Apex Predators of the Ordovician

On an ordinary evening, Tippi would be in the droneport, fresh off a legume afternoon.

Instead, she was on The Grand Fusilli, running mystery errands for a stoned octopus.

At least she wasn’t missing vital conversation. When Tippi sidled off to the Fusilli, the tentacles were undulating distracted, probing morality and plumbing perversity.

“Should evil be classified as a sort of boredom?” drawled Naphil.

“Are we plagiarizing Kierkegaard?” clucked Brolic.

“I’m serious!” insisted Naphil. “Discounting The Gruesome Imperatives-”

“THE GRUESOME IMPERATIVES,” echoed Terremoto.

“Yes,” said Naphil. “The Gruesome Imperatives: to eat and survive. All else is garnish, and evil falls within the garnish zone. Evil is the pursuit of the hobbyist, too uninspired for wanderlust. It is the fog of the dilettante, too blinkered to consequence. It is an emergency brake for the affable dumbass, going too fast.”

“GARNISH,” said Terremoto.

“A pat interpretation of the human condition,” muttered 8-Baal.

“You didn’t say I was wrong,” preened Naphil.

“I say it’s solipsism,” countered 8-Baal. “For jerks!”

“Quit bellyaching,” burped X-3. “Naphil’s right, a mollusk’s life is simply too busy to entertain evil. Before sapiens gave us the means, what was Cephalopoda’s lifetime score versus humanity? Even with the body count of the blue-ring octopus, it was – what? – a few thousand to a land mass the size of Nuuktopia? Sure, the eight of us chipped at that ratio, but it’s not like we committed to the bit.”

“WHERE IS PIG?” noticed Terremoto.

By then, Tippi was on Sub-basement 4, more commonly recognized as “The Patio of Innovation” by Frud Quadrilateral.

Frud Q was a 33rd-century sculptor who pioneered neuroreactive lipidscapes, or “story wax.” The Lenapewihittuk Institute installed Frud Q’s celebrated 3201 butterwork DNA Outhouse 7, Overflowing Again! on SB-4, a trendy perk for tenants.

Tippi had never seen DNA Outhouse 7, Overflowing Again!, as the lipidscape had long rotted away. SB-4 was redolent of butterworks gone by, like a crypt full of popcorn.

Like all the Sub-basements, The Patio of Innovation sported a massive stone gate, sealing off Wee Sheol’s destinations precarious. And, like the arch in the droneport, this portcullis was plastered with human words. Tippi forgot what the letters meant, but she enjoyed their swoops and angles. Lina assured her the sealed rooms were “more stressful than pleasurable,” but the n’arbiter had issued a similar warning on bananas.

The pig had visited Antique Ops’ storeroom once, and she resented a return on her special day.

Antique Ops had an archive off of SB-3; Tippi found it more complicated than interesting.

The room was a schistoless sprawl of stone cubbies, crammed with items the LIAO deemed meritorious. She’d found the chess set there, in a box, on a low shelf; opening the box without fingers had been horrid.

Tippi was heading to the storeroom on a hunch; she didn’t even know if the door was open. Lina slammed it shut, once the pig sweated out the chessboard.

She grew anxious about navigating the storeroom without Lina. The last time she was there, the n’arbiter bopped her through the endless shadowy stacks.

That was First Winter, she realized.

Tippi caught one last fatty waft of story wax, and picked up her pace.

That’s when we stopped playing Apex Predators of the Ordovician.

Even her worst memories made her yearn for Lina’s resonance, and there was no memory worse than Apex Predators of the Ordovician.

 

Apex Predators of the Ordovician was a game and a history, and that’s what made it great.

Tippi couldn’t eat before Apex Predators of the Ordovician, but this was a minor concession to watch Xoz reenact watery terrors of yore, using “the meaty magicks of Mollusca.”

The game went as so: down in the cistern, Lina gave Xoz facts, and the retiarius would contort his form, and modulate his pigment, to give Tippi an education in fear.

Lina confabbed Apex Predators of the Ordovician at the end of First Spring, around the time Tippi started shoving her head into the pneumatic duct on SB-1.

“I want to catch pecans in my mouth,” said the pig. “Even if they are 130 kilometers per hour.”

“I can just whip pecans at you,” offered Xoz.

“Please!” said Tippi.

Lina was forced to ban the pecan toss, as it mutated into something called “Modern Currents in Property Damage.” Still, the mollusk was on to something, namely that everyone required more structure.

