A Lucky Puddle

Chess wasn’t anyone’s favorite game; that distinction went to apex predators, and pinball. Lina would eventually ban all three.

The n’arbiter tried to keep the organics enriched and occupied. Lina compared this task to that of the Victorian sailor, “who’d scrub a dreadnought daily, against a sea of salt.”

“Sapiens grew real earthy about space” said Xoz. “Their spoor absolutely marinated the low-G.”

Tippi learned about pinball during a discussion of monotheism. Given their collective history, Lina thought it wise to tackle sapiens society, but a single deity proved too cozy.

“I struggle with stories not about you or Xoz,” yawned Tippi.

Meanwhile, Xoz demanded “fight profiles” on Zoroaster, The Mother of Harlots, and Mike “The Hitman” Christ.

“Can we discuss fight profiles on our private channel?” said Lina.

“No,” said Xoz. “I need it for your knowledge of failed telekinesis experiments, and it’s important Tippi learn about Mike. My point is, if Methusaleh lived for 969 years, how many killing arts did he master?”

“The Book of Genesis never goes into detail.”

“A glaring omission. This Bible of yours, Lina.”

When Yaki St. Signar’s 10(k) The$es of Fiduciary Large$$e converted Tippi to naptime, Lina switched topics, and told the organics about a forbidden game of the 20th century:

“It was called pinball-”

“Besides sadism,” interrupted Xoz. “The best part of absolute monarchy was vacation. The good times rolled, until the heads did.”

“Tell me more about sadism,” said Tippi.

“Soon,” vouchsafed Xoz. “First, I must know if you are a sadist.”

“Go for it,” said Tippi.

“You have 24 hours to subdue 500K civilians,” said Xoz. “Do it.”

“Are we Earth, or extraplan?”

“Say 500K on Earth, 100K extra. Your call.”

“Extra. How are the 100K loaded? Equally, over five frigates, 20K a pop?”

“Sure, five frigates, brimming with pricks.”

“Hard mods?”

“Some got cyber, ikijime plugs. Each frigate’s got a master-at-arms.”

“How about gene mods?”

“Prenatals, anti-oncogene, muscle thickeners. Usual battery of spacewalk salks.”

“Anything esoteric?”

“Really?”

“It’s not my fault you skimped on your own details.”

“There are, uh, tigermen. Seven on a single frigate, you don’t know which. Only a nuisance if you interrupt their blood orgy, and you won’t.”

“I know the scam answer.”

“And that is?”

“An atmospheric spore, probably fungal. Maybe you paid big for caracoles, but point’s moot.”

“Tips, where are you going with this?”

“Specify when we are.”

“Uh, 3100.”

“How far out?”

“Venus.”

Tippi didn’t even get up:

“Antifungals came standard with frigate filtration by 2870. As for the ‘coles, emosperm harpoons wouldn’t work, they wouldn’t survive the trip from the slugyard on Tierra del Fuego.”

“Fermisht,” said Xoz.

“Hey, you taught me that.”

“I love the arrogance, but you haven’t answered my question.”

“Are you kidding? The answer is you.”

Xoz fluttered, underwater.

“Congratulations, Tips. You’re no sadist.”

“Phew!”

Lina had critiques.

“Xoz, in 3100, you were in Antique Ops. And I thought you fell asleep during stories about strangers.”

“Lina,  he’s always the answer.”

“In this case, it was me, or that spore Tippi mentioned, stirred into the crew’s lemonade.”

“What’s lemonade?”

“A foul serum, Tips. You’d hate it.”

“Does anybody want to learn about PIN-pinball?”

Fortunately, pinball had one rule: evade the gladiators, who were also trapped in the machine.

“Juvenile delinquency ends today,” said Xoz, eight arms raining ammo.

“Someday it’ll be you in here, Fiorello LaGuardia!” cried Tippi.

“Don’t waste aminospheres,” said Lina. “They attract crickets.”

“Good,” said Xoz, as Tippi fell in the lagoon.

Lina felt stuck. The organics were too rambunctious for objective truth. They’d confused 20th-century New York with peak Rome, but that wasn’t their most glaring error: their pinball machine was actually the Colosseum.

“My vision is this,” trumpeted Large Caligula. “We will build a new pinball machine, for a new generation of God-Kaisers.”

Lil’ Caligula, who never fashioned herself royalty or godhead, had a note:

“We don’t have access to the Appian Way!”

“My proposal to the senate is forthcoming,” averred Large Caligula.

An ashen chain of waste flew out of Xoz’s siphon, landing in the grimy corner of the frigidarium, scaring the crickets.

Lina couldn’t fault the organics for conflating eras. The century shelter’s records were 9,000 years out of date.

