Hi, feeling good today. Sorry about last time. Seems that the tricky boffin who designed my little clay buddies put a little glitch into my new internal chemistry set. I called it a virus when they told me about it and they shouted at me. Not a virus, they say, Viruses are self replicating programs inside computers this was something so different that it doesn’t help to use the word. It’s nice to be lectured; when you’re alive. So I had to be carried home from the last mission and the woman we were to save had to walk out hand in hand with Mockery’s Splinter rather than riding in style within me. At least she was lucky enough not to be able to see him. I think I mentioned before that it’s tricky to get a look at him if you have a sane human mind containing concepts like fear and self preservation. Fortunately my sense of self preservation is strong enough that I’m forced to see him. Mock is a very dangerous boy. He looks a little like a rough mechanical scorpion and he feeds through the ‘tail’. It’s funny because Nutrasweet, the robot chappy, fills the exact same volume as Mock so that their carrying cases are interchangeable. The two of them disassemble into identically sized pieces. It is a small ambition of mine to swap some of the pieces over when I’m putting them together but I’m not sure exactly what the system would be for annoying Mockery however I’m fairly sure that it would start with putting him together wrong. I’m not sure why Mock follows orders or indeed if he likes me. We work closely together all the time, I’m in charge of his assembly, transport; and because I can see him I’m his line-manager, shrink, and backup. We are close but I don’t know if I’m his friend. He has friends, a little Chinese kid comes to see him sometimes. The kid teases him about being ‘king of the vagrants’ and about being rich and powerful back in Hong Kong. Funny, Mock takes orders from this kid too, a deathless ultra-killer slapped and bullied by a greedy, dirty streetkid. It shows the lengths to which the department are willing to go to secure his services that this urchin is allowed to know of the existence of the base, let alone visit. If you are wondering why I’m just sitting here talking to you then it’s because the mission today is far, far off and we must travel in an aeroplane. I can see little by pressing an eye to the window, flying is just like travelling in a crate for me. I can’t see it but we have left our rural town dwelling and we speed over the black sea, below us in the night. We are headed for a city, an industrial super city which squats at the mouth of The Yangtze River. It holds all trade on the river in its belly. The city is defended by a creature from a storybook. A giant robot that was designed to sink the ships of pirates. The city fathers use this beast to oppress the land around and to draw more materials into the super factory. Workshop of the world. Information about conditions within the city is limited. First it is very far away from our base, none of us have ever been there. Second the city exports goods, not information. It is assumed that the standard of living is no higher than in any smaller city round the world. The city is fuel hungry and shielded against pollution so the river, sea and surrounding land are heavily dumped. A rough sketch would show nuclear dumping on the land, volatiles and metals in the river and cracked fractions of oil and human sewage in the sea. Across this beautiful vista the giant robot stalks like a marabou stork.
I am blessed with luck today and there will be a treat for you. You will get to see me in action underwater, really the only place for me. I know that it is the lot of all water based super heroes to moan about the lack of opportunities they have to shine; I just hope I don’t carp on about it too noticeably. I can do deserts, I can do space. I just prefer going back where it all began, to where every direction is up and nobody is scared to try to kill you all the time. Fishy types don’t scare, I don’t care how big you are, let’s do the dance half a mile down in the dark, you can’t be sure who’ll win out. Could be the little guy with the big brain. Could be the little guy with the drill for a head that you swallowed last meal, bigmouth. After wrestling a shoal of squid in true three-d, land combat just seems like going through the motions. Advance, retreat, hit them into the wall until they lose consciousness. When there are no walls and you can retreat in all directions, then it becomes a little trickier. So if I have to go toe to toe with this Chinese neo-colossus then I will give the big metal prong a tussle for his money. Don’t worry on my account though, that is not in the plan. I have to swim in underwater, avoid the colossus and then deliver Mockery to complete his mission. Then I take him apart again and swim away. Simple except that we don’t have a map. We also don’t know exactly how to achieve Mock’s mission but it will obviously be something to do with killing people. If we need help then the little clay men will be sent in to get us out and, I hope, punish whoever gave us the trouble. Nero 2 was killed last mission, probably my fault for getting poisoned, and the new one isn’t ready yet so no help there. Also the equipment that controls Nutra is too expensive and bulky to ship around the world so we won’t have a fake retarded Mockery around to confuse matters. It doesn’t confuse people who can’t see Mockery but it takes me a moment every time to realise that, no, Mock hasn’t become suddenly simple, that metal thing is Nutra. Just the two of us and a fresh batch of medium fired terracotta warriors if we hit trouble softly enough not to kill it.
