One day in 2009 I happened upon a picture of a mermaid-style wetsuit from Otter Bay Suits (now defunct, I think). I showed it to a writer friend of mine, saying it looked like something from a science fiction story. One of us (I forget who) proposed to make it a challenge: We'd each take a stab at a story and see whose was best. The only rule was that it had to include that sort of wetsuit, though we could jazz it up a little with tech. While my effort was pretty rough I finished it in 72 hours, while my friend never managed to finish, so I won by default.
Since then I've cleaned it up a little. The climax is somewhat broken, because my depiction of the physical phenomenon I chose as my Big Threat isn't exactly realistic. But I wrote that bit in the last couple hours of the challenge, and finished in the final minutes, so I was writing to save my life. I'll have to redo that part if I ever decide to submit this story for publication.
Still, I think the story has some charm. I hope you enjoy it.
Since then I've cleaned it up a little. The climax is somewhat broken, because my depiction of the physical phenomenon I chose as my Big Threat isn't exactly realistic. But I wrote that bit in the last couple hours of the challenge, and finished in the final minutes, so I was writing to save my life. I'll have to redo that part if I ever decide to submit this story for publication.
Still, I think the story has some charm. I hope you enjoy it.
Randa
by Sandra Kishi Glenn
Swimming at a depth of twenty meters off the coast of Brunei, Victor Timbancaya and Roger Murphy swept their flashlights over module D5, looking for signs of sabotage. Skillful, persistent monkey-wrenching had forced the shutdown of the entire array for days at a time, and the Sultan didn't like his toy being offline. But that didn't matter to Victor, because for him, these attacks were personal.
No one was going to mess with his baby.
-----
In 2045, a small tech company named Topologix developed the gravitator, a spinning superconducting disk that could slightly alter the local gravitational force. Spun one way, objects above the device became 20% heavier. Spun the other way, it made them that much lighter. While the gravitator was far too heavy, inefficient, and expensive to serve as a means of propulsion, it did find specialized applications in industry and defense. Then in 2050 a junior engineer at Topologix named Victor Timbancaya thought of an unusual use for the technology.
All he needed was a half-billion dollars and some beach-front property on which to try it out.
-----
You could see it from space, glittering on the northern coast of Brunei: the massive arcology they called The Tetracropolis. It was pyramidal, a mile across at the base and nearly as tall, made of liquid-metal glass and nanostruct pylons, big enough to hold a small country within its immense volume. In 2059, ten years after groundbreaking and with another ten to go before completion, it had already become the cultural and commercial hub of the Eastern world.
In the international game of architecture, the Tetra had been Brunei's three-trillion-dollar answer to the extravagance of proud, but aging, Dubai. There was nothing else like it in the world. But history would remember Tetracropolis for something else entirely: Victor's Littoral Gravimetric Phased Array.
Tetra could create designer waves, making it the surfing capitol of the world.
Which ultimately lead to humanity's conquest of the stars. But that came later.
-----
[I see you], said a woman's voice in Victor's head, startling him. It had a dark, playful inflection. Roger had heard it also.
It was in open-channel vox of course, the synthetic voice messaging system which had replaced texting from the early part of the century. With vox, you thought a message to your neural interface, and it was broadcast as data packets, to be received and converted to speech directly into the other person's auditory nerve. The protocol included settings for simulating a user's natural voice, or near enough. Usually the data was passed via the net, but in places with no wi-fi coverage it could be used in direct broadcast mode, such as they were doing here.
Victor and Roger looked around for another diver, but saw no one. [Who is this?] Victor voxed back.
[A fan of nature], came the answer, after a brief pause. Radio comms didn't travel far underwater, so the speaker had to be fairly close, within a hundred meters. But where was she? Victor aimed his light this way and that, then stopped when he realized how stupid he looked. On impulse, he shut off his light and motioned for Roger to swim around the left side of the large, cylindrical module. If he went to the right, they might catch someone hiding on the far side in a pincer move.
When he had gone almost a quarter way around the module, he saw something like a fish dart into view and surge away with powerful strokes of dolphin-shaped flukes. In a second, it had disappeared into the murk. It had human-looking skin and a head with dark, flowing hair, too.
[Hahaha], came faint feminine laughter, heavy with static. [You won't catch me!]
Roger finally came around from his left-hand circuit of the module, to find Victor dumbstruck, staring after the bizarre creature.
[What the hell was that?] Roger finally asked, breaking comms silence, but using their encrypted private channel.
[It looked like a…mermaid], Victor answered, and instantly regretted it.
And ten minutes later, as he climbed aboard the patrol boat, Victor kicked himself for forgetting to capture a screenshot from his visual stream, while it was still in the buffer.
“Not a word to anyone,” he told Roger. “I want to find out what we saw before I make a fool of myself.”
A little later, on their way back to the dock, Victor asked, “Is there any way to track the motion of large objects in the vicinity of the array?”
“We don't have sensors in place for that,” his friend answered.
“No, but what about the array itself? It already measures ocean movements and draws power from them. All we'd have to do is find anomalous mass changes inside the grid.”
“Oh wow. Yeah, but whatever it was, its signature is too small for the resolution you're talking about. The array's meant to track millions of tons of water, not a...a big fish. You'd never see it.”
Victor mulled that over.
“Hmm. What if we used interferometry? I bet we could isolate something human-sized. If it was moving fast enough.”
“Okay, I'll grab tonight's data dump and go see Shelley about writing some code. The good thing is, we know exactly when and where to look. If we find a unique signature there, we can use it to monitor in real-time.”
