The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [2]
Vera was petrified. “Scared of what? What happens down here?”
“Just keep your hands braced on that big vein of dolomite,” Karen told her, the lucid voice of good sense and reason. “We’ve got plenty of safety sensors. This whole mine is crawling with smart dust.”
“Are you telling me that this stupid rock is moving?”
“Yeah. It moves a little. Because we’re draining it. It has to subside.”
“What if it falls right on top of us?”
“You’re holding it up,” Karen pointed out. She wiped her helmet’s exterior faceplate with a dainty little sponge on a stick. “I just hit a good nasty wet spot! I can practically smell that!”
“But what if this whole mine falls in on us? That would smash us like bugs!”
Karen sneezed. All cross-eyed, she looked sadly at the spray across the bottom of her faceplate. “Well, that won’t happen.”
“How do you know that?”
“It won’t happen. It’s a judgment call.”
This was not an answer Vera wanted to hear. The whole point of installing and running a sensorweb was to avoid human “judgment calls.” Only idiots used guesswork when a sensorweb was available.
For instance, pumping toxins down here in the first place: That was some idiot’s “judgment call.” Some fool had judged that it was much easier to hide an environmental crime than it was to pay to be clean.
Then the Acquis had arrived with their sensorweb and their mediation, so everybody knew everything about the woe and horror on this island. The hidden criminality was part of the public record, suddenly. They were mining the crime. There was crime all around them.
A nasty fit of nerves gathered steam within Vera. She hadn’t had one of these fits of nerves in months. She had thought she was well and truly over her fits of nerves. She’d been sure she would never have a fit of nerves while wearing an Acquis neural helmet.
“Let me use the drill,” Vera pleaded.
“This drill needs a special touch.”
“Let me do it.”
“You volunteered for mine work,” said Karen. “That doesn’t make you good at it. Not yet.”
“ ‘We learn by doing,’ ” Vera quoted stiffly, and that was a very correct, Acquis-style thing to say. So Karen shrugged and splashed out of the way. Karen braced herself against the stony roof.
Vera wrapped her arms around the rugged contours of the drill. Her boneware shifted at the hips and knees as she raised the drill’s tip overhead. She pressed the trigger.
The drill whirled wildly in her arms and jammed. All the lights in the mine went out.
Vera’s exoskeleton, instantly, locked tight around her flesh. She was stuck to the drill as if nailed to it.
“I’m stuck,” she announced. “And it’s dark.”
“Yeah, we’re all stuck here now,” said Karen, in the sullen blackness. Toxic water dripped musically.
“I can’t move! I can’t see my own hands. I can’t even see my mediation!”
“That’s because you just blew out the power, Vera. Freezing the system is a safety procedure.”
An angry, muffled shout came from another miner. “Okay, what idiot pulled that stunt?” Vera heard the miner sloshing toward them through the darkness.
“I did that!” Vera shouted. In the Acquis, it was always best to take responsibility at once. “That was my fault! I’ll do better.”
“Oh. So it was you? You, the newbie?”
Karen was indignant. “Gregor, don’t you dare call Vera a ‘newbie.’ This is Vera Mihajlovic! Compared to her, you’re the newbie.”
“Well, it’s a good thing I still have charge left in my capacitors.”
Karen sighed aloud in the wet darkness. “Just go and reboot us, Gregor. We’ve all got a schedule to meet.”
“Please help me,” Vera begged him. “I’m stuck here, I can’t move!”
“You’ll have to wait for a miracle, stupid,” said Gregor, and he left them there, rigid in the darkness.
“You made Gregor angry,” Karen assessed. “Gregor’s our very best rock man, but he’s not exactly a people person.”
Vera heaved uselessly against the silent pads and straps of her dead exoskeleton. Her boneware, which gave her such strength, grace, lightness, power, had become her intimate prison.
“Who designed all this?” she shrieked. “We should have power