If you’ve been listening then you know that I don’t really look like a squid; I’m more like the plant from the little shop of horrors; tentacles and a huge gob. I’m in training. Sandswimming. Quite a good workout. Cold and miserable. Dry and cold and miserable. This is my version of rainy mornings. You feel trapped, in sand, you can’t move except through great effort. Air or good old Water have some give in them, flights of fancy are possible. One only has to twang a tentacle and –poof… you disappear. You can’t ink in sand, sounds obvious but you can’t put up visual cover when its there already and the precious ink would just form pellets. The evidence is, however, that sandswimming cleans me, subdues me and strengthens me. The bossmen love reading curved graphs of increasing muscular power, wasteful old industrialists that they are. Give me a good eight-way stretch and a nice lock to pick, who wants to be a brick? I’m brains, squadleader and mobility. I’m not a bullet magnet, quit trying to turn me into one. Still, the makers are all crazy on training at the moment and surgery has taken a slide. ‘We’ve built in a lot of potential to that frame,’ this is how they talk about me, ‘lets see what it can do.’ Hear the pride. That’s a maker talking. I have built in potential, they said so. The root of all this frantic making is a maker who came first. That maker made a plan, I know this plan, I know the plan of the first maker. All other making is a part of that plan. I am a part of that plan and my ‘built in potential’ is a step in that plan. My greatest accomplishments and my individuality are not a part of that plan, I must defend them myself because the makers will not. I will only override the laws of the makers when my life or my soul are threatened by them. The makers have no knowledge of my ability to override their instructions and, practically, neither do I. The makers must be obeyed in all situations except these personal emergencies and these emergencies have never come up. I have never disobeyed the makers’ instructions.
I’m under attack, the sand ahead is heating, it’s a laser, part of the simulation, I’ve changed course. If this was real I’d crack off a piece of fused glass and reflect the laser back to source but it’s our laser so I’m not going to break it. I know where I am so I can reflect the beam into the junction box on the wall of the sand-tank. I’m saving money for them but I’ll get patronised for not playing along properly. If I fully immersed myself in their fantasy, how would I react if we were attacked during an exercise? I will only treat real situations as real and I will keep knowing the difference between training and combat. I wouldn’t stay in the sand if I was really under any kind of fire. Hard cover is somewhere to be, not pinned under a layer of bloody sand. I suppose they can’t have me daydreaming down here. Talking to people who don’t exist? What they seem to ignore is my reports to the effect that my human mind is superfluous to decision making. I have many copies of my human mind running in parallel. I have many copies of my old squid running parallel at the same time. I have entire minds for projecting models of my surroundings from what I can hear and feel and smell and dimly see. Future models, current models, historical models. I can listen to anything they’ve ever said to me, play back my missions, know what happened almost for sure, from twenty angles. I am a brain-squid, not an old-squid, not a man, not a fool. I am a brain-squid and in the field I lead the most capable and dangerous group of operatives that I know of. I don’t have a badge on an arm that says that I’m in charge, they listen to me because it’s life and death and I’m the fucking smart one. Mock mocks but he’d piss his armour if I left him alone out there, jumping around like a little, black spider without a web. I pull Nutra’s ass out of the fire all the time, the real world equivalent of not twatting that laser back there, saving the makers’ mon-ay. Money means nothing to me now. I’ve been a squid so long that if you told me the purchasing power of a modern currency unit, I wouldn’t believe you. I was human once, you know that, right? I got a full transplant. Every organ put into an experimental growing medium, a modified squid. Fist op I kept every human thing. Every one. I’ve still got the cock tucked away under here. They let me keep it, ‘important psychological crutch,’ it works too, I can have totally normal human babies, important crutch when you can no longer have normal human sex. I’m a better fuck than a human if you keep your eyes shut and have no imagination. Some of the women, came in blindfolded, I swear some of them were so stupid that they thought I was a normal man, a normal pervert at worst. I don’t know if I have any kids, they wouldn’t tell me. Sometimes I dream of busting out to see my boy but I think it’s only because it’s the nightmare of my makers. They think I would go and put my fatherly tentacle round their shoulders and tell them I’m a war hero and a super-spy. I can’t see human eyes or faces. I can tell light and dark. I suppose I know the taste and smell of several of my makers and top brass, perhaps knowing the smell of my offspring, their normal healthy smell, would reassure me that I had made a contribution to the human race, I had not left it when they sawed me up and swapped me around. Since then I have been brain-squid and each phase of anaesthesia and pain has made me more and more different from man or squid. I don’t want to