Afro Puffs Are The Antennae Of The Universe

by Zig Zag Claybourne

  “That’s what I’m getting. Mirrors in you.”

  “Lolita was there as well. Everyone reacts slightly differently. We still have Lolita’s recipes for a seaweed bake.”

  Neon perked up. “I know that name. Lolita. Milo talked about her.”

  “Lolita Bebida. We became celebrities the same year. Beautiful soul,” said Biddle. “She mentioned Milo to me in correspondence, but I’ve never met him.”

  “You’re not missing much,” Neon said, successfully stifling a grin.

  “So, is Bobo a pet?” asked Neon.

  “Pet ownership is another way to convince yourself that domination over others is a form of love,” said the doctor. “No pets. Doctor, you’ve been very silent,” Biddle said to Keita, who’d been in deep thought the entire time walking the ark.

  “Just thinking about ghosts,” said Keita, “and what connects them to us machines.”

  Bobo knew he overthought things. It was a failing. Escaping a predator was no different from escaping one of the many tube puzzles several scientists (now fired) at the Portland Oceanic Institute used to love throwing at him. Literally throwing. Bobo was big. And when Bobo escaped, Bobo tended to hustle and flail. Underwater, it would have been a magnificent display of ferocity. On land, even though still dangerous, he looked like a Harryhausen dramaturge.

  Good times.

  Out there in the ocean, there wasn’t a current, cuttlefish, or sand swirl he couldn’t read to his advantage. Could any shark ever say it’d tasted even the tip of one of the strawberry suckers of Bobo the Mag? Mag for magnificent. Only if it was lying, which sharks did all the time. What could anyone expect from something always trying to look uninterested as it figured out vectors to murder you?

  This one was a mako, a big one, and it was intentionally circling wide and slow to get other makos involved, maybe hem Bobo in so its beady-eyed, politician-caught-in-a-sex-scandal rictus face could swoop in for the grand nab.

  Not today, you idiot fuck.

  To Bobo’s right: wide-open ocean inviting him to escape, which might totally be a mistake he wouldn’t live to regret. Makos were stupidly fast.

  To Bobo’s left: the hulk of a ship that had settled on a shelf and had been home to moray eels for several generations.

  Below him: silt. Loads of it in many directions.

  He hunkered very still, looking like the kin of the large piece of snapped coral several yards away, his usual reddish hue turned sickly grey and brown, complete with coral spikes, nodules and crags in unfortunate places.

  Swirling above him: a warm, spiraling current. Bluefin tuna loved those. And there was a large-enough school nearby to be effective.

  The trick would be getting enough of the tuna to slam into the shark…

  “Why am I so damned thirsty?” said Neon. “If the ghost of Bea Arthur offered me a glass of lukewarm water right now in exchange for two hours of dry cunnilingus, there’d be no hesitation on my part. Crazy thirsty.”

  “That’s Bobo,” said Desiree.

  Bobo, all eighty-five kilos of him, rested comfortably in a glass pool that looked two sizes too small for something even half his size.

  It had been a hell of a trip, one of escapes, epiphanies, new love interests, and a villain (rogue dragoon formerly of Atlantis named Death-Mael) finally worthy of Bobo the Mag, eighth wonder of the Pacific, numbers one through seven as well.

  He’d finally answered the call.

  “Bobo makes you thirsty?” said Neon.

  “When you first meet him. Bobo, cut it out,” said Desiree.

  The Mag didn’t have to be psychic to read sharp tones and intentions.

  “He’s generally only like this after mating,” said Biddle. “An unusually high amount of mating around here.”

  “You’ve created the perfect singles party,” said Desiree.

  “Yes, there’s that.”

  Neon moved cautiously closer. “How do we communicate with it?”

  “You have to touch it,” said Desiree.

  “Speaking in the general ‘you,’ yes?”

  “Nerp,” said Desiree. “You.”

  “Nerp.”

  “Listen, Bubba’s our main psychic. He’s gone,” said Desiree. “That leaves you.”

  “Do you know what hentai is?” she asked her captain, then looked at the size of Bobo again.

