Deep End

Maria

Slam.

"What you call this swill?" the patron demanded.

"I call it fermented waste," I snapped. "And you didn't complain yesterday when you got yourself smashed on it, so why start now?"

"I had a bad day."

"I could tell. You came here."

Welcome to the Deep End, Fantasma's bar. I'm not sure whose idea it was to set this place up, probably it was Ghost Icey's. But I'm glad. I'd've been pretty bored in this place without this job.

It wasn't even as boring as one might assume, indeed, it got rather exciting trying to convince Ghost Delithita to surrender enough biomass to ferment anything. Usually even with the accelerant we only got a hundred fifty proof, gray brew that tasted like either propanol or rotten garlic, depending how much sulfur leaked into the mix in the fermentation chamber.

Sulfur. This region of Mercury was packed with various kinds of pyrites and galena and sulfides and sulfates, and we had the ill luck to have a fermentation chamber dug out of plain stone. The process let the sulfur loose to pollute the drinks, and the iron flavor didn't help much either. Supposedly Mercury's crust was iron-poor. Bless Ghost Wolfe for sitting the colony right on top of an anomalous iron deposit.

"Well, this stuff is nasty," the patron said, making a face as he knocked back another swig of the stuff. I peered into the dirty glass as he slammed it back on the table. There were indeed little fragments of gold pyrite floating around in the bottom of the glass.

"What you think this is? The Imperial Court? No duh the stuff's nasty. This is the Deep End, remember? You don't like it, you can always find another bar."

Not that there was one, of course.

I'd dialed up the proof on the stuff with a wee bit of centrifuge work, and this batch managed to get up to one eighty, so this guy was kinda sloshed after his next three drinks. The bouncer by the door gently escorted the fellow out as he tried to pick a fight with a fellow patron. The bouncee picked himself off the floor with a groan and wobbled down the corridor and out of sight.

The plaque on the airlock door (which was ajar to admit patrons, as usual) swung slowly back and forth as a wind blew. The simulated wood sign (really composed of some Cybrid salvage, since Ghost Delithita would sooner use her own arm for lumber than her precious trees) banged into the stone of the airlock, making a loud clapping noise.

A moment later the source of the wind tumbled into the bar. Think of the devil and you see her horns. "What'll it be, Del?"

"The blood of the scumbag who picked some of my grapes without asking," she growled, stalking through the bar and dropping herself down on one of the barstools. The other patrons tried to pretend she wasn't there, lest she turn her attentions to them.

"One Bloody Scumbag, coming up," I said, drawing another pint of the swill from the spigot below the bar. As an afterthought I mixed in a bit of red dye, and set the drink on the bar in front of her. Del was pissed (so what else is new?) so she knocked the drink on the floor, leaned over the bar, and grabbed me by the collar.

I was glad I'd already written out my will. "Pick one more grape and I'll carve the difference outta your eyeballs," she said, her intense, pale eyes drilling into me like Cybrid torture devices.

I didn't want to contemplate Cybrid tortures any more than I wanted to contemplate Del working her will on my helpless eyeballs, so I managed a meek "Sorry" and detached myself carefully.

"Just be sure to make me a nice red someday," she muttered, rose, and stalked off.

I stared after her. You don't spend so many years as a bartender without being able to tell when something's wrong, and I could tell something was wrong.

My cybernetic eye with its damnable transmitter was whirring, too. That's one of the reasons I was stuck in the colony's deepest guts: so the Cybrids would not detect the low-level transmitter that the Ghosts had been unable to remove. Hidden under seven hundred meters of rock, the secondary transmitter was kind of useless. My choice was the loss of my cybernetic eye-- and thus blindness-- or exile to the lowest level. Not much of a choice, eh?

Something was up, though. I could feel it.

-----

Sleep sucks. I am really tired of playing out two years of Cybrid experimentation in my dreams each night. Two years of helplessness, humiliation, pain--

Damnit. I wish I could just go get smashed in the Deep End, but if I did that the docs would have me on some nasty soberall drugs for a few weeks, and those suck worse than hangovers. Alcoholism is not worth it in the twenty-ninth century.

Besides, I am not quite useless here in Fantasma, despite my handicaps.

I can't leave Level Four. I cannot see without the objects of my focus being submitted to a number of frequency-specific scans and Cybrid processing protocols. Whatever I look at directly dissolved into schematics. Nice enough for analyzing the composition of alcoholic beverages, but no good for dealing with people.

