by Ken Liu
“Quiet, or I’ll throw you into the water to look for your friends.” Paolo didn’t even look up as he said this, didn’t make eye contact.
Heat flared in Friend Paolo, but he quenched it with a slow count to ten and walked briskly down to the seaward-edge, far from Paolo. Anger would solve nothing. He needed to think. The water lay flat as a mirror where the two surfaces met, creating a ghost of the platform extending out into the ocean.
There had been workers here. Dozens of them. But he heard no voices, no calls for help. No splashing. Nothing.
The Navigator awoke to endless, crushing blackness. Ocean. Space without stars. After years in vacuum, her scorched exoskeleton creaked beneath the pull of gravity.
She remembered the sensation, just barely, from her life before she was stoneskin, before she joined the Sisterhood to sing her own news of sacrifice, and of dust swelling to life. Back then—back home—she had leaped, and floated, before her planet pulled her back and knocked the breath out of her.
Huddled in the shade of their filament screens, the adults had exchanged knowing glances. They had known what awaited her, but then she had not. She had been too preoccupied with the grit beneath her bare skin, the smell of the kai-blossoms drifting in with the storm winds, the envy of the other youths. All those things she lost to space and the relentless static presence of the Seed. Or paid, perhaps, in purchase of it.
The Seed.
Startled from her reverie, she realized she could still feel it, separated from her somewhere on the way down, but intact. It would carry out their mission.
Her armor, once seamless, shifted. Pieces of it ground against each other like tectonic plates.
Broken.
She tried to calm herself, but scores of tiny quicksilver creatures crowded against her, nibbled at her, tried to force open the hairline fractures in her carapace. And above, swarming in hives on the continents, there were other creatures, bipedal. She had seen them in their crude attempts to manipulate the spectrum to communicate, transmissions of violence and shouting and affection.
Soft and hopelessly vulnerable, like she had once been.
This was their home... until the Seed did its work. It would boil their oceans into atmosphere and petrify the strange greens of life here. Their children would burn and ash away into a sky that would turn slowly into the streaked oranges and reds so familiar from her youth. The vision grew in intensity—the smell of ozone, the screams—and she realized that these thoughts came from something outside of her.
Something had opened the Seed.
Strange movements, but following definite and purposeful patterns. Someone. She traced the patterns for almost an hour before she understood. This creature, whatever it was, hoped to interact. It thought the Seed was, what, an object? A tool?
She recoiled at the thought, her limbs thrashing sluggish through the pressure. The sudden action disturbed something near her and she was rocked by the wake of something massive passing nearby—or perhaps the synchronized flight of thousands of tiny beings, invisible in the blackness. Water and atmosphere continued their oppressive push onto her, into her, widening the faults in her armor.
Somewhere above, the creature continued its clumsy attempts at control.
The Seed still slept. But what would these creatures do when it woke?
Sometime during that first night, the welding seams healed themselves. Friend Paolo ran his fingers over the smooth steel in astonishment, but Paolo smirked and shrugged it off. “Trivial.”
The day came and brought with it thirst and hunger. Friend Paolo tried again to discuss leaving the platform and reporting the accident, but Paolo didn’t even respond.
Frustration turned to fitful sleep. Strange noises moaned in the night, stirring Friend Paolo in half-sleep and conjuring dreams of drowning, wrapped in iron-hard tentacles and sinking, sinking, the sensation so real that even as his eyes fluttered open he could swear he was really moving.
Friend Paolo sat up with a start. He was moving. The rig was shifting. Metal groaned, louder now, and as Friend Paolo tried to stand the entire platform leapt into the air like a breaching whale. He fell, scrabbling for a handhold on the slope but finding none, and slid backward toward the ocean void.
“Paolo!” he screamed, tearing his fingernails against the metal. Above him, black against the night sky, the platform’s far edge shook like a volcano, then settled, then straightened. It took several more gulps of air before Friend Paolo realized that the deadly slope had become level ground, like it was before the impact—that he was no longer falling.
