Dolphin Half, part III:

The Lament of the Cosmos

“Into the abyss

I fall

And weep”

Lounging on the beach, Herbert Gould idly sucked on his lemonade straw.

“Ah, this is the life,” he sighed.

“Sure is,” replied his robotic copilot, flipping a seashell in its tiny robotic hand.

“Surprised we’re not dead,” remarked Gould.

“Yep.”

“Too bad about the ship, though” he added, adjusting his sunglasses.

“Well, we’ll figure out a way to dredge it up sometime,” said the robot, “No hurry though.”

“Nope, no hurry.” Gould stirred the ice in his glass with the bendy-straw. “Funny about the black hole, though.”

“Yep.”

“Never expected it to short out like that when it hit the water.”

“I guess they never intended it to operate outside a vacuum,” said the robot, tossing the shell into the scintillating rainbow-colored sand around the base of his beach chair. A small puff of titanium dust rose around it, settling quickly.

“Lucky for us,” mumbled Gould.

“Lucky for this planet,” added the robot.

Gould finished his lemonade in one long sip. Turning, he stuck the glass into the Lemonade Replenisher hermetically mounted on the side of a nearby Distillation Palm. A thin stream of cool liquid poured into the glass from a shiny chrome nozzle, a few fresh ice cubes plinking in as well. As Gould removed the glass, solar panels shimmered on the machine’s surface. A small red indicator needle wavered as the machine pumped fresh water from the palm’s reservoir.

“That thing’s pretty handy,” said the robot.

“Yeah… Hard to believe she built it.”

“Well, you know what they say about genius and insanity. Still say she reminds me of someone…”

“Hmm,” frowned Gould. He drew circles in the sand with a finger. “Funny the stuff you find dissolved in sea water.”

“A fortune in rare metals… Perfect for nanoconstruction, too.” The robot made a vague gesture with his arm. “Sand Bloom coming up,” he said.

Off in the distance a Distillation Palm bulged ominously. Its fleshy trunk pulsed in strange pneumatic rhythm, convulsing with growing frequency. A quick, violent shudder, and a geyser of steam erupted from the top, carrying glittering particles in the mix. As the clouds dissipated, a rain of scintillating dust fell around the palm, waste sediment concentrated from the sea. Even now, freshly distilled water was seeping down into holding vesicles deep beneath the tree-like structure, ready for whatever obscure energy-interchange reactions the Sargasso Colony thrived on.

A few stray granules drifted down towards Gould’s lemonade, bouncing off the little paper umbrella in the glass.

Gould shook a few grains from his hair. “You know, we should put up a volleyball net. I bet we—ULK!”

Something clamped onto Gould’s neck from behind, closing off his airways. Hot breath in his ear.

“Chippyyyyyyyyyy!” shouted a high-pitched voice, also in his ear.

“Let… Let go of me…” he gasped, flailing his arms. “Ro…robot… he-he-help!” The robot did not move.

“Chiiiiiiiippppppppppyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!” came the voice, threatening to burst his eardrums, and also his brain.

“W-wait a second!”

“What is it, Chippy?” asked the girl’s voice.

“I… can’t breathe…”

“Haha, that’s so cute!” The arms tightened around his throat, and he could feel his brain swell.

“P-please…”

“Oh Chippy, you know I can’t resist you!”

“…”

“Before you came here it was so BORING!”

“…”

“You know, Chippy, I… Chippy?”

“…”

“Are you unconscious?” The arms relaxed, slightly.

Gould’s vision abruptly surged back from monochromatic twilight. “N…not quite,” he said.

“I need you again,” said the girl, pressing her head against his. A lock of green hair dangled in front of Gould’s eyes.

“S… so soon?”

Her hand came down to stroke his chest. The sensation brought waves of remembrance surging through Gould’s head.

“Your body is so incredible,” whispered the girl, giggling.

“I still haven’t healed up from last time,” Gould whined.

“Pleeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaase!” she cried, bouncing up and down.

“Okay, okay, let’s do it.”

“YAAAAAY!”

“So, ah… Your place or mine?”

“Duh! Mine, silly! Yours doesn’t have the proper equipment!”

“Oh, that’s right… um… hmmmmmm…” Gould felt a trickle of sweat. “You know, that’s, uhh, are you sure—”

“Don’t worry, leave everything to me!” A small hand flew in front of his face, slender fingers clamping a damp cloth over his nose and mouth.

“Everything will be just fine!”

The rag had a faintly sweet odor; Gould found it cool and relaxing. He felt comfortable in the green-haired girl’s arms, more comfortable than he’d ever felt before. As he faded into a state of total relaxation, he briefly wondered if he was in love with her.

No, he decided, it was probably the chloroform.

* * *

Bed. Soft pillow, cotton sheets. Sound of the ocean in the distance. Gould opened his eyes, found himself staring at a white wall. Wait- which way was up? A ceiling, not a wall. Lying on the bed. Glancing up, he saw a tripod-mounted camera, its dim eye pointed in his direction. Strange. He reached up to touch it, and realized that his hands were tied down with leather straps. Legs too, now that he noticed. He tried to sit up, but found another strap around his throat.

“Umm…” he said, and that was what he was thinking.

“Oh, you’re awake?” came the girl’s voice. Her face appeared over his, staring down at him with her big green eyes. “That means we can start right away!” She started to unbutton his shirt.

“It won’t be… like last time, will it?” Gould asked.

“Oh no, not like last time. I think I figured out what I did wrong. It shouldn’t be anywhere near as messy this time,” she said, with a wink.

“Oh… Good…” She’d gotten his shirt open, now she was rubbing something cool and damp over his chest.

“You know, you’re a lot more muscular than you look at first glance,” she giggled, leaning over the bed. “You’re quite a specimen.”

“I feel… funny… Like I’m floating in the sea…”

“Oh, that. I gave you a little something to help you relax.”

“Oh. Good, I think.”

“Trust me. You’ll enjoy the experience a lot more this way.” Again with the winking. She climbed up on the bed, out of his direct line of sight. “Well, shall we get started?”

“Okay.” Gould felt the bed rocking, but didn’t feel much else. I wonder how much of that stuff she gave me, he thought.

“Errrgh… Mmph… Just a second…” she said. Gould heard rustling, sounds of exertion. He felt a weight; she was leaning on his chest. “Okay, here we go!”

Slrrrrrch!

The bone-splitter tore Gould’s chest wide open, the blade sawing through his breastbone in an instant, then the hydraulic arms spreading his ribs far apart, opening him in a manner not unlike a flower petal—a bloody, bony flower petal full of pulsating viscera.

“…” said Gould.

“Wow!” shouted the girl, excited. “No matter how many times I do it, I’m still amazed. You have the coolest guts I’ve ever seen!”

“…” repeated Gould.

“Why, with these lungs I bet you could dive a thousand feet on a single gulp of air! And this thermal layer! Do you ever get cold?”

“…” shouted Gould.

“And your cells are even weirder! Did you know they can change density by themselves? It’s like you’re totally designed for deep-water diving! And these… Chippy? Can you hear me?”

“…” cried Gould, in tears.

“Oops!” she laughed, looking up. “I forgot! I have to hook you up to a respirator or you’ll die!”

“…” cursed Gould.

The girl walked over and strapped a clear plastic mask around his nose and mouth. His eyes slowly uncrossed.

“Thank you,” mumbled Gould, on an exhaling breath.

“Sure thing! Hey, I have a present for you…” She fished around on a nearby table, picked up a small black sphere with long dangling tendrils. “It’s a microfusion oxygen replenisher. If you’re diving in deep water and can’t readily surface, this’ll convert the carbon dioxide in your bloodstream back to oxygen. It harvests deuterium fuel from naturally occurring isotopes in seawater and absorbs it through your skin. In theory you can stay underwater forever with this!”

Gould, finding it too much exertion to speak, simply nodded his cautious approval.

“Great! Now, let’s get to work installing this thing.” She started poking around inside his chest cavity. “There, I think I found a space for it… This thing, though… Hey Chippy!” She held up a fleshy pink lump. “You know what this thing does?”

Gould shook his head weakly.

“No? Well, it’s kind of in the way… Oh well, it’s probably not important anyway…” she grinned, cheerfully. She gave it a hard yank.

Gould felt his body explode in a shower of agonic light. The room disappeared in a brilliant conflagration of sound and fury, and Gould felt electricity surging through every cell in his body. Somewhere, through the opalescent fire, he saw God.

Gould’s vision faded back to normal.

“Sorry, I didn’t notice it was connected to your spine.”

A single tear rolled down Gould’s face.

“Uh-oh.”

“Mmpf?” Gould was too tired to talk, and getting moreso by the second.

“Where’s all this blood coming from?”

“MMPH!?”

“Wow, that was a pretty big artery. Hmm… Looks like I’m gonna have to stop your heart while I patch it up from the inside. Don’t worry, I’ll inject some preservative so your brain doesn’t die.”

Gould was about to protest this course of action, but as he opened his mouth a large brick struck him in the back of the head. Actually, the sensation was more like that of a brick striking all sides of his head simultaneously from all possible directions including the fourth and fifth dimensions. The room, as usual, faded into blackness.

* * *

Gould opened his eyes to find himself lost in a blinding golden haze. Warmth engulfed him, and he felt totally at peace.

“I’m in Heaven. She finally killed me.”

“Huh? Oh, you’re awake”

“That voice! It’s her! No, I’m in Hell!”

A shaft of golden sunlight assaulted Gould’s eyes as the girl lifted the cloth off of his face. “What are you talking about?” she asked, frowning.

“Umm… nothing. A dream,” he lied.

“Oh. Anyway, I put this cloth over your face so you wouldn’t get a sunburn.”

“Oh, thanks, I… What’s this on my arm?”

