Somewhere else and somewhen later, the “hotel doctor” and their accomplices retrieved me. I can’t describe the location, only infer that it was probably deeper than the hotel, and in a cheaper neighborhood populated by fly-by-night businesses and anonymous warehouses. There would have been cassettes of unassimilated mechanocytes to hand, seething and squabbling in search of a body to join. A power supply and liquid feedstock. There would have been a vivisection slab. The doctor and his accomplices would have lifted my body onto the slab and shackled it in place before they took up their scalpels and sketched lines on my skin, then my ’cytes to fissure to either side.
What I’d intended to buy was a set of minor body-mods that would make life in the sunlit surface waters easier for the remainder of my stay: After all, although I hoped to linger in Nova Ploetsk no longer than a few tens of days, experience had taught me that orbital dynamics paid no heed to my travel preferences. I might be stuck here for some time, and webbed fingers and toes, enhanced oxygen storage capacity, and an enhanced orientation sense all seemed to make sense.
But my abductors were working at the orders of someone who had other plans for me. They went to work on my body, mutilating and resculpting it to fit a design template they’d been given and, on a smaller scale, broadcasting a series of radical firmware updates to my ’cytes, equipping them to function in the abyssal depths.
First they broke my feet, removed most of the fine bones, and replaced them with radiating weblike fins. Then they split the fleshy inner surface of my legs apart and added shims of new flesh, fusing muscle masses back together to form a seamless, tapering trunk. My pelvic girdle they resectioned, and my hip joints they completely replaced: Buttocks disappeared. Walking upright would be impossible in my new form.
My skin chromatophores adopted new and oddly toothlike shapes, overlapping, scaly, and iridescent. I was streamlined everywhere, curved and polished to reduce drag.
Internal organs changed, too. Countercurrent recyclers and feedstock processors were moved; ducts and peristaltic tubes and support webbing were rearranged to make better use of the space between my narrowed hips and my rib cage. My gas-exchange lungs they replaced completely, installing new ones that still worked but that could be sealed off from my throat and collapsed safely under extreme pressure, then reinflated subsequently. They added gills behind cunningly concealed flaps in my neck and upper thorax. They added webbing between my fingers and acoustic sensory lines along my flanks.
Then they broke my face.
We are not Fragile, but our minds are based on an emulation of the Fragile neuroanatomy, and the Fragile recognize each other by facial appearance. It underlies our sense of identity at a very deep level, so that damage-induced changes to facial structure cause considerable psychological distress. My abductors changed me, editing my face so that at the end of the process my new form was a barely recognizable parody of Krina.
Some of the changes were subtle or invisible to me. They resculpted my skull for better hydrodynamic flow. Made subtle changes to hair and skin texture. But other changes were more noticeable. A flatter, smaller button nose with internal pressure flaps to seal it. Point-tipped ears that folded back flush against the sides of my skull. And as for my eyes—
There is pitifully little light in the Hadean depths of the world-ocean. What light exists is mostly the product of bioluminescent processes, or the dreaded blue smokers that fission and boil as they rise from the ice-clad core of the world. To trap this light, small, jelly-filled capsules are insufficient. And so my abductors broke my facial bones apart, peeled out my cheeks, and resculpted the orbits of my eyes. Then they deglobed me, opened up my eyeballs, and expanded them, adding exotic sensors before they shoved them back inside my face and rebuilt my skin. My new eyes were huge and dark, fist-sized spheres nestling behind eyelids padded with epicanthic folds and lined with nictitating membranes to seal and protect them. My face was distorted around them, narrow-chinned and small-mouthed and pointy. Elfin in a horrible, uncanny parody of my former appearance.
Probably they thought it wouldn’t matter to me. After all, where I was going, there were no mirrors.
There were deeper changes, too. Within every mechanocyte in my body, subtle, engineered modifications proceeded to allow the molecular machinery to withstand the crushing pressures and chills of the eternal-midnight depths. Aqueous and hydrophobic fluids expand and contract at different rates when under pressure, introducing subtle distortions into enzymes and replicators and molecular tools. The antipressure toolkit stabilized molecules, armored active centers and receptor sites—at a metabolic cost: I’d need to consume more nutrients or clock my metabolism more slowly. I’d lose resilience at high temperatures and in vacuum. I’d be prone to gout and a condition not unlike arthritis among the Fragile if I spent too long in low-pressure regimes. And, of course, my newly tweaked body would need to pace itself as it descended or ascended, to avoid a messy and agonizing death.
I’m not sure how long the “hotel doctor” and his assistants worked on my flesh. Certainly, the changes were drastic, even radicaclass="underline" Turning a surface-dwelling orthohumanoid into a free-swimming Hadean was an extreme process. But eventually the job was finished, and they transferred me, still in a state of deep unconsciousness maintained by a metabolic debugger chip, back into a cargo pod. They attached a small outboard motor to the capsule and dumped it into the waters below the city, to slowly sink through the thermoclinal frontier below the Kingdom of Argos and into the savage darkness below—the home of the squid-people, the wild mermaid tribes, and my shadowy captor who had paid to remake me in their form.
Slow money doesn’t grow on trees. It is a bitcoinage, generated algorithmically, the twist in the tale being that it is countersigned by banks orbiting other stars to authenticate the system where it is minted. It is no accident that a single slow dollar is roughly equal in value to the productive labor of a skilled worker over a period of a hundred standard years. Or that for the first decades of any new colony, a debt of slow money would be incurred in order to acquire the services of colonists willing to accept the risks of serialization and transfer across interstellar distances via beacon laser, a debt which would later be paid off by the establishment of daughter colonies. Debt is the economic engine that spreads humanity to the stars. But what happens if a colony racks up so much debt that it cannot repay it through ordinary means?
Involuntary autarky is a possibility. It is not as if there exist any physical commodities that can justify the cost of shipping between the stars—we trade in bits, not atoms, and a hermit kingdom is in principle capable of surviving for centuries or millennia without input. They might be reduced to eating one another toward the end, but some would say: If that’s the price of freedom . . .
We—those of us who are of Post Humanity descended from the Fragile—are accustomed to being part of a greater economy. We expect to participate in a greater culture, vicariously abstracting the arts, amusements, insights, and personalities of hundreds of star systems. Autarky sucks for everyone except the reigning monarch or other tyrant who ordered it. It’s the systemic equivalent of locking yourself in your home and pretending you’re not in to avoid your creditors.