09 April 2004 - 01:15

If anyone else could have been there, they would have seen two figures walking hand in hand along a sandy beach, an archetypal but richly detailed tropical vista, inherently familiar. She is sprinkled with glistening scales, as if they were freckles, and his silhouette is softened by a wash of short downy fur. They hold hands as they traverse the sand, their footfalls leaving not a mark behind them in the ground, as each step lands perhaps six inches into the air above it.

Indeed, the sand is very still, stirred only by a gentle breeze. The ocean is frozen in time, high arcing waves glistening wetly in the sun, bubbling foam locked in its caress of the shore. The two friends smile easily at each other, and the woman speaks. “Our work keeps us so busy, so tense ... we risk forgetting the value of simple pleasures such as these.” He grins. “These perhaps, but not others. Though this is certainly precious ...”

They pause, and he gestures illustratively. “Look at those clouds on the horizon. And the ridges of that cat’s paw down there. Do you think the one continues to exist when you glance at the other? And if it does, why? You know, we need so little to actually maintain continuity. Artful suggestion. Exformation! The rest is normally processed by the same daemons that here must be creating it.”

She nods, thoughtfully. “It’s a pleasure that we can even discuss these kinds of questions. Parsimony suggests that in fact, the normal result of that processing is here simply formed ex nihilo and produces the normal effect. A deceptively simple explanation, because it constrains the possible ways that those functions could work. I think network experimentation might actually–”

A piercing whistle echoes through the small tinny room, and simultaneously through the cylindrical tank housed within. Eclipse’s poised curves become awkward angles as her limbs jerk in three dimensions and her eyes fly open. A sharp exhalation through the regulator creates a crowd of bubbles, and then a second, which rises to the surface alongside her bare body. She leans over the side of the tank, frowning sternly at where the speakers are set into the wall. “Joan? Platypus and I haven't had much time for new ideas since he got that grant, and it ...” – a burst of squawks and chitters assail the room through the wallspeakers – “My husband has what? Stopped broadcasting? Get me downloads. Thank you, Joan.”

Eclipse does a front flip out of the tank and lands on the textured floor. Water runs out of her hair in rivulets, leaving a trail behind her as she pads up to the bridge. She pulls a light white cotton robe out of a hallway storage unit, and steps out behind the captain’s chair. Heavy blue light filters through the transparent dome around the bridge, refractions in the currents casting shifting shadows across the floor. Peering out and down, it’s black. Inky, beckoning black.

A dolphin appears suddenly alongside the vessel, a small chubby Tursiops with melon swirls that almost curl, and glints of metal circling over her head, about an inch back from her blowhole, and nearly coating her dorsal fin. Joan nods her head in a jerking motion – Eclipse still struggles not to take it for the typical aggressive gesture – and slips back past the window to float in the slipstream of the vessel, to interface. Eclipse plants herself into the seat, wistfully remembering that sunny beach, then frowning hard as she remembers the last set of digital feeds she got from Wheel. He was so powerfully capable, in his unpredictable, chromatic way, that she rarely needed to worry ... but recently, there had been a flurry of rumors and reports about a wide variety of infamous, deadly, and very sexy characters all on the prowl, all apparently converging, by chance or by design, to the same thing, to the same city. And now if Wheel had stopped sending continuous datafeeds to her....

Eclipse kissed the gold ring on her left hand for luck, and grimaced as she plunged the dataspike down into the socket in her skull.

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