In the stillness, Paolo laughed with delight.
Still pounding with adrenaline, Friend Paolo crept to the edge and peered over. The buckled legs of the rig were straight again, the platform returned to its proper place—but both were subtly different, their surfaces smoothly grained, not the bare gloss of steel, and seamless.
“Fixing is nothing,” Paolo said. He was standing, all a shadow, over Friend Paolo, who was still crouched at the platform’s edge, shaking. Friend Paolo could see a white smear of smile in the starlight. “Now it’s time to create.”
For days thereafter, Paolo experimented with the thing, talking to himself and building increasingly complex objects by manipulating the panels. Meanwhile, Friend Paolo paced circles as the shadows in his head grew darker, and the far-below water grew louder.
They were surrounded by things Paolo created, seemingly transmuted from saltwater, and then discarded. Smooth cubes; metal balls; intricate models; other objects, now debris. Even food, which Paolo had devoured but Friend Paolo had refused to touch. Over time—sometimes only a few hours—the initially perfect objects Paolo created had become pitted and sprouted fine, curling filaments. The untouched food gradually cocooned themselves, and Friend Paolo felt less and less tempted to try them.
Fresh water he could not resist, though, reluctantly drowning the urgent aching of his stomach from an elegant, rounded vessel which Paolo had manifested for him. Thirst sated but cramped by hunger, Friend Paolo continued pushing his friend, looking for any indication his advice would be heeded as it had been in all the years past.
“We don’t understand how it’s doing these things,” Friend Paolo said. “People are dead! And something... something may be looking for it.”
Paolo snorted. “Do you understand what I can accomplish with this? In one night, I fixed all of your team’s mistakes, in another I raised the very ground beneath our feet. What could I do a week from now?” He shook his head, in sorrow or perhaps disgust. “You’re probably still thinking about wind energy and research facilities. Still in love with your budgets and your spreadsheets. But those don’t apply any more. I hold the world in my hand now. Anything I can imagine, I can build. And I’m not setting that aside because my fucking assistant doesn’t understand how it works.”
“Assistant?”
They argued. First, a bickering kind of disagreement. Then louder and more fierce, unlike anything they had experienced before, as Friend Paolo pulled at his hair and refused to acquiesce—“the workers,” he yelled again and again—and Paolo grew colder and more unyielding in the face of this insubordination.
Finally, Friend Paolo demanded to leave. “This isn’t who we are, Paolo.”
They didn’t say another word to each other; Paolo drove him down from the platform towards the docking floats and used the device to conjure a crude sailboat and shoved Friend Paolo into it: a hollow, almond-shaped thing, the mast jutting out crooked like a branch, the rigging hanging in thin, fraying strands, the sails a strange wet material, rough like raw silk, the whole as light as fiberglass.
When it hit the water, Friend Paolo tried to paddle furiously back to the platform, shouting—“Paolo! You have to stop! Paolo!”—but the boat, curving itself around him, caught the wind and carried him, helpless, over the horizon to the distant shore.
Paolo did not watch him go.
In the upper bedroom of a seaside bed-and-breakfast
, Friend Paolo stared at the closed blinds, his foot tapping a quick, syncopated beat against the black walnut floor. Almost two days since he left the platform. The longest he’d been away from Paolo for almost fifteen years.
The curves of the shadow-whips had begun to fade from his mind. His fear seemed silly now, but it hadn’t been silly with 300 fathoms of saltwater beneath his feet. And he still felt it at night, when he forgot where he was and he could see again the impenetrable blackness of its descent and feel it reaching up toward him. It was the same feeling he used to get as a kid when he knew something was behind him on the basement stairs, close enough to grab him and trip him into the sharp, splintered corners of the wood and pull him down step, by step, by step, by step.
He shook his head and stood up. This was not the platform. Beneath him was nothing but wood floor and concrete foundation. Dirt and rock.
