The bulkhead sealed shut behind Noviko. Armed men rushed in and took her hands. They quietly marveled over her; they remarked bitterly upon her traditional Ryukyuan tattoos, but favorably upon her full figure and her child-bearing hips. Their tone was somewhere between covetous and reverent. A little part of her liked it. Another part of her – the Tokiko part – screamed in animal fury at the sensation of those hands half-holding and half-restraining her. She itched for the hilt of her katana, but that had been the first thing they took away from her.
They were quick to lead her to a medical facility manned by a doctor in a paper mask and blue scrubs. They laid her down on the table and told her they would free her in a matter of minutes. They applied local anesthesia to her skull and warmed up a surgical saw.
“So that’s it,” said her mother’s voice. “You betray me. You betray everything beautiful.”
I want it all to stop. I just want it all to stop. Get out of me. Get out of my body. Get out of my mind, all of you that have taken everything from me, until I do not recognize myself.
“I forgive your smallness of heart. I will be here for you if you return. I will bring annual offerings to your shrine if you do not.”
Noviko kept herself clenched. It took everything she had not to lash out, to bite, to scratch or fight. She was determined not to. And went she heard the saw squelching into the back of her head and opening up a panel in her skull, felt the gentle pop behind her eyes and saw them holding up a tiny, pea-sized implant with squirming filaments in front of her, she smiled.
“Am I free?”
“You are free,” said the doctor. “Without this entanglement chip, they cannot access your mind this far into the ocean. Lets patch you up and get you to intake.”
“… intake.”
“Yes, it’s standard procedure.”
Intake was a sit-down in a tiny office within the facility. The woman sitting across from Noviko wore a military uniform that was crisp at the edges and seams, pressed, and looking absolutely correct. There was a soft, pitying look in her eyes as she scanned Noviko with a handheld device of some kind.
“Am I really free?” Noviko asked.
“Your mind is free,” said the uniformed woman. “But no one is truly free until they are safe behind the walls of Honshu.”
“And… how will I get there?”
The woman in uniform avoided eye contact with Noviko and just smiled as she finished up her scans. “No combat cybernetics detected – good. Once we complete our mission here, you will be reunited with your family.”
Her heart ached at the thought of Trip and Banh. But she was not going to them. They had their mother already. She willed her implants on, to check a quick feed of them. But there was no MetaNet connection. There was no SynCon. There were no ghosts or voices, no PRISMA hallucinations, no DMs, no little puzzle games to play on the side when a conversation was boring. She was free from all of that colorful mayhem.
“I have a family,” said Noviko. “In Ryukyu. Maybe we can save them, too?”
The woman still avoided eye contact, or looking at Noviko in general, as If doing so would be some grievous sin. “Yes, I think we can. Our people are capable of great heroism. I’m sure you have been lied to your entire life about our capabilities. But much of your degenerate empire is compromised by our operatives.”
“How?” Noviko could not really imagine it.
“How? As if I would tell you? Don’t be foolish.”
“… oh, uh… of course. Forgive me.”
“Rest now,” said the woman. “You will stay with the other females.”
“Is that where you stay?”
“I am a reformed degenerate. My corrupt desires mean I am not permitted to cohabitate with other women and must remain close to my duties.”
Noviko did not know what a degenerate was and there was no automated linguistic node ready-and-waiting to help her understand unfamiliar words. Noviko noticed a knotted surgical scar on the side of the woman’s head, and a small, blinking implant embedded into the site.
“Does that mean we’re similar?” Asked Noviko. “We are… reformed degenerates?”
The woman did not smile. She gestured to the door and the pair of armed guards there. “For your sake,” said the woman, “I hope you are nothing like me.”
Noviko remembered Vox and Dunk. “What will happen to… my friends?”
The woman continued gesturing at the door, stock-still as if holding a salute. “One has already been captured. The men stormed the airlock with EMP grenades and true courage. The other remains on the enemy vessel. Do you have further questions?”
“No… thank you.”
