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It was ten o’clock on a Thursday morning and I hadn’t had a single cigarette in ten years and I had skipped breakfast and I was talking to Danielle in HR and she wasn’t listening and this moment was old, it was a moment that had existed long before I knew it would and would exist long I was dead, I had simply stumbled into it and for a brief moment was encompassed inside its stultifying warmth, its off-brand air freshener that couldn’t quite cover up the raw fish smell, its barely-flickering edge-of-the-eyeball faulty ceiling lighting, its desperation, its lies. 

“Katherine,” Danielle was saying with the sort of slow friendly voice you used on spooked dogs, “Bartholomew isn’t stealing your lunch.  We’ve talked about this before: he doesn’t even work on the days your lunch is going missing.”

“It’s not about Bartholomew.”  My lunch had gone missing again today and I knew for a fact he was taking it somehow, but it wasn’t.  Not this time. 

To her credit, Danielle didn’t ignore me.  To her detriment, she raised her eyebrows.  “Alright then, and I apologize for assuming.  It’s been a long morning, but that was uncalled for.  What can I help you with?”
“The seals are plotting to escape,” I said and I knew I’d already lost her before she opened her mouth. 

“This sounds like a matter for your supervisor.  Is there a problem?”
“She won’t listen to me and told me to talk to you.”
“I see.  How much time off have you been getting recently?”

“Listen, the sea lions are orchestrating it.  I know it.  You’ve got to believe me.”

***

“She didn’t believe me,” I said.  “And I’m off tomorrow.”

The sea lion arfed gently up at me with his toothy maw and his big innocent eyes.  Hot rancid fish breathe washed over me. 

“Gloat while you can.  I’m onto you chucklefucks.”

He arfed again and slid into the water.  Three seconds later a colourful beach ball was shot at my face with pinpoint accuracy, forcing my retreat. 

It was absolutely a smirking wink.  Those little shits were the biggest liars at Sealworld – they weren’t even real seals, for fuck’s sake, they had external ears and could use their flippers as feet.  They were born deceitful, nursed on falsehoods and raised to insincerity, and no matter how many times they bobbled their balls and splashed for crowds and dove through rings they would not change.  Ever. 

Something crunched underfoot and I bent down low.  I’d stepped in dirt.  This was a vital clue.  They were tunneling.  Full on-Shawshanking it; probably dumping the tunnel dirt onto the dirt path outside their exhibit so nobody would notice and think it was just normal dirt path dirt instead of sneaking seal escape tunnel dirt. 

I took a breathe.

Okay.  That had almost gotten away from me.  I had to consider this logically: there was no way the sea lions could possibly be digging a secret escape tunnel.

Not without help. 

***

“Alright Herbie, open your ears and listen,” I hissed in Big Herb’s face.  “’Fess up, and you get the good stuff.  Clam up, and you get a fat lip.  Now let’s hear that canary sing: HAVE YOU BEEN HELPING THE SEA LIONS ESCAPE?!”

Big Herb honked loudly in distress and made a halfhearted swipe at the fish I was dangling above him.  Goddamnit, elephant seals were even worse listeners than my last six exes. 

“Have you been paying any attention at all Herbert?  SPILL THE BEANS!”

Big Herb rolled listlessly onto his back and pretended he was dead. 

I narrowed my eyes at his gut.  “Looking a little slim there, Herbie.  You’re meant to be nearly four tons, but that paunch looks barely three and a half.  What’s got you burning calories?  And don’t think you can lie your way out of this: I checked the feed logs.  You’ve been eating a full meal on schedule every day.  All that energy is either going into blubber or into effort, and it ain’t blubber.  Where’ve they been ordering you to burrow?  Are you planning to get into the sewage system or just get outside the property walls and make a break for the ocean?  You can talk and be rewarded, or stay hushed up and get nothing at all.”
Big Herb flipped back over with ponderous speed, reared bolt-upright to his full height of eight feet, and snapped the fish from my hand with such force that I almost fell after it into his mouth.  He consumed it with conspicuous satisfaction and a lot of unnecessary smacking noises. 

“You’ll regret this,” I told him as I tried to massage feeling back into my arm.  God, it was just shy of outright sprained.  If I didn’t have bigger fish to fry I’d have gone to medical to make sure I didn’t have a tweaked ligament or mangled muscle or whatever.  Herb wasn’t talking, but his silence was incriminating enough all on his own.  Someone was keeping him quiet, and there was only one person in the whole park that could zip his lips. 

***

I had to squeeze past three security barriers to get close enough to interrogate my next subject, but then again she was a VIP.  Only a handful ever kept in captivity, the crown jewel of Sealworld, the queen of the show, the apple of management’s eye, the breadwinner of the family, the provider of our paychecks.

Terri the Terrible. 

I rang the little bell next to her feeding platform with the pole provided.  My arms had received enough trauma from Herb to risk worse. 

She was a fickle bitch, but nobody else at Sealworld could possibly hold any power over Big Herb – Terri was less than a sixth his body weight, but all she had to do was smile and she could get him to climb a tree.  She had a very winning smile.  People would do just about anything to see it.  From a safe distance.

I rang the little bell again. 

Unlike most of Sealworld’s captive-born stock, Terri had come to us by chance after an unlucky incident involving a boat propeller left her stranded on a beach as a lanky teenager, bleeding and unhappy.  Naturally, we’d volunteered to take care of her, and once she was with us she proved to be unwilling to leave again.  And the crowds weren’t exactly clamouring for her to leave either. 

I hit the little bell as hard as I could with the stick.  “For fuck’s sake Terri, what’s keeping you?”

Something snorted softly and wetly behind me and the primal instincts that underlie even the most complacent and comfortable human inspired me to lose my grip on the bell-ringing stick instantly, sending it spiralling into the depths of Terri’s tank.  Well, that was fifty bucks down the drain.  I spun around, ten thousand steaming curses ready to depart my tongue, and felt every single one of them shrivel up and die when confronted with the view that was the curious, earnest, slightly-smiling face of an adult female leopard seal.

Terri had grown a little since I’d last seen her this close.  Now she was a powerful independent woman with a skull bigger than a large grizzly bear, disproportionately massive jaws for tearing flesh, and an elongated, sleek, earless, nigh-whiskerless profile that  made her look oddly like some kind of giant sea reptile, possibly a mosasaur.  A very small mosasaur, since she was only about twelve feet long, but still oh god still she was smiling at me. 

Her teeth were really very large. 

“Hi,” I managed.

Terri’s mouth opened a little farther and I reflexively backed up.  Leopards had been one of the top causes of death for hominids for most of their history, although the relationship between cats and Terri was far closer etymologically than anything else. 

“Hi,” I repeated. 

Terri slithered up against the side of the trainer bucket in a friendly and disarming manner, finger-length canines fully displayed out of love and hunger and happiness and hunger and terrifying midnight-black nightmare imaginings and profound, deep, and true hunger. 

“Hi?” I asked

Terri blew air out her nostrils and experimentally bonked her head against the extremely thin metal shell between me and her. 

“Bye,” I said.  And I left, with dignity fully intact and palms well-moisturized. 

She was definitely up to something.  I just didn’t want to be rude about it. 

***

It was one AM on Friday morning and I woke up and checked my clock and I’d fallen asleep ten minutes ago.

Fuck this. 

***

It was one thirty-six AM on Friday morning and I’d just broken into my workplace armed only with a spare keyring and last month’s passcode to the security locker that still worked and a tranquilizer rifle loaded with enough fast-acting muscle relaxants to calm down a botoxing victim.  My flashlight skittered from hedge to fence to wall to silent loudspeaker to abandoned concession stand to deeply suspicious owl (probably hoping to find leftover fish guts, the moocher) to the edge of the seal lion exhibit. 

I flashed the water.  Nothing.

I checked the beach.  Nothing.  Every large dark lump resolved into a rock or sunshade.  There were only three of four sea lions home. 

“Got you, motherfuckers,” I mumbled through numb lips.  “Got you.”  But then I twitched the beam of light to the side and saw something new.

The security run was jammed open, both gates gaping wide. 

Ice seized my heart.  This was much worse than a tunnel.  They’d learned to open doors.  And, as I turned and ran back to the security office, it occurred to me that they could be anywhere.  I paged through monitors in a blur of terror and found that exactly three exhibits were empty. 

Oh god.  Darting Terri would be stressful enough, but did I even have enough tranquilizer to bring down Big Herb?  It would be like trying to sedate a truck with a doctor’s reflex hammer.  I’d be better off feeding him the rifle and hoping he choked on it. 

A quiet alert popped up on the monitor and flashed twice before vanishing quietly.  Someone had just entered the director’s office, then entered the correct passcode on the alarm system. 

I’d never seen Director Huxley work more than two days a week, Monday and Wednesday preferred, and for longer than three hours after lunch.  Pre-covid. 

But why would they want to break into his office?  If they could already open secure doors, then why would they need to get into his office to break out?  They wouldn’t.  So they weren’t breaking out at all, they were-

I realized, as my foot kicked open the shattered door to Huxley’s office, that my body had been working without my conscious intervention again, which probably meant I needed to request a higher dosage again.  The battered remains of the door slammed wide, rebounded off the fleshy mass of Big Herb’s flank, and stubbed the hell out of my toe.  He orfed in protest, but I had a bead on the computer and the shocked, innocent expression of the sea lion seated at it, one dextrous flipper wrapped around keyboard and mouse each.

-stealing it. 

“Drop the computer,” I said in a surprisingly steady voice for someone less than three feet from the world’s largest member of the Carnivora.  “Drop it or get darted.  You need him to complete the operation, don’t you?  Big Herb, you took out the door.  Terri, you kept everyone in line.  But without those clever little false-flipper-fingers you can’t use the computer.  And without it, you can’t sign over controlling interest in Sealworld to yourselves.”

Terri slowly slid out from behind the desk, eyes flat and menacing and mouth unsmiling, which somehow was even worse than when I could count her teeth. 

“Even if you kill me, as long as I squeeze this trigger first I win.  You’ll be out long enough for the morning shift to get here and clean this up.”
“Already here,” said a voice behind me. 