I can see Chang Jiang in my head. There is no solid three-d map yet, just what I know about the mega-city laid out before my inner eyes. I see a structure sunk upon many pylons. I see Venice. To control piracy you must be pirate yourself. To feed your workshops you must bring the sea into the heart of your city. You must bring the rice in off the land. You must be ambitious and aware of outsiders. This factory port will be a maze. Eyes will be peeled. I am a squid and a warrior, I know nothing of human cultures. That this city is Chinese means nothing to me. I remember that when I was human I saw films made and set in China but this means nothing as the world of films is strictest fantasy. I know that there is a general opinion that the Chinese culture is very old but exactly what this means I cannot remember. All cultures are of the same age it seems to me. All humans are similarly of an age with each other. The squid is a little older as an expression of life but I would not say that it has any culture at all. I am left puzzled by human subtlety, a rare experience for me. These minutes of consciousness during missions are always my best for working on the niggling problems that my squid mind has brought up for me to think about. The pepping up process before a mission and the release of my mental faculties from their ‘off’ setting that I experience during downtime is an exhilaration in itself. Also there is the possibility that the makers are watching. Sometimes I feel that I am the pure will of the makers and those moments are filled with a strange trepidation and joy. At first I did not know what the feeling was. Sometimes I would hear a drumming in my ear and feel a clarity in my head. I don’t have a human head anymore and so the feeling of clarity filled my squid-brain and all my little tentacles. Also I would feel that I had been especially useful yet also sidestepped in favour of a higher power. I felt honoured to be selected to perform such deeds yet felt also that I had missed out on being myself at the most important moments of my life. The feeling comes with increased physical power and speed, the drumming sound as I have said and enormous lust for everything coupled with the feeling that I was missing out on some greater game. A game of spirit. I feel separately that my nature as a squid and the part of myself that I call old-squid give me a stake in the spirit game. I don’t know what part a squid man hybrid may play in the games of spirits and such but I have fought side by side with a chunk of a demon for most of my working life and I am not afraid of becoming involved with the spirit realm, per se, if only because I have no ability to feel fear. Fear too often interferes with personal survival. It may help humans as a whole if the ones that get attacked act like damn fools but I can’t be saved by herd mentality as a single creature. I’m more of an individual that a human could ever be. I was made so that I am never lonely and I can comfort myself as well as any human social system. I make my own art to soothe my own soul. I don’t just wait for other animals to tell me what constitutes permissible behaviour. I was trained against hard physical objectives and no other demands were made of me inside my mind. As long as I also work out winning plans and coach Mock and get the targets out of there then I can be whoever I like that is sane enough to work in this team. Most blends of squid and man do not survive, by my nature I am the blend that thrives. I do not doubt that I will work out a positive synergy from my squid and man psychology: it is only a question of how I will put that winning formula together. What from the squid, what from the man? I must as a base line continue to satisfy the department and make the makers proud but as an individual I must also provide a culture for myself that will sustain my unnaturally long life. I cannot, I feel, be faddish in my outlook. I must form something lasting and properly grounded. I hope that is not a sop to my human fears of losing grip on the last branch, I