Then they go dark, and by the time anyone realizes something is wrong, the elusive last travelers from Atlantis have vanished.
What actually happened in Atlantis System is unknown at this time. Pushed to speculate I would say this: They kept their colony small and sickly because that way it would be easier to destroy. Interstellar communications beacons operating in the freezing depths of near-interstellar space require fusion reactors, and fusion reactors make it easy to breed plutonium. Systembanks are likewise vulnerable targets. Small colonies limited to a handful of hollowed-out asteroids . . . blink and nobody will miss them. If the plotters did their job carefully, there would have been numerous single points of failure in the Atlantean economy—communications hubs, factories specializing in unique and irreplaceable services, and so on. More speculatively: If everyone who knows how to build and operate a beacon station is dead or exiled, no beacon system will be rebuilt for many centuries or even millennia. It is my belief that human life is extinct in Atlantis System, and the loss of the starships sent to investigate is no coincidence: Someone is, to this day, intent on concealing the murderous, genocidal foundations of the grandest fraud in history.
“Save me the lecture, sis.” I oriented myself facedown and resumed flexing from thorax to tail, arms wrapped around the briefing box. “How far down do I have to go to see you?”
“Current range to next waypoint: thirteen kilometers horizontal on bearing two six six, eleven thousand two hundred meters vertically down.”
“Eleven kilometers”—I confess my voice cracked—“you expect me to dive?”
“Confirmed. A pressure-gradient upgrade pack has been applied to your marrow techné: You should pause for one hour after each two-kilometer depth change to allow your ’cytes to reequilibrate their hydrophobic-phase vesicles, but your body is now warranted for operation down to depths under up to two gigapascals pressure. Beyond two gPa, you may experience impaired metabolic functioning and should apply a further approved upgrade pack immediately. Warning: Deep operations below two gPa requires extensive intracyte modification and may result in fatal impairment in event of ascent above 1.8 gPa without commutation and depressurization.”
The briefing box was almost as loquacious as my annoying taskmaster aboard the chapel. I tried to roll my eyes—discovered to my discomfort that their range of motion was severely restricted—and kicked on. “Box. How deep can I go before the pressure effects become problematic? How deep is two gigapascals?”
“Approximately one hundred and ninety kilometers of liquid-phase water.”
I shuddered briefly, then oriented myself head down and flexed my tail, hard. I felt the rush of water over my skin but no sensation of internal pressure building. Whatever else they’d done to me, this mermaid body-mod certainly seemed to be at home in the crushing darkness.
“Box. If I turn round and go up, what happens?”
“Your metabolic viability will be compromised if the ambient pressure drops below fifty megapascals.” Ana’s purloined tone was bland and precise: I shuddered, trying to work it out.
“And would I be right in thinking that the laminar republics don’t reach this deep?”
“The Kingdom of Argos lays claim to surface waters to a depth of five hundred meters. The Republic of Persephone claims the strata from five five zero to two thousand meters. Below the Republic of Persephone lie the Unclaimed Deeps. Your current location is four thousand three hundred meters below the ventral frontier of the Republic of Persephone.”
How wonderfuclass="underline" I was lost in a wilderness below inhabited waters, with only this treacherous box for a guide! Worse, my kidnappers had (seemingly with Ana’s collusion) modified me for pressure resistance in such a way that if I turned tail and rose to within five kilometers of the surface, I’d explode messily. The intricate nanoscale structures in my ’cytes, modified for depth resistance, would simply puff up and stop working if they weren’t under enormous ambient pressure. Neither vision appealed. So: I could do as I was told and join Ana, and hope to talk her into letting me return to the surface. Or . . . my imagination met a rolling fogbank of uncertainty and recoiled.
I used a rare scatological phrase in the privacy of my skull, and stroked downward—straight into a field of floating parasitic worms.
I didn’t know what they were at the time, of course. What I knew was that I’d rammed something soft and rubbery that twisted around me and stuck to my skin. The quiet waters were filled with a hissing, boiling sibilance. Disoriented, I lost my sense of direction. “Krina! Attention!” the box called out. “Attention! Krina! Dive, dive, dive!”
“Which way?” I tried to shout. Whatever was sticking to the small of my back felt as if it was burning. Another loop of it rolled against my left flank, sticking and itching painfully where it touched me. I felt my chromatophores spiking up at my unseen attacker, forming hollow tubes through which nematocytes stabbed out—exuding something they’d been programmed with. The worms writhed, and the one on my back pulled away, but I could feel it take a layer of skin with it. I kicked hard, trying to dive deeper. Worms grabbed at my hair and my fins, and I kicked harder, suddenly panicking, wondering if I was fighting for my life.
Abruptly I was free of the mat, diving through clear water with half my skin on fire. I rolled, running my hands across my conjoined legs—no, my tail, I forced myself to acknowledge—feeling broken scales, sore and painful ’phores. “What was that?” I demanded.
“Bezos worms,” said the box. “Named for their characteristic acoustic signature, they form free-floating colonies between depths of two and eighty kilometers down. Morphologically, they are simple pseudonematoidea, with a tubular digestive system and no skeleton. Individual worms are a colony organism, composed of an ensemble of feral, depth-adapted mechanocytes running a parasitic metaprogram that is believed to have evolved from a weaponized virus. They are saprophytic mechanovores, directly metabolizing dead tissues falling from above and reprogramming living mechanocytes harvested from other organisms to join the ensemble—”
“You mean they’re going to reprogram the skin ’cytes they stripped off my back and make them into more worms?”
A brief pause, then the talking box resumed describing the charming habits of the worm colony, accidentally confirming my inference along the way.
“Oh for— How do I avoid them?” I demanded. Oriented head down, still adrift in the inky darkness, all I could sense was the faint play of currents in the water around me, and a very faint blue glow from below.
“Bezos worms coordinate by acoustic synchronization around two kilohertz,” the box explained. “They respond actively to challenge using their own distinctive signaling mechanism. Sound sample—” And it emitted a hissing, buzzing noise: Bzzzzz-osss. A second later, a subtly different echo from above made me cringe.
“Box.” I gritted my teeth, swallowing an obscenity. My flank burned, my back felt as if I’d been whipped, and my scalp ached. “I want you to play that sound sample again. Every sixty seconds or every time I travel a hundred meters. Can you do that? And warn me of anything else we run into that might eat me before, you know, it actually gets its teeth into my skin?”
“Yes.” A brief pause. “Extended use of acoustic signaling will impair battery life—”