The Distraction Factory

Saltwater stung Tippi as she slid down the hydrothermal vent, trailing the sulfurous plume into the Earth.

This isn’t real.

She was alone, except for the microscopic extremophiles who’d evaded discovery, anaerobically, until the dying days of human science.

But this isn’t the Mark of Freehold.

Tippi understood her situation with a manic clarity. The concentration of sulfides inside the vent caused it to smell worse than the open ocean, and she was frightfully aware that the hydrostatic pressure was lethal to little pigs.

Did I metabolize brine when I bit that turnip? Am I still in the droneport?

Tippi shed her atomic structure as the vent gave way to tight tectonic folds, followed by miles of magma.

Have the past four days been a 30-second psychotic episode?

Soon, the disembodied pig was blasting through an impenetrable sky of nickel and iron.

I’m a diffuse consciousness at the Earth’s core. As one is.

The pig rode the brimstone across the unforgiving metal, until she regenerated, and splashed down into the vast, pristine meltwaters at the planet’s center.

Just as Gerasa said: The Night Sea.

The Night Sea was the liminal realm between waking life and the inner tinkerings of Leviathan; it was temperate, with a low salinity and a citric aftertaste. No sunlight pierced The Night Sea, but Tippi was a cave pig, and used to ferreting out her photons.

Her eyes adjusted, and she saw pinkish silhouettes, splayed across a 360° horizon of bituminous black. These were the Earth’s continents, etched in a luminous coral. East and West were reversed, as she was viewing the land from below.

The global glow didn’t do much for her field of vision, for The Night Sea spanned empty in all directions. After some desultory bobbing, Tippi caught the familiar tang of sulfur. She traced the plume across the cool blue, until the water grew murky.

The pig peered into the dank. The sulfur’s source was a crater, pocked with calcium deposits. She paddled to get a better view.

Oh, for crying out loud.

The crater was a blowhole, and the blowhole puckered out of a whale skeleton, hundreds of kilometers long. She hadn’t seen the mass of bones, as they’d been obscured by the nauseating waft.

The skeleton’s bleached skull was a mountain range, disgorging an avalanche of ossified baleen. Two gnarled spires hung between the baleen; these were narwhal tusks, and they gave the skeleton a mien of fangs. Stripped of muscles and skin, the flipper bones resembled claws. Laced between the phalanges were dense forests of dead kelp where darting shadows fed. Occasionally, these faraway forms were sucked into the skeleton’s thorax and shredded, as its ribs housed a rending confluence of riptides.

The skeleton was a ghastly caricature of cetacean life, save its tail: that’s where the Rattus came out. In the absence of flukes were two braids of rat tails, knotted by the million. Gummy scars anchored the tails to the haemal arches, rendering the nearby bone red with infection. The tails were suffused with injury and excrement; Tippi was unsure where this skeleton scrounged the organs to defecate.

Every aspect of the behemoth, from its impossible anatomy to its agonizing stench, was tailored to throttle the sanity. But this was Tippi’s second visit to the astral plane in one day, and the pig refused to be cowed.

“This definitely isn’t real,” she tutted.

The skeleton croaked back.

this is: very real

Tippi somersaulted in place, scornful.

“Pakicetus. What do you call your new look?”

Gore: Fossil

“Well, you look healthy.”

and you should have stayed: in your hole

“And you flew up my nose. It’s a little late for regrets.”

you are too weak: for the real world

“Hush, you. Lina needs my help, and all complacency got me was crickets.”

The Gore: Fossil rattled with mocking echolocation, unloosing acres of rotting kelp. The seaweed slid into the depths, pursued by the ravenous shadows.

friendship: love: loyalty, rasped Pakicetus. euphemisms

“You tried to rip out my eyes. Your opinions are disqualified.”

you reek: of optimism

“And you simply reek,” said the pig. “So, why?”

why: what

“Why am I here? Where are the rats? Why whales?”

The Gore: Fossil rose up to her, until she was staring into an eye socket the size of the Chicxulub crater.

what are: the three parts of: anything, asked the vacuous orbit.

“Golly, a riddle.”

not riddle: truth

“Fine, what are the three parts of anything?”

beginning: middle: end

“You don’t say.”

my beginning was: scheduled by them

“You were under the floorboards.”

in the middle: i manifested Father

“Yes, yes, you came from the drains. I know all this.”

i know something: you don’t

“You’re mighty coy, for a giant corpse.”

i was supposed to be: them

“Who?”

The inverse continents blinked a bleak pastel, and landed their light upon The Gore: Fossil’s cavernous rib cage. Each rib bore its own colossus, carved in a meticulous scrimshaw.

“Humans,” gaped the pig.

