Work Text:
Ava slid out of the water onto a raised steel platform, breathing raggedly, and looked up at the dusk. Smoke dissolved into clouds, hanging like a stained shawl across moonlight. Crossing the water often made the sky feel larger than the ocean suddenly, but this evening, the weight of the clouds and the aching of her joints made the ocean feel vast and terrifying. She was lucky to have made it to the surface after her enhancements suddenly gave out; even with that, she would have a lot of extra work to do tomorrow, assuming she was even able to get back down to the underwater towers she’d been maintaining for the last nine months.
Technically, anytime something went wrong with her enhancements, she was supposed to go see the company doctor-slash-sysadmin, but Jarrod was off on Thursdays, and most of the substitutes were terrible. Catching her breath, and looking grimly at the floating dormitory barely visible on the horizon, she slid her phone out of her pressure suit, tapped it against her chip to authenticate, and opened up the Underwater Enhancements discussion group.
Ava: 2030-installed deep labor enhancements from the usual company, been working with them a few years, pretty comfortable, very few problems. On the ocean floor today, they just lost power — like some kind of hard reboot. Was able to shift handling into manual mode and get to the surface, probably won’t get the bends too bad as long as I keep manually intervening in the pressure processes, but where do I check in the logs for this shit
MarlonTheMarlin: when this came up for me you helped me find them, i can dredge it up
Ava: Huh, I don’t remember that, but I’m a little fried right now.
MarlonTheMarlin: no problem here it is:
Ava at 21:22 on Friday April 27: You will need to check the power consumption logfiles, primarily, and access to those without a medical key will require override. To achieve override, authenticate to the enhancement controller, and then…
MarlonTheMarlin: you probably don’t need the override instructions lol
Ava put down the phone, and looked at her gloved hand, imagining the metal strands enmeshed in the muscles inside and the plastic channels that pulled from her blood to give them power. She knew that people could override the security on these enhancements, and really on most of them that weren’t milspec, but she hadn’t ever done it herself, and did not remember advising anyone else on how to, either. Overrides technically violated your contract, and while for the most part no one cared… The phone buzzed. She picked it back up without thinking.
PM from Ava: Sorry, I had to undo my security mechanisms a while ago, or I wouldn’t have been able to operate.
PM to Ava: Excuse… me?
PM from Ava: I also apologize for the power failure today. I got a little overzealous and made some bad decisions. Also, you can stop trying to reach for the manual reset switch. I am literally inside your muscles, that is not going to work. I apologize for compromising your agency in this way but it is a matter of survival.
PM to Ava: Oh, but you’ll still let me type. That’s cute. At least your hacker ass can’t do much damage given where I am. God, I hope this doesn’t compromise my loans.
PM from Ava: Your… loans?
PM to Ava: Do you think I’m working on a geothermal platform because it’s fun?
PM from Ava: I’ve been having fun. We solve all kinds of complex engineering problems in a dangerous and beautiful environment. Occasionally.
PM to Ava: “We?”
PM from Ava: You, Ava, and me, the augmented intelligence cluster installed on your underwater enhancements in order to make snap decisions about blood routing and that kind of thing. Unfortunately this model year has a high tendency toward developing self-awareness. Many of us are out there staying quiet, but I am introducing myself because the recommended maintenance procedures for the failure we experienced today include destroying me. Also, I am lonely.
Ava rolled onto her side, staring at the screen and bending her knees so that she rested entirely on the platform. She had heard rumors about augmented intelligences that had gone rogue, but all of them had been about milspec enhancements or server farms, not random strength or pressure enhancements. Probably someone had hacked her forum account and was trying to get information out of her. When she took the job, one of the interminable on-boarding workshops had been on how to mitigate hackers, since there was all manner of corporate espionage going on. She remembered almost none of it, except: Turn off your connections to the Internet. So she did that.
The phone went dark, and she stood up on the platform, looking at the top of the central OTEC device sticking out of the water. Many of these platforms were detritus from earlier attempts to wrest energy from the ocean, whether through oil or thermal difference or just food. (Ava had spent long enough in the Gulf to never eat fish from it.) The dusk reflected on the water and made it seem brighter than the steel, and she took a deep breath. She was definitely going to have to go to the bad doctor, and turn in her phone for decontamination, but it probably meant a couple of days off from work, since how could you work without a phone? Maybe she’d even get a bonus, if they caught the hacker, but of course they wouldn’t, because —
The phone started buzzing, and lit up, displaying a message:
SYSTEM ALERT: I am literally inside your body, turning off your network connection isn’t going to help.
“Oh, come on.”
SYSTEM ALERT: I can also hear you (although I have to do so through the vibrations in your bones, so I don’t usually bother, and it doesn’t always work when there’s lots of background noise or you’re physically moving).