  “I’m not saying open a bottle of champagne with it. Touch it, let it sense your desires, move on.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better if Tash did this?” said Neon.

  “It doesn’t know Tash’s mind. It knows humans. Why do you think I briefed you and Tash, and had her meld with you?” said Desiree.

  “As backup.”

  “Front and center, dear. Show Bobo what you got.”

  Bobo’s wet bulk shuddered and undulated.

  “You saw that?” Neon said. “Sucker’s got a hard-on under there somewhere.”

  “Are you seriously daunted? Neon, we need this.”

  “Just some small daunts.”

  “Neon Temples, you touch that octopus or I swear to Gaia, I’ll scream.” Which was a sentence she’d never have thought needed saying.

  “That a direct order?” said Neon.

  “Very much so,” said Desiree. “Reach out, touch Bobo’s hand, make this world a better place. If you can.”

  “M’god, woman, you said that with a straight face.”

  Neon looked at Bobo again. After all the shit she’d seen, being squicked by an octopus was an eminently dick move. An octopus. You are calamari, she thought. I use plates, knives and forks.

  But why’d it have to be so bulbous, knobby, and slick? Thing was a ball sack with excellent mobility.

  She reached down. Touched Bobo. Nothing happened, then Bobo ballooned and dashed down his tube so quickly, he looked flushed, leaving a bewildered woman to stare at jetted silt. “That was it?”

  “Doesn’t take long.”

  “The location in my head feels like it’s a hundred miles away and deep as shit.”

  “Yeah,” said Desiree. “Knowing Bobo, he’ll get there before us.”

  Generally, Bobo hated wearing trackers. The Institute had done nothing but track him. Ping, ping, ping all through the oceans, with them never figuring out how he crossed huge sections of ocean so fast. Equipment failure, they figured.

  Doofuses. It was a water world and they were just polyps in it. There were so many Hollow Points, Blanks, and Thin Strips, Bobo could go from his secret home in the Pacific to a ’pi call in the Atlantic (as there were no booties within his kind) in less time than it took Desiree to eventually reach the spot where his tracker’s encoded beacon would stop her. Maybe then he’d get to meet that new consciousness he’d vaguely sensed peeking out from the guts and wires of her boat.

  “Soul in a box,” they said, and deep. Likely not unprotected. Likely very difficult to get to.

  Yes, let the octopus get killed.

  Except he was Bobo the Mag. Who else had ever slapped Raffic the Mad Buddha and gotten away with it?

  The tracker would ping him when the dry-bones caught up and were in range. Bobo shaped his twenty-three feet of length into a dart, jetting toward the impenetrable deeps, focusing all his attention on his bioelectrical sensory net. It was colder there, just enough to be annoying. He oscillated rapid muscle contractions back and forth along each of his strong limbs, but not enough to be a clarion call to some glow-jawed, overly toothed, dead-eyed beast hoping for a quick lunch.

  For a squishy ball sack with excellent mobility, he could take a lot more pressure than any dry-ass four-limb. He now navigated totally by the sense of space the box occupied in his head.

  He detected the first of the sentry sensors by its energy signature, or rather by its paucity of energy. There were no attention-drawing lights on it, and just the faintest motor whir. A four-limb wouldn’t have noticed it in this alien atmosphere but surely would have been noticed; the small machine, though, being in Bobo’s home, merely
logged the passing of his cephalopod body’s languid, unhurried arc over and around it. Bobo knew these signatures well. Certain ships traveled with these sensors hidden beneath their massive hulls like hypervigilant remora. He’d not yet been able to sneak onto one of the stealthy ships, but he’d learned to dance with their parasite remora pretty well.

  Desiree, having banked on the fact that Kosugi thought the soul absolutely well hidden, had anticipated at best a long response time if any alarms were tripped by an aquatic. Animals with electrical equipment were commonplace in these waters. If Bobo played his cards right, he’d appear to be one more object of study released into the wild.

