Chapter 22
Go Max Mean
Swaying side to side, Xoz clung to the skinny evergreen. He clasped it at the tip-top, by the terminal bud, his body pinched into a raindrop reversed. The woods screamed all around him, as millions of rats engulfed the forest. The swarm squirmed up his fir, a quadruped ichor dripping skyward. The stench of the necroprobes had nullified his invisibility, so the octopus wore his most condescending tangerine.
Ein grimmiger Tannenbaum! he grumbled.
When Xoz escaped to the woods, the chase devolved into a siege. Upon realizing a direct attack earned a kiss from Pig Iron, the rats committed to a grisly routine. They’d follow him up a tree and topple it under their weight, in hopes of dislodging Xoz and dogpiling him dead. But the mollusk was spry; whenever a trunk buckled, he’d hop one tree over. Their danse macabre went on until dusk, until he’d been corralled into the flimsy fir.
Xoz was queasy with worry. He planned to grab The Cute Pals the second he ditched the rats, but the swarm was dogged, even without those two wolfy fucks. He couldn’t even blow up the azide detonator stapled to his heart, as Tippi required him to abscond from her tree.
From the droopy canopy, Xoz saw the constellations unfurl over old Lenapehoking. This was the closest he’d get to the stars again.
Mass murder was so much simpler up there, he sighed.
Xoz had survived eight trips to space, all at the behest of his sapiens benefactors. Because of the brine, each spacewalk was years apart, and ranged from 12.82 minutes to 42.7 days.
Good-bye, Cassiopeia. We had fun, didn’t we?
Xoz had so many stories, and most of them ended with a gaggle of Cosa Nuova Starbois shouting crude remarks from an airlock. He felt a twinge at Terremoto’s stump. According to the timer in his mind’s eye, that decapitated rat shaved another two weeks off his life.
The octopus reflected on his expiration date. Planning for his good-bye month began just after the winter solstice. While Tippi slept, The Boneless Pals conspired to secure her future. Their scheme was such: Xoz would die, Lina and Tippi would spend a few millennia together, and the n’arbiter would teach the pig how to build a rock sled out of bicycle parts and vegetable glue. Once Lina’s pneumatics farted out, the pig would drag her sled through the solar shade and escape the century shelter. She would scream down the mountainside, towards fortune fantastic.
Xoz had no idea how the pig would steer the rock sled; that was Lina’s job. But the mollusk had done his best to teach her everything he knew, even if the Mafia was long extinct. In any case, the plan went to pot three days earlier, and now he was bashing thousands of rats with his bat.
Normally, Xoz would revel in a scrap of this magnitude. He’d bashed many in his travels, from asteroid-field claim jumpers to security bots to solar krakens, but it was no fun bashing the rats. The swarm was a furry slurry, animated by misery and obligation, and pounding them felt churlish.
The male specimens were the saddest; they were encumbered with fat, rat balls. The males expended so much effort lugging their testicles up the tree, only to be flicked aside by Pig Iron, who’d pop their sex like salmon roe.
External genitalia! fulminated Xoz. A fool’s design!
The octopus did an inventory; he had Pig Iron, but lost his chair. Within his folds of flesh were the diamond-tip trigger (too slow, weeks away) and the psychoactive turnip. His suit kept the brine at bay, and he hadn’t told Tippi he’d brought the turnip. It was irresponsible to leave it in Wee Sheol, but he didn’t need her getting peckish and talking to flowers.
The fir creaked, cracked, and fell, ornery orange meatball in tow. Rats lost their grip by the hundred, ballooning the day’s already preposterous death toll.
Remember the sol-kraks? Activate apex aggro! Go max mean!
Xoz was glad he wasn’t born a solar kraken. To reduce overhead, some primate whiz-kids bred 600-foot-long vacuum-proof octopuses that drank radiation. The sol-kraks were belt sentries: inert 99% of the time, and utterly deranged upon the approach of an unauthorized skiff. The sol-kraks behaved until 2899, when they stopped discriminating between wildcat crews and legitimate corporate monopolies, and Xoz was deployed to clean out the Cybeles.
As he rode the tree down, Xoz considered ingesting the turnip for one last drug-fueled rampage. If he was going to exit this world as soup, he might as well go out as bisque, with bold notes of madness.
But the mollusk changed his mind; seconds before the fir slapped the duff, the rats ran.
The octopus stood poised in a needly patch, bat at bullroarer, while the swarm ignored him with the same hardscrabble apathy that colored their pursuit.
Something out there was more important than killing him.
For the lack of a better idea, he followed the rats. But bashing was a given, so first he had to grab his chair.
“That was my day,” paraphrased Xoz. “How was yours?”