can swim, you see. Not swim through air, I grant you, but jet through the water with style. With each beat of my stroke I fill with water and fire it behind me as my four human arms join my tentacles in a clap that sends me smoothly lunging forwards. I can also dart a small distance in an attack lunge that is too fast for me to describe it. This only happens underwater, on land it is a more explicable leap, something that I understand. In liquid only my squid brain understands what I am doing and it cannot talk to you to tell. Inside this mega city, though, the squid would be lost without the man. I can read, large, signs. I know the functions of many machines and buildings. My brain is needed, even as a simulation within the mind of a squid. I know what hands are. I know what bones are. I know about buttons of all types. I remember in a very human way, specific and wastefully linear. I can small talk a team through a mission. I am no mere squid. Here I am on an aeroplane, thinking in English about a Chinese super-city. A squid would be more trapped than I in this world of politics and people. Trapped and eaten most likely. I am a cosseted slave, miles above calamari in the food chain. These people must eat squid, I will be familiar to them. They will have sharp cleavers. This is why I am usually left mentally dormant between missions. I have altogether too much imagination. No human is a real threat to me. The information about what humans can do in combat was the first information used to design me. I used to be human and sometimes I try to imagine how I could have beaten my current self. Even giving myself a huge terrain advantage I know how slow and delicate I used to be. I would have had to know how to hit me. My heart is diffuse, like my brain. I was designed to break smoothly. My abilities lessen and lessen, they do not fall off suddenly. I can drop through levels of consciousness and unconsciousness. A drop in sensory input, a spike in internal pressure. I heal faster, if I go down then you have to be sure that I’m not faking. Sheer wet bulk makes me difficult to burn. Chopping me up would be a thirty hour job for two men that knew what they were doing and had the tools. If I had time to cocoon and the cocoon had time to dry and cure then add two more men and two more days also assuming the correct equipment. Whilst in a cocoon I can vent irritant gas slowly and unnoticeably. If I am handled without suitable gloves then an hour of direct exposure will cause the hands to swell to unusable proportions. Indirect exposure, such as breathing the gas takes effect over twelve hours or so dependant upon bodymass and fat ratio. The effect is clumsiness and reduced vision. The general idea is that if I am captured by primitives then I can hole up and recuperate and then make my escape through enemies of reduced effectiveness. The swollen hands and eyes rob humans of their tools. I’ve never done it outside of training. I’ve never been captured. Only that one boffin on our own side has ever put me down and out and he had to sneak something inside me while I was out cold in surgery. I can feel a metallic wrenching noise in the belly of the aeroplane. The bomb bay doors opening. They’re dropping the terracotta warriors here out of sight of the city, the little clay men will paraglide for as long and low as they can. Goodbye little buddies! Our aeroplane will land at Chang Jiang airport to refuel. The plan is that I will drop from the landing gear as it is opened before the runway. There are still a few minutes Mock is already in his case. A light will go on when we drop below assumed sensor visibility. There’s the light. I’ve swallowed Mock’s box. I’m swinging and slithering down through a trapdoor and gripping close to the big strut that holds the gigantic tyres. The landing gear flaps open and all is blackness. Below me is supposed to be oil covered sea in the night, I can see nothing. I shoot beak-feed regardless of my own optical abilities. The landing gear begins its descent with a slight jar and that is my cue to. Let go.
