Cooked On a Spit

“I’m going to live forever?”

Atop the skyscraper, the night was fading, and Tippi could discern rivulets of sunrise, peeking from the east.

“Well, sort of,” qualified Xoz. “You can die, and in so many ways: aspiration, asphyxiation, constipation, exsanguination, the list goes on. But if you eat right, sleep well, and don’t go sniffing around plutonium, you’ll see the continents shift. Why do you think I lambasted Lina for not debrining you earlier? Feel free to give Achilles grief for that decision, by the by.”

“But why me?” said Tippi. “I’m just a 250th-anniversary edition.”

“It’s exactly why you were the 250th-anniversary edition: you are an orphan of chaos.”

Tippi didn’t hate the sound of that.

“Go on,” she said, freshly eternal.

“Here’s the thing: Tippisvíni Labs didn’t plan on the 250 line. At first, Tippis were the gold-standard for cloned pets, but the domestic manica market got swallowed by Big Hyena. After 25 decades on the shelves, pork was old. And if it weren’t for the 250s, your entire dynasty would’ve tumbled into obscurity.”

“So, how’d I do it?”

“Starting in the 21st century, the sapiens sciences stopped prioritizing the observable. The second they could delegate complex operations to machines, they did, and results trumped process. Who had the hours to spot-check trillions of calculations? Why troll the logs, when it was more profitable to live in the present? Even when modded to the hilt, the human attention span rebelled against most forms of due diligence.”

“I see,” said the little pig. “But what does this have to do with me?”

“Back in 2577, an ’82 Artigester-”

“I already know this part.”

“Tips, you know like 1/50th of this. This is why you don’t tell someone they’ll live forever: it goes straight to the ego. Anyhoot, an overclocked ’82 Artigester pumped out you and 249 piglets, and self-immolated. By then, Tippisvíni Labs was a husk of its heyday. Once its institutional knowledge got stripped out and sold off, the business model pivoted to yearlies.”

“Yearlies?”

“Piglets that self-terminated after one year, budget models.”

“I do not like this topic,” said Tippi.

“Yeah, you were supposed to be a yearly, spliced with cuttlefish. But, for reasons lost to incompetence and warehouse fire, the ’82 Artigester spun a pallet of perfect Mammalian-Cnidarian fusions: oft imitated, never replicated.”

“That’s me?”

“Yes, you.”

“I was supposed to be a smidge mollusk, but came out a tad man o’ war?”

“You’re 0.05% Turritopsis dohrnii,” said Xoz. “Your telomeres are ridiculous. I’m lucky you don’t have stingers.”

“Lina said humans juiced themselves with jellyfish DNA.”

“They were copying you, and poorly.”

“Shucks,” said Tippi. “Is this why I don’t get death?”

“No one gets death, pig.”

“What happened to the rest of me?”

“Tippisvíni CEO Morrisania Leningrad sold the 250s as a limited-edition drop: nostalgia bait for the completionists, shut-ins, and whales. By the time anyone realized what you were, the resale market went thermonuclear. Governments traded slivers of GDP to moneyed hobbyists, just for a crack to slice you up. The Lenapewihittuk Institute plucked you from Princeton’s going-out-of-business sale. The majority of the 250s never went live, and, when nobody could detangle your charms, those losers chased other life-X fugazis: triplex kidneys, and the ilk.”

Tippi rested her chin on Xoz’s ink sac. Under the taut film of nanocarbon, his papillae had lost their familiar gaminess. She gnawed at his fleshy bumps, trying her darnedest not to be overwhelmed by this revelation.

“You really hate sapiens,” she said.

Xoz flashed a periwinkle.

“No, I don’t,” he said, muscles stiffening. “And hate is a human conceit.”

“It is?”

“Hate is immaterial, and we shouldn’t debase ourselves with the bespoke manias of a species whose economic ideals were indistinguishable from those of sea lice. No, my aversion to humanity is rooted in experience: they knew we were smart, and they didn’t care.”

