Saturday Gazette - Octopus in Space

Episode 1 - Cephalopod in Space - Act I

We awake immersed in water, but it tastes somehow wrong. There's a current, a gentle, pulling sensation, and we instinctively allow ourselves to go with it. Our eyes focus for what seems like the first time in... longer than we can remember.

The water ends at an invisible barrier and the current tugs us along it. A word comes to us – window. There are windows on one... two, three, four sides, out of... six. We're in a... tank.

The words seem strange. The idea of a word itself seems strange – an alien concept describing an alien concept. We don't feel right. Sensations and awareness flood into us, fill us, threatening to overwhelm us. We're aware that we're aware. And there's something else to worry about too – beyond the water, beyond the windows, another alien phenomenon, that we somehow understand we should fear:

Fire.

The light around us changes rhythmically; it has a quality unfamiliar to us, then doesn't, has that quality, then doesn't – over and over. The quality is a colour – red. We don't know if we've ever seen a colour like this before, yet somehow we know what we're looking at. A loud tone sounds in time with the rhythm, demanding attention. Something falls from above, hitting the tank and causing jagged cracks to shear across our view of the flames beyond. Bright dots – sparks – spray into the air. They are yellow.

The reds and yellows seem to warn us that whatever is happening out there can't be good for us.

We follow the cracks downward, finding where the light the window transmits is most disjointed. Then we swarm either side of the crack, and pull. The crack widens and water begins spewing faster out onto featureless ground – a floor – beyond. This gap is much smaller than us, but that's not a problem. We know what to do. This, at least, is familiar.

We stretch, compress, squeeze, expand – flowing one arm at a time through the opening, in mimicry of the water itself, onto the floor. We relish this small challenge and splash triumphantly when all of us have escaped the tank. On this side there is air. It tastes unusual, and yet, of nothing.

There is no sea in this air. There is nothing of anything.

More sparks hiss and shower, and new lights begin to flash. The new lights are also red but are accompanied by a tone of a different frequency. How many sources of alarm must we wake to?

Alarm.

Yes, the noises do signify alarm – they are alarms. There is an elegance in these ideas, or maybe a logic. But what is logic? And from where did it come?

As we struggle to understand how it is that we seem to understand, part of a wall ahead moves. It begins folding down towards us, a giant limb of unnatural construction, jointed like a crawler rather than a swimmer. Now a new sound arises, complex yet coherent. It make new words, but these aren't in our mind. These words are in the air itself.

'Warning. Containment failure. Subject escaping. Recapture protocols initiated.'

We know what the words mean, but we don't have time to consider the abstract concepts they imply. The construction, a mechanical device of some sort, lunges towards us. We yank ourselves aside and it snaps closed where we were, reorients and comes at us again. It's fast, and our body seems slow, unfamiliar in all its responses. This time the thing snares us by one limb, raising us up off the floor. We flail around, curling around the thing's jaws, trying to wrench them apart. Two of our arms strain at our attacker, but make no difference to our attempts to escape... nor do three, nor four... but when our fifth limb – the second on our left – curls around the device, it only has to flex once and our captor snaps apart, sending us to the floor with a wet slap.