The sapiens were portraits of agony, their horror frozen in bone. Their tortured forms wore curious garb: suspenders of feathers, bejeweled huaraches, and delicate crop tops of organza.

“Did they all dress like this?”

the important ones: did

The continents focused their long luminosity on a man in a top hat and chiffon sarong, and a familiar voice reverberated across the water.

“It’s Q2, Lavallette-3! I see we got Senator Senpai in the front row, sporting our vintage ’67 jodhpurs. Look at those spacious thigh pockets, don’t tell me you’re smuggling cocaína dippos, Senator!”

It was the human Tippi heard before, delivering the same slick spiel.

“Now, some of you may have heard those ugly rumors about Ringwood. ‘Why’d DorCorp shill to Grandpa Sam? Dorset, the codpiece people?’ Others may be thinking, ‘Life-X? C’mon! Immortality’s the purview of the snake oiler, peddling nips of RAMbrusco up the seaboard!’ Look, I hear you: it’s 2996, and nobody wants to be a brain in a jar or a ghost in a machine.”

The Night Sea rippled with clapter, and Tippi realized the sculpted man obscured his face with wrenched fists.

“Allow me to answer with a question of my own: what makes a miracle? Dwell on that for a second: it’ll give the Senator here time to sneak a toot. I’m just joshing ya, Sen-Sen! You’re alright!”

Next to the man, the pig noticed a shawled woman, clutching an infant. The baby slept, brow furrowed.

“So, what defines a miracle? Folks, here’s the hard reality of miracles: they’re exclusive. Miracles don’t happen every day. Some say we live in a time of miracles, but we’ve been balls-deep in miracles for the last 1,000 years. Extraplan-explo, synthetics, Barvus: these would be miracles to Homo erectus, but I don’t see a room full of hunter-gatherers. I see a room full of clever investors, savvy to the future of life-X: Leviathan!”

Tippi stared at the scrimshaw child, and was overcome with an implacable sorrow.

“Picture it: your genes, coded into Dorset’s proprietary microentities, who’ll dictate your designs while you rest assured, spared the infirmities of eternity. If you can’t beat The Clench, join it! But seriously, DorCorp wouldn’t be here, at The Big Atlantic Trade Fiesta, if we didn’t think we had something good on our hands. Something powerful. Something primordial. Something borderline divine. And who better to ensure your dynasty than the fashion house who reinvented the banana hammock for the Alpha Regio set-”

The man’s voice petered out, along with the continental spotlight.

no one: bought it

“Then how did Leviathan enter the ecosystem?” asked Tippi.

four years later: DorCorp went under: to evade the creditors: they released me

The Gore: Fossil gave an igneous emission, fragrant of sadism.

the Dorsets went in: and never came out

“What do you mean?”

they wanted: to become nature: instead: they became my audience

A chill crept into the water.

they witnessed: every conquest: every casualty: every day

“You forced a child to watch centuries of incoherence and violence, through rats?”

that child: is but a brain scan: facsimile

“Doesn’t matter!” shivered Tippi. “What’s wrong with you?”

what was wrong was them: they put the yearling in

The pig knew The Night Sea was nothing more than a fantastic illusion, but it was growing cold.

that child grew up to be: worse than me

She kicked her hooves, in an attempt to build body heat.

on a cellular level: the mind breaks: they weren’t meant to knead: mitochondria by hand

“So how’s this all end?”

i thought: it was The Distillate of Perfection: Leviathan’s next iteration: but The Prince is dead: no sister lives: to seed the mothers: no Mark of Freehold: to catalyze Father’s rebirth

“So you can’t come back.”

on the contrary: I am renewed: thanks to you

“Explain.”

we can’t forget that: which we never knew

“And that is?”

the new evolution: Scream: Tide

“Show me Scream: Tide.”

no: no

“Why not?”

i have: what i need: and your time: is up

Tippi’s senses went white, as the glacial meltwaters paralyzed her body.

puny piglet: so friendly: so chatty: so stupid

The Gore: Fossil loomed over her, blotting out the coral.

The Night Sea: has extracted: the secret of: your longevity: 250th anniversary edition

The skeleton descended.

your makeup: eluded my makers: but thanks to you: i might survive: Point Pleasant

The scrimshaw statues closed in.

your body is dying: but i am gracious

Tippi would join the howling monuments to humanity damned.

forever: with us

The underworld ocean coagulated around her.

Scream: Tide: hunts your friends

Icy water filled her lungs.

they’ve fought the tide: for six hours

 

Xoz was crawling through a cornfield.

“Lina-2! Where are you?”