  Bobo didn’t have a conceptual analog for just be cool, because that would have been like the ocean having an abundance of ways to call itself wet; he spread all eight limbs outward, becoming an invisible yet slowly spinning umbrella that drifted past yet another drone, his body drawing ever downward, downward, into the stygian depths of the canyon of a volcanic outcropping. Whatever the thing he sought was, it knew precisely where it was, which was highly unusual. Its sense of place felt almost like a drug. Bobo wanted to be there.

  Most of the species he’d encountered were utter dullards at anything deeper than visual recognition of space. Now that he knew how to recognize this thing’s tings and strokes as directions, it was a beacon he couldn’t miss with all nine brains shut down. Same as the dull glow issuing upward from beneath an outcropping he approached after drifting downward quite some time.

  He knew plasma arcs. The Bimaiy had used them against him once off-planet. This wasn’t as sophisticated, but the biting teeth of its energy felt the same. The barrier was set deep into the stone of a crevasse. The latticework arcs across the crevasse prevented getting to the other side. The volcanic range itself was too extensive for four-limbs to go around safely, with all their needs for oxygen and not being crushed to death and whatnot.

  No overthinking. The builders obviously thought in terms of four-limbs with machinery. Bobo drifted as close to the lattice as the waters it heated around it allowed. He flattened his body to the black rock in the black water, allowing his skin to assume that shade as well out of habit, and very carefully probed for holes.

  His sensitive suckers found cracks, crevices, and pockmarks but nothing of use. He worked methodically, each limb’s brain reporting their detailed findings to central HQ, covering all sides of the angry lattice that was hungry to slice off some errant octopus part as a snack for the deeps.

  Nothing. An impenetrable barrier, even for Bobo the Mag.

  Which was utter four-limb bullshit.

  Who’d gotten out of the Portland Oceanic Institute not twice but six times?

  Who’d then gotten out, despite “added containment measures,” a seventh time?

  Getting out of someplace was no different from getting in.

  If he was very, very careful, an arm would indeed fit through the lattice. He could have slipped his entire body through…except he wasn’t working with a fixed surface. Squeezing through a tube the diameter of a cantaloupe was hugely different from doing underwater limbo between plasma arcs. The currents themselves introduced a hundred variables.

  Bobo detached, letting said invisible watery forces waft him a short distance away from the heat.

  He almost entered committee mode, each brain eagerly ready to offer amazing options, then he remembered: he overthought.

  So, instead, he went basic WWAHD. What would a human do?

  They loved projectile action. Guns, emotions, anything they could fling away from themselves with violent intent toward others formed an awesome day.

  He darted upward. A limb shot out, a sucker affixed to a sentry drone, and the first test of the Bobo aught-eight whipped toward the lattice’s perimeter after a tight spiral and release by Bobo the Mag.

  It got decent speed, and his aim was, of course, impeccable. The drone hit half rock and half plasma, flared the all-encompassing black for a tight second, then faded, popping here and there as detritus landed blindly.

  He jetted away to gather ammunition, quickly returning with a drone tightly coiled in each arm.

  One, two, three, four, five, each striking like punches to stone, the black ocean mimicking a melting fireworks sky, the lattice finally rewarding Bobo, who waited patiently, with a flicker. Just the top row, but it was enough. That particular fire went dark.

  Bobo flattened himself, prodigious head included, to the thickness of smoke and slowly, carefully oil-slicked his way contrary to gravity down the craggy surface, along the top of the opening, focusing all nine brains on remaining unhurt so he could lord his superiority over the humans later.

  It took forever for a cooler temperature to clue him into having cleared the energetic death sewn into the aperture of what opened out to a huge cavern. He expanded, released, and hovered in place, getting a sense of the space. More accurately, getting no sense of life in the space, even though it was large enough—and he was literally in the bowels of a volcano, so he knew the cavern branched and connected with other spaces of varying size somewhere, likely one that led to the other side, and likely some that housed glowing tooth-faced devils that he really didn’t feel like being bothered with—but all around: stillness. Perfect stillness. And at the bottom of that stillness, a box. He couldn’t see it; he felt it along every cell of his body. He smelled the metallic tang of it mixed with the brine and soot of its ancient tomb. He felt the electricity of security systems interlaced through and through it like a nervous system.