Victor thought of the glimpse he'd had of the intruder. She had to be human of course, as mythical creatures weren't likely to use vox. It must be an extreme bodymod...but he'd never heard of anyone being turned into a mermaid.
He'd seen no air tanks or a mask, so it must have been a total conversion: synthetic gills, underwater vision, and a host of other, equally aggressive adaptations. That would be an important clue, as such mods must be very rare and very expensive. As he looked out over the afternoon sea, Victor opened a browser in his vision buffer, and accessed a search engine. He entered the terms mermaid bodymod brunei, and scanned the results. It took only a moment for him to find what he sought.
There were only three people who had ever gotten that particular mod, and each had cost a fortune. One, a world-famous freediver, who had died of unrelated causes a couple years ago. The second was a Hawaiian porn star who went on to make such films as Mermaid Heat and Slippery When Wet.
The third result, however, was the one he sought: HRH Princess Miranda, seventh daughter of the reigning Sultan of Brunei, born to his third wife on 14 March, 2037. Two years ago she'd had the transformation, causing a brief splash in the global gossip threads.
After some additional searching, he found she had a homepage. Randa of the Sea. There was a photo of her, smiling beatifically with her head and shoulders above the glistening water, skin like coffee.
Bloody hell.
“Maybe she just likes to explore. You don't know she's the one doing the sabotage,” Roger said, when he'd calmed down. Victor had to admit this.
“Yeah. But I have a hunch.”
“And you can't very well walk up to one of the richest men in the world and ask if his daughter is a radical environmentalist. Especially when he's your boss.”
Also true.
“Then we'll just have to convince her to stop,” Victor said.
“'Oh, please, princess, have mercy on a poor filipino surfer dude! I'm just trying to make a living!'” Roger teased.
Victor cuffed his partner, and laughed to hide his irritation. “Jerk. No, but maybe we can reason with her.” Back in his office, he brought up Miranda's homepage on his work pad, and began to read.
It was geared toward a younger audience, with links and blog posts about scientific things, most pertaining to sea life and underwater ecology. She had a small but devoted trail of fans, mostly young girls who desperately wanted to know what it was like to be a real mermaid princess. Miranda (who used the name Randa for this page) was always polite and enthusiastic in her replies to the fans, but she did get the occasional troll.
SupaHuge: u so hot fish babby just want 2 do u
Randa: Not in a million years, sorry.
She had a picture gallery, too, but most of the images were of the flora and fauna native to these waters. Only now and then did she turn the camera on herself, and it was these images he studied closely.
He would call her pretty, almost beautiful, and there was a Malaysian cast to her her warm smile, bright eyes, and small nose. Her shoulder-length hair was the color of corn silk.
She wasn't naked after all. She had several different bikini tops, but she didn't seem to wear anything over her tail, which looked exactly like a Miranda-colored rear half of a dolphin.
Of course, fifty years ago the daughter of a sultan would never have been allowed to wear so little, but things had changed drastically after the breakup of the US and the resulting changes in global power. Brunei's star had risen, and few things produce a shift toward liberalism than prolonged, rising affluence among a people. Still, Victor sensed Miranda was a firebrand, pushing the limits of tradition in ways it was never prepared to address.
He saw three curved slits on either side of her ribcage. Gills, apparently. If she didn't breath with her lungs, could she still talk? Probably not; she must communicate entirely by vox.
He couldn't imagine the sacrifices she must make for an aquatic life. It wouldn't matter a bit with respect to her online life, having access to Vox and the net. But simple things he took for granted would be off limits for her. She probably lived in the Tetra, in custom accommodations with private access to the sea. Her living quarters must be very interesting indeed, and a real engineering challenge.
Was such an extensive body modification even reversible? Maybe, though he wasn't well versed in the limits of such things. He shuddered at the mental image of her legs stored in cryo somewhere, awaiting eventual reattachment and nerve splicing. Gods, what a thought.
He didn't know her personal internet identity address, of course, so he looked for a proxy address on her homepage. Unsurprisingly there were none listed. But she did have a text-only, embedded public chatbox. Victor created a guest account in the chat client and tried to compose a message that would grab her attention, without betraying anything to the world at large.
DiverVic: I'm a fan of nature too, you know.
He waited for an answer, and several minutes passed. Just as he was about to give up, he saw a reply.
RandaMer: Then stop wrecking my biome, stalker.
Hmm.
DiverVic: I didn't think I was. All I do is make waves. And weren't you stalking me first?
RandaMer: You tech types are all alike. You never think about the damage you cause.
He started to type Then show me, but thought better of the aggressive tone, as it would only make her angry. Thank god he wasn't voxing or it would have been out before he could catch it. He backspaced and wrote:
DiverVic: Will you show me? I'd like to see.
There, he thought. Bait on the hook.
Long minutes passed.
RandaMer: Maybe. Goodbye.
A solid nibble. Progress.
-----
Just before he left the office that night, Victor brought his buddy list into view and voxed Roger.
Victor: [What are you doing?]
Roger: [I'm here with Shelley. I think we can make your tracker out of parts of her old Project Kai'e'e code. She actually found a bug she'd overlooked before, and fixed it. Why?]
Victor: [What if I wanted to move really fast underwater? Do we have anything?]
Roger: [What do you mean, like one of those electric tow-things? Or more like a scooter?]
Victor: [Nothing motorized. Something quiet that won't piss off an environmentalist.]
Roger: [Ah... Let me get back to you on that.]
Victor: [We might not need the tracker, but keep working on that anyway.]
