After the mirror

Anna took a deep breath and started the next round of psych evaluations. The crews for the deep sonar bathysphere had to spend 5 months together and they needed to get along. The last ship sent out before they appointed her had crashed into an octopus cloning and training nursery. The activists were still campaigning for all the records.
She stepped into the waiting room and called out the first man's name. He was an army captain and she could almost smell the gunpowder and testosterone.
His answers were unsettling. Usually people answered all the questions as though they were the happiest people alive. Or they fought her, behaving like spies in enemy territory. Damian was different, subtly wrongfooting her, and making eye contact while he answered.
Anna was used to staring, the accident that had chewed her up had caused a lot of second glances. But this was different, she remembered flirting, she had quite enjoyed it, but she had closed that door when she limped away from her former life. So she ignored his undertones, and hit his curve balls straight.
He was sane, he wasn’t depressed, and his social communication was disconcertingly good. She was pleased when he had answered all of her probes, and she pointed back down to the waiting room, he could see himself out. But he stayed in her mind. Even when she fenced with the man with deep seated psychosis, and led the depression sufferer to the solar panelled comfort zone. Two shifts of sailors had worked their wages by the time she finished her assessments; training dolphins, harvesting algae and negotiating with the sentient octopuses.
Intruigingly, given that the latter owed their intelligence to man’s experimentation with nuclear power, the aquatic stakeholders were firm opponents of the programme. They could taste if radioactive waste was released, and retaliated with a refreshing disregard for the ethnicity and geography of their victims. It amused Anna that the octosentients had achieved world peace in ten brief years. The activists had to move quickly to find new causes.
She filed her reports, adjusting her poloneck to hide the burns on her neck, but keeping her scarred hands resolutely in view. She wondered sometimes if she was the psych evaluation, but she was good at her job. She told herself that every day.
The captain was standing in the waiting room again. “I don’t make the final decisions.” She said absently, and limped out into the corridor. The floating panopticon was a rare ambassador in tentacle territory. They policed the seas firmly, and let men pass only on the negotiated routes. Anna loved the water, the sense of space she missed from her diving days, and the glorious relentless medium that swallowed man’s ambition and divided the continents.
The big windows jolted above and below the waterline, and she admired the horizon, and the floating pens. The captain followed her out and looked down at her, subtly invading her space with his smile and his unclear intentions. She waited for him to offer a bribe or an explanation for an unguarded remark, but he didn’t, and she limped to the elevator, resenting his intrusion into her usual evening routines of decompression.
“I’ve already got the feedback,” he told her, “so I wondered if I could buy you a drink? We’re going to be working together.”
“I can buy my own drinks.” She stepped into the elevator reserved for permanent staff, she knew he wouldn’t yet have a code. The door shut in his hopeful face, and she put him out of her mind, she need a gin and tonic.
The Bar at the Bottom of the Boat was the only space accessible by all. She zipped her drysuit up to her neck, and felt all her strained stinging muscles relax in the forgiving aquatic gravity. The bar staff were octosatients, mostly refugees from their coldly utilitarian society. She signed her greeting to the barkeep who was her friend; in a hermaphrodite community it managed to be camp. The captain was already at the bar, sitting in the seat that was hers, and signing to her confidant. He offered her a drink again and she shook her head, and turned so that she could not see him anymore. The barkeep reached up to her favourite bottle, its tentacles oozing questions as caressed the optics.
She held out her card for the bill and the captain reached past her, his thick arms inches from her face. She flinched, remembering the night they had burned her, and she pushed him under the water and held him there, years of yoga culminating in this adrenaline rush.
The barkeep separated them, and gestured to her in exasperation. It knew that people didn’t usually try to buy her drinks, but it knew that the personal forcefield she exuded kept all but the most confident at the other end of the bar. She felt the flush of embarrassment heating her throat and looked away when the barkeep displayed a vivid understanding of human reproduction.
“I’m sorry,” the captain explained when he had stopped choking, “you’re very attractive and I wanted to buy you a drink.”
“I’m not used to accepting compliments anymore.” Her voice was flattened by years of modulating her emotions, but she treated him to the tiniest smile.
“Then let me teach you.” He said, and moved to sit beside her in the Bar at the Bottom of the Boat.

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