“That’s the needle for your IV,” she said, pointing to the liquid-filled bag dangling over his head. “I had to feed you intravenously so you wouldn’t digest your own organs,” she said.

“What? You didn’t have to do that, not for the short time I was out.” Her eyes unconsciously shifted to the right, and he followed her gaze to a large garbage bin, at least four feet high, in the corner of the room. It was overflowing with small plastic bags identical to the one now hanging above him. There was a pause.

“Umm, how long was I out?”

“L… Long enough to heal up completely!” she said, with a smile that made his hair stand on end.

“Well, at least I didn’t die.”

“Oh… Well, actually…”

“What?”

“Good thing I know voodoo! Just try to stay away from salt water, it’ll make you dissolve,” she said, with a severe look.

“WHAT?”

“Just kidding!” The smile again.

“My head hurts.”

“Oh, well I can give you something for that.”

“It’s better now.”

“Oh.” She looked disappointed. “Well, in that case, can you get dressed and come into the briefing room in a few minutes? There’s something we need to talk about.”

“Okay, I’ll just… Wait, what briefing room? Since when have we had a briefing room?” He looked around. “Hey, since when was this room drywalled?”

“Oh, I made a few improvements while you were… out. To get to the briefing room, just follow the blue arrows.”

“What blue arrows?”

“These ones.” She scribbled a pen across her clipboard; a line of glowing blue arrows appeared beneath the surface of the hardwood floor, trailing off into the hallway.

Gould’s eyes followed the impossible pathway, pulsing from deep within the wood. Finally, he sighed.

“My head…” He trailed off, glancing up.

Her eyes widened, hope glimmering.

“…f-feels perfectly fine.”

* * *

“Holy shit, you’re still alive?!”

“Nice to see you too, Robot,” said Gould

The little robot stared up at him with incredulity. “I never thought you’d wake up again, what with the way what’s-her-name kept accidentally ripping open your stitches.”

“What? How?” He unconsciously rubbed the long scar on his chest.

“Ah, I dunno, something about ‘mounting you in your sleep’ or some such. What’s that mean, anyway? I figured it had something to do with file systems, but then it might be different if you’re not a robot.” A faint rumble in the distance. “All I know is that she always had trouble walking afterwards, and the sheets got all these weird stains on them, and-” The door flew off its hinges.

“GOD DAMN STUPID ROBOT WOULD YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP ALREADY?” The green-haired girl exploded through the door and delivered a solid kick to the robot’s head that sent him hurtling through a plate glass window. The broken edges silently began to flow together like molasses.

“He’s cute, isn’t he? Always kidding,” she said, tapping the steel-plated toe of her boot against the floor. Gould watched as it melted back into a white sneaker. “Why, just the other day he was asking if you were dead yet. He said he wanted to shrink your head and wear it as a necklace.”

Gould scratched the back of his head. “Are you sure he was kidding about that?” he asked. The window finished regenerating with a schup.

“Well, I guess so, since he doesn’t actually have a neck to put it on.”

“I don’t think he’s ever thought anything that far through,” Gould mumbled. Behind them, the door swung open.

“I’d send you a repair bill,” said the robot, “but since I’m indestructible it’d be blank anyway.”

“Indestructible?” Gould asked, “Since when have you been indestructible?”

The robot looked annoyed. “Since they built me, you moron. I double as a black box, you know.”

“Seems to me you’ve been killed before, though,” said Gould, “Something involving a battleship?”

The robot scratched his head in a preprogrammed gesture of irritation. “I hardly think a direct hit by antimatter missiles counts towards one’s destructibility rating, seeing as how NOTHING IN THE UNIVERSE CAN SURVIVE THEM!”

“Well, I survived them…”

“THEY DIDN’T HIT YOU!”

“NOW THAT WE’RE ALL HERE,” shouted the green-haired girl, “Maybe we should start the briefing.” She tapped something on her clipboard and the windows went opaque. The wood paneling of the room faded into a bank of projection screens and holographic displays.

“I still want to know when you remodeled,” said Gould. The girl said nothing, making another gesture with her stylus. A blue sphere appeared in the nearest holographic matrix, slowly spinning. Patches of green drifted across its surface, and, deep within, darkness swelled.

“As you know,” she began, “this planetoid is composed entirely of water, at least to the depth at which our soundings can detect. At sufficient pressure, of course, water is indistinguishable from solid rock…”

“I didn’t know that,” Gould muttered, to the robot.

“There’re a lot of things you don’t know,” was the reply.

“…host to a wide variety of marine life, from single-celled photoautotrophs to large aquatic predators of indeterminate size. Especially vital are the large kelp colony masses, thickly-woven Sargasso mats buoyant enough to raise artificial structures on. Apart from being the only habitable land on the planet, the kelp masses provide the only means of gas interchange above the water’s surface, which provides breathable oxygen for the native seabird life. Without the Sargasso colonies, surface life would have to rely on gasses released by evaporation of oxygenated seawater, which would not provide a rate of exchange sufficient for indefinite survival of the surface ecosystem. Furthermore…”

“This is boring,” whined Gould. “Is there a point to this, or is she just trying to impress us?”

“I dunno, I stopped listening a while ago,” answered the robot. “I swear she reminds me of someone, I just can’t tell who. Weird that a girl would just happen to be here on this unpopulated planet way outside of normal jump routes. Weirder still that she’d be a nanotech genius, especially since the things are outlawed throughout the entire galaxy.”

“What? Nanotech? What makes you think she’s got nanotech?”

The robot stood silent, dumbfounded. “Have you ever noticed how things completely re-form themselves at her command? How she changes from a tennis outfit to a bathing suit to a suit of armor without taking off her clothes? How she can build things out of piles of multi-elemental sand and organic debris that’d take city-sized factories weeks to churn out? Where do you think all these buildings came from, and those lemonade dispensers, and, hell, this room? Did you think she was some kind of magician?”

“Umm… No… I guess I never gave it much thought…”

“You truly astound me.”

“Umm… Thanks? I mean, even though I’m a hero and all, I’m just a regular guy, so you don’t have to look up to me or anything, but still, I appreciate the senti—”

“SHUT THE HELL UP YOU ASSHOLES, I’M TRYING TO TALK HERE!” Something hard struck Gould over the head, nearly splitting his skull. When the spinning galaxies that leapt into existence within the orbs of his eyes had faded to a vague nebula, he picked himself up off the floor, noticing a broken yardstick there that seemed to be in the process of knitting itself back together.

“Sorry about that,” Gould said, smoothing his clothes. He started to turn towards her. “I was just commenting to the robot how fascinating the field of exomarine biology can be, especially—”

Gould turned to find himself staring into a cluster of eight glassy eyes, set in a shiny black carapace the size of a beach ball.

“Hey robot,” Gould said, not taking his eyes off of it, “Where’d this spider come from?”

“I’m not a spider,” said the spider. Something green flickered behind its eyes.

“Oh. Well, you look like a spider.”

“Does a spider have arms, like these?” the spider said, holding up two armored black limbs. Long fingers flexed beneath jointed gauntlets.

“Well, I’ve never seen a spider’s arms up close, so… maybe.”

“Does a spider have legs like these?” The spider indicated two standard hominid legs, sheathed likewise in lusterous obsidian.

“Well… no.”

“And does a spider have cute breasts like these?” asked the spider, indicating its massive bas-relief cuirass.

“What breasts?” asked Gould.

The carapace flipped up on unseen hinges, exposing a green-framed face, burning red.

“It’s me, you idiot,” said the girl.

“You!” cried Gould, grabbing her by the shoulders. “I didn’t know you were a spider!”

“Just how hard did you hit him with that thing?” asked the robot, indicating the freshly healed stick.

“I’m wearing armor, you moron!”

“What? Why?”

“My clothes are programmed to reform themselves automatically depending on my mood.”

“Mood clothes?”

“Can we get back to the briefing?” asked the robot. “Because this is getting really, really annoying.”

* * *

“In short, the whole ecosystem’s dying,” said the girl, “everything from plankton to marine vertebrates to the Sargasso colonies themselves. And,” she added, straightening her glasses; purely cosmetic, of course, having just flowed out of her hair in liquid form and congealed in front of her eyes, “since there’s no dry land on the planet, if they die, we drown.”

“I can swim indefinitely,” said Gould.

“I don’t have any lungs,” said the robot. “Say, can’t you build a ship or something with your nanobots and the raw materials floating around? You could probably even generate some kind of self-replenishing food supply using stray hydrocarbons, so we could eat synthisteak and chocolate malts all day, every day. I don’t see what’s the big deal.”

“DON’T YOU ASSHOLES THINK I WOULD HAVE THOUGHT OF THAT ALREADY IF IT WAS POSSIBLE?”

“Hey, that’s a Murasame blade, isn’t it?” asked the robot, pointing to the object in her hand which had, a few moments ago, been a wooden pointer.

* * *

“They always said Murasame’s blades lacked ‘spiritual discernment’,” said the robot, “But I never knew what that meant until now.”

“Does that hurt?” asked Gould.

The robot fingered the long gash in his metallic casing. “Only my honor.”

There was a brief pause, not exactly awkward but not exactly not. Gould finally broke the silence.

“I wonder if this blood’ll come out?” he asked, poking at the large red stain splattered across his shirt.

“I wonder if she’s okay?” asked the robot, not sounding particularly concerned.

“Probably. She seems like the surviving type,” mumbled Gould. “Still, I bet she wasn’t expecting that blade to deflect like that.”

“Like I said, invincible. It’s surprising the thing scratched as deep as it did. She must’ve had some synthetic diamond or condensed-matter filaments worked into the metal.”

“I wish I’d have had a camera when she sliced her leg open. I didn’t think a person’d bleed like that from an extremity hit.”