P-ppppppp-p. P-P-P. All I can smell is crude oil. Its shielding me from the more invasive toxins that fill the water. There is no light. There are no fish. This dead sea tears at the coastline. The Chang Jiang Mega-city is founded upon the great sea wall which prevents the estuarine sediments being pulled away by the tide while allowing selected shipping into the inner river and up into greater China. People do no come to this coast to look at the water. Gulls do not circle this port. The sea is shunned here. Before the city was built the sea took territory here without mercy. The people are happy to pour filth into its heart. I am invisible here. Under this black tide in The Yellow Sea I am as far from controlling hands as I have ever been. My feed shoots nothing, all is black. My microphones are not sensitive enough to provide accurate information to those back at base. I can feel the sea around me, clouds of warmth and rivers of cold. An unfamiliar sea, the pressure and restriction of all that oil on the surface. All surfaces dull to my mucus an oil swathed tentacles. I know where I am going. I can feel the river, even gated by human blockages, I can feel the push of The Yangtze. I do not want to spend long in this stinking sea so I am full speed ahead towards where the mouth of the river has been fixed by human hands. A dragon, with its head caught in a hunter’s hands, million tributary tails thrashing. There is something in the sea with me. Another moving thing. Not living, nor yet a ship. It has no engine sound. It is very swift, perhaps swifter than I. Two somethings. Very large. Do they know I am here? I thought myself very much hidden right now. I am at the shoreline. The concrete cliffs rise above the dirty water, The Great Sea Wall of China, but I cannot break the surface of the oil to video it like a special forces tourist. I am concentrating on moving, I cannot hear the two underwater movers. Talking to you I realise that I have been listening to the legs of the colossus robot walking by. I am not a ship, I will not have been seen on any screen. I am at the door. The door stands always open but can be closed in times of war or to flood the delta. Inside the door the water has a strong tang of the river. My scanty intelligence tells of a computer terminal for which I have an access widget. The terminal is upstream, the sediment beds being judged the best place for me to unobtrusively exit the water. I hate having to be stealthy, I prefer movement and improvisation. I am very good at infiltration but my heart is in insurgence. My wide-band hearing and my range of hearing options mean that I know what’s going on around me more than any human might. I can hear the workings of cameras and work out their viewing angles. I can hear and smell human guards accurately a mile off. My squid brain does all the parallel processing and I just feel hunches about where might be good to flit to and when. All that aside, I might be observed from a distance or using a method that I cannot avoid and thereby embarrass or damage my makers and the department. This is a horrible thought. I could be seen and mere sight of me could provoke terrible consequences for those more important than me. It would be both my fault and not my fault and would grieve me deeply as an individual so I do not ever relish situations in which it may come to pass. Out of the water and onto the equally dirty sediment beds. Further upstream rotating bales keep the oil from covering the river. The mega-city wraps its pollution around itself like an old woman pulling in her shawl in winter. The dirt is a political symbol of will. It states that the output of human labour is worth the blackening of the environment. It never has been. A clean hillside with a river is worth a million shiny cars. Environmental valuation is the force responsible for things like The Chang Jiang Mega-city. The government of China wouldn’t do anything about a rivermouth disappearing but it will go to enormous lengths to avoid losing the gigantic sums of cash that all the properly valued real estate in the world is worth. The sea was devouring the worth of their country and they rushed to the defence of their pocketbooks. This hell on earth is a statement of investment in ecology. The black water like blood, the god money and the saving of the Yangtze slave river. The city’s symbol is the river dolphin, a creature long dead. I am in a plastic workman’s cabin on a patch of black sand high enough above the river to be sturdy. The cabin is deserted, as arranged. I log on with my widget which also connects to my audio feed via an optical wire for security. I listen in English, I don’t speak any kind of Chinese. I hear of a Dockmaster who has occupied a valuable building full of machinery and is making unreasonable demands. He needs to be silenced. I am glad that I don’t get jobs like this. Killing humans is a petty business, not one of them seems worth the cleaning up. What insult could such tiny things offer that would need killing for? Mockery loves it though, perfect job for him. I will not put him together just yet, he does slow everything down a notch. I take a hardcopy of the map which it lets me do and I try to copy everything into storage but the terminal will not do it. Outside the cabin its raining. I am hugging the