Roger: [You got it, boss.]
The next morning, Roger came to Victor's office with an armful of what looked like a wetsuit and gear. He plopped it on the big work table, where Victor had some large diagrams out, the big paper kind. They were an anachronism in this paperless world, but Victor liked to work that way sometimes.
“What is that?”
“I got this from our divemaster, who owes me a big favor. It's called a MerMate, and...well, the less you know about this, the better. One of our, um, special projects.” Roger mouthed the word military. “We can have it for a few days if we stay quiet about it.”
It looked like a wet suit, with some odd bulges for...power packs?...and only one leg, double wide. When Victor picked it up, the material around the suit's leg felt heavy, gel-like.
“What is this stuff?”
“Synthetic muscles, a servo system. You just wriggle and it motors like a tail. He says it's insanely fast.”
“I have no idea how to operate something like this. I hope he gave you a manual, too.”
After a moment, a light bleeped gently in the corner of Victor's eyesight. [Just sent you the documentation], Roger voxed in crypto as he opened the attachment. It was a large electronic manual with hyperlinks and diagrams. He had some serious reading to do. [Make sure you delete that when you're done. I mean it.]
-----
They took the boat out to the array around noon. This far out, the artificial waves were little more than rhythmic swells, but closer in they grew into large Hawaiian-style pipelines, wreathed in mist.
“I'm not sure I like having my legs stuck together like this,” Victor bitched as he sealed up the suit. The artificial mer-tail sensed that it was out of water, and wasn't amplifying his movements. He felt a little trapped. The oversized fin at the end was ungainly, heavy.
Roger said, “I'm just going to hang out up here and help Shelley with the tracking code. There's no way I could keep up with you anyway. I'll drop a wireless repeater and use ELF mode. Bandwidth will suck, but at least I can talk to you no matter how far you swim. The suit has a good transmitter. If you're within half a click I can probably pick you up.”
Victor nodded. Through the ship's wi-fi he accessed Randa's chat client on her homepage.
DiverVic: I feel like a swim, how about you?
There was no answer.
“Where are we right now?” he asked Roger.
“We're right above module F5.”
DiverVic: I know a little place called F5. I hope you can make it. I'll bring the wine.
The modules had their names painted on the sides, so she should be able to find him. Perhaps she was swimming deep, below radio depth, incommunicado. At any rate, she'd see the message the next time she checked her page.
“Here goes nothing,” Victor said, and put on his mask. He fell back into the water.
In the water, the suit came alive. Victor moved his legs up and down, and the synthetic muscles surged like Aquaman. With a little effort, he could blast through the water at about twenty knots. It was an incredible rush.
[Jesus!] Victor voxed. [Your friend wasn't kidding. This thing is nuts.]
[Watch your power. The faster you go, the shorter your range], Roger cautioned. Victor didn't like the idea of being stuck in this suit when the power ran out, though it was supposed to have a built-in limiter for low-battery mode.
The rushing movement felt like flying, though, and Victor couldn't help but put the suit through its paces. He did a run up and breached a little distance from the boat, easily leaping three meters above the surface before splashing back down.
[Dude, Victor voxed, I could jump over the boat in this thing.]
[Don't try it, boss. Breaking the toy is not allowed. The divemaster would have my ass.]
Victor tooled around for a bit, and checked the module for wear and tear. Then he swam down the line to F6 and did the same. After about ten minutes he turned back toward the boat when Roger voxed him.
[Shell's got a test version of the tracker up and running. The resolution is crap, but she sees the boat when I maneuver. And she sees you.]
A shadow swept over him, a long dark streak in the water, originating from up above. He twisted around in time to see a familiar shape slip away into the distance.
Roger : [There's a third blip now.]
Victor: [Yeah. I've got company. Lost sight of her.]
There she was, a pale shape now ten meters below, moving fast. Victor dove and hit the gas. Damn, the suit was fast. He was pretty sure it could outlast her, as the batteries were good for another hour. But as he came up behind, she saw him and peeled away. Miranda had the edge in agility.
She led him erratically toward the A row, the part of the 25x10 array closest to shore where the waves got their final push. He followed her in silence. Every couple of minutes another wave passed overhead, briefly blotting out the sunlight. He felt the water pushing him with greater and greater strength.
[I'm about to go out of range], he voxed to Roger on their coded channel. [Holler if anything crops up.]
[Yes, boss], was the reply.
Finally, about 100 meters past the final row of the array, she stopped above a large coral reef. He noticed she wore a Hello Kitty bikini top, and this struck him as funny in a way he couldn't have explained.
[Here's what your waves are doing], she voxed at last, and waved her hand over the scene. The reef did have large barren patches, and the plant life was also somewhat scarcer than further out. There weren't as many fish, either. The wave action was strong here, and maybe the extra flow posed a problem for the delicate polyps. Or it could be an increase in algae levels, their growth spurred by the greater oxygenation. He didn't know. But clearly something was damaging the reef, and these things healed slowly. She beckoned him to follow, and twenty minutes later he knew she was right.
[This is my home], she told him. [You're killing it with your machines. Please stop.] Even though her voice was only synthetic, it was encoded with urgency.
[I can't, Miranda. It's the biggest thing I've ever worked on, and I need this to go well.]
[What makes it so important?] she demanded.
[Because these machines can save us. Save the planet.]
She gave a synthetic laugh. [Right. By wrecking it?]
[No, Miranda. By taking us to the stars. We just haven't figured out how to harness the effect fully. We need to make it a couple orders of magnitude more efficient, that's all.]
