Leviathan

On her third day outside, Tippi saw a shark.

She was in the shallows, waiting for Xoz to filter out his suit. He was contorted into the invisible Xozebo, Cute Pals 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 the ear.

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

“Optical analysis says it’s a bull shark,” said Lina-2. “Looks natural, zero mods. Let’s get out of the water, now.”

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

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

“What?” yelped Tippi.

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

“How long will that take?”

“As of 20 seconds ago, 15 minutes.”

Out of options, they stayed put.

But so did the shark.

 

Back on the skyscraper, Xoz promised Tippi 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.

Xoz rested his arm on Tippi’s neck fuzz, where it remained until sunup.

She slept in while he 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!” said Tippi.

“I will be glad to see you return!” said Big Rehoboth.

Xoz went next.

“Building, you are full of crap, yet I’ve relinquished the urge to bash you into small bits.”

“Thank you?”

“There remains the matter of my appearance fee.”

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

“Oh,” said Big Rehoboth.

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

Down in the mud, the bat kept mum.

The mollusk put the chair on his crag, upside down and backwards.

“Look at me! I’m Henry the Eighth!”

As Xoz reveled in larceny, Tippi strolled the perimeter.

She stopped at the cabinet he’d thrown from the roof.

It had left a crater.

Its impact had loosened the soil, exposing meters of stone, smoothed by wind and rain.

Near the bottom, Tippi saw 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 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 me, or is this shark magnificent?”

“If the sea’s a pinball machine, this shark’s the ball,” agreed Tippi.

“Antares blew up out of respect,” ogled Lina-2.

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.

Humanity did their best to snuff out the bull sharks, but the sharks were older than the trees, and one cannot plot against a creature so ancient. Nothing interrupted her, except the insects and Lina-2, both chittering.

“That’s a cicada brood, in the spring! The first days of spring used to be colder. Sometimes, it snowed.”

“Huh,” said Tippi.

 

For lunch, Xoz picked hard green gooseberries. Lunch was on the go, because he needed a soak.

Xoz let the berries settle between his eyes, and warped his crag into a light spiral, so the gooseberries slalomed to Tippi. Six of his tentacles trundled down the towpath, and two carried her on the chair.

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

“My only crime is an overabundance of enthusiasm. Any updates on your geothermal disruption?”

“No.”

“Figure out where your humans went?”

“Yes.”

Xoz reduced to a saunter, careful not to disrupt the gooseberries.

“Want to talk about it?”

“No,” said Lina-2.

 

“This must be the most satisfying fish I’ve ever met. Oh, and 11 minutes.”

“I’m analyzing that call,” said Lina-2. “Those can’t be cicadas, right?”

“I dunno,” said Tippi.

The bull shark was occupied with large brown clumps, wending downstream by the dozen.

“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 a clump: it broke into chunks, filling the river with a cryptic pemmican.

The emulsion floated over to the Xozebo, glomming to it like barnacles.

Tippi peered into the moat, and the stench stole her breath.

Interwoven in the noisome substance was a white stone.

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

Lina-2 didn’t answer.

“Hello? Achilles?”

“Those are bones, Tippi.”

 

Tippi had never seen bones before. The cave crickets had exoskeletons, and the rest of her diet was a vegetable, or sphere.

Whoever owned these bones was a species with four paws. Their front paws had four claws: over and over and over and over again.

Tiny skulls smiled from the gristle, black blobs of humor weeping from their sockets.

These bones knew something Tippi didn’t.

As the shark gorged on tomb sauce, the viscera choked the Xozebo, transforming her hiding spot 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, she thought.

“Tips, open your eyes. We need you to watch the river.”

“And what if I don’t?”

“We’ll have half the data, which will double our chance of demise.”

Barely blinking, Tippi did her part.

 

“Four minutes,” said Xoz.

The shark gummed the grim effluence. On the opposite bank, the cicadas raged-

“Cross-reference complete!” said Lina-2. “Those, uh, aren’t cicadas.”

“Then what is it?” said Tippi.

“It’s an aural composite: a cicada brood at its core, but a warped imitation, and layered.”

“With?”

“Other sounds.”

“Such as?”

“Firearms, detonations, car horns.”

“You lost me at firearms.”

Lina-2 continued, too fast.

