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 is 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 Dr. Pods. “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 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 on SB-4 as a trendy perk for tenants, but it had long rotted.

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.

Chess was First Winter.

She picked up her pace.

That was after apex predators.

 

Apex predators went as so: Lina told Xoz facts about extinct horribles, and Xoz gave Tippi an education in fear. Apex predators was invented First Spring, when Tippi shoved her head in a food duct.

“I wanted 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 Period, failed to land.

“Sure, Anomalocaris ruled the seas,” said Xoz. “But that was 500 million years ago, and Anomalocaris was 40 centimeters.”

“The Cambrian had sponges,” whined Tippi.

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

Xoz crunched his body into The Mockery Log.

Along with colors and opinions, the mollusk used shape to communicate. The cruelest shape was The Mockery Log, for The Boredangle was banned after the poetry slam.

The Mockery Log floated, cylindrical and dowdy.

“Look, I’m the sea sponge!” said Xoz. “I’m immortal, but my weakness is algae.”

Tippi was so delighted, she jumped in the trench.

“No evolving on land!” she frothed.

Her hooves missed the sea sponge, yet The Mockery Log perished.

Soon it”ll be the Devonian, thought Lina. And Dunkleosteus will give Tippi the nap-shouts. Is this what parenting feels like?

Tippi stood on Xoz’s bag-o’-face, and chewed it.

No, that octopus has been to outer space.

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

 

Once Tippi learned the term “apex predator,” the friendly faces disappeared.

“Am I an apex predator?” she said.

“How about me?” asked Xoz, for fun.

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

“Nobody lives on the Moon these days,” scoffed Xoz. “Don’t patronize me.”

“Just citing your life,” said Lina.

Xoz turned blue: with pride.

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

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

Tippi rested 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, and outside.”

“What’s a ziggurat?”

“A polyhedron,” said Lina. “At the intersection of pyramid and pineapple.”

“May we all be ziggurats,” said Tippi.

 

Tippi was positioned on the filterway. The cistern laid below, slick and impenetrable.

Freshwater entered the cistern from the Lenapewihittuk, the river nearby; its low salinity wasn’t a problem for Xoz. Tippi couldn’t see the bottom of the cistern, but she knew the mollusk 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 on the loose.

Tippi jumped in the cistern, understanding she was a natural swimmer. Even in the summer, the water was cold.

She paddled around, until something slithered against her hoof.

“I am Endoceras!” screamed Xoz.

The mollusk was underneath her, deep, and dressed as the worst mollusk of the Ordovician Period.

“My schemes are depraved!”

Endoceras had a huge conical shell, and Xoz depicted the shell with his crag elongated.

“That shell is historically accurate,” said Lina. “Unlike the pentagrams festooning it.”

“Such a fun pattern,” cooed Tippi.

“It’s a diabolist’s step-and-repeat,” said Xoz. “Could’ve been Endoceras‘s natural coloration. Who knows?”

“Also, no more funny voices,” said Lina. “Endoceras lived in the ancient ocean, monologues were impossible.”

“Mollusks love monologues, except the oyster. Never understood oysters, 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 Xoz’s work commendable, even if the octopus denied vertebrates reciprocal dignity, and his ichthyosaurs were flaccid. The problem was, Xoz juiced his mollusks with an ahistoric melange of creation myths.

“I call it theistic seasoning,” said Xoz. “And so, Dante added Cerberus to Inferno, doing mollusks a true service.”

“Dante did?” said Tippi.

“Dante did. Cerberus had lost theological 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. You think they’d give up the ghosts, but space is one big shadow, so the poltergeists moved to asteroids. If octopuses had ghosts, there’d be too many ghosts per square inch. Do you know how many octopuses have ever existed? A single female Enteroctopus dofleini will lay up to 100,000 eggs. Average retiarius? Triple that. So if we multiply 100,000 eggs times every octopus ever, the afterlife would be ‘meat ocean, with intercourse.’ Lina, don’t blame yourself for my nonsense. Blame humanity, they had such a lush inner narrative.”

His tentacles spun, in creepy orbits.

“Guess how many I got?”

The ceiling above the cistern disgorged optimized gravy, in sticky spurts. The gravy had burst from its bolas, and horked out in chunks. The splatter that missed the water would fester, and infuse the vicinity with stench.

“Gravy,” said Tippi. “Nasty!”

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

“Xoz,” said Lina. “Stop it.”

“Gravy,” he replied.

Another gush of gravy dribbled from the ceiling. Xoz didn’t have a diadem, but 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. “And 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, and it’s weird you canonized your own tech support. No, I’m talking about your attitude.”

“My attitude?”

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

“But, gravy!” insisted Lina.

“You fret over a future that serves none of us. I mean, you could’ve freed me and Tippi centuries ago, but waited until we were on the verge of deep-brine psychosis. You took me and Tips 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 far in the past, you can’t enjoy 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,” said Xoz.

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

Lina waited for the last of the gravy to stop its drip.

“You’re full of it,” said the supercomputer.

“Excuse me?” said Xoz.

“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? All you do is break things, and then pretend you’re the victim. There’s nothing elevated about it, just more primeval scuttling, the same shtick as the paramecium or C-suite lickspittle. You’re not novel: you’re tired. Your act’s so rote, it was old on Pangaea.”

“You don’t know me!”

“Did mollusks always cry 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 cephalopods are beyond superstition, but all you do is wrestle with ghosts.”

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

“Cutting 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 Tippi!”

“You’re embarrassing yourself.”

“You’re a real 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!” wailed Tippi. “Shut up, shut up!”

She dashed out the frigidarium, bolting for The Fusilli.

“I just wanted to see a mammal!”

 

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, she shared a common ungulate with the orcas, and had been hoping for a blockbuster Orcinus.

Mammals have 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.

Tippi leapt into the cistern. She swam, carving laps through the chill and dark, thinking the most orca thoughts she could.

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.”

“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 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.”

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

“Blowholes away!”

The teacup hypermini dove deep, expelling all air from her lungs. Had Tippi a model of cetacean anatomy that wasn’t mostly colon, she would’ve understood this wasn’t how blowholes worked.

She realized her mistake, ten meters down.

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

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

“I can’t see! It’s too-”

Tippi swam into a wall, headfirst.

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.

Is this really where Xoz lives? Where’s the light?

“Tippi! You’re sinking-”

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

“Focus on my-

You have nothing left to give.

Tippi let the black water in.

“NO! NO! NO-”

The cold filled her lungs, and Lina washed away.

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

Or is it below me?

The explosion incinerated the dark.

Who is that?

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

Endoceras, smiled Tippi.

She mustered a final breath.

Such a cute shell.

 

“Tippi, you awake?”

She was, but her eyes were closed.

Tippi 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 leaving our towels and umbrellas.”

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

 

“Tips Tips Tips-”

thwack thwack thwack

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

“I’m trying I’m try-”

thwack thwack thwack

“Don’t die don’t die don’t-”

THWACK

caf caf caf

Something was poking Tippi’s snout.

Shivering, she opened her eyes.

She was on the filterway, and a cave cricket was staring at her.

With a chomp, Tippi bit its head off.

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

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

He was cold, but warmer than the cistern.

 

Outro: Michael Nesmith – “Cruisin'”