Read Online Starfish by Peter Watts - Free Book Online Page B

cut into you and you'll change ...
    But Fischer wasn't going to be rushed. "So what do I do for one year, underwater?"
    Scanlon showed him a vid.
    "Geez," Fischer said. "I can't do any of that."
    "No problem." Scanlon smiled. "You'll learn."

    * * *
    He did, too.
    A lot of it happened while he was sleeping. Every night they'd give him an injection, to help him learn, Scanlon said. Afterwards a machine beside his bed would feed him dreams. He could never exactly remember them but something must have stuck, because every morning he'd sit at the console with his tutor — a real person, though, not a program — and all the text and diagrams she showed him would be strangely familiar. Like he'd known it all years ago, and had just forgotten. Now he remembered everything: plate tectonics and subduction zones, Archimedes Principle, the thermal conductivity of two percent hydrox. Aldosterone.
    Alloplasty.
    He remembered his left lung after they cut it out, and the technical specs on the machines they put in its place.
    Afternoons, they'd attach leads to his body and saturate his striated muscles with low-amp current. He was starting to understand what was going on, now; the term was induced isometrics , and its meaning had come to him in a dream.
    A week after the operation he woke up with a fever.
    "Nothing to worry about," Scanlon told him. "That's just the last stage of your infection."
    "Infection?"
    "We shot you up with a retrovirus the day you came here. Didn't you know?"
    Fischer grabbed Scanlon's arm. "Like a disease? You—"
    "It's perfectly safe, Gerry." Scanlon smiled patiently, disentangling himself. "In fact, you wouldn't last very long down there without it; human enzymes don't work well at high pressure. So we loaded some extra genes into a tame virus and sent it in. It's been rewriting you from the inside out. Judging by your fever I'd say it's nearly finished. You should be feeling better in a day or so."
    "Rewriting?"
    "Half your enzymes come in two flavors now. They got the genes from one of those deep-water fish. Rattails, I think they're called." Scanlon patted Fischer on the shoulder. "So how does it feel to be part fish, Gerry?"
    " Coryphaenoides armatus ," Fischer said slowly.
    Scanlon frowned. "What was that?"
    "Rattails." Fischer concentrated. "Mostly dehydrogenases, right?"
    Scanlon glanced at the machine by the bed. "I'm, um, not sure."
    "That's it. Dehydrogenases. But they tweaked them to reduce the activation energy." He tapped his temple. "It's all here. Only I haven't done the tutorial yet."
    "That's great," Scanlon said; but he didn't sound like he meant it.

    * * *
    One day they put him in a tank built like a piston, five stories tall: its roof could press down like a giant hand, squeezing whatever was inside. They sealed the hatch and flooded the tank with seawater.
    Scanlon had warned him about the change. "We flood your trachea and your head cavities, but your lung and intestines aren't rigid so they just squeeze down. We're immunizing you against pressure, you see? They say it's a bit like drowning, but you get used to it."
    It wasn't that bad, actually. Fischer's guts twisted in on themselves, and his sinuses burned like hell, but he'd take that over another bout with Kevin any day.
    He floated there in the tank, seawater sliding through the tubes in his chest, and reflected on the queasy sensation of not breathing.
    "They're getting some turbulence." Scanlon's voice came at him from all directions, as if the walls themselves were talking. "From your exhaust port."
    A fine trail of bubbles was trickling from Fischer's chest. His eyecaps made everything seem marvelously clear, like a hallucination. "Just a bit of—"
    Not his voice. His words, but spoken by something else, some cheap machine that didn't know about harmonics. One hand went automatically to the disk embedded in his throat.
    "—hydrogen," he tried again. "No problem. Pressure'll squeeze them down when I get deep enough."
    "Yeah.