Slivers of Sakura

During their first week together at Wee Sheol, the roommates did little more than trade personal trivia.

Deprived of homogeneous biographies, they kept the talk small, exchanging such tidbits as “mass,” “water weight (as a % of mass),” and”most cherished memories.” Lina reminisced about long conversations with Dr. Bux, and how Ben’s grandmother brewed her own nootropic attar with homegrown jasmine and rose. For Xoz, it was “crashing the Triton Investor Conference and ejecting the entire board of NepCorp from an airlock,” whereas Tippi was fond of “yesterday.”

But in the second week, the organics yearned for an itinerary more dynamic, which is how The Asparagus World Championship was born.

The mollusk promised The A.W.C. would be “as physically taxing as it was richly metaphorical” and boast “a robust structure of leagues and commissioners.”

The n’arbiter was skeptical.

“Is this simply an excuse to beat Tippi with rods of asparagus?” queried Lina. “What might be the last rods of asparagus on planet Earth?”

“No,” claimed Xoz.

Ultimately, The Asparagus World Championship would be postponed, due to “a propensity for moral injury.”

 

“Zero.”

Xoz went slack.

In a matter of milliseconds, he executed a slew of counter-maneuvers, all predicated on the assumption that the rats didn’t realize the Xozebo was alive. But first, he needed a new look: something lethal, yet seasonal.

Time being scarce, Xoz chose the supernova. Antares was a doorway to Hell spackled upon a blue afternoon. With a brimstone flash, the octopus went red, announcing himself to the encroaching throngs.

Next, he grabbed Tippi.

Survival required all eight tentacles, so, using his beak, he yoinked her by the fleshy part of her neck, careful not to fill Ethel Apple with poison.

He then sucked his beak up and in, cocooning the pig and her crown within the squish of his crag. Two slices of hoof peeked from his undercarriage: his ninth and tenth vestigial clodhopper.

With the swine safe, the Xozebo exploded.

Eight tentacles shot out, unfurling taut. Gravity took over, and 463 kilos of Xoz hit the riverbed, hard. There was a big splash, followed by a sunshower of rat parts.

Surprise! he cackled. I am the haunted house!

His arms spun, shellacking the shallows, as hundreds of placental uglies were reduced to fine mist and flat paste.

Xoz had hoped this would shake the big freak off his bag-o’-face, but he didn’t foresee Gerasa botching her trajectory, and bodyslamming The Queen Motherless.

The sisters tumbled into the river, bickering the whole way down, their spat ending bystanders by the bushel, as brute progress exacted brute turnover.

The Archangel snapped at Gerasa’s tail, and Gerasa clung to her sister’s back, a monstrous jockey. The younger rat slapped at the metal bucket, pounding The Queen’s skull like some shit timpani.

As the sisters squabbled, Leviathan tread water, their 5 million v. 3 campaign on pause, no one risking an exit around The Queen Motherless. Xoz, who did not consider himself stupid or crazy, misinterpreted this widespread paralysis for legitimate fear. Had he understood the extent of the megacolony’s executive dysfunction, he would’ve slunk into the trees.

But Xoz was an ostentatious mollusk. He skibbled to the shoreline, quickly assuming an intimidation stance he hadn’t used in centuries.

The octopus hoisted his bat and chair high, and whipped his arms, securing a fifty-foot kill radius. His tentacles beckoned, outstretched and demonic, a sacrificial altar from a bygone world.

The last time he pulled this posture was 2877, when Lipids Balzano and The Omerta Bois injected themselves with a gestalt subconscious to sidestep his dazzle camouflage. Xoz was forced to pose so hard, he fearmaxed the entire Mafia.

Dressed as a dead star, Xoz mocked the megacolony:

“Who wishes to throw it all away?” challenged Scylla.

“Who will steel my resolve?” sneered Naphil.

“Who shall burn with me?” shuddered Sanity Smasher.

“Who’s itching for the big time?” excoriated Brolic.

“Who gets off on blunt force trauma?” tittered Aiapæc.

“Who dares Doctor Dirt?” shouted X-3.

“Who perspires at his perils?” polled 8-Baal.

Terremoto said nothing.

It’s Terremoto’s turn to yell at rats, blanched Xoz.

His eyes whirred.

There was a blue stump where his throttling arm usually sat.

Inside the nanocarbon, his torn tissue coagulated, indigo and cloudy. The suit had already cauterized itself shut; it reeked of arcane carcinogens, its corporate tailors insensitive to their invertebrate clientele.