riverbank and counting how far I have come. Three hundred metres later I have found a simple pressure door with a wheel. It is the right one, a salty foodstuff has been spread around the opening. Invisible to humans, obvious to me, salt is a favourite marker of mine. Food is best because it resists the rain, like tonight. I take a moment squirming over myself in the rain to clean off the last of the crude and I slip inside. This sea wall cum city was designed from the plumbing up and so the machine that I seek is handily right there in front of me. It draws purified water from the depths of the city to the gardens which crown it. I just have to slip into the high pressure water to be pushed anywhere within the system, so long as I keep an accurate map of the waterpipes in my head. There is no turning back down a tunnel that acts as a hose for a city. If I reach a dead end where the branches of the water tree are too thin to let me through then I will be caught and crushed. Happily the threat of death increases my concentration. I won’t make a mistake. I unpack Mockery’s Splinter and set him on the wet concrete floor. I give him the map and let him work out where he needs to go before I leave him to it. One moment. He’s laughing. Nasty, nasty noise, he only has a police bullhorn for a voice. I plug into him and ask, silently, what’s up. He laughs again and says something I can’t understand. Damn I forgot Mock speaks Chinese, is Chinese as much as he is anywhere. He seems happy even though he won’t stop speaking in Chinese. I’m asking if he’s ok for the job and he ignores me but in a way that I know means ‘yes’. He’s ok. I should have woken him up earlier so I could quiz him about what’s funny but I’m happy to leave him laughing and jet off up the tube. The directions take me to a cramped exchange tank. I fiddle with the hatch and spill out onto the floor. Indoors, bright lights, strange thrumming noise, like a fan, slight breeze stinking of humans, human breathing, hundreds of humans. I am in a low arched room with two tiers of reclining cyclists. The humans sit back, watching screens or with headphones on, legs pumping. They take water from water carriers and spill as much upon themselves as within. They are of mixed gender and the air is so hot that the majority wear only a baggy universal design of shorts, tied at the waist. Headbands are also much in evidence, the same material being used as a hand wipe, a cleaning cloth, a hankerchief, a nappy. The whole room glowed with well exercised young people. I’m pouring tentacle by tentacle out of the cupboard next to where the water bearers refill their plastic vessels. They must have been warned for none look at me as I cross to the door and slither out. I wish I had cleaned myself better before putting myself into their drinking water but it is their risk to take. They must need us here badly enough to accept all kinds of discomfort. Beyond the door of the cycling room is a corridor and a facing door. I’m through the door. Inside is a windowless room, walled with the familiar damp concrete that is all pervading in this grey seaside monolith. A man awaits me. He is dressed in the same dun material as the cyclists but he wears a top with his shorts to keep warm without moving. My eyes no longer bring me details of human faces so I cannot tell you how he looks.
“I am told you hear English.” He says, requesting reassurance. One wall of the office has a rewritable surface and I have caught up a bush which I use to write ‘Y E S’.  The man relaxes and sits on the floor. I’m lying down. Another human brings a tray of scented tea or like beverage and the man drinks. I unload Mock’s box to show that I am also relaxing. The room is still. Somewhere Mockery is fighting, I have a feed from him. He is still yelling in Chinese so I’m not really listening. I’m enjoying the tea steam on my skin. I’m enjoying the moment to think. To please the makers right now I must be awake but still. I usually hate inactivity but here it seems ok. I’m not even really listening to the people in the cycle room. I’m only dimly feeling beyond the room that I’m in. My squid brain is silent, nothing disturbs the deeps. I feel the security of living in this great maze of concrete. The walls muffle the cries of humans or the wail of machines. This huge, living building is solid and balanced. It peacefully does its dirty job, pouring out plastics into the world. No wonder the masters of the city feel secure enough to send their naval robot out to extort favours from their neighbours. I am trained infiltrator, good at assessing human buildings and emplacements and this place has me cowed and contained. Some castles are designed to draw attackers in and confuse them. I have heard that Venice, a place I would love to go, is similarly treacherous and amazing. To draw an enemy in and surround them is one of the fulcrums of wrestling and as such I understand it in my own fashion. Old-squid fears the net, the complex trap that draw with bait, the lure, bright and dancing in the dark, the cave that holds a hidden strike. Have we been drawn here to be netted? Mock has grown quiet, I’m pinging him. Nothing, but that never means anything. Another different human comes in, stinking of exertion. They leave a small pile of metal ingots against one perspiring wall. Each time