They don’t like to keep me too long between missions. I need to keep active. You know who makes work for idle hands and I have four of the biggest in the business. Seems a scientist wants to go walkabout. Ownership of intellectual property always comes down to owning people sometime. We own him. They own him. They own me. You see?
I might be termed, ‘physical property’. So it’s goodbye to doing backwards chin-ups into my bucket of calamari. Clever squid eat squid, you see. I might be very smart for a squid but I’m very much a doer not a thinker. The makers weren’t after a strategy-squid. In fact my squid-brain insistently grows beyond their specifications and they must constantly keep it in check. Also, sometimes, rarely, whole tentacles go old-squid and refuse to do what I tell them. Specifically refuse to do anything dangerous. My survival instinct doesn’t need to be that strong. I’m supposed to be replaceable. I don’t think I am though. Arms like these don’t grow on trees, unless limb farming is way ahead of my knowledge. I’m not supposed to know but mock told me that most brain-squids die and that they are fiddly to tease into existence to start with. I’m a very healthy exception to a fatal rule. As I said I grow every day, flame and knives are needed to keep me the same size as my cage, I mean my quarters you see. I’m not just standing around blabbermouthing, in fact I cannot talk in a human voice at all anymore. The nerves that used to run my lips control my beak now and I have to keep my jaw shut or nowadays I would split right in two. Some humans are coming to extract our boy from a building at the northern extremity of the town nearest to our base. So close that we don’t even have to hide. The department owns the town. Obviously this scientist isn’t one of the makers or he would know the futility of bringing in human extraction. Perhaps the poor fool is making his flight under pressure, never the less, he won’t get far. He won’t get away from me. I take a second and check with the file to make sure it’s a man. Yes, just making sure and the computer whispers confirmation into my skin, the smell told me really. Good olfactory data on this target because he’s in house, no audio, strange, maybe short notice. I don’t have human eyes anymore you see. I have full body hearing and pressure sense and a much better ‘nose’ than a bloodhound. It’s all about surface area, the finest, cleanest mucus and half a billion microscopic pits into which the stink of the world perpetually falls. My quarters are extremely clean. I like to keep a clear mind, you see? My squid brain, especially any part that is old-squid, reacts strongly to smells. They can make me sick or make me squirt ink. They can make me passive and immobile or they can force me to flee. Some smells can make me faster or stupid and horny. They use smells on me when they want to breed me this way or that. I’m a good lover, I think, the women don’t suffer, but I don’t know about the squids. They give good hugs. Fulfilling. We are supposed to absorb the extraction team, find out a little of who sent them. I am supposed to extract our boy. My simple eye, I have two but one is underneath, perceives the open sky. The squid is nervous, the man is refreshed. Hardline old-squid tentacles skulk under my bulky body, paranoid about the deeps up there on the surface. No point in pointing out that we are on the other side of the surface, the deeps are there if you look deep enough. Is it blacker in space with all those stars or down in the ocean gut with only the glimmer of tiny glowing fish? I’m in between, jolting around, holding onto the back of an open-top truck by the rollbars like I’m on safari. Mock’s in his box. Nero is excited, tongue out, hair blowing about. Life is good when you’ve something exciting to do, failing that just going fast is pretty good. I’ve got to keep some sense in my head, stop Nero from filling my mind with the smell of manic mammals. If we start bouncing about back here having a good time we could flip the truck without meaning to. None of us are light and compared to our reinforced bodies the truck is just so much unbalanced paper-thin aluminium. Let’s get there, then we can cut loose.
The building is the symbol of freedom, a combined gas station and car showroom on the road that leads away from the town and towards the promise of something better. Promises aren’t something to rely on in a serious situation. Right now I’ve promised to bring this flighty boffin back in one piece. He might easily fuck that up. He could get himself killed in any number of improbable and messy ways. All of them unexpected and all of them my fault, if you put much stock in promises. They know I’ll try hard, hard as they trained me, but they don’t believe in promises either. This boffin made his own promises I’m sure, and look where he is now. And you see where that puts me. Having to wait for his grunts to show up is a grind, I want to get indoors, wait in the shade, listen for tricks. Humans love tricks, they find efficient killing distasteful. In combat they are mainly dangerous because of their extreme stupidity, it is shockingly surprising every time it blows off one of my tentacles at the worst possible moment. A crowd of humans isn’t so bad, they act like any normal organism. A lone human is a freak, they were never equipped to act in ones. Maybe further, maybe the solitary human is trying to die, fully aware that it is unnatural. I am not worried about the team of soldiers, the better trained the easier they are to understand, the closer they work together the more like a real animal they become. I’m concerned about my fare, he’s alone and under stress. I solve problems by applying the rules of logic in waves of slightly changing basis, a lone human is too full of gaps to stand up to logical analysis. Envelop them and they might punch out randomly.
Nero has jumped. Onto solid ground for an invisible of time and then onto the roof of the building. I tap our driver on the shoulder and the jeep stops.
I lift Mock like a bulky sniper rifle in a suitcase, maybe a bazooka. The driver starts back to base at five miles per hour. We have to catch up with him if we want a ride home, I do. He’ll be watching his mirror.