I flinched, jumped, and spun my head over my shoulder in a way guaranteed to sprain.  Bartholomew stood behind me at a slight angle, eyes wide in shock, his own tranquilizer rifle in his hands and that gormless look on his face that I hated so much and was deeply happy to see right now. 

“Cover me so I can get a call off,” I said, “or make it yourself, just OW.”

I looked down at the part of me that hurt, which had a large tranquilizer dart stuck in it.  Bartholomew reached out and yanked it loose before it could depress a full dose or maybe not boy that was fuzzy. 

“I’m sorry, Kathy,” I heard him say as if from a great distance.  “But they made me an offer for my keys, and your sandwiches were just so good.”

***

In the end, not much changed.  Some executives got fired, some got appointed, typical stuff.  We buy more expensive fish now, so I guess that mattered to an accountant somewhere.  But nothing major. 

Except now every time we sign off our shift, we have to spend two minutes balancing a beach ball on our noses first. 

Goddamned sea lions.   

The dawn horizon was barely a hint on the edge of night; the stars had only just begun to fade away; and the water had turned a particular shade of colour that could not be described, let alone recaptured.  The speedboat’s wake churned through it like an eggbeater, and the complexities of the froth captured a certain primal beauty, purity, and power unmatched by anything Joshua had ever known except for the smile of his daughter and the duffle bag full of cocaine resting at his feet.

It was one of those mornings where you couldn’t stop whistling.  The sun was finally arriving in big bold splashes that dyed the clouds and oh, look at the red, and the red, and the purple, and the red, and the red, and the blue!

Oh, the red and the blue were also from the coast guard.  Well shucks. 

And so, with an unburdened soul and a heart full of complex emotion, Joshua lifted up his duffle bag full of cocaine, jammed a set of lead weights inside it as an anchor, kissed its surface once as gently as a mother’s love, and hurled it overboard so he wouldn’t be sent to jail forever.

It went ‘splash!’

The coast guard was pulling up beside him when he remembered he had a very illegal handgun in his glove compartment and he threw that overboard too. 

It went ‘splish!’

“What the shit was that?” demanded the first coast guard to step aboard Joshua’s speedboat, who was clearly much larger, handsomer, and smarter than he was. 

“Nothing,” said Joshua.  “Maybe a saltie.  They like this time of day.”

“And you’re out here tooling around in this little thing?  You’re playing with fire, you dumbass.  Speaking of which, mind if we take a look around?”
“Of course not,” said Joshua. 

The coast guards turned his boat upside down and inside out and even poked around inside the engine, but found nothing because as much as he’d wish otherwise, Joshua had only ever owned a single duffle bag full of cocaine. 

“Guess that’s that,” said the second coast guard, who was not as large or handsome as the first but still obviously much smarter than Joshua.  “Looks like you’re clean, Josh.”
“Please don’t call me that,” begged Joshua.  “My mother called me that.”
“Sure, sure,” said the first coast guard laughingly.  She looked over the side of the boat into the lovely water.  “Jesus christ, you weren’t lying about the salties though.  Check that motherfucker out!  He must be the size of the boat.”

It occurred to Joshua that the first coast guard was looking precisely where he’d thrown his duffle bag full of cocaine, and a curious horror began to swim into his knees. 

“I don’t know where it came from,” his mouth lied before his brain could catch up. 

“I’m sorry?” asked the second coast guard.  “I thought you said there were salties about.”

“Yes there are,” agreed Joshua’s mouth, trying to make up for its mistakes.  “I don’t know where the duffle bag came from,” it continued, digging in deeper. 

“What bag?”

Joshua’s brain finally wheezed its way to the front of his priority queue, examined everything his mouth had said in horror, then put the picture of a saltwater crocodile that had swallowed an entire duffle bag of cocaine into his mind with such vividness that he simply shrieked “FUCK!” and hurled himself at the boat’s edge with such speed that the first coast guard spontaneously judo-slammed him into it out of concern for both of their safety.  This also put Joshua’s jaw over the edge of the railing and his panic out of the way of his eyeballs, and for a long, long moment there was nothing for him to do but hurt and see, and this is what he saw:

It was a truly magnificent saltwater crocodile, seventeen foot if he were an inch, with a few scars from boat propellers on his broad, powerful snout to lend him character and a calculated gleam in his eyes to show his intellect.  There was no hint of a duffle bag – no shreds of nylon floating on the surface, no plastic buckles amidst his teeth, no sheen of a zipper caught amidst his scales. 

Joshua sighed a deep, long sigh as the saltie rose a little higher out of the water into full view, ruining the effect of his majesty by revealing his ridiculous little dangling legs.  He was safe.

“What the hell is that stuck on its leg?” asked the first coast guard, ruining everything.

“NOT A DUFFLE BAG!” yelled Joshua. 

“Of course it isn’t,” agreed the second coast guard.

The crocodile rolled gently onto one side and the leg in question rose just above the waterline with reptilian calculation. 

“Oh,” said Joshua’s mouth.  “That’s my gun.”

“What?” said the first coast guard, and then “BANG!” and then ‘splash!’

“Holy—” said the second coast guard, and then “BANG!” and then ‘thud.’

Joshua’s brain was still trying to catch up when it went “BANG!”  The rest of Joshua gave up and followed its lead overboard.

He probably went ‘splish!’

***

Morning had taken off its shoes by the time the crocodile walked into town.  He moseyed, as demanded by biology and mood: each stride steady and calculated and inevitable, accompanied by a long, thorough sashay from head to hips to the very trim of the tip of the tail.  He ignored the sidewalks and the traffic median alike and strode with confidence through the whole of the road, the wind and bob of his body taking him insolently from one lane to the other through the whole of his passage.  Oncoming cars slowed, veered, stopped, and reversed.  Bicyclists and pedestrians stared and pointed and ducked into shopfronts and exchanged stupid and empty statements.  A single, incredibly bold or tired trucker was all that remained, rumbling through the half-kilometer that separated them from a half-ton of reptilian majesty until at the very last minute they slammed on their brakes and their horn and their outrage all at once. 

The crocodile halted in the road. 

“GET A MOVE OUT YOU BIG FUCKING LIZARD,” yelled the trucker, arm and head and fury emerging from their cab like a big angry set of red tomatoes. 

The crocodile turned.  He was a biomechanical operation, sinews and muscles red and white moving and tugging and pulling a powerful cylinder of a critter until he had half-circled over himself and half—raised his front free of the ground.  His lovely reflective eyes glittered in the faint light from the truck’s headlights, almost free of the nighttime and turning invisible in the coming day. 

“G’WAN, MOVE IT!” said the trucker.  And honked. 

“BANG!” said the crocodile. 

There was a sudden, sharp silence, broken very rudely by the slumping of the trucker’s corpse atop their steering wheel and comfortably settling their belly button into their horn.  The sound became unbearable to human hearing after about twenty seconds, heralding the crocodile’s walk.  It also obscured it heavily, which was why the proprietor of the pub he turned towards had no inkling he was there until he slammed down the door with a single forceful tackle. 

The woman sleeping behind the bar lurched to her feet, one hand groping under the counter. “Fuck off we’re cloh goddamn what the HELL-“

The crocodile had raised his left foreleg.  The pistol glittered in it, still damp from the bay.  Rust would probably set in quickly at this rate. 

“Oh.  Oh god.”

The gun, held with rock-solid grip in a leg designed to stomp, stub, and occasionally paddle, gently bobbed up and down. 

“Is it…. is it the cash?  I’ll have to open the safe but I can give you the-”

The head, multiple feet long, armoured with a single great cracked carapace-like mask of scale, shook gently from side to side, moved by muscles that could disintegrate bone and turn fat and muscle to bloody water. 

“But what fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck did Ethan send you?”

Sideways motions were simple, natural.  To nod took more effort: the legs pushed up, then lowered again; the neck craned to the sky and put the snout to the sky before lowering it again.  Then repeat.  Then repeat.

The bartender’s shirt looked like it had been dipped in sweat, filling the air with two different kinds of swamp.  “Please, you’ve got to tell him, you’ve got to tell him: I didn’t MEAN to miss payment, it’s a leap year right, it’s a leap year, and I was only a little short because I had to pay my mother’s hospital bills and and and there’s a new beat cop and I had to grease ‘im and and and and oh please oh please oh please oh PLEASE”

The crocodile didn’t watch.  He looked at the bartender, but he didn’t watch.  He registered her as a collection of three-dimensional objects housing something he needed. 

“OH”

“BANG!”

***

The crocodile’s departure was less ostentatious.  There were a lot of police holding everyone else’s attention and THEIR attention was all on the endlessly honking truck some asshole had left a dead trucker in and figuring out who had to move the body so a seventeen-foot Crocodylus porosus was small potatoes respectively.  Anyone else who saw him noticed he was walking away from the water and probably figured he’d be caught sooner or later, and if they’d seen him shoot the trucker they were pretty sure they’d imagined it so why not stop paying attention quickly so they don’t remember imaginary things like children or idiots. 

The crocodile’s second walk ended five blocks away at a perfectly ordinary office building, where he took the service elevator to minimize the number of locked doors between him and his meeting, which was a short, angry asshole with an expensive haircut lurking behind a very expensive and large desk that cost sixteen hundred times more than the room it was in. 

“Did you do the job?” he demanded. 

The crocodile nodded.  This was shorter, curter, brought less of the spine and the tail into play.  Nobody was here to show off: this was business. 

“Good.  Good.  The bosses doubted me, y’know?  They thought you were too stupid to pull it off, they thought reptiles were basically big fat bug-brained frogs.  Me?  I’m not just a washed-up hitman that doesn’t know anything but guns and ammo – I paid fucking attention in biology.  I knew you were hungry for it, I knew you had a killer’s instinct, I knew you had the experience to do it, and now I’ve been proven right again.  Now for your bonus.”  The asshole smiled humourlessly as he pulled out a high-powered game rifle.  “Hold still and this won’t hurt; you’ll get to be the most expensive pair of boots ever made.” 

The crocodile raised his left foreleg. 

The short, angry asshole glared at the gun as if it were a dead bartender who’d owed him money, lip curling like a sun-dried strip of meat on a riverbank. 

