Chapter 23
The Distraction Factory
Saltwater stung Tippi’s eyes as she slid down the hydrothermal vent.
This isn’t real.
She trailed the sulfurous plume into the Earth, her only company microscopic, anaerobic extremophiles, who’d evaded discovery until the dying days of human science.
Or is it?
She was frightfully aware of the hydrostatic pressure.
Did I metabolize brine when I bit that turnip?
The vent gave way to tight tectonic folds, followed by miles of magma.
Am I still in the droneport? Have the past four days been a 30-second psychotic episode?
Tippi shed her atomic structure, blasting disembodied through an impenetrable sky of nickel and iron.
I’m a diffuse consciousness at the Earth’s core, as one is.
She transcended the metal and regenerated her form, splashing down into the vast and 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 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 continents, etched in a luminous coral. East and west were reversed, as she saw the land from below.
The coral continents didn’t do much for Tippi’s field of vision, as The Night Sea spanned empty in all directions. After some desultory bobbing, she caught the familiar tang of sulfur. She traced it through the cool blue, until the water grew murky.
She peered into the dank: the sulfurous plume was coming from a crater. She paddled to get a better view.
Oh, for crying out loud.
The crater was a gargantuan blowhole, puckering out of a whale skeleton, hundreds of miles long.
She hadn’t seen the bones, as they’d been obscured by the nauseating waft. The skull was a bleached range of baleen. Two gnarled spires hung between the baleen, narwhal tusks, which gave the skeleton a mien of fangs. Stripped of skin and muscle, the flippers resembled claws. Laced in the phalanges was a dense forest of sour kelp: there, darting shadows fed. Occasionally these faraway forms were sucked into the rib cage and shredded, as the organless thorax housed a 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 rat tails to the skeleton, rendering the nearby bone red with infection. The rat tails were suffused with injury and excrement: it was unclear how the bones found the means to defecate.
Every aspect of the behemoth, from its impossible anatomy to its agonizing stench, was tailored to throttle the sanity. But Tippi had visited the astral plane twice in one day, and she refused to be cowed.
“This definitely isn’t real,” she tutted.
The skeleton croaked back.
very: real
Tippi somersaulted in place, scornful.
“Pakicetus. What do you call this?”
Gore: Fossil
“Well, you look healthy.”
you should’ve stayed: in your hole
“Hey, you flew up my nose.”
weak: so weak
“Shut it. Lina needs my help, and complacency gets me crickets.”
The Gore: Fossil rattled with mocking echolocation, unloosing acres of rotting kelp. The seaweed slid into the depths, pursued by the peculiar shadows.
friendship: love: loyalty: euphemisms
“You tried to rip out my eyes. Your opinions are disqualified.”
you reek: of optimism
“And you simply reek. So, why?”
why: what
“Why am I here? Where are the rats? Why whales?”
The Gore: Fossil ascended to Tippi, until she was staring into an eye socket the size of the Chicxulub crater.
what are: the three parts of: anything, posed the vacuous orbit.
“Gosh, a riddle.”
not riddle: truth
“Fine, what are the three parts of anything?”
beginning: middle: end
“You don’t say.”
my beginning was: by them
“You were under the floorboards.”
in the middle: i manifested Father
“Yes, yes, you came from the drains, I’m aware.”
i know something: you don’t
“You’re rather coy, for a giant corpse.”
i was supposed to be: them
“Who?”
The coral 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,” said Tippi.
The sapiens were portraits of agony, their horror frozen in bone. Their tortured forms were garbed, in suspenders of feathers, bejeweled huaraches, and tube tops of delicate 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!”
It was the speaker from the severed head, delivering the same slick spiel.
“I see we got Senator Senpai in the front row, sporting our vintage ’67 jodhpurs. Look at those spacious thigh pockets, perfect for smuggling cocaína dippos, Sen-Sen! I’m just joshing ya! Now, some of you may have heard those ugly rumors about Ringwood. ‘Why’d DorCorp shill to Grandpa Sam? Dorset, the codpiece people?’ Others of you are thinking, ‘Life-X? C’mon! Immortality’s for 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.
“You know what’s funny? Nobody here believes in miracles, yet we’ve been balls-deep in miracles for a bit. Extraplan, synths, 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 graven child, and was overcome with an implacable sorrow.
