He doesn't dare ask aloud, so he turns to leave. And when Lenie Clarke lays one finger, very briefly, on the screen where Acton's icon flashes, he pretends not to notice.
TRANS/OFFI/260850:1352
I recently had an interesting conversation with Lenie Clarke. Although she didn't admit so openly— she is very well defended, and quite expert at hiding her feelings from laypeople— I believe that she and Karl Acton were sexually involved. This is a heartening discovery, insofar as my original profiles strongly suggested that such a relationship would develop. (Clarke has a history of relationships with Intermittent Explosives.) This adds a measure of empirical confidence to other, related predictions regarding rifter behavior.
I have also learned that Karl Acton, rather than simply disappearing, was actually killed by an erupting smoker. I don't know what he was doing down there— I'll continue to investigate— but the behavior itself seems foolish at best and quite possibly suicidal. Suicide is not consistent either with Karl Acton's DSM or ECM profiles, which must have been accurate when first derived. Suicide, therefore, would imply a degree of basic personality change. This is consistent with the trauma-addiction scenario. However, some sort of physical brain injury can not be ruled out. My search of the medical logs didn't turn up any head injuries, but was limited to living participants. Perhaps Acton was… different…
Oh. I found out who Archie Toothis is. Not in the personnel files at all. The library. Architeuthis: giant squid.
I think she was kidding.
Bulrushes
At times like this it seems as if the world has always been black.
It hasn't, of course. Joel Kita caught a hint of ambient blue out the dorsal port just ten minutes ago. Right before they dropped through the deep scattering layer; pretty thin stuff compared to the old days, he's been told, but still impressive. Glowing siphonophores and flashlight fish and all. Still beautiful.
That's a thousand meters above them now. Right here there's nothing but the thin vertical slash of Beebe's transponder line. Joel has put the 'scaphe into a lazy spin during the drop, forward floods sweeping the water in a descending corkscrew. The transponder line swings past the main viewport every thirty seconds or so, keeping time, a bright vertical line against the dark.
Other than that, blackness.
A tiny monster bumps the port. Needle teeth so long the mouth can't close, an eel-like body studded with glowing photophores— fifteen, twenty centimeters long, tops. It's not even big enough to make a sound when it hits and then it's gone, spinning away above them.
"Viperfish," Jarvis says.
Joel glances around at his passenger, hunched up beside him to take advantage of what might laughingly be called "the view". Jarvis is some sort of cellular physiologist out of Rand/Washington U., here to collect a mysterious package in a plain brown wrapper.
"See many of those?" he asks now.
Joel shakes his head. "Not this far down. Kind of unusual."
"Yeah, well, this whole area is unusual. That's why I'm here."
Joel checks tactical, nudges a trim tab.
"Now viperfish, they're not supposed to get any bigger than the one you just saw," Jarvis remarks. "But there was a guy, oh, back in the 1930s— Beebe his name was, the same guy they named— anyway, he swore he saw one that was over two meters long."
Joel grunts. "Didn't know people came down here back then."
"Yeah, well, they were just starting out. And everyone had always thought deepwater fish were these puny little midgets, because that's all they ever brought up in their trawls. But then Beebe sees this big ripping viperfish, and people start thinking hey, maybe we only caught little ones because all the big ones could outswim the trawls. Maybe the deep sea really is teeming with giant monsters."
"It's not," Joel says. "At least, not that I've seen."
"Yeah, well, that's what most people think. Every now and then you get pieces of something weird washing up, though. And of course there's Megamouth. And your garden-variety giant squid."
"They never get down this far. I bet none of your other giants do either. Not enough food."
"Except for the vents," Jarvis says.
"Except for the vents."
"Actually," Jarvis amends, "except for this vent."
The transponder line swings past, a silent metronome.
"Yeah," says Joel after a moment. "Why is that?"
"Well, we're not sure. We're working on it, though. That's what I'm doing here. Gonna bag one of those scaly mothers."
"You're kidding. We going to butt it to death with the hull?"
"Actually, it's already been bagged. The rifters got it for us a couple of days ago. All we do is pick it up."
"I could do that solo. Why'd you come along?"
"Got to check to make sure they did it right. Don't want the canister blowing up on the surface."
"And that extra tank you strapped onto my 'scaphe? The one with the biohazard stickers all over it?"
"Oh," Jarvis says. "That's just to sterilize the sample."
"Uh huh." Joel lets his eyes run over the panels. "You must pull a lot of weight back on shore."
"Oh? Why's that?"
"I used to make the Channer run a lot. Pharmaceutical dives, supply trips to Beebe, ecotourism. A while back I shuttled some corpse type out to Beebe; he said he was staying for a month or so. The GA calls me three days later and tells me to go pick him up. I show up for the run and they tell me it's cancelled. No explanation."
"Pretty strange," Jarvis remarks.
"You're the first run I've had to Channer in six weeks. You're the first run anyone's had, from what I can tell. So, you pull some weight."
"Not really." Jarvis shrugs in the half-light. "I'm just a research associate. I go where they tell me, just like you. Today they told me to go and pick up an order of fish to go."
Joel looks at him.
"You were asking why they got so big," Jarvis says, deking to the right. "We figure it's some kind of endosymbiotic infection."
"No shit."
"Say it's easier for some microbe to live inside a fish than out in the ocean — less osmotic stress — so once inside it's pumping out more ATP than it needs."
"ATP," Joel says.
"High-energy phosphate compound. Cellular battery. Anyway, it spits out this surplus ATP, and the host fish can use it as extra growth energy. So maybe Channer Vent's got some sort of unique bug that infects teleost fishes and gives 'em a growth spurt."
"Pretty weird."
"Actually, happens all the time. Every one of your own cells is a colony, for that matter. You know, nucleus, mitochondria, chloroplasts if you're a plant—"
"I'm not." More than I can say for some folks…
"— those all used to be free-living microbes in their own right. A few billion years ago something ate them, but it couldn't digest them properly so they all just kept living inside the cytoplasm. Eventually they struck up a deal with the host cell, took over housecleaning tasks and suchlike in lieu of rent. Voila: your modern eukaryotic cell."
"So what happens if this Channer bug gets into a person? We all grow three meters high?"
A polite laugh. "Nope. People stop growing when they reach adulthood. So do most vertebrates, actually. Fish, on the other hand, keep growing their whole lives. And deepwater fish—those don't do anything except grow, if you know what I mean."
Joel raises his eyebrows.
Jarvis holds up his hands. "I know, I know. Your baby finger is bigger than your average deepsea fish. But that just means they're short of fuel; when they do gas up, believe me, they use it for growth. Why waste calories just swimming around when you can't see anything anyway? In dark environments it makes more sense for predators to sit-and-wait. Whereas if you grow big enough, maybe you'll get too big for other predators, you see?"