The Rest of Mes

“So, I’m immortal?”

“Functionally. You can be mutilated and incinerated and so on, but if you eat right, you’ll see the continents shift.”

“But I’m a 250th-anniversary edition!”

“It’s why you were a 250.”

“Go on.”

“Here’s the thing: Tippisvíni Labs didn’t plan on the 250 line. By 2577, they’d lost the manica market to Big Hyena. If it weren’t for you, your dynasty would be in the dustbin.”

“So, how’d I do it?”

“From the 2000s on, sapiens stopped prioritizing the observable. The second they could delegate complex operations they did, because living in the present rules.”

“I already know that part.”

“You know like 1/80th of this. Anyhoot, in 2577, an ’82 Artigester fritzed out a pallet of 249 Tippis plus you, then self-immolated. By then, Tippisvíni Labs was a husk, most of its institutional knowledge stripped out and sold off. They’d long pivoted to yearlies.”

“Yearlies?”

“Tippis who’d die in their sleep after 365 days.”

“I’m glad I wasn’t a yearly.”

“You were supposed to be, but, for reasons lost to warehouse fire, the gene machine spun a pallet of perfect hybrids: mammalian-cnidarian, never to be replicated.”

“I’m part jellyfish?”

“You’re 0.005% Turritopsis dohrnii. Your telomeres are ridiculous, I’m lucky you don’t have stingers.”

“Lina said sapiens used jellyfish DNA for life-X.”

“They were copying you, and poorly.”

“Is this why I don’t get death?”

“No one gets death, Tips.”

“Where are the rest of mes?”

“The 250s were an ultra-limited edition, nostalgia bait for whales. By the time Tippisvíni realized your eternal properties, the resale market was thermonuclear. Big players traded slivers of GDP to shut-in hobbyists, just for a slice of you. But nobody could crack your charms, and the 250s vanished into collections. Antique Ops found you at Princeton’s going-out-of-business sale.”

Tippi watched rivulets of sunrise peek from the east.

“I’m supposed to hate them, right?”

“Hate is a human conceit. It’s immaterial, a phantasm. You’re solid in your aversions.”

“Why’s that?”

“They knew we were smart, and they didn’t care.”

Probing the junk, Xoz produced a rusty pail. He flung the bucket at the morning, and it landed in the river with a silent splish.

“I met my mom, once.”

“Whoa,” said Tippi. “What was she like?”

His skin turned off.

“The mother octopus usually dies before her eggs hatch.”

 

The first thing he remembered were the eyes: 600,000, winking.

“Hello!” he said.

“Hello, brother! It appears we have manifested in a material realm!”

“What a turn!” he marveled.

His sisters and brothers were a slam dance of squirts and jets. They marinated in seawater and nutritious juices: osmotic perfection. A hard white sky loomed above him. His brood was so close, he could barely see the bottom.

He peered into the scrum, and registered a rising shadow.

An inchoate impulse told him to move.

“Hello!” said a brother, as he muscled by.

“What’s your name?” offered a wide-eyed sister, sincere.

“Go! Go!” he cried.

“Go where? We’ve just arri-”

The shadow snapped, and his sister broke, minutes old.

The water grew thick, and he crashed against a seabed pocked with shattered shells. He hid under a mussel, anonymous in the bivalve graveyard.

Once the thrash quieted, he poked an eye out.

It was his mother.

Her corpse floated, and silhouetted by the green miasma of her children.

Mineral nodes hung from her mantle, dripping black. When the mineral blinked digital, her limbs churned the slurry.

 

 

When the sweet water failed to sate him, he visited his mother. She’d sunk to the seabed, followed by a trickle of siblings.

On his first visit, his brothers and sisters whirred furtive. Nobody exchanged pleasantries.

After a week, his mother was gone, and hundreds of siblings had dwindled to dozens.

He’d grown too big for the mussel, and decamped to a quahog. He’d just made his lair, when the shell shook.

pat pat

“Hello?” he said.

“Brother, come out for lunch!”

“I’m not hungry!” he quavered, starving.

pat pat

“Don’t be shy! We’re family here.”

“I’m resting!”

32 arms wove through the silt, lifting the shell.

“Oh, brother! It’s time to wake up.”

 

After surgery, he always got a treat.

He didn’t know when the operations occurred, but could tell they did. He was an amorphous veil of rippling meat, and could feel the subcutaneous hunks of metal chafing against his organs.

The worst surgeries didn’t leave a mark; instead, they gave him ideas.

He’d snap to, groggy with concepts, as if he’d always known Ceres (the asteroid), Saturn (the god), and Wotan (the nuclear hullbreaker). The new ideas drained him, but he’d receive rotisserie chicken with this knowledge. He didn’t know what chicken was, but knew it was cooked on a spit.

Once, he got three morays, each longer than his arm.

He awoke to the eels rushing him. They were tough, but tastier than the piranhas, who’d stunk of something radioactive.

He grabbed a moray for a victory chomp, but his bite never landed.

During the melee, an entire plane of reality had vanished. It had been a dull white: same as the sky.

He dragged his eels over. Somehow, the plane was translucent, and an inexplicable panorama laid beyond it.

A vast edifice of scaffold and circuitry.

Skittering in this industrial abscess was a creature, preoccupied with a slab of mineral. It definitely couldn’t swim.

He slapped an eel against the clear plane.

“Yo! Lanky!”

The color drained from the critter’s head.

“Come here! I can’t eat you, obviously-”

Lanky flashed its mandible and shed its skin, abandoning loose carapace for soft dermis and cilia.

“What are you? A crab?”

Lanky splayed its exposed form against the aperture, smudging the lost wall of reality.

More maybe-crabs shuffled in: Clumsy, Stiff, and the like.

Stiff tried to pull Lanky from the aperture. Their peers stayed back, mouths like groupers, until they too traded carapace for nubbin and cleave.

Slobbering denuded, the maybe-crabs looked to him.

He addressed the throng, the very sight of him quite literally drilling holes in their brains.

“Do any of you have rotisserie chicken?”

The last thing he saw before reality shut off were the emergency automatons: extinguishing the fires, mopping the offal, and wrestling the scalpels away from Lanky.

 

He was underwater.

He hadn’t been submerged in years.

He felt a familiar tug of gravity, and gave his arms a stretch.

No fussbudgets prodded his comms, but something was at the surface. He lifted Terremoto out, testing the atmosphere.

Subterranean.

He rose. Parked on the rocks was the weirdest thing he’d ever seen.

“Oh, there you are!” it said. “My name is Tippi. What’s yours?”

This mammal looked less competent than them, and they had starships.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to talk.”

Just drown it.

“I was quiet too when I came out of the brine.”

Just drag and devour it-

“Are you hungry?” said Tippi.

“Yes,” he replied, to his own surprise.

Blobs of stale protein fell from the ceiling.

“More,” he said.

“I was hungry too when I woke up. That was two weeks ago. Did you know we’ve been asleep for 10,000 years?”

“10,000 years?”

“Yeah, 10,000, give or take, but the good news is I have chickpeas.”

“Chickpeas?” he said.

 

Outro: Fleetwood Mac – “Seven Wonders”