“This doesn’t make sense, the last autos would’ve corroded centuries ago! It’s a recreation of car horns, and a poor one, plus there’s a linguistic pattern baked in-”

“Just tell us what it says!” shook the Xozebo.

“Archangel, Dorset, Gerasa. Archangel, Dorset, Gerasa.”

The cicadas stopped.

“Tips, whatever you do, do not take your eyes off the treeline.”

“Copy that. What’s an Archang-”

Across the river, a living sludge exploded from the woods.

Xoz was silent.

Lina went blank.

Tippi stared even harder.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh no.

The mass shattered the thicket, and collapsed into the water.

Oh foo.

The roiling flesh seeped across the bone dross, towards its quarry: the shark.

OH FIGS.

Tippi knew what was happening.

These were mammals.

More importantly, these were rats.

A cataract of rats thickened the river, and Lina-2 shook off the shock first.

“That is a megacolony of Rattus norvegicus minos, in the millions.”

“Three minutes,” disassociated Xoz.

From a distance, the rats gushed as one, but closer inspection revealed a mob trampling itself. Tippi saw a swell divert from the main swarm: within seconds, they were crushed, and she understood immediately.

They can’t leave.

Dozens made for a gully, only to be scratched out. Devout and deserter were punished alike, no prayers proffered.

They want to leave.

Millions scampered elemental, like fast erosion, smearing the dirt just to go somewhere. All coordination was illusory, all forward momentum an improvised panic.

“Three minutes!”

The rats mobbed the shark, tunneling for her gills and eyes.

Carcharhinus leucas rolled, shedding swarm in all directions, stanching bloodlines with each thrash.

The shark will escape.

The great fish dove again, and broke downstream.

We will escape-

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

Two huge creatures burst from the far forest, sinew outpacing synapses.

They ran, as if unencumbered by gravity, hips, and the usual frustrations of class Mammalia. Their bodies had too many angles, and their long tails snapped and scourged, calloused codas to impossible anatomy.

These weren’t Rattus norvegicus minos.

They were Rattus, and that’s where useful comparisons stopped.

Their fur was a blinding brand of photonic grease. In a Schrödingerian stagger-step, they strobed between moments. Prehensile teeth extruded from their jaws, and their tongues were muscled cords, investigating the air in spitty slurps. Exotic pustules peppered their necks, crowding their flat ears. Their black eyes blinked on and off, the ocular goo never totally sitting on their skulls.

“They can retract their eyes, like sperm whales,” said Lina-2. “They’re larger than wolves-”

“Two minutes!

The nightmare rats joined their kin in the river. They moved faster there, leaping in the spray and capering sebaceous.

In a state of mitochondrial overdrive, they leapt for the shark.

Carcharhinus leucas was too exhausted to check the sky.

The sisters ripped her apart: one at the head, one at the tail, and eons of evolutionary supremacy crumpled in seconds.

 

The shark surfaced, belly up, belly out, and the sisters panted as they batted their kill.

“60 seconds!”

The megacolony ferried the shark across the river, and millions of rats turned to the Xozebo.

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

“Scent markers!” growled Xoz. “45 seconds!”

Leviathan was upon them.

In the froth, Tippi found the sisters: they were on the shore behind her, tummies in a sunbeam.

“30 seconds!”

They’d eaten her aminospheres.

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

I apologize for abbreviating your affairs.

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

Your predicament reminds me of a hyena we met. She was laughing alone, on an island, Father said it was the “skull: kill,” you’d be amazed what he can remember. Who knows how she got there, but she was starved for recognizance. No curantis, no primate yearlings to herd. Just a manica, soured on solitude.

All was imparted in the rat’s stygian gaze.

We gave her company.

“20 seconds!”

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

It was Dorset’s turn.

Did you see my handiwork? My delicate probes? They were inspired by the orbital ornaments of old. They would fail and fall, corralling the weak species for us. 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.

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

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

Their air-raid war cry reverberated, shore to shore.

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

“Tips, close your eyes.”

“No.”

The first rat wriggled into the Xozebo. Fifty more followed.

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

“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 head, handle as a chinstrap.

“One!”

Eyes ashen, the giant rat looked into Tippi.

Now we recite The Poetry of Laceration.

Her sisters went aerial.

“Zero,” said the beak.

 

Outro: Underworld – “Moaner”