They walked Noviko down the narrow hallway. On the way, they were passed by a hustling group of more guards; they were young men with eager smiles on their faces. They all stopped at the end of the hall and peered through a viewing window. Some of them laughed and pointed, others appeared repulsed. As Noviko passed them, she glanced through the window and saw Neon Vox tied to an interrogation chair. They had torn her out of her exosuit, and it lay strewn across the floor. Two men took turns clubbing her thighs with heavy rods. Vox had her teeth clenched and an upright posture; even there, she seemed determined to keep her dignity.
One of the men spat in her face. The young men watching laughed and whistled. The two in the torture chamber paced around her, heavy rods in hand. There were no questions being asked, no interrogation taking place. This seemed to be a spectacle for cruelty’s sake.
“What do they want from her?” Noviko asked one of her escorts. The escort looked at her with a flash of rage in his eyes, like she was speaking out of turn. His companion put a steadying hand on the fellow’s shoulder and shook his head.
“Relax,” he said. “She is fresh.”
Vox screamed behind the looking glass. Noviko gasped and felt a little sick when saw they had shattered her shins backwards. Now they were smashing her kneecaps and beating on her thighs anew. Noviko felt tears welling up in her eyes. She did not feel like some uncaring sociopath in that moment. She felt anguish. She felt guilt.
I betrayed her. I betrayed everyone.
“Nyuhafu freak,” one of the escorts sneered. “I do not envy those brave men in there. They risk getting that man’s polluted blood on their boots.”
Noviko gulped dry air and felt her heart sink. “She is a woman.”
Both of her escorts looked at Noviko like she was insane. “No. Man. We know trannies when we see them – do you see the long fingers? The roman nose?”
“She is a beautiful woman, yes – Mediterranean heritage.”
“You have a womb and XX chromosomes. He does not – it is the first thing we scan for. That creature in there is nothing like you.”
Why would that be the first thing they scan for? That’s… weird.
Noviko knew then that she was in peril. Her hands trembled, but she hid them in the sleeves of her robe. She forced a compliant smile and did everything in her power not to shed tears and/or drive her fist into his nose. “Of course,” she said. “I have much to learn.”
“You can be forgiven. You were born into that filth.”
Noviko heard Vox’s femurs finally crack; the woman’s sobbing scream was too much to bear. Noviko turned her back to the escorts and walked ahead and used that moment to wipe tears from her eyes when they weren’t looking at her face. The hurt turned to cold fury. Her connection to the MetaNet and her mother may have been severed, but the muscle memory was still there.
Yes, Tokiko’s instincts were alive and well. Noviko felt her fingers curl into talon shapes. But she could not act. She was not strong. She was not a cyborg. She did not even have her blade. She felt worthless, stupid, and lost, being marched down the hall with men staring down her robes, thinking thoughts she had no access to.
They deposited her in their leader’s chamber. It was, like every other room in that facility, compact with a low ceiling. But still this man had managed to fill it with certificates, medals, gadgets in glass cases, and squid beaks gilded with golden filigree. A GYOTA logo was on the old desk, timeworn and almost lost.
The man was short, handsome, and had dark hair with a full beard. He had a cane and a fine suit, repurposed, it seemed, from GYOTA fashion. He reminded her of GYOTA’s CTO, Jace Windmill, but… it was a man. He wore a trimmed beard and a pressed suit. His smile was eager, almost radiant, and it reached his eyes. At last, Noviko felt like she was looking at the face of sincerity. At last, someone she could trust.
“You must be Noviko Tanaka,” he said, as he walked around the desk. He bowed just enough to be polite. “I’m in charge here. Please, forgive our sparse accommodations. We have been down here for generations, now, and this latest bit of excitement has the boys acting out of turn.”
The two young men escorting Noviko bowed down to ninety-degree angles and exited with their heads low. The door shut behind Noviko, and then she noticed her mother’s blade on the desk.
“How is it possible,” Noviko asked, as calmly as she could, “that your people have been down here for generations?”