[Oh, so you can rape other planets too?]
[Listen to me, Miranda. With a working gravity drive we can stop using oil. We can fundamentally change the way we move around. No more cars. And we can get the population density down. Bases on the moon. Mars. The possibilities are endless. But I need time to work on the problem, and the right resources.]
She thought about that for a long time, floating in the water like a goddess.
[If you could do really do that, it would cause an economic upheaval, wouldn't it? Change everything.]
He nodded. [It would have to.]
[My father wouldn't like that one bit.]
Victor didn't trust himself to find the right response, torn between the desire to compel and fealty to her father. Another wave passed overhead, displacing them in a big vertical circle.
The mermaid smiled mischievously, and with her hair swirling in the water, he thought she was the most beautiful creature he'd ever seen.
[Diver Vic, I think I like you.]
-----
Victor and Miranda were swimming westward a few minutes later when Roger sent a low-baud message over the ELF.
[Danger. Surface.]
He told Miranda about the warning and they ascended toward sunlight. When he broke surface, he voxed Roger, now that he had greater radio range.
Victor: [What's up?]
Roger: [Incoming tsunami, boss. We just had a big quake about 200 klicks out to sea. 8.5. We've got about 5 minutes before it gets here.]
Victor: [Take the boat, head into open water. You might be able to avoid the worst of it.]
Roger: [No can do. I'm coming to pick you up.]
Victor: [What good will that do?]
Roger: [Head to shore, you can make it with that suit.]
Victor: [Yeah, but Miranda can't. She needs water to breathe. Fuck.]
He relayed the news to Miranda, then thought hard for a minute.
Victor: [Roger, you still talking to Shelley? Does she have the Kai'e'e code up?]
Roger: [Holy crap, I forgot about that.]
Victor: [Tell her to load it NOW. We'll...we'll figure something out.]
Miranda knew she hadn't any options. The tsunami would hurl them onto land, dash them against the structures there, probably kill them both. The look on her face broke his heart.
Roger: [Shelley says if you swim to the lee of the array, say around A12, you might have a chance. Get moving.]
Victor: [On our way.]
He told Miranda to climb on his back, arms around his neck; the MerMate had better speed and endurance than she did. As he sped them both through the water, Victor told her the plan.
[We've got a program we wrote for the array a couple years ago, but never tested live. It works in simulations. It's designed to protect vital installations from a tidal wave, or at least weaken it.]
She was incredulous. [Wouldn't that take too much power?]
[The array pulls most of its power from the movement of the water, he voxed. Whether it can handle this amount of load is anyone's guess. But we have to try to get into the lee of the effect.]
Two minutes passed. Being submerged, Victor could only listen on the low-bandwidth ELF channel.
Roger: [Prog active. Pray.]
Victor looked down as the modules passed below. A8, A9... almost there.
The water began to move, a long, powerful sucking out to sea, and then he felt it: a strong, heterodyne pulsing from the phased modules, as they increased power and began to shape the gravitational slope. It grew and grew, until he could feel his whole body throb with it. They rose and rose on what felt like a continuous swell.
He remembered the simulations: the five- by two-kilometer array was bending gravity to create a basin of attraction, making a hill of water many meters tall over its entire area. At the right moment, it would send the water-hill into the tsunami. Once it had fired its shot, the array would reverse the polarity to create a gravitational hill that, theoretically, would function as a virtual breakwater. It was only a localized effect, though, and no matter what, the lower levels of the Tetra were going to get wet. But that was better than a giant wave smacking it full broadside. And it might create enough of a calm spot for Victor and Miranda to survive.
After he found the A12 module, he surfaced and looked for Roger's boat, but couldn't pick him out among the numerous boats dotting the horizon. Most were driving to sea, hoping to get out of danger, as the wave would be tallest near the shore.
They had to swim toward land just to maintain position as the program launched its counter-wave. Then they saw the incoming tsunami, at least ten meters tall, and growing as it drew near. The collision of the two waves, about a kilometer away, was incredible, a vertical explosion like God slapping the ocean. Then the field polarities reversed, and the two swimmers had to fight to stay in place as seawater churned in dangerous ways about them.
[I'm scared], she voxed, and clung to him. The wave was still coming, but now it had a huge gap in the middle of it. He thought their chances were better than zero, at least. And as the wave reached them the throbbing of the array reached new octaves of discomfort. It was nearly impossible to breathe. He almost passed out as they were tossed about like dolls, and for a time Victor was totally disoriented. Then it passed, and he slowly regained his bearings.
Miranda had managed to hang on. Thank you, he thought to himself.
The field from the array throttled back, and he felt he could breathe again. By then the wave had reached land, and was plowing through the city which lay about its flanks of the Tetra. But its strength had been greatly diminished along the five-kilometer stretch of the phased array.
Roger was shouting over the vox. [Holy shit, it worked! Did you see that?]
[We could use a lift, Victor told him. Then let's get this mermaid someplace safe.]
-----
Six weeks later, Miranda took Victor to see a pod of dolphins swimming a couple miles off the coast. Their grey, sleek bodies slipped around them in the shining water, and there must have been three dozen of the things. Two of the juvenile dolphins were doing something Victor had never seen before: creating ring-like bubbles with a toss of their head and chasing them through the water. He saw one of the young dolphins bite a ring and magically turn it into a smaller one, which lasted a good twenty seconds before breaking into a spray of gem-like bubbles.
[That's incredible], Victor voxed. [Thank you for showing me this.]
The behavior of the bubble rings was fascinating; they were incredibly long-lived and moved exactly like the smoke rings his grandfather used to make.
