I was accused of only having posted fantasy her, no SF, so here's soomething I fear most of youwill find too dry, too technical. No rocket ships or spacewarps, but definitely not fantasy style, either. I fear this tale doesn't lend itself to leaping straight in with the action, and it's only intended as a short story (about twice this length) so, you can see, it's not set up for many battles and pillage either.
*************************************
Home.
It smelt right, and his hindbrain told him he was back, not merely on holiday.
He'd chosen that station because it was close to a clothes shop he'd often used when younger. Fortunately, it was still there (he hadn't thought to check) so he stripped off his already dampening dryland gear and got up onto the laser scanning platform, knowing that the looks the young lady serving was giving him were for his patchy tan rather than anything else.
"And how long were you dryside?"
The voice – someone he should know. His biological memory went into overdrive, trying to assemble the clues; of course, his implants could interrogate the shop soft, but that would be impolite, and she'd be informed of the intrusion. Peschiri's little sister? Ah, yes "Three years – it's Doctor Jed now, Marina. And what happened to the skinny little eel who was always first into the air ducts?"
"Part of her" a hand movement indicating the torso "grew up, while another" the face, this time, particularly nose, he remembered "was very expensively modified while they were installing my secondary implants. Which is why I've taken a holiday job here, rather than in the labs or the open. Doctor, is it? Should I be coming to you with my feminine complaints?"
"Not unless they are seriously strange; my doctorate's in marine biochemistry, specialising in gastropods. I'll probably be working with more economically interesting shellfish, though."
"Might have known – unattached male, and he'll only notice me if I look like a mussel. How about this for a colour scheme?"
The costume on the screen would have dazzled a reef fish. Even allowing for the low light levels maintained in the corridors it would have been painful at twenty metres, blinding at two. If this was common, perhaps he shouldn't have been so hasty in disposing of his dryside sunglasses.
"Do people really wear that? Something more restrained for me, in greens and greys, I think."
"You're right; very few, and most of them younger than you. Still, you could have something a bit less formal, for parties and such." Her answer was aressed to the graphpad rather than him, and a more restrained outfit took shape on the screen.
"I doubt I'll be partying much, straight away – I start work tomorrow, and I've been out of circulation – yes, that's good, one like that and one with the yellow flashes accentuating the seams – for long enough that I won't be on anyone's invite list for a while."
"What, a genuine new, unattached male, who knows our ways? You won't be allowed to sleep when word gets out."
The costumes slid out, and he climbed into the first one, pressing his thumb onto the sensitised surface of the counter.
"I'll be back; I'll be needing some more changes as soon as I've seen what everyone else is wearing."
In his cubicle he was still organising his few belongings to convert the space to 'his', when the lights dimmed to 'emergency' levels. Knowing that, if the power were seriously threatened it would ignore him, he flicked on his comcon. The screen did not light, but a voice issued from the loudspeaker.
"...four tunnels, the power cables and the optical links to dry land are all severed. Power is being reserved for hydroponics and air circulation until the situation is fully analysed. Please do not attempt to contact emergency services unless your need is truly urgent. Emergency bulletin – three known FOG agents were seen to blow themselves up in the incoming tube tunnel a few minutes ago. The four tunnels, the power cables and the optical links to dry land are all sever.."
Foggers – friends of Gaia – believed that ninety percent of humanity should be eliminated, so the planet could regenerate itself. Two years ago, they had exploded an antiquated nuclear warhead against one of the giant floating islands in the Indian ocean, killing outright over a hundred and fifty thousand, and condemning at least that number more to death in the chaotic rescue and hopeless rehousing attempts that a desparate Indian government put in place – the Bengalis being totally incapable of an equivalent effort. The fact that their sabotage did more damage to the ecology than a century of the island's existence did not seem to penetrate their Luddite philosophy; reducing the human population by all means available, despite side effects, was their stated aim, and they held up the bay massacre as a major victory.
Despite all the evidence that the great melt had been caused by forces far beyond those mankind could bring to bear, their movement had swelled during the years of chaos when coastal cities were evacuated, population migrations forstalled by huge, co-operative military actions and human misery had been the norm. Now, it seemed, they were attacking those who embraced the new, enlaged oceans.