“Femoral artery, runs straight through the thigh. Somebody famous shot himself through that once, almost died. Teddy Roosevelt, or Curly from the Three Stooges, I forget which. Anyway, don’t worry, I got the whole thing on hi-res video,” he said, tapping his ocular lenses.

“Good, we can watch it later over popcorn. Too bad she didn’t leave her armor on, that stuff looked thick.”

“Yeah, a schoolgirl uniform doesn’t do much to deflect a katana. From that thwacking sound I’d say her bone did a better job.” As the robot spoke the words, a nearby automatic door wooshed open. A short, green-haired figure hobbled through, leaning on a shiny new crutch. There was a white plastic brace wrapped around her right leg. A thin line of metallic sparkles danced back and forth across her thigh.

“As I was saying,” she started, “the boat idea just won’t work.”

The robot shook his head, or at least he would have if he’d had a neck joint. “I still don’t see why not, I mean, there’s plenty of sand and organic material for…”

“I get seasick.”

“Oh.”

The girl shifted her weight to her non-recently-severed-leg, and once again began gesturing to the holographic model. “Because the onset of diatomic morbidity occurs soon after your arrival on the planet, we can only draw one conclusion.”

“That it’s our fault, again?” asked Gould. The robot kicked him.

“That the artificial black hole which struck the planet is not, in fact, dead.”

“That’s crazy,” said the robot, “If it were still working we’d all be compacted into a pinprick by now.”

“While the object’s gravity well projector has obviously failed, it may be exerting some other force upon the world.”

“Like what, radiation?”

“Radiation from a source that deep would be blocked by the sheer volume of seawater; besides, any energy source powerful enough to wipe out the whole ecosystem would probably boil the seas themselves.”

“So what are we talking about here?” asked the robot.

“That’s just it, we have no way of knowing… At least, not without taking a closer look.”

“A closer look?” asked the robot.

“A closer look,” answered the girl.

“A closer… shit,” said Gould, “I think I can see where this is going.”

The girl and the robot continued to look at each other. “We need someone to go down and take a closer look,” said the girl.

“Someone to whom the deep ocean currents are like the very blood in his veins,” said the robot.

“Wait, hey, wait a minute…” stammered Gould.

“Someone who can plumb the murky depths with his uncanny senses, honed like the edge of a diamond shard,” said the girl.

“Someone who can hold his breath for a long time,” said the robot.

“Someone who just got a CO2 scrubber grafted into his chest,” said the girl.

“Someone expendable,” said the robot.

“I swear to God that I will murder you both,” mumbled Gould, not exactly sounding like he could actually pull it off.

“Oh come now, be reasonable, man.”

“Shut up! Why don’t you go down there?”

“What, and short out? Conductive liquids and robots don’t exactly get along, if you know what I mean.”

“What? What happened to ‘indestructible’?”

“That was before I got this big gaping sword-hole in my casing. Salt water’ll rush through like a Mekong downpour. Besides,” he said, holding up his pincer-tipped arms, “Do I really look like I can swim?”

“So get the girl to build you a fucking mini-sub. For that matter, why doesn’t she go? She’s the smart one anyway, let her go check it out!”

“What?” shouted the girl, “Me, a helpless cripple? I just lost a limb, how could you expect me to go on an expedition like that, alone, with a billion tons of seawater threatening to crush me at any minute?”

“Don’t you think you’re overreacting?” he asked, pointing at her intact leg, sparkling with infused chromium, “You’ve got nanobots stitching up the muscle fibers as we speak.”

“That still doesn’t change the fact that I’m down about three pints of blood, dickhead, or didn’t you notice your shirt?”

“Trust me, I noticed. I’ll be sure to send you the cleaning bill, too.”

“The point is,” interjected the robot, “You’re the only one who can do it. It’s time to ask yourself whether you’re a man or a spineless jellyfish.”

“I’m a spineless jellyfish,” asserted Gould.

“Good, then you won’t mind taking a little swim,” said the girl.

“Why should I?”

The girl held up her crutch, pointing it at Gould’s chest. It seemed to grow larger and more solid.

“Because, shithead, if you don’t…”

“Uh-oh, I don’t like the looks of this,” said the robot, backing away. The crutch continued to metamorph.

“…I’m going to take this thing…”

The air filled with an electrical tension, and Gould could feel the hairs on the back of his neck saying “uh-oh”.

“AND BLAST YOU BACK INTO SPACE!”

The crutch, now shaped suspiciously like a Vortex Plasma Cannon, hummed with thermonuclear fury.

“I don’t suppose we can talk this over?” Gould asked.

The cannon abruptly purged its magnetorestrictor baffles in quadruple jets of electric blue. The windows of the room exploded outward.

“Didn’t think so.”

* * *

Massive banks of storm roiled in the sky, as if great oars were being drawn through them. Huge indigo waves crested with manes of cold white foam. Gould and the robot stood on the edge of a mossy cliff fifty feet above the swells, wind whipping against their raincoats.

“Look on the bright side, at least there aren’t any sharks.” The robot glanced up from its video unit towards the gray churning seas.

“Really?” asked Gould. “Well, that’s a relief, anyway.”

“Yeah. And even if there were any sharks, the Gulper Whales would make short work of them.”

“I’m not going.”

“Don’t worry, we haven’t spotted a whale in months. They’re probably all dead, along with most of the higher consumers. Food chain and all that. Top predators are actually the easiest to wipe out, since the available energy decreases with each step. That’s why you don’t usually find gigantic predators, just big herbivores. More abundant food supply, you know.”

“We seem to do okay… People, I mean. As predators.”

“Well, maybe if more of you guys ate plankton there wouldn’t be people cutting each others’ throats for a cheeseburger.

“Yeah, but we don’t like plankton.”

“I wonder if that’s really the reason,” mumbled the robot. “Damn!” he added.

“What is it?”

“I was trying to line up to drop a Heavy Bomb on something and I didn’t notice the Mechanical Fish. Now I lost my Big Wings, too.” The robot continued to stare at the little video display. The screen illuminated the robot’s faceless transparent parka, enshrouding the metal figure in a blue-pink nimbus.

“Don’t you ever get tired of playing video games?” asked Gould, turning away to gaze out over the roaring black waters. With a hand he shielded his face from a few big raindrops.

“I’m a machine. A flight control computer. Running simulations, elaborate games really, is my primary function. In a way, a very real way, games are my life.”

“There’s more to life than Heavy Bombs.”

“Maybe not.” The robot looked up. “You know, something’s been bothering me. The water… it’s so dark.”

“I noticed.” answered Gould, gazing out. “The clouds… they’re not reflecting on it.”

“Then the water…”

“No light escaping. Total photonic absorption. Just like…”

Gould and the robot stared out at the water, black, empty.

“An event horizon.”

“I have this feeling,” said Gould, “Like we’re already dead.”

“That reminds me… You know how I said that girl reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t remember who? Well, I remembered.”

“Yeah? Who is she?”

“Liquid Death.”

“WHAT? You’re crazy, Liquid Death’s been gone for a hundred years; the Combined Fleet shattered her dreadnaught with a Mega Particle Fountain big enough to disperse a nebula. Half the fleet’s ships were crippled by the blast, and the rest burned out their power converters generating the damned thing!”

“There’s a lot of stuff they don’t put in the history books, but that someone with enough know-how and processor time,” he tapped the side of his head, “can find out. The captain of the hyperspace lasso ship Mjöllnir claimed that a slip-shuttle torpedoed his sensor cluster and disappeared, right before the Dreadnaught’s shields overloaded and blanketed half the cosmos with static.”

“A slip-shuttle? Those things are pure Newtonian, they can’t even jump. She’d have never been able to get away in that.”

“With the lasso ship there’s no way she could have jumped anyway, even with a capable ship. The sensor blanket would have kept her from showing up on long-range scanners.”

“Well how’d she get all the way out here then? And why isn’t she ancient?”

“Remember your physics? Slip-shuttles don’t use tunnelers, they have to travel in normal space all the way through- but they can travel at damn near the speed of light anyway. Because of time dilation, a hundred years could pass for us while time stood almost still for her. That’s why she didn’t age.”

“Okay,” said Gould, “you’ve convinced me that it’s possible for Liquid Death to have escaped, but what makes you think the green-haired girl is her? The last time I checked, L.D. was a towering, raven-haired psychopath with a penchant for planetary conquest.”

“You remember that armor that appeared when she got pissed off?”

“The spider-shaped stuff? Yeah…”

“That wasn’t just spider-shaped. That was the shell of a Wind Spider from the arctic canyons of Polaris IX, better known as Arachne.”

“Arachne? They named the planet in honor of the spiders?”

“Not quite,” said the robot, “more like ‘in primordial dread of them’. You see, there isn’t any settlement on Arachne, at least not anymore. Not after the Wind-Spiders found them. You see, a ‘Wind Spider’ is named for the sound it makes as it approaches… at the speed of a jet airplane.”

“What? That’s crazy, nothing natural can move that fast, at least not without wings and a hell of a power supply.”

“Cold fusion.”

“WHAT?”

“The ice on Arachne is made of heavy water,” explained the robot, “deuterium oxide, fusable in conjunction with a proper catalyst. We’ve never been able to make it work right, but in however many billion years those things have been evolving on that hyperborean nightmare of a world they managed to work it out. Of course, the fusion just provides them with power… They still need organic matter to maintain their cell structure.”

“So what happened to the colony?” asked Gould, not particularly wanting to know the answer now.

The robot half-grinned, or would have if he’d had any teeth. “Mostly inside the spiders, I guess. The survivors managed to blast off in a supply shuttle, after which they re-christened the world with its current name. It used to be called Vanaheim, ‘home of the fair ones’. The official story says that no one else survived, but there were rumors… These were the days before the war, before nanotech was contraband punishable by brain implosion.”