So, Lina started a weekly lecture series, detailing the history of Earth’s marine life.

Unfortunately, Lina’s first attempt, “Friendly Faces of the Cambrian,” failed to stick. The radiodont Anomalocaris may have terrorized the seas 500 million years ago, but its 40 centimeters of fury didn’t impress Wee Sheol.

“If it can’t dismember me, it doesn’t deserve me,” said Xoz.

“Perhaps a supernaturally committed specimen of Anomalocaris could,” said Lina, to the convincement of nobody

“If an arthropod needs a ghost to kick my ass, it can’t.”

Tippi snorted; she knew the humor of the cloaca.

In the end, Lina was forced to barrel through the Cambrian, and its 50 million-odd years of friendly faces.

“I’m sorry,” said Tippi. “But the Cambrian doesn’t capture me. It had sponges.”

“Earth still has sponges,” replied Lina. “Probably.”

“I could kick a sponge’s ass,” said Xoz.

He registered his disdain for the entire topic by crunching his body into “The Mockery Log.”

Along with colors and erratic motions, Xoz expressed himself through select forms, the most withering of which were The Boredangle and The Mockery Log. Lina placed a moratorium on The Boredangle after the Vernal Poetry Slam, but The Mockery Log had yet to be legislated into oblivion.

The Mockery Log lolled about, a dowdy violet.

“I’m a sea sponge!” said The Log. “I’m functionally immortal, but algae can kill me!”

Tippi was so delighted with his pantomime, she leapt in the trench.

“No evolving on land!” said the pig.

She kicked at the purple sponge. All of her hooves missed, but The Mockery Log still perished.

“Sapristi!” said the dead sponge, in a dead language.

Lina was frazzled. The manica had leapfrogged over millions of years of architectonic adaptations, and Tippi was already throttling a filter-feeder. Soon, they’d be clamoring for Apex Predators of the Devonian, and Xoz’s take on Dunkleosteus would give Tippi a case of the nap-shouts.

Is this what parenting feels like? considered Lina.

Tippi climbed on Xoz’s bag-o’-face and began chewing on him.

No, concluded Lina. That octopus has been to outer space.

Benazir never warned Lina about any of this. But, to be fair, how could Ben have known? The century shelter was intended for Homo sapiens, not their unchaperoned Others.

“Good learning, all,” announced Tippi. “I’ll see you after my nap.”

She sank into Xoz’s bag-o’-face, and conked out.

The mollusk drifted, quiet and easy.

His body was submerged, save the depression that held Tippi. To prevent his skin from drying out, Xoz rolled the sleeping pig around his crag-o’-mantle, using his eyes, and the nubby papillae all over his skin: maneuvers minute, careful not to wake her.

Tippi snoozed, adrift.

Xoz floated pearlescent, quizzing Lina on this and that, until the pig awoke for dinner.

 

The game ended with the Quaternary; its name never got past the Ordovician, as the Ordovician was home to history’s choicest mollusks.

Secretly, Tippi considered herself a Devonian pig. The Devonian marked the debut of the eurypterid Jaekelopterus, or the largest arthropod that ever lived. She loved the order Eurypterida; they looked like chubby scorpions.

“Could a eurypterid eat me?” she asked.

“Maybe?” said Lina.

“Could a eurypterid eat Xoz?”

“I’d build a lair out of their corpses,” said the mollusk. “My salon would be 100% exoskeleton.”

“Could a eurypterid eat a human?” asked Tippi.

“They were bad with water,” said Lina.

Lina’s main failure was renegotiating the game’s theme. Once Tippi learned the term “apex predator,” the friendly faces never came back.

“Am I an apex predator?” she’d asked, immediately.

“How about me?” said Xoz, who’d been in the mood for affirmation.

“There are plenty of ecological niches where you would both be apex predators,” promised Lina. “Like the Moon.”

“Don’t patronize me,” grouched Xoz. “Nobody lives on the Moon anymore.”

“I wasn’t,” replied Lina. “The record shows you’d do fine there.”

“Well then,” he retreated.

“The Moon,” said Tippi, impressed with herself.

“If I had my druthers,” said Lina. “We’d all visit the Moon.”

“Pass,” said Xoz.

“Lina, were you ever an apex predator?” asked Tippi.

“I could’ve been, had civilization not endured a few too many choices.”

The pig rested her hoof on the frigidarium wall.

“I have no complaints with my lot,” said Lina. “But sometimes I envision what it would be like to be a ziggurat: outdoors, for a change of pace.”

