One of the tubes opens, almost hesitantly. Something dark and stringy drifts out, twitching. The gray plume sweeps across it; it sags, lifeless, across the sill of its burrow. Other tubes are opening now. Invertebrate corpses slump back into sight.

"What's in this stuff?" Joel whispers.

"Cyanide. Rotenone. Some other things. Sort of a cocktail."

The nozzle sputters for a few seconds and runs dry. Automatically, Joel retracts it.

"Okay," Jarvis says. "Let's grab it and go home."

Joel doesn't move.

"Hey," Jarvis says.

Joel shakes his head, plays the machinery. The 'scaphe extends its arms in a metal hug, pulls the canister off the bottom. Joel strips the 'phones from his eyes and taps the controls. They begin rising.

"That was a pretty thorough rinse," Joel remarks after a while.

"Yes. Well, the sample's costing us a fair bit. Don't want to contaminate it."

"I see."

"You can turn the lights back on," Jarvis says. "How long before we break the surface?"

Joel trips the floods. "Twenty minutes. Half hour."

"I hope the lifter pilot doesn't get too bored." Jarvis is all chummy again.

"There is no pilot. It's a smart gel."

"Really? You don't say." Jarvis frowns. "Those are scary things, those gels. You know one suffocated a bunch of people in London a while back?"

Yes, Joel's about to say, but Jarvis is back in spew mode. "No shit. It was running the subway system over there, perfect operational record, and then one day it just forgets to crank up the ventilators when it's supposed to. Train slides into station fifteen meters underground, everybody gets out, no air, boom."

Joel's heard this before. The punchline's got something to do with a broken clock, if he remembers it right.

"These things teach themselves from experience, right?," Jarvis continues. "So everyone just assumed it had learned to cue the ventilators on something obvious. Body heat, motion, CO2 levels, you know. Turns out instead it was watching a clock on the wall. Train arrival correlated with a predictable subset of patterns on the digital display, so it started the fans whenever it saw one of those patterns."

"Yeah. That's right." Joel shakes his head. "And vandals had smashed the clock, or something."

"Hey. You did hear about it."

"Jarvis, that story's ten years old if it's a day. That was way back when they were starting out with these things. Those gels have been debugged from the molecules up since then."

"Yeah? What makes you so sure?"

"Because a gel's been running the lifter for the better part of a year now, and it's had plenty of opportunity to fuck up. It hasn't."

"So you like these things?"

"Fuck no," Joel says, thinking about Ray Stericker. Thinking about himself. "I'd like 'em a lot better if they did screw up sometimes, you know?"

"Well, I don't like 'em or trust 'em. You've got to wonder what they're up to."