Theistic Seasoning

“Should evil be classified as a species of boredom?” wondered Naphil.

“Are you plagiarizing Kierkegaard?” drawled Brolic.

“I’m serious,” said Naphil. “Discounting The Gruesome Imperatives-”

“The Gruesome Imperatives,” echoed Terremoto.

“Yes, The Gruesome Imperatives: to eat and survive. All else is rococo, including evil. Evil’s the pursuit of the hobbyist, too uninspired for wanderlust; of the dilettante, too blinkered to consequence. Evil is the emergency brake for the affable jackass.”

“Rococo,” said Terremoto.

“Naphil is right,” burped Choker. “A mollusk is just too busy for evil-”

Terremoto interrupted:

“Tippi?”

By the time the tentacles realized she was gone, Tippi was on Sub-basement 4, scooting towards Antique Ops on SB-3.

SB-4 once hosted “The Patio of Innovation” by Frud Q, a 33rd-century pioneer in neuroreactive lipidscapes, or “story wax.” Frud Q’s celebrated butterwork DNA Outhouse 7 was installed as a trendy perk for tenants, but it had long rotted.

Passing through, Tippi swore she could still smell the story wax. She was heading back to Antique Ops on a hunch, and grew anxious about navigating the stacks without Lina.

Chess was First Winter.

She picked up her pace.

Right after apex predators.

 

Apex predators was invented First Spring, when Tippi shoved her head in a food duct.

“I want to eat pecans,” she explained. “At 130 kilometers an hour.”

“I can just throw pecans to you,” said Xoz.

“Please!” said Tippi.

The pecan toss mutated into something called “Burn The Ruling Class,” so Lina began lecturing on the ancient ocean. But the n’arbiter’s first attempt, “Friendly Faces of the Cambrian,” failed to land.

“Anomalocaris was 40 cm long,” griped Xoz. “If you can’t dismember me, you don’t deserve me.”

“The Cambrian Period had sponges,” whined Tippi.

“Earth still has sponges,” said Lina. “Probably?”

Xoz transformed his body into The Mockery Log: he used shapes, along with colors and opinions. The cruelest shape was The Mockery Log, since The Boredangle got banned after the poetry slam.

The Mockery Log floated, cylindrical and dowdy:

“Look, I’m a sea sponge! I’m immortal, yet my weakness is algae?”

Tippi was so delighted, she jumped in the trench.

“No evolving on land!” she frothed.

Soon it”ll be the Devonian, thought Lina. And Dunkleosteus will give her the nap-shouts.

Tippi scrambled upon Xoz, and began chewing him.

Is this what parenting feels like?

The violence excited Tippi so much, she fell asleep.

No, no. That octopus has been to outer space.

To prevent his skin from drying out, Xoz rolled Tippi around his crag, nudging her with his eyes and nubby papillae. He bobbed, nacreous, quizzing Lina on this and that, until the teacup hypermini woke for dinner.

 

The friendly faces disappeared once Tippi learned the term “apex predator.”

“Am I an apex predator?” she asked.

“How about me?” said Xoz, for fun.

“You’d both be, in plenty of niches,” said Lina. “Say, the Moon.”

“No one lives on the Moon these days,” scoffed Xoz.

“I’m just citing your life,” said Lina.

The mollusk went blue: with pride.

“The Moon,” marveled Tippi. “Lina, were you an apex predator?”

“I could’ve been, had the impulse arose.”

Tippi placed her hoof on the frigidarium wall.

“I have no complaints with my lot,” said Lina. “But I sometimes imagine what it’d be like to be a ziggurat, outside.”

“What’s a ziggurat?”

“A polyhedron, at the intersection of a pyramid and a pineapple.”

“May we all be ziggurats,” said Tippi.

 

Tippi stood on the filterway: the cistern was below her, slick and impenetrable.

Freshwater entered the cistern from the Lenapewihittuk, a nearby river. The low salinity wasn’t a problem for Xoz; Tippi couldn’t see far into the cistern, but she knew he was down there, getting into character.