“Picture it: your genes, coded on Dorset’s proprietary microentity, 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 vanished, along with the continental spotlight.
no one: bought it
“Then how did Leviathan enter the ecosystem?”
four years later: DorCorp went under: so: 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 made a child watch centuries of violence, through rats?”
that child: is but a brain scan: facsimile
“Doesn’t matter!” shivered Tippi. “What’s wrong with you?”
they: put the yearling in
Tippi 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?”
Father is dead: no sister lives: to seed the mothers: no Mark of Freehold: to catalyze his rebirth
“So you can’t come back.”
on the contrary: i’m renewed: thanks to you
“Explain.”
i can’t forget some: thing i never knew
“And that is?”
the next evolution: Scream: Tide
“Show me.”
no: no
“Why not?”
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 swam over her, blotting out the coral.
The Night Sea: has extracted: the secret of: your longevity: 250th anniversary edition
The skeleton descended upon Tippi.
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 been fighting 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 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, his bat navigating 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, abandoning the strictures of the greenbelt for 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, 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 soon they picked up, and the landscape haunted Xoz in an eerie lockstep.
He’d grabbed his friends and ran inland, racing across the starlit dark. Xoz didn’t need to sleep, but the rats were taxing, and he didn’t glean their scheme until he was in the cornfield. The mollusk smashed through the stalks, and-
puck-A! puck-A!
Xoz quickly learned how the corn 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, 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, he sat in the cornfield, eyes on ears. Tippi’s vitals were stable, even if she was snoozing and drooling. Lina-2’s disappearance rattled him more. The memory crown was still on Tippi, so Achilles 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-2! Her heartbeat’s going gonzo!”
Tippi’s temperature rose, ticking up towards brain death.
“If there ever was a time for your haptic magic, it’s now!”
Xoz fanned her 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.
Xoz tensed his muscles, holding the bat with Scylla and the chair in Brolic. He calculated that the force necessary would cost him the bat, 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, the bat 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.
It hemorrhaged raw energy in uncivil magnitudes, and the corn exploded.
“Fuck fuck fuc-”
Any kernels that weren’t incinerated skipped the puck-A puck-A, and went straight to pop-A pop-A.
She 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-2! Who ditched this with the kickballs?”
The memory crown didn’t reply, but the corn did.
Puck-A puck-A puck-A!
His bat had roused the swarm. The rats were in the field.
Xoz snatched Tippi, bounding on three tentacles while the other four wrangled with his plasmatic bat. He held it perpendicular to their escape, igniting the corn in a scorching swathe, praying the pop-A pop-A would obscure his own puck-A puck-A.
As the reached the cornfield’s edge, the bat‘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 was cutting stalks in half.
Xoz was so focused on his armament, he nearly missed a large shadow eclipsing the glare of dawn.
“Pa-pathetic,” he stuttered.
Xoz knew an intimidation stance when he saw one: the rats 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 lattice 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. Their 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 his brain.
Next came the scenes from his own history: The Siege of Zoozve, The Allemannsretten War of 2899, The Defenestration of Don Ultimo. Perilous memories, good memories.
His bat clattered in the mud, its heat sizzling the soil into a pebbly brick.
Xoz registered eight tentacles inside the tower, undulating gently and tending a clutch of eggs. He extended Naphil towards the eggs and-
ker-shoof
Tippi’d sneezed.
Xoz whipped his attention back to the tower. Amidst the streaks of daybreak, he found only rats.
Cobalt, he daubed Tippi with cold mud. He sucked her into his crag-o’-mantle, letting the nano-carbon slide over her like a vesicle.
Xoz returned the skull’s hollow stare.
“Lina said you had dazz.”
He picked up his bat, and shook off the grit.
“Until now, I’d never seen it myself.”
The cornfield burned behind him, and flurries of popcorn smoldered in the wind.
“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 water, as incandescent scars of core alloy rushed in to fill their outlines.
Tippi paid this no mind, because she was busy drowning.
no: choice
Earth’s islands fell out like rotting teeth.
no: hope
She was in a cathedral of ribs, bigger than Sicily.
let the black water: in
Tippi 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, as her memory atrophied in chunks.
There goes the taste of asparagus.
Pakicetus tore through her secrets, 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 for her.
There goes our poetry slam-
With a burp, Tippi expelled The Night Sea.
She was in an air pocket.
A blade of crucible steel hovered, centimeters from her snout.
The wootz belonged to a sentinel, in silk and plate, holding a lantern. Within it lived a hungry fire: Antares.
By the light of the supernova, Tippi saw her savior: they wore spectacles, with 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 spectacles with a shoulder roll.
“Pakicetus,” said Lina-2. “I can see you.”