Leviathan

On her third day outside, Tippi saw a shark.

She was in the shallows, waiting for Xoz to filter out his suit. Like the first day, he’d contorted into the invisible Xozebo, Tippi and Lina-2 hidden inside. They were an hour south of Big Rehoboth, belongings by the riverside. The sky was a solid blue, save the supernova’s claim.

Tippi was napping when the beak awoke her.

CLACK, said the mollusk alarm, right in her ear.

Behind clarion tentacles, she saw a fin, cleaving the water.

“Optical analysis says it’s a bull shark,” said Lina-2.

Tippi remembered the sharks from apex predators. Xoz had focused his lesson on the cookiecutter, at the expense of the megalodon.

“Looks natural, zero mods,” continued Achilles. “We need to go: now.”

“My suit is stuck in self-cleaning mode,” mumbled Xoz.

“What?” yelped Tippi.

“It’s vintage! I need to fire off a hard reboot before I can move!”

“How long will that take?”

“15 minutes,” said Xoz.

“Then we will stay unseen for 15 minutes,” said Lina-2.

Out of options, they stayed put.

But so did the shark.

 

The night prior, Tippi made Xoz promise he wouldn’t eat her, at least for the next nine weeks.

“What will I do without you?” she sobbed.

“What are we doing tomorrow?” he said.

He rested a tentacle on her neck fuzz, where it remained until sunup.

Tippi slept in, and Xoz retrieved Lina-2 from the data dock. After gamboling down the monolith, they said good-bye to it.

“We’ll be back this way in a few days,” said Tippi. “I imagine we’ll have a story to share.”

“I’ll await your return!” said Big Rehoboth.

Xoz went next.

“Building, you are full of shit, yet I’ve relinquished the urge to beat you to death.”

“Thank you?” said Big Rehoboth.

“There remains the small matter of my appearance fee.”

Xoz motioned to the meadow, where busted bric-a-brac littered the terrain: only the chair had survived his field testing.

“Oh,” said the monolith.

“Quality metallurgy,” said Xoz, holding the chair. “No offense, bat.”

Down in the mud, the bat kept mum.

Xoz plopped the chair on his crag, upside down and backwards.

“Look at me! I’m Henry the Eighth!”

“Huh?” said Big Rehoboth.

As Xoz reveled in larceny, Tippi strolled the perimeter, stopping at a cabinet he’d thrown from the monolith.

The cabinet had left a crater. Its impact had loosened the soil, exposing meters of stone, smoothed by wind and rain. Near the bottom, Tippi saw something she couldn’t explain.

They were carvings, scarring the monolith in a solid band.

They resembled nothing inside Big Rehoboth, or Wee Sheol. Tippi found those carvings esoteric, but recognized a virtuosity to every dot, loop, and dash.

These new carvings, though, were chaos. They crosshatched the stone, in four: over and over and over and over again.

“Tips, get out of the ditch. Your throne awaits.”

Tippi had never sat in a chair before, so she left the mystery in the hole.

 

“13 minutes,” said Xoz. “Is it just me, or is this shark magnificent?”

“Yaa,” ogled Tippi.

According to Lina, the shark was Carcharhinus leucas, an ocean fish who knew freshwater. Her fin flew across the Xozebo like a runaway fresco: a hunter eternal, swimming through history.

“If the sea is a pinball machine,” said Tippi. “Then this shark is the ball.”

“Antares clearly blew up out of respect,” said Xoz.

Humanity did their best to snuff the sharks, but the sharks were older than the trees, and one cannot plot against a fish so ancient.

Nature didn’t dare interrupt the shark, outside of the insects’ chitter, and Lina-2.

“I’m hearing a cicada brood,” said Achilles. “Goodness, they did a number on the ecosystem. The first days of spring used to be colder. Sometimes, it snowed.”

“Is that so?” said Tippi, eyes locked on the shark.

 

For lunch, Xoz picked hard green gooseberries.