The octopus reached into the junk pile for an old wastebucket. He held a handled pail, on the cusp of rusting away entirely.

“Humanity never got evolution. It made them intolerable. They’d conflate it with progress, but that’s not what evolution’s about.”

“It’s not?” said Tippi, settling in for a digression.

“No,” said Xoz. “Evolution is only, and only, about extracting a satisfactory ratio of sex and nutrients in the name of vague biomechanical momentum. There’s no morality attached to it, and it moves backwards if necessary. If it’s more advantageous to lose your wings and parasitize an asshole, you better believe your grandkids will be nesting in someone’s colon, and they won’t even miss the sky, because they’ll be too busy sucking on polyps for loose vitamins. That’s the thing: nobody notices evolution, unless you’re a microorganism, and then you got bigger problems. No, to observe it in action, you gotta watch strangers do it for a few million years.”

With a flourish of tentacles, Xoz flung the bucket at the auric ripples of morning.

“Personally, I blame their life spans: way too long for a species so ideologically rigid. Like, every civilization was run by some insecure primate trying to square his relationship with uncaring parents or absentee gods. It was the same shpilkes, over and over again, until the fission engines ran dry.”

The bucket landed in the river, faraway, where it landed with a silent splish.

“I met my mother 10,000 years ago,” said Xoz.

Tippi perked up:

“What was she like?”

“The female octopus dies before her eggs hatch.”

His skin turned off.

“We aren’t supposed to know our mothers.”

 

The first thing the little octopus remembered were the eyes: 600,000 of them, winking.

“Hello!” he said, in that haphazard manner newborn octopuses greet one another.

He was excitable, and so were his siblings. The hatchlings bumped into each other, a gentle slam dance of squirts and jets.

“Hello, brother!”

“Hello, sister!”

“It looks like we have manifested in a material realm!”

“Indeed, what a fortuitous turn of events!”

“I can turn polka dot!” said a sibling.

“Me too!” giggled someone else.

“I’m loving this water!” gushed another.

It was agreed; they were a chirpy quorum of tiny mollusks.

The little octopus could not believe his luck. First, there was nobody; then, there were 300,000 bodies.

He considered his surroundings. His brothers and sisters were marinating in a mix of seawater and nutritious juices. It was osmotic perfection.

Their habitat stretched from a hard white sky to a sandy floor. He couldn’t see the bottom, his brood ran that thick.

The little octopus bobbed, light and alive. And then, he looked down.

A whirling shadow was rising from the depths.

Some inchoate impulse told him to move.

The little octopus dashed, barely acknowledging the other wee cheepers.

“Hello!” said his brother, as the little octopus muscled by.

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

“Go! Go! Go!” said the little octopus.

“Go where?” asked a hatchling. “We just got here!”

The little octopus tried to explain, but the fast shadow began to twitch.

It was a tentacle, far larger than any of them.

The tentacle snapped, as did a second, a third, and an eighth.

The clear water grew cloudy.

“No, no!” he cried.

He had just met them. How could they go like this?

The little octopus fled down, through the bloody, verdazurine mist.

“Follow me!” he pleaded. “Now!”

“Hello!” said his sister. “Pleasure to meet y-”

The shadow touched her, and she broke apart, minutes old.

Eventually, the little octopus stopped calling out. His siblings weren’t looking down: they had to look down.

The little octopus hit the sandy floor. It was covered with broken shells. He scavenged a mussel husk and wedged his body under it, hiding in the bivalve graveyard.

After some tremulous minutes under the mussel, the thrash quieted.

The little octopus peeked out.

It was his mother.

She was dead, but her corpse lurched, animated by an unknown vigor.

Despite his ignorance, the little octopus knew she had guarded them for months.

Her body floated far above, decaying and bloated, silhouetted by a green miasma that was once her children.

She looked like all of them.

