an operation take place without the patient's knowledge?"
A pause. "I don't know how to answer that question."
"Could it take place without anesthetic?"
"Yes."
"Could it take place while the patient was asleep?"
"Yes."
"Would the patient feel the lesions forming?"
"No."
"Could the equipment for such a procedure be housed within, say, an NMR helmet?"
"I don't know," the booth admitted.
Beebe's medical cubby had had an NMR. She'd used it occasionally, when she'd cracked her head during combat with Channer's wildlife. No lesions had appeared on her printout then. Maybe they didn't show up on the default settings she'd used, maybe you had to dial up a specific test or something first.
Maybe someone had programmed Beebe's scanner to lie.
When did it happen? What happened? What can't I remember?
She was dimly aware of muffled sounds, distant and angry, rising from somewhere outside. They were irrelevant, they made no sense. Nothing made any sense. Her mind, luminous and transparent, rotated before her. Purple stars erupted from the medulla like a freeze-framed fountain, bright perfect droplets thrown high into the cortex and frozen at apogee. Bright thoughts. Memories, amputated and cauterized. They almost looked like some kind of free-form sculpture.
Lies could be so beautiful in the telling.
Decoys
The way Aviva Lu saw it, whoever died last was the winner.
It didn't matter what you actually did with your life. Da Vinci and Plasmid and Ian Anderson had all done mags more than Vive or any of her friends ever would. She'd never explore Mars or write a symphony or even build an animal, at least not from scratch. But the thing was, all those people were dead already. Fame hadn't kept Olivia M'Benga's faceplate from shattering. Andrew Simon's charge against Hydro-Q hadn't added one rotting day to his lifespan. Passion Play might have been immortal, but its composer had been dust for decades.
Aviva Lu knew more about the story so far than all of those guys had.
It was all just one big, sprawling interactive storybook. It had a beginning and a middle and an end. If you came in halfway through, you could always pick up the stuff you'd missed—that's what tutorials and encyclopedias and Maelstrom itself were for. You could get a thumbnail History of Life right back to the time Martian Mike dropped out of the sky and started the whole thing off. Once you were dead, though, that was it. You'd never know what came next. The real winners, Vive figured, were the ones who saw how the story finally ended.
That said, it kind of pissed her off to realize that she'd probably made it to the finals.