I bet you can't guess what my profession was before I was captured. Well, maybe you can; I still use the skills now and then, though in a completely different manner.

I was a psychologist. I helped people with psychological traumas, and though I'd never won the Dr. Penseur Award for my practice, I used to be good enough at what I do.

I'd worked for a time with Ghost Wolf at the Antipode Medical Response Station, and I was the only survivor from the facility's destruction. I know why I was captured, too. I knew the human mind better than anyone else at the facility, so who better to have their brains picked about how to control humans? That mix of drugs they used on us? Part of my own medicine cabinet. I used the stuff to induce deep hypnotic states for therapy. Cybrids thought nothing of perverting medicine for butchery.

They'd pulled me out of the wreckage and asked me how to "better coordinate our efforts with humans," as their deceitful voices told me. "Facilitating efficient and unstressful use of human resources," they said. Either they found a good way to use humans as intact as possible, or they'd just cut them up and incorporate what they could into the Cybrid nexi. Faced with a choice of a group of intact humans that might one day gain freedom, and a pile of butchered but still functional body parts, is there any wonder what I chose?

And after those two years, is it any wonder that a goodly number of Fantasma's residents blame me for their suffering and hate me as much as they do the Cybrids?

I rolled over in bed, heaving a deep sigh. My quarters, tucked into the wall around the Deep End, were really the deepest part of the Colony beyond Maria's sanctum. Some people wanted to take that room and make some kind of meditation chamber out of it. What they wanted to do with me to make room for this isn't really the most pleasant of topics. I hardly felt secure there, and my sleeps were mercifully short. I guzzled the Deep End's other product: a blend of caffeine, sucrose, and water generally called TN-Tea. Named after an ancient explosive, Maria said. She'd taken a sip of the stuff, blinked, and grinned at me. "Good recipe. Make more."

I'd just grunted and started planting fruit for the sucrose. I'd even taken some of Delithita's citrus fruit, since those were usually harvested freely. I hoped she would not look in my quarters and see the rows of plants there...

But then no one ever goes in my quarters anyway. Why would they?

An angry roar sounded from the other side of the wall, and I shook my head. The colonists were a very angry bunch. I'm a big, strong fellow, but even I'm kind of scared of the Deep End. "Tough crowd" doesn't say it. There are at least two fights almost every night, and free-for-alls at least weekly. No one's been killed-- yet-- but I've watched people break each other's pelvises, Hunter damn them! How much force does it take to smash someone's hip to splinters, anyway? And who'd want to bash someone with a stone chair anyway?

People in a lot of pain, I guess. The Cybrids did so much to them, they probably don't even notice such a little thing as a smashed pelvis or dislocated knee or any of the incredible number of soft-tissue injuries in the Deep End's repertoire.

The roar had grown in intensity, and it wasn't a brawl. That involves smashing and banging and a lot of thuds. If anything, the roar was dissipating, and a single angry voice was shouting something, and the patrons were responding to it.

I got up, grabbing a not-as-dirty-as-most shirt and throwing it on. I checked my reflection in the mirror, and paused as the disturbing image peered back at me with one metal eye and one lens cap. The fine traceries of silver wires ran down my cheek to the main facial nerve junction. I knew that if those wires ever got damaged, I'd lost what was left of my sight, forever.

I turned away with a shudder of revulsion.

I stepped out into the back of the bar. It seemed that one of the residents was standing on the bar shouting to an angry-looking crowd.

I did not want to venture out past the bar into that crowd.

The man was screaming something about gravesites when I pushed his legs and toppled him down onto the floor. "What's this?" I snapped. "You think this is a church for preachin' or somethin'?"

"Some bastards are ripping up our gravesites!" a young, Oriental woman with a thick-- and furious-- accent cried. "We'll kill them all!"

"Alright..." I said, reaching for the comm. I knew if anyone knew anything about anything or anyone, it would be the Ghosts. They'd know what the hell these people were talking about and what to tell them...

The Ghost on duty was Delithita, who was even more furious than usual. I hoped the comm system's relays wouldn't melt having to pipe her mood through. "What the hell do you want?" she literally screamed.

"Data," I said with forced calm. One does not respond to one with anger issues with anger in response. |One talks to them nicely... and carefully.

Delithita looked ready to come through the screen and shove a sparking power lead up my nose. But fortunately I did not have too deal with her, because another voice came over the link. "Calm yourself Del," the voice said quietly. Del snorted and made way for Ghost Wolfe to sit down in front of the screen.

