She doesn't have to watch this. She knows what's going on, and the machines will tell her when it's over. She couldn't stop them if she tried, not unless she smashed them into junk. That, in fact, is exactly what she wants to do. But she controls herself. Quiet as stone, Lenie Clarke sits in the command cubby staring at a blank screen, waiting for the alarm.

Nekton

Nekton

Dryback

Dryback

Jumpstart

He dreamed of water.

He always dreamed of water. He dreamed the smell of dead fish in rotten nets, and rainbow puddles of gasoline shimmering off the Steveston jetty, and a home so close to the shoreline you could barely get insurance. He dreamed of a time when waterfront meant something, even the muddy brown stretch where the Fraser hemorrhaged into the Strait of Georgia. His mother was standing over him, beaming a vital ecological resource, Yves. A staging ground for migrating birds. A filter for the whole world. And little Yves Scanlon smiled back, proud that he alone of all his friends— well, not friends exactly, but maybe they would be now— would grow up appreciating nature first-hand, right here in his new back yard. One and a half meters above the high-tide line.

And then, as usual, the real world kicked in the doors and electrocuted his mother in mid-smile.

Sometimes he could postpone the inevitable. Sometimes he could fight the jolt from his bedside dreamer, keep it from dragging him back for just a few more seconds. Thirty years of random images would flash across his mind in those moments; falling forests, bloating deserts, ultraviolet fingers reaching ever deeper into barren seas. Oceans creeping up shorelines. Vital ecological resources turning into squatting camps for refugees. Squatting camps turning into intertidal zones.

And Yves Scanlon was awake again, sweat-soaked, teeth clenched, jump-started.

God, no. I'm back.

The real world.

Three and a half hours. Only three and a half hours...

It was all the dreamer would allow him. Sleep stages one through four got ten minutes each. REM got thirty, in deference to the incompressibility of the dream state. A seventy-minute cycle, run three times nightly.

You could freelance. Everyone else does.

Freelancers chose their own hours. Employees— those few that remained— got their hours chosen for them. Yves Scanlon was an employee. He frequently reminded himself of the advantages: you didn't have to fight and scramble for a new contract every six months. You had stability, of a sort. If you performed. If you kept on performing. Which meant, of course, that Yves Scanlon couldn't afford the nightly nine-and-a-half-hours that was optimal for his species.

Servitude for security, then. No day passed when he didn't hate the choice he'd made. Some day, perhaps, he'd even hate it more than he feared the alternative.