It's a core of air inside a stable toroidal vortex, he realized. And then a flash of inspiration set his brain on fire.
That's it. That's the shape I need. That's how you make a space drive out of a gravitator. A self-reinforcing, rolling torus of field lines. You could dump almost limitless power into that field. And steer it, too.
He pulled out his mouthpiece and kissed the mermaid deeply, her hair flowing around them like a cloud.
Many eager suitors had promised the stars to win the heart of a beautiful princess. Victor Timbancaya was the first to actually snatch them.
© 2012 Sandra Kishi Glenn, all rights reserved.
by Sandra Kishi Glenn
Swimming at a depth of twenty meters off the coast of Brunei, Victor Timbancaya and Roger Murphy swept their flashlights over module D5, looking for signs of sabotage. Skillful, persistent monkey-wrenching had forced the shutdown of the entire array for days at a time, and the Sultan didn't like his toy being offline. But that didn't matter to Victor, because for him, these attacks were personal.
No one was going to mess with his baby.
-----
In 2045, a small tech company named Topologix developed the gravitator, a spinning superconducting disk that could slightly alter the local gravitational force. Spun one way, objects above the device became 20% heavier. Spun the other way, it made them that much lighter. While the gravitator was far too heavy, inefficient, and expensive to serve as a means of propulsion, it did find specialized applications in industry and defense. Then in 2050 a junior engineer at Topologix named Victor Timbancaya thought of an unusual use for the technology.
All he needed was a half-billion dollars and some beach-front property on which to try it out.
-----
You could see it from space, glittering on the northern coast of Brunei: the massive arcology they called The Tetracropolis. It was pyramidal, a mile across at the base and nearly as tall, made of liquid-metal glass and nanostruct pylons, big enough to hold a small country within its immense volume. In 2059, ten years after groundbreaking and with another ten to go before completion, it had already become the cultural and commercial hub of the Eastern world.
In the international game of architecture, the Tetra had been Brunei's three-trillion-dollar answer to the extravagance of proud, but aging, Dubai. There was nothing else like it in the world. But history would remember Tetracropolis for something else entirely: Victor's Littoral Gravimetric Phased Array.
Tetra could create designer waves, making it the surfing capitol of the world.
Which ultimately lead to humanity's conquest of the stars. But that came later.
-----
[I see you], said a woman's voice in Victor's head, startling him. It had a dark, playful inflection. Roger had heard it also.
It was in open-channel vox of course, the synthetic voice messaging system which had replaced texting from the early part of the century. With vox, you thought a message to your neural interface, and it was broadcast as data packets, to be received and converted to speech directly into the other person's auditory nerve. The protocol included settings for simulating a user's natural voice, or near enough. Usually the data was passed via the net, but in places with no wi-fi coverage it could be used in direct broadcast mode, such as they were doing here.
Victor and Roger looked around for another diver, but saw no one. [Who is this?] Victor voxed back.
[A fan of nature], came the answer, after a brief pause. Radio comms didn't travel far underwater, so the speaker had to be fairly close, within a hundred meters. But where was she? Victor aimed his light this way and that, then stopped when he realized how stupid he looked. On impulse, he shut off his light and motioned for Roger to swim around the left side of the large, cylindrical module. If he went to the right, they might catch someone hiding on the far side in a pincer move.
When he had gone almost a quarter way around the module, he saw something like a fish dart into view and surge away with powerful strokes of dolphin-shaped flukes. In a second, it had disappeared into the murk. It had human-looking skin and a head with dark, flowing hair, too.
[Hahaha], came faint feminine laughter, heavy with static. [You won't catch me!]
Roger finally came around from his left-hand circuit of the module, to find Victor dumbstruck, staring after the bizarre creature.
[What the hell was that?] Roger finally asked, breaking comms silence, but using their encrypted private channel.
[It looked like a…mermaid], Victor answered, and instantly regretted it.
And ten minutes later, as he climbed aboard the patrol boat, Victor kicked himself for forgetting to capture a screenshot from his visual stream, while it was still in the buffer.
“Not a word to anyone,” he told Roger. “I want to find out what we saw before I make a fool of myself.”
A little later, on their way back to the dock, Victor asked, “Is there any way to track the motion of large objects in the vicinity of the array?”
“We don't have sensors in place for that,” his friend answered.
“No, but what about the array itself? It already measures ocean movements and draws power from them. All we'd have to do is find anomalous mass changes inside the grid.”
“Oh wow. Yeah, but whatever it was, its signature is too small for the resolution you're talking about. The array's meant to track millions of tons of water, not a...a big fish. You'd never see it.”
Victor mulled that over.
“Hmm. What if we used interferometry? I bet we could isolate something human-sized. If it was moving fast enough.”
“Okay, I'll grab tonight's data dump and go see Shelley about writing some code. The good thing is, we know exactly when and where to look. If we find a unique signature there, we can use it to monitor in real-time.”
Victor thought of the glimpse he'd had of the intruder. She had to be human of course, as mythical creatures weren't likely to use vox. It must be an extreme bodymod...but he'd never heard of anyone being turned into a mermaid.
He'd seen no air tanks or a mask, so it must have been a total conversion: synthetic gills, underwater vision, and a host of other, equally aggressive adaptations. That would be an important clue, as such mods must be very rare and very expensive. As he looked out over the afternoon sea, Victor opened a browser in his vision buffer, and accessed a search engine. He entered the terms mermaid bodymod brunei, and scanned the results. It took only a moment for him to find what he sought.