"Ma'am," I said with a short bow. "We have a bunch of angry people here." Indeed the crowd seemed interested in screaming at each other. They were not mad at each other, it seemed: no fistfights had yet erupted, and there was a sense of directed wrath waiting to be released at some hideous evil.

"Yesterday one of our recon bikes discovered a human mining force has landed about thirty kilometers northwest of here."

"That's great! They'd have had to bring weapons to keep the Cybrids off..." My voice trailed away as her expression became cold and angry.

"They have begun mining operations squarely in Fantasma's gravesite perimeter. Preliminary scans suggest they have overturned at least half the graves."

I took an empty glass and threw it against the back wall. Being synthetic glass, it did not break, but it made a satisfying clang as it bounced off and fell to the floor. "Hunter damn them," I snarled. "But what do I tell my patrons?"

There was a long pause as Maria spoke to someone off the screen in rapid monotone, ordering the target to ready the vehicles in the bay. She turned back to the screen with a terrible gleam in her eyes. "Tell them," she said in a deadly whisper, "Tell them that as angry as they are, we Ghosts are angrier than all of them... and we're about to go over there."

The comm winked out.

"You go Ghosts," I muttered, and turned to address the patrons of the bar.

-----

"They are dead," Ghost Wolfe informed me bluntly as she went past the bar to the tunnel opening in the back wall. I'd caught her tinkering around with a bunch of nanite rockeaters a few months ago. She's smiled ruefully like a child caught at a mischievous prank. I didn't say anything, and she continued working until she had extended the tunnel downward out of sight.

"Who were they?"

"Some fools who thought an Imperial land deed would give them the right to dig up our graveyard. And who also thought said deed would protect them from us."

She disappeared down the tunnel and let me chew on that.

Greed. Gotta love it. Acquisition was one of the primary motivations of the natural human mind, and unfortunately, most people never grew beyond this.

The Cybrids had an interesting perspective: they were allegedly superior to humans. I fail to see how that could be, since they were prone to most of the same ailments less-enlightened humans were. Fear. Greed. Hatred. Obsession.

The next step in evolution? Ha. They were inferior, and they knew it. That was why there was so much discord among the Mercurian Cybrids: the staunch Prometheans were outnumbered by the Provocateurs who knew humanity better than most Cybrids.

When Prometheus created the Cybrids, what did he use as a model? Humanity. Where did he get the paradigms for Cybrid cognition? Humanity. Where did he get the general structure of Cybrid society? Humanity. Human theocracy, at that, one of the worst possible forms of social structure.

We humans have a saying: whoever is ignorant of the past is doomed to repeat it.

How evolved can the Cybrids be if they do not even understand that simple lesson?

I turned from Maria's hole in the wall back to the bar. The shelves dug into the rock were full. This might have been strange, until one realized that ninety-nine percent of the liquid volume of the beverages was either water or ethanol, both extremely easy to produce.

Fantasma got its water from a deep, subterranean vein of ice. When Mercury's primordial crust fractured, water ice from cometary impacts filled the shadowed cracks. When this happened, there remained stable reservoirs of ice lacing the planet's crust. Ice is eternally stable in Mercury's shadows: in those deeper craters near the poles, the sun never shines in and the shadowed regions can be only a hundred degrees over absolute zero. I always thought it was interesting that the polar regions contained sheets of water ice (liberally mixed with sulfur, of course) underneath the surface dust, even to this day. When the primordial crust was reshuffled by the main collapse three billion years ago, the veins of ice were enfolded by solid rock and some of them remain to this day.

This isn't to say there are bands of ice running through the rock. That would make things too easy. But if you were to look at a chunk of rock from a water-rich area, you'd see a faint sheen of moisture on it. The water is trapped in microscopic flaws in the rock. This store of water combined with that of hydrates (minerals that contain water molecules in their crystalline structure) add up when you dig a couple cubic kilometers of rock and bash it back to molecules like our nanites do. Fantasma had a store of many thousands of kiloliters of water, all stored on-site in a hundred different places in the colony. My storage tank was a hollowed-out rock face (surprised?) under the bar's floor. One could hear it gurgling in earthquakes.

I drew a few liters from the chamber with the pump that fed out behind the bar, and poured the water into a measuring cup in which I sprinkled some yeast. I didn't have too much to feed the hungry little fungi, so I looked around the bar to confirm it was empty, pulled a small bucket from the bar, and dumped the contents into the cup.

