The shark is seventy-three feet long and more than a hundred tons and it looks like a sausage crossed with a subway car crossed with a steakhouse knife cabinet. It is moving with great force and purpose and joy in the bay, just below the water’s surface, fin and back standing proud and tall in the midday sun like some sort of denticle-coated sailboat, the heft and force of it tipping jauntily as its mouth slides gently towards the surface and shatters another yacht at the keel, sending screaming weekenders into the bay. They thrash in fear and desperation, which attracts its interest, followed by its teeth, and some screams stop and some screams start and oh, oh, there is the ferry, crammed with tourists, and there it goes – bam! Right amidships! Look at the list, look at the tilt, see how such a small change in angle and degree makes such a big difference for so many people! Look at how simple and tidy it all looks from here, like a little paper boat sinking on a pond!
Oh, the military are here now. The drones are spotting for the helicopters, the helicopters are spotting for the missile cruisers. Oh, it leaps – a breach fit for a mako, on a body more than a hundred times a mako’s size! It’s in midair, above the deck, mouth open, the bullets all sliding harmlessly past it or tickling across steely skin, mouth open, all the fire and screams in the air, mouth open, the waves are red and churned by its wake, mouth open and Harold woke up in bed with sixteen minutes before the alarm went off. Again.
***
Since he was up early he spent a little more time on the toilet and a little more time brushing his teeth and put together they almost balanced out the a lot more time he spent trying not to remember what he’d been thinking about, and the a lot a lot more time he spent trying to forget about trying not to remember what he’d been thinking about.
Traffic helped. The streets were clogged with the third day of just enough rain to make everyone just a little upset but unable to avoid errands any longer – sorry about your weekend, cheer up, the week’s going to suck too. The bus was a cauldron of angry, damp, uncomfortable humans. Harold’s leg cramped; his shirt was sweatstained; a baby was screaming and someone was screaming at the baby. He was in nirvana.
Then his stop arrived, he walked two blocks in the drizzle, and he went into a building to sit down at a computer and go over the backlog of KRUNCHI data to make sure it wasn’t falling apart in the hands of the tools that were meant to make sure it wasn’t falling apart by checking it against the algorithms that were supposed to inform you if it was falling apart as long as the base code running them hadn’t fallen apart.
Harold’s monitor had a little sticker with a cartoony shark fin on it. Everyone on the team had gotten a pack and been strongly encouraged to use them. It got a little bigger every time he looked at it, which was never, or thought about it, which was every second he was sitting in front of it.
His inbox exploded in fanfares about a quarter of the way into a truly incomprehensible bug report: priority message from the Big Guy. All hands on deck, no slowing down because the weather’s bad and half the city is clogged and the other half is leaking, shape up or ship out, We Get Results or We Go Home, No Excuses, Remember How Badass Your Job Is.
Harold remembered how badass his job was and his arms started shaking a little until he went to the bathroom. Then he finished three-quarters of the next one-quarter of the bug report, took an early lunch, and on the way back – microwaved meal filling his stomach with watery grease – he took the walk by the Pool. Like a kid picking the scab, or poking the bruise.
The Pool was still there, and so was the shark. Encased in glass, swimming its endless, patient laps. Waiting for the Thursday feeding. They fed it variety on Thursdays, pre-vetted for safety but selected for unfamiliarity. To keep it interested.
Harold looked at the glass and wondered how interested it was in testing its thickness. He wondered how much variety it would get from shattering the walls, bursting into the lobby, sliding down the rain-slicked streets all the way to the waterfront. He wondered if the ferry would be there. He wondered if he’d be able to avoid biting his nails all the way back to his monitor and its sticker.
He didn’t, but only because he ground his teeth instead.
***
Another early night, another picture-play of his daytime thoughts. This time the shark is on land; he’d failed to check the bug reports in time and it’s sprouted legs through some kind of godawful reverse-neotenic nonsense, sending it scuttling through the skyscrapers like a centipede through a box of crickets. It flips the streetcars, it tramples the cart vendors, it wades through emergency response teams and tanks and it climbs an old cathedral downtown and heaves air through its gill slits in a deep, booming grunt that sounds like it’s coming from a hog too big for the deepest hells to hold.
Then Harold woke up again, twelve minutes early. So he had a little less time to sit on the toilet.
Fourth day of rain. A little more intense, with occasional pauses for hope. It lashed the windows now and then, to be sure you were paying attention.