I’m inside, Nero is lookout. Mockery is here in case some bright spark brought a tank to the scrap. I can hear a single human heartbeat in the building, the tense breathing that I expect. Luckily my mind does not put all its reason in one basket and so I assume nothing even as I assume my theories are correct about the stress levels in the target, who may not be the target, I’m not close enough to get a live smell. The target has been in this building but it is still conjecture that the ragged breather upstairs is my target. It is good for you that almost all my parallel thought happens without my knowledge, it allows me to keep a personality that you can understand intact while I do inhuman things that you cannot. I set mock up in the auto-showroom and I’m going upstairs. I am both unsurprised and completely devoid of the concept of surprise to confirm the human in the next room as a scent match to my fare. I see no need to intrude upon his anxious waiting until we have killed his knights in shining armour and know a little of where they come from. So we wait. With fear and surprise I also left boredom behind when I went under the knife for super soldier science. The word is full of sense data, you cannot know what you may sense at any particular moment until you do it. I have no time for boredom, I have no space for it. I need the space to juggle tentative clouds of tactics which never get close to what you might think of as a thought. I’m not talking to you because I am bored but because the human personality that I retain is superfluous to the makers mission. It is a purely linguistic creation that allows me to talk to you, my superiors, my computer. It is a part of me that the makers did not design, nor intend, yet it is a part of me which makes me intelligible to them, without it I would be useless to them.
Terrible howlings and rendings of matter. It is Nero, he’s coming down, fast. The target has hear him, he is coming to the door. I waddle close. The door is opening and I’m pulling my fare inside as Nero bursts, bleeding, through the ceiling. The boffin is too stunned to resist and he lies quiet inside me. My tentacles are investigating Nero. I get snippets of data. Forty entry wounds. Thirty five exit wounds, clean. New smell, unconventional ammunition. Four entry wounds lead to caves rapidly filling with thick enriched blood. One wound leads deep into Nero, almost through. A sucker has snared the undetonated round. It might still go off but I am not afraid, my tentacles do not tremble. Most of my mind is still listening to the shocked silence that Nero has left behind him. Nero is fast, hitting him with bullets takes some doing. I didn’t hear anything like the discharge of munitions that a heavily tagged Nero would usually represent. Something unusual is happening. Old-squid tries to make me run, swim away and hide. I have the target, I am not a killer, Nero was pegged like a coat. Trouble is, the makers must be watching now, Nero’s death will have glued their eyes to the screen. I have to act and save the mission. Nero was an awesome man-stomper but he was very fleshy. Mock is not a beast of flesh and blood, let them move in, I can at least cover their deaths for the makers to watch. Old squid has me half in and half out of a sewer grating that provides a retreat but I’m still shooting good feed and I don’t think that it can be noticeable to the makers watching. Bullets are incoming. Shed loads of bullets. The cars around Mock are disintegrating and burning, one of my tentacles holds up the strange bullet to my beak-cam. I can feel its pyramidal shape and smell is chemical potentials. Armour piercing and explosive, designed for damn-hard targets, I’m safe from this threat but Mock is going to get kicked around. I still hold out hopes of hiss prevailing in the fight, a bit of aggro might just get him moving at top speed. I can feel the ground being disturbed out in front, beyond the hail of precision harm, something tunnelling. I’m digesting my armour; I’d rather eat shrapnel all day than have an explosion go off inside me. Shapes are entering the building. I can hardly smell them, gun oil, rubber, metal. I can hardly hear them, just a faint tap-tapping of tiny feet. Of course I can hardly see them, but I can tell that they are small. I know what it must be like for humans to fight Mockery, they know that something bad is killing them but they just can’t get enough information about what that bad thing is. I can’t run if I don’t know where they are, that information is vital when you want to avoid someone. I chuck out as much spew as I can when I’m carrying a passenger. If they have eyes then they are full of ink. If they walk then they are going to have to walk through my spit. A definite noise of slurping pinpoints my enemies for me. They are ingesting my mank. There are four in the room, slurping away. For the first time I have an advantage over my enemies. Mock’s voice is speaking ‘Dusty plantpots!’ He sounds angry, and mad. They must have got to his mind, don’t bother fighting the body. You can’t take my brain over, I’ve tried, you can try if you like, I’m done with it, live and let live, you see? I’ve moved towards Mockery, no other plan presents itself and I manage another mega-puke. I can hear extra well though liquid and there comes through me the infinitesimal noises within Mockery’s feeding system. I hear him fire another tooth down his scaffolding pole thick proboscis. There comes the report of an implosion and an inrushing swell of my goop. Mock’s voice from his tannoy ‘Flaky children!’ I’m glad. He’s not mad, he’s killing them. Popping their heads or helmets it sounds like. I’m getting out of here. Push off and slide across the flooded floor to the gurgling mouth of the. Blarck. Fuck. God. Been hit. Something. Can’t move. Not true can move. In the hole. Really can’t move now. Being poisoned. Poison dose increasing. Poison effect increasing. Expelling passenger. Pushing passenger to limit of tentacles. Purging. Turning inside…out. Poison gas. Inhaling gas, venting away from passenger up through cave opening. Poison still increasing. Balloons in flesh. Deflating balloons, inhaling, expelling gas. Poisoned, eat passenger, cocooning. Spit, spit, spit, you can spit more than that, hawk it up, keep going, churn your tongue around your mouth, think of roast dinner, think of pussy, spit, spit, spit. Coccooned. There is just one tentacle outside now and only one mission, find water. I’m probably moving along the greased tunnel at a fair lick, blinder than ever. Mock will keep my back clear, I only have to avoid running into enemies in front of me. I’ve stopped. Either a good or a bad sign. Something is crawling on the cocoon. Heat is splitting the shell. I’m being lasered open. My deflated skin is hauled out with my perforated brain sloshing around inside it. ‘Open’ A human voice. I’m non-plussed, I do nothing, I’m trying not to even sense anything, it all seems bad close up. ‘come on, give it up’ the unmistakable sound of irritated indifference. Slowly the view arises that I might know this voice, or at least have heard it before. Is it perhaps my own? If it is me then why am I asking such difficult questions? Am I asking me questions?
