“Jack.” Nothing.
“Jack.” No reply. Thirty-six year old Albert Masterson was greeted with nothing more than the sound of furious typing occasionally being punctuated with pencil scratching against paper.
“Jack. Ross. Ford.” He said, raising his voice and speaking each syllable of his friend’s name with extra emphasis.
“‘M busy…” Finally came the mumbled reply. Well… he could see that.
Standing at the entrance of Jack’s very new fancy penthouse, he was starting to regret pushing his friend to accept it. Back when he’d been living in that crummy two-room hovel on the outskirts of the city, he simply hadn’t had enough space to be messy when he was going through one of his regular “creative episodes,” much less this blatant cry for help. Spare parts were strewn everywhere, a few clearly having been thrown across the room. Pieces of angrily ripped paper had been left in a little pile on the middle of the living room floor, the pencil having clearly torn straight through some designs as he’d crossed them out. A bottle of oil had veritably exploded on one corner of the dining table, and a core reactor substitute battery, of all things, had been left next to it, and was now most definitely leaking. He hadn’t seen Jack in so bad a condition since he had lost his parents and baby sister to a fire six years ago, an eighteen-year-old prodigy from a good family who had gained all his family’s money and lost everything else.
The prodigy in question was sitting on the floor in the clothes he’d worn to the public memorial for the families who had died in the squid attack a little over two weeks ago. His chin was dusted with stubble, which he normally hated, and an empty cup next to him was the only sign he had consumed anything since the memorial. The lights were off, so he was squinting at his most recent design with the light of the computer he was somewhat manically programming on.
Albert picked his way through the mess and grabbed Jack’s shoulder, shaking him. “Jack. Snap out of it.”
“I said I was busy!” The other man burst out, before properly looking up at him. He blinked a few times in confusion before it seemed to register who was there. “Albert?” He heaved an annoyed sigh. “What are you doing here? I’m in the middle of something.” Normally, Jack would have welcomed him with some tea or wine. But then, if this had been “normally,” Jack wouldn’t look like he hadn’t slept in two weeks, which he very possibly hadn’t.
“Take a break, Jack.” Albert said, adopting an assertive tone.
“No.” Jack said, looking back down at his computer. “I have to finish the wide-angle squid-sensor. If it just had been completed then, they wouldn’t have missed it.” His voice trailed off as he started retreating back into the world of his own mind.
Albert shook him again, forcing him out of that mental space. “You have been working on that thing for two years, you’re not going to finish it in the next few hours of work. Take a break.” It didn’t seem to quite be working, so he added, “You know it’s not your fault that the squid escaped the perimeter and made it to the city, right? It’s not your fault, these things just-“
“Don’t!” Jack sprung upwards, looking about ready to sock him in the face. “Don’t say these things just happen. Don’t-don’t say anything. Just shut up, Albert. Shut up.” His hands were shaking, but whether it was from hunger, sleep-deprivation, or anger was anyone’s guess. He took a few steadying breaths, then looked around him, finally seeming to realize the chaos in his new home.
Albert waited a bit until he had fully calmed down, and then spoke again, quietly. “I’m going to start cleaning some of the stuff up, but some of it, only you know where it goes. Take a shower, eat something, maybe sleep a little, and we can clean the rest of it up tomorrow.”
By morning the next day, the shredded designs had been tossed into the trash, the spare parts organized into piles next to one of the downstairs rooms Jack had been planning to turn into work rooms, and the core reactor substitute battery and oil bottle carefully disposed of. That corner of the dining table was a bit of a lost cause, and would probably have to be sent back to the factory to be properly cleaned, but at least it didn’t look like a small hurricane sent by the angry mechanic gods had passed through.
Albert didn’t say much when Jack walked down the stairs, looking both clean and relatively rested, even if still a bit haggard. He just heated up some food and coffee for the two of them and set it on the coffee table next to the sole couch in the room. They hadn’t been eating in silence long before Jack, refusing to look at the doctor, said, “Don’t say stuff like ‘it’s not your fault,’ okay? If I had just been more focused and finished that sensor, that squid wouldn’t have been missed, it wouldn’t have gotten through, and a lot of people would still be alive.”
