The dive was demented. Noviko felt the slippery flesh of tentacles in her hands and gazed into the grapefruit-sized eyes of a speckled squid. Its eyes were white with enormous black pupils, and the squid lay inside an observation tank of some kind. Noviko was crouching over the edge of the tank and holding the squid’s limbs. Its limbs curled around hers. They were having a moment of connection, or so she thought.
But there was a meta-feeling (a feeling from another time and place, in this case, most likely the terrible future) that this squid had nothing even resembling empathy in its heart. As it stared into her soul, she felt that she was being observed by a universe of hunger. The squid slipped away from her and fanned its tentacles out into the water into a beautiful, curvaceous symmetry she knew not the meaning of. Then it spoke to her with its skin. The lights stuttered, strobed, faded in and out, and swapped spectrums all across the rainbow. It said in lights:
“Swim with me, danger starfish. Morse green fish sky. You. Me. Love.”
Um… is this squid flirting with me?
“Swim. You. Me. Love. Morse green fish sky.”
But what is love to a squid? And why can I understand this?!
Noviko felt a familiar urge; it was an ego urge, the urge of the ego’s memory. The action that the old man (whose name she still did not know) had taken in this moment went against all of Noviko’s own earthly instincts. She had no desire to swim with this squid. But in the memory, the old man very much felt compelled to.
DESYNC RISK.
Her systems were warning her that she might tear away from her patient if she did not go along with his own remembered actions. And so she imagined the glowing hand of a goddess reaching from the sky down into this dark place. The hand reached into Noviko’s brain and stroked along her mind’s folds with the tenderest affection. It split open her mind and pressed upon her empathy center; a cosmic thumb on her psychological scales. This visualization exercise worked.
Noviko let herself slip into the pool with the squid. As she floated there, she looked around and saw trench marines in their powered armor looming along the catwalks above the pools. Their six-limbed combat suits had utility rifles at the ready.
“Please,” said Noviko, in the voice of a young man. “Don’t frighten her.”
One of the suits spoke through a garbled intimidation filter: “Your safety is our mission, doctor. If it attacks you, we shoot it – that’s the deal.”
“Only if there’s blood. Her only weapon is a beak, it’s not like she can do much.”
“I’ve seen these things rip a marine out of his armor.”
“Damn,” said another marine. “I just got here bro, are you fucking serious?”
The second marine nodded. “Serious as a wallaby’s ass in a forest fire, buckaroo.”
Noviko felt an empathic disgust. These marines bothered her because their mission was to keep the humans of the facility safe, while her mission was to decode squid behavior and understand their speech.
Wait… when is this?
Noviko risked desync just to satisfy her curiosity. She forced a question: “What year is it, marines? Uh… I’m establishing a, uh… science… baseline?”
“Very convincing,” said Vox, into Noviko’s mind. “You should be a spy.”
Oh, you have jokes? Humor is one of the services you provide as a handler?
“Jokes break tension,” said Vox.
Ever the utilitarian, ma’am.
Back in the memory, existence buzzed and fractured at the edges somewhat, but no full desync occurred. The marines answered the question: The year was 2145, almost two centuries before Noviko had even been born. This was the infancy of the Pacific Syndicate.
Also back in the memory, Noviko felt squid tentacles wrapping around her limbs. There was a disturbing gentleness to it, and she saw those giant, white-black eyes drawing closer and closer to her face as she floated there with the creature. Its forward-most tentacles lifted up to caress over her shoulders, and she saw in the blooming mass of limbs a black kernel of hardness: the squid’s beak, which was a pincer big enough to take a literal pound of flesh out of someone. And she knew, from her intuitive knowledge of the man’s mind she now shared, that this was a creature with a bite force exceeding that of a hyena, and hyenas were famous for being able to crunch through buffalo thigh bones as easily as a human eats a tube of jerky.
Needless to say, having such a deadly biological implement this close to her face was… anxiety-inducing. But she (and her host consciousness) were synced with an open mind.
“We’re just building trust,” said Noviko, in a man’s voice. “She’s testing my limits.”
The squid approached slow, like a dancer gauging a new partner. Noviko’s panic spiked when that black beak snapped just inches from her nose. She could smell the brine of the ocean everywhere. “Tell her to stop,” said Noviko, as calmly as she could. “Signal message four-eight-three.”
The squid grew still. Then, within ten long seconds, it slid off of her and thrust back through the water. She looked around and saw that screens on the edges of the water tank were flashing a message in shifting colors over and over. She understood it as: “Release and play.”
That was when the terror set in. “Who programmed that message?”
“Uh,” one of the marines checked some data inside his suit. “Your assistant.”