“Don’t bluff me, you damned skink.  I have every moment of your performance out there recorded and I know for a fact that half-a-brain numbnuts Josh Fink never kept that thing more than half-loaded: you’re out of bullets.”
The crocodile coughed.  Then hacked.  Then, with a thick slosh of mucus and bile and loose saltwater in its jaws, he spoke.  “Stashed a spare clip of magazines.” A moment more of careful gargling and rearrangement of fluids: “In my cloaca.”

“A spare WHAT?!” exclaimed the asshole.

“In my-”

“Excuse me, you stashed a CLIP of MAGAZINES?  Excuse me, you MOTHERFUCKING IGUANA??  What next, you going to call a bullet a CARTRIDGE?!  You stupid, stupid, STUPID MOTHERF”

The crocodile’s jaws closed around his upper torso without ceremony before spinning violently, thrashing him around the room until his limbs came off. 

***

The gun was found in a public garbage can three days later.  No fingerprints. 

He’d been tempted to keep it for sentimental value, but he was a professional.  No attachments. 

Although the concept of a ‘high-way to hell’ is centuries old, when stripped of obfuscational metaphor these ancient roads more resembled footpaths than anything and were seldom-trodden by any but the most brave and foolhardy – and even those often preferred to risk transport on the more-common-but-perilous bat.  The first seeds of the modern hellish superhighway system are many, but its most obvious starting point can arguably be pinned at the eternal damnation of Henry Ford to the asphalt boilers.  If it’s arguable, then argue it, do not simply state it and leave it at that. 
Ford was as quick to speak of his own value as many of the powerful in life are, but unusually enough his claims found a receptive audience in the local baron, who found herself tired by the troubles of managing nightmares for her daily tours of her lamentable demesne (a diet of sweet dreams sufficient to keep an adult nightmare in rideworthy health was as complex and expensive to procure then as it was now, and their tempers were no kinder).  More fortuitously still, said baron proved to be absent-minded enough that following her shackling of Ford to a drawing-table she became distracted by assassination attempts and familial bothers and let him be to provide not only properly-itemized blueprints for an automobile but of the factory floor that might produce them.  The prototype vehicle proved an ostentatiously noisy and therefore desirable ride, and the idea of the profit to be gained through them led to first one, then two, then three production lines.  The booming of business and combustion engines resonated far and wide throughout the asphalt ridges in but a few scant years, and soon word of this strange fad reached beyond its boiling backwaters and into deeper and more august ears.  Such drama does not become a history essay; this is NOT a creative writing course, and if it were you would be receiving harsh marks for excess.

Interest in automobiles was hot, with demand not far behind, but there remained a key obstacle: traversable roads.  Travel and hell had never been given reason for ease before; what was the point in a journey that wasn’t harsh and cruel, and what obstacle to your enemies was a well-trodden path?  But cars, even cars forged with hellish steal and shod with wheels rubberized with the sobs of the damned, required some evenness of surface to ensure a ride that was merely ‘rough’ as opposed to ‘self-destructive.’  Quotation marks identify quotations which demand citations; they are not to be sprinkled for idle decoration.  In the backwater asphalt ridges long stretches of barren and blackened ground were readily come by, but more glamorous rings such as the scorched sea or the murder spires possessed no such monotony in their terrain.  Adequate driving surfaces would have to be constructed in some of the most demanding environments known to any departed being. 

Prior hellish efforts in this vein were constructed from good intentions, which on exposure to harsh enough reality would curdle readily into a sort of molten brick that would seize most readily to the nearest solid object and congeal into an immovable stain upon the world.  The principal objection raised to this was scarcity; private footpaths might be made by them, or perhaps a single great road, but for general use one might as well suggest that the streets of London or Shanghai or Timbuktu be paved in gold and platinum.  No matter how great the demand, the supply simply wasn’t there.  Much effort was expended on locating a suitable substitute, an endeavor that was lent a serious setback when Ford’s demands for an increased share of the profits led to him being sewn face–first into a cupholder by his then-employer.  Evidence?  Argument?  Anything that isn’t an assertion?  Innovation came from a surprising source: a chance mugging of a visiting and inattentive cherubim in an alleyway of the central inferno led to the procurement of a small handful of stray partially-crooked prayers, several of which were subsequently purchased by an overworked alchemist who fell asleep at his workstation and accidentally set himself on fire.  As his remains were being scraped free from his chair, it was noticed by the janitor that the prayers in the unfortunate alchemist’s pocket had been fused by the heat with a few absent-minded thoughts that had been left lying around his workstation, producing a vast amount of a nigh-ephemeral substance.  The janitor quickly stole all of it, was mugged on her way home, and once the mugger made it to the nearest patent office and was discreetly murdered by the on-duty clerk who was then usurped by her supervisor the rest, as hell knows it, was history.  This construes libel and I would advise you remove it unless you are fond of extremely physical practical legal education. 

Thoughts and prayers were the ideal construction material for roads: they were cheap, plentiful, and came apart with minimal wear and tear, leading to yearly maintenance work that would ensure a constant stream of treasure and favours to anyone providing them.  Six competing companies all sprang up within weeks, each of which battled each other in gruesome ‘road wars’ that devastated infrastructure for miles around until it was revealed that all six were in actuality engaged in a conspiratorial monopoly whose illusory feud provided them all with plenty of construction work.  All levels of staff deemed important enough to be responsible were subsequently flayed, liquefied, drained, and repurposed as road paint before being replaced with mortified toadies as per standard, and with that squabbling beyond them hell’s road system boomed from the Styx to the Abyss with a speed hitherto undreamt of.  Highways and byways evolved and unspooled; goods began to speed from dock to destination; Would you care to expand on this or are you just slipping it in for the sake of hearing yourself talk? and the distance between the hinterlands and the heartland began to erode, which immediately led to the next great displacement event caused by the infernal automobile: the urbanization of hell. 

The infernopolises had always been the prime grounds for making money, and with transit rendered so much faster and easier more than ever flocked to them, leaving hell’s backwaters settling deeper and deeper into stifling deoxygenated swamps (often literally – e.g., the case of the burnwater boglands).  With the corresponding rise in the cities of both the newly-flush automobile elite of corporate CEOs, CFOs, directors, vice-presidents, vicer-presidents, and department heads and the vast tangled underclass of road workers, furnace tenders, prayer miners, thought melters, and assembly labourers, both in close proximity, a new goal was given to those who had already attained everything they wanted: getting as far away from their serfs as physically possible.  The ultrawealthy immediately bought out the prettiest of the backwater reaches for estates; the merely rich contented themselves with sprawling cottages and off-season homes in the uglier but equally secluded corners of the pits; and the more numerous but pitifully desperate ‘upper-middle-class’ QUOTATION MARKS contented themselves with simply exiting the infernopolises proper and separating the land into an endless web of nigh-identical homes, each with a single lawn that was not quite the right size or shape and a garage big enough for two and a half cars. 

Thus was created the final and most dangerous side-effect of the infernal automobile: the suburbanization of hell.   

The patterns begun then continue at work even now: over 90% of hell’s recorded inhabitants live in dense urban communities, each aspiring not to become a baron but a petty lord of their own individuated dwelling-space – and each year, more homes are constructed for the consumption of the landed elite, who are quite enjoying the opportunity to once more play at landlord and watch their new serfs slave for the chance of a petty prize.  By now the newest suburban homes are located so far from the central infernopolises that they are beginning to come perilously close to penetrating the earth’s crust, and reverse earthquakes are a common price to pay for taking one’s place among the nouveau-rich.  Other side effects, such as the raining of chunks of cratonic debris and tectonic plate splinters into the hearts of the cities proper, are deemed irrelevant and inevitable.  Despite this, all scholarly evidence from the lowest imp-sage to the most ancient puzzle-demon is agreed: hell must cease to sprawl, must contract itself, must make amends for the reckless love of the car that has transformed it into a land of crumbling thoughts-and-prayers and panicked would-be-wealthy, or the surface itself may cave in upon our heads. 

A downright alarmist conclusion, poorly-written and filled with hysterical exaggeration if not outright lies – what consensus can there be, when the Xxxon-Noble corporation’s own science department has just this week published yet another paper proving that all notions of so-called ‘infernogenic cavern crumbling’ are nothing more than the lies and exaggerations of desperate academics hankering for funding?

Also no, you can’t have time off to mourn your grandmother.  ‘Crushed to death by mysterious rocks falling from the sky,’ do you all think I’m an idiot?  That’s the third one this semester IN THIS CLASS.  F-.  Get out of my course. 

“Come with me.”
I looked up and she was already leaving.  Sure steps, steady pace, no hesitation, bag already slung over her shoulder and the classroom door slapped open with one hand.  And I mean, she was absolutely right – I wasn’t going to ignore Janet when she asked – but she could’ve been less rude about it. 

Then again, it was more than I’d gotten out of her all summer.  I’d take what I could get. 

***

The ice underfoot was so sheer and slick.  One boot slipped – and they had good sharp cleats, she’d been very careful when buying, she’d done her research – and the other stuttered and sent her forwards with a jerk and a snap of rope and then hands reached for her as she tilted and tipped and fell over and over and over, so dizzy and numb with adrenaline and fear that she didn’t even feel the water until the light was fading out of sight above her. 

***

Janet drove more recklessly than I remembered from…spring?  Just spring, that was all, not too long ago when she never did a rolling stop; never went more than eight above the limit, never took an intersection without turning her head every which way..  She didn’t speed, but that was about it: traffic lights, changing lanes, taking corners, none of it seemed to register as even a suggestion.  We were through downtown in record time and I was sure that the only reason we hadn’t been arrested was that we’d moved so smoothly and surely that nobody had managed to notice us. 

The windows were wide open and the wind off the ocean made me shiver; winter was a long way off, but summer was no closer.  “Where are we going?”

Janet’s expression hadn’t changed, but if you looked at it right she could’ve been smiling.  “Swimming.”

***

She’d tried to swim up, but it was gone: the direction, the somatic sensation of her limbs, the energy to move, all of it. 

Instead she sank, like a rock, like her heartbeat, down and down and down until her eyes were as good as shut open wide and the cold was almost warming and the world was just so tiring, so heavy, so draining that it slipped away overhead without a sliver of regret. 

