A Lucky Puddle

Chess wasn’t anyone’s favorite game; that distinction went 2) pinball and 1) Apex Predators of the Ordovician. Lina would banish all three pastimes, in the name of safety.

Lina tried to keep Tippi and Xoz intellectually enriched and physically occupied. The n’arbiter compared this task to that of the Victorian sailor, who’d spend his days scrubbing a single dreadnought, versus a sea of salt.

“Don’t forget the smell,” annotated Xoz. “Space made humanity stink, too. Their spoor flew around constantly in low-G, trapped.”

Tippi and Xoz learned about pinball early on, during a lecture on monotheism. Given the roommates’ pedigree, Lina thought it wise to tackle certain quirks of sapiens society, but the idea of a singular deity proved too cozy for Tippi.

“I’m sorry,” she yawned. “I struggle with stories about nobody I know.”

Meanwhile, Xoz demanded “fight profiles” on everyone: from Zoroaster, to The Mother of Harlots, to Mike “The Hitman” Christ.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to discuss fight profiles on our private channel?” offered Lina.

“No!” said Xoz. “I need it for your encyclopedic knowledge of failed telekinesis experiments, plus it’s important that Tippi learn about Mike Christ. Back to my question: if Methusaleh lived for 969 years, how many killing arts did he master?”

“The Book of Genesis never goes into detail.”

“A glaring omission. This Bible of yours, Lina.”

Lina switched tactics when they arrived at the Mammonists. Yaki St. Signar and her 10(k) The$es of Fiduciary Large$$e converted the pig to naptime, whereas Xoz proposed “reenacting the burning bush, with that 121st-century zhuzh.”

So, the n’arbiter told them of a forbidden game that terrorized the 20th century:

“It was called pinb-”

“Besides the sadism,” drolled Xoz. “The best part of absolute monarchy was the vacation time. And there was nothing better than nonstop vacation, look at The Redwood Conglo, or The House of Bourbon. The good times rolled, until the heads did too.”

“As I said, pin-”

“Of course, don’t discount the sadism. I never understood its appeal, and I had seven contemporaneous bounties on my head. But the good news about sadism is we’re all immune to it, because it was a uniquely human pathology.”

“Tippi, do ignor-”

“Tell me more about sadism,” said the pig.

“Soon, soon,” vouchsafed the mollusk. “First, let’s test your inner despot.”

“I won’t fail you,” promised Tippi.

“You have 24 hours to subdue 500,000 civilians,” said Xoz. “How do you do it?”

“Are we Earth, or extra?”

“Let’s tweak the scenario: 500,000 humans on Earth, or 100,000 extra. Your call.”

“Extra. Are the 100,000 loaded equally over five frigates, 20K a pop?”

“Life’s rarely that exact, but sure: five frigates, brimming with pricks.”

“Are they regular sapiens, or modded?”

“Some got cyber, let’s say nothing more exotic than ikijime plugs, plus each frigate’s got a master-at-arms.”

“Cool,” said Tippi. “How about gene mods?”

“Prenatal cocktails, anti-oncogene, muscle thickeners: folks onboard got the usual battery of spacewalk salks.”

“Any more esoteric mods?”

“Really?”

“It’s not my fault you skimped on your own details.”

Xoa grunted:

“Fine! The only mods of consequence are a family of tigermen. Seven, on one frigate, but you don’t know which. They’re only a nuisance if you interrupt their blood orgy, and you won’t, because they’re pungent and shrieking.”

“I know your scam answer.”

“Interesting. And that is?”

“A spore-emitting atmospheric mass, probably fungal. Maybe you paid big for caracoles, but point’s moot.”

“Pig, where are you going with this?”

“You never specified when this scenario occurred.”

“This year is, uh, 3100.”

“And, how far out are we?”

“Venusy.”

Tippi didn’t even get up:

“Okay, so antifungals came standard with frigate filtration by 2870. As for the ‘coles, emosperm harpoons would do bupkis around Venus. Why? They wouldn’t survive the trip from the slugyard on Tierra del Fuego.”

“Fermisht,” said the mollusk.

“Hey, you taught me all that.”

“I love the arrogance, but you still haven’t answered my question.”

“Are you kidding me?” said the pig. “The answer is you.”

Underwater, Xoz fluttered.

“Congratulations,” said the mollusk. “You’re no sadist.”

“Phew!” said Tippi.

Lina had critiques:

“Xoz, in 3100, you were comatose in Antique Ops. And I thought you were bad with stories about other people.”

“This isn’t a story,” said Tippi. “It’s a nonfiction hypothetical, and he’s always the answer.”

“Correct,” lilted Xoz. “It was me, or that spore-borne organism you mentioned, stirred into the crew’s lemonade.”