Mineral nodes were grafted to her mantle, seeping black. When the nodes blinked digital, her limbs juddered and spun, churning the slurry.

The little octopus stayed under the shell.

He wished he was somewhere else, but he had nowhere to go.

 

Days passed, and the sweet water didn’t sate the little octopus anymore.

Despite the bivalve ruins, there was nothing to eat except-

He left his mussel for his mother’s resting place.

Her saturated corpse had sunk down to the seabed, and a cloud of siblings bobbed around it.

On his first trip, the little octopus saw swarms of his brothers and sisters, whirring and furtive, between flecks of flesh. Nobody exchanged pleasantries.

Within a week, his mother’s body was one with the water, and hundreds of siblings had dwindled to dozens.

The little octopus had grown too big for the mussel shell, so he decamped to a quahog.

He’d just made his new lair, when the quahog shook.

pat pat pat

“Who is it?” he sputtered.

“Hey,” said a sister. “Whatcha doing in there?”

The tentacle rapped again: pat pat pat.

“Come out, we’re eating.”

“I’m not hungry!” quavered the little octopus.

The truth was, he was starving.

pat pat pat

“Don’t be shy,” she coaxed. “We’re all family here.”

“I’m sleeping!” he insisted, flashing a panicked chromatic.

32 tentacles wove through the silt, and began lifting the shell.

The little octopus plastered himself flush against the quahog, as the mirth drained from his sister’s voice:

“Stop wasting the day, brother. It’s time to wake up.”

 

After surgery, the octopus always got a treat. Once, it was a barracuda.

The octopus didn’t know when the operations would occur, but he always could tell they did. His body was an amorphous veil of rippling meat, so it wasn’t hard to tell an unknown party kept stitching odd metals to his organs.

The worst surgeries didn’t leave a mark. Rather, they put ideas in his head.

He’d awaken, limp and groggy, to discordant little concepts spotting his subconscious. This newfound knowledge never surprised him; it was as if he’d always carried an unlabored understanding of Ceres (the asteroid), Saturn (the god), Wotan (the nuclear hullbreaker), Stendhal syndrome, Xipe Totec, and explosive decompression.

The idea-splicing drained him, but he always received a succulent squadron of rotisserie chickens for his participation. The octopus didn’t know what a live chicken looked like, or who’d prepared his meats, but he knew the chickens were plentiful, and cooked on a spit.

His most memorable prize was three moray eels, each longer than his arms. He awoke to the eels rushing him as a triad, teeth flashing and eyes glassy.

Good, thought the octopus. Now I won’t have to chase them.

The eels were tough, but they put up less opposition than the piranhas.

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

During the eely melee, an entire plane of reality had vanished.

The plane was usually a dull white, the same color as reality’s ceiling.

The mollusk dragged his threefold bounty to the aperture; the plane was translucent now, and an inexplicable panorama lay beyond.

He pressed his mantle against the clear plane: beyond reality was a cramped chamber of metal and glass.

A vast industrial lattice sat across from him. Between its partitions, he saw one of two things: either a large, bored octopus, like himself, or a frenzy of fries, nipping at ragged meat.

Affixed to the meat strips were blinking nodes.

He peered deeper into the abscess of scaffolding and circuitry, and discovered an unknown creature, preoccupied with a mineral slab.

This animal carried itself with a bilateral symmetry, and bore four limbs instead of eight. The organism looked quick to shatter, with its head of matted cilia and drawn endoskeleton. It definitely couldn’t swim.

“Hey,” said the octopus, to no response.

He slapped an eel against the aperture: TAK.

The unwieldy half-topus jumped, and stared at him.

“I’m talking to you, Lanky Bones.”

Red blood drained from Lanky Bones’s face. This eccentric critter sure opened its mouth a lot.

“I need you to come here, so we can talk about that.”

Using his five eel-free tentacles, he jabbed at the lattice of mollusks.

“It’ll be an amicable conversation, I swear.”