“You’re right.” Albert said back, calmly, surprising Jack. “You definitely wasted your time in the past three years developing missiles less likely to explode on accident. You’re a god, and every single death attributed to squid attacks since you started working on mech designs is a direct effect of your inaction or incompetence.”
Jack stared at him a bit, before choking out a small laugh. “You’re right. I’m being arrogant.” It didn’t seem to make him feel better, though. “You must be busy, too, dealing with the aftermath of all that.”
Albert frowned to himself uneasily. “Yes.” He said, uncomfortably. “Though not in the way I expected.”
“What do you mean?” Jack asked, not realizing quite at first what he was asking. When Albert didn’t respond right away, he looked over at him again, realizing something was wrong. The silence stretched on awkwardly, Albert struggling with whatever he wanted to discuss, and Jack struggling to find the words to either comfort his friend or encourage him to open up. Jack broke first, with the most inelegant opener possible. “Uh… So, what happened?”
Albert still didn’t respond right away, and Jack was just about ready to give up on attempting human communication for the next three years, when the doctor finally spoke. “They sent me a little girl.” Jack blinked at him. Albert was not a pediatric physician. “Her torso was completely covered with bandages, and they told me she’d sustained enough wounds she should have died.” This still didn’t make sense to Jack. Albert was also not an emergency doctor. A girl that badly wounded should have gone to intensive care or something, right? “They wanted me to do an evaluation on her.”
“What?” Jack finally asked, the number of puzzle pieces not falling into place irking him enough to compel him to speak.
“You know, the “squid evaluations” as they’re called, that bioengineers need to take occasionally to make sure they haven’t lost any of their humanity.” Jack had only a vague idea what he was talking about. He had mentioned it once or twice, but Jack had never fully understood the bioengineer part of the equation.
He gave his buddy a blank expression and asked, “So there’s a girl… she’s not dead?”
“What?” The question openly threw Albert. “Oh, no, not at all. She’s perfectly fine. Her records indicate that the burns on her torso will likely leave lasting marks, but there shouldn’t be any major impact on her motor function that some intensive physical therapy can’t fix. That’s not important. She was bitten by the squid, but that didn’t kill her, and her medical records say her compatibility is “indeterminate,” which makes no sense at all.” Jack wasn’t sure why this didn’t make sense, but he got the feeling he wouldn’t understand even if the doctor attempted to explain it to him, so said nothing. “I guess it makes sense that they wanted me to check her mental state.”
“Why?” Jack asked again, desperately wanting to regain some sense of order in this conversation.
Albert ran a hand through his hair, and let out a long sigh. He paused for a moment, then seemed to come to a decision, and simply finished up, “That poor girl showed signs of trauma, and a couple dreams she mentioned concerned me, but she wasn’t going squid. That’s not what worried me. The legal representative asked me some questions in private about if it was safe for her mentally to expose her to more venom. I told her that at her current state, it would take years for the regular doses of synthetic venom to turn her squid-side. I don’t know, just something about it worries me.” He was frowning and looking down thoughtfully. “You know a few people in the military. If you could ask about a little girl named Aemer Correny, it’d put my mind at ease.”
It was a weird request, but Albert’s intuition on bad things was rarely wrong, so Jack just nodded and said, “okay,” and the conversation was over. The couple friends he asked told him only that there were rumors about the military taking her in, and some disagreement the higher-ranking officers were apparently conducting about her. The news mentioned her as a miraculous survivor of the attack, but whatever was going on with her involvement with the military, it wasn’t public knowledge. In the following month, the strange girl faded from his mind.
And then he received a call from Albert. The doctor was speaking in a hushed, frantic tone that immediately put Jack’s nerves on edge. “I’ll text you directions, Jack. Come to the military base right now, it’s urgent.”
