Chapter 1 #2
I was intrigued by her word choice. Authority.
Not command, which would seemingly continue in the person of Captain Deering, since the Nautilus was a military vessel, under the auspices of the United Solarian Alliance Earth Naval Forces.
Nor responsibility, to indicate the outcome would be on him for any failure to meet mission parameters.
Not even supervision, which would imply a certain oversight of the scientific personnel or investigative protocols we would be using.
Authority. Control. Power.
A man to be watched carefully, then. And probably not to be trusted. Constructs weren’t supposed to feel paranoia, either, but we’ve already established that my operating manual wasn’t completely accurate.
“Good morning, Mr. Mercer,” I said. The socially null platitude was, I felt, noncommittal enough not to put him on guard. It was now appropriate to face him fully, though I found nothing from my second observation to contradict the analysis of my first.
He raised a brow at my words, perhaps surprised that a construct would bother with a greeting.
But I wasn’t like others of my kind, some of whom never fully regained any real cognitive awareness after awakening.
But I had, and so I had been specifically designated to explore and evaluate.
To learn, not merely to perform a task. I had a fully functional brain: modified, perhaps, but human nonetheless.
“Good morning, Corbin,” he replied, his voice as uninteresting as everything else about him. “I read your dossier, and I found it quite fascinating. Construct for Oceanic Research, Biologically Integrated, right? You’re a very expensive, one of a kind being. And seemingly very good at what you do.”
It was unclear to me if he was trying to be ingratiating, but I wasn’t flattered by his words.
“I have explored much of the continental shelf to a maximum depth of 265 meters,” I acknowledged.
“I was designed to find suitable sites for the construction of suboceanic domes for human habitation and food production. Which I have done.”
“True.” He leaned forward in his seat. There was a gleam in his eyes behind the glasses that I couldn’t interpret. “But there are many more things under the sea than mere construction sites.”
I felt Dr. Gail tense in her chair. This was interesting; apparently Mr. Mercer had an agenda that Dr. Gail either didn’t know about or didn’t approve of.
“Indeed.” I kept my tone disinterested. I could see from his expression that he was trying to get me interested in his plans.
Which probably meant it had something to do with greed.
While I personally had no acquisitive tendencies for much besides raw knowledge, there still seemed to be a streak of pronounced avarice among humans.
Ridiculous, I’d always thought, given how few people occupied the planet these days.
Fighting over resources did nothing but waste those same resources.
The Climate Catastrophe had caused a massive melting of the polar ice caps, which had increased global sea level by over forty meters within a decade.
This, in turn, had sparked unbelievably violent weather patterns that still wreaked havoc on the surface of the entire globe, forcing agriculture into domes, underground, or into space.
At the same time, the melting had been accompanied by long dormant strains of bacteria and unknown viruses being released from glaciers and permafrost where they’d been trapped for millennia.
The result had been pandemics among humans, animals, and even plants that had made the worst of those of the past fade into insignificance.
Not even the Black Death, Covid, and the Spanish Flu combined had killed as many as died in the last half of the twenty-first century.
It might take millennia for humans to repopulate their vastly changed world.
“Come come, aren’t you interested in what else you might discover?” Mr. Mercer asked, a flash of annoyance crossing his face.
“I have already discovered thirty-six new species of fish which have mutated from their pre-CC forms, verified the extinction of two hundred fifty-four other species, and recovered the contents of two dozen museums lost in the CC. Discovery is simply a part of my job. I do it almost every day.”
My words seemed to displease him, because he frowned and waved a dismissive hand. “I’m not talking about fish or relics of pre-CC civilization. Are you telling me you’ve never seen anything that… intrigued you?”
For about a millisecond, I considered telling him about the megalodon that had nearly eaten me when I reached the edge of the continental shelf off what used to be Calimex, but I knew that wasn’t what he was looking for.
There was an agenda here: he was looking for something specific and trying to get information from me about whether I had already discovered it.
Which didn’t narrow down the possibilities.
“No.”
If I were being completely honest, the octopi that were busily deconstructing the remnants of flooded cities were intriguing to me, but octopi had always had an agenda all their own.
Don’t ask me how I know that, I just do — but it’s not the kind of thing you tell your handlers, lest they think you are malfunctioning and need to have your CPU reprogrammed.
Mr. Mercer’s eyebrows snapped together, and Dr. Gail hurriedly stepped in. “Corbin has always been very conscientious about their missions. We’ve never seen anything unusual in their mission logs.”
Dr. Gail’s stress level seemed to elevate further, so I decided a little diplomacy was in order. Plus, I was tired of this game of leading questions. “Perhaps if there is something particular you wish for me to look for, you should tell me what it is.”
Mercer sat back in his seat, his expression smoothing into blandness once more.
“Actually, I feel it best not to prejudice your impartiality,” he said.
“The mission parameters are that you are now to report anything out of the ordinary directly to me. Your mission logs will be held as classified until I review and release them.”
Classified?
I glanced quickly at Captain Deering. Her mouth had firmed into a hard line, so the order obviously didn’t sit well with her. Dr. Gail looked unhappy, but neither of them said a word.
Whoever this guy was, he obviously had the clout to make both civilians and military dance to his tune.
At the same time, he’d given me little to go on.
I wasn’t pleased with having my work reviewed by someone other than the team I’d grown accustomed to working with, but there was obviously nothing I could do about it.
I still had a contract to fulfill in order to pay off the astronomical cost of my existence.
Another thing I had my past self to thank for.
“Understood,” I replied. There didn’t seem to be anything else I could say, anyway.
No doubt after I reported hours of irrelevant minutiae to him, Mercer would grow tired of the routine.
Apparently some of my personality traits had survived where my memories didn’t, and from that, I knew I had been someone who wasn’t fond of bullies.
I may also have been a bit of a petty asshole, but I wasn’t here to make friends, was I?
Satisfied, Mercer rose to his feet and left the room without another word. Dr. Gail and Captain Deering exchanged a look I couldn’t decipher, and then after a courteous farewell, the Captain also departed.
“We might as well get started,” Dr. Gail said as she, too, stood, her face dark with some emotion I couldn’t fully fathom. “I don’t know what he’s expecting you to find, Corbin, but I guess we still need to look.”
It wasn’t searching for something when I didn’t know what I was looking for that bothered me. It was not knowing the consequences that might occur if I didn’t find it.