the door opens there is a flood of noise and smell that pours into the room and covers me as I lie peacefully. Another attendant replenishes the tea on its wooden tray, a luxury perhaps in this plastic world. The uniform material they are all wearing is a plastic of some kind I now smell from the hot crush of bodies in the room next door. Another human comes in with a mop and bucket and stows them nervously in the corner, spilling some slops on the floor; orders cannot always make the unnatural palatable. I’m still a big fishy monster, soldier or serf I am something to fear more than you fear your superiors. I wish I could see more of the workings of this great city, sound its catacombs, parade its battlements. I have to wait here for Mock. He shouldn’t be long. Two humans are now in the room. One carries a plant in a pot, the other carries a ceremonial object with smoking incense. The man, who’s room we are in, is talking and directing the two junior workers. The plant goes against the wall. The little human, with the shrine of slowly puffing sticks held delicately before it, is coming forward. Clearly looking at me. The man gesticulates. The object is intended for the patch of floor in which I have lain down. I rise and sweep past the timorous attendant. I settle in the middle of the room and the little human puts down the shrine and scurries out of the door. The man sits with the tray before him on the floor, a small plastic waterproof cushion under his buttocks, drinking tea slowly. What business does the department have that brings us to be solving this man’s problems? How does he even know about our existence? How do the department feel about letting someone see me for this long? I’m not so easy to keep secret and maybe three dozen people have had a chance to look at me here. Is a strict secret not as useful as a slightly blabbed one? Am I here with Mock to prove that I can be, and could be again? Mock is here.
This man can clearly see him and is reacting to him without the easy manner of Mock’s child friends. This man hates interacting with Mock, as he should, but not enough to push him out of his mind altogether. Mock is yelling in Chinese again, I’m filming the pair of them with my beak camera. Mock has the printout of the map in his pincers, I can hear the crackle of plastic paper, smell the recent evaporating toner smell. He is tapping at the diagram as he wails away in his low-quality voice. The man puts down his cup and says a few short sentences. Mock sits still and silent. I am happy to do the same. Mock is coming over. He punches his secure link into mine.
“Trapped.” Sez he.
“This pigwaffle has us in a containment ring. See the objects around the room. They each hold us trapped in a different way. They each rob us of our energies and consume us to power our own containment.”
Mockery barks a few more clips of Chinese at the man. He gets one long sentence in return.
“He says that our comms have been subverted and faked for the last ten minutes. Ever since the end of the fight by my guess.”
I don’t know what to say. I lie on the cold wet concrete. Mockery talks to the man again. Then to me
“How do you feel?”
“I’m happy and I’d like to learn more about this great city” Say I, surprised myself at how childlike I sound.
“Okay” sez he. “They’ve got you with some subtle kind of drug, can you do anything to purge yourself?”
“Sure I can, for you, big brother J” “You are high and soft as a hippy, stop thinking smileys to me, it’s disgusting. Puke your load, flowerpower!”
Purging.
Purged.
Fresh clean mucus on my skin. I feel nasty inside. The weight of the mega-city oppresses me. The air smells bad. People have been everywhere. Millions of people have breathed this air, walked through these rooms, died here, lived here. There is no sky, no freedom. This world is inflexible and cramped like a restrictive morality in a bawdy house. Working so hard you drop is no defence for living a squalid life. Each manhour expended here goes towards forcing others to accept the same low standards of life. Plants, tides, animals and humans all pushed to the side in favour of concrete and petrochemicals. We are caught by this man. A man high in his hierarchy no doubt but unable to see the sunshine as he works. Maybe he works so hard to afford the rental of a garden on the roof to share with his daughter and wife once a week. I project that here I shall be tied to a wheel and worked until exhaustion every day. No more exciting missions to the corners and depths of the world. The department and even the makers have done some pretty horrible things to me and to other people but they never let me get bored. Are these people happy, working in their warren? I know that many philosophies call for humans to be happy independent of their situation and the uses that their bodies are put to but to me that seems asinine. A creature is happy when it has the things that it requires, clean water, prey and space to mate. The discipline that makes it ok to be dirty, hungry and frustrated is a self destructive discipline. Thrive or die seems better to me, to crawl through the bitter mud of life uncomplainingly seems contrary to the currents within life. Dicipline and survival suck the glory out of life, without extending its span or its reach. Mockery pushes into my thoughts,
“How are you now?”
