CHAPTER 5 - THE DOCTORS CAN'T SAVE YOU
Main system… LOW BATTERY ALERT. Set metabolism to extreme battery saver mode?
Envy’s glider was dying. Worse, the fat stores on her body were burning off to support her cybernetics and keep her warm, and the lack of sleep from gliding underwater all night was making everything less efficient. With the sun finally rising, rays of light shot down around her.
She had to extend auxiliary solar wings to catch an anemic dawn’s light.
From the back of her coat, long, gossamer wings unfolded. They were a paper-thin, dark film printed with solar cells, and they undulated behind her in the current. These ‘wings’ transferred trace bits of solar power back into her bionics to offset the drain on her body’s metabolism.
Envy got into her biomon with admin thoughts: Set circadian rhythm to dolphin mode.
The hormone release made her eyes heavy and her grip slip. Her bionic arm locked in place on the glider and the clips remained for safety. With its route set, the glider brought her to the surface and extended its breathing pipe upwards. Envy connected the support tubes of her gillmask into the glider and enjoyed a rush of easy oxygen.
Half of her brain shut down, and while she didn’t lose consciousness, she drifted in a state of half-sleep, like a light nap, or the cusp of rest at night; she was just juiced out. Like a stormtrooper on the third day of a lightning offensive, the drugs, the adrenaline, and the sleep-deprivation had come to collect.
In the Navy they called stimming up ‘borrowing tomorrow,’ and it was true. Now tomorrow was today; the bones hurt, the joints cried, and the heart felt like a deflated balloon.
The glider swapped to autopilot and dragged a limp Envy up the Olympic coast. It used sonar pulses and a rudimentary AI to avoid crashing into traffic, and there was plenty of traffic in this corridor. Enormous pods of grey whales and orcas flourished in the Puget Sound, protecting their precious inlet from the marauding tentacles of marauding tribes of invasive Humboldt squid.
The war between the squids and the sea mammals was eternal, with Syndicate stepping in and declaring all whales and dolphins as honorary citizens of their democracy, as thanks for their assistance in keeping squid populations down around the coastlines.
As Envy drifted in and out of consciousness, she had sleepy visions of barnacled, dark eyes swimming alongside her. A mother grey watched over the calf that had become curious about Envy and her drifting sea-glider.
Their song haunted the waters around Envy. It was auto-translated by her linguistic implants:
“Mommy,” said the calf, “four-point sky swimmer is sick.”
Four-point sky swimmer was common whale parlance for ‘human.’ It referenced their four pointy limbs and the fact that they entered and exited the ocean from the sky.
“Not sick,” said the mother grey, “tired and alone.”
“Good four-point sky swimmer?”
“Yes, good. This one is the one that tries; a keeper and a fish-giver.”
For Envy, all of this felt like a soothing fever dream. It was fine to drift along to their song.
But another song closed in. It was clicks, squeals, and playful shrieks. Envy’s linguistic software auto-translated that too: “Oh, what a beautiful baby.”
It was the death-chittering of Orca speech.
“Stay close,” said the mother grey, “the baby eaters are here.”
The grey calf huddled close to its mother.
“Nooooo,” one of the orcas called out, “we love your baby so much. We love it so much; we could eat its eyes and its tongue.”
“Stay back,” said the mother grey, “baby eaters are not welcome.”
In her half-sleep, Envy saw the pod of orcas as a drifting shadow in the waters beneath her. They rose up to engulf her in their bus-sized bodies of black-and-white, bumping her and her glider just enough to jostle her fully awake.
Envy mentally dictated into her whale-call chip: I am traveling to the west. There is a sea farm there and you will be rewarded with many fish if you escort me.
Her subdermal whale-call implant made her bones vibrate as it emanated their speech outward into the water.
“Oh ho ho,” said the orca pod, “oh ho ho ho! Fish-giver! This one is a fish-giver!”
“Fish-giver, shark-tamer!”
“Fish-giver, squid-slayer!”
“Fish-giver, you will have your escort! You are such a lucky fish-giver, to find the Great Pod of the Cloud, mightiest of all pods.”
“Take your fish-giver,” said the mother grey, “and go away, baby eaters.”
“There is no need for succulent baby meat when a fish-giver is here. Goodbye!”
And so, the Great Pod of the Cloud made Envy’s escort their quest. One of them grabbed her glider in its mouth, dragging it (and her) along through the ocean at a speed ten times what her struggling batteries could accomplish.