As he sidestepped the crunchier husks, his skin thrummed an anxious xanthous. Naphil was on pig duty; the tentacle held a comatose Tippi against the metal chair, off the ground but below the stalks.

“By the grace of the foliated god, pick up!”

Xoz slunk, and Pig Iron navigated the maize with careful prods. The cornfield was a relic of old world agriculture. Like most sapiens staples, the corn had been futzed with relentlessly, until it propagated of its own accord. The modded crop had long abandoned the strictures of the greenbelt, and had since colonized a whorl of hills.

When the rats attacked, Tippi and Lina-2 blanked out, in toto. Unlike previous skirmishes, the swarm moved with a sense of self-preservation that was more demonology than choreography. At first the rats plodded groggy, as if they were relearning their legs. This was convenient, as their slow approach had scared Xoz shitless. But the rats picked up the pace, and soon the landscape haunted Xoz in an eerie lockstep. He grabbed his friends and ran inland, racing through the starlit dark.

Xoz didn’t need to sleep, but the rats were taxing, and he didn’t glean their scheme until he found the corn. The mollusk smashed into the stalks, and-

puck-A! puck-A!

Xoz quickly learned how this particular patch had stayed so hardy; the slightest brush sent a volley of kernels into the early dawn’s light.

puck-A! puck-A! puck-A! puc-

The mollusk decelerated, as did the rain of grain. Gingerly pinching his meats, he peered over the stalks.

A quiet wash of rat cocooned the terrain, settling at the corn’s border.

Xoz slumped into a pile, deprived of conversation, and cover that didn’t celebrate his position. Worst of all, he was growing bored: an excruciating condition, when one knows the precise moment of their own necrosis.

For hours intolerable, the octopus sat in the cornfield, eyes on ears. Tippi’s vitals were stable, even if she was snoozing and drooling. Her slobber and languor were known to Xoz, so Lina’s disappearance rattled him more. The memory crown was still on the pig, so the clone should’ve been bawling him out with a smuggery synthetic.

Xoz cursed the cereal. The kernels reminded him of a scallop’s eyes, if more debased. Wiggling his bag-o-face above the anthers, Xoz gave Leviathan another peek. The rats weren’t moving, but Tippi’s pulse was-

“Lina! Her heartbeat’s going gonzo!”

The pig’s temperature rose, ticking up towards brain death.

“If there ever was a time for your haptic magic, it’s now!”

Xoz fanned Tippi with 8-Baal, frantic. He needed to throw her in a creek or something, but a cultic mass of drywall chewers blocked the exit.

“Dammit, clone! She’ll be dead in minutes!”

Deranged with friendship, Xoz improvised a plan so irresponsible, it made his heretofore life a profile in restraint. He would bang the bat against the chair at a scouring speed. Sparks would fly and torch the corn, and they’d skibble off, shrouded by flame and the puck-A puck-A of conflagration.

The mollusk tensed his muscles, holding the bat with Scylla and the chair in Brolic. He calculated that the force necessary would cost him Pig Iron, the chair, a few days of existence, and at least one arm. Still, it’d be worth it: he’d sacrifice many treasures for the most precious one of all, plus someone he happened to live with.

Xoz raised the bat to Antares, and dropped a slice supersonic.

Foo-BAM.

He anticipated a hard drench of hot metal. Instead, Pig Iron had rendered the chair unsittable, even by cephalopod standards.

Confounded, Xoz castigated the bat.

“Metallurgically maladapted piece of-”

KREEEEN!

A blue blast of plasma shot from the barrel of the bat.

Pig Iron hemorrhaged raw energy in uncivil magnitudes, and the corn exploded.

“Fuck fuck fuck fuc-”

Any non-incinerated kernels skipped the puck-A puck-A, and went straight to pop-A pop-A.

The pig massaged her butt on this!

The bat was a demanding dance partner, and the octopus rallied 8-Baal and Aiapæc to hold it steady.

I bashed everything with it!

Within seconds, the cornfield was ablaze, and a storm of popcorn heralded the incipient dawn.

“Lina, which dipshit ditched this with the kickballs?”

The memory crown didn’t reply, but the corn did.

Puck-A puck-A puck-A!

The plasmatic bat had roused the rats.

The mollusk snatched the pig, bounding on three tentacles while the other four wrangled with the bat. He held it perpendicular to their escape, igniting the corn in a scorching swathe. He prayed Pig Iron’s pop-A pop-A would obscure his own puck-A puck-A.

As the reached the cornfield’s edge, Pig Iron’s unruly transformation wore off. The flare of cosmic thermite dissipated, replaced by a seething aura of aqua. Xoz didn’t dare touch the bat‘s barrel, as its passing graze tore the stalks in half.