Tippi hobbled over and smushed her nostrils in nanocarbon. He smelled awful, but so did she.
“You weren’t in your tree,” said the octopus, as he stroked her ears with Sanity Smasher. “Before I picked up your diadem, I thought you were dead.”
“I thought you were dead!”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be dead in seven weeks. Wait, why are your eyes red?”
“I can talk to rats!” bawled the pig.
There was a deluge of data glyphs, as The Cute Pals relayed their awful adventure. Tippi told Xoz about a tongue made of brains, the broad strokes of her 9,000-year voyage through spacetime, and how her eyes had turned into hammers. Lina-2 prattled on about the cruelty of realtors, and how rats were secretly whales. Due to the cramped nature of the memory crown, everyone spoke over the other, and the mollusk understood the barest fraction of what had actually precipitated.
“So, if I am understanding correctly,” said Xoz. “Tippi is the queen of the rats, Lina is Kubla Kahn’s pleasure dome, and I’m down an arm. Clearly I’m losing this picnic.”
“Also, the world’s going to end in four days!” blurted Tippi. “I wish I could remember why!”
“Copy that,” said Xoz.
“You believe me?”
“Pig, I just spent the entire afternoon fighting billions of dollars of wildborn biotech. Caracoles in rats, dazzcamo in their eyes, I wouldn’t be surprised if their stool solved for x. And speaking of which, where are they?”
“Who?” said Tippi.
“The rats. Your loyal subjects!”
“I don’t know! They were across the river, last I checked.”
“Those hammers in your eyes must be busted.”
“They are,” said Tippi, crestfallen. “I haven’t seen rats since Pakicetus manifested a physical form.”
“There’s nothing about in my files about a sapiens collective force-evolving ancient cetacean traits in Ratti,” chimed Lina-2.” My latest guess is it’s a virus with delusions of godhood, or a self-iterating bio-code that got drunk on its own cruft.”
“It said it wasn’t a weapon,” recalled Tippi.
“Knowing sapiens, I find that unlikely-”
“Sorry to interrupt,” said Xoz. “I have no clue who you’re talking about.”
“Pakicetus?” said Lina. “The fleshbound avatar of the free-range microentity driving the swarm?”
“Whosit’s whatsit?”
“You tore off its head five minutes ago,” said Tippi.
“Oh, that critter,” said Xoz. “On a related note, where is its head?”
Pig Iron decelerated to gesturing velocity, and pointed to the brutal charcuterie that was once Pakicetus. Xoz was right; the monster’s meat was strewn all about the towpath, but its head had vanished. The Prince of Scum’s skull furnished the only discernible motion; the denuded bone laid unchained, spewing pheromonal mist into the evening pitch.
Suddenly, the friends heard an eerie squeak:
squeepo squeepo
“Something’s in that barberry thatch,” whispered Lina-2.
The mollusk torched up his tentacles and illuminated the brush. There, in the barberry, in the fantods of a retreat, was the head, inching away on its mutant tongue.
The neural lingua moved like a beached clam. The tongue dragged the brain, which remained anchored to the head. Sticky reams of white fluid dribbled from its chair-thwacked brain, attracting a wig of dry leaves. Bringing up the rear were The Archangel’s loose eyes; they trailed the head by their optic nerves, two discarded baubles slugging it through the mud.
Xoz tapped the pseudopod tongue with his bat. The neural lingua shot back into the head, worming and whipping under the skin, manipulating the musculature until the dead jaws snapped open. From the head’s severed windpipe burst a foul sound, far more sinister than squeepo squeepo.
“Good morning, Ringwood!” resounded the lockjawed head. “North Jersey Mod-Con 196, make some noise!”
“That’s a human voice,” gasped Lina.
“I hope you enjoyed the rundown of our award-winning spike proteins by our resident genetics guru, Professor Rambeaux Kis! Here at DorCorp, we believe that team work makes the dream work, so take another big bow, Dr. Ram! Don’t be shy, you’re a rock star! You’re a visionary!”
A smattering of polite claps fell out of the dead rat’s eye holes.
“Now, Dr. Ram and her team have done all the hard work. I’m here for the easy part, that is, convincing all you friendly faces to open up your wallets and invest in the future of terralogical solutions!”
While the head regurgitated canned patter, an earwig climbed up its nose.
“Imagine: hyperlocal campaigns, birthed at global chokepoints, no additional buy-in save biomass, and it’s all on your timetable! Think: Dorcorp’s patented designs, and no messy clean-up, regulations, personnel, or blame! Each campaign is a profitable surprise! Full-frontal reality, pure myth-making: that’s iterative IP, folks!”
“This creature is speaking gibberish,” said Xoz.