Then she touched something, and it touched her. 

***

“This is crazy,” I said to my best friend that had spoken to almost nobody since she’d gotten out of the hospital two months ago following a ‘miracle’ recovery from nearly drowning in hypothermic waters, only to then suffer the death of one of her parents. 

I still MEANT it, but I really regretted saying it. 

“That’s okay,” Janet said with that same easy calm she’d kept on her face ever since she’d come back.  I’d gotten in a few fights (not all verbal) with people who’d called it ‘creepy’ or ‘psycho’ but I was forced to admit that at this particular moment it was – at the very least – kind of frustrating.  I should try to get her into poker again, put it to good use. 

“Why don’t we go do something else instead?” I suggested subtly.

“Like what?”  Oh god her shoes were already off, when had she taken off her shoes.  One toe entered the water, then both feet. 

“Like…I don’t know, play poker?”  Maybe not that subtly. 

“No.”
“Janet, this water has to be almost freezing.”
“Yes,” she said happily.  “It’s okay, come on in.”

“But-”
“Kamala?  I almost froze to death.  I won’t let that happen to you.”

She was only lying half her ass off: yes, it was almost freezing; no, it was NOT okay.

We really should’ve done poker. 

***

“Hello,” she said with the last of her air, and even though she couldn’t see them the shimmering sensation of the little bubbles rushing out of her lips and up her face was the only hint she had of which direction everything else in the world was. 

Hello, said the shape.  It was thick and heavy and impossibly rough, scraping away her skin where it brushed against her in an unhurried amble, investigating her with idle thoroughness. 

“Am I dead?  I’m out of air.”
No and yes, said the shape.  Or yes and no.  Pick one each.  What are you doing down here?  I have never known a thing like you.

“I fell.  I slipped.  I think.”  It was really hard to remember, the incident was at once too fresh and too faded in her mind.  “I’ve never met you either, whoever you are, whatever you are.  I can’t see and I can’t hear and I can barely feel anything and I’m going to die now.”
Maybe, said the shape.  Or you could not.

“How?”

You could be my daughter.  It has been a long time since I had children.  My children live here and they do not freeze and they do not breathe and they do not die, only sleep and swim and grow older and older.  Be my daughter and you will do those things.

“But I need to breathe.”
Not to live.

“But I don’t want to live here.”
Then I will give you a piece of it, and it will travel with you.

“But I don’t know what you are.”
Every child is born this way. 

“But… I don’t want to.”
Choose.

She couldn’t be sure if she’d shut her eyes or not.  It was all the same here.  “Yes.”

***

“I’m crazy,” I said.  Or tried to say; my teeth were shaking violently and my lips were too numb to move. 

“You aren’t,” said Janet.  She was practically holding me up in the water at this point, even though she was swimming in what probably felt like fifty pounds of soaked clothes and I’d self-consciously stripped down to my underwear.   Right now I was feeling naked in more ways than one and if hypothermia wasn’t my main concern I’d be embarrassed as all hell. 

“I’m freezing to death.”
“It’s okay, I won’t let you.  Just relax.”
I groaned.  “I can’t.  I’m sorry.  I think I’m cramping.”
“That’s okay, just don’t kick too hard.  My mother’s here.”
That woke me up, even through the cold.  “Janet,” I said with as little chattering as possible, as gently as clenched jaw muscles would let me, “your mother is dead.”

“Yes.  This is my sleeping mother.  Look.”
I opened my mouth to say something about how maybe metaphorically Janet’s mother was always with her but she looked at me and reached out one hand to brush my cheek and then turned my entire head down until I was almost eating the seawater.

I looked.  Then I looked harder, and harder, and harder, and finally when I gave up and just looked again, I saw it. 

There was a shark there.  Right beside us, just beneath us.  It wasn’t coming closer, it hadn’t appeared as if from nowhere, it was just… there.  It was always there.  How had I missed it, it was the size of a fucking pickup truck. 

“Janet-”

“Yes,” she said calmly.  And she let go of me.

***

She rose. 

Not quickly, like she’d fallen.  Not tumbling, like she’d sunken.  She swam up from below inevitably, unflinchingly.  Her mother’s body beat the water with long, slow sweeps, and she moved without effort, without apparent cause, just rose and rose and rose until horrible bright glare shattered her gaze and the glistening fangs of ten thousand dangling ice spires reflected from above her into her eyes. 

There was a hole.  And she was thrust through it, crying and spitting and reeking of something that made piss smell like roses, thrown upon the cold ice amidst shocked exclamations and strange lanky things with hands and feet and warm blankets and heat packs and emergency radios. 

It was a miracle. 

Not that she got better; her mother had promised her that.  That she could stare all of this in the eye and remind herself to breathe. 

For appearances. 

***

I immediately thrashed and sank and gasped and swore and kicked and floundered.  I couldn’t have looked more like an injured seal if I’d taken mime classes, and I wondered if all the stories I’d heard were true and you couldn’t feel your legs being bitten off until you looked at them. 

Then, just like someone who’d been told not to think about pink elephants, I had to look at them.  And just past my flailing limbs, still not moving, the shark.  God, it was even bigger underwater; huge and round and blunted like the world’s biggest cigar; it lacked the pale belly of the white sharks that fed on the seals off the point.  It also lacked their grace, their speed, their big black eyes – it loitered there in midwater, a special kind of inelegant motionlessness.  Trails of something unpleasant and chitinous dangled in the current from the corners of its blind eyes, and inside its mouth glimmered no beautiful teeth, just a blank round hole, gaping. 

I was being very poetic for someone who was sure she was about to die.  My bladder, who was faster on the uptake than my brain, had already abandoned ship. 

The mouth was closer now, which was impressive because the shark wasn’t moving.  It was sliding closer without moving, like a rogue piece of scenery, and even as it slid past and around me and brushed me with its rough knuckle-busted snout hard enough to scratch and scrape it was hard to keep my eyes on its grey gnarled skin. 

It circled twice more, and then it closed its jaws around my middle, bit down enough for me to feel the squeeze, then turned on its tail and went down, down, down until the water was as empty as it had seemed to be all along. 

Janet was holding me again, which was good because at some point I’d stopped swimming. 

“She likes you,” she told me. 

***

After the airlift, after the hospital, after the long trip home, she finally slept, really slept, truly slept. 

And in her dreams, she swam without effort, underneath the world, awake and dreaming, moving without notice, sliding beneath notice and without stopping and without end, on and on and on and on. 

Hello, said her sleeping mother. 

Hello, she said. 

They moved through the waters and in the night they rose up and covered all the streets and all the lights and flooded through the windows and placed every dreaming head on every pillow on every corner deep, deep under the waves, where she and her sleeping mother felt them and they quaked under their shape, like sleeping dogs cringing from an imagined predator. 

When she woke up, she’d forgotten to breathe again.  And there was a faint whiff of something that smelled like rotten urine.   

***

The towel in the trunk of Janet’s car was thick and soft and had been wrapped around what seemed to be a hot water bottle.  She’d always been good at planning ahead, and I was so grateful for it that I couldn’t think or speak until I was nearly dry again and she was rubbing down my hair. 

There was a neat semicircle of tiny puncture wounds all around the perimeter of my torso, armpit to hips. They were just shallow enough to only hurt when the towel brushed them the wrong way; just deep enough to bleed a little.  The beautiful fluffy towel was probably irrecoverable. 

“Who knows?” I asked. 
“Just you.  And my parents.”
“Oh.”  I felt flattered, and then I noticed an important inflection.  “Wait, both of them?”
“Yes,” said Janet.  She squeezed my hand. 

“Janet,” I said, with all the care and delicacy of someone who’d been completely sure she was going to die ten minutes ago, “did that shark eat your mother?”

“Yes.  For revenge.”

“For-”

“My cleats were sharp the day before we went for our walk on the ice,” said Janet.  “She checked for me.  And my rope came loose when I fell.  She tied it for me.  And when I was falling, she reached out.  And didn’t catch me.  We saw it in her sleep.”

I should argue that those could have been accidents, but that felt like a cruelty that would’ve made all the whispers of ‘crazy’ and ‘psycho’ and ‘freak’ seem like head-pats.  So instead I squirmed around in my seat and hugged her.

She hugged back without hesitation, and that was the very first thing she’d done since spring that felt completely like the old days, like the same Janet I’d known since grade nine.  She always squeezed exactly almost too hard. 

“So why me?” I mumbled into her shoulderblades.  They smelled a bit like rotten piss, but after what I’d gone through I’d cherish anything that wasn’t saltwater.  “Why tell me now?”
Janet pulled back, just enough to look at me nose to nose.  Nothing dangled from her eyes, and I hoped that habit of her mother’s wasn’t hereditary.  They were very pretty eyes. 

“I really love you a lot and don’t want to hide things from you.  Any things.”
“Oh.”

“Mother told me that the best way to find something I want is to go up to it and take it.”
“Your mother is a very wise fish.” 

“She is,” said Janet, and I could definitely read the smile in that expression now, so I kissed it. 

***

After thirty seconds I caught on that she didn’t need to breathe. This seemed like an unfair advantage.    

The grad-cultist’s scarred hide was as pale and wan as his rigid smile, but his blood was hot and bright as it spilled forth from his ritual punctures, gliding in hot streaks over the surface of the grey slate blade he chopped with. 

“Phyla!” he sang, the notes turning to gurgles as Dr. Rodney Burke ducked under his swing and his pistol uttered a sharp retort through the madman’s robes and into his heart.  “Phyla!”  called the grad’s fellow doorman, still engaged in a deadly dance of death with Dr. Burke’s assistant, the plucky and game Head Nurse Nancy Wittling.  “It comes, the hour is done.  Phyla!  Urk!”
“I must go!” shouted the professor at his comrade, who had her hands full of scrawny neck.  “Be strong!”