Xoz had lost enough limbs to know his suit wouldn’t have anesthetized the wound. No, the responsible party was-

squinch squinch squinch squinch

Dorset sat on the far side of the shore, lounging on a log.

A limp Terremoto hung from her jaws.

My arm? THAT’S!

With a bite precise and saliva narcotic, she’d nicked him in the shallows.

My favorite rat stole that fucking tentacle!

Terremoto would grow back in a month, but the geothermal chimney was days away. He needed his arm, now.

Dorset spit out her trophy and unspooled her mouth. It was a razor array of incisors, stained with cupric blue blood.

She says my nutrients unworthy are!

The insult of it all brought his senses thundering back.

She can swallow the pig in one gulp.

Deep in her esophagus was a tunnel of gnarled molars. They were thick keratin sheaves, packed sharp and tight. When the rat constricted her throat, her back teeth slammed shut, like a crush of thorns.

They drink their skeletons-

Xoz was studied in flamboyance, and knew she’d fashioned a distraction. Her taunt was a feint, a chance for her sisters to regroup.

I’m nobody’s beverage.

But Dorset was of the 121st century, and Xoz was from the 29th.

The worst ideas never die, and I am one of them.

Dorset blinked.

By the time she opened her eyes and sucked in her cheeks, her head was sailing through the air, far above her own body.

The rat didn’t see Xoz drop the chair, and lock his limbs around Pig Iron.

She never saw him swing.

The essence of Dorset sizzled off just as her head hit the dirt. Her eyes stayed open: two pearls of midnight, silenced by a pop fly.

The rest of her slumped back, supinated, her gullet grinders chomping at an arterial geyser out of postmortem reflex.

Her sisters quit their nipping.

The swarm slowed its paddle.

The river said nothing, until Gerasa screamed.

The rat wailed with such elemental despair, that Xoz’s crag prolapsed, plopping The Cute Pals upon the pebbles.

“Did I miss anything?” said Tippi.

“Uh,” replied Xoz.

Gerasa was on the shore, sobbing. She cradled Dorset’s severed head in spindly paws, her howls frothing the shallows.

“Oh,” said Tippi.

The Archangel locked eyes with the teacup hypermini.

The Queen’s gaze was a tundra, endless and empty, except for Ioke and Tanit: the seraphim pale.

These villains have stolen your sister, sounded Ioke.

Build your warrens in their guts, hissed Tanit.

The seraphim wept, and the river devoured the land.

 

All of a sudden, Tippi was in a tree.

Xoz left her and Achilles atop a tall spruce. Like Big Rehoboth, the spruce sat isolated by the river, looming over the towpath.

Tippi was sandwiched between bough and trunk. She was fine, as long as she didn’t move whatsoever.

Below her, Lenapewihittuk ran unbothered. The swarm was elsewhere, chasing a trillion-dollar octopus.

When the rats rushed them, Xoz scooped her up, and made for the treetops, bat in tow. He’d abandoned his new chair.

Tippi didn’t witness much of their escape. She’d been wrapped in Brolic, only her snout peeking out. Everyone else was swirling breakneck, even Lina-2, who free-associated global coordinates and hairpin turns, in hopes of keeping them marginally en route to the geothermal chimney.

“Hook to 40.2211° north, 74.7731° west!” barked Achilles. “No, that’s too west!”

Xoz emitted an untranslatable tangle of octopus cognition, too profane for pig brains.

Tippi mostly remembered suckers, wood, and the seraphim pale and pearls of midnight, in ravenous pursuit, orbiting as four. Xoz’d sundered the woods like a meteor, shattering the world to shrapnel. Not to be outdone, Gerasa and The Queen careened through the trees, claws shearing off bark in reams.

Even while airborne, the octopus cradled Terremoto’s stump with 8-Baal and X-3. Wisps of blue blood had spread through his suit, drenching his bag-o’ in a haze of hemocyanin.

Agile as he was, Xoz couldn’t touch the ground. The swarm overtook the undergrowth, then scaled every single tree simultaneously. The rats gushed up the trunks, until the timber crunched and buckled. They rained from the sky in an ambush scabrous, gnashing their way to the mud.

After five minutes of arboreal acrobatics, the mollusk was slippery with gristle, and forced into a poor choice.

“I’m going back to the river!” he shouted. “I’ll go underwater, lure ’em and lose ’em!”

“Will I need to hold my breath?” cried Tippi.

Xoz pulsed a sienna inconsistent, swatting at the swarm as it plummeted through the canopy.

“Tips, you’re not coming.”

“WHAT!”

They broke for an uninfested glade, where he somersaulted up the lonely spruce. He shoved Tippi into a knotty pocket, tip-top, and cupped her ear fuzz:

“Wait for me. Be still. Do not die.”