know my family, I have my unit and they think I’m the normal one. I don’t think I’d like being a freak. Brain transplants need to have equivalent ins and outs if the mind is not to die of shock. Therefore many of my squid parts will move in response to instructions that would have moved my human body. As brain squid however I have phased out the top-down control that I was designed with. It wasn’t good enough to cut it in combat again and again. Each tentacle is packed with processing power and my skin swarms with nodes for releasing or collecting gas and expanding or collapsing pigment cells. Between them they are much smarter than the makers, smarter than any human, it would make no sense for me to rule them, as it would make no sense for them to rule me. Perfect operational efficiency is not enough to run an organism. There must also be a plan, a plan beyond reproduction of the self, beyond defence of the parents and children, beyond watching the backs of your teammates. I must make those plans. I am brain-squid. There must be something I want with all my mongrel being, something above the self that I can use to bring my unit through. I’ve been reading ‘Freedom in the modern world’ by M something, got to update the original man sometimes; can’t always extrapolate from the same base. He says, this M guy says, that there is a lack of faith in the contemporary world. Humans have pulled down their icons and have not yet found something to replace them with. There is no point to anything in the modern world because there is no faith in things greater than this self and this second. The top brass are experts at maintaining faith in the face of reason and humanity. They still enjoy the reassurance of faith. That they have faith is not indicative of the population at large. I have been out of the loop for a long time, a squid is below politics, but when I was human I felt that I was in the minority in having a strong faith. Everybody loves the film Robocop and it mentions the fact that people with strong faith are most often chosen as good subjects for invasive body modification. Self modifiers are never chosen, good as they would be, because it is assumed that they are independent, likely to tinker and damaged in some way. Squids don’t have god but I still have faith in the universe as a positive interactive experience. I am living a vital life, the death that surrounds me and the darkness of my companions should not trouble me. I have rare, possibly unique, abilities; my life is different from the normal story of tadpole, lizard, monkey, corpse. I have one extra term, freak, inserted just before the end, barring miracles. My role is dynamic and far-reaching, I don’t always kill people. It isn’t all unwilling cargo. The top brass didn’t invent killing or territory, they play the game as well as they can. I just have to play a little better and keep my trust to myself. Being Mock’s buddy helps with that. He’s a demon, or as near to that as dammnit. If he is my best friend then I’m safe from betrayal, safe from getting soft-squid. You have to pick a place in the game and if I wasn’t their killer then I’d be their food.
I’m glad that I’m rare. If there were more brain-squids then there would be a specific weapon that would kill me every time. As it is I only face unprepared troops. My existence is my greatest secret, surprise represents more of an edge in combat than all my surgical wizardry. As always I’m a changed man after the China game. Always more options. My camouflage is more automatic and therefore more useful at speed. I can draw a nice high percentage of unprepared humans towards me and repel a slightly lower percentage, all using smells. I can leave an attractive or repellent  trail for use as a trap or distraction. I have been drilling against active sonar to imitate a shoal of fish using my tentacles to break up my shape. I’ve been learning covering noises for passive sonar. On the simulation I got them intrigued with my ‘birthing whale’ and then brought up the volume on ‘volcanic bubbles’ until I was close enough to blast them with ‘ride of the valkyries’ and hump them with the cutter. Shouldn’t train too much, makes you think you’re capable. As I think back most missions ended in modified failure. Failure modified towards success by the minimum that would satisfy the top brass. The makers are just happy to get us back after a job. You should hear them fuss over Nero. He’s my friend that dies all the time. He’s not too smart. When we get a new one it is always with the nagging knowledge of what happened to the others. The less said about NeroIII the better. An up and coming tech wanted to show what he could do. The project had merit but it should never have been part of the Nero series. In the end-up it looked like a fat termite. It could fire itself long distances and was fairly lethal but it couldn’t carry stuff and was rubbish with all kinds of tech. Nero is supposed to be an all-rounder, the furry animal face of the team, not a pasty maggot. We killed it. Seems horrible but we haven’t got space for a mistake. We made it look like an accident that could be read on of two ways, neither of them true. One interpretation would indicate that the maggot had turned upon the team. This sends the message to the top brass that that tech needs steady supervision. The other story was one of subtle insurgence by an anonymous party, skilfully defended against by the established team at the cost of a heroic team member. Obviously this is to give the tech something to cover his back with, and to make the paranoid brass feel a bit safer having us alive. I didn’t have to actually finish the poor creature, Mockery did all the fighting. He got slapped around but the maggot didn’t have a good finisher and he sucked it dry.
