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the bowels of it own code into her input buffer:
    Don’t you even know who I am? I’m Lenie Clarke.
    They close, slashing.
    She doesn’t know that some slow-moving god snatched her from the Darwinian realm and twisted her into the thing she’s become. She doesn’t know that other gods, ageless and glacial, are watching as she and her opponent kill each other in this computational arena. She lacks even the awareness that most other monsters take for granted, but here, now—killing and dying in a thousand dismembered fragments—she does know one thing.
    If there’s one thing she hates, it’s Lenie Clarke.

OUTGROUP
    R ESIDUAL seawater gurgles through the grille beneath Clarke’s feet. She peels the diveskin back from her face and reflects on the disquieting sense of inflation as lung and guts unfold themselves, as air rushes back to reclaim her crushed or flooded passageways. In all this time she’s never quite gotten used to it. It’s a little like being unkicked in the stomach.
    She takes her first breath in twelve hours and bends to strip off her fins. The airlock hatch swings wide. Still dripping, Lenie Clarke rises from the wet room into the main lounge of the Nerve Hab.
    At least, that’s what it started out as: one of three redundant modules scattered about the plain, their axons and dendrites extending to every haphazard corner of this submarine trailer park—to the generators, to Atlantis, to all the other bits and pieces that keep them going. Not even rifter culture can escape some cephalization, however rudimentary.
    By now it’s evolved into something quite different. The nerves still function, but buried beneath five years of generalist overlay. Cyclers and food processors were the first additions to the mix. Then a handful of sleeping pallets, brought in during some emergency debug that went three times around the clock; once strewn across the deck, they proved too convenient to remove. Half a dozen VR headsets, some with Lorenz-lev haptic skins attached. A couple of dreamers with corroded contacts. A set of isometrics pads, fashionable among those wishing to retain a measure of gravity-bound muscle tone. Boxes and treasure chests, grown or extruded or welded together by amateur metalworkers in Atlantis’s expropriated fabrication shops; they hold the personal effects and secret possessions of whoever brought them here, sealed against intruders with passwords and DNA triggers and, in one case, a clunky antique combination padlock.
    Perhaps Nolan and the others looked in on the Gene Erickson Show from here, perhaps from somewhere else. Either way, the show’s long since over. Erickson, safely comatose, has been abandoned by flesh and blood, his welfare relegated to the attentions of machinery. If there was ever an audience in this dim and cluttered warren, it has dispersed in search of other diversions.
    That suits Clarke just fine. She’s here in search of private eyes.
    The hab’s lightstrips are not in use; environmental readouts and flickering surveillance images provide enough light for eyecaps. A dark shape startles at her appearance—then, apparently reassured, moves more calmly toward the far wall and settles onto a pallet.
    Rama Bhanderi: he of the once-mighty vocab and the big-ass neurotech degree, fallen from grace thanks to a basement lab and a batch of neurotropes sold to the wrong man’s son. He went native two months ago. You hardly ever see him inside any more. Clarke knows better than to talk to him.
    Someone’s delivered a canister of hydroponic produce from the greenhouse: apples, tomatoes, something that looks like a pineapple glistening listless and sickly gray in the reduced light. On a whim, Clarke reaches over to a wall panel and cranks up the lumens. The compartment glows with unaccustomed brightness.
    â€œShiiiittt… ” Or something like that. Clarke turns, catches a glimpse of Bhanderi