and control devices hanging below. Its segmented walls were made of triple-layer fabriglass interlaminated with ceramic micromesh—hyper-tough, impervious, and supposedly transparent. But time had hazed the walls with fragrant green-gray scum.
As the sphere gyrated down, soggy masses of ocean debris smeared against the exterior like slicks of oil. The sphere’s running lights were only marginally helpful in such thick muck. I thought about the crisp clean satellite scans Luc could have transmitted to me, if only I still had that Net node.
Before jettisoning me, Vincente had pumped both the dive sphere and the extra compression tanks full of an exotic oxy mix. My destination, he said, lay at the very bottom of the cliff—1,500 meters below sea level. The war had forced Merida to abandon her clinic. She’d gone deep, into a safe hideaway she’d built years earlier, far down in the old buried city that had once been called San Francisco. “Find the cave at the bottom of the cliff,” Vincente told me.
When I made a remark about the rusty pressure regulator controlling the auxiliary tanks, Vincente acted as if I’d insulted him. “Niña, if the sphere fails, use your surfsuit. Redundancy, sí?” Then he gallantly mended the split in my helmet—where he had kicked me—with a few rounds of duct tape.
Now, rolling through the spume of oily debris, the sphere began to spin in multiple directions, and my body somersaulted inside. I grabbed for the handholds, but they were slick with mold. My helmet slipped out of my hands and orbited like a moon. Vincente had strung ribbons of sinker weights round and round the sphere like yarn around a ball—to make sure I would descend all the way to 1,500 meters. It occurred to me now that this was not the most stable design.
You’re going to ask why I would trust such a crafty old liar as Vincente. Bien, you should have seen his eyes shine when he got that Net node in his hands. The truth fairly gushed out of him. That’s what my instincts told me anyway. Did I pause to consider his motives? Did I plan ahead in case it might be a trap? No. I am who I am. Adrienne, do you hear this? No point in making excuses after the fact.
On the other hand, I did not believe a word about Jin being brain-dead. The human will to believe is selective. It didn’t matter to me that the sea cliff dropped 1,500 meters down, that the sphere was old and brittle, and that if it failed, my surfsuit was clearly not rated for that depth. I had made my choice to do this. My mind was set. And besides, scary trips are my kind of fun.
My first discovery was that the sphere’s motor controls were frozen—probably hadn’t been serviced in years. By sheer luck, or perhaps the tide, the sphere drifted back to the sea cliff. I couldn’t see the cliff well, but as the sphere bumped against it and started moving down, the rock face appeared scabrous with knobs and folds and protrusions. I had more or less stabilized inside the sphere when, all at once, the sea turned blood red. An intense crimson flash from an undersea volcano lit up the cliff. Its size was staggering. It swelled above me, not as one smooth face but as a pair of colossal hemispheres, with that deep turbulent crevice running between. The whole thing was so large, I couldn’t see its beginning or end.
I scrubbed scum off the sphere’s inner wall to see better. The cliffs were ridged with swollen, twisted folds. Slabs of old highways and broken buildings were crushed in layers of sediment. It looked as if centuries of civilizations had been compressed and folded together. Abruptly, the red light faded, leaving me in semi-darkness. The volcanic eruption had ended.
That first hour passed slowly as the sphere rolled down the gnarly bulge. The convex walls creaked and hummed with the ocean’s mounting pressure, and the deeper I went, the more I thought about my guilt. I’m the one who introduced Jin to Merida. I kept obsessing about that. If
As the sphere gyrated down, soggy masses of ocean debris smeared against the exterior like slicks of oil. The sphere’s running lights were only marginally helpful in such thick muck. I thought about the crisp clean satellite scans Luc could have transmitted to me, if only I still had that Net node.
Before jettisoning me, Vincente had pumped both the dive sphere and the extra compression tanks full of an exotic oxy mix. My destination, he said, lay at the very bottom of the cliff—1,500 meters below sea level. The war had forced Merida to abandon her clinic. She’d gone deep, into a safe hideaway she’d built years earlier, far down in the old buried city that had once been called San Francisco. “Find the cave at the bottom of the cliff,” Vincente told me.
When I made a remark about the rusty pressure regulator controlling the auxiliary tanks, Vincente acted as if I’d insulted him. “Niña, if the sphere fails, use your surfsuit. Redundancy, sí?” Then he gallantly mended the split in my helmet—where he had kicked me—with a few rounds of duct tape.
Now, rolling through the spume of oily debris, the sphere began to spin in multiple directions, and my body somersaulted inside. I grabbed for the handholds, but they were slick with mold. My helmet slipped out of my hands and orbited like a moon. Vincente had strung ribbons of sinker weights round and round the sphere like yarn around a ball—to make sure I would descend all the way to 1,500 meters. It occurred to me now that this was not the most stable design.
You’re going to ask why I would trust such a crafty old liar as Vincente. Bien, you should have seen his eyes shine when he got that Net node in his hands. The truth fairly gushed out of him. That’s what my instincts told me anyway. Did I pause to consider his motives? Did I plan ahead in case it might be a trap? No. I am who I am. Adrienne, do you hear this? No point in making excuses after the fact.
On the other hand, I did not believe a word about Jin being brain-dead. The human will to believe is selective. It didn’t matter to me that the sea cliff dropped 1,500 meters down, that the sphere was old and brittle, and that if it failed, my surfsuit was clearly not rated for that depth. I had made my choice to do this. My mind was set. And besides, scary trips are my kind of fun.
My first discovery was that the sphere’s motor controls were frozen—probably hadn’t been serviced in years. By sheer luck, or perhaps the tide, the sphere drifted back to the sea cliff. I couldn’t see the cliff well, but as the sphere bumped against it and started moving down, the rock face appeared scabrous with knobs and folds and protrusions. I had more or less stabilized inside the sphere when, all at once, the sea turned blood red. An intense crimson flash from an undersea volcano lit up the cliff. Its size was staggering. It swelled above me, not as one smooth face but as a pair of colossal hemispheres, with that deep turbulent crevice running between. The whole thing was so large, I couldn’t see its beginning or end.
I scrubbed scum off the sphere’s inner wall to see better. The cliffs were ridged with swollen, twisted folds. Slabs of old highways and broken buildings were crushed in layers of sediment. It looked as if centuries of civilizations had been compressed and folded together. Abruptly, the red light faded, leaving me in semi-darkness. The volcanic eruption had ended.
That first hour passed slowly as the sphere rolled down the gnarly bulge. The convex walls creaked and hummed with the ocean’s mounting pressure, and the deeper I went, the more I thought about my guilt. I’m the one who introduced Jin to Merida. I kept obsessing about that. If
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