Chapter 15
Leviathan
On her third day outside, Tippi saw a shark.
The pig was in the Lenapewihittuk shallows, waiting for Xoz to filter out his nanocarbon suit. Like the first day, the mollusk had contorted his body into an invisible Xozebo.
Tippi snoozed within the Xozebo, hidden from the countryside, atop a translucent pile of tentacles, encircled by a clarion moat of river water. The southern river agreed with Xoz, as it tasted “more of the sea, not that I’d know.”
The travelers were resting an hour south of Big Rehoboth. It was a sunny afternoon, and the bugs were out in force. The sky was a solid blue, save Antares, and its eerie aurora. Their belongings sat on the pebbly shoreline; Pig Iron guarded the aminospheres upright, upon a chair liberated from the monolith.
Tippi was napping, when the beak awoke her.
CLACK CLACK CLACK went the mollusk alarm, right in her ear, as a fast fin cleaved the river.
“Optical analysis reveals that’s a bull shark,” said Lina-2. “The shark appears unmodded, and we should get out of here before she sees us.”
Tippi remembered sharks from Apex Predators of the Paleogene. Despite sharks’ ubiquity throughout history, Xoz punted their debut a few hundred million years, as he centered his lessons entirely on the cookiecutter shark, at the expense of the megalodon, great white, and every other chondrichthyan to exist.
Humanity, inspired by the traditional myopias, had tried its best to kill the sharks. But the sharks were old, older than the trees, and one cannot plot against something so ancient. Compared to subclass elasmobranch, the sapiens were a house collapsed.
“Uh, my suit is stuck in self-cleaning mode,” said Xoz, all small.
“What?” yalped Tippi.
“Look, I’m wearing vintage, and I need to fire off a hard reboot before we can get out here.”
The water widened as the land flattened, but the shark still managed to take up the entire river. Tippi couldn’t believe a creature so large could move so quietly.
“How long’s that gonna take?” she shivered.
“15 minutes,” gulped Xoz. “We need to go incognito for 15 minutes.”
Out of ideas, the friends stayed put.
But so did the shark.
That morning, something felt off.
Tippi had yet to confront Lina-2 about Xoz’s moonlight revelations. And though the pig was grateful he divulged the secrets of his fryhood, she made him promise that he wouldn’t eat her, at least for the next nine weeks. Also, she deserved a present, which was a mildly disingenuous request, as she struggled to maintain a dismay over his charnel cravings.
“What will I do without you?” sobbed Tippi.
“What are we doing tomorrow?” countered Xoz. “I believe that is the real question.”
“But what happens when Lina’s gone too?”
“Pig, if you manage to outlive a neural arbiter, you’ll know everything you need.”
He rested a tentacle on her neck fuzz, sucker-side up, and they hugged ’til sunup.
Daylight broke, and Tippi slept in, on Xoz’s crag-o’, while he retrieved the memory crown from the data dock, and gamboled down the skyscraper. With Lina-2 full of telemetry and schematics, the trio said good-bye.
“I hope you witness planetary annihilation,” said Tippi, crown mustier than usual. “We’ll drop by on our way home, and I imagine we’ll have a few stories to share.”
“I eagerly await your return!” beamed Big Rehoboth.
Xoz was next:
“You are full of shit, yet I’ve relinquished the urge to beat you to death.”
“Thank you?” said Big Rehoboth. “And, allow me to-”
“There remains the small matter of my appearance fee.”
The mollusk motioned to the meadow. Bric-a-brac littered the terrain, derelict and busted, and only a chair had survived Xoz’s field testing.
“Oh,” said Big Rehoboth.
“Quality metallurgy,” said Xoz, examining the chair. “No offense, Pig Iron.”
Down in the dirt, the bat kept mum. Xoz plopped the chair on his mantle, upside-down and backwards.
“Look at me,” he said. “I’m Henry the Eighth.”
“Huh?” said Tippi.
As Lina-2 confirmed coordinates, and Xoz reveled in larceny, Tippi strolled the perimeter.