Noviko’s heart thundered. It was the word ‘play’ in that message that bothered her, though the instinct for frantic survival overwhelmed any further consideration as to why. The squid had vanished from view, quite literally, is its skin shifted into a teal translucence meant to imitate the tank it swam in. The creature was effectively invisible to the naked eye.
Noviko swam toward the edge of the pool as fast as she could. She grabbed onto the ladder of the catwalk and began pulling herself out. Then she felt something whip around her legs and drag itself toward her, and then she felt a bladed garbage-compactor of a mouth sink into her calf and rip a chunk of muscle and torn wetsuit straight off the bone. The pain was so extreme, she would have preferred a jellyfish to the face again. She screamed: “DON’T SHOOT HER! PLAY MESSAGE SEVEN-SIX-NINER!”
The screens all around the tank flickered a new rainbow message in lights. This one caused the squid to release her grip and dart back into the water, a line of cloudy red streaking behind her like bloody rocket exhaust. The squid enjoyed her meal, while Noviko flopped onto the catwalk and heard sirens blaring through the laboratory. Sleek-suited medic marines and their supporting drone swarms flew down from the higher levels of the facility, and then, she lost consciousness.
SYNCHRONIZATION STABLE.
So that is what it feels like to have a piece torn out of you.
“You’re doing great so far,” said Vox. “Take a moment.”
My instincts tell me that it all gets so much worse. So very much.
“At this point, your intuition would know better than us. This is where official records are spotty, so it’s all uncharted territory from here on out. Do you feel confident you can proceed, psychopunk?”
How does the saying in Angrish go? ‘I was birthed for this purpose?’
“I think ‘I was born for this’ is what usually rolls off the tongue a little better.”
I was born for this. Do you have a heading for me to proceed on?
“Standby. Waiting on your vitals to return to baseline. If you have any calming visualizations you’d like to invoke, now would be the time.”
And what do you know about calming visualizations, Agent Vox?”
“We’re both card-carrying psychopunks.”
Oh ho, another union sister? And why aren’t you the one enduring this?
“Because the patient trusts you. I had to drug him to even get him to your hab.”
After this, you owe me an indulgence.
“If you discover what PRISMA wants us to discover,” said Vox, in a tone somehow both playful and forbidding, “I’ll indulge you any way you please.”
Such promises. I’ll have to call my husband and get his permission.
“One step at a time, your holiness – oh, hey. Your vitals are looking better. I’ll keep using conversation as a grounding tool from here on out, it clearly works for you.”
I’d like that. Now, if you are done revealing your attraction to maternal women, what’s my heading?
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
“Standby, O’ High Priestess of the Church of Mommy.”
Oh, heavens help me with this one.
“Sharpen your focus to the following psychic lodestones: a table covered in black beaks. A giant squid in a moon pool. A sense of betrayal. Fear of a dark hallway. A klaxon siren. A severed human leg. An empty one-person submarine that feels like a lifeline out of Hell itself. A ‘hard drive.’”
What on Earth is a ‘hard drive’?
“It’s like a brick full of data,” said Vox. “It looks like a smooth rectangle and has little lights on it. Basically, it’s how we stored data before the invention of quantum wetware computers and the Great Cloud. So like, try to envision a tiny hab unit being pulled out of a habstack, except it’s rectangular, has lights on it, and you can hold it with a handle.”
Noviko did her best to visualize it. And sure enough, she felt her consciousness yanked through a straw and shunted into a subconscious memory. She went with the flow.
SYNCED.
It’s all their fault. Those damned GYOTA materialists and their obsession with stronger, better, faster, harder – damn them, damn them all! This was supposed to be a place of cultural exchange and scientific inquiry, of crossing new horizons of understanding with the other sapient denizens of Earth, but of course, GYOTA had to ruin it. What a cursed corporation, it’s unbelievable the same STEM-bros who annihilated the planet with shortsighted overdevelopment are now a part of the Trine Accord. How can PRISMA allow it? Because of them, this is all doomed, I’m doomed, we’re all doomed. They’re everywhere outside. There’s no escape. They’ll chew through the power lines in a matter of hours.
Noviko suppressed the old man’s subconscious thoughts. She then pushed the edges of synchronization and risked looking down at her hands and surroundings more clearly. She was carrying a rectangle with a handle and lights on it – the ‘hard drive’ no doubt. And ahead of her was a table covered in black squid beaks of varying sizes. One of them was massive, as big as the bucket on a backhoe.
She had no desire to meet the creature it had belonged to.
The lights in the room flickered. Noviko was alone. She heard sirens. An order to evacuate echoed through the facility. Trench marines were nowhere to be seen. She knew that they were outside in the water, fighting through the ocean trenches that were their namesake, and she did not envy them.