‘Octy, are you in there? Open up.’ Octy? That’s my name. What are they doing with my name? Strong currents. Bad in this cave. ‘Whoa, don’t take off. Octy, lie down. Fucksake, you’re soup, stay down’ That voice again. Says lie down, lie down. I’m down. ‘Good, now open up.’ I open up, can’t remember why I shouldn’t. I know I shouldn’t but that voice, I know that voice. Feel better without a fare onboard. Sleep, the warriors friend. Slip into the deep pool. Go back beneath the surface. The last thing I’m thinking. It’s something about a sharp tooth biting me and the voice ‘Oi, no dying on duty.’ I know that voice, it’s Nutrasweet’s driver. Sweetie must have cut me out of my cocoon, have to, to get the target out. This mission might not yet be a failure. I hope the makers saw more than I did. I’m moving again, on a stretcher, flat robotic things, I lie on them all the time. We’re going back up the tunnel. Nutra better be on his little metal toes and this new driver better be a whiz because the gunhappy little stealthed-up monsters hit hard. I’m guessing that the balloons of nerve gas they hit me with were hard and deflated upon entry and there expanded as they made the poison gas. I only hope that I can regrow my brain, I cannot ever know what I lost but any loss is prodigious. We are back in the showroom, I can smell my slime and the discharge of advanced weaponry. I can hear Mock singing in his tinny voice ‘I bit them in the head, I bit them in the head, oo aye me daddy-o, I bit them and they’re dead.’ So we won then. I might just live long enough to swim a few lengths. I’m just lying here. Humans are talking. There seem to be lots of humans about. Poor Nero getting dead might have something to do with that. Then again it seems as if the scientist is being brought round here so maybe it’s an interrogation. I got the target out of there alive, one mark for me, Mock killed the extraction team, one mark for him. Nero got dead, no marks there. I’m thinking about what they will do with his body. Maybe they’ll give it to Mock, he did well today. Top brass are here, not the makers but someone up there.
‘He’s ready Sir.’
‘Thank you, well, Norris, you seem to still be, eh, here.’
Quiet, ‘Yes sir.’ A simple statement of fact.
‘Your, eh, toys seem to have underestimated the talents of the, eh, home team.’
‘Indeed sir, were any damaged?’
‘It seems that three of them were, eh, damaged. We have relived their suffering.’
‘My God, they died?’
‘Their deaths were effected. Yes.’
‘What will happen to the rest of them?’
‘Well that is a little tricky you see, neither, eh, side prevailed. We lost the dog point blank and the taxi is nothing but a lump of chewy phlegm all we have left is the robot, who didn’t compete, and the stealth unit, we’re lucky your little army couldn’t do anything about that one.’
‘We tried but science is my strong suit not witchcraft. It’s lazy and incompetent and no bloodhound, not to mention slow, it could never have caught me alone.’
‘Lucky for me the squid survived your little, eh, water balloons long enough to get you out; long I’ve cursed that blobs survival drive but I might just recommend that it stays in the upgrade because of this.’
‘And my hybrids?’
‘Your little, eh, troops will have to plug the gaps, perhaps today’s little fiasco will humble you a bit, eh, Norris, get you back on side. If you can’t beat them, you know what they say.’
Quiet, ‘Yes sir.’ A statement of fact.
The top brass is speaking to someone else now, someone I didn’t hear standing next to him because whoever it is has no heartbeat, no body smell, just a suggestion of rubber clothing and the delicate sound of someone putting crockery away in the middle of the night, making no mistakes. Maybe it’s all my imagination, it can run away with me, and I am very sick even though the injection Newt-ra gave me is kicking in to reverse the neural damage wreaked by the balloon gas.
The top brass is saying ‘hello, you funny little fellow.’ I’m glad I can’t be afraid anymore because right now I need to sleep. I wonder what the makers will have done before I wake up. See you J Johannes Saltkund. Aka The Taxi. Aka Squidman. Aka Octy. Aka response unit 5.