“This facility was to be a prototype for long-term, deepsea habitation. Originally we were of GYOTA, but… we chose to go independent, as you’ve seen.”
“But not independent from the dominion of Honshu.”
“We needed allies. You think that living in a society of law and order, behind sturdy walls patrolled by honorable men, is a worse fate than having an alien entity in your mind? Do you have any idea what PRISMA has become?”
An intrusive thought: a thousand beating hearts, a woman’s glistening face with jellyfish hair, and the biospeak of her skin flickering colors that said: “I protect you.”
“I… don’t. I don’t understand PRISMA, no.”
“Exactly. Neither do we. And yet it wants full access to your innermost self. It doesn’t even want to just monitor your mind or your body anymore, it wants your soul.”
“I see why you are cautious,” she said, as she eyed the blade on the desk. He noticed. He went to pick it up.
He offered it to her, both hands, with a small bow. “Show it to me.”
Noviko unsheathed the black blade her mother gave her. He murmured the inscription as he saw it: “Knowledge is only rumor until it is in the muscle. Hm. More madness dressed as wisdom.”
Noviko imagined whipping the blade between his vertebrae and taking his head back to her mother. But she did not let the intrusive thoughts win.
“Why take me in at all?” She asked.
“Because you have our blood. We owe you rehabilitation.”
“Our blood?”
“We have your scans. You share genes with a late, great man – one of Honshu’s most esteemed lords, slain before his time in the Ryukyuan insurgency. I do not know how you came to share his blood, but I imagine PRISMA and the treasonous factions within GYOTA took you in as a babe. It is said he was betrayed by his favorite concubine.”
“I see.”
“Weak men place rope in the hands of a woman. Strong men bind the wrists.”
What.
Noviko’s skin prickled. “And what does it say about you, having handed me a blade?”
He went to his desk and pumped hand sanitizer into his palms. “A black blade. A blade not crafted by strength or tradition but grown like a cyst from some demonic manufacturing pool. I gave it to you because you are harmless, and I would rather not dirty my hands with it further.”
Noviko looked him in the eyes. She held back everything. She forced softness, the same as him. “It’s true. I’m no warrior… only a mother and a healer.”
“The first will suffice. We will need to remove more than a simple quantum transponder from your brain. There are still devices implanted in you that record all your senses, and that will not do. We do not allow such affronts in our culture.”
“How generous.”
“Have you always been attracted to men?”
Who talks like this?
“Yes,” she said, taken aback by the bizarre question. Though I would describe it as more of an attraction to masculinity.”
“That is a degenerate distinction. Only men are masculine.”
Noviko no longer felt like she was talking to a grown man, but a demented child. “As you say.”
He smiled. “Indeed. The women will make you comfortable. We don’t have much down here, but we’ve survived this long. With the squids protecting us, there isn’t much your people can do even with the truth out; I understand PRISMA is squeamish about harming intelligent animals and we can see squid are quite intelligent. As smart as dogs, perhaps?”
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“Mm. Perhaps moreso.”
“I doubt it. Come.”
He led her out of the office. She walked behind him, the katana stuck into the shield belt they either neglected to remove or did not recognize as military equipment. The two morons with submachine guns followed her close behind. As they walked, the man kept talking, and it seemed he very much enjoyed the sound of his own voice.
“You’ll adjust quickly. Once a few more generations of squid are perfected, our mission here will be complete and then we can all return to the surface in safety. I have to ask, though… how did your people get past our guardian beasts?”
“We spoke to them.”
“… squids are animals. They don’t have language.”
“You would be wrong about that.”
“Even if they did, their place is to serve man. We ensure their compliance by exploiting their chemoreceptors – the whole facility is coated in a chemical that makes them think we are a cluster of eggs. We harvest that chemical from one of the alpha females we have captive. So, they are quite protective.”
Eggs… of course.
“Clever.”