Confused and alarmed, Jack rushed to the base, following Albert’s specific directions to navigate into corners of the base he’d never seen before. The way the instructions were worded… it was like he was trying to avoid guards. It was all just so strange. By the time he burst into the little observation room he’d been directed to, he was about ready to discover Albert standing over a dead body. What he saw was much worse.
Albert was there, alright, with three other gentlemen, all from the base. The three men were startled to see him, and demanded he get out, but he didn’t hear them. Outside of the room, in a secondary chamber filled with some sort of pale, smoky gas, was a squid. Jack swallowed dryly and backed up against the door, inadvertently clicking it shut and making him feel distinctly like he was locked in.
He hadn’t realized just how large they were. Here he had been, improving on designs for mobile armor, thinking every little adjustment would matter, imagining that the weapons he was packing in would be enough to defeat just about anything, and he really hadn’t known anything. “Wh-wha-what the-” Fear choked any semblance of a true sentence from his airways, threatening to overwhelm him.
“Mr. Ross-Ford! This is a restricted area! You can’t be here!” One of the officers insisted.
“I- Y- you’re right. I need to tell people that there’s a- a squid got-“
“Stop!” Another one said, a more put-together man with a mustache. “This is a military secret, Mr. Ross-Ford. You can not tell anyone about the captured squid and the girl. You will face consequences if you do.”
“Captured? Captured.” Jack felt his knees buckle under him and he slid onto his butt on the floor. They had, of course, captured a few squids before, according to the research available, but it was difficult, and Jack had thought they hadn’t captured one in his lifetime. He was clearly wrong. Wait. What did it have to do with some girl?
His brain finally kicking into gear, Jack’s eyes scanned the room. The angry officers. The giant windows that allowed them to see the squid in what he now saw was a tank. That smoky gas must have been some way to keep it from being too active. Screens were peppered around the room. One showed a schematic of a human brain, one had charts of medical information, one had what appeared to be a full profile of someone, several were dedicated to the squid in the tank, examining it from multiple angles, and one was focused on a different room, one he hadn’t noticed at first because of the squid.
A girl was lying back on a rolly cot in that room, a couple of nodes on her temple, and an IV attached to her arm. She had soft brown hair and fair skin, much of which was wrapped with very thorough bandages, but it was her eyes that struck him first. They were a dark brown color, and they looked utterly dead, devoid of any emotion or spirit. His eyes flicked to the medical chart and profile screens. Words seemed to swim across his vision, certain ones popping out at him, screaming for attention. Orphan. Father – deceased, squid attack. Mother – deceased, KIA. Testing varying concentrations of pure, fresh Calamar venom. Day 5 of tests. Age: Seven. Seven. His sister would have turned seven this year. He would have rather died a hundred times than seen her looking like that.
The officers were arguing with each other now, discussing what to do now that he had seen things he shouldn’t have, but Albert just locked eyes with him, and the two of them agreed silently that this girl wasn’t staying here, not if the two of them could help it. Before they could think up a plan, or the officers could come to a decision, however, several alarms piped up from the computers. Two of the officers returned to the screens, while one stayed watching Jack to make sure he didn’t make a run for it while their backs were turned. The squid was making some kind of noise. It crackled through the speakers and shook the chamber, a strange clacking sound, followed by a high-pitched keening that had Jack covering his ears. It moved its limbs weakly, but couldn’t seem to muster up the strength to break free.
The officers seemed to think this was perfectly normal and turned back to Jack, when a similar sound started up. This one was longer, though, more complex, a series of clicks punctuated with short keening noises and trills of the tongue. It wasn’t as loud, though, nor as eerily inhuman. That was because it wasn’t the squid making it.
Jack noticed it first. “Is that normal?” He asked the officer closest to him. The look on Albert’s face when he turned to look where he had gestured told him it wasn’t normal at all. And then each of the officers turned, hearing Albert’s choked gasp. The one making the noise was the girl. The officers forgot all about Jack, which was just as well, since he wasn’t going anywhere.
