But I resisted Ian’s pleas. I couldn’t imagine a life like that, a life like his. I couldn’t imagine never again walking along the beach, feeling the sun on my face or the wind in my hair.
Or perhaps, it was just that mundane human fear of giving away too much of myself.
I head out to the beach for my evening walk. I can’t tell if everything has changed or if I’m the one who’s changing, but the world seems altered in ways I can’t define.
I keep my eyes out for another specimen. I’m not sure if mine was an odd mutation or the beginning of something new: a migration pattern fatally shifted by the false signals of climate change, or maybe an unfamiliar virus, like that wasting disease that wiped out the starfish and sea urchins in the twenty-teens. Another sample could help me decide.
I find two of the things, and then a third.
Up ahead of me on the beach, a group of young people is dancing around a bonfire and a roiling column of smoke that climbs and shifts toward the sky. Students from the college? It’s hard for me to tell these days. The boys are shirtless and the girls nearly so, all of them barefoot and wild-haired, their music discordant and jangling and their dance fierce.
Roasting on a spit over the campfire are two more specimens.
I stand at the edge of the circle. They hardly notice me at first, they are so caught up in their feral laughter and the frenzy of their dance.
The smoke they breathe is heady and intoxicating and filled with strange tidings.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
A boy pauses to laugh. “Making calamari,” he says.
The greasy blood of the creature, or the thumbprint, or the extrusion, or whatever it is, drips sizzling into the fire, and the smoke drifts along the beach.
Passing a knife back and forth between them, the dancing children begin to shriek.
Soon after I rejected his pleas to join him, Ian moved to the divers’ quarters.
Most of the divers were ex-cons: brash, bold, bawdy guys who thrilled at physical danger and lived for risk-taking. A couple women, too. But none of them, not even the women, liked women very much, and they didn’t like me. Maybe it was because their creative obscenities always made me wince.
Officially, Ian was there to direct their resource surveys of the ocean floor, cataloging what bounty still remained and where. Their database grew and grew; it had become one of the most valuable assets that Triton Enterprises owned.
Unofficially, Ian continued his obsession with the underwater city, which he’d glimpsed only once—yet he remained convinced that it was there.
I only visited him twice in the divers’ quarters where his mutant friends flapped and leered. And in keeping with the unspoken rules, he never visited me at all. It bothered people, that kind of thing.
Then he disappeared.
There had always been disappearances. The ocean was deep and dangerous, filled with skilled predators, sharks and worse. This was not our world, and losses were to be expected.
(The shark is prehistoric and has honed its killing to an art, but in the end, it was no match for us. Hammerhead sharks, which first appeared around twenty million years ago, have declined 89 percent since 1986. At least forty million sharks are killed each year for their fins.)
They were upset to lose Ian, a particularly valuable asset. They’d spent so much money modifying him, but after a week, they gave up the search.
I couldn’t bear it.
I guess I went a little crazy for a while, too, driven mad not by the oppression of the ocean but by the finality of my loss. I stormed and screamed and demanded they keep searching. I made threats, falling back on the only power I knew, telling them that I had proof of all the illegal things happening down here and that I’d talk to the media, expose them to the world.
I even demanded they modify me the way they’d modified Ian and turn me into a diver, so I could go and look for him myself.
They diagnosed me with several varieties of psychiatric instability and sent me to the surface.
They could have disappeared me in a mysterious accident like Ian’s, so I guess I should be grateful. Mostly to Scott, my supervisor, who probably put his own job and reputation on the line to save me. I know he took a big risk.
If I’m honest, I know I’m never going back to the Underwater Research Lab.
And if I’m honest with myself, I know that Ian didn’t have an accident; I’m sure he slipped away to search for the buried city.
Did he waken something, knocking on the door of a place long forgotten?
Or was it wakened already, roused by the screaming cries of a trillion murdered things floating in the sea?
People are drifting down to the beach in hiccups and waves, drawn by the music, or the dancing, or the smoke, or the vague odor of roasting meat.
The sun sets terribly and beautifully, a flaring red ball of dancing fire.
I’m swept along with everyone else. Little vials of the black goo are passed around. The dancing grows fiercer, and the fighting gets bloodier. Then, we’re moving away from the beach, past the cul-de-sacs and the condos and the storefronts, into the city.
I’m part of it all, breathing deeply, seeing clearly. I’m an ant in a colony that’s gotten out of hand, running frenzied with sugar-sick joy, sucking up sticky crumbs with glorious madness before it all gets stamped out for good.
We’re smashing through glass, raising our voices in incomprehensible chants, setting the world alight and dancing in the flames.
Morning comes. The sun rises wan and confused over the used-up, burnt-out world. We wander back to the beach, wondering if there’s anything left to eat.
I stand for a moment and marvel at the coast, dark like an oil slick with drifts of stranded capsules for as far as the eye can see. Across the water shimmers the outline of a monstrous city—which rises roaring from the waves and claws its way back into being.
Desirina Boskovich’s short fiction has been published in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Kaleidotrope, PodCastle, Drabblecast, and anthologies such as The Way of the Wizard, Aliens: Recent Encounters, and The Apocalypse Triptych. Her nonfiction pieces on music, literature, and culture have appeared in Lightspeed, Weird Fiction Review, The Huffington Post, Wonderbook, and The Steampunk Bible. She is also the editor of It Came From the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction (Cheeky Frawg, 2013), and together with Jeff VanderMeer, co-author of The Steampunk User’s Manual (Abrams Image, 2014). Find her online at www.desirinaboskovich.com.
Tomorrow's Cthulhu: Stories at the Dawn of Posthumanity Page 33