“We took it a step further, too. We’ve been breeding new strains of them and releasing them into the water – optimized for pressure resistance, aggression, size, that sort of thing. All of the squid you saw on your way down here were the product of generations of pedigree. We applied to these creatures the same principles we apply to humans and society – encourage the favorable traits, eradicate the unfavorable. It is as simple as tending to a garden.”
In passing, Noviko noticed a door that read ‘DATA CENTER’ over the top. She felt a queer sense of déjà vu and anticipated a sign for a moon pool at the next corner. Sure enough, there was the sign for the moon pool. She could still see old, faded splotches where the blood of a severed leg had struck the wall.
“Excuse me, um,” Noviko strained herself to address this idiot. “… my lord?”
“Ah. Your deference does you credit.” He smiled over his shoulder and kept walking. “We’re almost to the Lifegiver Room. You’re a little past your prime, but I think with some close medical attention and plenty of fertility supplements you could give us at least six new bodies.”
Don’t vomit. Don’t vomit.
Noviko pointed back to the data center. “Could I have a look?”
The man’s smile died. “Why?”
“Curiosity. This is an ancient place.”
“That room is not relevant to you.”
“You won’t indulge me at all? I thought I was harmless.”
“Harmless and of immense value. We are eager to get you settled.”
Noviko glanced around herself, took stock of the three men. The two guards escorting her had eager glints in their eyes as they stared at her. She saw they had their fingers resting beside the triggers of their respective SMGs.
“Well,” said Noviko, “I was really hoping you would indulge my curiosity.”
The man sighed and looked at her with the most pitying eyes. “You’ll be treated in the way you want to be treated. Haven’t you ever read the old fantasy books women wrote during the era of cultural enlightenment, the 20th and 21st centuries?”
“I cannot say that I have.”
“Well, women would write stories about strong men forcing them to have sex. And you can see in that the subliminal desire to be put into a position where the woman has no choice but to enjoy sex. Knowing this fact about the female mind, we engineer situations wherein they are pampered, cherished, and put into positions where they have no choice but to… enjoy.”
Noviko’s skin crawled. Her soul screamed. When she looked into this man’s smiling eyes, she saw the empty eyes of a depraved alien.
“Are you well?” He asked. “You’re trembling. Take my arm?”
He offered his arm. Her chest felt like burning ice.
“No thank you,” she said. “I would rather die.”
Tokiko held her daughter’s hands. The blade flashed free of its scabbard and passed through the man’s neck as if it were warm jelly; she carried that momentum, spun to face the two men behind her, and passed the blade through their throats. One of them had managed to move his finger to the trigger and squeeze off a burst. This burst of bullets deflected off of her shield and into the walls. Her shield belt was hot against her skin as the battery overheated and entered a cooling phase. She was no longer protected.
She did not care.
She still had basic neural cyberware. The tiny implants in her brain were mundane by modern Syndicate standards. They were alien supercomputers by every other standard. She observed her environment through the gouts of pulsing blood and crumpling bodies. One of the young men escorting her clutched at his throat as he lay on the ground. She stood over him and watched him as he tried to keep spurts of red from spilling through his fingers.
She wiped blood from her eyes and stepped over him. He grasped at her skirts as they flowed over his face and she cut off his hand for the offense, without breaking stride.
The data center opened when she smeared their blood over the gene lock. The door opened and revealed shelves of old data drives. One of them had a hole in the center and was crudely pieced together from fragments. Noviko picked that one up and stuck her neural cable into it. Most of it was corrupted, but her onboard systems managed to download the imperfect information in a matter of seconds. She set her systems to decode and make sense of the data while she paced around the room. There was a terminal with a map of the facility. She plugged into that, too, and imprinted the layout of the facility into herself so that she could navigate using a map in her UI.
She went back out into the hallway. No patrols had come yet, but they would soon. She stepped over the mutilated bodies of the three men. The one who had been clinging to life now lay still with his eyes open. She kicked the severed head of their leader, the man with the ‘sincere’ smile, whose face was now frozen in a look of astonishment.