There were only three people who had ever gotten that particular mod, and each had cost a fortune. One, a world-famous freediver, who had died of unrelated causes a couple years ago. The second was a Hawaiian porn star who went on to make such films as Mermaid Heat and Slippery When Wet.
The third result, however, was the one he sought: HRH Princess Miranda, seventh daughter of the reigning Sultan of Brunei, born to his third wife on 14 March, 2037. Two years ago she'd had the transformation, causing a brief splash in the global gossip threads.
After some additional searching, he found she had a homepage. Randa of the Sea. There was a photo of her, smiling beatifically with her head and shoulders above the glistening water, skin like coffee.
Bloody hell.
“Maybe she just likes to explore. You don't know she's the one doing the sabotage,” Roger said, when he'd calmed down. Victor had to admit this.
“Yeah. But I have a hunch.”
“And you can't very well walk up to one of the richest men in the world and ask if his daughter is a radical environmentalist. Especially when he's your boss.”
Also true.
“Then we'll just have to convince her to stop,” Victor said.
“'Oh, please, princess, have mercy on a poor filipino surfer dude! I'm just trying to make a living!'” Roger teased.
Victor cuffed his partner, and laughed to hide his irritation. “Jerk. No, but maybe we can reason with her.” Back in his office, he brought up Miranda's homepage on his work pad, and began to read.
It was geared toward a younger audience, with links and blog posts about scientific things, most pertaining to sea life and underwater ecology. She had a small but devoted trail of fans, mostly young girls who desperately wanted to know what it was like to be a real mermaid princess. Miranda (who used the name Randa for this page) was always polite and enthusiastic in her replies to the fans, but she did get the occasional troll.
SupaHuge: u so hot fish babby just want 2 do u
Randa: Not in a million years, sorry.
She had a picture gallery, too, but most of the images were of the flora and fauna native to these waters. Only now and then did she turn the camera on herself, and it was these images he studied closely.
He would call her pretty, almost beautiful, and there was a Malaysian cast to her her warm smile, bright eyes, and small nose. Her shoulder-length hair was the color of corn silk.
She wasn't naked after all. She had several different bikini tops, but she didn't seem to wear anything over her tail, which looked exactly like a Miranda-colored rear half of a dolphin.
Of course, fifty years ago the daughter of a sultan would never have been allowed to wear so little, but things had changed drastically after the breakup of the US and the resulting changes in global power. Brunei's star had risen, and few things produce a shift toward liberalism than prolonged, rising affluence among a people. Still, Victor sensed Miranda was a firebrand, pushing the limits of tradition in ways it was never prepared to address.
He saw three curved slits on either side of her ribcage. Gills, apparently. If she didn't breath with her lungs, could she still talk? Probably not; she must communicate entirely by vox.
He couldn't imagine the sacrifices she must make for an aquatic life. It wouldn't matter a bit with respect to her online life, having access to Vox and the net. But simple things he took for granted would be off limits for her. She probably lived in the Tetra, in custom accommodations with private access to the sea. Her living quarters must be very interesting indeed, and a real engineering challenge.
Was such an extensive body modification even reversible? Maybe, though he wasn't well versed in the limits of such things. He shuddered at the mental image of her legs stored in cryo somewhere, awaiting eventual reattachment and nerve splicing. Gods, what a thought.
He didn't know her personal internet identity address, of course, so he looked for a proxy address on her homepage. Unsurprisingly there were none listed. But she did have a text-only, embedded public chatbox. Victor created a guest account in the chat client and tried to compose a message that would grab her attention, without betraying anything to the world at large.
DiverVic: I'm a fan of nature too, you know.
He waited for an answer, and several minutes passed. Just as he was about to give up, he saw a reply.
RandaMer: Then stop wrecking my biome, stalker.
Hmm.
DiverVic: I didn't think I was. All I do is make waves. And weren't you stalking me first?
RandaMer: You tech types are all alike. You never think about the damage you cause.
He started to type Then show me, but thought better of the aggressive tone, as it would only make her angry. Thank god he wasn't voxing or it would have been out before he could catch it. He backspaced and wrote:
DiverVic: Will you show me? I'd like to see.
There, he thought. Bait on the hook.
Long minutes passed.
RandaMer: Maybe. Goodbye.
A solid nibble. Progress.
-----
Just before he left the office that night, Victor brought his buddy list into view and voxed Roger.
Victor: [What are you doing?]
Roger: [I'm here with Shelley. I think we can make your tracker out of parts of her old Project Kai'e'e code. She actually found a bug she'd overlooked before, and fixed it. Why?]
Victor: [What if I wanted to move really fast underwater? Do we have anything?]
Roger: [What do you mean, like one of those electric tow-things? Or more like a scooter?]
Victor: [Nothing motorized. Something quiet that won't piss off an environmentalist.]
Roger: [Ah... Let me get back to you on that.]
Victor: [We might not need the tracker, but keep working on that anyway.]
Roger: [You got it, boss.]
The next morning, Roger came to Victor's office with an armful of what looked like a wetsuit and gear. He plopped it on the big work table, where Victor had some large diagrams out, the big paper kind. They were an anachronism in this paperless world, but Victor liked to work that way sometimes.
“What is that?”
“I got this from our divemaster, who owes me a big favor. It's called a MerMate, and...well, the less you know about this, the better. One of our, um, special projects.” Roger mouthed the word military. “We can have it for a few days if we stay quiet about it.”
It looked like a wet suit, with some odd bulges for...power packs?...and only one leg, double wide. When Victor picked it up, the material around the suit's leg felt heavy, gel-like.
