"We could do it, all right, but it'd be a complete waste of—I mean, my God! Half the Pacific coast just dropped into the sea, surely there's more—"

"Not for you, sir. You have your assignment."

He turned away, crowded by invisible statistics.

"What kind of external impetus, Doctor?" She said to his back.

He stopped. "What?"

"You said it would extinguish barring some external impetus. What did you mean?"

"Something to pump up the replication rate. New input to reinforce the meme."

"What kind of input?"

He turned to face her. "There is none, Ms. Rowan. That's my point. You've purged the records, you've broken the correlations, and you've eliminated the vectors, right?"

Rowan nodded. "We—"

—killed our people—

"eliminated the vectors," she said.

"Well there you go."

She deliberately softened her voice. "Please carry out my instructions, Dr. Murphy. I know they seem trivial to you, but I'd rather take the precautions than the risk."

His face conveyed exactly what he thought of the precautions she'd already undertaken. He nodded and left without another word.

Rowan sighed and sagged back in her chair. A banner of text scrolled across her field of view: another four hundred botflies successfully requisitioned for the SeaTac mop-up. That made over five thousand of the little teleops between SeaTac and Hongcouver, racing to sniff out the bodies before typhus and cholera beat them to the trough.

Millions dead. Trillions in damages. Preferable to the alternative, she knew. It didn't help much.

Saving the world had come with a price tag attached.

VOLVOX

MERMAID

The Pacific Ocean stood on her back. She ignored it.

It crushed the bodies of her friends. She forgot them.

It drank the light, blinding even her miraculous eyes. It dared her to give in, to use her headlamp like some crippled dryback.

She kept going, in darkness.

Eventually the sea floor tilted into a great escarpment, leading into light. The bottom changed. Mud disappeared under viscous clumps of half-digested petroleum: a century of oil spills, a great global rug to sweep them beneath. Generations of sunken barges and fishing trawlers haunted the bottom, each a corpse and crypt and epitaph unto itself. She explored the first one she found, slid through shattered windowpanes and upended corridors, and remembered, vaguely, that fish were supposed to congregate in such places.

A long time ago. Now there were only worms, and suffocating bivalves, and a woman turned amphibious by some abstract convergence of technology and economics.

She kept going.

It was growing almost bright enough to see without eyecaps. The bottom twitched with sluggish eutrophiles, creatures so black with hemoglobin they could squeeze oxygen from the rocks themselves. She flashed her headlamp at them, briefly: they shone crimson in the unexpected light.

She kept going.