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. Still." Other words, muffled, as Scanlon spoke to someone else. Fischer felt something vibrate softly in his chest. The bubbles grew larger, then smaller. Then disappeared.

Scanlon was back. "Better?"

"Yeah." Fischer didn't know how he felt about this, though. He didn't really like having a chest full of machinery. He didn't really like having to breathe by chopping water into chunks of hydrogen and oxygen. But he really didn't like the idea of some tech he'd never even met fiddling with his insides by remote control, reaching into his body and messing around in there without even asking. It made him feel—

Violated, right?

Sometimes Shadow was just a bitch. As if she hadn't been the one to put him up to it in the first place.

"We're going to kill the lights now, Gerry."

Darkness. The water hummed with the sound of vast machinery.

After a few moments he noticed a cold blue spark winking at him from somewhere overhead. It seemed to cast a lot more light than it should. As he watched, the inside of the tank reappeared in hazy shades of blue-on-black.

"Photoamps working okay?" Scanlon wanted to know.

"Uh huh."

"What can you see?"

"Everything. The inside of the tank. The hatch. Sort of bluish."

"Right. Luciferin light source."

"It's not very bright," Fischer said. "Everything's sort of like, dusk."

"Well, it'd be pitch black without your eyecaps."

And suddenly, it was.

"Hey."

"Don't worry, Gerry. Everything's fine. We just shut the light off."

He lay there in utter darkness. Floaters wriggled at the corner of his eye.

"How are you feeling, Gerry? Any sensation of falling? Claustrophobia?"

He felt almost peaceful.

"Gerry?"

"No. Nothing. I feel—fine—"

"Pressure's at two thousand meters."

"I can't feel it."

This might not be so bad after all. One year. One year…

"Doctor Scanlon," he said after a while. He was even getting used to the metallic buzz of his new voice.

"Right here."

"Why me?"

"What do you mean, Gerry?"

"I wasn't, you know, qualified. Even after all this training I bet there's lots of people who'd be better at this than me. Real engineers."

"It's not so much what you know," Scanlon said. "It's what you are."

He knew what he was. People had been telling him for as long as he could remember. He didn't see what the fuck that had to do with anything. "What's that, then?"

At first he thought he wasn't going to get an answer. But Scanlon finally spoke, and when he did there was something in his voice that Fischer had never heard before.

"Pre-adapted," was what he said.

The Pacific Ocean slopped two kilometers under his feet. He had a cargo of blank-eyed psychotics sitting behind him. And the lifter was being piloted by a large pizza with extra cheese. Joel Kita liked it all about as much as could be expected.

At least he had been expecting it, this time. For once the GA hadn't sprung one of their exercises in chaos theory onto his life without warning. He'd seen it coming almost a week in advance, when they'd sprung one onto Ray Stericker instead. Ray had been in this very cockpit, watching the pizza being installed and no doubt wondering when the term "job security" had become an oxymoron.

"I'm supposed to baby-sit it for a week," he had said then. Joel had climbed up into the 'scaphe for the usual preflight check and found his friend waiting by the controls. Ray had gestured up through the open hatchway to the lifter's cockpit, where a couple of techs were busy interfacing something to the controls. "Just in case it screws up in the field. Then I'm gone."

"Gone where?" Joel couldn't believe it. Ray had been on the Juan de Fuca run forever, even before the geothermal program. He’d even been an employee, back when such things were commonplace.

"Probably the Gorda circuit for a while. After that, who knows? They'll be upgrading everything before long."

Joel glanced up through the hatch. The techs were playing with a square vanilla box, half a meter on a side and about twice as thick as Kita's wrist. "What is the fucking thing? Some kind of autopilot?"

"With a difference. This takes off and lands. And all sorts of lovely things in between."

This was not good news. Humans had always been able to integrate three-D spatial information better than the machines that kept trying to replace them. Not that machines couldn't recognize a tree or a building when such objects were pointed out to them, but they got real confused whenever you rotated any of those objects a few degrees. The shapes changed, contrast and shadow shifted, and it always took way too long for any of those arsenide pretenders to update its spatial maps and recognize that yes, it's still a tree, and no, it didn't morph into something else, dummy, you just changed your point of view.

In some places that wasn't a problem. Ocean surfaces, for example. Or controlled-access highways where the cars had their own ID transponders. Or even lashed to the underside of a giant squashed doughnut filled with buoyant vacuum, floating in mid-air. These had been respected and venerable environments for autopilots since well before the turn of the century.

Take-offs and landings were a different scene altogether, though. Too many real objects going by too fast, too many things to keep an eye on. A few billion years of natural selection still had the edge when the fast lane got that crowded.

Until now, apparently.

"Let's get out of here." Ray dropped down onto the landing pad. Joel followed him out to the edge of the roof. Green tangled blankets of kudzu₄ spread out around them, shrouding the roofs of surrounding buildings. It always made Joel think post-apocalypse — weeds and ivy crawling back in from the wilderness to strangle the residue of some fallen civilization. Except, of course, these particular weeds were supposed to save civilization.

Way out by the coast, barely visible, streamers of smoke dribbled into the sky from the refugee strip. So much for civilization.

"It's one of those smart gels," Ray said at last.

"Smart gels?"

"Head cheese. Cultured brain cells on a slab. The same things they've been plugging into the Net to firewall infections."

"I know what they are, Ray. I just can't fucking believe it."

"Well, believe it. They'll be coming for you too, give 'em enough time."

"Yeah. Probably." Joel let it sink in. "I wonder when."

Ray shrugged. "You've got some breathing space. All that unpredictable volcanic shit, things blowing up under you. Nastier than flying a hoover. Harder to replace you."

He looked back at the lifter, and the 'scaphe nestled into its underbelly.

"Won't take long, though."

Joel fished a derm out of his pocket; a tricyclic with a mild lithium chaser. He held it out without a word.