The algae farms at Wolfport were cylinders of green as wide as a city reservoir and as deep as sun could reach. They stretched along the municipal coastline, tended to by sea rigs. The rigs were held up by concrete skyscrapers sticking out of the waves. The tops of the rigs were small cities unto themselves, and each of them were connected by suspension cables that carried gondolas full of workers, goods, and vehicles.
The central rig overflowed with neon habitation towers decorated with holographic ad space for Junmai-C, Churtles, the latest top-grade cyberware, etc. Other rigs were dedicated to agricultural dispatch, submerged whale embassies and their supporting augmentation bays, and one rig closer to open sea was lightly manned and meant to be ready to receive migratory Navy fleets coming in from sorties throughout the vast Pacific heartsea.
Every rig had a moon pool at the base. These moon pools were typically used for submarines, but whales could ping the pools with their calls and request docking permissions.
The Great Pod of the Cloud was one such group of whales. They were cleared by Current Control to surface in the central habitation rig’s moon pool. There they surfaced, led by their elder matriarch. There were two calves, their mothers, seven young warriors, and the matriarch’s old bull of a consort. It was the bull who pushed Envy’s glider to the surface.
A bald fellow with an anchor jaw stood at the edge of the pool. He leaned on a pole hook and had a hand half-stuck in the lifting girdle he wore around his prodigious gut.
“That one of ours, old man?” He said to the old bull orca, in plain English.
The old bull snorted through his blowhole and clicked an auto-translated reply: “Feed us.”
Dunkin Frost reached down with his pole hook and, with as much gentleness as strength, slipped it around Envy’s waist and attached the other end to a loading chain hanging from a series of pulleys over the moon pool. The operator in the control room craned Envy out of the pool and deposited her on a loading cart at the edge.
Dunkin signaled the control room. A bay door opened along the pulley chain system and sent in a hanging cargo can. It stalled over the moon pool. The orcas lifted their snouts from the water’s surface and opened their mouths. Some flapped their flippers and squealed when they heard the unloading alarm.
The can flipped open, and a silver cascade of live fish and seawater rushed out.
When the Orcas first joined the Syndicate under the Fish-Giving Accord of 2304, the Orcas were given fresh caught, unalive fish. While the Orca Tribal Authority was pleased with the easy meals, the matriarchs eventually forbade dead fish; it was reasoned that their calves could not learn to be efficient hunters without the sport of live fish.
And so, while most of the tribute raced out to sea through the bottom of the moon pool, the matriarchs accepted this, as it re-seeded their native waters. Of course, this did not stop the whole pod from catching as much as their mouths could carry.
With tribute made, the Great Pod of the Cloud turned tail and dove back down into the sea. But the old bull remained, his scarred face stuck out of the water near the edge of the moon pool. Dunkin crouched down at the edge and extended his hand to press against the bull’s snout.
“The scar,” squeaked the old bull, “still itches.”
Dunkin ran his fingers over the canyon scar along the top of the bull’s head. “You want us to take a look at it again?”
“No. The itch reminds. The itch protects.”
“Don’t forget to take your people to the embassy for a scrub and a resupply, old timer.”
“There is a sickness,” clicked the old bull. “It hates the sea. It twists the sky.”
Dunkin patted the old bull’s snout and stood up. He looked over to Envy’s unconscious body on the cargo trolley and stuck his hand back into his girdle.
“Yeah, we know about it.”
“My children are afraid. The seagulls have gone mad. They no longer shriek or steal. They attack us when we surface for air.”
Dunkin walked to the cargo trolley and pushed it toward the decontamination center.
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“Ours are scared too,” said Dunkin. “Be safe, old timer.”
The old bull dove down into the sea, parting from the moon pool with a mighty slap of his tail. The spray of ocean water spattered across Envy’s face. She gurgled and twitched, whined like a puppy having a nightmare. Dunkin went to wash his hands in the nearby utility sink, with a mix of herbal soap and seawater. He then stuck a toasted chicory stick between his teeth, then shoved Envy’s trolley into decontamination with his boot.
The decontamination bulkhead slammed shut and sealed itself off. Dunkin walked up the catwalk to the control room. The room was a central observation deck with ballistic glass shielding on the floor, the walls, and the ceiling. It overlooked the decontamination bay, the moon pool, the algae seeding chambers, and the heavy metal of the engineering bay.