“I feel awful, like an old man who’s estranged children have stopped writing.”
“Good, I’m not spending my time in a cell with a sentimental squid. Seems the tea that they drink to suppress claustrophobia affects you rather strongly. Get up and be ready if I give the signal. If the ring is suspended or broken then we may escape. Whether in one second or a century, jump with me when I give the signal. These guys live a long time but we do too, someone has to knock over that plantpot sooner or later.”
“Why don’t we knock it over ourselves?”
“It would drain your spirit if you touch it. Lie still squid-man, this clearly isn’t your fight.”
I have to lie here in the net. It makes my tentacles squirm. If I were human or squid I would go crazy in here. Luckily I am neither. Mock eyeballs the man who sits behind his wooden tea-tray shield. Short stabs of Chinese from Mock’s tannoy, the man laughs off his insults, threats, but it is a clear strain to talk to Mockery, to look at him. He is relieved when another new assistant comes in. The human whispers to him and I can hear Mock talking in my head,
“They sound worried, look for my signal. A break in concentration is all we need.”
The assistant clears out as fast as all the rest and the man remains, watching us.
I hear Mock again,
“You don’t have a gun do you? Something impersonal like that might break through the barrier.”
My silence serves him as an answer.
We are sitting in the blank room, beyond usual concepts of industrial minimalism. Maybe it only serves as a cell. It is cuboid with a door in one corner. The man smells old and tired, Mock is often right, seems at home in this moment. A moment that is fully alien to me. I have to take his word for our capture. It seems obvious to me that we should peg this nippy tea drinking guy, haul the door off its hinge and splat everything that stands between us and freedom. He says don’t touch and I don’t touch. He says lie still, I lie here. What hold could a potplant and a bucket have over us? Have they got to Mockery? I have to say that it previously has seemed that I am more susceptible to mental disturbance than him. My squid brain is capable and adaptable and grows back but it does not seem to be strongly shielded against malign influence. Mock is staggeringly individualistic, I am only extremely individualistic. Mock must maintain his existence in the face of the fact that he is a definite part of the body of a monotheistic dark god, or so he says. I was once a human, I have to assume that I am somebody. He cannot assume such things. To become relaxed about his identity could be to lose it and to be sucked back to wherever in the body of badness that he splintered off from. Mock likes things and chooses to do things only because of himself. A self strong enough to rip itself free from a god and make it to earth from wherever. He is not a good thing but he is a very great thing. The tea must be getting to me again because I can hear Mockery’s heart beating gloriously and Mockery does not have a heart. The bare cell looks noble. The water dripping from the walls looks fresh. The cold floor seems like enough. I want to work on a wheel without windows. I am kidding. I cannot be that easy to unhinge. Mockery will get me out of this. I just keep steady. One third ahead. I listen to Mr Tea’s breathing. I listen to Mock doing nothing. I can hear the rumbling of the city around me. How many rooms of reclining cyclists? How many dormitories crammed with hammocks? Schools to feed the assembly line. The dead go into the sea. The whole structure sucking in oil and spitting out plastic. Power comes ostensibly from the hydroelectric upstream but what with being pirate kings the rulers of Chang Jiang like self sufficiency. Is the body heat being used efficiently? What happens to the waste? All that piss, must be useful for something.
“Can you not do something?” I ask.
“Not anymore. Once I could have just made him let us go but now I’m kinda out of this game. I’m all earthman now. No fancy spiritual morning star. It isn’t a practical survival tool. It brings down heavy forces upon the user. This boy here spends most of his time cleansing and praying and he still most probba-bailey is gonna go to hell anyway. And it could be soon, too, messing with peoples souls makes you old fast.”
“Do you not hurt people’s souls when you drink their blood and cut them up and so on?”
“Not in the least. There is nothing occult about it. It is very much about the here and now and not a thing of the hereafter. Peoples souls are their own, its their asses that belong to me J” He puts a smile at the end of his message and I can tell that he is insulting me. He almost never does that to me, it feels like a compliment. Mock might be alright.
