The dead body’s muscles and viscera twitch and pulse regularly as individual mechanocytes desperately try to punch their way out through the woven, lifeless integument of his outer skin and clothing. Uncoupled and disoriented by his death, every ’cyte remaining in his body fights for itself: They’re not very smart, but they’re brighter than their purely biological antecedents, and the steadily increasing pressure of the mesopelagic zone is weakening the social contract that binds them into a body. The scavengers have noticed the presence of a meal falling through their space, and if they can’t escape soon, it will be too late.
Three hundred meters down, the corpses fall through a school of Bezos worms. They close around the falling bodies and tighten, adhering to each other in a matlike mass. The bodies dangle from the island as the worms prod and poke at their prize, rasping through skin with their concentric circular jaws. The harpoon’s armored body is largely immune to their efforts, but the dead man’s body is vulnerable. There is resistance: Mechanocytes do not appreciate being eaten, and fight back. But they lack coordination. Their owner could have directed their collective defense, were he still alive, lending them his sense of identity and will to selfhood. But the millimeter-scale ’cytes spilling from his dead body are weak and disoriented. They defect in their hordes, spilling into the worms’ stomatogastric mills, their resistance crumbling as the worms reprogram and repurpose them, adding them to their gut lining.
Despite the depredations of the worm colony, the body remains recognizable for another hundred meters. The worms squirm and writhe within his skin as they hunt down the remaining actuator mechanocytes and loot his feedstock exchange organs, then attempt to hack his quiescent neural trunks, wheedling the marrow techné and central neural core with recorded pleas for access and promises of repair, zombie messages harvested from previous victims. But the rich techné of the body’s marrow—the core of replicator mechanocytes from which his ordinary tissues are spawned—are either dead or firewalled, not responding.
The growing pressure of the aphotic zone threatens to wreck the delicate intracellular machinery of the worms’ own techné, crushing paraproteins and ribofabricators into nonviable conformations: They’re locked in a race against time, desperately trying to eat their fill without being pulled down below their crush depth. Finally, the worms let their prize fall, and the now-flensed skeleton continues its descent, still wearing its bag of skin for a shroud.
The body falls faster through the crushing pressure and chilly darkness of the abyssal depths. But it is not alone even here. Ghostly scavengers—little more than solitary, feral mechanocytes—latch onto his tough, barely digestible skin and patiently chew away, detaching dermal scales piece by piece. Gradually, his bones are laid bare to the night. There are neither lights nor eyes to witness the lustrous glory of fiber-reinforced titanium, still impaled on the point of the harpoon (stilled forever, its vestigial brain long since crushed by the steadily rising pressure), to note the elegance of his articulated joints, or the presence of the two external cranial interfaces, each still occupied by a soul chip.
As the corpse falls, the pressure rises, and the scavengers grow scarce. Finally, nearly a hundred kilometers below the ceiling of the world, there is a creak and a brisk pop as a seam in the cranial vault gives way. A brief mushroom cloud of debris spills from the base of his skull, and the dead harpoon rocks briefly, then topples free, falling point down into the Hadean depths. (Leading the way, it will reach its destination far ahead of the other remains.) There are more creaks and pops. The long leg bones, with their buried marrow techné let go next, and millions of the most complex mechanisms ever designed are smashed to pulp in microseconds by the mindless pressure of depths for which they are not adapted.
Hours pass, then more hours. The water grows clear and gelid in the utter darkness. Once, the utter black is broken by a pale rising glow of Cerenkov blue, roiling and bubbling with strange energies as it heads toward the surface: Then all is dark again. Hours pass, and tens of kilometers—then days, and hundreds of kilometers. Strange life lives down here, subsisting on the deadfall of Hadean dwellers whose corpses rain down from unthinkably far above. But the corpse, already stripped of anything that might be of use, is of little interest to the denizens of the deep ecosystem.
Nearly two hundred kilometers beneath the sky where he was murdered, the banker’s bones gently grind against a rocklike surface and rebound briefly before resuming their fall.
Twenty kilometers farther down, there is another impact, this time more final. The body has struck a cliff face of hard crystalline material rising from the darkness. There is no light to illuminate the pearly white finish of the sunken ultradense iceberg. Disarticulated by the impact, his bones tumble down the glacial cliff toward a plain of muddy debris that covers the tilted basalt plate where it abuts the ice. As it rebounds his damaged skull sheds its precious load, scattering the last legacy of his mind, stalled forever in the shock of sudden death.
And so it is that when his soul chips come to rest on the floor of the world ocean, their buffers are forever occupied by a meaningless exclamation of horror, by the final memory of a desperate pursuit and murder, and a debt that will never be redeemed.
part two
THE ABYSS
Arrested Development
“Will somebody tell me what’s going on?” I asked for the third time.
“I was hoping you could tell me,” Serjeant Bull rumbled from the far side of the interview table. He sounded bored rather than irritated or amused. A retina, covering its surface, showed a montage of views of my confused arrival and interview with Queen Medea.
“But I don’t know!” I rubbed my forehead. “All I can tell you is what happened to me. Which I’ve already done. Twice, now.”
“Well, why don’t you tell me again?” he asked. “Start with Taj Beacon, scholar, and your awakening in the arrivals hall.”
The worst thing about being remanded in police custody is the uncertainty; the second worst is the boredom. (Fear and pain . . . I consider myself lucky: Argos is a relatively civilized kingdom for an authoritarian tyranny, and while Medea has numerous faults, encouraging a culture of excessive brutality among her staff is not one of them. In the sunlit, nutrient-rich upper waters of Shin-Tethys, it is all too easy for disgruntled subjects to vote with their fins. Consequently, those rulers who arbitrarily torture and mutilate people do not benefit from a thriving revenue base.)
Serjeant Bull had already taken me through my account of the events of the past year on two separate interview days—I assume they were days, for between interviews and meals my coral-walled cell had darkened—and I had told him more or less exactly the same story twice now, omitting only a few details that I deemed to be of no interest to his investigation; the communiqué from Andrea, Rudi’s ownership of a slave chip (potentially a blackmailable lever over him while he was outside the safety of his vehicle’s hull and one that I felt no need to expend prematurely), Rudi’s suspicions of Deacon Dennett’s intentions (hearsay) and so on. And so I continued, for the third time:
“I am a mendicant scholar, halfway through a five-subjective-year study pilgrimage to visit and work with a number of my colleagues. My distant sib Ana, a child of an earlier fork of my own lineage mater, is one of the professors I expected to study with. I believed I would find her teaching in one of the outer republics, but apparently, two years before I arrived at Taj Beacon, she accepted a teaching post here, in Shin-Tethys. While I was in transit, I gather she disappeared. My lineage mater would be angry with me if I left a sib, even a distant one, in trouble without making at least some attempt to find her, so I took the first available passage to come here. Along the way we were waylaid and audited by feral insurance underwriters, who told me that apparently the chapel I had taken a working passage with was engaged in questionable practices and that my sib was suspected by various parties of having been involved in some sort of skullduggery. Now. Can I point out that the record will show that I wasn’t even in this star system when my sister went missing?”