Inside the room was a woman hunched over a microscope array. Her hair was a sloppy red bun with a mechanical pencil stuck through it. “What’s in decon?” she asked, without looking up from her work. Dunkin stood by the window overlooking the decontamination chamber. When he squinted at Envy, he could have sworn there was a kind of shimmer to her.
“Neon Vox,” he said.
Dr. Tasque looked up and put on her glasses. She grabbed her tablet and went to join Dunkin at the window. She held up her tablet and took pictures. “Did you touch her?”
“Yeah, but I washed my hands.”
Dr. Tasque jerked away from him and held up her scanning tablet. “Show me your hands.”
Dunkin complied, holding out his knotty palms for her to scan. Dr. Tasque ran through a number of spectrums, even zoomed into the cells of his skin. They showed nothing but the usual microbes. Dr. Tasque pulled the mechanical pencil from her hair and printed out a slip of paper from her tablet, upon which she scribbled notes in an arcane shorthand only she could read.
“Okay,” she said. “Walk me through this. You touched one of the Orcas. Then you washed your hands. Did the orca have that shimmer on it?”
“No, not that I could see.”
“And the utility sink uses, what… pumped seawater and soap?”
“Rosemary and poppy seed soap.”
“May or may not be relevant.”
“Uhh, I ain’t a scientist, but I don’t think the contagion is allergic to poppies and rosemary.”
“Nope,” she tore off her paper note and went to the corkboard near her workstation, then stuck the note in next to a tangled wreath of similar notes.
Dr. Tasque worked her fingers through her hair and paced by the window. “I got some preliminary data from the cache’s fairy surgeon, and nothing in her labs suggested nanomachine infection.”
“Tasque, we’re an hour from union lunch, and this isn’t my job description. You need me for anything else or can I go back to real work while you do… science voodoo.”
“Whatever this ‘shimmer’ is, I need a contained sample and a real lab.”
Dunkin pointed at her workstation. “Ain’t that a lab?”
Dr. Tasque cut into him with her eyes over the rim of her glasses. “That is my personal microscope and a corkboard, Mr. Frost.”
“Chill. What about the lab on the ag-rig?”
“That is some marine biologist’s playground idea of a lab, which I borrow now and then with a please and a thank you.”
“Better hope their team lead isn’t listening in on your stream.”
She smiled. “I don’t have a stream.”
“Sure you don’t, Anon. Be respectful, this is Wolfport, not your corporate playground at the bottom of the Aleutian. We all pull our weight here.”
“I moved here because we’re on the front lines, Mr. Frost, and we’re not giving this thing another inch. I need you to leverage your authority over the unions to get the entire rig array ready for the worst.”
Dunkin swapped the chicory stick from one corner of his mouth to the other. “Slow the hell down. Are we putting Wolfport on lockdown? What about the Orca pod?”
“Are you sure you didn’t see the shimmer on the orcas?”
“No,” said Dunkin. “And come to think of it, I didn’t see it on Vox, either. Not until she was out of the water for a little while.”
Dr. Tasque stuck her tablet in her lab coat pocket and crossed her arms. She stared at Envy with no small amount of pity. “Get engineering to move the magnets over here. I have an idea.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Dunkin threw his chicory stick into a wastebasket. “They’re scrapping as we speak, I can’t shut that down!”
“If I’m going to deal with this existential crisis, I need to figure out if we’re dealing with a synthetic or organic threat. To do that, I need magnets.”
“Industrial magnets?! Neon Vox is half-chrome, are you trying to brick the oldest woman in Syndicate? Get yourself dragged by SynCon?”
“Fuck SynCon and their political darlings; medically speaking, scientifically speaking, this is no longer a ‘symbol of Syndicate psychological resilience,’ this is patient zero in a potentially world-eating pandemic.”
“Doomerism, doc.”
“Worse than world-eating,” Dr. Tasque chewed on her thumbnail. “This is world-corrupting, world-torturing. Who knows what the Cascadian shimmer does to your brain? Do you like the idea of being lobotomized? Were you watching Envy’s stream when that ‘Indicatrix’ thing went at her with tech that I -- a woman of science, a woman with three doctorates and a four-decade tour in PRISMA trenchworks -- can only describe as ‘alien’?”
That one gave Dunkin pause. “I remember it. I remember Aurok’s face.” There was a faraway look in his warm old eyes. “But… one step at a time, alright?” Dunkin smiled and clapped his leathery palm across her back.