“What’s lemonade?”

“A foul serum, Tippi. You’d hate it.”

“Does anybody want to learn about PIN-pinball?” wondered Lina.

Fortunately for the roommates, pinball had one rule: evade the gladiators, who too were trapped in the pinball machine.

“Juvenile delinquency ends today!” vowed Xoz, pelting Tippi, eight arms raining amino.

The pig raged:

“Someday it’ll be you inside this labyrinth, Fiorello LaGuardia!”

“Please don’t waste aminospheres,” pleaded Lina. “It attracts crickets.”

“Good,” said Xoz, and Tippi fell in the lagoon.

Lina was stuck; pinball had rendered the organics too rambunctious for objective truth. They’d confused Pre-Hip-Hop New York with peak Rome, but that wasn’t the manica’s most glaring error. No, they’d concluded pinball machines were the size of the Colosseum.

Lina’s preferred style of pedagogy involved the contrast of two topics, to tease out the things between, and after “Monotheism and Pinball,” the n’arbiter knew to cancel “Walnuts and Meteorites.”

Lina had nobody to blame but Lina. The supercomputer favored teaching aids, and most everything in Wee Sheol was spherical: bolas, aminospheres, pebbles of note, and the homemade aminospheres, which were crickets, balled.

Large Caligula trumpeted:

“My vision is this: we will build a new pinball machine, for a new generation of God-Kaisers: Lil’ Commodus, and this guy!”

But Lil’ Commodus, who never fashioned herself royalty or a godhead, saw a flaw.

“Stop everything!” she shouted. “We don’t have access to the Appian Way!”

“Don’t worry!” averred Large Caligula. “My proposal to the senate is forthcoming!”

A pasty chain shot out of his crag-o’-mantle, and settled in the grimy corner of the frigidarium, scattering the crickets.

Lina couldn’t fault the manica for conflating eras. After all, the century shelter held 6,000 years of recorded history, and the n’arbiter’s files were 9,000 out of date.

 

Tippi was fifty feet above the trench, squabbling with a tentacle.

 

“My suckers absorbed hard brine!” said the tentacle, who the pig recognized as Scylla, Xoz’s third-favorite arm.

“And?”

“And hard brine is a psychostimulant!” wailed Scylla, orange with trapezoids.

“So?”

“I haven’t done drugs since I was a fry!”

“Wait, what drugs?”

“Surgical anesthesia,” said Scylla. “Not going to lie, this latest peccadillo of ours will complicate things.”

“Our peccadillo?” grumped Tippi. “Do elaborate!”

“I’m having trouble doing just that! How’d you carry that vegetable without losing your mind?”

“I am a very coordinated pig. What’s your excuse?”

Scylla was zigzagging around the trench, twirling Tippi with a parabolic zest.

“It’s like I’m trapped on the wheel of Saṃsāra,” brayed Scylla. “And I want off!”

“Well, don’t take me with you!”

“Sorry, sorry!” said Scylla.

Tippi plonked down shoreside, her descent gentle if corkscrew.

“How often did humanity encounter psychoactive brine?” she shuddered.

“All the time!” said Scylla, pert. “At first, it was scandal, but that’s only because it was novel, and then it became the selling point. Picture it: 70-year-old onions, so delicious, they made you rob a bank. You’re lucky Antique Ops left you on the shelf. Too much jostling, and you’d be a national treasure.”

“I’m not following.”

“Think about it: psychedelic bacon, century-aged. There’d be one last war, and the winner would roll you up and smoke you.”

“Please stop visualizing my demise,” said Tippi.

“Apologies!”

“Why’d sapiens preserve their food in a psychostim?” said the pig. “It seems so ripe for error.”

“Why’d they have pharynxes?” whipped Scylla, swerving rainbow. “Why’d they make me?”

Tippi had never met anyone on drugs.

“The point is,” said Scylla. “Why’d they do anything? Try to find a throughline to a few billion sapiens: you can’t. The most you’d glean is ‘tortured by their mod cons’ and ‘sleep deprivation.”

“Was I that mod con?” asked Tippi.

“What? No! It wasn’t even me, and I was the mascot of a civilization in decline. It wasn’t any one thing with them: just one passel of fraught innovations after the next. Wanna know my theory?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“They didn’t discover aliens quickly enough.”

 

There were no extraterrestrials, or at least none anyone knew personally.

Lina acknowledged aliens were a probabilistic sureshot. They were likely tucked away in the universe’s casual infinity, but Tippi “would find them dull.”

“They’re probably microorganisms,” said Lina. “On a moon, in an ocean, awaiting their moment.”

The pig stamped her hoof.

Tippi had never seen the ocean, but she didn’t care. It sounded like microgravity, if dirtier. Xoz had never swam the seas either, but he’d been to Neptune.