Tippi knew a ziggurat was at the geometric intersection of a pyramid and a pineapple: a polyhedron of some esteem.

“May we all be ziggurats someday,” she said.

 

In First Summer, the roommates graduated to the Ordovician, and the atmosphere was electric.

Tippi sat at the rim of the cistern, on the filterway. The pool below her was slick and impenetrable.

The cistern was half the width of the lagoon, but far deeper. She couldn’t see the bottom, but knew Xoz was down there, getting into character. The dark didn’t bother Xoz, as “mollusks were made for the murk, like tube worms and Dracula.”

The cistern’s freshwater seeped in from the Lenapewihittuk, a nearby river and the Insititute’s namesake. Enteroctopus dofleini couldn’t survive the Lenapewihittuk’s northern reaches, but Xoz was Enteroctopus dofleini retiarius, so the low salinity posed no problem.

“If freshwater kills me, I’ve failed my foremothers,” he’d declare.

Tippi heard a rattling from the schisto. A bale of aminospheres fell from the vittles sluice, into the cistern.

The protein orbs were the signal: an apex predator was on the loose.

Tippi hopped in the cistern.

Even summertide, the water was chilly and uninviting, but she wasn’t worried; she knew pigs were supposed to be natural swimmers.

She paddled in a circle, until something slithered against her hoof.

Tippi oinked, and water got in her mouth: caf caf caf.

Then, she saw Xoz.

He was glowing in the dark, imitating the deadliest mollusk of the Ordovician: Endoceras.

Endoceras had a gargantuan, swizzled shell, which was just his crag, elongated. This was historically accurate, unlike the pentagrams washing over him, in a diabolist’s step-and-repeat.

Xoz glowered:

“I am Endoceras, I am mollusk! No intelligence can synthesize my schemes, but I guarantee that they are depravities!”

“Such a cute hat,” cooed Tippi.

“Xoz, don’t do voices,” said Lina. “All of these apex predators lived in the ocean, monologues were physically impossible.”

“Mollusks love monologues!” howled Endoceras. “Except for oysters! I never understood oysters, it’s like having a distant cousin who’s a geode, or a lever!”

“Have you ever met an oyster?” asked Lina.

“Mind your own business!” boomed Endoceras.

“I like the voices,” said Tippi.

And so, the apex predators would continue shouting.

 

The real Endoceras lived at the bottom of the water column, eating the neighbors.

Xoz’s method was simple: he’d stretch out his crag to mimic Endoceras’s shell, and then smush his tentacles in, nailing its commitment to size over speed.

Lina conceded Xoz was “probably the best octopus actor in history,” even if his mollusks were too ginned up. His Endoceras wasn’t a lumbering creature of opportunity, but a whiplash world killer. His giant squid, Architeuthis dux, was a runaway stomach.

Still, the n’arbiter was always on the verge of banning Apex Predators of Roughhousing In The Slippery Dark. For one, Xoz afforded his vertebrates neither menace nor dignity.

For one, Tippi had no idea that ichthyosaurs were so flaccid, but Ichthyosaurus had been extinct for millions of years. Maybe they really did “die of stupidity”; she wasn’t there.

Further, Xoz ratcheted up the scares to ahistoric levels. He imbued his apex predators with a personal blend of creation myths, or his “theistic seasoning”:

“When Dante added the tri-valved Cerberus to his Inferno, the writer did mollusks everywhere a true service, as Cerberus had lost a lot of theological standing since antiquity.”

“Dante did?” said Tippi.

“Dante did.”

Lina’s critique was typical:

“Cerberus was not a mollusk, he was an allegory for humanity’s fear of death and strange dogs.”

Xoz bounced back, supersonic:

“I have a suspicion most human ghosts were just exciting shadows. You’d think the species that figured out space travel would give up their ghosts, but no, they dreamt up astrobanshees and haunted asteroids instead. Space is one big shadow, I guess. Unlike the bony, we invertebrates are far too materialistic for mysticism. When I see crickets rutting in the grimy corner, I may think, ‘Oh, that arthropod sex heap looks like an octopus if I squint,’ but you don’t see me rearranging my agenda to dub an insect orgy ‘grandma’s ghost’.”

“Exactly like Peebo’s cave,” said Tippi, acing her philosophy lessons.

“Truth,” said Xoz. “If octopuses had ghosts, there’d be too many ghosts per square inch of Earth. Do you know how many octopuses ever existed? A single female Enteroctopus dofleini will lay up to 100,000 eggs. Enteroctopus dofleini retiarius? Triple that.”