He wondered if the shark noticed. It probably could. Megalodon(™) was mostly C. carcharias in stock, scaled up beyond even the wildest fish-tales or the most Peter Benchley-inspired nightmares, and they had pretty good eyes and liked to check out stuff above water. It probably still had those instincts and abilities. KRUNCHI had added size. Added a ‘more dramatic’ paler colouration; reducing the effectiveness of the fish’s countershading in the process. Made the teeth bigger. Other than that it had mostly contributed a steady flow of bug reports. O. megalodon probably wouldn’t have looked like anything like this, wouldn’t have acted anything like this; but it was what you saw when you looked it up on the internet, and that was always what the Big Guy wanted, so it was what he got.
He wondered if the shark cared. He had no idea. It probably didn’t.
He wondered if he was thinking about the rain or not.
***
Its fins elongate into wings. It soars through the air (that it can’t breathe) and breathes fire (that it really can’t breathe) and it tears the jets from the sky and jukes and dives and rends asunder missiles and fighter-planes alike, a dogfish in a dogfight. It defecates a contrail across the sky; it topples the radio antennas of the tallest towers; it dips its tail in mocking salute as it buzzes the bay one last time and soars away across the water to menace the globe. And twenty minutes before Harold’s alarm was going to go off. Enough time for toilet and toothbrush AND staring at the ceiling. Beautiful.
Day five. No raindrops, just eternal mist in coagulated globules that tried to seep into your clothing from the inside out, like alien sweat. The gutters remained full and sullen from yesterday.
Harold finished the bug report. He was informed it was late, and had it explained to him in an automated sort of way that this was bad, and he was also on thin ice because if he wasn’t badass he had no place here, that was just the way evolution and ecology worked.
Harold’s body demanded energy input. Early lunch again, but he dawdled by the Pool until it was merely on time.
Down below, the shark swam. Watching, waiting, whirling.
He ate underdressed salad, for his health, and he worked on a new bug report, for his career, and just as an experiment he filled it with autogenerated genetic lorem ipsum and labelled it complete and then did that three times over and set them up to be handed in one at a time for the next three days and though this was the first time he’d done this since he was a child and stole a jelly bean from a corner store sweet bin he knew in his heart and soul this would not be noticed or caught.
So he worked on a bug report some more, for real, and didn’t look at the shark fin sticker.
And he went home, and he dreamed.
***
It is nuclear powered. It will destroy the world. It is radio-active and cybernetic and genetically modified and powered by generative AI. It is the ultimate organism and it is a big fat fluxing mess squatting on the city, a derivative blob of threatening biological urges. Big hairy body! Big scaly nose! Fangs! Claws! Jaws!
It’s the big bear outside the cave and he doesn’t have a spear there’s no spear big enough.
But then come the jets, pum pum pum go the missiles, and oh they’ve shot it, they’ve shot it and it’s leaking data tables and shoddy algorithms and fabricated bug reports everywhere. It’s leaking, it’s failing, it has so much blood needed to fuel so many organs inside it, it’s just mortal. It’s just an organism. Outnumbered, frail, enmeshed in a reality so much bigger than it is that it can’t even imagine it, let alone defy it, isolated by systems and systemically isolated, a prisoner in a puddle.
So he falls off the city – vulnerable to crude physics, empty, dead – and he woke up in bed with the alarm in his ears.
The rain had stopped. The dawn was soft and yellow. It was a beautiful day, and soon the sun would be shining down into the Pool. By noon it would be the perfect photo op.
So Harold didn’t pack a lunch, but he did pack his best jacket, and he sent his three bug reports early, and went for lunch right on time, in his best jacket. He walked firmly and decisively like he hadn’t since he was six, and he walked past the security on the Pool’s scenic bridge like he paid them, and he walked into the photoshoot, and up to the Big Guy, and he gave him a firm, strong handshake, then a hug, then a hop, then a fall.
Then a splash.
It was a very curious creature, and Thursday WAS variety day. So it moved with great force and purpose and joy
***
The board was divided on the subject.
On the one hand, the project was a money sink. And sunk cost fallacy was a danger.
On the other, to euthanize your advertising campaign seemed a self-inflicted blow. And really, it wasn’t so hard a swerve to sell, was it? Marketing had done more with worse for longer, for less reason.
Sharks were badass. The company was for badasses. And it wasn’t like ‘anti-corpro punk’ was a difficult aesthetic to commercialize, especially when you gave it teeth.
They could put it on stickers.