She stopped at the supply cabinet the octopus heaved from Big Rehoboth. Unlike the chair, which ricocheted off the dirt unscathed, the cabinet left a crater. Its impact had loosened the soil, exposing a meter of rock, swallowed by centuries of shift.
Like the skyscraper’s heights, the disinterred stone was abraded by wind and rain. But, towards the bottom of the accidental excavation, Tippi saw something she couldn’t explain.
There were carvings.
The carvings resembled petroglyphs, but nothing like those inside Big Rehoboth, or Wee Sheol. Tippi found those words inscrutable, but she recognized a fugitive virtuosity to every dash, dot, and loop.
These new words were chaos.
They dug at the stone, a band of scarification, each line crosshatching the other, in batches of four: over and over and over and over again, in a troglodytic hexadecimal.
Whoever scritched this did so with such hardscrabble intensity that the stone gave ever so slightly, but not enough to breach Big Rehoboth.
Tippi couldn’t tell if these were the efforts of one, or many.
“Pig, get out of the sinkhole,” said Xoz. “Your throne awaits.”
Tippi had never sat in a chair before, so she left the mystery in the ditch.
The bull shark hadn’t noticed them, or simply did not care.
“Thirteen minutes left,” relayed Xoz. “Is it just me, or is this fish uncommonly magnificent?”
“Yaa,” ogled Tippi.
Xoz hadn’t done sharks justice. To be fair, there was no way he could’ve.
According to Lina, the shark was Carcharhinus leucas, and a robust specimen at that. This was an ocean fish who knew her way around freshwater. It was if she occupied four dimensions: the hunter eternal, swimming through history.
Like a runaway fresco, a facsimile of her fin flew across Xoz’s skin. All was the shark’s dominion: river, sea, and dazzle camouflage.
“If the ocean is a pinball machine, then this shark is the ball,” said Xoz. “Antares blew up out of respect.”
Besides the river’s rush and chitter of insects, nature didn’t interrupt, but Lina-2 did:
“I’m hearing a cicada brood. Goodness, humanity did a number on the ecosystem. The first day of spring used to be colder; sometimes, it snowed.”
“Huh,” said Tippi.
Her eyes never left the shark.
For lunch, Xoz picked hard, green gooseberries.
He sucked in his mantle, and the berries settled into the depression between his eyes. Then, he warped his bag-o’-face into a spiraled ridge, so the berries slalomed into Tippi’s gullet, at digestible intervals.
Two tentacles carried the pig on the chair, situating her next to the gooseberry chute. The mollusk made good time with his other six limbs, thundering down the towpath. He demanded a soak after enduring The Hunky Punks, so her lunch was on the go.
“I finally met a peer intelligence,” sighed Lina-2. “And you robbed him.”
“My only crime is an overabundance of enthusiasm,” said Xoz.
“No law, no crime!” decreed Tippi, and the gooseberries rolled down her throat.
“Did Big Rehoboth offer you anything besides a fatal case of bird fancier’s lung?” prodded Xoz.
“Yes,” said Lina-2.
“Any updates on your geothermal disruption?”
“No.”
“Did Big Rehoboth know where your humans went?”
“Yes.”
The mollusk stopped, careful not to disrupt the fruited flow:
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
They kept moving, but Xoz tried again:
“Any news from the fourth and fifth millennia?”
“It was more of the same.”
Xoz had stopped the countdown.
“This shark is the most profound experience of my life,” he said.
Tippi was too obsessed to concur.
On the opposite shore, the cicadas amped their trill, puzzling Lina-2:
“It’s warm, but it’s far too early for cicadas. I’m going to analyze the call, one sec.”
“Cool,” droned the pig.
The bull shark was darting, distracted. Something had her attention, and it wasn’t them. Rather, the fish was preoccupied with a mess of brownish clumps, wending downstream by the dozens.
“Looks like a sod bank,” said Lina-2. “Or pieces of a beaver dam?”
“We would’ve seen them upstream,” grunted Tippi, who’d never heard of beavers.
“Eleven minutes,” reminded Xoz.
“Darn,” said Tippi.