He tapped a sequence on his pad, indicating that he was there, would be sleeping, could be woken if he could be useful and lay down to achieve the second of these states.
After an indeterminite time his comcon detected the change in breathing that indicated a human was ready for more information input. The screen lit up with a message politely indicating he might like to make his way to... he downloaded the address to his implants, just as a cup of caffein/choc mix appeared through the hatch. Sipping, he stripped off his clothes and sluiced himself down – it only tasted right brewed under at least three atmospheres, and why couldn't drysiders make cups you could use under the shower? - before dressing in his second costume, and letting his implants thread the three dimensional maze to the meeting room.
"Ah, Dr. Horvitz. You've been on dry land the most recently of us – what do think of the 'anti-slimey' sentiment? If we are forced to send a large number of our citizens away, will they be treated
as badly as the Bengalis were? They'd be different, after all."
"Well, as an individual, I never had any particular problems, but the bad feeling exists, yes. We're percieved as promiscuous, clannish and bad smelling; and that last is probably what affects the majority of the populace. Furthermore, we do smell different – to do with our diet, I suspect. And that affects people at an instinctive level, way below conscious thought. No, a largish colony of us couldn't blend easily into a dry community."
"And there aren't enough other sea cities to absorb us, either. Furthermore, we don't stock enough of the 'anti-bends' compounds to get more than a third of our population depressurised safely, anyway; in fact, that's the main job I'd like you to start working on. I understand it's not your speciality, but if you could analyse a dose and see if we could synthesise it down here, rapidly and in quantity, that might be critical."
"To economise energy, the outlying buildings will be allowed to achieve thermal equilibrium, and families will double up in the main constructions" So it was with no great surprise that Jeb saw someone waiting outside the door to 'his' cubicle, but rather more that it was female, in fact it was Marina.
"I knew you were back, and took advantage of my knowledge to apply to share with you. Of course, you won't be obliged to have sex with me; but I'd be quite interested to check my sister's reports."
During the three years he's been at university Jeb has had only five partners, and one of those had been from another undersea community, a shallow one in what had been Belgium. Sex with drysiders was just not safe, and a set of taboos had grown up to reflect this situation. So his release had been, if not over artistic, enthusiastic.
"Well, that should have reduced the workload for the heaters"
"But not, unfortunately, for the dehumidifiers. Do you think we can both get into the cleanse?"
"We can try, anyway. I'm quite flexible. More important, will we be able to get out again?"
The tide and wave power generators produce energy in a form easily stored and more convenient underwater than electricity; compressed air.The huge, heavy surface buoys compress the air with the incoming swell, or the slow rise and fall of the tides, but in a high wind, or better still one of the storms the melt had proliferated, they could charge up weeks' worth.
The heat pumps, the air circulation system and a variety of transport and kitchen gadgetry ran on direct mechanical energy, never converted into electricity, while the generators for lights and comcons (originally comunications consoles, but now computer interface, entertainment centre, notebook – and communications, obviously) were lightweight turbines, a ferroceramic rotor with a few coils of superconducting wire in a polyfibre box. Simple, and almost foolproof. The only things requiring serious current were the cooking devices (running at minimum during the crisis) and a few laboratory functions. None of this lent itself to inreased efficiency but, given enough compressed air, they could survive very well without the superconducting three-phase cable to shore.
Of course there were solar panels on the buoys, but most of the output of these was involved with powering the motors that kept the other attachments to the upper surfaces, the satelite dishes, aligned with their targets.
The most important was probably the heat pumps. Not only did they heat the living quarters to a comfortable temperature (and the higher population and good insulation could probably have maintained that) but the cold end acted as a dehumidifier, producing the thousands of litres of clean, distilled water that this number of people went through. Rationing power didn't touch drinking supplies, but it did make bathing a social function, not the hardship it might have been in a more body-conscious society, or one with a higher incidence of disease.
