If they'd really wanted to keep her from putting her grubby paws all over company property then they shouldn't have left this service panel in her chest. But they were on such a steep curve, back then. The brownouts weren't waiting; Hydro-Q wasn't waiting; the GA couldn't wait either. The whole geothermal program was fast-tracked, rearguard, and on the fly; the rifters themselves were a short term stopgap even on that breakneck schedule. Lenie Clarke and her buddies were prototypes, field tests, and final product all rolled into one. How could any accountant justify sealing up the implants on Monday when you'd only have to cut your way back in on Wednesday to fix a faulty myocell, or install some vital component that the advance sims had overlooked?

Even the deadman alarms were an afterthought, Clarke remembers. Karl Acton brought them down to Beebe at the start of his tour, handed them out like throat lozenges, told everyone to pop themselves open and slide 'em in right next to the seawater intake.

Karl was the one who discovered how to do what Lenie Clarke is doing right now. Ken Lubin killed him for it.

Times change, Clarke reflects, and tweaks another setting.

Finally she's finished. She lets the fleshy flap fall back into her chest, feels the phospholipids rebind along the seam. Molecular tails embrace in an orgy of hydrophobia. Another ache throbs diffusely inside now, subtly different from those that have gone before: disinfectants and synthetic antibodies, spraying down the implant cavity in the unlikely event that its lining should fail.

The outraged handpad has given up; half of its readouts are yellow and orange.

Inside Clarke's head, things are beginning to change. The permeability of critical membranes is edging up a few percent. The production of certain chemicals, designed not to carry signals but to blockade them, is subtly being scaled back. Windows are not yet opening, but they are being unlocked.

She can feel none of this directly, of course. The changes, by themselves, are necessary but not sufficient—they don't matter here where lungs are used, where pressure is a mere single atmosphere. They only matter when catalyzed by the weight of an ocean.

But now, when Lenie Clarke goes outside—when she steps into the airlock and the pressure accretes around her like a liquid mountain; when three hundred atmospheres squeeze her head so hard that her very synapses start short-circuiting—then, Lenie Clarke will be able to look into men's souls. Not the bright parts, of course. No philosophy or music, no altruism, no intellectual musings about right and wrong. Nothing neocortical at all. What Lenie Clarke will feel predates all of that by a hundred million years. The hypothalamus, the reticular formation, the amygdala. The reptile brain, the midbrain. Jealousies, appetites, fears and inarticulate hatreds. She'll feel them all, to a range of fifteen meters or more.

She remembers what it was like. Too well. Six years gone and it seems like yesterday.