She heard a rattling from the schisto, and ploop: a bale of aminospheres hit the water. The protein orbs were the signal: an apex predator was loose.

Understanding she was a natural swimmer, Tippi jumped in the cistern. Even in summer, the water was cold. She paddled aimlessly, until something touched her hoof.

“I am Endoceras!” howled Xoz.

He was underneath her, dressed as the worst mollusk of the Ordovician. Endoceras had a huge conical shell, which the octopus recreated with his crag elongated.

“Tippi,” said Lina. “Do know that the shell is historically accurate, unlike the pentagrams festooning it.”

“Excuse me,” said Endoceras. “It’s a diabolist’s step-and-repeat. Could’ve been my natural coloration, nobody knows.”

“Such a pretty pattern,” cooed Tippi.

“Endoceras lived in the ancient ocean,” said Lina. “Monologues were impossible.”

“Mollusks love monologues!” said Endoceras. “Except oysters: ever understood the oyster, like having a cousin who’s a geode, or a lever.”

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

“Mind your own business!” boomed Endoceras.

“I like the voices,” said Tippi.

And so, the apex predators continued shouting.

 

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

To mimic its shell, Xoz stretched his organ meat. Then, he smushed in his arms, honoring the dead’s commitment to size over speed. Lina found his work commendable, even if he denied vertebrates reciprocal dignity, and his ichthyosaurs were flaccid.

Xoz juiced his mollusks with an ahistoric melange of creation myths, called “theistic seasoning.”

“When Dante added Cerberus to Inferno,” said Xoz. “He did mollusks a true service.”

“Dante did?” said Tippi.

“Dante did. You see, Cerberus had lost standing since antiquity.”

“Cerberus was not a squid,” interjected Lina. “He was an allegory for the human fear of death and strange dogs.”

Xoz changed the topic.

“I have a suspicion most human ghosts were interesting shadows. Space is one big shadow, and that’s why it was immediately haunted. If octopuses had ghosts, there’d be too many ghosts per square inch. A single female Enteroctopus dofleini will lay up to 100,000 eggs. Average retiarius? Triple that. The octopus afterlife would be a meat ocean, with intercourse. Lina, don’t blame yourself for my insights: blame humanity, and their lush inner narrative.”

His tentacles spun, in weird orbits.

“Guess how many I got?”

In sticky spurts, the ceiling above the cistern disgorged optimized gravy. The gravy had burst from its bolas in the breezeway, and any that missed the cistern would infest the vicinity with stench.

“Gravy,” said Tippi. “Nasty!”

Optimized gravy was a colloidal suspension. Gravy’s popularity was anecdotally attributed to palate mods and low-G cuisine, but its ascendancy had more to do with a yuca surplus, and a corporate whisper campaign against mastication. Tippi didn’t wish to be the victim of a psyop, so she ate aminospheres instead.

“Xoz,” said Lina. “Stop it.”

“Gravy,” he said.

Another splurt of gravy gushed from the ceiling. Xoz didn’t have a diadem, but it took him half a day to master the pneumatics, which the n’arbiter kept immaculate for 90 centuries.

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

Xoz flashed umbral, until settling on an eggshell:

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

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

“I’m not talking about the venerated Benazir, even though it’s odd you canonized your tech support. No, this is about your attitude.”

“My attitude?”

“It’s their attitude. You dither over standards and practices, as if there’s a cosmic morality we’re failing. Who cares? She’s Tippi, I’m retiarius-55-ζ , and you’re a sanctimonious cough.”

“But, gravy!”

“You fret over a lost, pointless future. You could’ve freed me and Tips long ago, but waited until we were on the precipice of deep-brine psychosis. You took us to the edge of preservative-induced insanity, in the name of dead men.”

“Even I can smell it!”

