By Holden Arquilevich
In the frame is only the abyss. Muted color in water this deep, even where the floodlights penetrate the dark. They illuminate wandering specks of marine snow, the seafloor a pale moonscape. Occasionally a lazy crustacean creeps along the bottom, or a blind, transparent eel drifts into the edge of the light’s pollution. In the distance, bioluminescence shines like distant traffic.
The five feet of pressure-proof glass is kept so clean it may as well not be there. Amalia, the documentarian, adjusts the framing, capturing her true quarry. The CSO standing beside a large, framed photo of an old woman smiling. The CSO has no podium, a podium qualifying as an unnecessary expense. Besides, she bears no agitations for a podium to obscure, comfortable at parade rest. Averse to public speaking, Amalia is nervous just watching, and keeps the hundred or so lab workers, bioengineers, marine biologists, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, physicists, cooks, and medicos cut out of frame, which makes her feel better in the little world of the documentary.
“Today, on Life and Legacy Day, we honor M. Tabatha, doctor, engineer, and visionary,” says the CSO, gesturing at the photo of the old woman. There is rousing, professional applause before she can continue.
“Let me remind you of another time. A time of fraught superstition. A time where we thought blood type mattered. When we were O-negative.”
There is snickering in the mess hall, and the CSO nods in amusement with a warm smile.
“We may laugh today, thanks to M. Tabatha, but can we truly blame our predecessors?”
The CSO points a straight arm, index finger a needle, at the abyss behind her.
“They are like us at the beginning, are they not? They start like us, so it would be reasonable to assume O-negative as the safest option for transfusion, no?”
The snickering stops, and there are respectful murmurs of assent and emphatic nods.
“For those of you that are too young to remember, there was a time where sixty-five percent of our materiel, manpower, and grant money went into simply acquiring the blood. The researchers to find the right donors and the most penetrable institutions for harvest. The subterfuge to extract it. The hard labor of the engineers to get the blood from topside to bottom. All of it for the blood.”
Can you use “donor” and “harvest” in the same sentence? Amalia wonders.
“How long could we have kept it up? Months? Perhaps years if we were lucky, but sooner or later the civs would notice. It’s O-negative for Chrissake! We tried mitigating, of course. We know their original blood types, so alongside the O-negative, we’d also harvest what was compatible. But even that turned into a logistical Hell! Now we had to store the blood in eight different silos! And with one erroneous deposit–which did happen from time to time, as good as we are–we would lose literal tons of harvest.”
People shake their heads in the mess hall. Some of the shame is inherited, some experienced firsthand. Some lower their heads in lamentation for the lost blood.
“M. Tabatha saw it!” The CSO jabs her finger at the photo. “She saw that we were on the path to stagnation! So she did what we do best–she experimented! And what did she find, after the taste-testing of her transfusion studies? After her daring spacewalk along the floor, and the first handfeeding in history? What did she find?!”
Overcome, the CSO turns and bows to the photo. The audience rises and does the same. Amalia doesn’t bow, but no one sees her at the back of the hall.
“She found that type didn’t matter. Any blood would keep them hale and growing, as long as the blood was good and fresh. Intravenous transfusions were rendered superfluous after the hand feeding, when the brave, courageous, determined M. Tabatha took her walk and opened the capsule, closer than any had ever dared. And it worked! A filtration capability previously undiscovered! They can drink the blood! Even mingled with the salt water, they dispense what they don’t use! Now the blood is stored in one silo! Harvesting operations are written with detectability as the key factor! The drones complete a day’s feeding in mere hours! A miracle of efficiency! A miracle of life, growing more worthy of our devotion with every new discovery! Growing! Growing! Growing….”
The CSO turns to the photo, places a palm against the old woman’s face. There are choking sobs in the audience. Tears flow, free of judgment.
“What great sacrifice,” the CSO whispers, “that M. Tabatha was taken along with the blood.”
The CSO huddles against M. Tabatha’s face, nose and palms planted against the canvas as though seeking shelter. Only Amalia, her camera’s microphone sensitive enough, can hear the CSO whisper under her breath.
“I love you momma. You did so good. Happy birthday. We all love you so much.”