“What is this stuff?”
“Synthetic muscles, a servo system. You just wriggle and it motors like a tail. He says it's insanely fast.”
“I have no idea how to operate something like this. I hope he gave you a manual, too.”
After a moment, a light bleeped gently in the corner of Victor's eyesight. [Just sent you the documentation], Roger voxed in crypto as he opened the attachment. It was a large electronic manual with hyperlinks and diagrams. He had some serious reading to do. [Make sure you delete that when you're done. I mean it.]
-----
They took the boat out to the array around noon. This far out, the artificial waves were little more than rhythmic swells, but closer in they grew into large Hawaiian-style pipelines, wreathed in mist.
“I'm not sure I like having my legs stuck together like this,” Victor bitched as he sealed up the suit. The artificial mer-tail sensed that it was out of water, and wasn't amplifying his movements. He felt a little trapped. The oversized fin at the end was ungainly, heavy.
Roger said, “I'm just going to hang out up here and help Shelley with the tracking code. There's no way I could keep up with you anyway. I'll drop a wireless repeater and use ELF mode. Bandwidth will suck, but at least I can talk to you no matter how far you swim. The suit has a good transmitter. If you're within half a click I can probably pick you up.”
Victor nodded. Through the ship's wi-fi he accessed Randa's chat client on her homepage.
DiverVic: I feel like a swim, how about you?
There was no answer.
“Where are we right now?” he asked Roger.
“We're right above module F5.”
DiverVic: I know a little place called F5. I hope you can make it. I'll bring the wine.
The modules had their names painted on the sides, so she should be able to find him. Perhaps she was swimming deep, below radio depth, incommunicado. At any rate, she'd see the message the next time she checked her page.
“Here goes nothing,” Victor said, and put on his mask. He fell back into the water.
In the water, the suit came alive. Victor moved his legs up and down, and the synthetic muscles surged like Aquaman. With a little effort, he could blast through the water at about twenty knots. It was an incredible rush.
[Jesus!] Victor voxed. [Your friend wasn't kidding. This thing is nuts.]
[Watch your power. The faster you go, the shorter your range], Roger cautioned. Victor didn't like the idea of being stuck in this suit when the power ran out, though it was supposed to have a built-in limiter for low-battery mode.
The rushing movement felt like flying, though, and Victor couldn't help but put the suit through its paces. He did a run up and breached a little distance from the boat, easily leaping three meters above the surface before splashing back down.
[Dude, Victor voxed, I could jump over the boat in this thing.]
[Don't try it, boss. Breaking the toy is not allowed. The divemaster would have my ass.]
Victor tooled around for a bit, and checked the module for wear and tear. Then he swam down the line to F6 and did the same. After about ten minutes he turned back toward the boat when Roger voxed him.
[Shell's got a test version of the tracker up and running. The resolution is crap, but she sees the boat when I maneuver. And she sees you.]
A shadow swept over him, a long dark streak in the water, originating from up above. He twisted around in time to see a familiar shape slip away into the distance.
Roger : [There's a third blip now.]
Victor: [Yeah. I've got company. Lost sight of her.]
There she was, a pale shape now ten meters below, moving fast. Victor dove and hit the gas. Damn, the suit was fast. He was pretty sure it could outlast her, as the batteries were good for another hour. But as he came up behind, she saw him and peeled away. Miranda had the edge in agility.
She led him erratically toward the A row, the part of the 25x10 array closest to shore where the waves got their final push. He followed her in silence. Every couple of minutes another wave passed overhead, briefly blotting out the sunlight. He felt the water pushing him with greater and greater strength.
[I'm about to go out of range], he voxed to Roger on their coded channel. [Holler if anything crops up.]
[Yes, boss], was the reply.
Finally, about 100 meters past the final row of the array, she stopped above a large coral reef. He noticed she wore a Hello Kitty bikini top, and this struck him as funny in a way he couldn't have explained.
[Here's what your waves are doing], she voxed at last, and waved her hand over the scene. The reef did have large barren patches, and the plant life was also somewhat scarcer than further out. There weren't as many fish, either. The wave action was strong here, and maybe the extra flow posed a problem for the delicate polyps. Or it could be an increase in algae levels, their growth spurred by the greater oxygenation. He didn't know. But clearly something was damaging the reef, and these things healed slowly. She beckoned him to follow, and twenty minutes later he knew she was right.
[This is my home], she told him. [You're killing it with your machines. Please stop.] Even though her voice was only synthetic, it was encoded with urgency.
[I can't, Miranda. It's the biggest thing I've ever worked on, and I need this to go well.]
[What makes it so important?] she demanded.
[Because these machines can save us. Save the planet.]
She gave a synthetic laugh. [Right. By wrecking it?]
[No, Miranda. By taking us to the stars. We just haven't figured out how to harness the effect fully. We need to make it a couple orders of magnitude more efficient, that's all.]
[Oh, so you can rape other planets too?]
[Listen to me, Miranda. With a working gravity drive we can stop using oil. We can fundamentally change the way we move around. No more cars. And we can get the population density down. Bases on the moon. Mars. The possibilities are endless. But I need time to work on the problem, and the right resources.]
She thought about that for a long time, floating in the water like a goddess.
[If you could do really do that, it would cause an economic upheaval, wouldn't it? Change everything.]
He nodded. [It would have to.]
[My father wouldn't like that one bit.]
Victor didn't trust himself to find the right response, torn between the desire to compel and fealty to her father. Another wave passed overhead, displacing them in a big vertical circle.