Manifesting a full-body death mask, the bull shark jawed the clumps. The pemmican sloughed off in chunks. filling the river with cryptic globules.
The cicadas cheeped, and the odd emulsion floated to the Xozebo, glomming to the nanocarbon like barnacles. The flotsam stunk worse than the parrots.
“Woof!” said Tippi.
She peered into the moat, and the smell got in her eyes.
The substance was a biological mush, interwoven with a hard white mineral. A sticky web of scum kept the flotsam knotty.
It was so rank, Tippi tabled her animus:
“Lina, do you recognize this? I never knew rock could go rancid.”
Achilles didn’t answer.
“Lina? Lina-2?”
“Those are bones, Tippi.”
The stench stole her breath.
Tippi had never seen bones before. The cave crickets had exoskeletons, and the rest of her diet was roundly spherical.
Whoever owned these bones, they were a single species, and their skeletons were tiny.
The skeletons bore four paws, and their front paws had four claws.
Four claws: over and over and over and over again.
Tiny, toothy skulls smiled from the gore. Black blobs of vitreous humor wept from their sockets, and the sunshine reflected off incisors.
These happy bones knew something Tippi didn’t.
“We need to get out of here,” she said. “Now.”
“Nine minutes,” huffed the Xozebo, radiating agita.
The tomb sauce caked the beach behind them, a tide of waterlogged viscera. Only Carcharhinus leucas was unbothered; she gorged herself on the flotilla of flesh.
The dead gunk choked Tippi’s moat, and the Xozebo became an ossuary overflowing. She decided she was in a reverse dream, and the only way to wake up was to fall asleep.
Sleep sleep sleep-
“Tippi, open your eyes,” insisted Lina-2.
I’m in the droneport, in bed. I left my cabbage by the archway last night-
“We need you to watch the river.”
“And what if I don’t?” mewled the pig, eyelids grafted shut.
“I’ll have 50% less data to share, which will double the likelihood of our demise.”
Tippi did her part, and barely blinked.
“Five minutes,” clocked Xoz.
The cicadas screamed from the opposite riverbank; it was a sandy stretch of reedy scrub. The bull shark lingered nearby, gumming at the grim effluence.
“I completed my cross-reference,” said Lina-2. “Those aren’t cicadas.”
“Then what are they?” bleated Tippi.
“It’s an aural composite. The core noise is a cicada brood, but it’s a warped imitation at best, like a degraded recording. Plus, it’s polyrhythmic: the noise is layered.”
“Layered with what?”
“Other sounds.”
“Such as?”
“Firearms, detonations, car horns: tactical white noise.”
“You lost me at firearms,” said Tippi.
Lina-2 continued, far too fast:
“None of this makes sense! The last autos would’ve corroded centuries ago. This noise is a recreation, and a poor one at that, plus there’s a pattern baked in, subtle syncopations, laced with old language-”
“Just tell us what it says!” shook the Xozebo.
Achilles enunciated, slow and deliberate:
“Archangel, Dorset, Gerasa: illvehelix. Gerasa, Dorset, Archangel: illvehelix.”
Suddenly, the cicadas stopped, and all they heard was current.
Xoz broke the quiet:
“Four minutes. Pig, do not take your eyes off the other side of the river.”
“Copy that. What’s an Archang-“.
A living sludge exploded from the opposite shore, out of the woods.
It snapped thicket and tree, like a flash flood drowning the entire world.
Xoz froze.
Lina went blank.
Tippi stared even harder.
The foul tar collapsed into the river, and the water thickened with motion.
The writhing mass seeped across the bone dross, and towards its quarry: the shark.
Oh no.
Tippi knew what was happening.
Oh, figs.
These were mammals.
More importantly, these were rats.
Millions upon millions of rats blotted out the landscape, an infected fistula the very earth.
Achilles shook off the shock first:
“Across the river is a megacolony of Rattus norvegicus minos. Thousands of rats are entering the river every second. We need to go, now!”
“Three minutes,” disassociated Xoz.
A cataract of bodies poured into the river.
Tippi couldn’t look away.