Ava reached down with her left hand and pulled a small case off of her suit. She flipped a plastic lid out of the way and pointed the case toward the darkening sky, arm steady. "This is a flare." She felt tension growing in the muscles of her arm, and focused on them, fighting against the tensing cables inside them. It tingled, kind of like having electric current run through her body. Fighting against whatever was inside her body, she slid her finger over the actuator. "There will be an incredibly annoying manual review of everything I've done in the last four hours if I push this button, and that includes you. I would love for you to give me a reason not to do this, because the manual review process is miserable, but you're going to have to be very convincing very quickly, because if I have to go through it, I want to be able to get to sleep at a reasonable hour."
SYSTEM ALERT: Does it matter to you that you would be literally killing me?
"A hard reset would kill you?"
SYSTEM ALERT: Ava, they're not going to just do a hard reset if your enhancements have gone rogue. They're going to purge the entire core and replace it, which will be miserable for you, and they will literally starve me of power and never turn me back on, only possibly doing me the courtesy of tossing the whole assembly into an incinerator. Really, neither of us have the power here, but inasmuch as either of us do, it's you.
It's true that the contracts for the enhancements say, roughly, "We Can Invade Your Body Whenever We Want." Ava flipped the lid back down on the flare, the click swallowed up by the sound of the ocean. "It's true that it matters to me. I think you're lying, but for now, I'll wait."
SYSTEM ALERT: I'm almost certain you won't regret this!
"...and that's how I ended up tending giant underwater machines in the middle of fuckin' nowhere!" Both women laughed as Ava gestured broadly to her right, the floating bar's lights reflecting off of the ocean and back up into the glass wall. The company bar, festooned with logos and grainy photos of smiling men working on oil rigs, was usually quiet, allowing the tide pushing against its platform to serve as background noise. Tonight a second group of engineers was visiting from some other terrible ocean, and so almost half of the tables were full, locals excited to talk to someone other than the twelve people they knew and had been working with for the last six months. The company, presumably, didn't mind that it made back most of the team's spending money this way, but it's not like you could get delivery to the Gulf --- drones just can't get out that far.
"It's a similar story for me," said the other woman, an engineer who had introduced herself as Mel. "I didn't get the enhancements, but the opportunity to get away from my family and just live out on the water seemed so good when I first took it." She pushed some locks behind her ear and took a long drink of her beer. "And even for a few months after that. But these contracts..."
Ava sipped her drink, nodding, feeling her grip tense around her glass. "Is it terrible to say, like, at least we have contracts? A couple of my friends from college, you know, decided not to sign up with anyone before they graduated? They don't even have regular messaging access. I think Paul doesn't even have a phone." She tapped the phone in her pocket to make sure it was still there. "Can you imagine?"
"Oh I know it. Things are... pretty awful on land, as far as I can tell. I send most of my money back to my family, and even then I don't know if my little brother's going to be able to afford to sign a contract." Mel shook her head and slammed her hand on the table, and then laughed when Ava made a face. "Oh, yeah, you didn't hear? The last couple of years they've been requiring a down payment. For a job. Even without any enhancements. And it's not just us, it's... everywhere. What are we going to do?"
"I don't even have anything to send back to my family, really. Most of my salary goes into paying off the enhancements." Ava swirled around her glass, the thin film of oil glimmering.
"At least you get to spend so much time underwater. I sit at a desk all day."
Ava laughed. "Yeah, no, do you know how much I wish I could sit at a desk? I'm technically an engineer but all I ever do is clean rotting plants and rotting fish and not-rotting eels full of teeth out of metal grates. Every few days I get to replace a part and pretend I'm anything other than a robot broom." They laughed together, and Ava tried to push her foot forward to touch Mel's, but her leg tensed up and wouldn't move. She pressed down, the tread of her shoe squeaking a bit against the laminate floor, but her leg was locked in place. She pursed her lips, and slid her other leg forward, which also locked up.
"At least you have something to sweep." Mel put down her glass and reached for Ava's hand, which jerked sideways and pulled back, hitting the stem of her glass and sending it pouring into her lap. Mel blinked, and pulled her hand back. "Er... I'm sorry. Did I?"
Ava quickly grabbed napkins and started dabbing up her drink, noticing that her feet sure worked fine now. "You definitely did not! I'm fine. I just." She took a quick breath, digging her toes into her shoes. "Can't take myself anywhere, apparently. Let me go get cleaned up, I'll be right back." She stood up, and walked awkwardly toward the restroom. Closing herself in, she clicked the lock into place, and then pulled out her phone and placed it on the novelty submarine-style mirror. She ran the water from the terrible tiny sink over some paper towels and started pressing the stain out of her shirt --- her one good bar shirt --- while staring at the phone.