She then noticed bundles of cables trailing down the hallway and fastened to the wall. All of them led to the moon pool. She walked toward the moon pool. The door was still cut open from two-hundred years before. Inside the moon pool chamber’s water was an enormous squid restrained by dozens of cables and crude implants connected to the facility’s systems. The squid was lethargic, its giant tentacles curling and shuddering over the edge of the pool. Its eyes were milky, and it was, in all, about the size of a school bus.
All around the moon pool were great clusters of elongated eggs, stuck to the sides of the pool like bunches of slimy, translucent bananas. Noviko felt afraid of this animal. She also felt sympathy for it. Noviko observed the various cables. One of them was a large data cable connected to an implant that presumably went into the squid’s brain.
Noviko searched the room for a terminal and found one. She stuck her neural cable into it and allowed her systems to brute force their way past every encryption. She found the squid there, suspended in a simulation meant to keep its brain from dying. It was torment.
Noviko disconnected from the terminal. She turned and looked at the giant squid. Its faded eyes, it seemed, looked right back at her. Then its skin flickered colors. A message:
“HELP ME. HELP ME.”
Noviko raised her blade, then hacked through the data cable until it broke apart. The giant squid then sank down through the waters of the moon pool, turned over, and died.
There was no wonder to be had in this place. No exploration into inter-species collaboration. The naichi had taken that away. They had poisoned everything.
The room went dark and turned to pulsing red lights. The facility was on alert.
They found the bodies. I have to help Vox. I have to die trying to help her.
She marched out of the moon pool chamber, blade in hand. She fully expected to be gunned down in the hall and did not care. But the bodies were where she left them, and no one was standing there ready to shoot. There was shouting deeper in the facility. There was shouting and gunfire. They were dealing, it seemed, with something other than her.
Noviko tucked her blade aside and sprinted down the hallway toward the interrogation chamber. Vox was there, abandoned and broken, still tied to the chair. Noviko smeared more of their leader’s blood on the gene lock and walked in. She rushed to Vox’s side and knelt before her like a contrite samurai.
“I like you just the way you are,” she kept her eyes down. “Please forgive me. Please let me carry you from this place. Please forgive me, please…”
“Nice play,” Vox smirked through busted lips. She spat blood to the side. “Could have done without the torture. What’s our next move?”
“I… aren’t you angry at me?”
“Why would I be? I assumed it was all a ploy to throw them off guard, so I played along. And here you are, covered in their blood. Again, uh… could have done without the torture… but that’s what painkiller implants are for, heh heheheh… heh…”
Yes. All part of my master plan. Let’s go with that.
“How do we get you out of here?”
“We wait.”
“We… what? No, let me carry you.”
“Girl, I’m twice your body weight.”
“I can carry you, let me try.”
“No you can’t, you’ve got mom arms.”
“I’m going to excuse your rudeness in light of the circumstances and focus—"
She heard a burst of gunfire get closer. She saw, through the room window, a naichi soldier doing a fighting retreat with about six others. Then a tethered harpoon slammed into the soldier’s stomach. He roared and fired at whatever was at the end of the hall.
“Rush him while he’s got me, rush him!”
His friends turned on their heel, ready to charge and make their battle cries. Then their harpooned friend exploded in a plume of pink mist. The harpoon snapped back toward its origin, caught another fellow on its barb, and dragged him to unseen doom. Noviko heard the telltale sound of servos whirring and a human body being crunched across a hard floor. Their brave charge turned into a screaming retreat. One of the naichi even slipped on the mulched remains of his friend and fell face-first into it.
“Oh, he’s comin’…” Neon Vox giggled that stupid, goonish giggle people do when they’re high on painkillers and waiting to be driven home from the dentist’s office.
The prone soldier tried to scramble away, but a giant made of black metal smashed his armored boot into the soldier’s leg and dragged him closer. Noviko heard Dunk’s already low voice turned demonic by the intimidation filters of the trench marine armor.
“WHERE ARE THEY?!”
