Continued from Facebook: Every so often we get a chance to pull the plug on some puny species that has far too much to say for itself, gets into scraps over its parochial borders, and then starts to leak out of its playpen to bother everybody else. This job was a gift.
We dropped the first spout into the middle of the Atlantic and left it there, like a bracket with lightning at one end and spray at the other. It got no attention at all the first couple of days, but when it was still there at the end of the week, ramping up its dervishing and taking blue and purple pot shots at the sea, a few of them noticed and went out to poke at it, jousting and buzzing around it like hornets in dodgems. When it doubled its size, milled up some of their boats, and spat them out again like chaff, they started to sit up. So did we, it was about to get interesting. At the very least social media would be flooded with idiot speculation, and maybe we could look forward to a full scale fight.

Ha ha, army’s coming – so long sucker! You taking bets?

It’s not real, it’s a hologram. It’s wet, dumbo.

They making a movie here or what? Mostly what.

     After a fortnight with it rooted to the spot and widening out at both ends, interest intensified. They filmed it, probed it, speculated on its physics, and flew aircraft full of measuring devices around it. Their TV companies wheeled out politicians and religious leaders for explanations and answers, and reporters door-stepped psychics and scientists alike for sound-bites.

     It’s global warming. And what did you do about that?

     We’ve had them before, it’s nothing to worry about. No, you haven’t and yes, it is.

     It’s the Rapture! Enjoy.

There are only three reasons for a procedure like this: start-ups, refreshers, and full scale re-boots like this one – a big job that comes in just short of complete reconfiguration. You charge the system first to pull some fluid into the pipes, then you turn on the taps and let it go. The biomass that comes with it is either there to boost the existing gene pool or it’s not going to be staying. This wasn’t staying but it was going to liven things up a bit in the interim, and when stuff started plopping through there was only a moment of paralysis before pandemonium broke out. They put up barriers, shut down the media, set up floating laboratories inside the new perimeter, and started arming people. Even desert countries set their lawyers onto claiming it in case it had military or commercial value. Then the fights broke out and some of them died trying to grab a thing they didn’t understand from someone else who didn’t understand, all the while babbling nonsense about what it meant.

     It’s from the seabed. Wrong.

     It’s a CGI. No, really it isn’t.

     We’re in a virtual world and this is the next-door sim leaking through, ha ha! Of course it is.

It’s from outer space. You don’t know the half.

A few of them actually applied a bit of thought to the situation and began analysing a batch of biologicals they’d managed to prise out of the military. But that all stopped when they saw what else was happening.

With waterspouts, the convention is that they suck the ocean up into the sky and then let it spin out and drop back where it came from. It’s a tornado without the houses and cars, cats and cows whirling around in it. You get fish and boats sometimes, obviously, and anything else oceanic that happens to be in the way, but the key characteristic is that the primary direction of flow is first up and then down. It’s not contributory or additive, it’s circulatory.

     By the time they figured out that this one was different and the stuff being flung out into the ocean was perhaps not indigenous to the locality, the process was well underway. That the floundering critters and globs of oleaginous mush were not indigenous to anywhere they knew of, didn’t occur to them for quite a while because they were distracted by endless pop vox accounts of frogs and fish raining down in deserts and onto people’s lawns. But then when sea levels started to rise and a few islands vanished, the odd unidentified invertebrate suddenly seemed less of a priority.

     But if water is coming down, where’s it coming from? Good question.

     And these creatures, where are they from? Ditto.

     Off-shore fracking, you mark my words. That’s gas and it comes up, genius.

     Are we going to drown? Oh yes, that’s the idea. Make the most of the time you’ve got left, losers.

Irritating little system, this. Management had to pay it a visit a while ago to sort out their neighbours because they were well on the way to sparking social armageddon, and of course they had no idea. Just before we intervened, they were messing with bacteria they found in a new species of night moth and trying to incorporate it into their own mating decorations, because apparently it flashed whenever emotions ran a bit high. But it just latched onto their nervous systems and set up camp in their front brains. They got a little foggy-minded and disinhibited after that, which is probably why they didn’t think twice about putting their so-called friendship blooms onto a series of deep space probes as invitations to life forms everywhere to drop in for tea. Right then, that was just fine but a few more tweaks to the DNA – along the quad core bases for instance – and it would have run riot among the sentients with more threats to stable governance than was good for anyone. Obviously, we had to do a complete bio-scrub to remove all trace, and then we left the system alone.

In hindsight, we should have kept an eye on this lot, though. Despite their cack-handedness, they were quite quick off the mark and rather nosey to boot. So when they began poking about over there with their goggle-eyed Rovers, scrutinising samples at nano-molecular level and talking about seeing worms, alarm bells rang. Had we been rigorous enough with the clean up? And what about those fans and folds – was the place active again? The top brass were sweating a bit, to be honest. When you considered the possibility of them revitalising a Friendship Bloom and infecting all the others with it, an ELE was the only real option. Two birds with one stone as it turned out. We tried not to be too gleeful about the comeuppance – bunch of over-grown, self-important little coelomates.

Water transfer takes a while. Not for us obviously, but in their timescale there was plenty of opportunity to adapt. Pointlessly of course. Pretty soon, as the landmasses shrank away and they gathered on the tops of mountains or built floating cities out of the junk they’d been throwing out there for decades, being wet was a familiar experience. They were telling new tales of twisting spouts in blackened skies that threw whole oceans at their world, and singing lullabies from folk memory about fields and sheep and things called meatfeastpizzas, for which there was no longer a tangible reference. That and oggi-oggi-oggi became a kind of incantation they thought had healing properties, which tells you all you need to know about them.