The foggers had anticipated pictures of bedraggled sea dwellers in makeshift camps, emphasising their powerlessness, as they had had for the Bengal island. Instead, the news carried reports of determined citizens, pulling together in adversity, refusing to abandon their homes to the aggressor; a 'blitz' scenario that played well to the British public. Combined with film of how, downcurrent of the explosion, the devastated region of marine life was already larger than the entire built-up region (where, more film showed, lobsters and fish and shellfish flourished). Already the police had found a shipment of ancient depth-charges being loaded into a barge in Plymouth harbour, an attempt to restablish dominance. The perpetrators had done their bit for the planet, blowing the ship and themselves to splitnters in the harbour but the image of the undersea colony had not suffered
Engineers and technicians, frustrated at being kept from their usual teleoperating jobs by the destruction of the fibre-optic connection to land, cobbled up a sensor network out of whatever they could liberate; and sure enough, a group of scuba divers with a tow jet (stealth. Through water that thing could be heard five kilometres off, without any additional sensors) were detected, netted and disarmed. They were evidently amateurs, as they'd planned on putting their explosive under the building, having seem it floating tethered away from the bottom. They had simply not considered that, for a diving-bell type construction, this would have no effect whatsoever unless they broke enough braided monofilament to overturn the thing. As they were conducted along the dark corridors, oneof them, a woman, started insisting she had rights, and shouting out for a lawyer, aparently expecting the people she had come to kill to take her side against her captors (who were only more of the same; and when sympathy was not forthcoming, first screamed, then whimpered "You're all animals, animals", as if this didn't make her killing of them unjust by her own standards, too.
The three terrorists who had done all the damage were found to have had encapulated plutonium particles inserted in their chests and backed with explosive charges, enabling them to achieve critical mass. The explosion had only been a couple of kilotons, but that had been enough, and unmodified plutonium was the main poison in the still lethal waters; It should have been very easy to detect, particularly since the three of them were in the database as sympathisers, so it was no real surprise when two of the security guards were found to have been blackmailed into looking the other way.
Jeb was not using his degree knowledge at all; it had been decided that, should it be necessary to evacuate, one of the secondary buildings would be allowed to rise slowly to the surface, spilling air and depressurising as it went. With a calm sea, this could be extended to days, and only an extended period of calm weather could drive them from their homes. So young, fit and accustomed to underwater construction (like most of his generation from down here, but almost none from land) he was helping to build the dome over the break in the tunnels, cable and info-link, so that new sections could be spliced in. Nights were spent with Marina, but mainly in tutoring her in chemistry and computer models, so physically tired and mentally alert he found himself.
*************************************
Home.
It smelt right, and his hindbrain told him he was back, not merely on holiday.
He'd chosen that station because it was close to a clothes shop he'd often used when younger. Fortunately, it was still there (he hadn't thought to check) so he stripped off his already dampening dryland gear and got up onto the laser scanning platform, knowing that the looks the young lady serving was giving him were for his patchy tan rather than anything else.
"And how long were you dryside?"
The voice – someone he should know. His biological memory went into overdrive, trying to assemble the clues; of course, his implants could interrogate the shop soft, but that would be impolite, and she'd be informed of the intrusion. Peschiri's little sister? Ah, yes "Three years – it's Doctor Jed now, Marina. And what happened to the skinny little eel who was always first into the air ducts?"
"Part of her" a hand movement indicating the torso "grew up, while another" the face, this time, particularly nose, he remembered "was very expensively modified while they were installing my secondary implants. Which is why I've taken a holiday job here, rather than in the labs or the open. Doctor, is it? Should I be coming to you with my feminine complaints?"
"Not unless they are seriously strange; my doctorate's in marine biochemistry, specialising in gastropods. I'll probably be working with more economically interesting shellfish, though."
"Might have known – unattached male, and he'll only notice me if I look like a mussel. How about this for a colour scheme?"
The costume on the screen would have dazzled a reef fish. Even allowing for the low light levels maintained in the corridors it would have been painful at twenty metres, blinding at two. If this was common, perhaps he shouldn't have been so hasty in disposing of his dryside sunglasses.
"Do people really wear that? Something more restrained for me, in greens and greys, I think."
"You're right; very few, and most of them younger than you. Still, you could have something a bit less formal, for parties and such." Her answer was aressed to the graphpad rather than him, and a more restrained outfit took shape on the screen.
"I doubt I'll be partying much, straight away – I start work tomorrow, and I've been out of circulation – yes, that's good, one like that and one with the yellow flashes accentuating the seams – for long enough that I won't be on anyone's invite list for a while."
