[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 2

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Part 1}

“How was prison, anyways?” he asked. Really? Come on, Dad. “Oh, you know. Taco tuesdays. Gluten free buffet, movie nights, day spa, sometimes pickup baseball games. Usual prison stuff.” He folded his rusty arms and stared expectantly.

“What do you want me to say Dad? It’s prison. You want to know if some big burly dude named Tyrone made me his prison wife, don’t you? I’ll have you know that contrary to what you’ve heard, Tyrone is a gentle lover with a big heart.”

He bust out laughing, reflexively wiping a tear from his eye as if he still had tear ducts. “Well as long as you can say something like that, it couldn’t have been too bad. I mean, at least you didn’t get reamed or something.”

I put my hands on my hips. “Hey now. Plenty of people pay good money to be reamed, yanno. Probably there are starving kids in Africa who have never even been reamed once. Think about that.” I pulled out a chair and sat him down at the opposite end of a big round wooden table with flaking red paint, then told him how I slept through the entire thing.

He brought his fist down with a metallic thud. “That’s the cleverest damn thing I ever heard of, you son of a gun. I guess that makes me the gun, though. You sure nobody caught on?” I explained the features of the domestic robot AI that I had Alejandro put in six years ago.

“Nobody knew me there, so the AI’s basic conversational responses were enough to fool them. They would’ve taken me apart otherwise and forced me to serve my sentence properly.” As I spoke, I checked out Alejandro’s darknet site. Nothing came up. Either went out of business, or nabbed by spooks for operating without a license.

“Is there anybody on this tub that can work on fullmetals?” I asked not expecting much, given how rare fullmetals are on seasteads for obvious reasons. I also figured Dad wouldn’t let himself get so disgustingly rusty if there was anybody local who could do something about it.

To my surprise though, he nodded. “Not up top, but down below.” ...Down...below? He couldn’t mean…? But he did. A faint vapor began drifting down from a nozzle in the ceiling that I’d assumed was for putting out fires.

Instead a trio of laser projectors cast their respective images into the vapor, coming together as I watched to form a volumetric diagram of the seastead. “Vapor projection? You’re collecting antiques now?” He hushed me, and gestured to the lower portion of the diagram.

Below the fuzzy, undulating vector facsimile of the ocean’s surface, there was a facility of some kind on the bottom. An ugly, industrial looking cluster of interlocking metal cylinders with bubble windows at the end, propped up on thick weighted pilings driven deep into the seabed.

“That’s below us? Like, right now?” He nodded. “For saturation diving. The stead we’re on is really the smallest part of this community, and the only part visible from the air. The tip of the proverbial iceberg.” All around the seafloor habitat, there were concentrically larger rings of netted enclosures.

“What do you raise in there?” he zoomed in to clarify the tiny swimming forms within. “Fish, mostly. The stead includes the hardware needed to process the seawater so it’s suitable for mariculture. There’s a membranous barrier about a mile in diameter around us to insulate these conditions from the acidic waters outside it.”

I rubbed my chin. Another one of those habits that never leaves you, even after your biology does. “We get a lot of former miners coming in,” Dad continued, “bunking down there just because it’s comfortable. It’s what they know, and it’s safer from the storms than the stead is.”

It certainly looked large enough for it. Much of it cobbled together, expanded far beyond its original design. “Lots of Chinese down there too. From those nuclear powered mining habitats built in the 2020s.” I asked him why I needed to know that they’re Chinese.

He seemed flustered. “Nothing. It’s fine. Just, you know. Don’t buy anything from them.” I’d have rolled my eyes if I still could. I considered scolding him, but then the restrictions on speech I grew up with on the mainland don’t exist this far out to sea. Dad can be as backwards as he wants. If anything, I’m the relic here.

“So that’s where the body shop is?” He nodded, isolating the module in question. “It’s cramped, but fully equipped. You might take some time to look at what they have on offer, there’s a lot of banned parts you can still get out here.”

Music to my ears. Microphones, whatever. “But how do we get down to it?” Dad began cackling. “Oh, you’ll like this.” Which of course meant I was guaranteed not to. He led me outside, bracing himself on my arm. The winds were violent now, and the methane was increasingly thick. But having been designed for such conditions, all buildings had handrails mounted to their exterior walls.

Working our way along these handrails, ignoring blinking projected warnings to seek refuge against the intensifying storm, we made our way to what looked very much like a subway station entrance. Except at the bottom of the stairs, rather than a train, there was a submarine.

It jostled gently in the moon pool, painted with yellow and black hazard stripes around the rim. “Used to carry tourists! The main pumpjet is busted now, but we really just use it as an elevator to travel between the surface and the subsea platform.”

I assumed he meant the habitat. I eyeballed the dingy looking vessel, lined with eleven huge dome windows along either side. A cable trailing from the sub to a ceiling mounted reel suggested that the sub itself had no internal batteries. Just a big ‘ol makeshift diving chamber.

There were two shifty looking dudes presumably also waiting to depart for the ocean floor. Neither were fullmetal, but may as well have been for how severely borged up they were. One couldn’t take his eyes off me, presumably because actual fullmetals are a rare sight at sea.

I abruptly turned to look directly at him. His eyes widened, and he stumbled back a few steps. I’m going to miss this body. Nobody fucks with fullmetals except other fullmetals. The waves in the moon pool, residual storm action buffered by the structure of the stead itself, made boarding the sub somewhat dicey.

Once everybody was inside, the rear hatch swung down on hydraulics and sealed tight against a black rubber O-ring. Just below every window was a faded, peeling plastic guide to identifying tropical fish and a pair of busted headphones which I figured were once used to narrate the tours.

“So, what ever happened to “organic meals in their bellies?” I asked Dad once the two of us were seated and strapped in for the descent. “Oh, you mean the produce import business? Ruined when an aeroponic farm ship included my stead in its route. Stuff shipped in from land can’t compete on freshness with crops grown at sea.”

I offered my condolences. “Not at all! Not at all. What is failure but a free lesson? An invitation to start a new chapter of your life.” I balked at hearing that sort of thing from the same man who spent decades stubbornly refusing to budge from that trailer.

“Living out here really has changed you, hasn’t it?” He proudly thumped his chest with another hollow clang. “Body, mind and spirit!” The sub lurched under us as it began to descend, lowered by a pair of massive, ponderous winches.

I gripped the armrest. If I had knuckles, they’d be white. “Nothin’ to get worked up about” Dad assured me, sensing my apprehensiveness. “I’ve done this more times than I care to recall.” That would’ve put my fears to rest, except that the two locals seated opposite us looked more nervous than me.

Down, down, down. The meager sunlight, already stifled by the stormclouds, did not penetrate far. After a few minutes the water outside was pitch black. Try as I might, I could make out no reference points by which to judge our rate of descent.

That is until the sub lights illuminated a long, thick cable at a steep vertical angle. I pointed it out to Dad. “Oh, that’s the umbilical. Supplies power, hot water and data from the seastead to the subsea platform.” Beyond it, I could faintly make out a massive vertical column with squared off metal fins projecting from it,

“And that?” He craned his neck to peer out the porthole at the structure I’d gestured to. “OTEC. Thermal energy converter. There’s enough of a temperature difference between the top layer of the ocean and the layers just below the thermocline to generate a substantial amount of electricity. Enough for the average stead, anyways.”

He then pointed out a large spherical cage mounted to the lowest point of the column. “Because it emits warm water from the surface at the bottom, we can cultivate lobster and crab down there. Once a month, a buddy of mine dives down there to harvest the critters. It’s a hell of a feast for everybody on the stead that can still eat.”

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 3!}