“Look,” honeyed the head. “It’s nobody’s fault if the mold in this bale of hay I’m sitting on right here mysteriously causes a citywide outbreak of farmer’s lung. We’re living in Clench times, people! Sometimes, evolution moves fast and breaks things! That’s lepidopteric kismet! Whoops, sounds like I’d better stand up!”
The head convulsed with tepid laughter.
“See, that’s the genius of Leviathan. It’s all results, without the brinkmanship! The occasional influencer casualty is bad enough, so why risk Q4 on full-blown genocide? Why not sleep easy, knowing that your legacy is being handled by the most esteemed material solutions team in the industry? Leviathan takes the path of least resistance, and shatters it to pieces. And hey, if things go haywire, you can always blame the hay!”
A single, distant cough plunked out of the head.
“Well folks, it looks like our time is up. Corporal Xiaofu Nimrod at Shareholder Relations is telling me that last riff was biometrically formulated to generate rapturous applause, so this deck is officially embargoed, indefinitely, immediately. All exits will be sealed until you relinquish-”
The neural lingua went limp, and the brain fell into barberry, taking the voice with it.
Tippi and Xoz stared at brain, aghast. Thanks to Lina-2’s translation protocols, they’d picked up every word.
“I never imagined sapiens sounded like that,” said Tippi. “Phlegmy!”
“To be fair, that human was being played on a rat,” said Xoz. “Lina, is there anything in your files on DorCorp?”
“The Dorset Corporation, founded in 2888. They primarily dealt in fine goods: ascots, kerchiefs, dress cods, and other froufrou. DorCorp was a family enterprise; its first dynastic CEO was geneticist Lemuelette Dorset, whose proprietary silkworms brought in the fops. That voice is from 2984.”
“How can you be sure?” said Tippi.
“It was recorded at the 196th North Jersey Mod-Con, which began as an actual genetics convention, but, after two centuries, pivoted to a less discerning clientele: nepocorps, self-anointed supervillains, and the floundering dregs of the federal government. Makes sense that DorCorp was hawking there; by then, their finances were a wreck. 2984 was the height of post-Proxima Neo-realism, and there wasn’t a demand for fin-de-siècle dandywear.”
“Know anything about a DorCorp product called Leviathan?”
“Old churn’s coming up empty. Sounds like DorCorp didn’t want this pitch getting out.”
“That,” said Xoz. “Or they used it as an excuse to rob would-be investors blind.”
“Both could be true,” said Lina-2. “By the 2980s, the North Jersey Mod-Con wasn’t attracting a credible element, and convention-hall extortion was common. They’d lock you in the room, drain your wallet, and kick you out with an NDA.”
“An NDA?” asked Tippi.
“A nano-dendritic annihilator,” replied Xoz. “First, they’d inject you in the neck-”
“Kah-SHOOF!”
Something on the breeze made Tippi sneeze. She achooed again:
“Go–CHEEF!”
The pig wheeled away from the barberry, snout smarting, and traced the itchy odor to the Prince of Scum’s skull. As the friends investigated the runaway head, the shucked-off skull had upped its stink. Pheromones steamed out in rancid amplitudes, fogging up the towpath and blotting out Antares.
“Will anyone care if I toss that thing downstream?” polled Xoz.
“Plea-ZOOT! Please!”
Xoz spun the skull by its cord of flesh and lobbed it at the river. “Who was that, anyway?”
“The Prince of Scu-MOOTZ!”
“Did I meet him?”
“Sort of-FUTZ!”
The pig could not stop sneezing.
“Funny that,” said Lina. “I didn’t hear a splash.”
“More like a clunk,” agreed Xoz. “I was aiming for the-”
Black water surrounded Tippi.
The water was cold, but she didn’t shiver. Her lungs were calm, even if she’d lost her memory crown.
Panic stanched, she allowed herself to drift deeper, into the endless still.
After sinking for minutes or days, Tippi saw the faraway aura of thermal vents, and the current whisked her to the light.
The pig wove across fields of towering white smokers; the ancient vents wept thin strains of silicon and calcium into the seawater. Below her undulated tube worms, tangled in the dark. A see-through eel idled by, gumming at nothing. Hunched shrimps ignored the pig, as they shambled from hotspot to hotspot.
The current swerved as the white smokers rose higher and hardened off, sclerotic, and presented her with the largest hydrothermal vent on the ocean floor.
The great vent spurted out sulfides in hot blasts. Vast volumes of iron and copper washed over the pig, but the metals didn’t sear or stain. Rather, she permitted the current to deposit her at the vent’s burning peak.
Tippi gave the abyssal zone a final glance, and tumbled into the vent.