ReVISIONS by Julie E. Czerneda

accident. It might have been system failure. In this imperfect, knife’s-edge world, it could also have been human action. It might have been deliberate. It might have been murder. I won’t lose anyone else to find out.
    Â 
    I pace the halls, the sweat of my jumpsuit dried to residue. I probably stink. I can’t bring myself to care. The sounds around me are muted, the lights dimmed or shut off.
    It’s past midnight Topside, in the halls of Mission Control. I can visualize it, if I try. Lamps still burning over coffee-strewn desks; quiet voices and self-doubt and if-onlies, those who aren’t beating off the press or justifying themselves to the president and God and everyone else with a sudden interest in the fate of NEREUS. The only ones asleep are those who have medicated themselves out of the pain.
    I don’t have that option, not yet. Sleep is impossible.
    Gateway station is empty: of the seventy-two warm bodies that used to fill the space, only seven remain. They’re the cleanup crew, clearing and scrambling the servers so nobody can take anything from here but memories. Everyone else has gone already, hustled off within hours. Just enough time to stuff a kit bag, knowing you won’t be back.
    The last sub comes for us in the morning. Four hours, maybe five. I’ll be the last one to leave. Turn out the last light. My responsibility. My right.
    The wheels of investigation are already turning, but there’s only so much you can do. The site is off-limits, my order confirmed by NEREUS Command. You can’t send bomb-sniffing dogs in, or lay the pieces out on a hangar floor, backtracking until you come to the moment it all went wrong. All we have are records, and readouts, and the hope that someday we’ll know what happened.
    But that will have to wait. The country’s drifting on other currents now, moving into war. It fights us for space on the news feeds, making reporters’ heads spin with the glorious glut of news.
    But all wars end, eventually. They’ll come for Gateway itself then: there’s too much here that can be reused, or worse, used by someone else. No squatters are allowed on our failures. The machinery of progress, the massive claws and levers of industry, will dismantle what can be reused, leave the hull sitting here, the Slide a rooted stem without petals, without a head. Rebuild farther down the ocean floor. Somewhere the orange markers won’t mock us.
    I’m broken and bleeding inside. I know that, the way you know impossible things that are nonetheless true. I’m bleeding inside, and it’s flooding me until I can’t breathe anymore. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel. I don’t remember what I used to feel.
    They tried to retrieve me first, bring me Topside for debriefing, but I wouldn’t go. Not yet. There will be time for all that. There will be nothing but time, soon enough. The shrinks will pull it all from me, the anger and the pain and the fear. They’ll drain me and patch me and if I’m not as good as new; well, nobody who knows will tell. And then they’ll reassign me to a very important desk job, somewhere miles from the brine.
    I can almost accept it. I’ll lie to myself, all for the sake of the dream, that there will be a Site Fifteen. That Kim and Gary and Seth and Michaels and all the others didn’t sacrifice everything for nothing.
    Tomorrow, I’ll believe that.

    I’ve been walking all this time. It seems inevitable, somehow, that I end up outside the Gate Room.
    Red across the board. Out of habit, I flick the toggle. “Site Fourteen, this is Gateway Control.”
    Somewhere inside the broken silence within me, I hear the echo of a single ping.
    Revision Point
    There were several turning points I played with in “Site Fourteen.” Foremost among them is the invention of the first practical self-contained dive apparatus by Henry Fleuss in 1878. For the