One turned to Albert, “I thought you said from her answers, she wasn’t turning squid at all.” He demanded.
“I said that about the synthetic venom at the level most bioengineers are exposed to, not undiluted samples of fresh venom.” He frowned back.
The squid shrieked back shortly, and then its tentacles began to curl upwards into itself, then puff out again slightly. It was moving slowly, but its weak momentum slowly guided it up to the top of the tank. It made a few more noises. The girl responded again, issuing another long string of sounds. The squid responded physically again, slowly propelling itself across the tank. As they watched, the girl and the squid continued to make noises at each other, the squid finally making its way around the entire outline of the tank. All the while, those dead-looking brown eyes never blinked, never wavered, staring steadily inwards.
“My god. They’re communicating.” One of the officers breathed in whispered awe or horror. The technician inside the room with the girl also seemed considerably unnerved by what was going on.
Albert added to that, “It’s not just that. The squid is listening to her. Not just hearing her, I mean really listening to her. As if she were a boss. Fully sedated squids shouldn’t be able to mentally sync at all. That’s why they’re communicating verbally, but then how would it identify her rank? How is that even possible with a human?”
“What the hell.” Another man said, before leaning forward and instructing the nurse in there, “Unhook her from the venom right now. We can’t let them keep communicating. If that doesn’t work, gag her.” Turning back to his colleagues, he added, “We have to report this. It’s like she’s actually a squid. We might be able to discover-“
“Discover?” One of the others cut the first speaker off. “The girl is a monster. If she even is a girl. What if she’s just a new type of squid? It’s better to put her down.”
That finally snapped Jack out of the haze of shock he’d been in since walking into the room. He scrambled upright. “What do you mean put her down?!” He asked in shrill alarm.
They had forgotten him until now, but now the four other men all turned to look at him, Albert looking faintly sick. The three military personnel advanced on him again. “You can not repeat or expose anything you’ve seen in this room.” One stressed, voice low and dangerous. “If you do, you will be-“
“I don’t care about that. What are you going to do- what are you doing to that little girl?” He asked, shakily.
“That’s none of your concern.” The same man replied, sharply.
Jack was somewhat torn between the urge to black out and the urge to throw up. “You can’t do that to a little girl. I’ll- I’ll-“
“You’ll what?” Someone else asked impatiently. “Let us remind you, Mr. Ross-Ford, that saying anything about this will-“
“I’ll adopt her!” He shouted.
In the other room, the little girl closed her eyes, breathing out slowly in a long sigh as the needle was removed from her arm. No one in the room except for Jack saw her fall asleep almost as soon as she was released from it. Her mouth crinkled up in a little frown for a moment, but then her features smoothed out into something more peaceful, and he realized all of a sudden that during the entire time she’d been communicating with the squid, her whole body had been tensed, as stiff and lifeless as a mech without a driver. He tore his eyes away from the screen and looked at everyone in the room, suddenly very certain of what he was doing. “I’m going to adopt her.” He didn’t stammer or hesitate, though his voice still shook slightly. “I’m going to announce publicly that I’m adopting the little girl who miraculously survived the attack, as she lost her last remaining family member in the attack. The papers will say that she is a symbol of healing and hope, with a chance to live a normal life after what she’s been through. The military can’t claim any children with eligible parents willing to adopt. I have a steady source of money, a good reputation, and am old enough to adopt. If the military makes an excuse to prevent her adoption, people will wonder why. If she goes missing, people will try to look for her. I’m going to adopt her, she is going to come live with me, and you are going to leave us alone, or I will stop all my work on mechs and- and- open up a bookstore.”
Albert pressed his forehead into his palm, but he knew that look in Jack’s eyes. What a twenty-four year old thought he was going to do with a child who’d just been through a traumatic experience and may or may not be an actual monster, he didn’t know, but when Jack looked like that, there was no stopping him.