tumbldown stories

The End of the War Between the Land and the Sea

(originally published April 2016)

The egg case fractured on the change of pressure, and as it broke away, fluttering on the thermocline, Nioe was free. All that time growing in the egg, all that time receiving the programming down in the depths: it was all for this, her purpose, the certain end to the war.

The pressure changed, and more light filtered down; she was coming closer to the surface, closer to the end. But there was something wrong – the water hurt as it passed through her, through her gills, through her body. She wasn't supposed to be able to feel pain – that was outside the spec – but this was pain, the feel of a scratching or blistering, something definitely and completely wrong. And worse, the sea was empty and silent: no mats of drifting seaweed, no fish flicking through the water column, and no sounds, not the long hollow songs of the great whales, not the hammering and crashing and clacking of the engines on the land people's ships. She called out as she swam up, calling in the voice of the sea people – this close to the base where she'd been grown, there ought to be some of them – and received no reply.

Something was wrong, and it became more wrong when Nioe finally reached the surface. This was part of the plan, part of her programming as well, to determine the necessary yield, but on the surface it seemed almost like there had been a mistake. The land was hundreds of meters further away than it was supposed to be from this emergence point, and the sky was a sickly, angry gray-green instead of the blue it was supposed to be. There was no sign of the land people – a few of their buildings lay collapsed in the shallows, far off, but there was no noise, no smoke of their factories, no sound from their vehicles like the programming said there would be. Something was deeply, deeply wrong.

In the plan, Nioe was allowed to gather intelligence, to determine her own best placement and correct yield, and so she decided to, swimming in through the silt and the painful water towards the land. She would find the land people and assess the situation, and determine for herself whether she still had a purpose to fulfill. On the land, the muddy shore lapped by the sickly and painful tide, she stood for a minute as her systems reconfigured, her respiration switching over to air-breathing and her skin switching to water-retaining; if the water had been painful, the air was worse. There was a heavy rasp in it that her lungs were not designed for, and the sooner she could get back in the water, the better. For the moment, though, she still had her mission to follow.

Nioe walked inland, slowly in the bad air and the tingling on the soles of her feet, like the ground itself was as corrupted as the water and air. There was no sign of any of the land people – apart from the wind through spindly and dying trees, there was no sign of anything alive. All was as silent and barren as it had been in the water coming up. Her purpose was to end the war, but it seemed that the war, at least here, had already been ended with a finality that no one had reckoned with.

After what seemed like hours through more or less complete silence, Nioe's ears finally picked up something that was more than just the wind; over this rise, around that clump of trees not completely dead and collapsed yet, there was the sound of running water, and the gentle whicker of something mechanical. She slowed up, crouching to approach, in case the land people were there in numbers. Coming into view of it, though, it was anyone's guess whether there were any of them there at all. Beside a little stream, as gray and sickly as the ocean had been, there was a slumping cottage, and over it, a fan windmill turning quickly on a tall derrick. Nioe stood up and walked closer. If there were no land people here, there would be at least some clues to where they'd all gone, and if there were land people here, there wouldn't be enough of them to restrain her from getting into the water and getting away.

The walls of the cottage, up close, looked to be made of some kind of fabric, hung off posts and ribs of wood; this was far more primitive than the drowned buildings of stone that she'd swum past coming to shore. It was the sort of shelter that someone might make for themselves on their own, unaided, especially if they were concerned about keeping out the poisonous air. Nioe ran a hand along the side, eventually finding a place where the fabric panels overlapped, an open seam that could be pushed aside. The fabric wall was in layers and heavy, heavier than she expected, and inside the cottage, it was almost completely dark; she stood for a second, looking around inside, trying to get her eyes to adjust to the lack of light, when finally, for the first time, someone spoke.