“The ideas fly as fast as jets. This thriller has brains!”
An excerpt from the Long Eyes collection:
“Pressure”
They said I wouldn’t feel a thing, but my dreams were awful. I felt pain and tightness and smothering weight, none of which overcame my excitement. I also dreamed of flying — dreamed I dove right through the ground and smashed into a spectacular new universe — yet I caught only glimpses of brightness before my eyes ruptured and abrasive rock crammed through my mouth and sinus cavities.
The mind persists in making sense of things, even when drugged and unconscious. It remembers.
Waking was the real nightmare. I had no face, I weighed too little, and raw swelling in my throat choked my voice.
The bite of a needle on one leg helped center me even before the tranquilizer took hold. I stopped thrashing and understood that I was submerged in a tank not much larger than myself. I knew it was a horizontal rectangle, knew I was in its middle — yet I had no eyes.
Could my hearing be acute enough to measure distance? There wasn’t time to sort through my senses. The ponderous blood-weight of the tranquilizer could not subdue the breathing reflex and I dug at the water with every limb, moving up, up—
A hard ceiling punched into the smooth metal protrusions of my face before I reached a surface. There was no air. But I could not drown. I snorted water through the generous filter plate where my nose had been, then expelled a shocking pocket of liquid through the gills beneath my armpits.
For a moment I did nothing more than breathe, feeling each exhalation against my elbows. I almost touched my face, hesitated, then grew interested in my hands and brought them together. The index fingers and thumbs felt no different but my other digits were thicker, longer, webbed.
“Garcia?” Stenstrom’s voice was too loud in the VLF transceiver buried high in my cheekbone, distorted by the mumble of other people around him. “How do you feel?”
I thought I heard the vibrations of his enthusiastic tone directly as well, dulled by the water and walls of my tank.
They’d told me the recovery tank would be glass. I imagined his entire research team all around my naked body, bristling with recorders and palmtops, every face intent.
Andrea had always giggled when we skinny-dipped together, watchful for neighbors but emboldened by each other’s daring, in the early days when we lived at her parents’ house in San Diego. Before she got pregnant. “Shark!” she’d whisper, and grab for me. I can be a pensive son of a bitch and her teasing, her smiles, had always been what I needed most.
The thought of her now helped me ignore my embarrassment.
My scrotum had been tucked away, my penis shortened, protective measures that Stenstrom’s people swore were reversible, like all of the surgeries and implants. I had that in writing and an eight figure insurance policy to back it, but there’s not a man in the world who wants to be cut in that area, no matter the compensation.
“Garcia?” Stenstrom raised his volume painfully.
Answering, I almost swallowed a mouthful of water. Despite all of my training, subvocalizing into a throat mike was very different after the changes reinforcing my mouth and neck. Eating would be a chore.
I croaked, “Drop volume!”
Stenstrom was apologetic. “Is this better?”
“Down, down. Lots.”
“You’re more sensitive than we expected, apparently. Any other immediate difficulties?”
I kicked through a tight somersault. “Feel great!”
My pride was my savior, my source of endurance.
I spent the longest five weeks of my life in that tank and in a deeper pool, healing, testing, practicing. My feet and toes had been augmented much like my hands, my thighs shortened to maximize the available muscle. I was damned quick. Relearning construction techniques with my new fingers was sometimes frustrating, yet my progress was real and those periods of solitary labor became important to me.
At the surface, in the shallows, doctors poked and prodded and put me through redundant tortures. I had been warned that the study of my new body would be extensive and I did my best not to fear or hate them, but I’d never imagined such intense scrutiny. During my years as a SEAL, I had been like a bug under a microscope, constantly evaluated and scored. Here I was the microscope, my body the only lens through which they could measure their work.
Stenstrom tried to be my buddy, as he had always tried, joking and asking what I’d do with the money, yet his possessiveness was obvious. “We’ll be famous,” he said. “We’ll change the world.”
I wasn’t a slave or a pet exactly, but I was anxious to get started — to get away from them.
The project had almost selected someone else, a loudmouth much better at politicking than me, but the job would mostly be done alone and they must have thought he’d break without an audience.
I’m sure my Navy files indicated no problems of that nature. I’m the private type, happiest diving or surfing with my laughing Andrea or teaching our boys to swim, feeling my heartbeat, finding the perfect ride, the perfect moment, away from other people and their squabbles and protest marches. I’ve never understood the urge to merge, never wanted to add my opinions to the bubbling stew of e-media or buy five minutes of fame on iBio. For me, a mob holds no power, no point. Running in circles won’t improve the economy, clean the environment, or affect the East Asian guerrilla wars in any way. Hard work is the answer. Honor. Persistence. A willingness to take risks.
The project offered all that and more.
I had to relearn how to chew and swallow, a slow process but strangely more flavorful. Stenstrom said that was only because of the premium foods they’d secured for me, but I had eaten well occasionally in the past and decided my improved palate must be a side effect of the surgeries that had strengthened my jaw and lips. Could taste buds be sensitized?
Learning to see again was also a challenge. From old research with dolphins and orcas, Stenstrom knew better than to surround me with smooth walls. Many of those captives had gone insane over time. That wasn’t a concern here, but they didn’t want my brain to establish its new neural patterns in wrong or confused ways.
Before activating my sonar receptors, which used ultra low frequencies far below my improved range of hearing, they put me in the deeper, irregularly shaped pool.
It was beautiful. I’d lost color but the textures were vivid, stark, each shape imposing. My receptors could also see normally but had no better than 20/600 vision in that mode, which I’d use only for close-up work and to read instrumentation.
I chose complete blindness when calling my family. Rather than face a showphone, I let a computer read and type for me, my throat mike patched into a voder. Site management had encouraged me to limit our exchanges to text only, which was easier to encrypt — and who knew what seven- and four-year-old boys would make of some stiff-mouthed monster claiming to be their father? Brent had only stopped referring to me as “step-dad” a short time ago, and Roberto was still young enough to forget me. The portrait we’d had done before I left was not an image that I wanted to disturb, even though I had been caught in mid-blink and Andrea’s smile looked forced, too large.
“I’m doing great, Hon, how are the boys?” I asked.
Her response came in stuttering groups of syllables, all emotion masked by the machine: “I used part of the advance money to buy a DFender for our apartment.”