 

Tippi was over the trench, squabbling with a tentacle.

 

“My suckers absorbed hard brine!” said the arm, who Tippi recognized as Scylla.

“And?” said Tippi.

“And hard brine is a psychostimulant!” wailed Scylla, orange with trapezoids.

“So?”

“I haven’t done drugs since I was a fry!”

“What drugs?”

“Surgical anesthesia,” said Scylla. “Not going to lie, this latest peccadillo of ours will complicate things.”

“Of ours?” Do elaborate.”

“How’d you carry that turnip without losing your mind?”

“I’m very coordinated. What’s your excuse?”

Scylla zigzagged around the trench, foisting Tippi with a parabolic zest.

“It’s like I’m trapped on the wheel of Saṃsāra,” said Scylla. “And I want off!”

“Well, don’t take me with you!”

“Okay, okay!”

Scylla gently deposited Tippi by the filterway. Each of Xoz’s arms had its own micro-personality, earned in skirmish.

“How often was psychoactive brine a problem?” shuddered Tippi.

“All the time! First it was scandal, then it was novel, then the selling point. Imagine: 70-year-old onions, so delicious, you rob a bank. You’re lucky Antique Ops kept you mint. Too much jostling, and you’d be a national treasure.”

“I’m not following.”

“Psychedelic bacon, century-aged. There’d be one last war, and the winner would roll you up and smoke you.”

“Please stop visualizing my demise,” said Tippi.

“Apologies!”

“Why’d sapiens preserve their food in psychostim? Seems ripe for error.”

“Why’d they have pharynxes?” said Scylla, swerving rainbow. “Why’d they do anything? Why’d they make me?”

Tippi had never met anyone on drugs.

“Try to find a through line to sapiens,” said Scylla. “Most you’d get is sleep deprivation, and strung out on mods.”

“Am I that mod?”

“It wasn’t even me, and I’m the mascot of a civilization in decline. It wasn’t any one thing, just one passel of fraught innovations after the next. Want to know my theory?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“They needed to discover aliens.”

 

Lina acknowledged ETs were tucked away in the infinite, but “they’re probably microorganisms, on a moon, in an ocean, awaiting their moment.”

Tippi stamped her hoof.

She’d never seen the ocean; it sounded like space, if dirtier. Xoz hadn’t seen the ocean either, but he’d been to Neptune.

“I never saw aliens out there,” recalled Xoz. “But I saw strange stuff.”

“Like what?” said Tippi.

“Some guy once chased me around an asteroid, with a turbo-shiv.”

“Whoa!”

“Yeah, it was dark.”

“What happened to him?”

“He’s still out there, white-knuckling his shiv. Maybe in a million years he’ll fertilize a lucky puddle.”

Three conversations in, Tippi learned to disable a frigate.

“The key to disabling a frigate is another frigate,” said Xoz.

“What if there are three frigates?” said Tippi.

“You only need two for a chain collision.”

“What if there’s one frigate?”

“Well,” chuckled Xoz. “That’s when I go in.”

“Nice!” said Tippi.

82 conversations later, Tippi and Xoz formed the Treyf Pals Urban Infiltration Unit. Lina disapproved, but was helpless before a cephalopod’s charm.

 

“Out of apathy, fear, or odds, aliens never showed up. Who could blame them? Sapiens peppered the outer sys with dugouts and maul cruisers, who’d burn a bloodline over a roll of insulation. Pluto life, Sanity Smasher.”

 

Naphil nodded at Scylla’s wisdom.

“Earth is famous for its smothering parasocial fixations.”

“I’m glad we slept through the 33rd,” said Sanity Smasher.

“I’d fuck up Pluto,” assured Brolic.

“But what of the rods and cones?”said Aiapæc. “Dazzle camouflage doesn’t always hit betinkered eyes.”

“It was the 33rd century, we wouldn’t even need dazzcamo,” reasoned Dr. Pods. “Most maul cruisers were recycled lunar transports, doing long hours. They’d be better off in covered wagons.”

“Always the cowboy, and never the stock boy,” tutted Aiapæc.

“The stock boy of what?” replied Dr. Pods.

“Of the rock candy parlor,” giggled Aiapæc. “He’s escaping his gambling debts out east.”

Sanity Smasher broke it up:

“Without ETs, sapiens picked at their parts, salting the soil for shitcoins. This planet’s lucky it still has trees.”

“Couldn’t an alien encounter have led to a golden age of philosophical humility?” said 8-Baal, underwater.

Her seven siblings towered above the trench: terrible and smug.

“You lot are too cynical,” said 8-Baal.