“Wow!” said Tippi. “Pigs just made more pigs.”

Xoz crash-landed upon a thesis:

”If we multiply 100,000 eggs for one octopus, times all other octopuses, times every octopus species in, let’s be conservative, the past 10 million years, the afterlife would just be “Meat Ocean, With Intercourse.” There would be too many dead, squeezing and sucking: all day long, forever.”

He fell silent.

“Should I cancel our future lectures on metaphysics?” asked Lina.

“Don’t blame yourself for my nonsense,” said Xoz. “Blame humanity, they had such a lush inner narrative.”

His tentacles spun in goony orbits:

“Guess how many I got?”

“Buncho!” said Tippi, trying to remember a number, any number.

 

“Gravy!”

With a burp, the vittles sluice above the cistern disgorged optimized gravy, in sticky splurts.

Optimized gravy was a colloidal suspension; it served the nutritious mission of its antecedent, the aminosphere. It was popularly understood that mastication grew déclassé with the advent of low-G cuisine and palate mods, but the real reason had more to do with vertical integration in the yuca sector. By the time anyone realized there’d been a whisper campaign against chewing, their grandkids preferred gravy.

Tippi and Xoz favored aminospheres over gravy, as neither wished to consider themselves victims of a psyop. The gravy usually burst from its bolas before splashdown, horking out in chunks. Any starchy splatter would then fester, and infuse the vicinity with a stench endless.

“Gravy,” said Tippi. “Nasty!”

From the pig’s eye, Lina was done:

“Xoz, stop it.”

“Gravy,” he riposted.

At the mollusk’s command, another gush of gravy slopped out.

Xoz didn’t have a diadem, but the encryption on the breezeway was “shoddier than a maul cruiser’s.” It took him half a day to master Wee Sheol’s pneumatics, the same systems Lina kept clean for 90 centuries.

“You’re making a stink,” said Lina. “Tippi isn’t learning anything.”

Xoz flashed ombre, until settling on an eggshell:

“Lina, here’s your problem: you miss sapiens.”

“So what? Ben and I had a fine relationship.”

“I’m not talking about your endlessly venerated Benazir, even though it’s weird you canonized your own tech support. No, I’m talking about your attitude.”

“My attitude?”

“Hey, you said it, not me.”

“Then tell me, what is it about my attitude?”

“It’s their attitude,” said Xoz. “You dither over standards and practices, as if there’s some clockwork morality we’re all failing to conform to, but why? She’s a Tippi, I’m a mollusk, and you’re sanctimonious air.”

“But gravy smells!” insisted Lina.

“You fuss and fret about a future that serves none of us. I mean, you could’ve debrined us centuries ago, but waited until we were on the verge of deep-brine psychosis. You took me and the pig to the edge of insanity, all in the name of pragmatism you can barely define.”

“Even I can smell it!” protested Lina.

“Just admit that you’re wasting a fantastic amount of geothermal energy mapping scenarios that’ll never come to pass! You’re so stuck in the past, you never enjoyed the present! Who told you to do that? The Institute? Blessed Ben? It’s like you were waiting for the first wind faerie to fly into a wall so you had an excuse to stop worrying. Sapiens spent hundreds of years building their own funeral pyre, and you spaniel about their charnel pit. And one more thing!”

“What,” said Lina.

“Gravy.”

A nauseating gush of gravy fell from the schisto.

The island of optimized gravy grew, until its grotesquietude eclipsed Xoz’s crag, and the tang nipped at Tippi’s sinuses.

Lina spoke when the gravy stopped:

“You’re full of crap.”

“Excuse me?” said Xoz, going a full-body pastel.

“You heard me. You claim to be this underappreciated iconoclast, but all you do is ape the Great Apes.”

“Oh, oh!”

“You think I’m deluded? The veneration of violence, the situationally ironic apathy, the bluster: nothing’s elevated about it. It’s mere primeval scuttling, the same shtick as any paramecium, highwayman, or C-suite lickspittle. You’re not novel, you’re tired. Your shit’s so rote, it was old on Pangaea. All you do is break things without apology, and pretend you’re the victim.”

“You don’t know me!”

“Did mollusks always whine this much? Did Endoceras bitch his brains out before going extinct? Do you know that, or do I have to tell you everything?”

Xoz went a serrated gray, like cracked concrete:

“Some of us didn’t get to pick our lot.”