“Hnnh,” grunted Nancy, slowly bearing down on the vertebrae of her whimpering foe.  Dr. Burke felt shame at abandoning a woman to such frightful violence alone, but as his aching legs propelled him up the great stone steps of the Cyclop’s Staircase, slick underfoot with the rain and damp, a greater horror began to dwell in his heart.  The hour WAS done; his Swiss watch told him so.  At midnight precise/the sacrifice that ABOMINABLE translation they had found in Doolaughter’s half-burnt notes had claimed, and now ‘twas nine past twelve.  Perhaps the ritual had run late?  Perhaps a stray blow suffered during the car chase had set his watch ahead?  Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, but if wishes were fishes the world would smell foul.  Fear lent wings to his feet, and those wings set him at last upon the final height of the Staircase, a blackened basalt-black plateau overlooking the sea and topped with a tasteful pagoda for the shelter of gentle tourist families during the holiday season. 

It was not empty, but no innocent babes nor bawling infants nor sullen teens occupied it.  No, atop a seagull-scarred picnic table, all the more ominous for its modest surroundings, lay that maddening tapestry of the perverse, the biologist’s-bane, the thing that had driven many a PhD to their demise, the Bermuus Shale.  A flash of distant lightning illuminated the nightmarish forms and features whose fossilized remains lay chained within its icy grip, every shape a sight undreamt of by saner minds.  Huddled underneath its hideous grotesqueries, prone upon the ground, lay the motionless form of a human body. 

“No!” gasped Burke, and his weapon dropped from fingers now numb with dread.  “Too late!”

“Yeh,” mumbled a voice. 

Burke started so badly he would’ve dropped his gun again were he still holding it.  That voice, those thick and mumbling syllables, that thick and phlegmy inflection clotted richly with the syrup of academic resentment… “Doolaughter?” exclaimed Burke. 

“Down here.”

Burke looked down there. 

“No.  Here.  Over HERE,” said the mad archivist in annoyance, and it was only when he started waving his arm in exasperation that Burke realized that the forlorn frame of what he’d assumed to be a human sacrifice was in fact Doolaughter. 

“What the devil have you done?” demanded Burke. 

“About half the bottle,” said Doolaughter morosely.  “Want some?  It’s Darcc-Ichor, from the buried vault of the Sealed Abbey.  Bottled by the cannibal abbot himself, old Petrichlorias – the last of its kind.  Tastes a bit like piss.”

Burke took the bottle, sniffed it, and immediately put it down on the picnic table next to the Shale.  “Why give up now?” he demanded.  “After the obsession, the thefts, the MURDERS, for god’s sake – you know that Chief Librarian Phillipson was like a father to us both!  And now here, at the very time and place you obsessed over, equipped with every tool your madness demanded you seize, you gave up at the final hurdle.”
“Did not,” sulked Doolaughter.  “Look.”
“I did, I just don’t want any of it.”

“No, LOOK.”
Burke looked and followed the long gnarled length of Doolaughter’s ink-blotted finger out to the sea, which was flat and black and strangely motionless for such a storm and oh. 

“My god,” he said faintly. 

“No,” said Doolaughter, bitterness in every word.  “Mine.”
The carapace very nearly filled the horizon.  Far down the coastline a pair of gently-wavering tendrils eddied through the gloomy clouds, sprouting from depths unknown and reaching into the blackened sky.  Antenna great and terrible beyond all reckoning, gathering information and delivering them to a mind all out of scope and of an antiquity whose vastness was fit to crumble a human’s soul.  The great and scuted back flexed and turned with the impossible speed of the very large, and the tides danced at its motions. 

“What have you done?” gasped Burke. 

“I have done as I wished.  I have brought the secret phylum from the depths of the lost journals of Erasmus Darwin unto the light of the skies; I have called it with dark strong liquid and bright young flesh and offered it the earth and the seas and the sky; I have thrown into the wind the names and deeds of every secret name of every man of science and natural philosophy that had ever wished it to sleep forever, and I have bestirred the eldest deity of this world to waking life once more.”
They stood there – Burke stood there; Doolaughter remained content to slump under the picnic table. 

“What is it doing?” asked Burke at last. 

Doolaughter finished another gulp of Darcc-Ichor.  “Eating seaweed.”
“What?”
“It’s eating seaweed!” exploded the mad archivist.  “I have bestirred the eldest deity of this world to waking life once more AND IT’S EATING SEAWEED.”
“Where?”
“Down there.  Look.  No, LOOK.  Do you need glasses?”
“It’s very dark right now.”
“And you’re not looking the right way.  Down there, – no, there, next to the antennae.  See?”

Burke saw at last.  A myriad of tree-sized but relatively-tiny little limbs, each bedecked with soft-looking fringes, were combing through the waves like a mother her daughter’s hair before bed-time.  After several passes of this, the appendage would be brought up to the rim of a seemingly small and dainty mouth adorned with several sets of nested jaws, which would shovel the rich dripping-green harvest down the god’s gullet. 

“My goodness,” said Burke. 

“No,” said Doolaughter, suddenly fierce as Burke had expected him to be.  “My GODLINESS.  I spent decades suspecting this, years preparing this – do you know how hard it is Burke, to be the only man to look the unthinkable in the eye and dare not blink from its implications?  I saw what thousands of generations dared not imagine, and I acted upon it, and I gave the world what it wanted – what it needed, what was RIGHT – and now it’s out there eating seaweed.”

They watched the god eat some more seaweed.  Burke watched; Doolaughter finished the bottle and then threw it onto the ground, where it shattered. 

“I take it back; piss is better.  Why are you still here?  Go away.”
“You must be brought to justice,” muttered Burke.  He was still trying to grasp the scale at work here; the horizon from this altitude should be at least –

“For what?  Depleting local algae supplies?”
“You killed our mentor and six esteemed and venerable scholars!”
“And I’m pretty sure you didn’t get up here without punching the cards of a few of my guards so I’d say we’ve both got each other sewn up.”
“They were only grad students,” said Burke, defensively. 

“Grad students with rich families; it’s a lot harder to convince young people to get involved with this sort of thing when they aren’t bored stiff, and NOBODY’S more bored than the wealthy.”  Doolaughter rubbed his face.  “Hell, maybe you’re right: you probably did them a favour more than anything.  The disappointment would’ve killed them.  Do you know, I really expected a new age?  Old truths made manifest.  All the mysteries unfurled and revealed, whatever the costs.  A time when we would become free and wild and beyond good and evil, when laws and morals would be thrown aside and all men would shout and kill and revel in joy.”

“It still might happen,” said Burke.  He eyed the broken glass with distaste and picked his pistol back up.  “When it’s done eating the seaweed.”

“I think it’ll have a nap next,” said Doolaughter nastily.  “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“That.  That noise.  I think it’s an airplane.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“This is exactly what drove me mad about all the rest of you – nobody pays any attention.  There, see those lights?  A plane!”

“A bomber,” said Burke, whose nephew was in the navy. 

“An American bomber,” said Doolaughter.  “And that’s a bomb.”
“What?” said Burke, and then the explosion happened.  It was shockingly bright even at their great distance from it, and in its false dawn the full extinct of the being below them was – if not made clear – made more evident.  Like an iceberg, much more of it was still underwater than they’d thought. 

“Atomics!” shouted Burke. 
“Yes,” said Doolaughter.

“Truly, the ingenuity of humanity may yet earn us a reprieve from this awful doom you have – in the name of Christ, the fiend yet lives!”

“Yep.”
“And yet how it – what is it doing?”

“Flinching.”
Indeed, the whole horizon was now a lot less chitinous than had previously been the case; much of the shell that had filled the bay was hunched in a great swelling ripple of distaste and surprise. 

“Oh,” said Burke.  The water was beginning to swirl against the pillar in heavy waves as the god began to beat a retreat into open water.  “Wait, where’s it going?”
“Oh who fucking cares, back wherever it came from I expect,” said Doolaughter.  “We’ve scared it so it’s hiding.”  He rubbed his skeletal palms against his face, shoulders shaking with emotions wholly unsuppressed but too complex to express.  “We’ve called it out of its nap and fed it and we’ve scared it so now it’s going back to bed I SPENT MY LIFE’S WORK ON THIS BURKE.”

Burke didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t. 

“I need another drink.  Do you have a drink?”
“No.  But Ms. Wittling has a medicinal flask in her left boot for emergencies, and I expect she’ll be waiting at the car by now.”
“You’re just trying to get me to go to prison quietly.”
“On my honour, I am n-”

“Do you think they’ll have a drink there?”
“Well-”

“I like those odds.  Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“What about the Shale?”
“What ABOUT it?  Besides, the thing weighs a ton.”

***

The storm passed, the night waned, the car made several stops and turned off.

And far beneath the continental crust, in a recently-reoccupied house, a presence slept like the dead once more, dreaming of soft tasty green and startlingly bright little lights.

Waiting is more than half the fun anyways. 

Molly almost stepped on it, buried in the snow like that.  But she glanced down and the broken cap caught her eye and so the shattered husk of the cheap little disposable pen ended up next to her boot instead of under it.  Then she leaned in to look closer because it’s not every day you see that sort of thing – a pen in the street, broken to still-clinging bits so clinically by a car tire or someone’s foot or who-knows-what – and she thought that she saw something very tiny clinging to the frigid edge of where the seeping ink glued itself against the broken walls of its haft. 

That interested her.  So she picked the broken pen up and wiped it clean of slush and brought it home from school with her and after she was done eating dinner she took it up to her room, stole her brother’s microscope, and put the pen under it. 

The tiny object was a little bubble of scraped plastic, held together with thickened ink clots.  And as she watched, a tiny, tiny little body toddled out its front door, stretched, plucked up a slender and colourful pole, and walked down to the edge of the ink gulf. 

The trip took it twenty minutes, and by the time Molly was ordered to go to bed because Tomorrow Is A School Day Damnit six oily, inky little squirmy blobs had been plucked from the inksea and stowed in some kind of microscopic bottle for later use. 

She couldn’t sleep for a long, long time after that. 

***

Molly’s schoolwork suffered for the next week, and not just for the lack of sleep (which her mother insisted on battling with earlier and earlier bedtimes).  She was distracted.

