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Saturday Gazette - Octopus in Space
Episode 1 - Cephalopod in Space - Act I

Episode 1 - Cephalopod in Space - Act I

We awake immersed in water, but it tastes somehow wrong. There's a current, a gentle, pulling sensation, and we instinctively allow ourselves to go with it. Our eyes focus for what seems like the first time in... longer than we can remember.

The water ends at an invisible barrier and the current tugs us along it. A word comes to us – window. There are windows on one... two, three, four sides, out of… six. We're in a... tank.

The words seem strange. The idea of a word itself seems strange – an alien concept describing an alien concept. We don't feel right. Sensations and awareness flood into us, fill us, threatening to overwhelm us. We’re aware that we’re aware. And there’s something else to worry about too – beyond the water, beyond the windows, another alien phenomenon, that we somehow understand we should fear:

Fire.

The light around us changes rhythmically; it has a quality unfamiliar to us, then doesn’t, has that quality, then doesn’t – over and over. The quality is a colour – red. We don’t know if we’ve ever seen a colour like this before, yet somehow we know what we’re looking at. A loud tone sounds in time with the rhythm, demanding attention. Something falls from above, hitting the tank and causing jagged cracks to shear across our view of the flames beyond. Bright dots – sparks – spray into the air. They are yellow.

The reds and yellows seem to warn us that whatever is happening out there can't be good for us.

We follow the cracks downward, finding where the light the window transmits is most disjointed. Then we swarm either side of the crack, and pull. The crack widens and water begins spewing faster out onto featureless ground – a floor – beyond. This gap is much smaller than us, but that's not a problem. We know what to do. This, at least, is familiar.

We stretch, compress, squeeze, expand – flowing one arm at a time through the opening, in mimicry of the water itself, onto the floor. We relish this small challenge and splash triumphantly when all of us have escaped the tank. On this side there is air. It tastes unusual, and yet, of nothing.

There is no sea in this air. There is nothing of anything.

More sparks hiss and shower, and new lights begin to flash. The new lights are also red but are accompanied by a tone of a different frequency. How many sources of alarm must we wake to?

Alarm.

Yes, the noises do signify alarm – they are alarms. There is an elegance in these ideas, or maybe a logic. But what is logic? And from where did it come?

As we struggle to understand how it is that we seem to understand, part of a wall ahead moves. It begins folding down towards us, a giant limb of unnatural construction, jointed like a crawler rather than a swimmer. Now a new sound arises, complex yet coherent. It make new words, but these aren't in our mind. These words are in the air itself.

'Warning. Containment failure. Subject escaping. Recapture protocols initiated.'

We know what the words mean, but we don't have time to consider the abstract concepts they imply. The construction, a mechanical device of some sort, lunges towards us. We yank ourselves aside and it snaps closed where we were, reorients and comes at us again. It's fast, and our body seems slow, unfamiliar in all its responses. This time the thing snares us by one limb, raising us up off the floor. We flail around, curling around the thing's jaws, trying to wrench them apart. Two of our arms strain at our attacker, but make no difference to our attempts to escape... nor do three, nor four... but when our fifth limb – the second on our left – curls around the device, it only has to flex once and our captor snaps apart, sending us to the floor with a wet slap.

Our broken attacker jerks uselessly overhead as we study our own victorious arm. It's only slightly larger than our others, but clearly much more mighty.

But there isn't time to wonder at our body for long. The floor is vibrating strangely under us, the fire spreading, the air filling with dark, particulate matter. Smoke. The wall to our left looks different, functional. It's a solid plane, designed to be passed through. A door. This makes no sense to us – why block passage with a door, if a door’s function is to allow passage?

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

There's something on the wall beside it – a control panel. We slip across the floor to it, wondering again how we know all this. While most of us flail at the panel, wondering how to use it, one arm – the one immediately opposite the mighty one – unerringly pokes at a glyph on the panel, and the door slides open with a soft noise.

'Good job, p...' we begin.

But this stuns us into silence.

Words.

But this time words we are emitting ourself, forced out with air, pushed out of the siphon we use to pump water. We can pump words into the very air...

We can talk.

But this is something we'll have to wonder about later, along with how we know what it means to do a good job. For now there's fire and alarms to worry about. We slip through the door, only to be confronted with more mysteries – for in the next room there is another tank.

'Another tank,' we say. 'Another tank another tank another tank another tank.'

Words!

This tank is more severely damaged than the one in which we awoke. The glass is shattered and the floor more deeply flooded, and amongst the shattered fragments lies a creature we recognise. It's a dolphin. We don't think we ever called it a 'dolphin' before, but that's what it is. It's clearly dead, or unconscious, so we leave it and move on through the next door, using our pokey limb to access the controls again.

In the chamber beyond we discover a shark, floating belly-up in a more intact tank.

The rooms, we realise, are small self-contained chambers, each containing a single occupant. When we reach the next chamber we discover that not all of these occupants are aquatic – there is a four-limbed creature there that we somehow identify as a boar, and its tank is filled with a liquid more viscous than water. The boar's belly moves slowly as we watch, rising and falling. It is suspended with cables and wires. We think of releasing it, but then wonder what purpose that would serve. We can't eat it, juggle it or carry it, and it is clearly not awake.

We move on, slithering rapidly to the next door. The chamber beyond has a spider monkey in it, and the one beyond that a capybara. Then there is a jaguar, and then a human. The human's chamber is different to the others – there is a small subsection that contains fabrics it must once have worn, and some small personal items we can identify: a data device called a phone, a stylus called a pen, credit tokens called coins and unique-access keys called cards, hygienic blotters called tissues, a utility container called a purse, and a printed current-affairs data medium called a newspaper, which is entitled Saturday Gazette.

This title is made of words too, but these ones are very different. We can see these ones, right there in front of us. Words that exist not in our mind or as sounds in the air, but on the substance of the newspaper itself. Words that can be seen, that look like... Well, that look like words. Abstract markings on a surface.

'Huh,' we think, and the corresponding noise comes from our siphon. Things are starting to make more sense now. We raise one of our arms and think, “Saturday Gazette”. Our skin mottles and changes, as if we were trying to hide against the newspaper, and it darkens in an elongated pattern. The pattern is blurry, but is words: “Saturday Gazette”.

A few of our arms slap on the floor excitedly and we look back at the tank, tracking our eyes across the newspaper. The words under the title seem to relate an event, and images come to us as we read them... Images that don't appear in front of us like the words on the newspaper, but are elsewhere in our mind, like the images of a dream.

The images are of a cat, which seems like a smaller version of the jaguar in the last chamber. The cat is helpless in the limbs of a tree, which is a shaggy mass of green up high on the land where we don't like to go. We can't imagine what the limbs of a tree might be, but we have an idea that they are solid and dark and branch from each other... in fact the word 'branch' is there on the newspaper before us, so we think we might have the right idea.

The words relate to us how the cat was rescued from the tree by men and women made of fire. This seems sort of terrifying, but maybe cats have less to fear from flames than we do. We consider going back to the jaguar, but our attention is diverted when the background noise of the alarms is muted somewhat, and audible words sound over them.

'Warning,’ the words say. ‘Orbit unstable. Contact with planetary atmosphere has begun decelerating ship. Safe egress using escape pods will no longer be viable when this countdown terminates. [547. 546. 545...]'

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