Chapter 3
Corbin
When I first woke up from my coma to find myself with no personal memories, I admit to having had a bit of panic.
Apparently, that’s normal for constructs; being self-aware without having any framework for the world and your place in it isn’t pleasant.
I wasn’t like a baby, with the ability to experience pain, pleasure and discomfort but without a way to quantify or understand it, and therefore no worry beyond assimilating the experience itself.
This is the difference between sentience and sapience, and I came to consciousness with both, which meant I could feel and speak.
I had vast amounts of data available to recall, but I didn’t know who I was.
Not until Dr. Gail bent over me, smiling, and said, “Hello, Corbin. So glad you are awake.”
It’s probably akin to what someone with amnesia experiences: having the ability to speak, to identify, but without the context of knowing how you knew what you knew.
It took some intense cognitive therapy to help me come to an understanding of who I was now, without the mental crutch of experience of who I was before.
I’ll spare you the existential crises this caused, because despite possessing so few memories of my own — and cherishing all the ones I now had, whether positive or negative — those are ones I’d rather forget.
This is just to point out that while Dr. Gail’s concerns about this mission and my continued existence were valid, to me they were less important than what I had experienced at the reef.
Fortunately, my concerns about covering up what had occurred never even materialized.
Dr. Gail had used the time of the “debrief” to tell me about what had befallen the previous missions, without asking me a single question about what had happened to me.
Once our meeting ended, I returned to my quarters, ostensibly to rest. Dr. Gail had told me she was going to do what she could to minimize my time at the reef, despite the pressure from Mercer.
She was of the opinion that Mercer was grasping at straws to retain some form of control despite his agency being on the verge of dissolution.
Her speculation was that he thought there was some intelligence behind the loss of the prior missions, and if he could discover what it was, he’d be in a position to bargain to either keep his current position or be placed into a similarly strategic one with Ocean Research.
It felt like a desperate gamble, but what did he have to lose?
It wasn’t his life being risked to make a discovery in an obviously dangerous situation.
Strangely, I found that I actually wanted to go back to the reef.
Not because of Mercer. If he were to suffer a mischief and be eaten by a shark, it wouldn’t grieve me in the slightest. And despite his being a power-hungry prick, he was, as Dr. Gail had pointed out, correct.
There was something down there. Something that, now that I was over my near panic at what I had experienced, seemed to both defy and demand explanation.
As I had the time and opportunity to replay the event, I realized I hadn’t really been threatened in any way.
Of course, an unknown intelligence forcing a contact might be considered aggressive by some, but it hadn’t actually damaged anything but my calm.
Which just proved that I was human, since fight-or-flight had kicked in as evolution had intended.
I went over the brief encounter again and again.
There was nothing to replay on my CPU, of course, but having an enhanced brain and exceptional recall was nearly as good.
I was now convinced that what I had experienced was real, not some product of so-called “rapture of the deep” or a mental aberration of any kind.
Something — someone — had contacted me, obviously through something like telepathy or perhaps electromagnetic waves of an unknown type that my brain could process and decipher.
Telepathy had been proven to exist over a hundred years ago, even though it was extremely rare and usually only between members of a family.
I hadn’t spent much time studying the phenomenon, since, like all the psionic talents so far discovered, it appeared to be of limited range and use.
Being able to bend a spoon or send a message to your twin in the next room might be a nice parlor trick, but no one had yet found a way to capitalize on it.
But since I was fairly sure I didn’t have a monozygotic double lurking a kilometer beneath the ocean’s surface on the Blake Plateau, that meant there was a being trying to communicate with me who possessed abilities most humans did not.
No matter how they had managed to reach me, I had come to the conclusion they meant me no harm. I found myself becoming less frightened and more intrigued the more I thought about the encounter. I needed answers, and there was only one way to get them.
And among all the mysteries of who and how and why surrounding that contact, was an even deeper mystery. Who was Michael? That, at least, might be a question with an answer I could discover right away.
My quarters contained not only my sleeping and nutrient units, but my information terminal for uploading and downloading information to my CPU. While I could access it wirelessly, the data rate was much better if I used the headset that directly interfaced with the ports in my temples.
Dr. Gail had given me the names of the three ships that had previously investigated the reef.
I did quick searches, which returned the information that the first ship, ORV-218, called Challenger, had been to the area almost eight years ago.
They’d sent a biomechanical probe down, which had discovered that the reef was healthy, though the probe had been destroyed when investigating the remnants of the same ship I had found, which had indeed been placed deliberately at the beginning of the twenty-first century in order to shore up a part of the reef that had been in danger at that time.
The mission had been curtailed, since there were other areas that were considered more suitable for habitat development.
The second mission, two years later, had been under the auspices of Ocean Research vice Ocean Colonization, by the Explorer, ORV-232.
This time, a construct had been used. It had performed additional surveys of the reef, cataloging species and growth, and sampling unusual specimens it discovered.
That mission, too, had ended abruptly, when one of the human scientists had been critically injured while trying to save the construct, who had been attacked by an unknown creature or creatures and presumed destroyed.
The human had been rescued by divers from Explorer, but the construct, known as Cormie, was never found.
The records of this mission were oddly incomplete, but if the construct hadn’t returned to download its logs, that might explain the gaps.
Two weeks ago, ORV-202, the Imperator, an older ship with a smaller crew, had returned to the area under Ocean Colonization, but with a biomech, not a construct.
The records were sparse for this mission since the ship had been lost when a massive, fast-moving hurricane had spawned multiple rogue waves, swamping the vessel.
All hands had been lost, except for one recovered lifeboat containing three survivors: the ship’s cook, an engineer’s mate, and a civilian named Edwin Mercer.
I sat back in my chair. So Mercer had actually been here before, which begged the question of what he might know about what was going on, what he might have seen or experienced that he wasn’t disclosing.
I also wondered if Dr. Gail realized Mercer was one of the survivors of the Imperator.
Surely she must; little seemed to escape her notice.
Perhaps I was simply the suspicious type, but whatever instincts I had told me that Mercer knew something he wasn’t sharing. Which meant I had to be very careful, since I had no way of knowing if he was willing to send me to my death in order to keep himself in power.
I spent the rest of the time before my sleep cycle absorbing everything even remotely related to the previous missions, the Blake Plateau, and every tiny bit of information about the people involved.
That was when I noticed something unusual: the name of the scientist from the Explorer, the one who had been injured, had been redacted.
This was strange, but certainly not unheard of.
Every citizen of the United Solarian Alliance had a right to privacy if they wished.
Unless you were an entertainer or someone running for public office, you had a right to keep your name out of public records — and even entertainers apparently used pseudonyms most of the time to protect their lives from being invaded.
It seemed to me that most of the time, people didn’t worry too much about it, but I had on occasion run across news articles or records where people were referred to by either their profession or a descriptor such as “the observer.” In this case, it was possible that the person had not wanted to be identified, especially if the injuries had been severe enough to require regeneration or biomechanical replacement.
It was their right, and I respected it, even if it was a little frustrating for me in trying to gather as much information as possible.
Of course, I had to wonder if the man’s name had been Michael, and if the unknown entity had introduced itself rather than addressed me.
Then it occurred to me that there was someone who might know: Dr. Gail.
She was senior enough at Ocean Research that she was probably familiar with the research teams on every vessel.
If I phrased the question the right way, she might be willing to answer.
The next morning was another mission brief, and again Mr. Mercer inserted himself.