I stirred the concoction of miscellaneous vegetable matter until it was well mixed and piles of cellulose came floating to the top. This I pulled out with a strainer and threw back into the bucket to later form into interesting dishes (don't ask), and I took the cup and poured it into the inlet to the fermentation chamber behind me. The slurry gurgled its way down the tube and disappeared into the wall.

Razorback popped in and I gazed at him sympathetically. There was a man in pain, though he did not seem too concerned with improving his situation. I nodded shortly to him and pulled out a bottle. He shook his head. "Water will do," he said, sitting down at the bar without looking at me.

I poured him some and he stared at the proffered glass as though he had forgotten he had requested up. It doesn't take a psychologist-- or a bartender-- to recognize someone in pain, so I gave him an "I'm here, speak" look and leaned back against the table behind me.

"Damned miners," Razorback muttered.

I nodded. I'd analyzed some miners before the Cybrids hit. Nasty lot, most of them. Running away from their problems elsewhere to come to Mercury and hide under a tough-guy (or -gal) shell and attack rock in lieu of other people. There weren't many bioderms on Mercury; those were mostly sent to Venus because the environment was even harsher there (somehow), so Mercury got regular humans.

The Mining Guild people, I presumed, were cut from the same cloth: angry, frustrated people looking to carve out a niche the only place they knew how. I regretted the extermination of the AMG base, and if had only been over the gravesite I'd probably have been rather disturbed by the slaughter. But it wasn't just that. The miners were a threat: we didn't need the glitches all riled up and they were riling them up. Even if Petresun didn't tell the miners to occupy Fantasma, the Cybrids would concentrate a force way too close to us... and we've survived here too long to risk that.

"I've had run-ins with miners before," Razorback added. It was not like him to volunteer any information even under duress, so I gave him my full attention and raised a questioning eyebrow.

"On Mars," he said, and drank half the glass of water with a quick series of gulps. Razorback pulled a notepad from his suit collar and dropped it on the bar.

I knew better than to watch too closely as he drew, but I was curious. He didn't get more than a few lines drawn before he realized that the crumbling black mineral (I have no idea what it is, but veins of it run through the rock here on Level Four) was somewhat oxidized, so he pulled a small utility knife from his belt and began cutting away the plastic casing around the core of black. When he had honed the pencil to razor sharpness, he continued his drawing.

"Bit too crowded up there, eh?" I said quietly, pointing at the ceiling.

Razorback nodded distractedly. The bar was empty right now, it being about zero six hundred, no fit hour for anyone to be awake. Ghost Wolfe, of course, was an exception; I have seen her ducking into that tunnel at every hour of the day and night. I doubt she ever slept... or needed to. Razorback needed to. I could see it in the lines in his face, the dropping posture of his thin frame, and the unnecessarily firm grip in which he held the pencil.

If I ever get out of Fantasma, I'm going to send a very, very long report to the Journal of Psychological Studies about what I call Ghost Syndrome. I'm not sure how to categorize it, but my observations suggest that it is a unique combination of erratic depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, with a few unique aspects including heightened subconscious environmental sensitivity. The Fantasmans had been through hell, and it was very easy to see. Razorback was normal enough for Fantasma, but I knew that he (and most of the other residents) would instantly be institutionalized on Earth.

I was intrigued that the suicide rate was apparently very close to dead zero. Indeed, the Fantasmans had an incredible stress tolerance and were not prone to most of the more severe effects of depression. I had to determine what compensations were being used.

What modern psychologists called "Napean paradigm" seemed to be the primary way Fantasmans dealt with the world. The "Indopacifican paradigm," was strangely buried in most Fantasmans.

Several hundred years ago it was noted that the human world seemed to have a deep psychological division between the western societies and the eastern. The western, it seemed, was much more focused on survival of the individual, and had an incredibly different way of describing the universe. The scientific revolution only enhanced the vision of "individual vs. objective exterior universe" that western societies adopted.

Eastern thought emphasized the community as a whole, and beyond that, viewed the individual as an irrelevant part of a universe in which every aspect was a transient manifestation of something else. There is evidence that western societies were beginning to embrace these ideas just prior to the Devastation, but that those times forced the societies of the time to fall back to their own strengths to survive that time.

The European Alliance and the North American Prefecture (hence Napean) solidified their ideals and they became even more firmly entrenched in psychology. The eastern societies (suffering less devastation) tried to shut out other cultures as somehow alien, not interested in suffering the trials that they saw as a result of the western way of thought.

Over several hundred years, Earth's dualism remained strong even as the colonies (formed of both societies) blended their philosophies into something of a combative paradigm, in which the eastern "enlightenment" was seen as an ideal that was a worthy ideal yet incompatible with the survival of the individual.