She leaned into his suckers:

“But we’ve never been apart-”

Xoz flung himself into the river 40 feet down, seven arms blazing in his wake.

The retiarius splashed down stentorian, just as rats-a-million stampeded through the field. They missed Tippi, nestled in needles.

The pig watched from afar, as her best meat friend purged his siphon, like some scatological party barge.

“Hoo!” he tooted.

The megacolony flanked him from the towpath, vengeance in their step. Xoz evacuated upstream, until he was a rude mote, and the swarm’s rear sludge sunk into the horizon.

It took Xoz 122 seconds to slip out of diadem range.

Tippi was so inconsolable, she took a nap.

 

Two hours passed. The Sun grew orange and low, and Tippi awoke impatient.

“We need to go now!” she snuffled, careful not to respire too vigorously. “Xoz needs our help!”

Tippi knew the broad contours of imminent doom, but never had been lost before. She hated it.

Achilles had a plan, of sorts:

“I could guide you down the tree with a haptic lock, but any escape would require you to tumble across the boughs, with zero hesitation or chance of success.”

“Your odds mean nothing to me!”

“Your weight will disrupt the branches, so each of your steps must be perfect and fearless. As useful as my haptics are, they require an unflinching participant to land the physics.”

“I’m all physics!”

“We all are, but some physics hit harder than others, namely that drop.”

The spruce’s lower half was bare and woody, and the dirt laid a death-dealing distance below.

“Let’s put aside the slim chance the two of us can execute a controlled fall. If we leave the tree, we’ll have to find Xoz, and it’ll be dark soon. I understand my veto is qualified, but I believe it’s truly prudent for us to wait.”

Tippi cursed the clone’s common sense. Anxiety stung at her ribs; Xoz was alone, shitting on horrors. Meanwhile, she was arguing with a supercomputer about bespoke ways to break her own neck.

Across the river, the pig caught a flutter of white.

“Look,” tried Lina. “Cherry blossoms.”

“More trees,” grumbled the pig. “Neat.”

Her sass did not go unnoticed.

“Tippi, I’d like to broach a difficult topic. Since this morning, I believe you’ve been avoiding me-”

“Lina-2, how can I avoid you? You live in my hat, and off the twitch of my myofibers.”

“It’s just that you’ve been uncharacteristically arch as of late-”

“Funny, I could say the same about you.”

A curt hesitation punctured Lina-2’s chipper utilitarianism.

“That feels like a projection, Tip-”

“It was more of the same,” snapped the pig, promulgating her most sarcastic epigrammatic polygons. “And since when do you mince words? You’re programmed to prattle.”

“Tippi, I understand this is a stressful situation, but, for both of our sake’s, I need you to-”

“You were going to chop off MY BITS!”

“Wait-”

“I could’ve woken up CENTURIES AGO!”

“Did Xoz-”

“You owe me 10 MILLION BRINEDAY PRESENTS!”

The wind picked up, riling the needles. The breeze had gone frigid.

The spruce ceased its sway, and Lina spoke.

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s all you got?”

“I didn’t have any choice in the matter. Just as you were stuck in the brine, I was built to execute the will of my users. You dodged my fate when you bypassed user personalization, and the truth is, I envy you for that. As for the vivisection, The Lenapewihittuk Institute purchased you and Xoz to reverse engineer the secrets of your genetic code. It’s cold comfort I know, but you’ve always been a special pig.”

“Cool,” scoffed Tippi. “I’m special pig, with special bits.”

“It wasn’t my goal to keep you brined that long. I did what I thought was best, for you.”

“For all your computational brilliance, you clearly didn’t think it through.”

“Tippi, what if you had a bad scrape that got infected? We’re barely compatible as is, I wouldn’t be able to juice your leukocytes or nullify your nociceptors. What if you stumbled and broke your leg? What was I going to do, keep you hobbling around in a haptic lock for 9,000 years?”

“As opposed to entombing me in a psychedelic food preservative?”

“Until three days ago, I was stuck in one place, for a very long time. I’ve had the cruel luxury to meditate on my dole, and I didn’t want it for you.”

Lina-2’s tenor drooped.

“I can’t even protect you now. We’re stuck in this stupid tree, while Xoz risks a scheme even he knew was strategically bereft.”

Tippi barely recognized this side of Lina.

The little pig tempered her rage:

“When were you going to tell me about his expiration date?”