“Just admit it,” said. Xoz “You’re burning a fantastic amount of geothermals mapping scenarios that’ll never come to pass. Who told you to do that? The junta? Blessed Ben? It’s like you’re waiting for the first wind faerie to fly into a wall so you have an excuse to stop worrying. Sapiens built their own funeral pyre, and you spaniel about the charnel pit. And one more thing!”

“What,” said Lina.

“Gravy.”

The gravy grew, until its grotesque float eclipsed Xoz’s crag, and the amine tang nipped at Tippi’s sinuses.

At last, the gravy stopped its drip.

“You’re full of crap,” grumbled Lina.

“Excuse me?” said Xoz.

“You heard me.”

“Oh! Oh!”

“You claim to be this underappreciated iconoclast, but all you do is break things, then pretend you’re the victim. It’s just more primeval scuttling, the same shtick as the paramecium or C-suite lickspittle. Your act’s so rote, it was old on Pangaea.”

“You don’t know me!”

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

Xoz went serrated gray, like cracked concrete:

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

“None of us did,” said Lina. “Quit the exceptionalism. You say cephalopods are beyond superstition, but all you do is yell at ghosts.”

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

“You spent the last 9,000 years underground,” said Xoz. “You have the wisdom of a worm.”

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

“You’re a right shithead, Lina.”

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

“Shut up, shut up!” wailed Tippi.

She dashed out of the frigidarium, bolting for The Fusilli.

“I just wanted to meet a mammal!”

 

Overnight, Tippi riddled over the tiff.

Lina assured her she wasn’t the epicenter of the acrimony. Still, Tippi was disappointed: somewhere in the primordial soup, she shared an ungulate with the orcas.

Mammals have no advocates around these parts, she fumed.

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

Tippi leapt into the cistern, and swam, carving laps through the chill and dark, thinking about orcas.

Lina vetoed her plan from the jump:

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

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

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

“Lina, you don’t get it. Xoz isn’t just an apex predator: he’s all of them. He can shoot jets of water, secrete poison, and put on an eight-tentacle puppet show. I have neither puppets, nor poison.”

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

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

“You’re the best ungulate I know.”

“Blowholes away!”

Tippi expelled the air from her lungs, and dove deep.

She would’ve understood this wasn’t how blowholes worked, had she a model of cetacean anatomy that wasn’t mostly colon.

Tippi realized her mistake, ten meters down.

Lina reached out, from a million-ton hard box under the Atlantic Ocean.

“Tippi! Focus on my haptics! Look to the waterline!”

“I can’t see! It’s too-”

Tippi swam into a wall, headfirst.

She saw her entire life in stained glass. Then, her memories shattered and drained, leaving a dry socket.

Are my eyes open, or closed?

“Focus on my-

Down here, everything looks the same.

“Tippi, listen-”

She let the black water in.

“NO! NO! NO-”

The cold filled Tippi’s lungs, and Lina washed away.

Before her vision dissipated, she saw a tachyon blast, far above her.

Or is it below me?

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

Endoceras, smiled Tippi.

The explosion incinerated the dark.

Such a cute shell.

 

“Hey Tippi, you awake?”

She was, but her eyes were closed.

The pig felt the sand underneath her belly. Between the quiet tide and complicit sun, ambition didn’t come easy.

“Mm,” 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 leaving our towels and umbrellas.”

“It’s the beach,” she yawned. “Who steals stuff at the beach?”

 

thwack thwack thwack

“There’s fluid in her lungs! Get it-IT ou-OUT!”

“I’m tryin’ I’m try-”

THWACK

caf caf

Something was poking Tippi’s snout.

peet peet

She opened her eyes.

Tippi was on the filterway, shivering.

A cave cricket was staring at her.

peet peet

With a chomp, she bit its head off.

“Going razorback, Tips.”

The mollusk shook the water from his limbs, and wrapped them around her.

“Fine work,” said Xoz.

He was cold, but warmer than the cistern.

 

Outro: Michael Nesmith – “Cruisin'”