When he left, he left because Paolo had become indifferent. The missing workers were people; they had families. Friend Paolo had a responsibility to them.
But there was no hope now. He had waited, servile, while Paolo built and the survivors—if there had been any—drowned, alone and undiscovered.
Yet, more than 24 hours after checking into this room, he’d still called no one. Said nothing. And why?
He had hidden the new-made boat by a small dock at the edge of town, in a winter shed empty of anything but ancient oars, dry with rot. Fitting, for even before the coastline eased into view, the decay had commenced, slowly overcoming Paolo’s new creation just as it had the others—creasing, flaking, shriveling it.
Perhaps it was already dust.
He had expected an uproar, but what he’d found on his return was the incongruity of a world that was just as he left it. The impact wave that had struck the rig never came to shore. No disaster had claimed the seaboard, no racing wall had smashed inland, erasing all before it, dragging the dead and the ruined in its wake. No news stories, no panic, no concern, only the murmur of a quiet vacation town, watching birds, shopping for souvenirs, oblivious.
No one saw the thing fall.
It was as though nothing had happened at all. Their investors were used to Paolo’s silence and long ago learned to stay hands-off. The families of the lost workers didn’t expect them home for months, and so didn’t have any reason to suspect that...
He started to pace, the same path he had paced almost every hour since checking in. He tried to tell himself: there’s no point, they’re gone. But he was too realistic, too honest to fool himself.
He was protecting Paolo.
One phone call would end everything—the project, Paolo’s career, his own, their partnership... maybe more.
But Friend Paolo remembered the look in Paolo’s eyes in those final hours, absorbed in the strange light of the thing that fell from the sky, and he knew.
Paolo was gone.
Everything was already destroyed. Even the little sailboat had warped and frayed, like everything else created with that monstrous device.
The only thing that remained was what to do next.
Friend Paolo picked up the phone.
The Navigator had been anointed because of her strength of will. And now? Now she was a cracking husk, deep, somewhere deep and lonely.
She tried to climb. She tried to rise, to surface, to warn. She came to build, not destroy. But each attempt ground her deeper into the sand and expanded the fissures fractaling across her exoskeleton. Her whips drifted now, useless, manipulated only by the flux and circulation of the ocean.
Far above, the Seed awoke.
The San Diego morning flared golden-white; the sun made Friend Paolo’s skin itch.
Not permitted to accompany the investigators that had responded to his call, he lingered with a group of people gathered on the rocks by the shore, chatting over coffee and staring out toward the open sea.
The Coast Guard had mustered days before, but had been repelled.
No one could reach Paolo.
Near where the platform should have been, a vast dark cylinder—like a water spout, but rigidly vertical and symmetrical—stretched like a thread between the black of the ocean and the churning clouds, casting that region of sea into shadow. It gave the impression of a tower, or perhaps a cluster of towers. Strange shapes curled out of the vortex, only the very edges of each visible through the gloom.
Friend Paolo sat, feeling the heat of the rocks press against his back, listening to the cries of the sea gulls, and stared with the others at the maelstrom darkening the furthest horizon. He felt a growing unease, the same tremendous weight he’d felt when he realized Paolo would not listen, would not stop. Not even for him.
The calm was broken by a scream echoing through the salt-sharp air from further down the beach. The entire crowd startled, then hurried to the source of the alarm.
At the bottom of a nearby cliff, bodies—some clad in the dark blue uniforms used by the platform workers, others in white military garb—were snagged on the shore in one great tangled mass, arms and legs necrotic and woven around each other—an obscene, final intimacy.
Someone spoke to him in horrified tones, but Friend Paolo could not understand, could only stand and tremble.
What has he done?
Sirens shrieked and news vans arrived, but Friend Paolo did not wait with the other bystanders. He pushed his way out of the crowd and ran back to the small, private dock and the corrugated aluminum shed where he left Paolo’s sailboat.