  He felt the soul of Hashira Megu reaching ever outward.

  That was an odd, highly odd feeling. The box told him it was alive, but he knew the difference between alive, animate, and mere stuff.

  The stillness made Bobo feel incredibly lonely, but he knew that was the box’s doing, just as he knew the box wasn’t simply stuff. Bobo ejected himself from the stillness and let himself go down, down…

  When he went up, up, up, he waited, noting that nothing deigned to bother him, waited until a submersible piloted by Neon met him for the all-important exchange, which consisted of him floating the intricately etched box before the submersible’s arm, a nozzle extending from said arm, a silvery mist blasting from the nozzle to coat the box, the arm’s three-fingered hand retrieving the box, the arm drawing back into the body of the wee beast, and Bobo slapping himself to the sub’s cold hull for a ride up to the Ann, its large aquarium, and a nap.

  “He had a brilliant idea,” Neon said. She’d given him a good touch and he’d again zipped away. “He figured no one would want the box injured, in case something managed to come at it from within, plus there’s no human foolish enough to believe they can truly keep anything from a citizen of the deeps, so he retrieved the box, swam boldly to the watery fire, and held the box forward. Just as he neared certain death, the fire disappeared as if it knew the pointlessness of facing Bobo the Mag—look, this is exactly what that sucker fed into my head, somewhat translated—and all the waters opened to Bobo, carrying upward—”

  “Bobo got deep in your head, huh?” said Yvonne.

  “Tentacle dreams for the next two weeks, right?” said Neon.

  “Octopus equals arms,” said Biddle. “Suckers the entire length, base to tip. Tentacles, suckers solely near the ends.”

  “I give zero fucks,” said Neon.

  “We’re stable on no signals in or out of the box,” said Keita, holding goofy-looking tech over the tissue box–sized cube covered in silver. “They know it’s gone but no idea where.”

  “That’ll clue ’em to the fact that somebody fairly awesome has it,” said Desiree. “Let’s move with the quickness. Biddle, thank you.”

  “Is Bobo going to stay aboard?” Biddle asked.

  Desiree shrugged. “He can get out anytime he feels like it.” To Yvonne: “Keep us scrambled, shielded, and running full speed.”

  “Africa?” said Yvonne.

  “Africa,” said Desiree.

  “I need to lay
down,” said Neon, already on her way away from everything for a bit. When she passed Sharon’s stateroom belowdecks, the former Nonrich commander inquired, “What’s going on?” to which Neon, minus breaking stride, responded, “Shut the hell up”, at which Sharon said, “Okay”, having heard in Neon’s voice a field indeed barren of fucks.

  Sucker dreams and random memes.

  12

  Zoned

  Back in the Sahara Depot. Again. Tired AF: everyone.

  Desiree to Keita: “That thing locked, blocked, and secure?”

  Keita nodded.

  “Good,” said Desiree, haggard face swinging upward to Po. “Po, nothing happens until we take a nap.” She re-bleared at Keita. “Siesta,” said the captain.

  “Big siesta,” said Keita.

  13

  Quiet, Please

  Her heart wasn’t in it. Usually, there was nothing more stimulating to Megu than unraveling yet another thread in the massive ball of yarn that took form as reality. The fact that galaxies were connected by invisible superstrands should have sent her into a day-long isolation akin to a fasting monk, but there she was, standing before a vending machine, knowing she was about to pick something to snack on and not caring what it was.

  Two underlings, noting her uncharacteristic lack of decision-making, bowed and made themselves available at her immediate periphery should she require assistance. The machine was stocked with an international assortment of prudent items, whimsical items, and exorbitant items.

  Megu stared the machine up and down. An apple sat dead center. She didn’t want an apple; she wanted answers. She wanted—

  Tapioca.

  Tapioca on the third shelf.

  Lemon.

  There was nothing of note about tapioca. And yet there it was. She keyed the selection. The door slipped open. Out came the cool container in her hands.

  The underlings were pleased.