“I never saw aliens out there,” he recalled. “But I saw strange stuff.”

“Like what?” asked Tippi.

“A man once chased me around an asteroid, with a turbo-shiv.”

“Whoa!”

“Yeah, it was dark.”

“What happened to him?”

“He’s still out there, white-knuckling the shiv. His head went in the opposite direction. Maybe, in a million years, he’ll fertilize a lucky puddle.”

Tippi never held the illusion Xoz was a diplomat; he taught her to disable a frigate, three conversations in:

“The key to disabling a frigate is another frigate.”

“What if there are three frigates?” posed Tippi.

“Well, you only need two frigates to start a chain collision.”

“What if there’s one frigate?”

“Well,” chuckled Xoz. “That’s when I go in.”

“Hooray!” said Tippi.

Ten conversations in, the duo forged The Cave Slayers Alliance, the first draft of the Treyf Pals Urban Infiltration Unit. Lina nattered with disapproval, but the n’arbiter was up against 500 million years of cephalopod evolution.

 

“Out of apathy, apprehension, or garbage odds, ETs never showed up for humans. And who could blame them? Sapiens peppered the outer habitables with hermitages, dugouts, and maul cruisers, the latter of which burned entire bloodlines feuding over a roll of insulation or whatever. That was life on a Plutonian cruiser, and I wouldn’t be shocked if ETs avoided our system out of pity.”

 

Scylla’s wisdom held the audience rapt.

Naphil nodded:

“Earth is famous for its smothering parasocial fixations.”

“I’m glad we slept through the 3200s,” said Sanity Smasher.

“I’d maul the mauls,” hissed Brolic.

“But what about their rods and cones?” posed Aiapæc. “Our dazzcamo might not work on humanity’s more betinkered eyes.”

“It was the 33rd century, we wouldn’t even need dazz,” reasoned X-3, who used to be Xoz Jr., before Junior was lopped off on Ceres. “Most maul cruisers were shucked-out shuttles: cheapo lunar transports, modified for low-g sortie. They’d put up a better fight in covered wagons.”

Aiapæc was delighted:

“Everyone always assumes they’re the cowboy, and never the stock boy.”

“The stock boy of what?” wheezed X-3.

“Of the rock candy parlor,” giggled Aiapæc. “He’s escaping his gambling debts out east.”

Scylla cut in:

“You’re all missing my point. Without an extraterrestrial menace, sapiens picked at their parts, salting the soil for shitcoins. This planet’s lucky it still has trees.”

“Couldn’t an alien encounter have ushered a golden age of philosophical humility?” twirled 8-Baal, submerged.

Towering over the trench, her seven siblings convulsed: terrible, and smug.

“I was speaking theoretically,” sulked 8-Baal. “You lot are too cynical.”

“Don’t be dense,” spat X-3. “The primates spiked their own gene pool in the name of Halloween. College kids injected themselves with pumpkin DNA for the weekend.”

“WHY DO I KNOW SO MUCH ABOUT HUMANS?” demanded Terremoto.

“Are we ever going to play chess?” interjected Lil’ Commodus.

Seven tentacles, like spires of white phosphorus, spun around.

“TIPPI!” they screamed.

Xoz was tripping, hard.

The pig knew that each of his eight arms had their own micro-personality, earned in skirmish. Xoz was addled by hard brine, but he’d left his comms conspicuously open. He was saying something crucial, if by one-mollusk puppet show.

“Tippi!” waved 8-Baal. “Ahoy-hoy, I’m underwater!”

The pig sometimes struggled with details, but she knew her friends’ patterns, and nothing about Third Spring felt right. Lina was “fine,” but off the map. The doomsday device was high, but he’d been dosed.

Then, there was the mystery of her turnip:

If brine leaks were as common as Xoz said, then why haven’t we encountered one before? He eats 20 kilos of aminospheres daily. A bale of aminos falls out of the bulk sluice, above the cistern, every hour on the hour. Even as I’m deducing this, he’s relieving himself, by the pound.

Xoz’s feces were heavy, off-white cables that tooted from his siphon. Sometimes, these ashen ropes ended up in the grimy corner, to tempt the crickets, but they mostly sank to the bottom of the cistern, 300 meters down.

“PIG!” exulted Terremoto. “CHESS!”

Of Xoz’s eight arms, Terremoto was the least articulate. If Xoz was speaking with his most primal limb, something him rattled, and Tippi had only seen the mollusk freak out, once.

Something weirder was at work, beyond the hallucinating octopus. A mystery was positively protruding, like a fat date wrapped in endive, which was a recipe the pig invented, all by herself.

We haven’t played chess in years, she realized.