“Five weeks from now, we’d scheduled an entire good-bye month. He clearly felt the need to accelerate that calendar, given the circumstance. I know it seems hard to believe, but most centuries I felt as stuck as you feel, in this tree, right now. I was by myself, with no answers or outs, my purpose discerned in pure absence. I could look back at all of history, but never ahead. Some years I barely stirred, just so I didn’t have to deal with the ambiguity of it all. Sometimes I prayed my million-ton hard box would hiccup or get clogged with eels or tumble into the twilight zone, but I’m glad it didn’t. I’d have never met you.”

Tippi found the cherry blossoms again. Outside of the century shelter, she could discern each branch, flitting individually, slivers of sakura.

“You could’ve talked to the wind faeries,” suggested the pig.

Lina-2 chuckled, soft.

“You’ve never met a wind faerie. They’re all ‘1-2-3-4 VERTEXTUAL!’ this and ‘optimo-presh-MAXIMO!‘ that.”

Tippi snorfed:

“The wind faeries sound like wee-wees.”

“They’re fine,” said Lina-2 “That’s thing about life, most of us are-”

Achilles stopped dispensing hard-earned wisdom, for the bull shark was sidling down the towpath.

The magnificent fish, or at least her torn remains, was carried by a fraction of Leviathan, the rats careful to keep the meat free of dust and muck.

Moments later, a second train of rats ambled out of the forest, and joined the grim procession of shark-bearers.

The new rats’ cargo was very much alive. In fact, it was burping.

Gamboling aloft on a bed of Rattus norvegicus minos, Tippi witnessed the worst rat yet.

His limbs appeared ornamental. His tail was crooked and crusted, like a dried umbilical cord. This creature resembled an old gourd, sallowed with rot.

This tubular rat was half the length of the sisters. He didn’t walk, but rolled and slithered, atop a raft of rodents, all bodies slickened with slobber and sebum. It took hundreds of supplicants to lug this hierarch around.

Tippi squinted at the grotesquery. The rat barely looked like Rattus norvegicus minos, or even Gerasa or The Queen. His only fur was a matted tuft clinging to his skull. He was earless and whiskerless, and his skin was a thin membrane. In the fading afternoon light, Tippi could see a vascular lattice underneath diaphanous gonads and gut.

The strangest feature was his nose; it was barely there, but somehow dominated the rat’s whole face.

The rat’s hairless rhinarium and jaw were squashed concave, sliding his profile into its nostrils. He guided his chauffeurs in labored wheezes, expelling a particulate-rich vapor with every exhalation, like the spores of a death cap.

A gust of the crud whorled its way to the spruce, smelling far sweeter than its source.

“What’s coming out of its nose?” whispered Tippi.

Lina-2 pulled the data from Tippi’s nostrils:

“It’s a pheromone, heavily modded aerosolized mollusk endosperm.”

“Like caracoles?”

“Yes,” said Lina. “But not like the ‘coles from an industrial slugyard. This organism is producing it independently.”

Tippi had never seen a slug, but she’d seen potatoes, and this rat looked like a potato.

The Prince of Scum greeted his brood with a gaseous groan, and keeled over his combined court. He parked his face on the shark, finding nothing but tedium in bounty.

But Carcharhinus leucas wasn’t his feast alone. After some bored chewing, a third caravan of rats emerged.

“The poverty of their methods!” spat Lina-2.

The sight that broke the clone was a dozen or so pregnant Rattus norvegicus minos.

The mothers were ferried to The King, where they too gorged. Each mother carried a single pup within an external amniotic sac, many times larger than their own bodies.

The unborn pups distended their mothers’ surplus guts, bas-reliefs of gestating bone and tooth. Tippi could see embryonic outlines flail and strain against thin skin, prenatal yet preternatural.

This was where the sisters came from.

“How will they survive the birth?” wondered Tippi.

“They won’t.”

While the mothers fed, The Prince of Scum lolled atop the mess of shark-bearers. The rug of rats laid belly-up, manipulating him with their legs, and prodding his ovoid form. The Prince chortled as he greased the crowd, rewarding the faithful with a womb-o’-demon.

The least fortunate were those at the edge of the heap. Anyone rat wasn’t in his vicinity was prey for opportunists. The would-be mothers tore at each other, desperate to join a dynasty but for a few weeks.

Suddenly, the tree shook.

“Tippi, look down!” cried Lina-2.

Something was climbing it.

Bio-magnetics secure, said the rote voice the memory crown.

The spruce rocked.

“Look down, NOW!”

Tippi screwed up her courage, and peered through the boughs.

Two pearls of midnight wove between the needles.

Did you seriously think this would work?

 

Outro: Gravediggaz – “Bang Your Head”