Amalia returns to her designated quarters after the ceremony and begins checking her equipment. As she does, she wonders why the Hell they would ever allow a documentarian below. Certainly a sign of being too comfortable with their many victories, their many years undetected. Above, the food is running out. Supply chains drying up. Perhaps the people above don’t have time for conspiracies anymore. Maybe the CSO knows that if the food goes, the blood will go next, and they feel an urgency to document what they did, for posterity. In hopes that even if the blood runs dry, someone will continue the work. Amalia can’t be sure, but it doesn’t detract from the deep-seeded gratitude she feels warming her gut. She’s worked very hard to be here and has savored every moment.
Before the food started to run out, she was a librarian. After, she was a revolutionary. She was good at it too, good enough to be the one to go below once Control got the invitation. They wanted a documentarian to come aboard. Amalia was happy to oblige.
She lays out her camera equipment, along with the charges. Checks the camera’s core memory, and its live uplink to Control’s satellite and server feeds.
No mean feat this connection, from the very bottom to the very top.
She checks the levels on her mic and replaces the fluffy covering on the end with a fresh piece.
“Test, test, test.”
She plays it back. Crystal. It’s all she’s willing to say with the room being bugged.
Finally, she takes the charges and wraps them around her chest, like a bandolier of bricks. They’re chunky and heavy, and the detonator is an archaic remote. It even has a big red button beneath a protective cap. Control has access to more elegant toys, but this was the only thing they could smuggle in after her arrival. They’d gotten so good at detecting the new stuff, they’d forgotten how to sniff out the old stuff. It would crack the hull just the same. That was proven in the simulations.
Amalia conceals all the alarming things about herself beneath her jacket, the station’s logo embossed over her heart (a silhouette, crablike, with lots of arms and lots of legs), and heads to her last assignment.
“Our subjects don’t go far. They can’t go far, more precisely. Most of them grow to terrible proportions, their great sizes rendering them immobile, like GU88-035 here.”
The CSO gestures at the monitor to her left, and Amalia zooms in. In the upper right corner of the fuzzy feed is a battery level and the words “CAM 3.” The drone stabilizes itself in the gentle flow, watching the subject. The drone’s camera can only expose a narrow spotlight of GU88-035, revealing a spherical mound of a body, and a multitude of appendages with joints at harsh angles, all growing from one side.
I still haven’t gotten used to them, Amalia shudders. You can still see humanity in the shape and color. Gets me every time.
“We call him Gubble, for short,” she smiles. “Gubble is quite average. Like most of our subjects, his growth outpaced his adaptational capabilities. His appendages grew long and strong, but his thorax-torso won out. Gubble could grow a thousand legs, but the poor sucker still won’t crawl.”
The CSO chuckles to herself, and the other scientists stationed at the blinking lights and terminals chuckle too.
Maybe Gubble will grow a thousand legs, Amalia thinks to herself. That’ll show em’.
“This is what makes Snodgrass so exciting,” the CSO says, leaning over one of her peons and punching some buttons. The monitor switches to “STN CAM 1,” a wide lens of green night vision perched on the station itself. It displays the moonscape, disturbed on the horizon by a great green nimbus of drifting dust. At its origin, Amalia can just make out chugging, inexorable arms. It appears to be digging, like a massive piece of organic mining equipment.
“SN18-018, or Snodgrass, is our breakthrough,” the CSO says. “Beautifully proportioned, and growing stronger every day, she is the Homo habilis in the great chain of what is to come. She has developed impressive motor skills, using her thirty-seven appendages to pull herself forward in a crawling action, similar to a hermit crab. She is prehensile like her kin, and favors certain limbs for certain tasks, like digging, as you can see. More meaningful, this behavior exhibits innate curiosity, an essential ingredient of intelligence.”
She sighs and hits another button. The billowing dust cloud freezes, as do Snodgrass’s limbs, which now resemble the teeth of a combine mid-harvest.
The CSO clasps her hands.
“What did we do to deserve such a blessing as Snodgrass? Such progress in a single lifetime?”
What didn’t you do?