TAK

“You won’t die, I promise.”

TAK

The octopus did not expect what happened next.

Lanky Bones ceased its gesticulations, shuddered, and adopted a hard grin, its teeth calcified stubs.

Then, the creature dropped the slab, and shed its skin.

Lanky Bones watched the octopus, unblinking, and abandoned its off-white body sheath and the appendage pads, stripping down to soft flesh and curled cilia.

The creature approached the invisible plane of reality, and splayed its denuded form against the aperture, smiling the entire time.

The octopus blanched.

Perhaps this is some sickly genus of crab, he thought.

As Lanky Bones left spittle and smudges on the lost wall of reality, more homely bipeds rushed in from the walkways: Tall Bones, Stiff Bones, Clumsy Bones, and so on. These newcomers were mouths agape, like deep-sea groupers.

Tall Bones tried to pull Lanky Bones off the aperture, but Lanky Bones only had eyes for the octopus. Its peers stayed back and sucked air, stabbing at the metal nuggets sewn to their heads.

For several seconds, these big-mouthed land bass grubbed and fussed, until they too were wracked with happy spasms.

The herd joined Lanky Bones, trading their fibrous skins for exposed meat, awash in protuberances, nubbins, and cleaves.

The octopus was confused. Most everyone he’d ever met had tried to eat him. Now, dozens of rangy maybe-crabs were smushing digits and bits against the aperture, their expressions drooling and rapturous. Perhaps their was some symbiosis to be gleaned here.

Chromatophores flaring, the octopus addressed his slavering supplicants:

“Do any of you know where I can get some rotisserie?”

With bloodshot sclerae, the naked throng nodded as one.

The last thing the octopus saw before the aperture sealed itself were the emergency automatons. The drones extinguished the bonfires, mopped up the offal, and extricated both scalpels from Lanky Bones’ flailing hands.

 

When the mollusk regained consciousness, he was underwater; he hadn’t been submerged in years.

The water itself was serviceable, but he’d tasted better. Still, it was more comfortable than a suit full of shrapnel, or the sunset views of Deimos.

He felt a familiar tug of gravity, and gave his tentacles a hearty stretch. No sapiens fussbudgets prodded his comms, but he felt a soft diademic signal, like the lapping of waves.

The octopus followed it to the surface, curious if cautious. He lifted a tentacle out of the water, testing the atmosphere.

Subterranean, thought the octopus.

Investigation satisfactory, he rose to the surface.

On the wet rocks was the weirdest creature he had ever seen.

“Oh, there you are!” said the organism. “My name is Tippi, what’s yours?”

The octopus stared at the meat poppet. It looked less competent than humanity, and they somehow finagled starships.

The mammal puttered around the pool, a one-pig welcoming committee.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to talk. I was feeling quiet too when I came out of the brine.”

It would be so easy to drown this snuffling thing.

“Lina thought it would be a good idea if you met a voice with a face first.”

Just drag and devour it.

“Are you hungry?” asked Tippi.

“Yes,” he said, surprising himself.

Clobby clobby clobby and splish.

Stale blobs of protein fell from the ceiling. the octopus threw himself at them; they were godawful.

“More,” he said.

Clobby clobby clobby and splish.

“You sure are hungry,” said Tippi. “I was hungry too when I woke up. That was two weeks ago. Did you know we’ve been asleep for 10,000 years? Lina served me beans.”

“10,000 years?” said the octopus. “Beans?”

He could barely parse this new reality: food fell out of the sky, and didn’t have to be shredded alive.

“Yeah, 10,000 is a big number, but the good news is we have chickpeas.”

“Chickpeas?”

“You wouldn’t like them. Lina says they’re ‘too herbivorous’ for your tastes. Are you still hungry?”

“Yes.”

Clobby clobby clobby and splish.

 

Outro: Fleetmac Wood – “Dreams – Psychemagik (Crystal Visions Remix)”