“I hear that hurts.”

“Yeah. Anyway, the rumors… Distress calls, really faint and desperate, like whispered screams across the galaxy, that kind of thing. If anyone stayed alive down there they must have learned to fight pretty fast… learned to kill.”

“Are you saying that was her?”

“It all fits. Inexplicable person living where there shouldn’t be any people around, possessing an ancient, long-forbidden technology, complete disregard for human life and dignity…”

“Tell me about it.”

“…and to top it all off, armor made out of a dead Polaris Wind Spider, nanotech recreation but totally accurate nonetheless.”

“Liquid Death’s fleet was built with nanoscale technology, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. Majestically honed, a perfection of the art like nobody’d seen before or since. Liquid Death would have been a little girl when Arachne fell. Growing up in a frozen web of crystal, your only companions machines, and bones, and… gnawing things. What kind of person would a world like that create?”

“Maybe the kind of person who’d lay waste to half the galaxy on an antisocial whim?”

“Like Nietzche said: ‘When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you.’ I don’t know what she became in order to survive that tenth level of frozen hell, but I know it’s nothing like we’ve ever run into before. I almost wish I was going down into the ocean myself, rather than being alone with her.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure of that. What’s down there… doesn’t feel right.”

Gould and the robot stared into the obsidian depths, both suppressing shudders.

“I still haven’t figured out why her hair’s green, or why she’s so short. I mean, what the hell?”

“Nanotech body mods,” said the robot. “Dynamic gene recombination. Who knows? She probably got bored with the old body and wanted something more… I dunno, playful. She’s like one of those old cartoon characters from that island with all the lizard problems. She probably grew up watching old videos from the colony’s databanks and developed a warped sense of the human ideal.

“That’s really weird.”

* * *

The two were still there when the girl descended from the sky on cones of orange fire. Gould picked himself up off the ground and dusted spent propellant from his clothes.

“I wish you wouldn’t do things like that,” he said. The green-haired girl closed up her jet nacelles and dropped them into her waist pockets. Her wings folded again and again, recursing into nothingness. She stuck her tongue out.

“You don’t think I’m actually going to walk around like some kind of migrating ape, do you? I have more important things to do with my time.”

“Yeah, like setting people on fire.” Gould turned to watch the robot crawl back up over the edge of the cliff.

“You know” it said, “Somebody’s going to get hurt, one of these days.”

“Somebody gets hurt just about every day,” Gould sighed.

“Will you two shut up while I show you what I just finished making?” she said. The girl pulled out a small white cardboard box with a strangely mercurial skull and lightning bolt insignia on the top.

“Hey,” whispered Gould, “Isn’t that the insignia of Liquid…”

“Ix-Nay!” hissed the robot. The girl dutifully presented the box to Gould, who held it rather sheepishly for quite some time.

“Well?” she asked.

“Oh. Right.” Gould opened the box. Inside was a piece of violet-blue fabric emblazoned with a leaping dolphin logo, smiling, grotesque, Buddha-like. He noted that it had an exceptionally large phallus. The box abruptly fell from his shock-numbed hands, the garment unraveling to it its full size.

It was a bodysuit. A violet-blue bodysuit, trimmed with broad strips of electric green running down the legs, and capped with huge shoulder patches in neon tangerine.

“I’m…” His eyes burned from the colors.

“I’m…”

She smiled at him, blinking her big green eyes.

“I’m…” He swallowed. “About to cry.”

“You like it! Yippee!” She jumped several yards into the air. “Well, hurry up and put it on,” she said, after landing again.

“I… Not right now, I don’t…”

“Come on!” she shouted, lunging at him. With inhuman speed she yanked off his trench coat and pulled his shirt over his head, and she’d almost succeeded in ripping his pants off when he managed to squirm away.

“Wait! It’s not right!” he cried.

The girl went out of focus for a brief instant. When her image sharpened again he could see that she was holding a pair of pants. His pants.

“How… How’d you do that while I was standing up?”

She smiled and looked away. From her left palm she produced a diamond-edged boxcutter.

Gould looked down at his bare legs. The skin was covered with a few dozen deep lacerations, and blood was collecting on the ground around his feet.

“Yeah, that’s not so surprising, I guess,” he said, before passing out.

* * *

Gould examined the metallic bands of nanobandage encasing his legs. It made him feel rather like a gilded mummy, a chrome Pharaoh from some post-industrial mausoleum.

“Seems like I lost a lot of blood. You think maybe we should put off the expedition?”

“Naah, don’t worry about it, Chippy. I gave you a transfusion before you woke up.” The girl absent-mindedly batted aside a few strands of bright green hair.

“Really? Whose blood? Yours?” asked Gould. “You mean you gave up your own blood for me? I…”

“No, don’t be stupid. I just siphoned up the stuff that spilled out and pumped it back in.”

“Oh.” Gould looked at the ground. “I guess I don’t have long to live now, do I?”

“What?” she turned her head to look at him. “Oh, I strained it out first. No worries.”

As Gould watched, the mirrored wrappings faded to thin silver traces along his newly healed legs, a spider’s web of reflected light. The lacerations safely closed, he squirmed his way into the polychromatic wetsuit, the only article of clothing available. He noted with some relief that once he donned the suit, the garish color scheme was mostly outside his field of view. Mostly, that is, except for the fact that the suit reflected a curtain of throbbing neon glare onto whatever happened to be in the vicinity.

“Well,” he said, striding up to the precipice. “If I’m going to die I guess now is as good a time as any.”

The girl turned again to face him. “Oh, take this with you.” She handed him a transparent wrap-around facemask with black plastic seals.

He shook his head. “I don’t need goggles. I have a nictitating membrane that compensates for the refraction index of water; I can see just fine.”

“Yeah, but you can’t talk with your mouth full of water. This has a two-way radio in it with an expansion bladder so you can breathe. It should be good down to a few hundred kilometers; after that it’ll implode. It doesn’t matter, though, since low-frequency radio won’t get that far anyway. Ditch it when the faceplate starts to crack so you don’t get glass shards through your face.” She turned back to face the surging waves.

“I’ll try and remember that.” Gould fitted the mask over his face and ears. He stepped up to the cliff’s edge, looking down at the black breakers crashing against the cellulose bluffs, froth sluicing through their knotted green veins. “I feel a dread the likes of which I have never before known. There are places no man may go and yet retain his sanity. What pale unblinking eyes gaze up from bottomless depths beneath these cursed waves? What becomes of the crumbling bones that sink, soundless, beyond the reach of light and life? I fear that I shall learn.”

“Ch-Chippy…” the girl started, voice wavering. “Good luck!” she cried, twirling around and lunging at him, pressing her quivering lips to his…

Crunch

…faceplate.

With a squeak of pain she stumbled back, clutching her nose. A streak of blood hovered in front of Gould’s eyes.

“You fucking dick! Why the hell’d you put that on so soon?!”

“It’s your own fault! You’re supposed to close your eyes after you kiss someone, not before!”

“What?” she shouted, muffled by the swelling. “First you break my nose and then you lecture me on protocol? Fucking die!” Her flying spinkick connected quite solidly with the side of Gould’s skull, sending him reeling to the left. This wouldn’t have been a problem, of course, had he not been standing on the edge of a cliff at the time. It is perhaps of interest to note that the robot’s audiovisual record of the subsequent few moments ended up receiving no less than thirteen academy awards and was eventually licensed by the Jerry Lewis Institute of Ganymede for an astronomical amount of money, all of which the robot kept for himself.

Gould, his cetacean instincts taking over, wasted no time flailing his arms in the air in the peculiar fashion of normal men, a holdover from the brachiating arboreal days of apish forebears, the random grasping for branches and vines that saved the life of many a thick-browed ancestor of contemporary thick-browed personal injury lawyers. With the blood of the sea roaring in his ears he twirled in the air and folded into a sleek dart-shape, plunging into the black waters like a dagger.

Atop the bluffs far above, the girl and the robot stared down at the waves.

“You think he’ll make it?” asked the robot.

The girl sniffed, wiping a last drop of blood from her rapidly-healing nose. “I don’t know. I don’t really know what we’re up against. But… when I look into the water, there’s something there… I don’t know what it is, but… it terrifies me.”

The robot looked into the churning waves. “Yeah,” it said, “We’re dead.”

* * *

The water was warm to the touch, but it chilled his skin nonetheless. Gould took in the view from a few meters beneath the surface. Storm-wracked waves churned at the interface of air and water, but a few fathoms down the currents were calm, and still. Through the rippling glassy froth the broken sky shone with white-gray light, charcoal mottling and violet sparks of far-off lightning. Behind him the immense green mass of the Sargasso colony loomed ghostlike through the twilight gloom. Far below, its features were lost in dim bluish haze, darker than the hollow cobalt-turquoise waters of earthly seas. The water seemed thin and unusually clear; Gould realized it was from the lack of clouding plankton, the fundamental unit of marine life. The sea was empty, like a cold-water lake, cold and clear and dead. Gould felt weak, and hollow, and alone.

“Chippy? Chippy, do you read?” The voice crackled through his headset, mercifully drowning out the ever-present submarine rumbling that now seemed so alien to him.

“I read.” Air bladders on his mask bulged and shrank as he spoke, the pressure continually equalizing, more or less.

“Oh good, you survived. Now, the unstable magnetic field seems to indicate the planetoid lacks a molten iron core, but if you go down far enough I don’t know what you’ll find. You don’t have to worry about air, but the pressure gradient might be… intense. It might take you a while to get to the bottom, though.”

“Great,” he mumbled, “Now I’m freaking Beowulf.”

“Who? Bay Wolf? Is he a superhero?”

“Something like that.”

“Neat. Anyway, I worked it out, and it should take you about twelve days at an average speed of eight knots…”

“I can swim a lot faster than that, you know.”