The octopus was so focused on his armament, he nearly missed the large shadow, eclipsing the glare of dawn.

“Pa-pathetic,” he stuttered. “Excessive.”

Xoz knew an intimidation stance when he saw one: the swarm had formed a quivering tower, 50 meters tall, at the intersection of terrestrial megafauna and clockwork fortress.

Just as father and daughter metastasized into Pakicetus, Leviathan composed this writhing edifice. Each rat was a particle of this superstructure, held together by vectors of tail and jaw and claw, plus a crackling skeleton of loose lumber. The swarm’s astounding weight threatened to crush any one rat, so the tower was in perpetual motion, swirling hypnotic, its components leaping and scampering from one position to the next. Ramparts rose and fell like dust devils. Geodesic spheres of interlocked Rattus offered a shifting scaffolding; the rodent buckminsterfullerene rolled and dropped, then burst and scattered, the ecstatic mortar of this monument to vertigo.

The rat aggregate lacked individuated organs or appendages, but it did have a face. Perched atop a neck of branches was the skull Xoz tossed at the river, its pheromone plume exhausted. The braincase wove like an Apatosaurus exhumed, and the rats unleashed a synchronized brux. The tower’s teeth gnashed as one, and the mollusk felt the noise in his three hearts.

From its high parapet, the jawless skull preened.

Scream: Tide, it gloated.

Xoz didn’t return its gaze. He was too transfixed by the tower’s guts, and the distraction factory skittering within.

From the chittering mania, figures and notions emerged: Gashadokuro, The Temptation of St. Anthony, Duzakh and Ahriman, Saturn Devouring His Son.

Mollusks weren’t supposed to know these names, but they’d been grafted onto Xoz’s brain.

Next came the scenes from his own history: The Siege of Zoozve, The Allemannsretten War of 2899, that hard landing outside Ulaanbaatar, The Defenestration of Don Ultimo. Perilous memories: good memories.

Pig Iron clattered in the mud, and its ambient heat sizzled the soil into pebbly brick.

Xoz registered eight tentacles, undulating gently and tending a clutch of eggs. The arms were pillars of light, delicate, rising out of the tower and into the atmosphere.

He extended Naphil towards the eggs and-

ker-shoof

The pig had sneezed.

Xoz whipped back to the clutch of eggs. Amidst the streaks of daybreak, he found only rats.

Cobalt, the octopus daubed Tippi with cold mud. He sucked her into his crag-o’-mantle, and the nano-carbon slid over her like a vesicle.

Xoz returned the skull’s hollow stare.

“Lina said you had dazz.”

He picked up the simmering bat, and shook off the grit.

“Until now, I’d never seen it myself.”

Flurries of popcorn smoldered in the wind.

“That was a mistake.”

The cornfield burned behind him.

“I’m not bored anymore.”

 

An immense shudder wracked The Night Sea, dislodging a splatter of islands from the continental tapestry. Sulawesi, Sardinia, and Maui tumbled into the deep blue, and incandescent scars of core alloy rushed in to fill their outlines.

Tippi paid this no mind, because she was busy drowning.

you have: no choice

Earth’s islands fell out like rotting teeth.

you have: no hope

She was in a cathedral of ribs, bigger than Sicily.

let: the black water: in

The pig was hostage to a hallucination, and did not die. Instead, she floated aimless, suffocating in stasis.

She saw the full quanta of her life, far and myriad.

And then, her memory atrophied in chunks.

There goes the taste of asparagus.

Pakicetus tore towards the secrets of her longevity, excreting amnesia.

There goes my favorite color.

She knew she was forgetting things.

There goes the time I almost drowned in the cistern. Xoz saved me that day. He was so bright.

She couldn’t forget that light.

There goes that time me and Xoz decided we were living in a simulation, and Lina threatened to quit.

The light wasn’t fading.

There goes that day you were stolen at the beach.

The light was coming straight at her.

There goes the poetry slam.

With explosive force, Tippi regurgitated The Night Sea.

caf-caf-caf

The pig was in an air pocket.

A massive blade of crucible steel hovered centimeters from her snout.

Her eyes traced the curve of wootz to its owner: a sentinel, in plates and silk, holding a sword and lantern.

Within the lantern lived a hungry fire: Antares.

By the light of the supernova, Tippi saw a human face.

The human wore spectacles, with thick lenses, a wedge of ticky-tack on the side.

 

Judging from the eyewear, this was the late Dr. Benazir Bux.

And if Ben was here, that meant-

Hands full, the warrior adjusted their glasses with a shoulder roll.

“Pakicetus,” said Lina-2. “I can see you now.”

 

Outro: Pendulum feat. Steve Wilson – “The Fountain” (Instrumental)