So when civilization needs someone to run generating stations three kilometres below the surface of the Pacific it seeks out a special sort of person for its Rifters program. It recruits those whose histories have pre-adapted them to dangerous environments people so used to broken bodies & chronic stress that life on the edge of an undersea volcano would actually be a step up. Nobody worries too much about job satisfaction; if you havent spent a lifetime learning the futility of fighting back you wouldnt be a rifter in the first place. Its a small price to keep the lights going back on shore. But there are things among the cliffs & trenches of the Juan de Fuca Ridge that no one expected to find & enough pressure can forge the most obedient career-victim into something made from iron. At first not even the rifters know what they have in them
- & by the time anyone else finds out the outcast & the downtrodden have their hands on a kill switch for the whole damn planet.