At least ZON’s jarheads have the plausible-deniability of being too stupid to comprehend the consequences of their own actions. GYOTA should know better. Intelligence without empathy, intelligence without wisdom, that’s GYOTA.
Noviko wanted to gain control over her stream of consciousness again, but the crackling of the edges of her senses when she tried to think an independent thought revealed that the old man’s thoughts were crucial to maintaining synchronization.
“Doctor Humboldt,” said an androgynous voice from a nearby doorway. “There’s a sub in the voidward moon pool, big enough for two people.”
Noviko looked at the figure and saw a person with gold-tipped fingers in an immaculate suit. They were neither masculine nor feminine, with shaggy black hair and a pretty face with a handsome chin. While Noviko felt no strong feelings one way or another about this person, her patient’s feelings of betrayal, disgust, and hatred were overpowering.
“To hell with you,” said Noviko, in someone else’s voice. “To hell with your whole cursed corporation. I don’t care if you’re part of the Accord now, you’re the reason this is happening, and you’re the reason my work is sabotaged.”
“Your work isn’t sabotaged,” said the person in the suit. “It’s in that drive you’re carrying, right there. All we have to do is get to the surface, and ZON will cover for us, there’s a whole fleet on standby once we get in torpedo range.”
“You people are sociopaths.”
“Will you spare me, please? I’ve been nothing but accommodating to you and your whole hippie-dippy team since you got here. Squid beaks are one of the hardest and most advanced biological materials on the planet, you’re not going to prevent us from reverse-engineering their fabrication because you think cephalopods have emotions.”
“They have proven sapience, and you were butchering them in front of their own kind.”
“They’re cannibals, doctor. They don’t care about the dead.”
“They were dead because you murdered them.”
“Again: cannibals. We even fed their friends the scraps after the beaks were removed.”
Noviko felt her whole being recoil in disgust. “You don’t see the problem, there?”
“I don’t see a problem for the squids, no, not based on their instincts for eating each other the moment one of them shows any weakness whatsoever – there’s a trait I bet you’re glad we don’t share with them, eh?”
“Human beings have practiced cannibalism too, particularly throughout the Pacific,” admitted Noviko. “But outside of widespread cases of mental illness or prion disease, they don’t eat their friends and family.”
“Squids aren’t mammals, they don’t empathy bond,” said the enby with an eyeroll. “How is it I’m the one teaching the marine biologist about his own field? Squid psychology isn’t anywhere near human psychology!”
Noviko wanted to punch this person right then and there, so she did. The blow struck the cheek, and she didn’t even look back before storming down the hallway.
“Find your own sub!” The person called out from behind. “Have fun with your feelings!”
Noviko held up a middle finger over her shoulder as she turned a corner. The lights flickered again. This time, they faded on and off, then shut down entirely. Emergency power kicked on, lighting up the long hallway ahead of her with red safety lights. The signage told her that the moon pools were just ahead.
But then, she heard that enby’s voice echoing down the hallway. “Aren’t you guys supposed to be outside? Maybe you should catch up with Doctor Humboldt, he’s having a bit of a mental break – wait – HOW?!”
Noviko heard screams. She heard the ripping fabric of a fine suit and the ripping tendons of a limb being separated from the body. She heard the whirring servos of a suit of power armor clanking down the hall around the corner, closer and closer. In the roulette of fight, flight, or freeze, freeze (most unfortunately) had taken over. She stared back where she’d came from.
She saw a human leg thrown against the far wall from around the blind corner. Flight took over. She sprinted in the opposite direction, down the dark hall of red safety lights, toward the moon pools. She ran until her lungs burned and her legs felt numb. The terror was real. The terror was icy and complete.
They’re in the suits. They’re in the damned suits. They augmented them. They augmented the squids with neural cyberware. GYOTA… why… why would you do that?! WHY?!
She heard the clanking of power armor limbs thumping behind her.
It grew louder every moment. It came closer every second.
She dared a desync to look over her shoulder. She did not know if what she saw when she looked was the AI trying to render what it expected her to see from context, or if it is actually what Doctor Humboldt saw at some point.
It was a pair of white-black eyes, enormous and empty, pressed against the translucent glass dome of a suit of power armor. It had crawled inside, and somehow, integrated with the suit’s nervous system. The movements of the suit as it stomped toward Noviko were surprisingly fluid, indicating that squid had a shocking neuroplasticity; the ability of a brain to adapt to exotic cybernetics.
Six snapping limbs rose from the power armor’s back and telescoped toward Noviko. The edges of reality fractured but held for now. As a spear-like limb shot toward her, she held up her hard drive to deflect it. The limb spiked through it and drew the hard drive back. The suit stopped and examined the drive as a fisherman examines a catch on his spear. This bought Noviko enough time to sprint to a moon pool bulkhead, smash her hand against the biometric reader, and begin the process of unsealing the heavy door.