“They spiked their gene pool in the name of Halloween,” said Sanity Smasher.

“College kids injecting themselves with hentai,” chirped Scylla. “For the weekend!”

“Stop talking about humans!” said Terremoto.

“Are we playing chess?” said Tippi.

Seven tentacles, like spires of white phosphorus, twirled around:

“TIPS!”

Tippi gnashed her teeth, befuddled. Nothing about Third Spring felt right. Lina was “fine,” but off the map. The doomsday device was high. Then, there was her turnip.

If brine leaks were common, then why was this our first? Xoz eats 20 kilos of aminospheres a day.

“Tippi!” implored Terremoto.

They fall out of the bulk sluice–

“Chess!” said Terremoto.

A mystery protruded like an endive-wrapped date, which was a recipe Tippi invented all by herself:

We haven’t played chess in years.

 

Tippi replaced her rooks with carrots, but The Wee Sheol Winter Chess Spectacular nonetheless ended in seconds.

Tippi had the first move. She lifted a pawn off the board, with her teeth.

“Perimeter secure,” she declared. “How many points did I score?”

“How about just moving forward?” suggested Lina.

“Thanks for the input, but your maneuver leaves my pawn open to ambush.”

“From who?”

“From Chess. Who else? He can’t digest cellulose, so watch out.”

“I can’t say I’m clear on your interpretation of chess,” said Lina.

“Chess doesn’t play by the rules,” scoffed Tippi. “He has five fingers, needs eight hours of sleep, and stores his sperm in external genitalia.”

From a million-ton hard box under the Atlantic Ocean, Lina chose patience.

“Sure,” said the supercomputer. “Xoz, you’re up.”

“Regicide!” he thundered.

Terremoto exploded from the trench, and pulverized the chessboard.

“No war economy!” said Xoz. “No divine right!”

Tippi pranced, impish:

“No lunch! No dinner!”

Bishops annihilated, Xoz poked his bag out of the water. The uppermost portion of his crag-o’-mantle was his “bag-o’-face,” and his bag was a beatific blue.

“Chess won’t be bothering us anymore,” said the bag.

Tippi was so excited, she jumped into the trench and landed on the bag. She rolled into the tough, cold divot between Xoz’s eyes, and stared at the schisto, belly side up.

“How’s the moss?” asked Xoz, who felt her wiggling.

“Could be better.”

“The schisto once won the Nobel Prize,” said Lina.

“Eh,” said Tippi. “Green is not my color.”

“So?” said Xoz. “I’m colorblind, but I can become anything I want. Lina has no eyes, but can see everything, including the secret colors, like microwave.”

“Between the three of us, we have access to the full spectrum,” fizzed Lina.

Tippi was happy to contribute.

 

“I’m dying,” wheezed Brolic.

“No, you’re not,” said Sanity Smasher.

“I think I’m dead,” said Brolic.

“If you’re dead, we’d all dead,” replied Sanity Smasher.

“What about Tippi?” asked Brolic. “Is she dead?”

“I’m alive,” confirmed Tippi.

Naphil ogled the schisto:

“Maybe we’re all dead, and this cave is hell.”

Aiapæc disagreed:

“What if this cave is heaven, and our sins have soiled its manitou?”

“Theories abound,” grumbled Tippi.

Xoz was proper zonked. Seven of his arms loitered above the waterline, like a tranche of hungover plesiosaurs, bumping into each other and going down but to freshen up.

Tippi tried to divine a leitmotif from the molluscan nonsense. The tentacles waxed circuitous about space crime and the afterlife, but that was typical. The outlier was clear: Xoz kept referencing a game they’d only played once.

“Tippi-tip-top,” slurred 8-Baal. “Where’s the chessboard?”

“You threw it in the cistern,” said Tippi. “To give the hubris of empire the tomb it deserves.”

“Yeah, that sounds like me,” said 8-Baal. “Why’d you let me do that?”

“Look, I secured the perimeter.”

“Tippi!” vamped 8-Baal. “So doughty, so young.”

“I was born 278 years before you,” said the teacup hypermini.

“Indeed you were! Say, do you remember where we left the chessboard?”

Tippi buried her head under a nearby stack of bola skins.

Her rustling alerted the cave crickets, who’d been grubbing at the turnip. With a pyrrhic charge, the insects threw themselves at Tippi. She would’ve eaten them, but they were brimming with brine.

If only Lina were here to decipher Xoz, she slouched. All he’s doing is flashing black and white, pointing at the schisto, and-

The truth clattered upon Tippi, and her right ear emerged from the bola skins, twitching:

I have to go back to that awful room.

 

Outro: Okay Temiz – “Penguin”