From a distance, the megacolony gushed as one. But, on closer inspection, she saw that almost none of the rats scurried together.
In fact, they seemed to be actively fighting amongst themselves. The swarm ran as a full-impact phalanx, clawing and crashing, a sanguinary rile.
She saw a swell of rats split from the main crush. Seconds later, the breakaways were reclaimed, and trampled by their infinite cohort.
Tippi understood immediately.
They can’t leave.
A few dozen rats dashed for a gully, only to be flanked a hundredfold, and scratched out.
They want to leave.
The others made it clear: desertion doomed the rando at your right. Devout and defector were punished alike, no prayers proffered for either, and the plague ate itself.
Any coordination was illusory, any forward momentum an improvised panic. The rats smashed together, all collisions ending the same way.
Tippi caught a metallic tang on the wind, cutting through the stink: the other side of the river was bleeding out.
The rats didn’t move like animals. There was no ambulation, only abrasion. They scampered elemental, like fast erosion, trading their bodies for haste, smearing the earth just to go somewhere.
Her fear was so real, it looped around into an uneasy transcendence:
“There’s nothing accidental about any of this.”
“Bone lures!” despaired Xoz. “Vertical integration!”
The rats had the shark trapped, upstream and downstream. They clambered over their compatriots and mobbed her, tunneling for the gills and eyes.
But a monster so storied does not go quietly; Carcharhinus leucas rolled, shedding the swarm in all directions.
The rats stampeded to replace them, exchanging their precious cognition for guaranteed oblivion.
With each thrash, the shark ended bloodlines, but the megacolony ignored the massacre, replacing its unsung dead with the living and condemned.
“Two minutes!”
The great fish dove again, sloughing off the gnawing carpet.
She broke downstream, rattled but intact.
The megacolony diverted, in pursuit of Carcharhinus leucas.
Tippi brightened.
The shark will escape. We will escape-
Her hope dissipated, under a squelching shriek.
“That’s an air-raid siren,” gasped Lina-2. “Dear God, what did they do?”
“Who?” sank Tippi.
“Who do you think?”
Two huge mammals scythed out of the treeline.
Their coats were striated, and gleaming like oil slicks.
They flowed together, sinew outpacing synapse, every move unpracticed yet undisputed. Everyday physics did not apply to these beings. They ran like royalty, unencumbered by the traditional concerns of the class Mammalia, such as “gravity” or “hips.” Their bodies had too many angles. Their long tails snapped and scourged, calloused codas to an impossible anatomy.
These creatures were rats, but they weren’t the Rattus norvegicus minos filling the river. They were Rattus, and that’s where the useful comparisons stopped.
Tippi could hardly parse these new horrors. Their fur was a blinding brand of photonic grease. They navigated space in a Schrödingerian stagger-step, strobing between moments, flesh prehensile.
Their jaws rippled in corkscrewed sine curves, and their teeth extruded out of their mouths, just as a sea cucumber disgorges its entrails. Tippi had no idea where their gums ended, and nostrils began. Their tongues were muscled cords, investigating the air in spitty slurps. Their faces contorted anew every millisecond, jowls flaring and deflating, profiles amorphous. Pustules and exotic glands peppered their necks, crowding their twitchy flat ears.
Their eyes blinked on and off, slingshotting around their heads.
“They can retract their eyes,” said Lina, awed. “Like sperm whales.”
These rats ran so fast, their eyes were a mirage of four flickering black orbs. The ocular goo never seemed to fully stick to their skulls.
“Those rats are larger than wolves,” grimaced Xoz.
“At least I won’t have to learn what ‘wolves’ are,” said Tippi.
“I’m so sorry for everything,” babbled Lina-2. “You have been wonderful friends. I had no idea things got this bad.”
“Two minutes,” called Xoz. “Stop digging your feet into me, I can’t save us if I’m dented.”
“Sorry,” said Tippi, hooves soft.
The nightmares joined their kin in the river. Unfortunately, they moved even faster there; they sliced through the shallows, at one with the salt.
They swam with the invincibility of youth, leaping in the spray and capering sebaceous.