The soldier’s shaking hand pointed at the window. Dunk smashed his giant fist through the window, picked the soldier up by the scruff of his cute little uniform, laid him over the frame of broken glass, and gorilla-slammed his back so that he split in half.
The sight made Noviko’s stomach turn. She couldn’t look at it.
Vox, too, seemed to try not to look at the mess on the floor. “Put a pin in that rampage and get us the fuck out of here, papa walrus!”
Dunk reached into the room and grabbed the back of the interrogation chair. He dragged it to the window and lifted it through, then dragged the seated Vox behind him through the hallway. “LET’S GO, LADIES.”
Noviko made herself useful and gathered up Vox’s empty exosuit from the floor. It was far lighter than she imagined it would be. She then passed through the door and gingerly stepped over glass and body parts to keep up with Dunk. She saw the harpoon launcher snap back up into his forearm. It was connected by hollow tether to a large canister of C02.
“Got to use the whip-it poon after all,” Vox grinned. “That was rad.”
Dunk said nothing. He just growled through his helmet and dragged them back to the sub.
“Oh hey,” Vox lolled her head to the side and looked at Noviko. “You get the… thing?”
“Our objective? I did.”
“Damn. You’re a natural. Hey, do me a favor? Grab one of those grenades from my suit’s utility belt and huck it down the hallway to cover our retreat.”
Noviko sorted through the belt. “This one?”
“Yeah yeah yeah….”
“Just… click the button?”
“Yyyyyeeeep.”
Noviko clicked the button.
Noviko stared at the beeping grenade.
“… FUCKING THROW IT, NOVIKO!”
“AAAAH!”
Noviko threw the grenade as far as she could down the hallway behind them. It hit the ground and exploded into a plume of tiny bomblets that attached to the walls, ceiling, and floor. Now the hallway was covered in black studs.
“What are those?”
“No no no, just wait for it. Keep walking.”
They kept walking down the long, gore-strewn hallway toward the sub. Noviko kept checking over her shoulder. Then she heard an explosion and saw parts of a soldier hit the far wall behind them. Vox snort-laughed. Dunk dragged her into the airlock and Noviko followed.
Once back aboard, Dunk walked into the docking apparatus for his suit. Its arms reached down and lifted him up into a secure position. Vox had insisted, over and over while sounding higher by the second, to ‘just leave me on the floor, man.’ So they did.
Dunk boomed through the intercom: “I’m stuck in this suit until the thing decycles. Noviko, get to the helm and get us out of here.”
“I can’t pilot a submarine?!”
“IT’S EASY, JUST FUCKING DO IT. PLEASE.”
Noviko scrambled up the ladder to the bridge. The adrenaline faded into whole-body trembling. She found the sink near the bunks at the helm and vomited into it. She swished her mouth out with stale, recycled water and stood up straight. Noviko then took a few minutes to wash the blood from her face, hair, and blade.
She took a breath, made sure she still recognized herself in the mirror, then walked over to the helm. There, through the wide screen of the helm’s observation array, she saw multiple squid as big or bigger than their submarine hovering within grasping range. They seemed stunned, confused, or worse, quietly analyzing the situation.
Noviko plugged herself into the sub’s modules trusted she had fully digested the data from the old drive in the facility. She attempted fluent biospeak:
“Back away. We do not want to hurt you.”
The squids drifted back, though not by much. One of them, possibly the enormous female that escorted them there (it was hard to tell) signaled back:
“You are not one of us.”
The level of nuance in their communications frightened her. She realized, in that moment, that squid were far more intelligent than she or anyone else had previously predicted.
“No,” said Noviko. “But we could be friends.”
“Friends are interesting. Friends can also be delicious. Are you delicious?”
“No. We are dangerous.”
“Show me.”
The giant female slammed her barbed tentacle onto the exterior of the sub. An automatic alarm blared through the submarine warning of an impact. Noviko scrambled through the helm controls but then found a big, red button above her that read. ‘ELECTRIC MEMBRANE.’