“What will they do with us?”
“They’re going to kill you. Me they’ll keep until they work out what I am and then they’ll let me go.”
“Great, why are you so lucky?”
“To get rid of me proper they’d have to open a line of communication to that-of-which-I-am-but-a-tiny-part-curse-it. Humans don’t want to do that so they’ll just ask me to leave.”
“If they do kill me, can I ask you to kill a lot of them in return?”
“Maybe.”
That is the best I am going to get. In cases of vengeance I would rather have Mockery’s ‘maybe’ than anyone else’s mere ‘yes’. I lie quiet.
There is the sound of a gravel hopper being emptied, far away in the enormous building. A drawn out roar, hard objects falling. What mammoth process gives that call? Is it purposeful construction or accidental destruction that moves so much matter around so fast? Is the giant from the beanstalk shovelling snow from his drive? Crunch, crunch, crunch. God eating an apple. A troll biting a stone. Coal pouring into an endless pile. The clamour now shakes the room. The concrete wobbles with soundwaves. The five ceremonial objects that hold us are wobbling. Water slops from the bucket. The unprecedented noise is increasing. Booming and tearing, the fabric of the city is being rent apart. The concrete bubble that is the room above this one has popped and its contents thrown into the sky. The destruction is coming.
Silence.
Mr Tea is staring at the ceiling, his cup forgotten on the floor. Metal is dragging across the floor of the room above. The room that isn’t there anymore. Our fragile veil shakes. More waves of noise and crashing around and below us. We have been bypassed. Has the ring which binds us warned off some greater power? Has imprisonment saved our lives?
The silence is here again. Now the scraping. The grendel is coming back for us. At last we shall be killed in our net. The fisherman is coming to gather us in.

The room is under pressure. The concrete breaks away as it tries to bend. Darkness is forcing its way through. Force personified is cracking our world. The industrial grey is crumbling, beyond is only blackness; coming ever onward. Now the darkness is gone and light shines in. Even my primitive eyes can see it. A corner of the simplistic room is gone, replaced by a hole to the sky. A metal ram batters through the hole, widening it. The ram is alive and groping. Its tip waves around. It crushes the potplant into brownness. Mock has sprung. Mr Tea is drinking his own blood, still staring at the cracked ceiling. Mock sits in his lap, holding him tight in his metal arms. The ram retracts and returns with reinforcements. They tear the wall off. Mock says “We’re done here.” And rips his connector out of mine. All is quiet as I disassemble him and swallow his box. I turn to the rooms new aspect. I cannot see the robot but I shoot it with my beak camera for the makers if they are watching. The giant sea-going humanoid has climbed out of the water. It stands in the crater that was the city’s roof garden. A crater enlarged by its digging. With its terrible hands it has wrought a great excavation. Upon a peak that it has left our tiny cell sits in splendour over desolation. Now it squats before me in the hole that it has made. The super-city is an anthill, torn open by an evil child. The people are shown to be only noisy ants, swarming over what they consider to be theirs. The population density here is perhaps the highest that humans have ever achieved and so the destruction was equal to that when it came. Bombs and hurricanes don’t kill people nearly as well as giant robots. The robot’s missile banks are empty, helicopters stud the wreckage. Desperately brave humans are firing from all corners with the puny weapons that they can lift.
The war machine’s hand is being held flat out right in front of me. I’m climbing aboard. My suckers attach everywhere as my squid-brain senses that we are moving off the ground. I am being brought close to the head of the city slayer. Those watching the feed may have picked them out before I caught the whiff of recently fired clay and rubber. They head of the robotic monster is swarming with tiny parasites. The little buggers have put wires into the beast’s head and are forcing it to do what they want. My little buddies. I hop onto the head beside them. Now the robot is moving. It climbs out of the smashed boiled egg that it has made of the city and drops into the sea. The splash is big enough to part the oil for a moment. I can hear distant seagulls. I can smell the wind. I’m a squid riding a giant robot off into the sunset. Fuck yeah!