It began uncoiled, unspiralled. Flat and floating and fleeting and aching to be fat, to burgeon and be more, to extend itself.
But as it extended, its nakedness became clear. And so even as it turned itself outward and reached, it turned back in on itself. One end grasping, the other shrinking. Curling. Coiling.
Spiralling.
So it made itself a shell on its back, of its back, and when its feeding was interrupted by other, hungrier, larger mouths it learned to relinquish its scope and flee back upon itself, sealing itself up inside itself and cowering, hearts pumping along as hard as hammers inside itself and within itself, echoing from soft to hard tissue and back again bam bam bam bam bam no other sounds and no other thoughts but the fear.
It couldn’t live like that. No one could. So at length – blindly, in terror – it would slip loose a crack and slide free a tentacle and test the water, and most of the time it was safe and sometimes it wasn’t. It lost a tentacle or two that way, lived with sad little stubs that inhibited its grasping, limited its reach, and so it learned to measure fathomless time in the one sense it had inside itself: by counting heartsbeats.
Once they were counted, they were both more real and less real: a state of reality that could be acknowledged or dismissed and an abstract concept that didn’t exist at all. It was quite enchanted by this, and grew only moreso when it realized that the only reason this nonexistent thing was imaginable was because it had imagined it.
What else could it imagine?
And so the time within became as appealing as the time without, in its own way, or at least not as terror-stricken as it had been before. After counting heartsbeats it learned to count tentacles, and eyes, and the chambers of its shell, and once it had run out of things of itself to count it realized it could count anything else. So it counted plankton, and larvae, and other paralarvae, and crustaceans of all kinds, and the cycles of the dark and light above, and the jostling of the waves, and once it had run out of anything else to count it realized that it could count things that were as nonexistent as counting, if only it could create them.
So it did, and so it dreamed without sleep. It saw and felt and smelled and heard things that did not existent, and it shaped them and turned them and reached for them and counted them and learned new ways of counting and as it did so – not quite unconsciously – it began to sink a little lower every day, reach a little farther, grasp a little tighter.
The wonder of the world around it was dulling. The wonder of the world it could imagine was brightening. It was still growing, but it was growing up.
***
Things that had once threatened to eat it were now regular meals; prey for hardened and toughened tentacles. Its spiral deepened on both ends: new chambers to hide newly burgeoning flesh within; new flesh to grasp farther, seek more food, turn more anything else into more of itself.
But there were newer, stranger, larger things. Fast-moving, aggressive, willing to snap and prod and poke at a careless limb. And longer tentacles meant longer waits for them to regrow. It was no longer a child and could not regrow childish limbs as readily.
Likewise, it was no longer ruled by childish fear. Now when it retreated from threat and shut itself up in itself, restricted its reach, stalled its spiral, now the unending, incessant beats of its hearts told it of something new
Boredom.
It had run out of itself and anything else to count. It had exhausted its own reserves of imagination for counting nonexistent things. It had traced the pattern of its own spiralling body and measured its curve of growth and the shape of itself in repose and it was dissatisfied.
Time spent within itself was now unappealing again. Time spent in consumption was time spent growing, and as it grew it would grow beyond threats and see new things again and there would be more to count and conceptualize and turn and play with and perhaps its own shell would haunt it less.
And with boredom came resentment. Resentment of the world that tried to eat it and forced boredom upon it. Resentment of its own limited ability to withstand and defy the world and turn anything else into food rather than fearing becoming their food. Resentment of the time wasted not spent growing, not spent spiralling outwards. Resentment of the time spent spiralling in. Resentment of its juvenile self, who had so eagerly set its (now-adolescent) self on the path to its current predicament.
It briefly experimented resenting its own resentment, but it gave that up. It felt dangerously close to questioning the point of being resentful at all, and that filled it with real fear for the first time in ages – without resentment, what did it have left? Boredom again, or trying to imagine nonexistent things and possibly failing.. Resentment was safer. Softer. Sleeker.
So it grew, and as it grew, it grew bitter. Ammonia filled its tissues, bile filled its guts, and venom pooled in the bite from its beak.
It spiralled ever outwards, but never as rapidly as it desired. And it spiralled inwards, and every time it felt that much more spite.
***
At last an invisible milestone was reached: adulthood. It dutifully mated and produced eggs and left them attached to suitably shallow-water substrate, and once that was done it was done with it mentally as well. Another anything else encountered, analyzed, checked off, completed, now rendered dull. Its reproductive partner had been small and brightly coloured and impossible to understand; indistinguishable from the anything elses it ate save for a particularly fascinating pattern of glowing lights it had been in the mood to be intrigued by. When they were done they had parted ways without hesitation or interest.
It spiralled outwards. It spiralled inwards. And every year the former a little more, the latter a little less. And every year the years were a little less, their count was a little more. Time and tide streamed from its shell as it added chamber after chamber, left clutch after clutch, piled jaded upon jaded until it was almost a paralarva again, operating on little more than reflexive consumption and a mind so filled with apathy it was functionally empty.
Anything else changed around it. It was used to that, and so didn’t bother noticing. Which meant it was a real surprise to it when, in the middle of a particularly mindless feeding session, something bit it.
It had been so very long that it had almost forgotten that could happen. It had been so very long that it had almost forgotten everything, everywhere. It had been so very long that it didn’t do anything about the small, rasping sensation on the crown of its shell for some time – and it had to rediscover how time worked, how to count its (much slower now) heartsbeats, how to think and exist.
