The Iron Submarines
Chapter 10: The Iron Submarines
The girl's name was Coralie.
She said this the way she said most things: quietly, with the directness of someone who had been taught that words were precious and should not be wasted. Her people called themselves the Soraumi — a word that meant, as best Shizuka could translate from Coralie's explanation, something between "sky-sea" and "the people who feel the deep."
"We have been here," Coralie said, "for longer than your kind has had writing."
They were sitting in a low archway at the edge of the crowd, Shizuka and Coralie together, with the others standing behind them. Doraemon was watching the machines at the outer wall. Giant had his arms folded and was watching them with the particular expression he used for things he wanted to hit. Suneo was watching everything and saying nothing, which was his version of taking notes.
Nobita had found a small fish that seemed to like him and was feeding it something from his pocket. This was not relevant to the crisis but was happening anyway.
"How long have they been attacking?" Shizuka asked.
"Longer than it looks," Coralie said. "They came first three seasons ago. They took samples. Pieces of the outer wall, pieces of the light-plants, pieces of our machines." She paused. "Then they came back with more of themselves. And now—"
Another section of wall came down. The crowd made a sound that was not quite a sound — more like a feeling passing through a group of people simultaneously, a collective flinch.
The lights dimmed.
Doctor Doom did not appear in person. He sent his face instead.
It arrived on the hull of the largest submarine — a projection, pale blue light forming rigid angular features and a metal mask that reflected nothing. The voice that came with it was not amplified particularly loudly. It did not need to be. It had the quality of someone who had never had to raise their voice and found the very concept faintly wasteful.
"Citizens of the seafloor," Doctor Doom said, in a tone that suggested he was reading from a prepared statement. "You possess technology of considerable interest. You have not used it for military purposes. You have not used it for conquest. You have not, as far as my instruments can determine, used it for anything beyond the internal functioning of this city. This is inefficient. I am correcting it."
Suneo leaned close to Doraemon. "He's explaining himself?"
"He believes the explanation is sufficient," Doraemon said quietly. "He genuinely believes that."
"Resistance would be futile," Doom continued, "as you lack both the weapons and, I suspect, the inclination. What I require is the energy cores that power your infrastructure. The Doombots will extract them. This will take approximately four days. I recommend using the time to adapt to reduced power." A pause. "I expect this to proceed without complications."
The hologram cut out.
"He's stealing their power source," Shizuka said. She was not asking.
"Apparently," Doraemon said.
"What does their power source do? What makes it worth stealing?"
Coralie had been listening quietly. Now she spoke.
"Come," she said. "I'll show you."
The central tower was taller from the inside than it looked from outside, which was impossible but true. The walls were not stone. They were a living material — the same coral-thing that everything else was made of — and it pulsed faintly with the same light that lit the streets. The pulse was irregular. Sometimes it quickened. Sometimes it slowed.
"This is the heart," Coralie said.
The center of the tower opened into a chamber. In the middle of the chamber, suspended in the water by some mechanism that was invisible, was a sphere. It was about the size of a large watermelon. It glowed in shifting colors — the same blue-greens of the city's lights, the same warm gold that came and went.
It was beautiful. It was also, clearly, the source of everything. You could feel it. The water near it had a quality — warmth, vibration, something that wasn't quite sound — that the water elsewhere did not.
"This is the Resonance Core," Coralie said. "It has been here as long as the city."
"What does it run on?" Shizuka asked.
Coralie looked at her. "Us," she said. "What we feel."
She said it the way you say something that has always been true and requires no particular emphasis.
Doraemon reached into his pocket for the sensor. He held it near the sphere and read the display. His expression shifted through three things quickly: surprise, interest, and then something more careful.
"She's right," he said. "The energy field is — it's emotional in origin. Not metaphorically. Literally. The signature is biological and specifically empathic. It's been generated by — " he squinted at the readings, "— collective feeling. Joy. Hope. Love. Over a very long time. Compressed and sustained."
"Feelings made into energy," Nobita said. He was looking at the sphere with his mouth slightly open.
"A civilization that runs on feelings," Doraemon said. "The architecture, the light, the warmth — all of it powered by what the people feel together."
Shizuka looked at the sphere. She looked at the city around it. She looked at the crowd outside, dim and frightened.
"When they feel afraid," she said slowly, "the lights go out."
"Yes," Coralie said.
"And the Doombots are taking the cores from the outer buildings. Those buildings — they're—"
"They're dimming," Coralie said. "Every core they remove, we lose a piece. Not just light. Heat. The machines that purify the water. The nets that bring food. Everything." She paused. "And we — when we are afraid, we generate less. We have less. Which makes us more afraid." She looked at her hands. "He chose his method well."
Giant had had enough.
He left the tower and swam back to the outer wall.
The Doombot he punched first made a sound like a very large bell being struck. The Doombot tumbled sideways, bounced off a section of partially dismantled wall, and spun slowly in the water with its arms still making excavation motions out of habit.
Giant looked at his fist. The fist was fine. Metal was not a match for Giant's fist on land, and it turned out metal was not a match for Giant's fist underwater either, though the water resistance made the swing slower and therefore less satisfying.
"Giant," Doraemon called. He had followed.
"I'm helping," Giant said, and punched another one. This one had better anchoring and punching it was like punching a wall, which Giant also had some experience with, and the result was that the Doombot moved about thirty centimeters and continued its work.
"There are dozens of them," Doraemon said.
"I can punch dozens of things."
"The ones you've already hit have already resumed working."
Giant looked. The first Doombot had righted itself and was back at the wall.
Giant looked at his fist again. It was still fine. The situation was less fine.
"Maybe," he said, "I need bigger punches."