“What? Even a regular dolphin can only reach 25 or 30 knots for quick bursts, and you’re…”

“There’s nothing regular about me. You should know that by now.”

Over the radio he could make out the faint voice of the robot in the background. “…telling the truth. If there’s one thing he is, it’s fast. Why, when there’s danger around he can run away faster than any man I’ve ever…” A sharp crackling drowned out the rest of the sentence, static from a nearby lightning bolt.

The girl’s voice came back over the link. “Wow, I had no idea! Chippy, try to make it back in one piece so I can take another look at you. There’re some more tests I want to run on your muscle fiber and spinal throughput rates…”

“I’ll try not to disappoint.” With that, he doubled over, kicked upwards, and surged down into the depths.

The water became darker as he descended; light from the surface gradually filtered away. Red and orange were the first to go, miring Gould in blue-green fog. Eventually, the shorter wavelengths began to fade, the cobalt walls drifting to a thin purple shroud, and, finally, blackness.

Gould could see for miles around. His echolocation organs clicked in the night, faint echoes bouncing back from thermal layers and deep-sea currents. Aside from the occasional pale watery squid or gelatinous drifter, dimly strobing across the luminescent spectrum, the water was empty.

“So tell me about these whale things,” he spoke into the pickup. “Robot said he thought they were dead.”

“The gulper whales?” Her voice was fainter now, muffled by a hundred fathoms of seawater. “They are, or at least were, the top predators in the ecosystem. Incredible creatures, ghastly to look at but structurally fascinating. They aren’t exactly cetaceans, in that they don’t have to surface for air, but they have bony, muscular bodies with densely-packed cell structures. They’re metavores, meaning they can eat just about anything in the sea, although I suspect they mostly feed on schools of light invertebrates. I dissected a few of the smaller ones. Big brain case, even bigger jaws. I should say “brain cases” though, since there’s more than one, although I’m not quite sure how that works. Might be a distributed nervous system, but you don’t normally see that in creatures this evolved. Kind of strange, though… They’re built for speed and rapid acceleration, but they’ve got bone structure rugged enough to support creatures way heavier than the ones I’ve actually seen, which makes me think that maybe the bigger ones stay in the depths.”

“Which of course is where I’m going.”

“Yeah, but we haven’t seen any in quite a while.”

Something was scratching at the back of Gould’s conscious. He couldn’t quite figure out what it was yet, but it seemed urgent. Terribly urgent, like part of his brain was screaming at the rest from inside a locked vault. He made a mental note to spit on Sigmund Freud’s grave when he got back, or at least spraypaint something obscene on the phallic spires of the thousand-foot-high Freud Memorial Arcology on Beta Antares III.

As he descended through the eternal, starless night, the pressure around him continued to rise. The tension of a million tons of seawater above him bore down upon every millimeter of his body. A small decomposer in his mask broke down some of the surrounding water, pumping oxygen into his lungs to equalize the pressure. He continued to probe the depths with his sonar, the sound waves refracting off of deep-water current irregularities or simply vanishing into the distance. All of a sudden, he heard it, and froze.

Click.

The sonar pickup was huge. It was as if the wave had reflected off a solid wall.

But there were no solid walls down here… were there? He pinged again, same response. Cautiously, he drifted toward the sound.

He couldn’t believe it. Concrete? That’s what it felt like, anyway. Sonar showed it was thick, remarkably solid, but not completely so. There were flaws in the matrix, empty spots and clumps of varying refractivity. Different materials, perhaps?

“Hey, do you read?” he said into the mike. “I’ve found something.”

“Ch…ppy? …you?” The voice was full of static and intermittent drop-offs. Gould kicked away from the rock to get a clearer line of sight.

“Do you read me now? Repeat, do you read?”

“Barely.” The voice was faint and tinny, like talking through tin cans and a string. “You said you found something?” Gould explained the mass to her.

“Interesting… And you said it was uneven, like it was some kind of aggregate?”

“Yeah, like a clump of low-grade concrete, but a hundred times more coarse. Also, it’s floating. Same density as the surrounding water, more or less.”

“I wonder… Lots of meteors and miscellaneous space junk get caught in the planetoid’s gravitational field and splash down in the water. They must get carried on the currents until they reach a depth of zero buoyancy; that is, the same density as the surrounding water. The currents carry them around and eventually deposit them in dead spaces between flows. I’d guess minerals settle out of the still water onto their surfaces and set them like concrete after a few thousand years. Like giant floating mountains, full of cracks and fissures. Watch out for the caves, you never know what might be hiding in there.”

“Down here, you never know what might be hiding right in front of you.”

“Point taken. Is the suit working out okay?”

“Huh? The suit?” Gould had all but forgotten about it in the fashionable darkness. He noted with some surprise that the water here was like ice, but under the suit he wasn’t even cold.

“That’s weird. I didn’t even notice it, but it’s like the cold isn’t even touching me.”

“Of course it isn’t. That’s a white-body suit. It reflects all radiant energy. The warmth from your body bounces right off it and is re-absorbed; no heat is lost to the outside.”

“Really? Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“I thought you knew. The luminous colors are a dead giveaway; it reflects 100% of the light that strikes it too. What, did you think I made it like that because it looked good?”

“Well…”

“Damn, you sure can be stupid sometimes.”

* * *

Leaving the drifting mountain behind, Gould continued to descend through the empty world. Down here, in the cold, complete blackness, he could feel the weight of half the planet bearing down on him, threatening to crush him to nothingness.

Nothingness. Time drifted away from Gould like a feather in the tide.

The utter, total blackness.

Light… what was it like? I… can’t remember. All there is is darkness; it is all that has ever been and all that will ever be. It is the absolute nature of creation.

The thunderous, titanic cacophony of nothing, roaring in my ears. The expectant murmur of voices yet unborn, or the howling cries of the ancient dead? Is there a difference?

Down in the bowels of the world, a billion tons of pressure on every molecule of his body, creation began to unravel.

Though my eyes are blind I see within myself, and within myself I behold the universe. Every atom of my body explodes upon the pulsing chaos of pre-creation, the primordial unification of matter and energy, all things in nothing, from this I burst forth in a billion rebirths and fade back to a billion shades of death. For I see through the eyes of God, and I am everything and nothing, every place and no place; I am the brightest star exploding in the night and the lowest grain of earthly dust.

My atoms… what are they but coalescent energy, energy which is infinitely permutable. I am the fundamental unit of creation; time and space are but the length and breadth of my essence.

Where am I? The question I should ask is where I am not, and that is nowhere. This is also the answer to the previous question.

Why am I here? It is the nature of things for me to be here, it would not be possible for me to not be here, except that I am not here.

But… there is something… something I must do.

I must do everything that is done, for it will be done, and has been done, and I have done it and will do it, and am doing it, all at once.

No… something… here… now… with this flesh…

What was it?

Something horrible. Something immense. Something… so near.

The shrieking roar slammed Gould back into lucidity.

It was a cry of anger, of pain, of trembling cosmic fury. The sort of sound made by the great monstrosities of the darkest depths; a cry made to remind themselves that they still existed despite the all-consuming numbness of the abyss.

It was very near. Gould’s blood ran cold despite the warmth of the diving suit.

“Hey… Hey!” he hissed into the pickup, keeping his voice as low as possible. The glass of his faceplate was double-paned, with vacuum in the middle; still, the sound was not entirely bottled in.

A faint hiss of static was the only reply.

Nervously, Gould quickened his pace. The sea was different now, thicker. A faint luminance hung in the water; Gould found he could now see his arms. There hung before him points of pale blue-green light flickering in the water, twinkling stars in the ethereal sea. One passed by his visor; he saw it was a miniscule gelatinous form, translucent, pumping softly while dragging a faint, mesh-like veil. A tiny ring of lights crowned its jellyfish-like mantle, ghostly regalia in the aquatic mist. A scavenger, straining the waters for microscopic particles of long-dead marine life, the only source of nutrients to sink to this level. Filled with an ancestral relief at the coming of the dawn, Gould almost forgot the sound that had filled him with such terror. He continued his descent, clicking his sonar occasionally to monitor his path beyond the visible range. He had clicked and was waiting for a reply when it hit him.

THUMP.

It was faint, and almost too low to pick up, but the realization of it turned his bones to shards of frozen crystal, stabbing at his soul.

It was a sonar ping. Not his.

Gould had the innate knowledge of ten million generations of dolphin burned into his mind so deep that no human could understand, detached as they were from their ancestral roots. He could tell, no, feel the dynamics of a sound wave as it rippled through the turbulent waters, subtly deflecting off the faintest eddies and currents, minutely altered in pitch by transitions between thermal boundary layers, and bouncing off of sand, or rock, or gravel, or silt; fish, or squid, or sharks, or seals. Gould could tell a friend by the sound of his click from a mile away, or pick up a hostile orca’s ping from a league and a half.

There are two simple rules to follow when identifying an unknown ping. The first rule is simple: The frequency of a ping is inversely proportionate to the size of the resonant organ, or melon, that generates it. That is, the larger the melon the deeper the frequency of the click. The second rule is even simpler: The size of the melon is directly proportionate to the size of the creature it is attached to. This varies to some degree depending on species configuration and internal layout, but as a ballpark estimation it is superbly effective.

The ping that Gould heard had come from the single largest creature he had ever in his life encountered.

As if a tumbler had slid into place, the little vault in Gould’s mind popped open. A chain of simple logic flowed through his brain.

