He floated there in the tank, seawater sliding through the tubes in his chest, and reflected on the queasy sensation of not breathing.

"They're getting some turbulence." Scanlon's voice came at him from all directions, as if the walls themselves were talking. "From your exhaust port."

A fine trail of bubbles was trickling from Fischer's chest. His eyecaps made everything seem marvelously clear, like a hallucination. "Just a bit of—"

Not his voice. His words, but spoken by something else, some cheap machine that didn't know about harmonics. One hand went automatically to the disk embedded in his throat.

"—hydrogen," he tried again. "No problem. Pressure'll squeeze them down when I get deep enough."

"Yeah. Still." Other words, muffled, as Scanlon spoke to someone else. Fischer felt something vibrate softly in his chest. The bubbles grew larger, then smaller. Then disappeared.

Scanlon was back. "Better?"

"Yeah." Fischer didn't know how he felt about this, though. He didn't really like having a chest full of machinery. He didn't really like having to breathe by chopping water into chunks of hydrogen and oxygen. But he really didn't like the idea of some tech he'd never even met fiddling with his insides by remote control, reaching into his body and messing around in there without even asking. It made him feel—

Violated, right?

Sometimes Shadow was just a bitch. As if she hadn't been the one to put him up to it in the first place.

"We're going to kill the lights now, Gerry."

Darkness. The water hummed with the sound of vast machinery.

After a few moments he noticed a cold blue spark winking at him from somewhere overhead. It seemed to cast a lot more light than it should. As he watched, the inside of the tank reappeared in hazy shades of blue-on-black.

"Photoamps working okay?" Scanlon wanted to know.

"Uh huh."

"What can you see?"

"Everything. The inside of the tank. The hatch. Sort of bluish."

"Right. Luciferin light source."

"It's not very bright," Fischer said. "Everything's sort of like, dusk."

"Well, it'd be pitch black without your eyecaps."

And suddenly, it was.

"Hey."

"Don't worry, Gerry. Everything's fine. We just shut the light off."

He lay there in utter darkness. Floaters wriggled at the corner of his eye.

"How are you feeling, Gerry? Any sensation of falling? Claustrophobia?"

He felt almost peaceful.

"Gerry?"

"No. Nothing. I feel—fine—"

"Pressure's at two thousand meters."

"I can't feel it."

This might not be so bad after all. One year. One year...

"Doctor Scanlon," he said after a while. He was even getting used to the metallic buzz of his new voice.

"Right here."

"Why me?"

"What do you mean, Gerry?"

"I wasn't, you know, qualified. Even after all this training I bet there's lots of people who'd be better at this than me. Real engineers."

"It's not so much what you know," Scanlon said. "It's what you are."

He knew what he was. People had been telling him for as long as he could remember. He didn't see what the fuck that had to do with anything. "What's that, then?"