“And just when we thought it couldn’t get any better…”
The CSO whips around, the keyboard clicking fast. The picture changes, and now the scene is serene. Full battery, “SRV-CAM 5.” A much wider spotlight than “CAM 3” casts an iris of blue, gradient darkening from a cerulean center to pitch black at the edges. The iris reveals the resting bones of a whale.
“A variable! A variable from the heavens above! No need for us to sign off on plus-sized alphabet blocks and colossal games of ‘match-the-shape’!”
Giddy, her attention is torn between the monitor and Amalia’s camera.
“Whale falls are rare. We’re lucky there was one within the habitat perimeter. More than that, it’s at the perfect stage. The mobile scavengers like hagfish and sharks have moved on, along with most of the mollusks and worms, leaving nice, clean bones to play with. We’ve seen plenty of subjects, too pathetic to protect themselves, fall to mobile scavengers. Even the mollusks and worms can become parasitic when they encounter one of ours. A specimen like Gubble is a monumental event to them this far down! More than two thousand years of marine snow, just sitting there!”
She holds a key down, and the feed speeds up.
“But not Snodgrass,” she grins. “Snodgrass is simply a prodigy. Watch! Watch!”
Amalia zooms in on the monitor. The CSO slows the feed down, and Snodgrass drags herself into frame. She begins inspecting the bones with her smaller limbs. Her extremities are echoes of hands, now more akin to pincers. Some are no more than fleshy nubs or ossified clubs, but these she seems comfortable using for balance, keeping her globulous body from rolling over in the current.
“Watch! Watch!”
Snodgrass begins lifting the whale’s ribs, its jaw, its tail with the fluidity of a puppeteer playing the strings. What few mollusks and fish are left to disturb her are swatted away by lesser limbs, the little lives fleeing her reach. She begins laying the bones across each other in a loose pattern, like pick-up sticks. She goes back on her decisions as much as she makes them. Her limbs move fast in a dance of constant rearrangement. Snodgrass is all body language now, and to Amalia, the creature seems enraptured in this new kind of play.
“Like the shamans of ancient times!” cries the CSO. “Reading the bones! And that’s not all!”
She speeds it up again, and Snodgrass darts spiderlike, zipping about the whale fall, the bones piling higher and higher and the original form of the skeleton unpiecing bit by bit.
“It goes beyond mere curiosity… mere experimentation… look!”
The video stops. Snodgrass is gone. Left behind is her creation. Encircled by a hovering ring of dust is a spire of whale bones. The jaw and vertebrae used as foundation stones, the ribs interlocking in careful balance, the tower reaching bent towards the sky. The whale’s skull sits atop, glowering over the seafloor and at the bones of ill-use to Snodgrass, which are left scattered around the effigy in a loose spiral.
“Aesthetics! Culture! We’ve finally done it! Sentience! Through hard work and dedication!” She slaps her team on the shoulders, and they grin back at her. She’s practically glowing.
“Don’t you think it might have something to do with the fact that she was once a person? Have you ever thought of that?”
The scientists round on her, dumbfounded.
Shit, was that out loud?
Per terms of the contract, Amalia is supposed to be a fly-on-the-wall. She’s spoken no more than twenty words since she arrived a week ago, and certainly nothing confrontational. The CSO frowns at her, and the other scientists begin reaching for the holsters at their ankles. The pistols carry rubber rounds so they won’t damage the hull, but they still have a mean velocity. With her training, Amalia can probably take three of them before going down. That is, if the first two miss something vital.
Oh, well. I’ve been putting it off long enough anyway.
Amalia whips open her jacket and flourishes the detonator. The scientists leap from their cushions. The CSO lunges at Amalia, barehanded and screaming.
“Viva humanidad assholes,” she growls.
End.
Holden Arquilevich is an aspiring horror writer, aspiring librarian, and aspiring bookseller. He has published a few pieces of flash fiction on FlashFictionMagazine.com, and his short story, “The Gargoyle Carver,” was featured in the April 2024 issue of Dark Horses: The Magazine of Weird Fiction. He is from Ojai, California. You can find him sweating at live music shows and used book stores. You can find links to his writing @harquilevich on Instagram.