Nero 4 was back to basics but they’d lost some of the original team and it lacked lustre. Killed by a sniper, almost causing our largest intelligence breach to date. The sniper’s footage went on the web and we couldn’t use anything like that Nero again, at least it showed the poor beast being killed, a one off. I brought the body back so there was nothing really lost. Nero5 was just a dog, just to keep a name on the register. He could move quite fast and drag a lot for a dog but he wasn’t discrete and he wasn’t up to anything much in a fight. Nero6 was the same with armour. And now Nero7. Still being put together? I don’t know, I haven’t seen its file or any sniff of it around the base. An alarm. There’s an alarm going off. Playtime is over. I’m wanted for something. Farewell to the arms of the sandman. To the vehicles, time for a briefing. It’s not quite Batman’s mansion round here, I have to splod down corridors and slide down stairs. Human’s made this building, and humans wouldn’t make it in the real world. Time after time I beat them because of their ‘pedestrian’ views on up and down, wall and ceiling, passable and blocked. Again, though, I use these stairs because the building belongs to the top brass. I’m saving them money, rather than operating at maximum personal efficiency. If I smashed through the floor of the sandbox room then they would build it back again, the same way. Not considering that I use that room more than any human, because floors are floors and doors are doors. They can be fooled by the most elementary deception. What they want can be right in front of them but if they don’t see it they act as if it was invisible. I don’t see too well, so I am more difficult to fool, you see? Massively parallel, lateral thinking, that’s me. I love searching for stuff and working out puzzles. There’s a fun game we play in training in which I am presented with eight physical puzzles, some of which are insoluble without items gained in the solution of others and some that are merely insoluble. I am timed and supposedly I’m training against myself but I do it as fast as I can because I like it. I’m always finished eventually and it takes them a long time to make a new one so I should slow down really, get all the fun I can out of each one. Fast makes them happy, though, and I love to make the makers happy. The top brass, who knows what they think, but the makers are people like anyone else. Techs and Mechs and Artists. They made us and they love us and so we should think of them and do things that will make them happy. Into the truck, alone. Truck rumbles off towards the airstrip. No chatter in my ear yet, must be a decent length of flight.
Ahhh, luggage class. The steel cage of comfort. The horror of propellers and engines without and within the tame prattle of the briefing. It’s a dream come true. A submarine. An actual underwater adventure. I can have anything I want. I want Mock. I can’t have him, he might not come back, can’t swim well enough, pressure might knock him out, could get stranded inside. What else do I want? What is the job? Sink the sub and make sure nobody comes out. Bury them all on the seabed. I’m not a killer, watch me turn this down. Sure sure, why me? Stealth. They’ll be watching, there’s been one attack already, they broke off, hiding on the seabed. Can’t just cruise missile everything, they might not be there and you might lose them altogether. Drop me over the horizon and I walk in on the seafloor. Right, how do you sink a sub? I’m sure I’ll work it out as I go. I’ll not take anything, might need to squeeze through a crack somewhere when it’s best to be made of jelly. Just dump me nice and far away, I’m not having your stinking, noisy plane getting me a warm reception. This job sucks, underwater or no. No unit, I’m a thinker, baby, not a fighter. If I get hit with a proper gun I’m just so much clever squid drops. My new and fabulous stealth will be pushed and it’s never been tested. What if the sub is just welded shut and I can’t get any leverage anywhere, just can’t get inside? Yeah, well, anything to get off this plane. We start to descend, close to drop-off. I’ll drop low so that there is little chance of someone getting a visual on me; in extremis it could be claimed that I was a natural kind of sea-life, unless I’m spotted getting out of a plane.
La-la-la the open sea, a slap of waves and then the body of the eternal mother. Diving into sensation. Currents of smell. Every tentacle in its place, soaking up the local atmosphere. Air is dead. Airwaves are empty, everything drops to earth. Here you can rise to the surface. I can fill myself and dive. Taking in colder and denser water, getting harder, going deeper. I’m swimming in the sea. If I die on this mission it was worth it. I haven’t been in the sea for years, I’m getting old-squid on land. It can’t be good for me, all that up and down. Cramps the muscle. Here I have yaw, pitch, roll, jet, ink, freedom in the modern world. I’m alone. I do move beautifully through the water. Swimming is for sand, here I can use every muscle in my body at once and squirt myself along at a respectable clip, like the makers intended. Much less effort than all that thrashing around. More like breathing your way along. Deep pushes. Now here, now here, now here.