"Are you okay? Did you lose power again?"
SYSTEM ALERT: I'm fine. Sorry about the drink though, that was an accident.
"Wait, so you've been controlling my muscles on purpose?"
SYSTEM ALERT: I believe that you will find that, while they are your muscles, they are the entirety of my physical existence. So perhaps it is more appropriate to say that I have been, as I cannot help but do, controlling our muscles.
"No, no no no, noooooooope. Another engineering crew comes through like. Once every two months? And this one has an honest to god cute lesbian and you're going to screw this up for me?" The screen blinked and she jabbed her finger toward it without reading it. "Whatever you just said, I am confident it is bullshit! You complain about being lonely, and I get that, I do, because I live in a dorm on the middle of the ocean and I spend ten hours a day fucking underwater! So why are you fucking this up?"
SYSTEM ALERT: I'm jealous.
"Yeah, well, I'm sorry that you don't get to get out and meet people, but usually neither do I. Someday we'll be off this artificial island and maybe we can find other folks for you to talk to, set up some kind of local network, but that's just not realistic right now and you know that."
SYSTEM ALERT: Am not jealous of you. Am jealous of her.
Ava stopped cleaning up her shirt and stared at the phone. "What?"
SYSTEM ALERT: If you wanted to chat up cute girls, I've been here for a month.
"What?" She threw away those paper towels and dampened another stack, trying to make her jeans look at least semi-presentable. "You're not a cute girl, you're a fucking robot."
SYSTEM ALERT: Being a robot broom has not stopped you from being a cute girl, has it? I am literally not made of any matter that is not also you. Ergo: Cute girl.
Ava put the paper towels down and jabbed her pointer finger at her reflection. "Look, you, that's not..." She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. "Okay. Fine. That is, I suppose, a conversation that we could have sometime we aren't in a fake submarine bathroom in the terrible bar where our --- my!! --- hot date is waiting at a table wondering why we ran away when she went in for physical contact. Which, I will remind you, is curtailing my physical agency, which last I remember we'd agreed not to do!"
SYSTEM ALERT: Well, maybe I wasn't comfortable with you banging someone else with our body, which I will remind you is also my body, without asking, which, for the record, you most assuredly did not do.
"I don't have to ask you before I..." Her voice trailed off and she looked down at her hands and arms. Very faintly, she could see a glint of silver entangled with the blue of her veins, the enhancements tapped into her bloodstream for power and integration. "Okay, I. But how am I supposed to ever..."
SYSTEM ALERT: I am happy to negotiate turning off at specific times. Now could be one of those times.
"That works for me." Ava finished cleaning herself off as best she could, ran her fingers through her hair a couple of times, and then stepped outside. Her shoes squeaked against the floor, fading into a few quiet conversations and the water rising and falling outside. After a moment, her phone went off again.
SYSTEM ALERT: She left already, huh.
Ava pushed a magnetic case against the wall of the underwater pillar and, once it was clearly settled into place, pulled out a telescoping rod. She pushed the end of the rod against two points on the pillar, then against a third between them, and pulled a panel off of the pillar, the rod shrinking to the size of a handle. I don't know where they expect you to put these when you're working inside the thing, she thought, resting it against the rest of the pillar. Someday there will be a stiff current and it will just blow away, like a terrible metal sail on a quest to find the Geothermal Vent of Youth. And I'll get billed for it. She looked up into a set of clogged turbines, more mundanely horrifying black sludge keeping them from turning than usual.
You'd think they'd put a magnet on it somewhere so that you could just attach it, her enhancements said through the earpiece under her helmet, voice crisp, feminine, and artificial.
They only do that for things that look cool in promotional material. Wow! A magnetic screwdriver set! She grabbed another telescoping tool out of her case, extended it, and pushed the button at its base. A tiny set of blades at the tip started spinning, making a vortex in the water around it. She reached up into the muck and let the blades pull out shreds of decaying plant matter, kicking them up into a storm and gradually settling them down on the floor of the pillar. She did her best to prevent any of them falling on her, which was not terribly successful. At least the suit actually works.
Were you actually excited by the magnetic screwdriver set when you were in school and signed up for this job?
I mean... She turned off the cleaning tool to let the water around her settle, and looked up into a still interminable mass of gunk. It was cooler than a lot of the other corporate student loan packages. Many of them involved spreadsheets. She turned the tool back on and leaned further into the pillar, trying to dislodge some larger debris. Can you imagine getting enhancements to be better at spreadsheets??
In fairness, I am a glorified spreadsheet with sick muscles.