The gulper whales, which possess a bone structure sufficient for a creature many tens of times their size, have disappeared from the known surface waters. This happened soon after the increase in morbidity among the smaller marine creatures, particularly the chromatic plankton that makes up the bottom rung of any marine food chain. This led to the gradual collapse of higher levels on the chain, including those that fed the young surface-dwelling whales. As their food supply dwindled, they began to dive deeper and deeper in search of fish to prey upon. When they dove deeper, they found that many of the deep-water fish had also disappeared, and that the larger, older whales were also in need of food. Thus, the young gulper whales became an excellent source of protein for the larger whales, who, being metavores, have the ability to open their mouths exceedingly wide.

Because the younger whales have all been devoured, the larger whales are once again in need of food.

Because of cannibalistic tendencies in times of extreme distress, only the largest and most powerful whales are still alive.

Something very large and very much alive has just bounced a sonar ping off of me.

I am in a great deal of trouble.

Gould pinged his sonar—gently—into the water around him. After a moment he found what he sought—a faint sonic refraction, a thermal boundary layer, the banks of an undersea river. Gould quietly slipped into the turbulent masking and waited. The bone-rattling noise repeated.

THUMP.

It was louder, closer. Gould hoped the chaos of the boundary coupled with the lessened fidelity of low-frequency sound waves would be enough to mask his presence. He turned his body so as to present the smallest possible sonar cross-section.

THUMP.

The creature would probably be looking for larger prey anyway.

THUMP.

Maybe.

THUMP.

The shockwave hit Gould like a mortar. Tiny glowing traces etched their way across his field of view. Like worms, they inched across the glass of his faceplate; reflective lines of fractured temper. As the cracks grew Gould felt the pressure in his mask changing. With razor-edged shards threatening to implode through his face at any second, Gould carefully detached the strap and broke the seal. Water rushed in with the force of a firehose. Stunned, he dropped the mask and covered his eyes with his hands. When he opened them again the world was fuzzy and blurred; his face felt uncomfortably bare. As his lenses refocused beneath their nictitating shields, everything came back into view; the water, the glowfish, and the huge black shadow surging towards him.

It was immense, not in the sense that one perceives a mountain or planet as big, stark and detached, a piece of scenic backdrop to the universe. No, it was vividly gargantuan, that special titanic enormity one usually only associates with a living god, a primordial ur-creature, a sentient force of nature.

The Leviathan hurtled through the ethereal mists with frightening speed. Its great broad flukes pulsed with unimaginable power as it undulated through the water, long pectoral fins like folded wings beneath.

Gould stared in abject terror as the thing swam by him, meters away. It was close enough that he could see the bones protruding from beneath its withered skin, the long, downward-curving lines of the tremendous jaw, the ribbed bellows of the throat. The mouth, cruel and terrible, was set in an eyeless head. Gould watched as it glided past, unknowing, unseeing. He felt a faint glimmer of hope, of release. He looked back from the creature’s passing jaws straight into a long chain of glassy eyes stretching back across the creature’s sides, cold and hollow. They were staring straight at Gould.

The creature passed in silence, then began a long, slow turn, arcing up in a submarine Immelman. It swung around in the distance, nose pointed directly at him.

Hurry!

Gould looked around for the source of the voice, found it was coming from nowhere in particular.

You must move quickly if you wish to survive!

The whale made a few minor corrections to its aim.

There is a rock formation nearby with numerous hollows in which you may conceal yourself. Swim downwards to reach it.

Leviathan seemed to grow monstrously larger, its body swelling as hydrojet organs sucked in water through muscled openings.

Move now!

The monster contracted, forcing out high-pressure jets of water. It lunged forward, tail thrashing.

Gould turned and kicked as hard as he could, bolting for the deep. He could sense the thing behind him, a storm of rage in the sea. He started pinging, searching for the prophesied sanctuary. He could feel the creature behind him, feel the pressure wave building ahead of it. He swam with all his superhuman might, but he knew the thing was gaining. How could he, a mere man, hope to outswim a god?— a black, ravenous, bestial god of a dead world adrift in the cold, empty blackness of space; a god of the void itself; a god of nothing.

A faint echo from the distance suppressed his terror. Hope again glimmered in Gould’s heart as the hard, crisp sound of sonar reflecting off of rock came to him. He surged forward with every bit of strength he had left, pulsing his sonar rapidly to look for any hollow or crevice. As the sheer wall materialized out of the distance he caught the refracted echo of a narrow cavern, more than wide enough for him but nowhere near that required by his pursuer. He shifted course and made for the opening, his pulsing legs cavitating incredibly in the dense water. Ahead of him on the cragged rock face he could dimly make out the tunnel, an eroded hollow between great fused boulders. As he crossed the threshold he felt a strong resistance, the pressure of a closed system; he steadied himself with his hands and lurched into the crevice, not stopping until he was so deep that the dim glow of drifting decay had faded to utter blackness.

Gould came to a rest in a wide chamber deep within the rock, guided there by his high-frequency sonar. He rested and caught his breath, or at least would have caught it, had he been breathing. The rebreather organ kept his blood steadily oxygenated despite the exertion.

Do not think that you have escaped. The voice again, from nowhere. Gould listened in the darkness to the bodiless whisperer.

The creature will pursue you to the end of time.

“I hardly think I’m worth the effort,” Gould thought to himself. “That thing probably burns more calories in an hour than I have in my whole body.”

It is not your flesh it hungers for.

“You can hear me?”

You must do as I say if you are to survive.

“I can’t tell if that’s a threat or not.”

Continue onward through the cavern.

“Yeah, well, I was gonna do that anyway,” Gould thought, starting for the far side of the chamber. He paused.

“Thanks for telling me about the cave.”

There was no answer.

For hours Gould swam through the twisting passages within the undersea mountain, squeezing through cracks barely larger than his body and drifting across chambers so huge they returned only the faintest of echoes. The rock was hard and dense, like marble or limestone. As he wound onward through the blackness, he wondered how deep he was in the mountain, and what had happened to the creature. Was it circling beside the entrance, as the voice had suggested, or had it gone off in search of other prey? At any rate, it didn’t matter, since Gould had no intention of going back the way he came.

As he went on he noted that the tunnels were less cramped , with the large abscesses coming much more frequently. He decided it must have been a melding point, where two large rocks had fused together at some point in the past and left an uneven joint. As he turned a corner he was startled to find a pale blue glow illuminating the tunnel before him. Was this the end of the cave, the far side of the mountain? As he swam onward the glow became brighter, finally resolving itself to a small crevice along the right side of the tunnel. It threw a faint shaft of velvety blue-white light across his path, with dusty particles rotating in mute suspension.

He swam up to the gap and looked out into the blue sea, lit by a scattering of luminous anemones. The crack, a few inches wide, was edged on the far side with huge rock shutters, tremendous boulders slanting outward. Gould found he was peering out through the base of a great horizontal chasm in the rock.

As he stared out into the empty waters, an immense black shape moved across the rift. A chain of glossy reflective eyes on the side of the creature’s body gazed into the crevice where Gould lay shuddering, wanting to look away but unable. Leviathan held motionless in the water as its eyes pierced his soul. The obsidian spheres shone with the hollow emptiness that Gould recognized from his encounters with the thralls of the Eternal Ones. That same hollow, dead abyss had burned down from under the Oblivion Commando’s maniacal brow, twisted with rage and murderous lust. From beneath the glossy visor of the Ouroboros Captain those selfsame eyes had peered with cold detachment, the distant gaze of lifeless shades.

That voracious pit of absolute nothing hung beneath the sunken socket-chains of the great gulper whale, Leviathan. It had followed him all the way here. Here, though Gould himself had not himself known where he was going, had not known where the path was leading; here, though no sonar could have penetrated those miles of frozen sediment, plumbed that twisting maze beneath watery Olympus where night sank eternal in rough-walled tombs.

COME OUT.

It was not the same voice as before. This one was… slurred, broken, frequency-bent across the whole audible spectrum and back again, and then some. He felt it rumbling in his bones as it howled in his ears, pulling at his mind with cold phantasmic chains.

COME OUT.

Gould felt a terrible strain, a pressing urge to obey the voice, the multitude of speakers commanding him to relent.

“What… what do you want from me?” Gould shouted, in his mind.

There was a long pause.

EAT.

Gould swallowed. “Well, at least you’re honest.” He shuddered again. “Why waste so much effort chasing me? If you’re hungry I’m sure there’re more nutritious things in the sea…”

NOT HUNGRY FOR FOOD.

“Wha—”

HUNGRY FOR DEATH.

“I’m not quite sure I understand. I’m not quite sure I want to.”

ONCE WE SWAM THE WORLD BITING AT CLOUDS.

“Clouds?”

TINY SWIMMERS.

“Squid? Krill?”

WE ATE AND WE WERE FULL. THEN IT CAME AND GAVE US THE NEW HUNGER.

“What?”

ONCE WE BIT ONLY FOOD. IT TAUGHT US THE JOY OF BITING THAT WHICH IS NOT FOOD. THAT WHICH SCREAMS WHEN IT DIES.

Gould decided to stay in the cave for the rest of his life.

Come along now, called the other voice, from nowhere. It is not wise to remain in the company of such things.

Gould swung back from the gap, paused. One last look out at the shadowy form, then he kicked away and disappeared into the cavernous night.

“I was wondering when you’d show up.” Gould twisted through a series of hairpin turns in the tunnel.

I did not wish you to be lost to that creature.

“I don’t think he could’ve gotten in here, the clearance was a little less than the required mile.”

Its influence is strong, and terrible. Much greater than was expected.

Gould narrowed his eyes. ‘Expected?’ “Who are you, anyway?”

You will learn, in time.

“So what were you saying about its influence?”

There was a noticeable pause. Psychomanipulation. It can subtly bend the wills of lesser beings, useful for trapping shoals of krill and other invertebrates.

“So it was a baleen feeder after all? What the hell happened?”

A terrible corruption. A perversion of that which was meant to be.

“That’s not very specific.”