 

Tippi replaced her rooks with carrots, but Wee Sheol’s Winter Chesstival managed to end on the first turn.

The pig had the first move; she lifted a pawn off the board, with her teeth.

“Perimeter secure,” declared Tippi. “How many points did I score?”

“How about just moving the piece forward?” suggested Lina.

“Thanks for the input, but your maneuver leaves us open to ambush.”

“From who?”

“From Chess. Who else? He can’t digest cellulose, so watch out.”

“Tippi, I can’t say I’m clear on your interpretation of the rules.”

“What interpretation? Chess needs eight hours of sleep daily, has five fingers, and stores his sperm in external genitals. That’s the smooth and dirty of it, yeah?”

Somewhere, in a million-ton hard box under the Atlantic Ocean, Lina chose patience.

“Sure,” said the n’arbiter. “Xoz, you’re up.”

“Regicide!” thundered the mollusk.

Terremoto exploded from the trench. With the density and dash of a 10-ton diamond-tip, he pulverized the chessboard, reducing it to sand and crumble.

“No war economy!” said Xoz. “No middlemen! No divine right!”

Tippi snuffled and pranced, impish:

“No lunch! No dinner!”

The last of the bishops settled, and Xoz poked his crag-o’-mantle out of the water.

The uppermost sector of his crag-o’-mantle was his “bag-o’-face,” and his bag-o’face was a beatific blue.

“Chess won’t be bothering us anymore,” said the bag.

Tippi was so excited, she jumped into the trench, snout-first. She landed on his bag-o’-face, and oinked into the tough, cold flesh.

“There’s my pig! That’s the thumping stuff!”

Tippi rolled into the divot between his eyes, belly-side up, and stared at the schisto.

“How’s the moss?” asked Xoz, who felt her wiggling atop his bag-o’.

The schisto won a Nobel Prize once, but to Tippi, it was oblivion, speckled.

“Could be better,” she said. “Green is not my light.”

“So?” said Xoz. “I’m colorblind, but I can be anything I want. Meanwhile, Lina has no eyes, but can see everything, but only by first negotiating The Secret Colors, like microwave.”

“Between the three of us, we have access to the full spectrum,” rippled Lina.

Tippi was happy to contribute.

 

“I’m dying,” wheezed Brolic.

“No, you’re not,” said Sanity Smasher.

“I think I’m dead,” insisted Brolic.

“If you were dead, we’d all be dead,” said Smasher.

“What about the pig?” asked Brolic. “Is she dead?”

“I’m alive!” confirmed Tippi.

Tippi didn’t know where she’d go when the entropy snowed her, but she knew she wasn’t deceased.

“Maybe we’re all dead,” mused Naphil, ogling the schisto. “And this cave is hell.”

“What if this is really heaven?” rebutted Aiapæc. “And our sins have soiled its manitou?”

“Theories abound!” groused Tippi.

By now, the last of Xoz’s limbs had embraced the brine. Seven of them loitered above the waterline, great glowing stalks, their suckers blinking an indigo-pinky. Like a tranche of hungover plesiosaurs, they bumped into each other, going down but to freshen up.

Even his more personable arms were zonked; Naphil, who was normally quick with a blue raspberry or a myofascial massage, was swivoting jolly.

“Hey, Tippi,” she murmured.

“Yes?”

“Phaloonge.”

The pig tried to divine a leitmotif from the tentacles’ go-nowhere ramblings and circuitous rudeness. They waxed spectacular about space crime and the afterlife, but those were typical topics around Wee Sheol.

The outlier was clear: Xoz kept referencing a game they’d officially played, once.

“Piggy, pig, pig,” slurred 8-Baal. “Where’d you leave the chessboard?”

“You threw it in the cistern,” replied Tippi. “To ‘give the hubris of empire the tomb it deserves’.”

“Yeah, that sounds like me,” languished 8-Baal. “Why’d you let me do that?”

“Don’t blame me,” said the pig. “I secured the perimeter.”

“My favorite Tippi,” vamped 8-Baal. “So doughty, so young.”

“I was born 278 years before you,” said Tippi.

“Indeed! You! Were! Say, do you remember where we left the chessboard?”

The pig buried her head under the nearby stack of bola skins. The rustling alerted the cave crickets, who’d been grubbing at the turnip.

With a pyrrhic charge, the insects threw themselves at her haunches. Tippi would’ve eaten them, but they were brimming with brine, and she was flummoxed enough already.

If only Lina were here to decipher this molluscan nonsense, she slouched. All he’s doing is glowing black and white, flashing arrows, which point up towards the schisto, and-

The truth clattered upon Tippi, and her right ear emerged from the skins, shaking:

I have to go back to that awful room.

 

Outro: Okay Temiz – “Penguin”