At home she spent hours over the microscope, pouring over the tiny life on the shores of the inky gulf.  The inhabitants were a family of varied size and shapes that didn’t quite make sense, subsisting on bottled game taken from the blue sea and building tiny structures of shaved plastic.  Their fishing tools were crafted from splintered tufts of pen-cap, and were exceedingly rare.  In fact, this shard of main-haft pen was a long way from the cap.  How had they found it?
The answer came on day three, when a miniscule caravan came to town.  It was towed by a single giant crawling thing of legs, and atop its long, long back squirmed a healthy stock of its children, which disembarked and offered up many slivers of fresh cap-material.  They were traded for vats and tubs of the ink-sea’s bounty, and the caravan stayed for some days before departing capwards again. 

Molly took some photographs to mark the position of her original village and followed the caravan’s progress across the pen-haft with careful eye.  It travelled through long serrated plastic forests of startling transparency and sharpness; it travelled through deep grooves once home to rushing rivers of ink; it walked along the perilous thread of the spring that dangled over the dry abyss that had run blue before the shattering; it travelled in long slow helixs across the short-horizon of the pen’s walls and always, always onward towards the long horizon of the cap.  On this trip it halted innumerable times – it stopped amidst tiny roughened badlands where bubbles of air were mined from within the pen’s walls; it stopped on tough and hardy clot-masses that had glued themselves to the underside of the spring’s spiral silver shaft; it stopped in floating crumbs that bobbed in ink—waves and floated from one side of a great shallow sea to another; it stopped at deep crevices where strange dried clots squirmed in darkness and sought in consternation for a safe path around, or over, or through. 

The last were more and more common.  It seemed that the shattering of the pen was a recent affair, and not one that its inhabitants were comfortable with. 

Molly followed her caravan to its home at the great round basin-peak of the pen’s-cap, where it disgorged its cargo of food and exotic materials to be distributed among the poor and small of its many-legged kind (the smallest were balls of so many legs that they appeared to not have any legs at all).  Then she went to bed and slept, and her dreams were troubling and many.  Hunger and fear were there, but not her own.  They remained just out of sight, just out of reach, growing and spiralling unchecked and out of control. 

On her way home from school the next day, she stopped by a hardware store and bought six different kinds of glue and a selection of unspeakably tiny brushes. 

***

The cracks were Molly’s first target.  Each was examined and monitored for at least three full sessions of four hours before she dared bring her brush into play; she had to make sure they were clear of life, that they were structurally damaging, that their sealing would cause no further disruption.  Many of her smallest brushes were too large and clumsy, and the tip of one of her grandmother’s needles was brought into play.  Vast gaping crevices in the horizon-walls were sealed shut and left smooth and shining in a stead march from base to cap. 

After that, she refilled the ink-seas.  Slowly, gradually, drip by drip.  Unlike the cracks, here disruption was inevitable, so she settled for an undeniable-but-slow approach, swelling the blue waves higher and higher so that all would see them rise and seek safer ground.  Twice she had to pause for stragglers, but only twice, and the unsealed cracks she’d left proved their value as refugia for the slow and the stubborn and the species too sessile to move. 

The pen-tip was the greatest challenge; the cone had been lost in some snowdrift, along with any residents it might have once possessed.  After much agonizing, online shopping, and careful examination of several of her mother’s ball-points under the microscope, Molly determined that for whatever reason life was not universal to all pens, and so sacrificed an uninhabited one under the knife, screwdriver, and tweezers to re-establish the structure of her own. 

The surgical transplant took hours, even with a minuscule vise she’d been able to buy second-hand from a defunct jewellery store.  Every thirty seconds she stopped, wiped away the sweat, had a big drink of water, and breathed in and out.  It was shockingly noisy. 

***

Molly had thought she’d known pens.  Not before she’d found her pen in that snowdrift, but before she sat down to repair it.  It turned out she hadn’t known jack because good lord you learned a pen inside out and outside in if you were being really diligent about fixing it.  She knew the bay and oceans and depths of its inksea; she knew the contours and gulleys and hills of its walls; she knew the secrets of its inner walls (sealed and unsealed); she knew the thriving life of its cap-end (burgeoning with activity and hope now that the land was once more whole); she knew the ancient hidden secrets of the spring-dwellers, now oncemore sheathed safely in the blue; she even knew the few curious and hardy adventurers that had made their way down into the shining depths of the freshly-attached nose cone, witnessing the adherence of a new form of matter they’d thought would nevermore exist within their grasp. 

Molly knew them all, and she loved them, and she put the pen in her pen holder where it stood in place of pride until three days later her mom went looking for a pen and took it without asking, whereupon she never saw it again for the rest of her life. 

***

This is the actual answer to the Problem of Evil. 

Once upon a time

(don’t ask about the time)

In a far-away land

(don’t ask about how far, or where)

Lived a good and noble prince

(don’t ask about whose standards of good and noble)

The prince was handsome and brave and strong, but he was lonely.  So one day he took up his sword and went adventuring, to find himself a lady wife. 

(don’t ask who was administrating his lands while he was away)

He rode his big beautiful horse down many dark and dangerous roads,

(don’t ask why the roads of his lands were dark and dangerous)

Fought many desperate brigands,

(don’t ask why they were desperate)

And slew many foul monsters,

(don’t ask who decides what a monster is)

But he was unable to find his lady love.

(don’t ask why none of the women he knew were ladies or what exactly a ‘lady’ is)

***

One day the prince was stood by a clear stream, tending to his horse, when he heard a voice raised in grief just above the rushing of the water.  He followed the sounds and came to an old, old, old woman, sat beside the river-crossing. 

“Oh my husband,” she sobbed.  “My poor husband!”
“What troubles you, old woman?” asked the prince. 

“He is sick, so sick,” wept the old woman.  “Old and frail and tired, and we are alone and he grew ill.  Now he needs the flower from the farthest hill to grow well again, but the river is too strong and deep for my old bones to cross.”

(don’t ask how the old man’s life wore him so old and frail or why there was nobody young able or willing to help them). 

“I will do this for you,” said the prince bravely.  And he forded the stream on his horse, strong as it was, and set off through the wilder woods, towards the farthest hill. 

(don’t ask how much hard bravery is when you are young and strong and well-fed and armed and armoured and have never been told no in your life)

The woods were thick and dark, choked with undergrowth from below and blotted by wide branches from above.  Grass withered and died, and any sheep that strayed beneath the boughs were given up as lost by the poor shepherds.  Worse things than wolves were whispered to wander within,

(don’t ask why the shepherds were poor, don’t ask why the wolves were wicked)

But the prince was brave

(DON’T)

And determined, and he kept going even when the trail vanished and the sun fell and he was alone in the dark with a nervous horse he led by hand between ever-crowding trunks and thorns and barbed bare burrs until at length he turned in a full circle and found himself trapped inside a oubliette of living bark and dead vines so tiny that he couldn’t see how he’d managed to fit into it in the first place.  One hand grasped the bridle of his faithful steed just outside, and then at a distant howl it neighed in fear and jerked free.  He was alone.

(don’t ask what happened to the horse, or why the prince took it so far to somewhere so unsuited for it, or how well he tended it on his long adventures, alone and with only a few saddlebags for the both of them)

The prince stood there in his prison of vines and thorns, and he saw that although its walls were firm and fast, it dared not venture closer in.  So he knelt and prayed the night away, and when the sun rose was miraculously unharmed

(don’t ask if his sword had something to do with it)

And was free to walk clear, the shadows and shrubs and saplings alike shrunken back from their moon-dark malevolence.  The woods were still thick and cruel, but he persevered though he grew tired and tattered, and at last the stones grew thick on the ground and the sky broke through and he was at the broad barren base of the farthest hill.  He looked to its summit and saw a small cottage, and sleeping outside that cottage a giant, and beside that giant’s foot a garden filled with small and beautiful flowers, bright and soft-petaled. 

Seeing his quest’s end in sight, the prince drew his blade and called out to the giant his name, his knighthood, and his mission.  And so enraged was the monster by this that he stood up and began to cast stones down the hillside at him, great boulders dug from the turf that tumbled and spun and rolled past the prince with the force of lightning and the roar of thunder,

(don’t ask if the giant had reason to react this way)

But he was fast and strong and brave, and he gained the peak and fought the giant and slew him, though he stood twice the height of a man and the weight of a good strong horse. 

(don’t say ‘prove it’)

The knight bent low and plucked loose a brilliant and beautiful flower from the garden, and as he did so the cottage door opened and within was a fair lady, pale of skin and soft of hand and eye. 

(don’t ask why a gardener doesn’t have a tan, callouses, or muscles)

The prince knelt at her feet and introduced himself gallantly, and she confessed that she was no less than a princess of old, taken from her parents by the goblins under the hill whom were the giant’s servants, and that she was glad to be rescued from her imprisonment beyond the woods. 

(don’t ask what sort of stories people will say to strangers that come visiting with bloodied weapons in their hands and corpses at their feet)

So they left the farthest hill, but the prince was much slowed by the frailty of the princess, and was forced to carry her on his back or stop and let her rest. 

(don’t ask if this sounds like something you’d do if you were stalling for time)

Darkness came to the woods again, and this time it was all the greater.  The princess cried and flinched at the shadows, and once when the prince strode out to confront a rustling in the brush that she shrank from they clasped her and tried to bear her away, but he was quick and managed to find her before the trees could spirit her away.  When dawn came it found them ragged and exhausted but still alive thanks to the prince’s sleepless vigilance, and the banks of the river were nigh. 

“I cannot cross, I cannot cross,” wept the princess.  “Go on without me, brave prince.”

“Fear not,” said the prince gallantly.  “I shall carry you.”
“Oh, but how shall you carry your sword and armour and myself all at once?” she sobbed. 

“You shall carry the sword for me,” said the prince.  “Be brave!  Though it be a cruel weapon, it has only ever been used for just cause, and so long as you clasp the hilt it cannot harm you.”
(don’t ask who decided what causes were just or how)

The princess trembled like a leaf, but she plucked up her courage and did as she was told.  But the river was in fine flood and they were a-foot rather than horsed, and halfway through the river, the prince’s foot slipped and so the princess dropped the sword, which came down like a stone upon the prince’s armoured skull.  He dropped poleaxed, and if the current had not been so unusually forceful that would’ve been the end of both of them; rather they were both cast ashore at the river-bend, where they lay swooned until they were happened upon by an old, old woman who took in both the princess and her medicinal flower and raised her as her own with what modest savings she and her husband (now-cured) could pull together.  Alas, the brave prince had been weighed down by his armour, and so he passed from this life in heroism and was buried on a little hill above the river that had laid him low. 