He sucked in his mantle, letting the berries settle between his eyes. Then, he warped his flesh into a spiraled ridge, so the fruit slalomed down his crag, and into Tippi’s gullet.

Two tentacles carried her on the chair, next to the gooseberry chute, and his other six limbs trundled down the towpath. The mollusk demanded a soak after The Hunky Punks, so lunch was on the go.

“I finally met a peer intelligence,” said Lina-2. “And you robbed them.”

“My only crime is an overabundance of enthusiasm.”

“No laws, no crime!” said Tippi, between gooseberries.

“Did you get anything interesting?” prodded Xoz. “Besides bird fancier’s lung, that is.”

“Yes,” said Lina-2.

“Any updates on your geothermal disruption?”

“No.”

“Did you figure out where your humans went?”

“Yes.”

Xoz reduced to a saunter, careful not to disrupt the flow of fruit.

“Want to talk about it?”

“No,” said Lina-2.

 

“11 minutes,” said Xoz. “This shark may be the most profound experience of my life.”

On the opposite shore, the cicadas amped their trill.

“It’s warm, but too early for cicadas,” puzzled Lina-2. “I’m going to analyze their call.”

“You do you,” said Tippi.

The bull shark was darting distracted. She was preoccupied with large, brown clumps, wending downstream by the dozens.

“That looks like sod,” said Lina-2. “Or a beaver dam?”

“We would’ve seen them upstream,” said Tippi, who’d never heard of beavers.

Manifesting a full-body death mask, the shark jawed the clumps.

The clumps scattered in chunks, filling the river with a cryptic pemmican. The odd emulsion floated over, glomming to the Xozebo like barnacles.

It stunk worse than the parrots.

Tippi peered into the moat, and the smell got in her eyes: the noisome substance was interwoven with a hard white stone.

“What mineral is this? I never knew rocks went rancid.”

Lina-2 didn’t answer.

“Hello? Achilles?”

“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: over and over and over and over again.

Tiny, toothy skulls smiled from the gristle. 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 viscera caked the shore behind them, as Carcharhinus leucas gorged herself on the flotilla of flesh. The dead gunk choked the Xozebo, transforming their hiding place into an ossuary overflowing.

Tippi 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,” said Lina-2.

I’m in bed. I left my cabbage by the arch last night-

“We need you to watch the river.”

“And what if I don’t?” said Tippi, eyelids grafted shut.

“I’ll have 50% less data, which will double the likelihood of our demise.”

The teacup hypermini did her part, and barely blinked.

 

“Five minutes,” said Xoz.

The cicadas screamed from the opposite riverbank, 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. Its core is a cicada brood, but it’s a warped imitation at best, like a degraded recording. Plus, it’s layered.”

“Layered with what?”

“Other sounds.”

“Such as?”

“Firearms, detonations, car horns.”

“Tactical white noise,” said Xoz.

“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.”

The cicadas stopped.

All anyone heard was the current.

“Four minutes,” said Xoz. “Tips, whatever you do, do not take your eyes off the river.”

“Copy that. What’s an Archang-”

Across the river, a living sludge exploded out of the woods, snapping thicket and branch, like a flash flood drowning the world.

Xoz froze.

Lina went blank.

Tippi looked 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 of rats blotted out the far shore, an infected fistula on the very earth.

Lina-2 was the first to shake off the shock.

“That 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. From a distance, the megacolony gushed as one. But, on closer inspection, Tippi 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 and scratched out, a hundred times over.

They want to leave.

The others made it clear: desertion doomed the rat at your right. Devout and defector were punished alike, no prayers proffered for either. Any coordination was illusory, any forward momentum was an improvised panic. The mammals 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 scampered elemental, like fast erosion, trading their bodies for haste, smearing the dirt just to go somewhere.

Her fear was so real, it looped around into transcendence.

“There’s nothing accidental about any of this,” she said.

“Bone lures!” shouted Xoz. “Vertical integration!”

The rats had the shark trapped. They clambered over their compatriots and mobbed the fish, tunneling for her gills and eyes, but a monster so storied does not go quietly.