The mermaid smiled mischievously, and with her hair swirling in the water, he thought she was the most beautiful creature he'd ever seen.
[Diver Vic, I think I like you.]
-----
Victor and Miranda were swimming westward a few minutes later when Roger sent a low-baud message over the ELF.
[Danger. Surface.]
He told Miranda about the warning and they ascended toward sunlight. When he broke surface, he voxed Roger, now that he had greater radio range.
Victor: [What's up?]
Roger: [Incoming tsunami, boss. We just had a big quake about 200 klicks out to sea. 8.5. We've got about 5 minutes before it gets here.]
Victor: [Take the boat, head into open water. You might be able to avoid the worst of it.]
Roger: [No can do. I'm coming to pick you up.]
Victor: [What good will that do?]
Roger: [Head to shore, you can make it with that suit.]
Victor: [Yeah, but Miranda can't. She needs water to breathe. Fuck.]
He relayed the news to Miranda, then thought hard for a minute.
Victor: [Roger, you still talking to Shelley? Does she have the Kai'e'e code up?]
Roger: [Holy crap, I forgot about that.]
Victor: [Tell her to load it NOW. We'll...we'll figure something out.]
Miranda knew she hadn't any options. The tsunami would hurl them onto land, dash them against the structures there, probably kill them both. The look on her face broke his heart.
Roger: [Shelley says if you swim to the lee of the array, say around A12, you might have a chance. Get moving.]
Victor: [On our way.]
He told Miranda to climb on his back, arms around his neck; the MerMate had better speed and endurance than she did. As he sped them both through the water, Victor told her the plan.
[We've got a program we wrote for the array a couple years ago, but never tested live. It works in simulations. It's designed to protect vital installations from a tidal wave, or at least weaken it.]
She was incredulous. [Wouldn't that take too much power?]
[The array pulls most of its power from the movement of the water, he voxed. Whether it can handle this amount of load is anyone's guess. But we have to try to get into the lee of the effect.]
Two minutes passed. Being submerged, Victor could only listen on the low-bandwidth ELF channel.
Roger: [Prog active. Pray.]
Victor looked down as the modules passed below. A8, A9... almost there.
The water began to move, a long, powerful sucking out to sea, and then he felt it: a strong, heterodyne pulsing from the phased modules, as they increased power and began to shape the gravitational slope. It grew and grew, until he could feel his whole body throb with it. They rose and rose on what felt like a continuous swell.
He remembered the simulations: the five- by two-kilometer array was bending gravity to create a basin of attraction, making a hill of water many meters tall over its entire area. At the right moment, it would send the water-hill into the tsunami. Once it had fired its shot, the array would reverse the polarity to create a gravitational hill that, theoretically, would function as a virtual breakwater. It was only a localized effect, though, and no matter what, the lower levels of the Tetra were going to get wet. But that was better than a giant wave smacking it full broadside. And it might create enough of a calm spot for Victor and Miranda to survive.
After he found the A12 module, he surfaced and looked for Roger's boat, but couldn't pick him out among the numerous boats dotting the horizon. Most were driving to sea, hoping to get out of danger, as the wave would be tallest near the shore.
They had to swim toward land just to maintain position as the program launched its counter-wave. Then they saw the incoming tsunami, at least ten meters tall, and growing as it drew near. The collision of the two waves, about a kilometer away, was incredible, a vertical explosion like God slapping the ocean. Then the field polarities reversed, and the two swimmers had to fight to stay in place as seawater churned in dangerous ways about them.
[I'm scared], she voxed, and clung to him. The wave was still coming, but now it had a huge gap in the middle of it. He thought their chances were better than zero, at least. And as the wave reached them the throbbing of the array reached new octaves of discomfort. It was nearly impossible to breathe. He almost passed out as they were tossed about like dolls, and for a time Victor was totally disoriented. Then it passed, and he slowly regained his bearings.
Miranda had managed to hang on. Thank you, he thought to himself.
The field from the array throttled back, and he felt he could breathe again. By then the wave had reached land, and was plowing through the city which lay about its flanks of the Tetra. But its strength had been greatly diminished along the five-kilometer stretch of the phased array.
Roger was shouting over the vox. [Holy shit, it worked! Did you see that?]
[We could use a lift, Victor told him. Then let's get this mermaid someplace safe.]
-----
Six weeks later, Miranda took Victor to see a pod of dolphins swimming a couple miles off the coast. Their grey, sleek bodies slipped around them in the shining water, and there must have been three dozen of the things. Two of the juvenile dolphins were doing something Victor had never seen before: creating ring-like bubbles with a toss of their head and chasing them through the water. He saw one of the young dolphins bite a ring and magically turn it into a smaller one, which lasted a good twenty seconds before breaking into a spray of gem-like bubbles.
[That's incredible], Victor voxed. [Thank you for showing me this.]
The behavior of the bubble rings was fascinating; they were incredibly long-lived and moved exactly like the smoke rings his grandfather used to make.
It's a core of air inside a stable toroidal vortex, he realized. And then a flash of inspiration set his brain on fire.
That's it. That's the shape I need. That's how you make a space drive out of a gravitator. A self-reinforcing, rolling torus of field lines. You could dump almost limitless power into that field. And steer it, too.
He pulled out his mouthpiece and kissed the mermaid deeply, her hair flowing around them like a cloud.
Many eager suitors had promised the stars to win the heart of a beautiful princess. Victor Timbancaya was the first to actually snatch them.
© 2012 Sandra Kishi Glenn, all rights reserved.