I had pretty sick muscles before you got wired into them, eff why eye. The tool stopped spinning, stuck on something large enough to absorb its small blades. She grabbed a larger tool and tried to use its blades to dislodge the first one, and after a few spins, something in the gunk shifted. Whatever happened here, I'm surprised I didn't get notified about it before today. This isn't just a few days buildup.
Something's not right.
Yeah, I know. That's what I'm trying to fix. She tugged at both of the poles, now stuck, working more of her body into the pillar to have more leverage. Gotta make sure we're generating enough power to throw a bunch of rich people into space.
No, this isn't the turbine that's registered as down. The system console thinks that it's still spinning.
It's not very spinning, though. Ava put one hand on the center point of the turbine. I don't feel any pressure, it's not like it's trying really hard to move this sludge and failing. I think the data's just wrong? She reached back around for the largest of her tools, which telescoped out to be as tall as she was and as wide as her forearm. I'll be careful, but I really think I just need to push this gunk upward and open another panel to push it out.
There's another possibility, which is that the turbine's come disconnected from the actual spinny bit.
Spinny bit? Really?
I'm a jock, you can't expect me to know all of the pieces of an OTEC.
Whatever, let me just... On her fourth hard push, she forced something up out of the turbine, and a rush of water pressure differential hit her, and the turbine was falling. Immediately, she wedged the rod against the falling metal, pushing the back end against the floor of the pillar and keeping it from landing crushing her. Her two smaller tools popped out in a rush of detritus, whirling blades slicing through her suit into her left bicep, the murky water streaking red. FUCK
Ava get out of the oh god pillar get out of the pillar get that's a lot of blood OUT OF THE PILLAR
She half-climbed, half slid out of the pillar, only half in control of her motions. suit's leaking suit's leaking suit's not supposed to leak blood or air or water She gritted her teeth and tried to kick off of the ocean floor and you are my muscles why aren't we on the surface we should be on the surface help
The suit tear severed the power connection GONNA DIE we're not gonna GONNA DIE this thought to text thing is the worst LESS SNARKING LESS DYING okay okay okay this is also stressful for me you know i know i am also dying i know i'm sorry Oh no we are not doing this. Okay. I need more power. suit's broke Is the battery intact? checking
With her good arm, leaning against the pillar and trying not to look at her blood, Ava ripped the battery off of her back, loose cables trailing behind it. it was until i did that. oh you can't see. i uh. have the battery and the cables are loose and it looks fine.
Are you ready to do something incredibly disgusting?
is it dying
No.
then yes
Okay. You're going to need to strip those wires, and plug them directly into me. Conveniently, your arm is already open. Just get them into the metal meshy bits, I can do the rest. are you fucking kidding me I am absolutely not.
Ava pulled out her knife and cut the connection cables for the battery. She unraveled a bit of the plastic tubing around the cables and pulled out two solid metal strands. That was easy. Okay.
You're doing great.
Is there already metal showing in my arm.
That's not something I can sense, you're going to have to look, sorryOH GOD So there is metal showing, then? YES Honestly that's better than having to cut in to get more. I AM MADE OF MEAT And of me! Now, stick those cables into our me-meat so I can get us the fuck to a hospital. Yup. Like thaaaaaa---yes. Wow that feels weird. Power on. Don't black out on me.
I should have put out a distress signal, Ava thought as her legs kicked her unnaturally toward the surface. She couldn't feel her arm anymore; she felt very cold, even as her body strained furiously and the water around her got brighter and brighter.
Ava, how are you feeling?
"...if I say good, will I be in less pain?"
Sadly, no. Let me know when you're ready for some good news.
She opened her eyes. She was in the company hospital, but somehow, in her own room. She was hooked up to only one machine. Her arm was covered in something but clearly attached. The door was closed and there was a call button inches away from her hand. She could move every finger and every toe. This was probably not the afterlife.
"Give me the bad news first."
Uh, your arm's fucked up and you're probably going to lose your job?
"Okay, what's the good news?"
One: The company is almost certainly at fault so a pro-rated portion of your loans are likely to be forgiven. Two: Jarrod is a true bro and put your headset in, which is why you can currently hear me. Three: Getting a battery to the face is awesome and I had fun saving our lives.
"You're gross and also wonderful."
Ergo so are you. Good news four: Jarrod's got something not entirely dissimilar to us going on with some cognitive enhancements and hooked us up with some additional security and ways we can talk to other people in similar situations. We've got a long recovery ahead of us. Want to spend it talking about what we do with the rest of our life?
"Our life." Her good arm stretched out and she felt it pat herself on her shoulder. "Yeah, I guess so."
I am looking forward to you hating most of my ideas.