She pounded the button. The water around them flashed with light.
The enormous female turned limp. She was dead.
“BATTERY AT FIFTY PERCENT.” The ship’s systems warned.
“You only get one of those,” Dunk said over the intercom. “Hope it was worth it.”
“Kuso…”
Every other squid present drifted a little further away from the sub. Then, one of them grasped at the dead female, its tentacles almost gentle… perhaps reverent? Or curious.
Then a squid lashed its barbed tentacles into the body and pulled. Another did the same. Over and over, the squids signaled at each other: “Don’t touch my food!”
“It’s mine!”
“I let you eat the last one!”
“I’ll eat you!”
“I’ll eat both of you!”
These arguments went on and on while the pack of squid ripped apart their former comrade and devoured her chunk by chunk. Then they turned on each other. Noviko saw an opportunity. She engaged the ascent portion of the throttle and put it to maximum. The sub pushed away from the facility and drifted up through the pack of hungry squid.
One, however, followed them. It was a smaller squid (only the size of a van, rather than a plane or bus), and it swam ahead of them and kept itself in view, as if it were aware of where the sub’s ‘eyes’ were.
“We can be friends,” said the smaller squid. “Do you want to be friends?”
“I would love to be friends,” Noviko signaled back. “But trust is earned.”
“We have trust. Give me more trust.”
Noviko then realized she’d hit the limits of squid comprehension. “Trust is earned.”
“Okay. Give me all of your trust.”
“Do you know what trust is?”
“Trust is how long you wait before eating your friends. Much trust, much waiting.”
“I will never eat you.”
“Good. Then I will never eat you.”
“Do you have a name?”
“Squid.”
“Do you have a family?”
“Squid.”
“What do you love?”
“Eating.”
“And what do you hate?”
“Being eaten. These are weird questions.”
“I suppose they are.”
“I’m going to go use new tools to eat the meat inside of the egg place. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
The little squid shimmered out of view; its natural color-changing turned it clear as the sea around it. This was nature’s first cloaking device, and Syndicate studied for over a century to replicate it in their Ghost armor membranes.
Noviko heard the hatch open in the engineering bay. Dunk stomped out onto the bridge, toweling himself off and wafting his cotton tank top against his hairy gut. He gently shoved Noviko aside and took the helm without a word.
“We in the clear?” He asked.
“I think so… but squid are much weirder than I expected.”
“What the fuck did you expect, eh? They’re squid, they rip each other apart and eat anything that moves. I mean I respect that, but if they do have a culture, I’d hate to live in it.”
They ascended for about fifteen minutes. Dunk kept his eyes on the rear and belly-mounted cameras as they rose. He pulled down the comms tether, swapped a toggle on it, and spoke into it: “Big bull, this is starfish diver. We need an escort as deep as you can get. Big bull, follow this signal.”
The words resonated out into the ocean as the mournful cries of whale speech. The signal repeated itself automatically every minute or so. When multiple colossal squid rose up to pursue them from the darkness below, they were waylaid by a pack of sperm whales. The whales fired sonic bullets at the squids, powerful enough to stun them. Then the whales unloaded torpedoes from their torpedo launcher implants.
The whales enjoyed the easy-to-eat meat, and their playful calls reflected this. Noviko could see the translation in her UI:
“I love this. My children also love this. Bring some to the children.”
Over the course of the following three years, psychopunks from across Syndicate would attempt diplomatic outreach with the squids. All efforts ended in people being eaten. One particularly hopeful individual tried to build trust with the squids by swimming unprotected with them. The individual lasted fifteen minutes before one squid said the biospeak equivalent of “SIKE.” The individual was eaten immediately.
Due to their nonexistent empathy, playful enthusiasm for violence, ability to use tools, ability to interface with cyberware, and demonstrated capacity for elaborate deception, squids were determined to be more of an existential threat than a potential ally. An all-out war between Syndicate and the squid ensued. Many cyber-whales and submarines would die valiantly.
Noviko wanted nothing to do with any of it.