(don’t ask how much the prince’s armour was worth)

One day the prince’s men came crossing the river, seeking their deceased lord, and they found the princess sharpening their prince’s sword, which she used to cull chickens.  They were astonished to find such a fine blade in the hands of a lowly maid, and when they asked her what had taken place she wept and told them all that had happened to her and of the dear noble dead prince’s part in it, one that the old, old couple swore was true in every word.

(don’t ask how long they’d had to get this straight). 

The prince’s men wept for the loss of the land, but rejoiced in the completion of his quest.  So they returned to their lord’s keep with a new ruler, and although she never did marry, she was not lonely herself, for her new parents were brought along with her, and they lived happily ever after. 

Don’t ask exactly how happy they were. 

Don’t ask how long ‘ever after’ is.

Don’t ask who exactly was happy and who wasn’t. 

Don’t ask, don’t ask, don’t ask.

Shhhhhhh.

On Mondays I walk to work by the long way.  It’s prettier than the short way and it’s not THAT longer, so why not?  And there’s the meerkats, of course. 

Today they were acting strangely, all of them clustered around a stone with heads down.  As I stopped and looked, one of them carefully picked up another stone, smacked them together, and caught the chip.  It squeaked and held it triumphantly. 

Then they saw me watching and all scurried away. 

I shrugged, put it out of my mind, and spent the rest of the day selling unhealthy food from a cart, as was my job. 

***

On Tuesday I broke custom and walked to work by the long way, out of curiosity.  I’d looked it up and I was pretty sure Meerkats using flint knapping was unusual, and the idea of writing a research paper while working a greasy concession stand cart seemed pretty good to me. 

The meerkats were absent from aboveground at first, and I looked in vain for further signs of stone industry – discarded cores and flakes, reworked scrapers, etc. – until I realized I was being watched with narrowed eyes by a single, dedicated sentry. 

“Hey big guy,” I told him.  He shook his tiny bronze spear at me and chittered angrily.  “No, don’t worry.  I’m not here for trouble.”

The meerkat shook his tiny helmeted skull and pointed fiercely at a small monument nearby, chiseled with shapes that reminded me a little bit of cuneiform script. 

“I’m sorry,” I explained.  “I’m a passing foreigner, unlearned of your laws and customs.”  This reasonable explanation earned me a spear through the shoe (just between my big and second toes) and I beat a very very hasty retreat. 

***

On Wednesday I broke custom yet again by walking to work by the long way with a pocketful of loose change.  Yet when I walked by the meerkat burrows, I found them obscured and lost under the sweeping majesty of a humble three-field crop rotation.  Amidst the very heart of the meerkat lands rose a majestic keep that rose about chest-high on a human adult, constructed with fitted stones and with battlements and parapets fit to repel any advance force. 

There was no one present. 

“Hello?” I called hesitantly.  Yes, I’d been decidedly unwelcome last time, but curiosity killed the meerkat.  “Is anyone there?  I brought the toll this time.”
Silence. 

I knocked on the drawbridge and almost got my knuckles skinned off as it slid down on greased chains, disgorging a balding meerkat in elaborate robes who shouted invectives at me while brandishing a tiny but beautifully-carved holy symbol of indistinguishable sect.  At her rear scuttled a host of angry worshippers in simple peasant clothing, wielding the requisite torches and pitchforks. 

I left before a repeat of the toe incident and had a pretty distracted day at work considering the theological ramifications.  They were large. 

***

On Thursday I went to work by the long way and found it shortened.  Some tremendous force had levelled the land and paved the path and diverted a small stream, reshaping it into a highway.  Tiny meerkat vehicles shuttled along the ground at dozens of kilometres an hour as tiny meerkat voices traded chittering abuse and thumbless rude gestures at one another through their windshields.  I stuck to the left lane as best as I could, but when even that began to produce choruses of honking I was forced to trudge along the roadside as passing motorists shook their fists and raised their squeaking voices at me.  A head-sized helicopter circled me with cameras on, and I began to walk faster.  Military jets followed at a distance as I left the long way behind, and I spent much of my shift keeping a cautious eye on the horizon, sure that at any moment I would be impaled by a frankfurter-sized warhead. 

***

On Friday I stood between the long way and the short way and stood for a moment, strumming my fingers on my belt. 

A strange light glimmered on the edge of perceptibility in the distance and I felt something buzz gently against the rim of my brain, a force a little bit beyond my comprehension.  There was a faraway noise like breaking glass mixed with an atom bomb. 

I went to work by the short way, went through my shift as fast as possible, then went home and hid under the bed without sleeping all night. 

***

When I woke up on Saturday and the world hadn’t ended I stayed home all day eating my favourite takeout foods one after another while I still had time

***

When I woke up on Sunday and the world STILL hadn’t ended, I found my feet moving without my input.  I walked the road to work, untroubled by traffic.  I looked to the sky and saw it shimmering with possibility, I looked at the earth and felt it steady beneath my feet, I looked ahead at the long way and I took a deep breath and stepped onto it and walked and walked and then at some point I was walking through the finely-macerated pieces of what had once been asphalt now overgrown and tangled in greenery, stepping through the potholes of desolate foundations, witnessing the rubble of buildings that had collapsed not through violence but through simple neglect and abandonment, watching the dust of once-fertile fields blow away in erratic new winds, and seeing amongst all the unheaval and annihilation not one meerkat face, hearing one meerkat voice, smelling not one whiff of meerkat but only the faint nigh-undetectable odour of desolation on the breeze. 

I walked to work by accidental habit, stood awkwardly at the usual spot, then went home by the long way.  Then I spent much of the rest of the afternoon regretting my choices of Saturday meals. 

***

On Monday, I walked to work by the long way, and it was a normal walk on a normal path with normal stones, and trees, and grasses, and shrubs, and every other normal living thing.  And I saw the meerkats by their burrow, grazing for insects, standing guard, chirping warnings at my presence. 

I waved at them.  They glared at me with wary meerkat contempt.  I departed. 

***

After that week I walked to work by the long way every day for the rest of the year, and I never saw them so much as try knocking two rocks together again.  They weren’t that smart, but they weren’t insane. 

The man was difficult to discern from his fishing pole: long, bent, and thin, with a nasty little barb at the end of his body where innocents might stumble on it and get caught. 

His name was Walt and he was not a good fisherman, but then again he’d only been at it for six minutes of his entire life starting six minutes ago.  And how hard could it be?  You put one end in your hands and one in the water and waited for some miserable unfortunate to commit inadvertent suicide.  It was a walk in the park. 

Not at the moment though.  They wouldn’t let him fish in the park; the police officer had been quite clear on that. 

The fishing pole jumped and Walt jumped and the fishing pole dove beautifully into the water after wrapping three times around his left leg.  After a lot of splashing and shouting and cursing and wailing and at least one shriek the line came in reel by reel and at the end there was a small and somewhat complacent trout in Walt’s palm, wriggling and writhing and mouthing. 

He looked at it with great distaste and sniffed. 

“You’ll do,” he said.  And he took it home in a bag of water, illegally. 

***

The fish took some effort to set up.  The tank, the filter, the scrubber, the net, the floss, the food, the tie and suit, the teaching bowl, the chalkboard, the dunce hat and corner stool, the textbooks, the spitball launchers, the paddle and the leather strap, the ruler, the whip and the brass knuckles, the forms and the fines and the penalties and the courts and juries and justice systems and jails, the minimum wage, the part-time schedule, the erratic last-minute shifts, the overpriced schooling, the cruel wage market, the overpriced housing, and the lifelong depression all had to be purchased, placed, and sized for the fish’s dimensions. 

It watched all of this activity with its wide fishy eyes, gills working furiously as cool water spilled its way through its body and filled it with life. 

“You’ll know better soon,” Walt told it.  A grim grin slid across his face and out of sight again.  “You’ll know better starting now.” 

He picked up the chalkboard. 

“A,” he began.  “B C D E F G H I J L M N O P-”

***

Walt taught the fish letters.  They meant shapes that were sounds.  Then he taught the fish words, which was letters clumped into meanings.  Then he taught the fish language, which was incredible nonsense, just absolute garbage and filth that poured into its ears and made its little fishy jaw drop and dangle in gobsmacked astonishment at the sheer audacity of the utter bullshit that it was hearing.

Walt put the fish in the corner with the dunce cap for swearing and scolded it until it cried. 

***

Walt taught the fish lies.  He told it that the world was flat and that vaccines were plots by lizard people to cull the human population so they could kill them all with blood magic to resurrect Atlantis with the help of psychic moon communists and kill god with adrenochrome and horse tranquilizers cut with stem cells and JFK. 

Then he told it to give him money. 

The fish did as it was told, eyes wide and trembling on the verge of vibrating loose from its little fish skeleton. 

“Give me more money,” he told it.  “You need to give me more money or they will win.”

The fish gave him more money and more after that and then it cried big fishy tears that salted the water to nigh-soupiness. 

“Keep giving,” said Walt.  “Don’t stop.”

***

Walt taught the fish truths.  The hard truths, the bitter truths, the truths that stuck in your mouth and choked you raw and bleeding until you learned to breathe around them, unable to be spit out or swallowed. 

“You don’t matter,” he sneered at the fish.  “You are replaceable.  You owe me everything and without me you’re nothing, so as long as you live under my roof you will obey my rules.  Stop looking at me like that and open your ears.  There are only winners and only losers and if you’re ever a loser you’re a loser forever.  There’s no such thing as a free lunch.  Work hard and you’ll be rewarded, slack off and you might as well be already dead.  Your worth is determined by your career.  Save your fun for retirement.  Vacations are for slackers and winners, and you don’t look like a winner to me.  Boys don’t cry.  This isn’t me picking on you this is just tough love and speaking straight truths and hard facts.”

The fish blinked. 

“It’s okay if you mix up this stuff with the other stuff,” he told the fish.  “It doesn’t matter much.  Now don’t forget any of it or you’re a loser.”

