It almost seemed like she was having a different conversation.
“Why bother?” I asked. “The house should be ready soon.” Smart alarms cost thousands of dollars, just a speck of what I’d earn, but the money was supposed to last the rest of our lives.
“We’re still here in the meantime,” she said.
The boys gave me no chance to brood over the resentment that seemed so clear in her words. Maybe I only imagined it. “Are you in the ocean yet how far down can you go?” one of them babbled, without first identifying himself, and other said, “Greenpeace rated you a top ten on the widecast yesterday!”
Brent and Roberto both took after their mother. They were rambunctious little monkeys, and gave me the praise and enthusiasm I’d expected. I hadn’t realized that Brent could type so fast. The voder spoke his questions much more smoothly than anything Andrea had sent.
Somehow, technical sketches of my surgeries and gear had leaked onto the net. I even had fan clubs with names like Cyborg.org and zMerman. The boys hoped for an exclusive and I decided it was better to play along and celebrate my alienness. I promised to bring them both mementos when I returned. By then, security should have loosened enough for me to take home a few small bits of hardware, something for them to put on a shelf or carry in their pockets.
When Andrea came back on, she was encouraging but brief. “Six hundred four to go,” the voder said for her, but I didn’t know how to answer. I had lost track of the days left until my contract was up, knowing how long it would be.
“Love you,” I rasped, and the computer carried my inadequate words away.
Mapping the ocean floor was the greatest thrill of my life. Most people probably would have considered it tedious, gliding through a quiet, monochromatic world, but then the only way to get a rise out of most people is to batter them with kaleidoscopes of music, breasts, and talking heads — or to turn off the net and TV. The worst riots always occurred during the rotating brownouts.
Oil and coal were fast becoming memories, and incredible advances in solar power had come to nothing due to greenhouse clouds and the megatonnage of dirt thrown into the atmosphere by the Nine Days War. With tens of thousands of people still sick from radiation poisoning, no politician would even mention new nuclear plants, and hydroelectric, biomass, and wind generators weren’t enough to keep civilization chugging along without interruption.
Aro Corp. had the answer. For months now, crews had been scouting various locales with buoys and remote operated vehicles. The tiny Japanese island of Miyake-jima, dead south of Tokyo Bay, was deemed perfect for political as well as economic reasons. Miyake-jima belonged to an underwater ridge that extended from the Japanese mainland directly into the Pacific current, and its steep southern slope offered powerful updrafts in addition to the normal ocean tides. Aro Corp. planned to build a field of turbines as deep as five hundred feet, using cutting edge technologies like me.
Normal divers max out at three hundred feet and can’t remain there long in any case. My surgeries eliminated the need for air tanks. More importantly, a gel solution had been suffused through my bloodstream and organs to protect me from compression.
In addition to performing final, hands-on site inspections, I was also conducting field tests of myself. Before creating other “mods,” Aro Corp. wanted to see if unforeseen problems would arise, physical, mental, or emotional.
I was glad for the test period. In three months, I would become a teacher and a foreman, caged by responsibility. Meanwhile, I explored natural altars of rock and coral, spread my arms to ride rip-currents, and chased quick clouds of fish.
One morning, I caught a yellowtail. Its buttery flavor was complemented well by sour kelp. I began to forage instead of eating only from the tubes on my food belt — secretly, truly making myself a part of this environment.
The work itself was more fun than difficult, placing beacons and running spot checks on our communications net. The attenuation of radio waves is very high in salt water, even for the military band VLF signals that Aro Corp. had leased from the U.S. Navy. They wanted to be sure they could always reach me, but there were dead areas within the construction zone. During the first twenty days, we added five more relays than they’d originally allowed for in the budget, three on the sea floor, plus two additional surface buoys whose anchoring tethers also functioned as antennae.
The grid was set. The smaller boats that had helped me through this initial stage were replaced by a barge, capable of lowering heavier and larger gear. The first steel cradles for the turbine mounts were coming down.
For a country that had been almost entirely nuclear-powered for decades, Japan had a wretched safety record, averaging two and a half accidents per year. Worse, loss of containment at eleven reactors during the war had done more damage than North Korean missiles. They were desperate for a solution.
Aro Corp. hoped to rev up a quad of turbines as soon as possible, not so much to offset costs but to prove to critics and nervous investors that the idea was fundamentally sound. The complete project, involving hundreds of turbines, channelers, and land-based transformers, wouldn’t be finished for four years — and of course Aro Corp. hoped construction would continue for most of the century as they developed other locations around the globe.
I worked nine- and ten-hour shifts, sometimes arguing with Stenstrom when he wanted me to come in. I’m no hero. I was angling for a bonus.
My gung-ho attitude was also based on the fact that my camp on the lee side of Miyake held little appeal. Sleep was always welcome, but any messages the boys had sent tended to make me feel lonely, and then there was nothing to do but wait and brood, composing inarticulate letters to Andrea that I usually deleted.
I was tired when my robot tug brought me to deeper water east of the island. We’d completed inspection of the last sites a week early and the engineers wanted back-up options.
As I kicked away from the tug, a familiar thrill shot through my exhaustion. Beyond this shelf, the sea floor plunged away for miles. This place was like another planet, strange and new, and I was the very first.
The squid didn’t hesitate. Its only predators were much larger and shaped differently than me. As I drifted into range, holding a small mapping computer to my face, the giant latched onto my left elbow and biceps with its two longer, grasping tentacles.
Just weeks before, I might have yelled. But in this world there was nobody who could come to help.
I tried to kick away. No good.
Its eight regular arms spread in a horrible, ash-yellow blossom. When I switched to sonar the squid seemed even larger, backed by a spotty, rising cloud of silt.
I dropped my computer, bumping one of the squid’s closing arms. It hesitated, grabbing the small device, but at the same time the pair of stronger tentacles around my left arm reflexively increased their grip. My armor tore open. So did the softer muscle beneath. Blood squirted out in diffuse threads and I was lucky not to suffer a stroke, but too frantic to realize it at the time.
My fletchette gun was holstered on my left forearm beneath the tentacles. I groped for the knife strapped to my leg, but another of the squid’s arms brushed my foot, then seized hold, and I yanked my free hand away before it was also trapped.
“Garcia! Garcia!” Stenstrom’s voice felt like part of the adrenaline-pulse throbbing through my head.
I kicked not away from the squid but into it, winning slack from its tentacles, using this moment of freedom to twist sideways. Its arms closed in. My face and left arm led toward the monster’s hard, gaping beak. Then my free hand found the gun and squeezed off three-quarters of a magazine, tearing open the back of my left ring finger.