Carcharhinus leucas rolled, shedding the swarm in all directions. With each thrash, the shark ended bloodlines, but the megacolony replaced its unsung dead with the living condemned, who exchanged their cognition for guaranteed oblivion.

“Two minutes!”

The great fish dove again, and broke downstream. The megacolony diverted, in pursuit.

Tippi brightened.

The shark will escape. We will escape-

An unholy shriek squelched her hope.

“That’s an air-raid siren,” gasped Lina-2. “Oh God, what did they do?”

“Who?” sank Tippi.

“Who do you think?” said Xoz.

Suddenly, two huge creatures burst from the opposite bank.

They flowed together, sinew outpacing synapses. Everyday physics did not apply to these beings. They ran, unencumbered by the usual frustrations of class Mammalia, such as “gravity” or “hips.” Their bodies had too many angles, and 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 as a sea cucumber disgorges its entrails. She 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. 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 Achilles, awed. “Like sperm whales.”

These rats ran so fast, their eyes became a mirage of four flickering black orbs, the ocular goo never fully sticking 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 two nightmares joined their kin in the river. Unfortunately, they moved even faster there.

They sliced through the shallows, at one with the salt, swimming 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 massive rats 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 evolutionary supremacy crumpled in seconds.

The bull shark surfaced: belly up, belly out.

The sisters panted happily as they batted about their kill: clearly, they’d done this before.

“What could have justified this?” howled Lina-2, abandoning all calm.

The megacolony enveloped the corpse, but didn’t dare lap its blood.

“60 seconds!”

As the shark meat was ferried across the river, the millions turned to the Xozebo.

“They can see us,” whimpered Tippi. “They always could.”

“Scent markers!” growled Xoz.

“Time check!” rang Lina-2.

“45 seconds!”

The entire river came at them.

“30 seconds!”

In the froth, Tippi found the big rats: they were behind her.

The Ratti were on the pebbly shore, next to the bat and chair, tummies in the sunbeams.

“They ate my aminospheres!” she cried.

The larger sister sashayed over to Xoz’s new chair, and balanced her chin on the seat.

Gerasa opened her eyes, and two pearls of midnight impaled Tippi.

I apologize for abbreviating your affairs.

Gerasa didn’t have a diadem: Tippi knew her name.

Your predicament reminds me of a hyena we saw. We found her west, laughing to herself alone, on an island in the middle of a river. “skull: kill,” said 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 curantis nearby, no primate yearlings to herd. Just a manica, soured on solitude. We gave her the company she desired.

All was imparted by the rat’s stygian stare.

“20 seconds!”

Can Xoz hear her too? No, his siphon would be spewing-

Tippi never collected her thoughts, for it was Dorset’s turn.

Did you see my handiwork? My delicate necroprobes? They were inspired by the sky, the orbital ornaments of old. They would fail and fall, boiling the soil. The blasts startled the weaker species, who we’d intercept. Practical destruction is aspirational destruction.

“These are the last mammals,” whispered Tippi. “They killed the rest.”

You are unique, said Gerasa. But we don’t have the patience for novelty.

We will remember you, said Dorset. Unless your taste is uninspired.

Four pearls of midnight locked into a bleak constellation, surging for the shallows.

Darkness comes swift, said Gerasa. That is our compassion.

You will die, added Dorset. That is our promise.

The sisters’ air-raid war cry reverberated, shore to shore.

“We are not apex predators,” said Tippi. “We never were.”

“Tips, close your eyes.”

“No,” she said.

The first rat wriggled into the Xozebo, and fifty more followed.

Here we go! said the pilots, from their necroprobes.

“Five!”

CLUD

Something was on top of Xoz.

“Four!”

Through invisible skin, Tippi saw the biggest sister.

“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.

“One!”

Eyes bulbous and milky, The Archangel looked straight into Tippi.

Now we recite The Poetry of Laceration.

Her sisters went aerial.

“Zero,” said the beak.

 

Outro: Underworld – “Moaner”