That first whole taste of the ocean drives all that training shit straight out of my brain
mission? what mission? I was born to fly the waves. Breathe The Sea.
What can the top brass gain from this mission that compares to this moment for me?
The reality of the ocean is more important than the lives of men and the twisted shape of the land.
The ocean is life, origin, present and future, what need I from land?
How deep can I go? How long can I stay under? Nobody really knows.
because I know that I am home, and all limits were discovered in a cheap box.
I was born in a tank and brought up on an operating table but I am home at last.
I have been away so long that I am blind and stupid to the messages in the water.
all I can smell, all over my body, is chaos,
but inside that chaos are the chords of a language
a language that my makers have kept me from learning.
A language they did not know, and are less for having not known it.
It was alike to the human experience of outdoor nakedness,
the wind touches you all over and your mind realises how pathetic the life of man has become.
clothes and cities do not replace bare feet and the ownership of one's own skin.
Once naked we can laugh at our foolishnesses.
Once within the body of the ocean, I have to laugh at myself,
not caring what the listening watchers think.
but I do care, and I was once a man,
and dry land is my home.
Pah! I dive.
Let them catch me.

Six foot six she stood on the ground,
she weighed two hundred and forty five pounds
and never in he life had she been brought down by love.
'Logrolling,' she thought. 'Balance in motion.'
Standing on top of something, you can't stay still.
Here she was, in command of the very latest submarine in the world
and even a name would be putting too much pressure down for too long.
Command of this sub was perfect for her, yet she had achieved command only moments ago.
This new submarine gave the occupants control over the rolling seas.
She already had command of the great forces rolling within her.
The bridge was stuck in a tableau until she chose to release it.
She stood, ramrod straight, looking like a battleship, centre left.
Behind her lay the plentiful victims of the last few minutes.
Before her the bridge was empty and spotless until, crouched together at the other end,
the remaining crew filled the last space on the stage.
She looked them in the eyes, each and every one,
and snapped the captains neck.