Suneo's approach had a certain elegant logic to it, and the fact that it didn't work was not really a flaw in the logic.
He swam to the largest submarine and knocked on the hull. He had an idea that whoever was in charge would hear this and open some kind of communication port and he could explain to them, rationally and politely, that this was a diplomatic incident waiting to happen and that his family had a yacht and connections that might be useful. He knocked quite authoritatively. The hull did not respond.
"Hello?" he said. "I am Honekawa Suneo. My family has significant — hello?"
The submarine did not answer. A Doombot swam past him with total indifference. He had been categorized, apparently, as not a threat. He was not sure whether to be relieved or insulted.
He swam back.
"It didn't work," he said.
"We heard," Nobita said.
Nobita had been watching the city.
Specifically, he had been watching the lights. He had also, at some point, fallen asleep while hovering horizontally in the water column with his arms spread, which was deeply unusual even by his standards, and then woken up again, which was good, and noticed something.
"The lights change when people talk to each other," he said.
Shizuka looked at him. Then she looked at the lights.
"Not just when they're afraid," Nobita said. "They change. When those two people over there started talking, the building next to them got brighter. Just a little. But it did."
Shizuka watched. A woman near the base of the central tower had taken the hands of two children and was speaking to them, leaning close, forehead nearly touching theirs. The building above them bloomed briefly with a warm amber glow and then settled back.
Shizuka looked at Doraemon.
"The whole city is an empathy engine," she said. "It's not just the cores. The cores are — reservoirs. Compressed emotion. But the source is the people."
"Yes," Doraemon said. "When they feel strongly, they generate. The cores store what they've generated. Doom's Doombots are draining the storage. But the generation—"
"Is still happening," Shizuka said.
"If they could feel strongly enough, together—"
She stopped. She had an idea. It was still forming, and not quite visible yet, but she could feel its shape.
Doctor Doom appeared again toward evening — if evening meant anything this far below the surface.
He appeared in person this time, in a vessel that was part submarine and part something else: a command chamber with thick viewports through which his helmet was briefly visible. He did not emerge. He surveyed the progress of the Doombots with the attention of someone reviewing a schedule.
His voice came through a speaker mounted on the hull.
"Progress is satisfactory," he said, to no one in particular and perhaps to himself. "Emotional energy as a fuel source. Inefficient in delivery, but the density of accumulated feeling is extraordinary." A pause. "Thousands of years of collective joy and hope and love, compressed into portable cores. The sentimentality of biological life made finally useful."
Shizuka had swum close enough to hear this clearly.
She listened to him talk about "feelings" the way she might listen to someone talk about a fuel they had never tasted but were very eager to burn.
"He thinks feelings are noise," Coralie said from beside her. She had followed without being asked.
"He thinks they're a resource," Shizuka said. "Which is almost worse."
Doom's vessel turned. Through the viewport, for just a moment, his eyes moved across the assembled people of the city and the five strange visitors from the surface. His gaze was not unkind. It was simply indifferent, the way a catalog is indifferent to the objects it lists.
Shizuka met his eyes through the viewport.
She held his gaze for three seconds. Then she looked away — not because she was afraid, but because she had already learned what she needed to know.
He thought feelings were inefficient.
She thought: I will show you what they can do.
The Mermaid Suit was waiting in Doraemon's pocket.
It looked like a wetsuit but thinner, and it was the blue-green of the ocean in shallow water, and the label on the interior read: MERMAID SUIT — ENHANCED AQUATIC MOBILITY — DEEP-WATER COMMUNICATION ENABLED. It fit Shizuka exactly.
"The communication function," Doraemon said, "works on a basic emotional-resonance frequency. Marine mammals. Not language — just feeling. A good feeling, a bad feeling, urgency, calm."
"Dolphins?" Shizuka said.
"And whales. And some of the larger fish, though the fish are harder."
She put it on.
The dolphins came from the northern water, three of them, drawn by something they were not asked to explain. They circled her twice, making the clicking patterns that might have been conversation or might have been something simpler than conversation but just as important. Shizuka held out her hand. The nearest one touched its snout to her palm.
She felt: recognition.
Not language. Not message. Just: we know you. You are here. What do you need?
She told them, in the same way. Not language. Feeling.
The three dolphins turned and disappeared into the dark water.
"They'll watch the approaches," Shizuka said. "They'll tell us if more submarines come."
Giant had been watching. "You just talked to dolphins."
"Yes."
"Through feelings."
"Yes."
Giant was quiet for a moment. "That's better than punching," he said, in a tone of genuine respect.
It was Coralie who found them.
Three of the underwater citizens, held in a smaller vessel at the eastern edge of the city. Not Doom himself — Doombots, following protocol. They were being held as subjects of examination. Not harmed. Not fed. Simply contained, the way a scientist contains specimens when the experiment has already been designed and the specimens' preferences are not a variable in it.
Coralie came back to Shizuka with this information and her face was very still in the way faces go still when the feeling underneath is too large for normal expression.
"He's going to drain them," she said. "Directly. To test the efficiency of the extraction."
"I know," Shizuka said.
She had been sitting quietly for the last several minutes, thinking. Around her, the city had continued its slow dim. The buildings near the outer wall were dark now. The crowd near the center tower was larger, and quieter, and the lights above them pulsed unevenly.
She looked at the crowd.
She looked at the submarine holding the three citizens.
She looked at Coralie.
"He thinks feelings are weakness," she said. It came out quieter than she intended, which was fine. She was not saying it for anyone else.
She was saying it to herself. As a fact to hold onto.
"I'll show him," she said, "that they're the strongest thing in the world."
Coralie looked at her for a long moment.
"What do you need?" she said.
"I need to meet your queen."