Fantasmans edged toward the Napean. Enlightenment was limited to simple acceptance of the situation. They knew they'd never get rid of the dangers they faced, so they focused on something else. For some, it was just day-to-day routine, for others, it was a sense of hope.

The Fantasmans had hope that when they went to bed, there would be air to breathe, that Cybrids wouldn't be stalking them in the corridors with nanite cannon. They had faith, too, faith that they could go to bed and not wake up dead. This faith conflicted with their conscious realization of their danger, and thus set up a whole host of dualist schisms.

The human mind does not like experiencing two conflicting truths at once. There are loads of nasty little sidesteps and psychoses that result when it tries. Here, we had a deep-seated guilt complex that resulted from Mercury's death toll. This survivor's guilt distracted the mind from the conflicts of faith and reason (mutually exclusive paradigms) admirably, though I cannot understand how they survive the guilt itself.

Like I said, it needs more study. None of this, though, helped Razorback.

I was intrigued when I glanced over Razorback's hands at the drawing he was creating. It seemed to be a picture of the bar, drawn in strong, bold strokes. It wasn't impressionist, either. It was nearly photographic in its technical accuracy, and the image of myself was as precise as the rest of it. He'd captured the present state of just about everything in the bar, including some items that were not even visible to him.

"Still life," I noted, and he looked up at me with a surprised expression. He had apparently forgotten my presence.

"Yeah," he acknowledged.

"Where are you?" I asked quietly. He'd drawn everything with perfect accuracy... but the stool on which he sat was empty in the drawing.

"The artist does not include himself," he said, and from his tone I knew that was not the real reason.

"He does when drawing a third-person omniscient view," I noted, and he grimaced. "But it is good work, nevertheless."

"Thanks," he muttered. He looked back up at me. "I don't include myself because I don't exist."

I heard my cybernetic eye clicking softly, as it usually did when I was pondering something of interest. Razorback did not seem like the Indopacifican type to me...

"What do you mean?" I asked in a tone intended to keep him talking.

"This place runs and will continue to run, whether I am here or not."

I nodded. "I suppose, though I doubt your fellow Ghosts would like to hear that."

"Perhaps not." Razorback shrugged.

I looked around at the colony's cold, impersonal stone walls. The place looked and felt like a ghost town despite having thousands of residents. It often felt like one was a transient presence that the colony tolerated but did not care about, since one would likely be dead in a heartbeat while the tunnels would last for aeons.

That was another thing in the psychology of this place. Most places people could call home had something to them that made them home, This place did not. This was just the stone of a world that people walked through, stone that did not care. The residents walked through the colony with no connection to their surroundings, existing in the vacuum of their own thoughts.

If they could survive that, Fantasma would have some intriguing cultural mores in a hundred years... if the people survived.

"Internalization," I said, snapping my fingers. There was the key.

Razorback looked at me, but did not speak. I knew he was curious as to my meaning, though.

"Did you realize that most of Fantasma's residents have only the most basic connection to their surroundings, that most of their energies are directed back into themselves?"

"I hadn't, but you're right."

"This allows them to maintain their sanity," I said. "By detachment from their surroundings..."

Razorback laughed, harshly, and stood. "Imagine that," he said. "Detachment to save one's brain from scrambling itself. Who'd've thought?" he said sarcastically. He looked down at his drawing, shook his head, and left.

What would develop from two thousand people who would only interact with their environment for their basic needs, and the rest of the time turned their energies inward? Arts would flourish... if they bothered to turn their inspirations into concrete form. Perhaps they would turn to each other and interact on a deeper personal level than most people. Or the opposite, if they perceived others as mere pieces of the irrelevant world around them.

There would probably be a slide into purer Napean thought, or purer Indopacifican. The duality could not last long, when the mind did not interact with the outside universe on more than a basic level.

I only hoped that it brought them peace.

I picked up Razorback's glass, dumped the water into the filtration system and put the glass back in its place. I thought of Razor's drawing. Arts. Perhaps that was the key, I mused as I started mashing another batch of vegetable matter (including a few bunches of pilfered grapes). Perhaps the expressions of the mind would add something to Fantasma. A sense of humanity overlaying the uncaring stone. A sense of hey look! I'm here. You're here. There is meaning in this place. My thoughts which created this art. Yours which appreciate it.

Perhaps there was some hope for this place after all.

And how could I deny the power of hope? It was all these people had.

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