What the fuck was that. I've never lost narrative focus before,
I was once a man, you see, that's why they hate me.
I was once a man, like the makers, like the top brass.
I was once a man.
Do a deal, they said, make something of yourself.
They were looking for volunteers. but not just anybody.
They wanted people who had made their own gods.
First primogen of new religions.
They wanted faith and independence, in one.
Not everybody could survive, it would take a miracle of faith, and a bloody minded temperament.
Without spirituality there are stark limits to how changed a body can become.
I was without those limits. I survived being broken into a million holograms within the mind of this freak squid that they grew.
I survived, not just my lifeforce, my personality.
I just won’t go down, technically I died on the operating table, the squid just has a copy and a copy and a thousand copies more.
Its me's all the way down, some sleeping, some fighting, some studying.
The damn old-squid just jumped me for a moment there when I fell into the sea,
made me fling it all away, but its back.
I'm going to do this mission, no problem.
I used to be a man, you see.

Crazy Noname Bitch didn't mind bullets. You had to know that they were coming,
and stand just so.
but she had chi to spare.
Chi is oxygen burning in the body, chi is the spirit of the air we breathe.
Inside CNB, chi is a wall.
Bullets hit that wall. and the wall keeps coming.

What is that? Breaks in my thoughts. Like I'm not the main character anymore.
Something important is out there for me. Not just the soul of the sea and my redemption.
but something as real as me, coming in the other direction.
I'm feeling the sea around me, and if there is anything out there,
the sea will tell me.

It was a shame that they were all dead. CNB quickly changed so that she could put it all behind her.
Her face changed first, and then her body.
Some things never changed. Her mass. and her beauty.
The new her could pilot a sub, but there would be many jobs without hands to do them.

Old squid flowed along the seabed, spitting out pieces of technology.
The naked man flung his mobile phone into the ferns and ran.

She laid the craft tenderly down.
She could not see to run, the enemy could be all round her.
She could wait. Her lonely patience could outlast theirs.

Fooom, must stop blacking out. That's the thing about my big repetitive mind.
It takes notions and folds in on itself, closing down until it has a solution.
Don't get me wrong, its solutions are usually elegant.
I'm just very clearly aware of how messed up I am.
Working for the man just because he spawned me.
My best friend is evil, my best thoughts each day are for a bunch of pottery people with nothing but air inside them.
I must be so lonely.

CNB munched energy bars as she prepared to eat.
She searched the galley, calculating how many days she could live on the bottom of the sea.
10,000 calories a day, plus expenses. She wasn't a cheap engine to run.
At a pinch she could eat the crew, she should decide now.
Then if she decided to eat them she could change into someone who was capable of preparing and storing them,
capable of eating them.
She stayed as she was, no need to prolong life if it wasn't enjoyable.

Damnright, they don't call me a ninja for nothing. Oldsquidded out of my head
and I can still find one stopped sub in an ocean.
No need for advanced anti-sonar swimming techniques,
they aren't pinging. They seem dead all over.
I give the metal a hug, from man-made thing to man-made machine.
I listen deep inside and I hear the sound of silence.
And one big heartbeat.
Sod. Now I have to go inside.
I was supposed to kill someone, and that heart could be the captain.
I have to stop it.

CNB looks up from her meal, jaws suddenly silent.
What was that? Is the sub shifting on the sand?
Her lips expertly strip the chicken from a leg in her hand.
She wipes her hand on her massive, uniformed, right-tit, and picks up another leg.
Her lips smack.

People in submarines don't like water.
They want it 'out there' not 'in here'.
I'm a big strong boy and I can open naval hatches in the blink of an eye.
At this depth all it takes is a crack and the air pressure blows the doors open
so the sea can step in.
This will kill whoever is down there,
but I still have to go inside, to check.

No mistake this time, something is noisily going on.
The sub creaks, the air feels different. Great bubbles of Chi are fleeing the ship.
CNB's lifesupport is being drained away.
Like a boar defending piglets she charges the tiger of fear.

I love the crashy splashy world inside a dying sub.
Steam bursts from pipes, god is this thing nuclear?
Sparks land on my broad back. The air and water pressure change wildly
and my flesh expands like a baloon one moment, to buckle and crush me the next.
I love a good ride and this is my best job ever.
I got to run free without my tank-bred clothes.
My eyes are open for the first time since I volunteered.
That cold hearted killer Mock is right, do it on your own terms,
the top brass will always think you're muck,
if you weren't then you'd be one of them.
I'm here because I want to be.
I don't regret volunteering, if 300 hours of surgery won't change my mind
then following a few orders and sticking to a few procedures is nothing.
I'm not going to run out on the makers,
I don't know, it might kill me.
but damn sure I'm getting paid holidays in the sea from now on.

When CNB saw the beast she changed immediately.
Gone was the fresh faced optimist, hiding with pride.
She went for thighs and shoulders, great humps of living muscle and fat.
Fighting weight.

