The Wake Tone
Anneli came up out of sleep the way a diver comes up through water that is almost too cold to survive — in a long, aching arc, aware first of pressure, then of light, and only much later of the fact that she was a person and the person had a name. The rack opened around her in the way racks always did, the gel draining off her skin in thick fingers that left her shivering. Her mouth tasted of the electrolyte wash they gave you in the last ten minutes of the cycle, a taste like salt and copper and something faintly botanical that the chemists had put in so people would not quite remember the salt and the copper. It was not working on her today. She turned her head and spat into the slot meant for that, and lay still, and counted her own breaths until she got to twenty without losing count.
The bay was dark except for the soft green service lights along the ceiling runners and the white glow of her rack's status panel. She had gone under at forty-two. She would come out at forty-three. That was the arithmetic of a shift. Three years up, twelve down, two to read and train and argue and cook and make love and be bored and go back under. She had done it four times. The fifth time she had resented it a little, because there had been a man she liked, and the man had been on a different rotation, and they had both known what the rotation meant and gone into their racks on different