You will…

“…learn in time, yeah, I know how this works.” Gould mentally cursed. “That thing kept saying ‘we’, does that mean there’re more of these ‘corruptions’ around?”

No, there is only the one remaining. The creature’s immense size necessitates multiple brains throughout the body, resulting in a collective consciousness and a self-referential plural awareness.

“Guess he never gets lonely.” Gould said. “Or should I say “they?”

There was no answer. Gould frowned and continued through the darkness.

As the lightless miles went on Gould began to feel again the effects of the crushing pressure. His body numbed by the cold despite the bodysuit, he began to feel his connection to the world slipping. He imagined himself within the bowels of some great beast, far more terrible than the whale. Around him the decaying bodies of long-dead creatures slowly dissolved in caustic fluids. They whispered to him through fleshless mouths, the grins of the laughing damned.

When he emerged from the cavern it took him a few moments to realize what had happened. The light here was dimmer than above; fewer luminaries drifted at this level. Beneath him stretched an indeterminate haze of inky water, forming a horizon of sorts on all sides. His sonar clicks disappeared into it as though there were nothing there. He glanced up at the mountain above and saw that he had emerged near the flattened edge of it; the bulk was off to his left with clear water above.

In the midst of that starry turquoise sky, lit by dancing shoals of glow-squid, Leviathan’s great black shadow hung like a terrible moon.

Quickly! Your presence has been concealed from the great beast’s awareness, but the illusion cannot be held for long. Descend to the murky layer beneath; once you cross over into the darkness your safety will be assured.

“Wait a minute! How do I know this isn’t a trap? I didn’t come down here to run from whales, I came to find out-

There is no time! Even now the beast discovers you!

Gould looked back up to see the creature far above, now turned on its side. The row of eyes shone with pale rings in the sky, leering down with gleeful lust. The thing rolled again with its great flukes. Its winglike pectorals fanned out as it pitched down, inverted, to face him. The monstrous shape began to grow at a terrifying rate as it descended.

Move now or perish!

Gould spun around and dove for the blackness. He surged forward into the murky haze, the light from above instantly cutting out. His entire body went numb as he passed over, and time faded away with his consciousness.

After an eternity of oblivion the darkness fell away as swiftly as it had descended, and he found himself inside the great black cloud. The interior was well-lit and clear, with the far side of the cloud vanishing beyond a faint azure haze. Free-floating shoals of what looked like dull brown coral drifted in slow, silent orbits.

Beneath him, at the very core of the shadow, Gould stared down at the collapsed star.

The singularity was a sphere of total blackness a few meters in diameter, the event horizon shadowing the innermost point of negative space. Around it a shimmering accretion disk spun in perfect miniature.

Mister Gould, called the voice, it is good that you came here.

“You’re supposed to be dead… destroyed… burned out. You can’t possibly be alive, or this whole planet would be gone.”

Do you think so little of us, that we could not control our appetites? That our titanic will would be insufficient to bend such trivialities as time and space?

“I’m guessing you’re not just an artificial black hole, then.”

We are that into which all things descend. We are the Omega, the final point of creation. It is us to whom eternity belongs.

Gould stared down at the sphere, but said nothing.

We brought you here to ask a question. Why are you attempting to destroy the universe?

“I… what? Me? How am I destroying the universe?”

You… life… all living things.

“Life is destroying the universe? Last time I checked it wasn’t the living that consumed whole galaxies, sucked the very constellations from the sky.”

It is the way of things. From nothing all things spring, from the darkness, light; rising, glittering at its apex in a billion stars, swirling in the heavens, then down, down, back into the shadows, back into the perfect order of nothing. It is the grand function of the cosmos, and you seek to defile it.

“What the hell are you-”

Chaos! You twist the order of the heavens, seeking to tear the great cycle asunder! There is no force in the universe that does not follow the divine order save your own! With your interference you will destroy everything!

“I can’t believe I’m listening to this… to swim halfway through a planet to listen to the demented philosophical ravings of a piece of geometry…”

Mister Gould, it seems that you simply do not understand the fundamental nature of things. Your error is not one of malice but merely of ignorance. Your struggle against the inevitable darkness is terribly misguided. Allow us to explain in terms which are perhaps more familiar to you. Imagine, please, that the universe is a flower. This flower opens with the first light of dawn and closes again with the last rays of the setting sun. You, Mister Gould, you who finds the flower so beautiful that he is unwilling to part with it for even an instant, you try with all your might to prevent the flower from closing, forcing the blossom open with your indelicate hands, ripping the petals, destroying it. Mister Gould, this is what your resistance is doing to the order of the universe.

“It’s not the same. The flower will open again with the next dawn, but a world devoured by lustful shadow will never spring anew.”

You are certain of this? You have gazed across the eons and reached beyond the veil of infinity?

“You’re saying you’ve seen it? The circularity of time? A billion Earths born and dead, a universe rising and falling like a celestial phoenix?”

We have seen many things…

“Then we’ve had this conversation before, no doubt? Surely you must have questioned one of the previous Herbert Goulds to rise up from the mud of a long-dead world, asked him these same questions which I now spit back at you!”

Infinite variables, infinite permutations…

“Aha! Then time is not truly circular, it is only the structure of the universe that is self-repeating.”

The distinction is irrelevant.

“I think not. Endless cycles of destruction and re-creation ensure that no net gain is ever achieved. Endless renewal means endless stagnation as the same ground is covered again and again. Only through the destruction of the cycle itself can sentience transcend its current form.”

Mister Gould, it seems that you still do not understand; but there is a way to remedy this. In truth we did not bring you here to answer questions, but rather to make you a proposition.

“This is gonna be one of those ‘offers I can’t refuse’, right?”

The choice of acceptance rests solely in your hands.

“Good, I like to have choices.”

Merge with us.

“WHAT?”

Join with us and together we can become a force more powerful than the universe has yet known.

“What happened to ‘preserving the divine order’?”

Together we can ensure that order is never violated, and with us you may continue on beyond the end of time. With us you may transcend your current form and soar unfettered betwixt the astral winds.

“I’ve seen what becomes of those who merge with you. Hollow-eyed thralls, empty vessels for your nihilistic lusts. No thanks.”

Those you refer to were mere tools, dull instruments of our will. You, who slew them in all of their greatness, you are a giant among the living, worthy of our essence.

“This the same offer you made to Moby Dick back there? Biggest fish in the sea, and all that?”

That transformation bred unexpected consequences. Strength was all the creature understood, strength and hunger. In retrospect the savage mind was not ready for the prescience we offered.

“Which was?” As Gould spoke the words he felt a shifting in the currents. Something large was drifting near, out of the corner of his eye he saw it was one of the brown coral shoals he’d noticed before. He made a motion to avoid it, and as he turned he got a good look at it for the first time. He turned white.

“Of all the things that are holy…”

A thousand crumbling skulls gazed at him through hollow sockets. Great snaking spines twisted through the rib-lined mass. Great strips of what was once flesh played like anemones in the currents while the remains of organs sat in black mouldering lumps. Gould could make out some of the bones; whales, porpoises, great shelled turtles and bony fish, the cones of rotted squid, all intertwined in a gristly charnel mass, the populace of a murdered world.

The creature obviously held a similar sentiment.

“What the hell is this?” asked Gould, kicking away from the corpse-mass.

An offering from a pious disciple; lacking perhaps the subtle nuances of artistic destruction but more than making up for it in raw visceral spirit.

“That thing did this? Why?”

It appears that we were its first God.

“Christ, it must have killed the entire ocean.” He turned to the sphere. “Is this what you offer me? A trail of corpses ten miles long? Burning death-lust and a blackened soul?”

We offer you infinity. Light and darkness combined into one unstoppable wrath. Creation and destruction, a microcosm of reality. The fire in your blood and the ice in our souls will merge into one penultimate totality of will.

“Why don’t you just kill me and get it over with? I’m sure you can manage to annihilate the universe on your own. I seem to have lost my stomach for it.”

We could, of course, but that is not what we desire.

“And that is?”

We desire you.

Gould looked at the singularity, spinning with its mocking rings. He peered up at the death-shoal, drifting on, away, a monument to regret. He closed his eyes.

“I’m sorry. You’ll have to kill me.”

We suspected you would say such a thing. Unfortunate, but acceptable.

A rippling sound, like wind on water, caused Gould to open his eyes and look up. The great void of shadow was fading, pulling back from above like windswept clouds. Within seconds the path above him was clear.

“You’re letting me go?” asked Gould, looking down.

A huge shadow passed overhead.

Not exactly.

Gould swiveled up to see the gargantuan form of Leviathan looming overhead. With a swish of its thunderous tail it veered downward with nightmarish speed.

It’s not too late to change your mind.

“Never!”

The beast filled the water with its obscene, twisted mass. Huge cracks formed across its head as titanic jaws swung open; masses of immense white teeth shone jagged and ghostlike in the azure haze. The great billowing of the whale’s ribbed throat, now distended with an ocean of water, streaked toward him as huge jet bypasses blasted water out through ventral slits. Every cell in Gould’s body screamed in ancestral terror. The terrible night engulfed him.

“No! Wait! I surrender!” The words rang out in Gould’s mind as the jaws swung shut.

The deafening screech of million twisting girders threatened to tear Gould’s soul to ribbons. The unimaginable energy surge whited out his vision, as it returned he saw the great whale around him, stripped of all flesh by the devil-fire of the quasar beneath. Then, with a roar, the creature’s great white bones faded from existence in a shower of smoke-filled bubbles. Gould turned to see the singularity surging beneath him, swelling with obscene fury. The plasma jets above and below the stellar plane roared with unholy energy as the accretion disc spun wider and wider.

It is good that you have made this decision.

The sphere continued to grow.

With our combined essences we shall become the will of the universe itself.