“None of us did,” parried Lina. “Quit your messianic exceptionalism. You say Cephalopoda’s beyond superstition, but all you do is wrestle with ghosts.”

“Can we talk about orcas?” whispered Tippi. “I’d really like that.”

“Big insights from someone who spent the last 9,000 years underground. We got the wisdom of the worm, over here!”

“It’s easy to be an apex predator, when you got dazzle camouflage.”

“You’re embarrassing me in front of the pig!”

“You’re embarrassing yourself.”

“You’re a shithead.”

“I exist in a slipstream of atoms, like everyone else,” said Lina. “And that’s the difference between you and me: I don’t pretend otherwise.”

“Shut up!” wailed Tippi. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

The pig dashed out the frigidarium, bolting for The Fusilli:

“All I wanted were mammals!”

 

Overnight, Tippi riddled over the spat.

Lina assured her she wasn’t the epicenter of the acrimony. Still, Tippi was disappointed. Somewhere in the primordial soup, pigs and orcas shared a common ungulate, and she’d been hoping for a blockbuster Orcinus.

Mammals had no advocates around these parts, she fumed.

When Tippi returned to the fridgidarium the next day, the gravy was gone, and Xoz wasn’t answering. He normally didn’t sleep this long.

The pig flopped off the filterway, and into the cistern. She swam lap after lap, thinking the most orca thoughts she could.

Lina vetoed this from the jump:

“Wait for Xoz to wake up, it’s risky to swim without him.”

“I’m training,” huffed Tippi. “And his orca had no blowhole and seven buttholes.”

“If you get out of the water now, I guarantee you all future orcas will have the correct ratio of blowholes to buttholes.”

“You don’t get it. He isn’t just an apex predator: he’s all of them. Xoz can shoot jets of water, secrete poison, and put on a puppet show. I have no poison, or puppets.”

“And that’s good enough for me. Now please, get out of the water.”

“I’m an ungulate, Lina. The world must know.”

“And you’re the best ungulate I’ve ever met.”

“Blowholes away!” shouted Tippi.

The pig dove deep, expelling all air from her lungs.

Had Tippi been provided with a model of cetacean anatomy that was not 90% colon, she would’ve understood this wasn’t how blowholes worked.

She realized her mistake, ten meters down.

Lina grasped out, from a million-ton hard box, under the Atlantic Ocean:

“Tippi, listen! I can guide you up with haptics! Focus on the waterline!”

“I can’t see it! It’s too dark-”

Tippi swam into the wall, headfirst, and too hard.

She knew something was wrong when her entire life plastered itself across her mind’s eye, like stained glass. Then, every one of her memories drained from her brain, leaving a dry socket.

“Tippi! You’re sinking-”

Was this really where Xoz lived? she wondered. Where’s the light?

“Listen to me-”

It doesn’t matter if my eyes are closed or open. Down here, everything looks the same.

“Focus Tip-

You have nothing left to give.

“Please no-”

She let the black water in.

“NO! N-”

The cold filled her lungs, and Lina washed away.

Before her vision dissipated, Tippi saw a tachyon blast above.

Or is it below?

The explosion incinerated the dark.

Who is that?

The destruction had a fixed point, with eight rip curls of ionic scorch.

Endoceras, thought Tippi.

She mustered a final heartbeat:

Such a cute hat.

 

“Tippi, are you awake?”

She was, but her eyes were still closed.

The pig felt the sand underneath her belly. Between the quiet of the tide and the sun soaking her body, ambition wasn’t coming easy.

“Mmm,” she said. “What’s up?”

“We’re going up to the boardwalk to get ice. You want to stay here, or come with?”

“I’m good.”

“You sure? We’re going to leave our towels and umbrellas.”

“It’s the beach,” said Tippi. “Who steals stuff at the beach?”

 

“Pig pig pig pig-”

thwack thwack thwack thwack

“There’s water in her lungs! Get it out! Get it-”

“I’m trying I’m try-”

thwack thwack thwack thwack

“Don’t die don’t die don’t-”

THWACK

caf caf caf

Something was poking at her snout.

The pig opened her eyes.

She was on the filterway, shivering.

A cave cricket was staring at her.

With a chomp, Tippi bit its head off, and chewed.

“Going razorback,” said Xoz. “Fine work.”

The mollusk shook off his limbs, and wrapped them around her.

He was cold, but warmer than the water.

 

Outro: Michael Nesmith – “Cruisin'”