More than fifty years ago, we (myself, Ana, a handful of sibs and half-sibs and interested correspondents) established some ground rules and began investigating the Atlantis disappearance. And we started out by working on the assumption that it was an instance of the FTL scam.
Our first question—cui buono?—has a number of possible answers. Our obvious initial suspects were those founders of Atlantis colony who came from established wealthy lineages—which turned out to be most of them, for to buy shares in a starship venture is not the undertaking of a pauper.
But the surviving relatives of the founders of Atlantis had come under instant suspicion, back in the day; at best, they had lived out their subsequent lives under a perpetual cloud of surveillance, subjected to frequent audits. They must have rued their missing sibs’ activities! Certainly, none of them had received significant sums of slow money from Atlanteans desperate to hide their ill-gotten loot. (At worst, they disappeared—presumably kidnapped and interrogated destructively by those who wouldn’t take a mere audit for an exculpatory answer.)
Moving forward, we examined the banks and the bourses and the share gambling casinos and the insurance brokers who had been heavily implicated in transferring money to Atlantis Beacon. In particular, we looked at the public records of those banks that had declared bankruptcy in the wake of the crisis—for those were the ones that had been heaviest hit.
And that’s when we began to suspect that, despite centuries of highly motivated inquisitors finding nothing, we were right and there had been a fraud of monumental proportions. Because the boulders of evidence lying around were so enormous that we had mistaken it for the geography of the interstellar financial landscape.
The evidence was written in the stars.
Put yourself in my skin:
Distracted and somewhat bemused, you’re in a hotel room, thinking about the wreckage of your long-term strategy while a member of the staff you asked for is poking you with questions. “If you’d like to sit down and plug in this diagnostic cable I can dump your body’s structural layout and ask them to tender—”
You sit down and take the fiber-optic cable. “Where does this go?” you ask, holding up the free end, still freewheeling through possibilities: the need to send an advance message back to Andrea acknowledging receipt and confirming that you’ll be returning as soon as possible, solicitations for a fast physical berth back up to Taj Beacon, wondering how much the security detail you need is going to cost.
“Right here. If you’ll allow me—” You nod. Something touches the back of your neck. And the next thing you know:
Falling in darkness, head down, pressure rising.
You try to kick, but your legs are trussed together. You try to move your arms, but they’re not responding properly. Panicking, you open your eyes, then open them again—eyelids open within eyelids, like waking inside a nightmarish lucid dream. You feel as if your legs are wrapped tightly in a sleeping cocoon—but there is no fabric in contact with your skin: You are naked. Fingers flex apart, slowly, then stop, a sense of tension dragging between them. You feel your arms begin to move, but something keeps dragging them back against your body. You kick again, both legs simultaneously. You have the strangest sensation, as if you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins: But your inertial sense tells you something just happened, you’re not falling straight down anymore. There is stuff around you: not air, but a thicker and denser medium. Your legs are hobbled, but your feet feel the flow, and as you twist your prehensile toes, you roll onto your back. There is a faint glow of light far above you, punctuated by the silhouette of a cargo cylinder floating like a hole in your night vision. Kick again, and you feel the surge of water across your skin.
Not breathing; panic again.
I’m unsure how long it went on for. The resumption of my higher cognitive functioning took some time: During their biosculptural activities, my abductors suppressed my central nervous system, presumably to avoid having to deal with my displeasure at their actions. Now it took me some considerable effort to regain full awareness of my condition. Waking up in darkness and free fall, albeit in a liquid environment, with a cargo pod receding above me—well, I’d been in such a pod before, when the Queen had remanded me into the custody of her police officers. And I was obviously deep underwater and getting deeper, but not breathing, not breathless—I had gills. I could feel the flow through my throat and chest, a hollow, crushing sensation in my lungs, distant, as if they were packed with glass-fiber bundles. Legs locked together, but a powerful kick, feeling the pressure of water with my toes, but the toes of which foot? Left, right? It was hard to tell, nebulous, as if the distinction barely mattered. I tried to flex one knee, then the other: got nowhere, nothing but a gentle pushback from the medium. Overthinking, overcontrolling: I tried to relax, to stop worrying about the lack of sensation, and flexed. Flexed again and felt the world rush past around me as my fall slowed and stopped, transitioned smoothly into something like flight.
Changed. I’ve been changed.
You might think me slow, but I was still becoming aware of the modifications that I have described. I found that I could hear for an incredible distance. The medium I moved in was full of noises, burbling and twittering and high-pitched clicking and grinding that surely would have been inaudible in air. Some other sense, previously inarticulate or ignored, told me that I was almost half a kilometer down. If I came up too fast, I’d burst. I was, in fact, exiled from the laminar kingdoms, unreachably far above. It would take days for me to make my way back up there: And for all I knew, Nova Ploetsk could be hundreds of kilometers away.
Who did this to me, and why?
The anger was building fast when a voice below me said, very distinctly, “Krina.”
I thought I recognized the voice. “What?” I tried to say, rolling to face the darkness below. I’m not sure what came out: a booming rumble, possibly.
“Krina,” it said, again. “Can you talk?”
“Hey,” I attempted. A bit more successfully: “Who. Who are you?”
“I’m a messenger,” said the voice. Below, in darkness, I could see nothing.
“What are—” Icy-cold logic cut through my confusion and anger and I stopped. Whoever you are, I thought, you are complicit in this kidnapping. But the voice was eerily familiar. Something about its intonation reminded me of myself. “Explain yourself. What’s going on? Why did you have me abducted?”
“I’m a messenger,” the voice repeated, intonation exact. My optimism sank: another talking box with a fake personality. “Krina, I am ten meters below you and five meters ahead of you. Retrieve me, and I will guide you to your destination.”
“What destination?” I demanded, but I was already angling my head down to search for the sound source. I felt as if I could see it with my ears, a dense void in the acoustic medium. “Where is Argos from here?” (I could neither hear nor see the city, but inferred it was behind and impossibly high above me, in the sunlit near vacuum of the upper waters). A kick and a twist, and I felt a knot in the water nearby: I reached out and grabbed, caught and held on to a blocky capsule the size of both my fists. Its surface was tacky, as if primed to adhere to skin.