The edge of darkness was surging towards Gould.

With your lust for war and bloodshed life shall be undone and silent order will return to creation.

The ebon barrier touched Gould’s body, and he was no more.

Now, let us become infinity.

What? No!

It can’t be!

You can’t possibly be!

Treachery!

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo…

* * *

“At least his head’s not in it,” said the robot.

“Maybe his head’s not in one piece.” The girl turned the cracked mask over and over in her hands. A thin trickle of water ran out from between the fractured glass plates.

“Well,” said the robot, kicking a layered titanium pebble into the surf, “The recovery bladders didn’t get torn so it probably got cracked from the water pressure, rather than something’s teeth.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right. Beacon’s still working too, but that just means the battery didn’t short.”

“Is that an atomic battery? That thing probably would’ve blown his head off if it had. Why’d you use something like that, anyway?”

The girl rolled her eyes. “Because stuff that I build doesn’t short out and explode, you moron. It’s only dangerous if you’re a total idiot who doesn’t put a quantum seal-”

A sound like an atom bomb being dropped on a mountain of aluminum garbage cans heralded the eruption of a tremendous waterspout. The girl pressed a button on her wristwatch and a plastic-wrap force shield sprung into existence around her, causing the resultant tsunami to warp harmlessly past. As the waters receded, the robot hopped down from his temporary perch atop her head. She frowned and brushed stripes of spent rocket exhaust from her shoulders, glaring at the robot who only shrugged in return.

Above the churning froth hung a great black shape, burning with indigo flames. The pair gazed up with incredulity as a set of pearly teeth grew from the blackness, a perfect monochrome grin set in a shadow-flamed head. A swirling veil of light surrounded the figure, minute particles spinning inward towards its center. Suddenly, a double-geyser of compressed air erupted from its forehead.

“Chippy?” said the girl. “What the hell are you doing way up there?”

“I brought…” rasped the voice, with a new, hard edge, “…something back.”

The robot blinked his eyes on and off like a stoplight. “What, bronchitis?”

The figure raised his arms to the sky, and the sea turned to crashing foam. The girl and the robot were both shaken to their knees, or at least their nearest anatomical equivalents. A terrific roaring tore the air, and it seemed as though the very molecules of the planet were tearing away from each other.

Two immense mountains erupted from the sea, rocky spires thrusting up to the clouds. Rivulets of water sprang forth from a dozen shafts and canyons.

“There,” said Gould, alighting on the beach in front of the speechless pair, “Now we have somewhere to fish from without getting our hooks caught in all this fucking seaweed.”

The girl’s mouth hung open in disbelief. “But, uhh, Chippy…” She swallowed fast. “All the fish are, umm, dead.”

Gould turned to stare at the girl through jet-black eyes rimmed with fire. “Yeah,” he said, “I’m working on that one.”

Lounging on the beach next to the lagoon, Neo Herbert Gould sucked idly on his piña colada.

“Mister Robot,” he said, “This is most definitely the life.”

“I’m still not talking to you.” The robot drew little circles in the sand-colored sand, real silicon for a change. Off in the distance, a mackerel dropped out of the sky and landed in the water with a plop.

“Aww, come on, I told you I’d carve you that duck-shaped mountain next week. The rock I’m gonna use is floating under the pole now and it’s a bitch to get around the magnetic field from this far away.”

“That’s not it. I’m just annoyed, is all. At the cosmic irony of the thing.”

Gould leaned back in his lounge chair, looking up at the genuine palm trees far above on the mountain slope, wrapped in green velvet jungle. “Yeah… Funny how things work out.”

“So let me get this straight, just so I’m sure I’m not missing anything here. The artificial black hole, only it wasn’t really an artificial one after all but rather a sort of spy for the big ones, anyway it lured us here to this planet for the express purpose of capturing you and using your powers for their purposes.”

“More or less, although I’m not sure exactly how much of it was planned in advance and how much was just winged.” In the distance, a marlin materialized out of thin air and dropped into the ocean with a splash.

“Yeah. So then it manages to force you into letting your guard down for a minute by sending the whale after you, and in the instant you yielded it lunges into your body and tries to turn you into some sort of super killing machine of destruction, right?”

“Right. Only it didn’t count on one thing.”

“Yeah. Your total, complete, and utter idiocy and incompetence.”

“Well, that’s not exactly how I would put it. More like my being pure of heart.”

“More like your being empty of head. It’s like, the things control people by working on their deep-rooted lusts and desires, their carnal urges and private neuroses.”

“Which I, of course, am unburdened by.”

“It’s the first time I’ve ever heard of someone being saved by their total lack of any will, drive, motivation, or general humanity.” The robot tossed a pebble at a nearby hermit crab, missing on purpose.

“It’s like I’ve transcended my physical form.” He brushed a hand over his torso; cold black flames licked between his fingers. “Maybe not that far off.”

“It’s like you’re in some kind of nitwit nirvana, if you want my opinion.” The robot picked up a gamepad and started tapping buttons in tune with the crying of the gulls. “So there’s nothing left of its consciousness whatsoever?

“Nope. I think it died of shock. See, they’d assumed that since I managed to slag all their agents before that I was some kind of maniacal berserker or something; they were counting on that to drive me once I’d been corrupted—but what they thought was calculated, murderous fury was actually dumb luck and the occasional gut instinct.” In the distance, an ocean sunfish appeared in the sky and fell into the water with a smack.

“So you’re what now, the ultimate power in the universe or something?”

“Meh. I dunno, something like that. I don’t really care, I’d rather just hang around here fishing.”

“Do you even have a hook on that thing?” the robot asked, indicating Gould’s rod and cast line.

“Nah, I lost the taste for fish awhile back. It’s more fun without the pressure anyway.”

“Shouldn’t we go back and maybe take out the rest of the enemy fleet? Last I heard they still had a couple of Omega Destroyers kicking around…”

“Pfft. What’s the use? They’re broken, the singularities are terrified out of their wits—first time ever for them, probably—meaning the warships are all working on partial power and can’t even charge up their main guns. Let our fleet take care of them. People need to fight their own battles anyway, gives them a sense of purpose and responsibility. If I start flying around like some sort of costumed superhero, what’re people going to do? Stop taking responsibility for their own problems, that’s what they’d do. I don’t want to be some kind of moral crutch for the galaxy. If there’s a problem that’s too big for them to handle I’ll take care of it on the quiet. They won’t even know what almost hit ‘em.” Somewhere, some type of marine life fell from the sky with a kerplunk.

“That fish generator’s working pretty well, isn’t it?”

“Eh?” Gould turned to look at the metallic ring off in the distance, floating above the sea. It was in the process of assembling some kind of turtle. “Oh, yeah, I figure we’ll have the ecosystem replenished in no time, now that the plankton are coming back.”

“Won’t introducing all these earth fish totally screw up the native marine life, or what little’s left of it?”

“Ah, it’s just a temporary thing until the deep-sea probes come back with cell samples from the bodies I found. Then we can round up all the fish we made and clone a bunch of native species to repopulate the world whenever we decide to leave. Besides, all the native stuff is really ugly.”

“Hey, Chippy!” Gould and the robot turned to face the direction of the voice. The green-haired girl was crossing the suspension bridge they’d erected between the floating mountain and the kelp-colony mainland, moored together with spatial-lock tractors. She stepped off the bridge and came running over, carrying a big suitcase.

“Chippy!” she called, throwing her arms around his neck. The heatless indigo flame rose over her sleeves, but had no effect. “Thanks for letting me carve up that second mountain for raw materials! Now I have enough elemental stock to build just about anything!”

“How’d you bring these things up, anyway?” asked the robot.

“Oh, I just made it so about half the particles in the mountains themselves were repulsed by gravity instead of being attracted by it. Mostly the stuff deep-down, so we shouldn’t notice any effects here on the surface. They’ve got about twice the buoyancy of an iceberg now, and I fused the loose sections together so they wouldn’t break apart under the strain.”

“Yeah,” cut in the girl, “and I put stabilizers on them so they won’t rock or sink or tip over.”

“Good idea.” Somewhere, in the distance, a wet sound.

“So Chippy,” said the girl, “I’m designing a spaceship, but I’m not sure I wanna use it.”

“I don’t really have anywhere important to go at the moment. How about you, robot?”

“Where the hell would I go? I’m a navigational robot, it’s not like I have appointments to keep or anything.”

“I think you can hold off on the ship for awhile,” said Gould. “On second thought, build it anyway. We can use the backseat, at least.”

The girl giggled and squeezed his neck again. Gould turned to the robot.

“Yeah, I’ve been needing a place to tune my guitar, and an airtight spaceship’s the best place to do it right.”

The girl clamped her fingers around his throat and dug the nails into his windpipe.

“It’s funny,” said Gould, “I don’t seem to have the breathing problems like I used to.”

“You know,” said the girl, releasing him and jumping to her feet, “I’ve been kind of bored lately, since you’ve become indestructible and all and I can’t seem to get through your skin no matter how hard I cu—try,” she corrected. “So…” She flipped open the suitcase latches and kicked the lid open. Reaching in, she withdrew a huge black triangular device, humming faintly.

“…I designed this trans-spatial bone splitter just for you!” She flicked a switch and a dim blade of warped reality extended from the edges. “You think we can try it out? I’m sure there’s all sorts of neat new changes inside you now!”

Gould looked at her, and the blade, and the robot. Finally, he turned and gazed out at the sun, setting over the cobalt-blue horizon in amber-shafted splendor.

“Sure,” he said, “What the heck.”

The girl’s eyes lit up, not in quite the same manner as the robot’s typically did; no light bulbs.

“Just be sure to put everything back the way you found it when you’re done.”

Somewhere, in the distance, a large squid fell from the sky with a watery squelk.

fin