Coast Guard orders or no, he had to get back.
The water lapped against the rocks of the shore differently here, arrhythmically, as if trying to communicate with him. A warning?—for when he released the latch, the door blew outward with a great exhalation and knocked him to the ground. Frost formed on his clothes and skin, then melted almost as quickly as it grew.
The rushing air was thin, too thin to breathe. It was only when the strange wind subsided that he could catch his breath and look inside the shack.
A thick, rubbery substance covered the walls. It had been a deep black, dense as lacquer, when he opened the door, but now it was turning purple and iridescent. From each corner of the room, from the edges of the floor and the ceiling, thousands of thin, rough-barked tendrils stretched inward like vines. Where their paths intersected, they twisted tightly around each other to form ropes, thicker and denser the closer they were to the center of the room.
There, suspended by the web of liana, was what had once been the sailboat.
Its splintering, wood-like frame had smoothed into a thing of elegance, long and thin and smooth and opalescent. Its sails, once clumsily tethered with fibrous strands, had been replaced by flat blades which nested together with absolute precision, almost invisible against the curving bone-like mast.
Friend Paolo stepped across the threshold and the tendrils tightened. The boat quivered. He took another step and the tendrils contracted further, pulling it into shadow.
The air was still thin—too little oxygen, somehow. Lightheaded, he rested his hand against the closest wall to steady himself, his fingers upon the purpling surface—and in a rush of cold, he felt fear, fear, fear pour into him.
He staggered back and the sensation cut away; still, he counted out the seconds to calm himself. But even as the adrenaline fog lifted the fear stayed, compartmentalized somewhere within him, separate from his own emotions as if it belonged to someone else.
In the corners, the rope-vines stiffened. The boat shifted; the fear in him surged.
“Is that…” he whispered, then, hesitantly, “Is that you, Boat?” He felt like an idiot.
Many years ago, before his work with Paolo had overtaken him, he helped care for his neighbor’s horse. A huge, stamping thing, wreathed in steam in the early mornings, it was always attentive, always nervous. He can feel you, his neighbor told him, even if you’re not touching him. Just gotta love him, that’s all, and he’ll trust you.
Why not? Friend Paolo licked his lips and shushed into the overgr
own room. Just love him. He made a soft kissing noise and patted the wall. It rippled. The fear began to ebb.
“Okay,” he whispered, his heart beating faster as wonder overtook him. What had they done out there? “It’s okay. I think.”
The tendrils loosened and the boat swung a few inches toward him.
“Shh, it’ll all be okay. Let’s go find our friend.”
On the open water, the sail unfurled above him like the fin of an enormous steel fish.
A frenetic spiral of steam and water encased the platform. Around it, police and coast guard vessels clustered like a flock of fat metal birds. Hailstones rattled down on them, pinging off hulls and churning water. Crew members flitted back and forth across the decks, but the ships themselves were held utterly still, gripped by the ocean swells like bugs in amber.
Through this still-life, the sailboat split the water like a missile.
Friend Paolo, hunched in the bow, rubbed at his arms and stomped his feet to combat the persistent, localized frost. People on the ships waved tiny matchstick arms and shouted unintelligible orders over bullhorns, but the boat raced on, trembling with exertion. Soon they were alone, and the towering madness of the vortex parted before them like curtains hanging from the sky.
Within the storm-pillar, everything was new and calm, as cold as a January dawn. The water spout, a smooth matte gray on the inside, rose rigid to frame a sky that glowed like embers. The platform was still there, but above it... above it...
The buildings constructed directly on the platform were unmistakably Paolo’s designs. Smooth, sterile shapes, rounded at the edges. But higher up, the structures grew increasingly foreign, bulged and twisted, as though some other power had wrested control mid-creation. Higher still, high enough to catch the clouds, they split and stretched out like hundreds of bent fingers. At the top, no trace of Paolo’s influence could be seen—no frame of reference existed for what Friend Paolo saw.