"What, a genuine new, unattached male, who knows our ways? You won't be allowed to sleep when word gets out."
The costumes slid out, and he climbed into the first one, pressing his thumb onto the sensitised surface of the counter.
"I'll be back; I'll be needing some more changes as soon as I've seen what everyone else is wearing."
In his cubicle he was still organising his few belongings to convert the space to 'his', when the lights dimmed to 'emergency' levels. Knowing that, if the power were seriously threatened it would ignore him, he flicked on his comcon. The screen did not light, but a voice issued from the loudspeaker.
"...four tunnels, the power cables and the optical links to dry land are all severed. Power is being reserved for hydroponics and air circulation until the situation is fully analysed. Please do not attempt to contact emergency services unless your need is truly urgent. Emergency bulletin – three known FOG agents were seen to blow themselves up in the incoming tube tunnel a few minutes ago. The four tunnels, the power cables and the optical links to dry land are all sever.."
Foggers – friends of Gaia – believed that ninety percent of humanity should be eliminated, so the planet could regenerate itself. Two years ago, they had exploded an antiquated nuclear warhead against one of the giant floating islands in the Indian ocean, killing outright over a hundred and fifty thousand, and condemning at least that number more to death in the chaotic rescue and hopeless rehousing attempts that a desparate Indian government put in place – the Bengalis being totally incapable of an equivalent effort. The fact that their sabotage did more damage to the ecology than a century of the island's existence did not seem to penetrate their Luddite philosophy; reducing the human population by all means available, despite side effects, was their stated aim, and they held up the bay massacre as a major victory.
Despite all the evidence that the great melt had been caused by forces far beyond those mankind could bring to bear, their movement had swelled during the years of chaos when coastal cities were evacuated, population migrations forstalled by huge, co-operative military actions and human misery had been the norm. Now, it seemed, they were attacking those who embraced the new, enlaged oceans.
He tapped a sequence on his pad, indicating that he was there, would be sleeping, could be woken if he could be useful and lay down to achieve the second of these states.
After an indeterminite time his comcon detected the change in breathing that indicated a human was ready for more information input. The screen lit up with a message politely indicating he might like to make his way to... he downloaded the address to his implants, just as a cup of caffein/choc mix appeared through the hatch. Sipping, he stripped off his clothes and sluiced himself down – it only tasted right brewed under at least three atmospheres, and why couldn't drysiders make cups you could use under the shower? - before dressing in his second costume, and letting his implants thread the three dimensional maze to the meeting room.
"Ah, Dr. Horvitz. You've been on dry land the most recently of us – what do think of the 'anti-slimey' sentiment? If we are forced to send a large number of our citizens away, will they be treated
as badly as the Bengalis were? They'd be different, after all."
"Well, as an individual, I never had any particular problems, but the bad feeling exists, yes. We're percieved as promiscuous, clannish and bad smelling; and that last is probably what affects the majority of the populace. Furthermore, we do smell different – to do with our diet, I suspect. And that affects people at an instinctive level, way below conscious thought. No, a largish colony of us couldn't blend easily into a dry community."
"And there aren't enough other sea cities to absorb us, either. Furthermore, we don't stock enough of the 'anti-bends' compounds to get more than a third of our population depressurised safely, anyway; in fact, that's the main job I'd like you to start working on. I understand it's not your speciality, but if you could analyse a dose and see if we could synthesise it down here, rapidly and in quantity, that might be critical."
"To economise energy, the outlying buildings will be allowed to achieve thermal equilibrium, and families will double up in the main constructions" So it was with no great surprise that Jeb saw someone waiting outside the door to 'his' cubicle, but rather more that it was female, in fact it was Marina.
"I knew you were back, and took advantage of my knowledge to apply to share with you. Of course, you won't be obliged to have sex with me; but I'd be quite interested to check my sister's reports."
During the three years he's been at university Jeb has had only five partners, and one of those had been from another undersea community, a shallow one in what had been Belgium. Sex with drysiders was just not safe, and a set of taboos had grown up to reflect this situation. So his release had been, if not over artistic, enthusiastic.