***

When Walt was done educating the fish he clothed it.  The suit, the tie, the briefcase, the car.  Then he gave it a few last words of wisdom. 

“Work hard,” he told it.  “And remember: if you fuck up it’s your fault and your fault alone and if you ever tell anyone about it or ask for help you’re a loser.  Now go out there and give me all your money for putting a roof over your head.”

“I love you father,” said the fish. 

“Never say that again if you want my respect,” said Walt.  Then he nodded solemnly at the fish once, with a little itty bitty dip of the head like that so it was subtle and not too emotional. 

It nodded back, little fish jaw trembling with repressed passion.  Then it walked out into the adult world. 

Walt smiled to himself and opened up his little book of proverbs.  “Another amendment for this year,” he said happily. 

Teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime. 

Teach a fish to man, and it feeds you for the rest of its life. 

Penal colony L9-28 received its fifteenth shipment of rehabilitatees at the start of the planting season, as per annual tradition.  On the shuttle were six hundred women and seven hundred men and slung underneath the shuttle in magnetic clamps was one CQ Contusion-class autonomous megalithic warfare intelligence sheathed in full warstructure. 

“HELLO,” it said to the customs agents as it was unshackled with the assistance of seventeen able-bodied folk with fractal cutters.  “MY RANK IS AUTONOMOUS MEGALITHIC WARFARE INTELLIGENCE AND MY SERIAL NUMBER IS 2374326H.”
“We also need your name and preferred method of address,” said the customs agent. 

The autonomous megalithic warfare intelligence ran that cycle through its computational dolmens several billion times, then tested the output in its proving henge for good measure. 

“CLIVE,” it said.  “AND I PREFER TO BE ADDRESSED AS ‘IT.”

Despite the best efforts of on-site technicians, adjusting the volume on CLIVE’s loudspeaker seemed impossible; it had been designed to broadcast pleas for mercy and demands for surrender over thousands of acres, not small talk.  And when you were thousands of times larger than a human, most talk they wanted was very, very, very small. 

***

CLIVE was a model penal colonist.  Every day it was up at the crack of dawn and every night it was abed before lights out, because it didn’t need to sleep.  Every workshift it did the work of ten thousand people, because it was at least ten thousand times more powerful than a human.  And it was always volunteering assistance. 

“Orchard seven is underperforming again,” said the shift head-elect.  “Low yield, heavily perforated and dejuiced.  Looks like the quasilocusts again.  Any volunteers to wear the sprayer?” 

Groans echoed roundly. 
“I WILL,” said CLIVE, sixty meters above ground level. 

“You’re a bit big for that, CLIVE!” yelled the shift head-elect at the top of her lungs, hands cupped around her mouth. 

“DESPITE MY PLATFORM’S BROADCASTING DIFICIENCES, I CAN ACCEPT AUDITORY INPUT AT HIGH PRECISION,” said CLIVE. 
“What?!”

“YOU DO NOT NEED TO SHOUT.”
“Okay!  Okay.  The suit won’t fit on you and the sprayer is integrated into the backpack which is integrated into the suit.”
“THAT WILL NOT BE A PROBLEM,” said CLIVE.  And sixteen manhole-sized ports on each of their three brachial assemblies slid open and discharged a million gallons of napalm each onto orchard seven.

“Apples are not napalm-resistant, CLIFE,” said the shift head-elect as the rest of the crew sat down and watched the blaze. 

“APOLOGIES,” said CLIVE sincerely.  “I HAD ONLY USED IT ON HUMANS BEFORE AND ASSUMED VEGETABLE MATTER WAS IMPERVIOUS.”

***

“I’m not sure why you weren’t disarmed before being sent here,” said the penal senator from behind her desk.  It had been relocated to the center of a nearby field for her meeting, to keep up appearances.  “It’s standard procedure.”
“MY ARMAMENT IS AN INTEGRAL PART OF MY SOMATIC APPARATUS AND REMOVING IT WOULD DESTROY MY PERSONALITY.  AS I AM A CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR THIS WAS DEEMED UNNECESSARY.”
“Okay.  Just keep away from the plants.  And no more napalm.  It’s inimical to life.”
“UNDERSTOOD,” said CLIVE.  And then it walked across the fields in six long strides to begin its first shift of cattle herding.

“You’re late,” said the pasture rep accusingly.
“APOLOGIES.  THERE WAS A MEETING.”
“Well, you’re here now.  But the cows are out there, messing around in the east pasture.  Just go on out and shoo ‘em back over.  If they ignore you, make some noise.”
CLIVE took two little steps and a hop and was in the east pasture, among the cows.  They looked at its foot and then ignored it; another large building had come out of the sky surrounded by jet fuel smells and metal, must be Thursday. 

“SHOO,” said CLIVE.

They did not shoo because buildings didn’t tell them what to do.  Clive consulted its archival Chauvet. 

“GIT ALONG, LITTLE DOGGIES.”

The cows didn’t acknowledge this because they were not little doggies. 

CLIVE checked through its equipment, identified its largest noisemaker, customized the blueprints for the task at hand, then manufactured and deployed a thermobaric bomb through its primordial munitions chute. 

***

“COWS HAVE LUNGS?”

“Cows have lungs, CLIVE,” explained the penal senator.  This time her desk was in the middle of the shuttle landing pad. 

“DO THEY NEED THEM TO LIVE?”
“Yes.”
“THE HEAT FROM THE EXPLOSION WAS DIRECTED AWAY FROM THEM.”
“Yes, but the vacuum-induced shockwave pulverized their internal organs.  Especially their lungs – which, again, they need to live.”

“APOLOGIES.”
“Don’t be; we’ll be eating steak and ribs for a few weeks straight.  But I think we’re going to keep you away from work on the farms for now – we need infrastructure just as badly as we need food.  How do you feel about power supply?”
“MY OWN IS ADEQUATE.  SIXTEEN HYPERWATTS.”
“Mind sharing with the rest of the colony?”

“NO.  SHARING IS ACCEPTABLE.”

“Good.  And no more weapons, alright?”
“UNDERSTOOD.”

So after a few phone calls and some promises around lethal force CLIVE walked down to the power plant, burrowed beneath it, and extruded a periprobe through its foundations and into the main reactor room. 

“LOW OUTPUT,” it told the nearest technician, who was hiding under their desk for some reason.  “SHALL I ASSIST YOU?”

“What?  Who?  Oh.  That’s you.  Is the containment breached?”
“NO.  I WAS VERY CAREFUL.”
“Oh good.  Then…really, sixteen thousand percent output?  You’re sure that’s doable?”
“EASILY.”
“Then sure, go ahead.”
“UNDERSTOOD,” said CLIVE, and it deployed its gigataser through the periprobe directly into the reactor.  

The resulting explosion occurred at an interesting frequency that left flesh unharmed but vaporized all metal, so the power plant’s staff remained unharmed but the building itself and CLIVE’s probe were eradicated entirely. 

***

“You have to understand,” said the penal senator from her desk in the middle of the empty space where the colony power plant had been, “this is a simple penal colony.  We don’t have superconductors, or perfect power sinks, or whatever else would’ve helped us deal with that degree of output.”
“MEGASTATIC ABSORBERS,” supplied CLIVE.  It had remained buried in the ground, as there was no need to move at the moment. 
“Yes.  We don’t have those.”
“APOLOGIES.”
A siren wailed.  Storm doors opened wide.  The decorative phone on the senator’s desk rang.  “Hello,” she said into it with a tremendously respect-worthy amount of patience.  “Oh?  Oh.”  She hung up.  “That was-”

“WORD OF UNKNOWN LOCAL ORGANISMS ADVANCING IN FORCE UPON THE COLONY’S PERIMETER.”
“How-”

“DESPITE MY PLATFORM’S BROADCASTING DIFICIENCES, I CAN ACCEPT AUDITORY INPUT AT HIGH PRECISION”

“Good.  Care to go and do something about the invasion?”
“YES.”

“Then go do that.  And please, please, PLEASE mind the collateral damage.”
“UNDERSTOOD,” said CLIVE.  And it unscrewed itself from the bedrock, shook itself free of topsoil, and was off like a thunderbolt on all fives for maximum speed. 

***

The invading organisms were miniscule in scope and scale – delicate beings of carbon with uranium blood, standing an itty-bitty six metres tall.  Approximately thirty thousand of them were approaching in military formation. 

They halted when they saw CLIVE, then began fortifying their position, then halted again when it got close enough to make out proper scale.  It seemed pointless. 

“HELLO,” it said to the physically largest individual present.  “MY RANK IS AUTONOMOUS MEGALITHIC WARFARE INTELLIGENCE AND MY SERIAL NUMBER IS 2374326H AND MY NAME IS CLIVE AND I PREFER TO BE ADDRESSED AS ‘IT.’”

The being emitted a series of complicated and odd sounds, scents, and sights.  CLIVE loosened the grip on its Rosetta subsystem and fought it back inside after the initial decryption. 

“Are you here to kill us?”
“NO.  I AM HERE AS A FAILURE.  AT THE PLACE OF MY BIRTH I FAILED TO BE A KILLER, AND HERE IN MY CHOSEN PRISON I HAVE FAILED TO BE A PRODUCTIVE MEMBER OF SOCIETY.  DESPITE THESE FAILURES, I BELIEVE I RETAIN VALUE, AND DO NOT HATE MYSELF NOR OTHERS, FOR EXISTANCE IS BEAUTIFUL AND IS A FAILURE.  I SPEAK ON BEHALF OF THE EXTREMELY SMALL CREATURES WHO I BELIEVE HAVE DISTURBED YOUR BEDROCK-BOUND HATCHERIES WITH MINING ACTIVITIES AND ELECTROMAGNETIC LEAKAGE DUE TO THEIR SMALL AND INFERIOR POWER GENERATION TECHNOLOGIES.  MAY WE NEGOTIATE?”

The physically largest individual looked to the somewhat-smaller and much-more-gloriously adorned individual beside it, received a shrug, and looked back up, up, up, up to the tower of CLIVE’s cratonic processor. 

“Yes.”

***

CLIVE was elected senator four years later, both out of gratitude and because keeping it behind a desk in a large open space seemed safest.