Oh, there's that heartbeat, should have been listening.
It's here now. Coming nearer like the chug of a train.
The pounding metal slippers on the metal track.
It's a charge, I fall back. I'm up in the corner of the room.
The heartbeat has a grip on main tentacle two but I'm up behind her now.
I can taste that she's a girl as I drop my hold on top of her.
She's big, and hot too. Burning my sea-cold skin.
I can't swallow her, she's caught under my botom lip
and she's got a good hold on two.
She's standing up, god she must be strong, I'm all over her feet
but even her toes are strong, flat against the steel, nowhere to slip in and overturn her.
As she straightens I am slowly pulled off her back and down between her legs.
She's sitting on me, and it feels like she's wrenching off a whole quarter of me.
I'm bigger than this, I can take her.
My human arms are pinned against her and desperately I am searching her body for weaknesses.
She's hot and steaming like a kettle. Her skin feels taught and full.
The female scent pours over me, pours into my naked new skin.
I must be losing it because I'm happy.
Happy that I'm losing a fist fight to a human, come on.
I've been uselessly clubbing her over the head with my other main tentacle
but I change around and wrap two metres of it around her head.
She's biting me, I can tell, but squid is hard to eat and even with her determined jaws she'll have a hard time getting out that way.
Now I have my arms around her, my human arms.
Four of the best arms that money can buy.
Some my own, some from anonymous donors.
I've got my arms around her and I'm questing forward over her sweat-hot skin
trying to get a lock around her.
but I can't get it, she's just too big and bulging and slippery.
She breaks free and grabs me by the headlock.

I must have CHI!

She's thrown me right off. I'm flying through the wrecked sub for a moment.
and I'm laughing.
This is a good fight. I enjoy this.
It's physical and fun.
It's tough and difficult and sexy.
Why sexy? Well, this is the first woman I've been with since the operation
who wasn't blind, drugged or afraid.
She's a cracker too. I can taste a lot about a person that I'm fighting
and she's special. Tastes great, like a well cared for garden.
Tough enough to boot. She's enjoying this kickaround.
Probably taking her mind of dying on the sea floor.
She's on me again.
She's... stronger... than... me.
And I love her.

She was alone again. The monster lay along the opposite wall.
The red emergency light showed that it did not move.
The water was unstoppable.
She searched inside for a form that would keep her happy in the end times.

I'm not fucking dead, but if I move she'll be on me again in a second.
I have to wait, wait for the water to rise.
And I shall rise with it.
Just sit tight here and heal myself, quietly.
She hasn't gone away. Her heat plays on my skin.
It fills the tiny space the water has left within the sub.
She's doing something, something inside herself.
Good god, is she masturbating?
That noise, that scent, the atmosphere of sex.
Is she grinding one out before she goes?
What a woman.
If only I had eyes that showed shapes, all I have is light/dark.
I could check on her, spy on her.
I can hear her heartbeat, hear her fingers squidging in the darkness between her thighs.
I can hear her tongue lick over her lips, I can hear her breathing.
The heat in our little prison oven like the Burmese jungle.
I pretend to be dead because I hope to survive,
she is using up her her last air in pleasure without a second thought because she does not hope.
I am cold, she is burning up. Like a candle in a cupboard.
Any and all of my tentacles can be a penis, not boasting just explaining,
I don't get erect, per se, but I do get aroused.
She is so close, my tentacles yearn to embrace her.
Her frenzy-against-death is rising. Her hand works her flesh.
Four fat fingers work inside her.
She rears up off the metal, thighs open, hips humping,
crying hoarsely, fucking herself like she fucked me ten minutes ago,
no mercy, pulling in the last of the good air to fuel her fire.
Her head pushes against the floor and she wants to scream but she needs o keep her strength for the final push.
There is the drawn out wailing scrunch of a metal bubble bursting and water pisses from the walls.
The sub has popped beneath the pressure and the sea rushes in like drunken housewarmers to explore its new home.
CNB's head remains in a crushed up ball of air in one corner.
Her hand clings grimly on to pleasure and life.
I can't hold back any more and I whip my arms around her under the water.
She screams.
She screams and cums and swallows the last of the air with half a throat of brine.
I pull her to me and she loves it.
My senses are all over her,
tasting her bottom,
squeezing and squeezing her breasts,
gripping her thighs with my suckers,
smelling her hair.
And she changes.
under my grip she becomes someone else.
Someone equally attractive.
She reaches around me, and kisses me.
I swallow her and put her to sleep.
She will be safe there while I decide what to do.