Dr. Tasque readjusted her glasses from the force of the back-clap. “Please don’t do that.”
“Sorry, habit with the boys. You try not to fall apart up here,” he said. “And I’ll go sell the scrapper crew on sharing toys.”
“Seriously,” she glared at him. He could sense through metadata her general autistic aversion to surprises and physical contact, so he didn’t take it personally. “Don’t touch me ever again.”
Dunk smiled and held up his hands as he walked to the exit. “My bad, butterfly.”
Dr. Tasque brought down the rig’s command console and got into the local network. The native AIs watched her push into their domain like inquisitive forest spirits. One of them sent a message to the plain screen of her command console: “Do you need help?”
Another asked: “What are you trying to do, Dr. Tasque?”
Another had a simple statement: “Your hair looks nice today.”
“Thaaaank you fairies,” she smirked as she worked through the maze of sub-menus and commands on the console’s UI. “Can you help me reroute some juice from the grid to our decontamination bay? Enough for a few industrial-strength magnets.”
The fairies highlighted the various routes through the console UI with helpful highlights and thumbnails full of data and explanations. An alert went out through the Wolfport rig network, informing everyone to be patient through an upcoming series of grid fluctuations.
It took some cajoling and some promises of double-rations and OT, but Dunkin got around to persuading the scrappers to move the industrial magnets away from the engineering yard and toward the decontamination chamber.
An hour later, the sun hit noon across the Pacific coast and shone on the white caps of the misty Olympic Mountains. Algae skimmers, survey divers, cloud gliders, whale outreach boats, cable runners, ship mechanics, corner girls, cabin boys, sleep slingers, crate kids, creche moms, rig runners, and poon fishers all got the final alarm:
BRACE FOR GRID RESET… BRACE FOR GRID RESET.
Envy woke up blind. Her entire UI was dead, and none of her implants responded to her brain. She had no legs and just one arm. The sleep she’d been in before was a fever-dream of shimmering torments; Vaness, who apparently (and unsurprisingly) lived on in some form or another, had trapped Envy once more in a black box of isolated consciousness and subjected her to the usual psychological attacks intended to wear down Envy’s sense of self and drive her closer to suicide.
They were the needles of a childish bully, as they always were with the Indicatrix. Envy did not consciously recall them, but her body trembled with grief. Her heart ached in her chest. She felt softness under her back and rubbed smooth sheets between her fingers. When she moved her only arm, she felt the familiar discomfort of a plastic catheter in the hollow of her elbow, where an IV no doubt plugged into her artery.
Her hand raced to her heart, and there, lying over it, was the warm metal of her amulet of the Tao. She gripped it close.
There was a sense of solidity now that told her she was back in reality, or as PRISMA neura-techs called it, ‘the primary hallucination.’
“Can you hear me?” It was a woman’s voice, nearby.
“Yes,” Envy croaked.
“Good. What’s your name?”
“Neon Vox. People call me Envy.”
“Good. Why do they call you Envy?”
“The initials, N.V.”
“Good, good. And do you know where you are?”
“I was at sea before. My body juiced out, went low on aux-batteries. I asked an orca pod to carry me to Wolfport… so, Wolfport, I hope?”
“Right on the dot.” She heard the smile in the woman’s voice. “And what year is it?”
“It’s 2410 CE.”
“Envy… I’m so sorry. You were in a coma for a thousand years. It’s 3410.”
Envy felt a surge of fear and confusion. “W-what…?”
Envy then heard a woman’s laugh, somehow both cruel and kind. A man’s voice, one deep and paternal baritone, spoke up. “That ain’t funny, Tasque.”
Envy recognized the voice and smiled. “Dunk…?”
Envy felt a big hand stroke through her hair. Hot tears fell from Envy’s empty eye sockets and her whole body shuddered from relief. “Hey, Dunk.”
“Ma’am. You look like a botched tuna carcass, ma’am.”
“Yeah, what’s the deal with the total de-sync? Why am I naked?”
When she asked ‘naked’ she didn’t mean without clothes, but without any cyberware. Dr. Tasque picked up the line of questioning. “I’m running point on your encounter with that thing we’re now calling ‘shimmer.’ Had to uh… brick everything. Put you on life support.”
“Those were 2215 GYOTA ferro-limbs, Dr. Tasque,” Envy tried to wipe at the tears, but her arm couldn’t bend with the IV in it. She felt Dunkin dabbing in her face with a tissue. “They literally don’t make them like that anymore.”