"Well, that should have reduced the workload for the heaters"
"But not, unfortunately, for the dehumidifiers. Do you think we can both get into the cleanse?"
"We can try, anyway. I'm quite flexible. More important, will we be able to get out again?"
The tide and wave power generators produce energy in a form easily stored and more convenient underwater than electricity; compressed air.The huge, heavy surface buoys compress the air with the incoming swell, or the slow rise and fall of the tides, but in a high wind, or better still one of the storms the melt had proliferated, they could charge up weeks' worth.
The heat pumps, the air circulation system and a variety of transport and kitchen gadgetry ran on direct mechanical energy, never converted into electricity, while the generators for lights and comcons (originally comunications consoles, but now computer interface, entertainment centre, notebook – and communications, obviously) were lightweight turbines, a ferroceramic rotor with a few coils of superconducting wire in a polyfibre box. Simple, and almost foolproof. The only things requiring serious current were the cooking devices (running at minimum during the crisis) and a few laboratory functions. None of this lent itself to inreased efficiency but, given enough compressed air, they could survive very well without the superconducting three-phase cable to shore.
Of course there were solar panels on the buoys, but most of the output of these was involved with powering the motors that kept the other attachments to the upper surfaces, the satelite dishes, aligned with their targets.
The most important was probably the heat pumps. Not only did they heat the living quarters to a comfortable temperature (and the higher population and good insulation could probably have maintained that) but the cold end acted as a dehumidifier, producing the thousands of litres of clean, distilled water that this number of people went through. Rationing power didn't touch drinking supplies, but it did make bathing a social function, not the hardship it might have been in a more body-conscious society, or one with a higher incidence of disease.
The foggers had anticipated pictures of bedraggled sea dwellers in makeshift camps, emphasising their powerlessness, as they had had for the Bengal island. Instead, the news carried reports of determined citizens, pulling together in adversity, refusing to abandon their homes to the aggressor; a 'blitz' scenario that played well to the British public. Combined with film of how, downcurrent of the explosion, the devastated region of marine life was already larger than the entire built-up region (where, more film showed, lobsters and fish and shellfish flourished). Already the police had found a shipment of ancient depth-charges being loaded into a barge in Plymouth harbour, an attempt to restablish dominance. The perpetrators had done their bit for the planet, blowing the ship and themselves to splitnters in the harbour but the image of the undersea colony had not suffered
Engineers and technicians, frustrated at being kept from their usual teleoperating jobs by the destruction of the fibre-optic connection to land, cobbled up a sensor network out of whatever they could liberate; and sure enough, a group of scuba divers with a tow jet (stealth. Through water that thing could be heard five kilometres off, without any additional sensors) were detected, netted and disarmed. They were evidently amateurs, as they'd planned on putting their explosive under the building, having seem it floating tethered away from the bottom. They had simply not considered that, for a diving-bell type construction, this would have no effect whatsoever unless they broke enough braided monofilament to overturn the thing. As they were conducted along the dark corridors, oneof them, a woman, started insisting she had rights, and shouting out for a lawyer, aparently expecting the people she had come to kill to take her side against her captors (who were only more of the same; and when sympathy was not forthcoming, first screamed, then whimpered "You're all animals, animals", as if this didn't make her killing of them unjust by her own standards, too.
The three terrorists who had done all the damage were found to have had encapulated plutonium particles inserted in their chests and backed with explosive charges, enabling them to achieve critical mass. The explosion had only been a couple of kilotons, but that had been enough, and unmodified plutonium was the main poison in the still lethal waters; It should have been very easy to detect, particularly since the three of them were in the database as sympathisers, so it was no real surprise when two of the security guards were found to have been blackmailed into looking the other way.
Jeb was not using his degree knowledge at all; it had been decided that, should it be necessary to evacuate, one of the secondary buildings would be allowed to rise slowly to the surface, spilling air and depressurising as it went. With a calm sea, this could be extended to days, and only an extended period of calm weather could drive them from their homes. So young, fit and accustomed to underwater construction (like most of his generation from down here, but almost none from land) he was helping to build the dome over the break in the tunnels, cable and info-link, so that new sections could be spliced in. Nights were spent with Marina, but mainly in tutoring her in chemistry and computer models, so physically tired and mentally alert he found himself.