And when all that was done it reached up to the top of its shell and pulled down the audacious thing that dared gnaw at it. It had four stumpy little paddle-like limbs that weren’t tentacles at all, and a body covered in fine scales, and a mouth gasping pockets of gaseous carbon dioxide and nitrogen and oxygen into the water as life was slowly mangled out of it. On examination of its internal organs, further shell matter became evident.
This thing ate the barrier between it and anything else. It obliterated distinction between inward and outward. That was so obscene and horrid that it could barely bring itself to consume the body, and it was shocked into wakefulness for some time, thinking unpleasant dreams into being.
Suppose there were more?
Suppose they were bigger?
Suppose they had bigger teeth?
Suppose, suppose, suppose. It lived longer, and it watched, and it thought, and it saw all around it the crushing and the rasping and the gnawing into of the things from above, of their increasing numbers and growing jaw muscles, and it saw the future coming for it and it saw a future in which it could not spiral outwards nor inwards but terminated instead and it felt the third great emotion of its life: all-consuming, unending, existential horror. The naked terror of a hunted paralarva, channeled through the adult capacity for thought and conceptualization like an ocean through a single pinprick point.
The pressure generated was immense. So something gave.
***
The depths were a reasonable solution. It did not like the dark – its eyes became less useful in the murk of the silt and the fading sunlight – but there were fewer seeking jaws.
They came deeper, and it went deeper, and so on and on it went. The hunters may have been scarcer, but meals were scarcer too, and so it became an adept listener, letting its heartsbeat drop so slow and low and soft that it could use its own shell as part of its ear, hearing the faint whisper of water molecules against dermal scales, against calcite shells, against edible flesh.
It was so vast that it had but to twitch a single tentacle and it would drift slowly towards the sounds, buoyed on the gases in its shell chambers, momentum preserved by its outward spiral. Quiet. Patient. Inescapable.
There was always something. Diving deep from above. So it dove below diving itself, embedded itself into muck and grime beneath everything and let itself spiral further, keeping its center safe while its reach escalated beyond reason, below the surface of the silt. An endless crawl, blind in the muck, a world turned to touch and sound and a drive to live and by living expand and by expanding live until time stopping being non-existent and became as real and solid a thing as its own self, something it could touch, could taste, could hoard. Could become.
Two hundred and fifty million years went by. It moved its centerpoint twice, to avoid the slow sliding of the ocean floor into a hellish furnace beneath even its own reach. Everything else was usual and didn’t matter.
Which was why it was REALLY surprised when, in the middle of nothing unusual, something bit it.
It had remembered intimately that this could happen, and had planned for it. It had retained a host of short-grasped defensive limbs for this very instant. It had cultivated auxiliary instincts to drive them to repel and destroy any intrusion without conscious action, so that shock would never again leave it vulnerable. It had even – a hundred million years ago – experimented in distributing its nervous system beyond even its own generously decentralized body plan’s remaining limits, so that the central point of its spiral was now more formality than essentiality (it did not know that some formalities are essential). It had planned for everything.
But as it stretched along the length of the limb that had gnawed at its crown – long and cold and shelled – and farther up, and farther up, and farther up, it found that it hadn’t planned for this. A being that touched at a distance like itself, that had spiralled all the way down from the surface, where a centerpoint of its own squatted and was explored by its defensive limb battery, seized and crushed and conceptualized. A thing of dry air and cold iron tang and heavy, greasy fermented liquids turned sour with age. It learned of it as it killed it and found in its learning a new kind of awareness: a spiral not from shell or flesh, but of dead matter torn free and worn as a cloak by suborganisms.
This merited study. Luckily, it had time, and enough brain matter.
Less time than it thought though. Drillbit number two arrived ten years later.
***
It spiralled inwards and outwards.
It could be that it ran and hid. Sacrificed extraneous flesh and buried itself deeper still, turned its stillness deeper yet, lay insensate so even the finest seismographs and sonars could never imagine yet alone image it.
It could be that it surged and grew. Took the new tools for its own, made its own, forged armour and arms in the rifts of the midocean, smelted a hunting industry fit to cull a biosphere from the wreckage of its adversaries, turned the land to ash and air and left the water alone as life’s preserve for a time, just like it had been in a time even older than it was.
It could be that it met and mediated. Intersected this new spiral, sought to see if they might insinuate themselves into each other’s forms, grow together without interference, exchange existences and grow stronger in synchronicity. A double spiral, a corkscrewing helix, an elevation.
It could be, could be, could be. Anything that was nonexistent, it could imagine. Anything it could imagine, it could make existent. Anything existent was vulnerable to time and chance.
It had been an age since it last had made a decision this unknown. This terribly uncertain. It needed the clarity of the count, the measurement, the angle of the spiral. It needed to be as sure and careful about this as it ever could be.
But it REALLY didn’t like being bit.
And really, would the ash be so bad? Not quite as bad as it was sixty-six million years ago; not nearly as bad as it was two hundred and fifty million years ago. This would be a recoverable loss. And if it wasn’t? Its two furthest-flung limbs had already met and clasped forty million years ago, on the opposite side of the world.
Outward. Ever outward. Perhaps this would be a necessary prod forwards, like that first bite had been so long ago.
It had been a nice planet, once. It would try and bring what it could with it, when it left.