“Sentimental attachment to obsolete cyberware aside, Neon Vox,” Dr. Tasque could be heard click-clacking on a nearby terminal, “let’s replace your basic commlink implants so you can get back on the grid and commune with SynCon.”
“Shit,” Dunkin said, “give her a week’s leave and some workman’s comp, for mercy’s sake.”
“It’s okay, Dunk,” Envy swiped blindly at his arm until she found it to give it a squeeze. It felt like grabbing a giant, hairy tree trunk. “I’m used to it. Corporate gig, and all.”
Dunk patted her hand. “Business bitch lunatic. Don’t expect me to come to your funeral if you do something as sad as die at your damned desk, face first in debrief paperwork.”
“Speaking of debrief paperwork,” said Dr. Tasque, “brace for the backlog.”
Envy felt the dull pinch of her optic nerves being stimulated by neural implants.
The darkness of Envy’s vision lit up with a warm UI. She saw her biomon stats, battery levels, hormone readouts, BPM, and her priority inbox filled with alerts. With nothing else to do as she lay there, she opened up the inbox and saw twenty URGENT messages from Junior Agent Trip Tanaka. The subject lines were in all-caps and kept going on about BIRDS.
“For goodness’ sake,” Envy muttered, “this kid is… oh, fuck, what… the fuck?”
She saw the series of pics, then the feed videos from Trip’s optics, of shimmering black crows gone psycho, stabbing at the thin walls of a shed with their beaks. She also saw two screaming mutant girls with green and blue hair, respectively.
I told him to kill those fucking fairies!
She saw the recording of the crow crackling and transforming, before being roasted by lighter fluid.
“Dr. Tasque, I’m sending you something,” said Envy.
“Let me guess,” said Task, “Tanaka’s bird crisis? It’s all over the feeds.”
“For the love of—” Envy clenched her amulet around her fist, then consciously released the tension. “In my day we had something resembling OPSEC in the field.”
“People are bored,” Dunk grunted. “They want content from the frontlines.”
Envy puffed a sigh. “What do you make of Tanaka’s situation?”
“It’s certainly weird,” Dr. Tasque began. “If there’s a connection to the shimmer, there’s three things we now know work in neutralizing it: salt, fire, and electromagnetic force.”
“Great.” Envy didn’t care, and her tone expressed it – the whole situation was overwhelming, and she had a powerful urge to sleep. “Look, I’m exhausted, and I’d like to rest while you tool me up – I’m giving you temporary clearance to send Tanaka a priority DM. Please walk him through the process of turning his suit battery into an electromagnetic bomb.”
“Is it urgent?” Asked Dr. Tasque. “I’m already ten minutes late for union lunch.”
The muscles in Envy’s empty eye sockets worked to roll eyes that weren’t there. “I’m sure SynCon will approve OT for extenuating circumstances if you work while eating.”
“I suppose a world-ending nanomachine pandemic does qualify,” said Dr. Tasque.
Envy could hear Dr. Tasque unwrapping some food. She smelled the fresh scent of chili oil, sea-beef, garlic, and lime. It was the smell of the sacred, deep-fried lovechild between the chimichanga and the banh mi sandwich; the banh-manga, a ZON corporate specialty and the sold-out darling of every public vending machine. Envy’s gut rumbled like a boiling pot.
Dunk patted her belly and chuckled. “Get this old bitch some eyes and a snack.”
“I’m afraid there will be no food for her that isn’t from a fortified glucose drip,” said Dr. Tasque, as she audibly chewed and rolled various medical devices closer to the bed.
Envy heard the familiar chime of an anesthesia machine turning on. In her mind’s eye, she could see the PRISMA corporate logo shimmering onto the screen with its rainbow colors.
“Relax,” said Dr. Tasque. “And have a fine little catnap, lioness.”
“How long until I’m out?”
“About ten seconds.”
Envy smirked. “And how do I know I can trust you, doctor?”
Envy felt a pencil tapping her forehead. “Oh, sweet soldier – who said I was a doctor?”
The last thing Envy heard before the darkness was Dunk’s complaining: “So, what, you don’t like being touched but you touch people when they’re laid out? Fucking creep.”
“I can touch with implements, that’s fine,” said Tasque.
“That’s worse. How…” it all drifted into fuzzy black nothing.
It was good to be home.