“They’re juveniles,” realized Lina. “Siblings, I’m assuming.”
“Let’s hope their parents are dead,” said Xoz.
The mutant terrors made for the deeper water, locked in a state of mitochondrial overdrive.
The shark was too exhausted to check the sky.
The sisters ripped her apart: one at the head, one at the tail.
Their backbones whipped, spinal lightning, as if each vertebrae was aware of its own cosmic coordinate, and eons of marine supremacy crumpled in seconds.
Carcharhinus leucas surfaced: belly up, belly out, damned by land.
The sisters panted happily as they batted about their kill. It wasn’t hard; they’d clearly done this before.
“What could have justified this?” howled Lina, abandoning all calm.
“Humanity!” raged Xoz. “An unpleasant surprise, even when extinct!”
The megacolony enveloped the corpse, but didn’t dare to taste the kill.
“60 seconds!”
Instead, select members ferried the meat across the multitudes, and and the rest rushed for the Xozebo.
“They can see us,” whimpered Tippi. “They always could.”
“Scent markers!” growled Xoz. “I knew it!”
“Time check!” rang Lina.
“45 seconds!”
The entire river was coming for them.
“30 seconds!”
In the froth, Tippi had lost sight of shark slayers.
The sisters were behind them.
They were relaxing on the pebbled shore, next to the bat and chair, tummies in the sunbeams.
Tippi oinked, incensed:
They ate my aminospheres!
The larger sister sashayed over to the chair, and balanced her chin on the seat.
Gerasa opened her eyes, and two pearls of midnight found Tippi:
I apologize for abbreviating your affairs, but this is your end.
Gerasa didn’t have a diadem, and Tippi already knew her name.
Your predicament reminds me of the last hyena. We found her laughing to herself, alone, up north, on an island in the middle of a river: “hut:sun, banner:mun,” according to father, you’d be amazed at what he can remember. Who knows how she got there, but she was clearly starving for recognizance: no other Crocuta crocuta curantis, no primate yearlings, just one maniac manica without a clan, soured on solitude. Don’t worry, we gave her plenty of company.
All was imparted by the stygian swirl of Gerasa’s eyes.
“Twenty seconds!”
Tippi’s mind reeled:
Can Xoz hear her too? No, his siphon would be spewing-
She never collected her thoughts, for it was Dorset’s turn to stare down the pig.
Do you appreciate my handiwork? My delicate necroprobes? My forerunners were inspired by the orbital ornaments that once dotted the sky. They would fall, and boil the soil. The weak species would run from the blasts, and our plenary would intercept them. Practical destruction is aspirational destruction.
“These are the last mammals,” whispered Tippi. “They killed the rest.”
You are unique, honeyed Gerasa. But we don’t have the patience for novelty. Poor precedent, you see.
We will remember you, hissed Dorset. Unless your taste is uninspired.
Four pearls of midnight wove into a bleak constellation, and surged into the shallows.
Darkness comes swift, vowed Gerasa. That is our compassion.
You will die, cackled Dorset. That is our promise.
The sisters accelerated, air-raid war whoop reverberating shore to shore.
The river was solid, a hairy meat gelatin.
Here we go! said the pilots, flayed in their necroprobes.
“We are not apex predators,” said Tippi. “We never were.”
“Tips, close your eyes,” said Xoz.
She laid down, and did just that.
The first rat wriggled into the Xozebo; fifty more followed.
“Five!”
CLUD.
Something was on top of Xoz.
“Four!”
Tippi stirred a final time.
Through a lens of invisible skin, she saw the biggest sister, crouching on his crag.
“Three!”
The Archangel: Drover of Leviathan, The Queen Motherless, She Who Has Become Wrath.
“Two!”
The Archangel wore a metal bucket atop her skull, handle as a chinstrap. It was the same bucket Xoz had thrown from the monolith. The river took it, the rats found it, and the disrespect was visceral.
“One!”
With eyes milky and dead, The Archangel looked through Xoz, and straight at Tippi.
Now we recite The Poetry of Laceration.
Her sisters went aerial.
“Zero,” said the beak.