The suit shattered the hard drive against the wall, over and over, and the violence almost seemed playful, like the thrown leg from before. Eventually the drive dislodged itself from the limb and the armor turned to stare at Noviko again.
She strained her arms to turn the bulkhead. The seals hissed loose. The armor closed in. Finally the bulkhead opened just enough for her to squeeze through, and she shoved herself inside, then grabbed the other end of the door and pulled. The door sealed shut and she spun the crank to lock the heavy bolts into place.
With her lungs aflame and her heart hammering against her ribs, she slumped down against the bulkhead and had a rest. The clang of metal against metal vibrated through the bulkhead as the power armor kicked, stabbed, and punched at the heavy door to no avail. She laughed in relief, and then realized the hard drive was lost, and laughed until she wept.
She tuned into local ZON frequencies to get a feel for what she was about to go out into, in the ocean outside. The radio chatter was clipped and constant.
“Mayday, mayday, mayday, this is Gamma One requesting reinforcements. Mayday, mayday, mayday, Gamma One requesting immediate reinforcements.”
“Gamma One this is Gitarja Actual, what the hell are we sending?”
“Everything. Everything. Send everything, over.”
“Copy that.”
Noviko knew that meant the full hammer of ZON was going to drop on top of whatever was going on out there. This both reassured and further terrified her. Tentatively, she spoke into the radio channel: “This is Doctor Humboldt, civilian researcher in the trenchworks facility. I am under attack and about to disembark toward the fleet, please do not shoot me. I repeat please—”
“We heard you. Disembark at will, you’ve got FOF on the sub. Use your sonar.”
“Copy that… uh, over and out.”
“Clear comms, please.”
Noviko walked to the edge of the moon pool and saw the two-person sub floating with its top open. She thought of the GYOTA rep earlier. Part of her wanted to go back and save them, but she had no idea how that was to be accomplished. Maybe there were some EMP grenades around the moon pool’s armory cabinets or something...
… she then heard a hissing sound and saw a bright light in the corner of her vision. Something was using an arc cutter to slice through the bulkhead’s seal. Given that squids in power armor weren’t likely to be attuned to the biometric readers of the facility, she didn’t have to think hard to guess who was trying to break in and get to her.
“Were they always this intelligent?” She wondered out loud. “It’s… beautiful.”
It’s terrifying.
She jumped into the sub’s seat and sealed the top dome shut. The canopy of the sub turned on, becoming a vast screen that simulated the outside as if she were gazing through a window. The moon pool’s mechanical arms lowered her into the water and gave her the green light once the suction cups had disengaged. She hit the throttle and shot through the darkness, then remembered to engage her sonar. The vast expanse of the abyssal floor spread out in front of her in the sub’s video feed of the exterior. She pitched up and jetted to the surface. It was nothing but open ocean.
A collision detection alarm beeped at her. The motion sensors around the sub indicated something was behind her and gaining. When she checked the rear camera through night vision, she saw the pale face of a colossal squid swimming toward her. The creature had a beak the size of a washing machine, and was more than capable, she imagined, of cracking her little sub’s hull like a parrot with a walnut. But the accelerator was already maxed out and her climb could not go faster.
Still, it gained on her. And she had thousands of meters left to go. But it was gaining slowly, and she could only hope it’d tire out eventually. After thirty seconds, it was closer than ever, its tentacles reaching out, its eyes silver discs reflecting the soft light of her thrusters. She closed her eyes and dictated something to the black box of the sub. An audio recording:
“Honey… I just want you to know I love you. Please forgive me for everything. You were having a hard time, and I just wasn’t there for you. I wasn’t myself. Give the girls my love and… just… live life. Be happy, with what remains of the world.”
And then, just as the colossal squid’s tentacles wrapped around the back of her sub and caused the whole thing to lurch and lean, angels bloomed all around.
Totally by accident, she had led the predatory squid into a bloom of giant jellyfish. As the first stinging jellyfish bumped into the squid’s face, it vibrated with agony and released its grip. More jellyfish squished into the great squid, and it fled at once back down into the darkness.
Noviko took a moment to admire the jellies. They floated effortlessly on the currents, some as big as her sub, and caressed the hull with gentle tendrils. They glowed so beautifully. And some of them spoke to her in that language of lights she only half-understood:
“Anger. Effort. Squid. Trespass. Yellow. Pink. Special. Starfish.”
DESYNCHRONIZED.
Now and forevermore, Noviko would understand the sacred beauty of jellyfish.