With a re-boot there is an end game – fill the place up with something inhospitable to the troublesome species, then drain it out and start again. We had a reservoir stashed a few million light years away, which was ironic as it was one they’d just identified with their little maser gizmos. They became pathetically excited about that and the possibility of finding life there, presumably so they could go and beat the daylights out of it, or eat it like they already had at home with anything that didn’t look like them. That’s what happens when a species makes technological advances way ahead of its morality curve: irresponsible, easily narked, and equipped for regime change – just what we needed. How many times have I said we should insert a limiter? And was anyone listening?

It’s quite attractive from a distance, this little blue marble, and soon the blue deepened and spread so it started to look like a tiny Neptune. We had more than a hundred spouts in place by then – all of them sucking water down the tubes from the reservoir and dropping it into the single ocean. Then we were done and it was time to begin the next phase; we powered down the system and everything stopped.

I really enjoy those moments, those points of balance, the pivots that hold everything still before it tips over into the new dynamic. Most things slow down because they’re not able stop suddenly, but they all eventually reach a point of stasis. Like a tidal river when it turns from incoming to outgoing, it hovers in the balance until the moon tells it which way to go, or it does when there is one. Their moon was a casualty of the first phase because it got in the way of an early probe and started chugging off on its own at an even faster rate than before. It was quite some time before they noticed; probably they were a bit preoccupied with not drowning or getting wiped out in the wars over bits of land and floating real estate. Some of the observatories were still intact, the ones at the tops of what had been mountains, and for a while they used them to track the moon on its way out into the solar system. But then they just began leaving fish entrails around the array and singing songs up at the lens.

     Twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are. You used to know.

     The lights in the sky are the souls of our ancestors. Here we go.

     See the eyes of the gods watching us; bring me the guts of a thousand fish. The Descent of Man.

     They were surprisingly resourceful, though. By the time the land disappeared, they had moved onto floating archipelagos that drifted at random around the globe. Still, eradication would not be a problem, the next phase would take care of that. We switched over to ‘suck’.

The problem with temporal asynchronicity is that you can sometimes miss detail. Who knows how a rock and a flea would count time but you can bet it wouldn’t be the same. Every millisecond could be a year to a flea, and every year a millisecond to the rock. Us? We go longer than rocks so it’s not surprising we didn’t spot the new developments until they were well underway. Ok, we can focus down for the transitional work where you need a bit of hands-on, and I must say some of the going-forward effects can be quite entertaining so a bit of temporal window work is often worth the effort. But this pretty much happened during a tea break and suddenly we found we had three brands of sentient to take account of. There were the ones who stayed on the surface and clung to survival by building fish and seaweed farms – acres of them in huge clots drifting around the ocean with people scrambling about on them and fighting off raiders from beneath. Then there were the raiders, the aquatics – the ones who took to the water and made a whole new life for themselves with gills and phalangeal webbing. But there was also – and this should have been anticipated so some clipboard jockey is going to get it in the neck, no doubt – there was also the bunch that presumably came from a cross between dolphins and some bit of functioning exobiology. Whether ours from when we flooded the place or theirs from their off-world tinkering and rock-hoarding, I couldn’t say. Thinking about it was above my pay grade anyway.

As water levels dropped, these factions were forced together and we waited for the inevitable rumpus to start.

     Wot that? It’s an adapted aquatic sentient. It’s smarter than you now.

What’s that? It’s a regressed human. They used to eat you.

     Er, those things? Your guess is as good as mine, people.

Then the rest of the team suddenly took off to sort out an unscheduled collision of galaxies and I was left here on my own. Just keep an eye on it all, they said, nothing too complicated, even for you. Quite how Andromeda had been knocked into reverse is another of those administrative mysteries but there would be hell to pay if all that matter got vaporised ahead of time and out of place. Not to mention it’s where we keep a lot of spare nursery stock. So anyway, here I was, feet up, keeping tabs on the action and looking forward to some right royal scrapping.

     Webbed feet are the sign of evil! Check your DNA. Oh, sorry, you can’t any more.

     No fins, no soul! Is that a pun? Surely that’s not a pun.

     Click. Fine contribution there, Dolphin Man.

     Eventually, with the ocean shrinking and less open space to mess around in, they started to pay more attention to the spouts. The Adapteds got there first, or they thought they did. In fact they burst through the warning rings the Evolveds put up a few centuries before when they were still clicking and no one could make heads or tails of them.  The Evolveds had found nearly all the waterspouts and quickly lost about half their population up the chute just by playing about round the bases and jumping the currents. They circled them all with anchored kelp and hung sonar emitters on them as a warning which the Adapteds thought were just bits of coral, so they barged on through. Who knew fish could build sonar emitters? Who knew they could build anything, in fact?

     Meanwhile, the Drylanders, the ones who had been afloat and living on fish and seaweed, began to bump up against emerging mountain sides. Great platforms of weed and coral and architectural fish bones stranded like so many arks on so many Ararats. They followed the water’s edge as it crept down hillsides, onto plains, and down to where the old beaches had been. Old beaches around new, separate, shrinking seas. Suddenly everyone – Drylanders and Adapteds – wanted the same resources. Finally, some action looked likely – I waited for hostilities to break out.

     How do you swim like that? Hello – flippers!

     Are these safe to eat? Oh please try them, they’ll shut down your kidneys and I’ll get out of here sooner.

     Your gills are fascinating! Easy to see where your miserable entertainment programming came from. We’ve been trapping and deleting that stuff for years.

Sucking the water off a planet means that vast currents pull everything nearby into the vortex, and nearby can mean a good few miles diameter all round. This is not so much of a problem if you have a massive ocean to make use of, but it becomes an issue when that shrinks to the size of a few large ponds. That’s the point of course, flood them out then dry them out. Rough justice but look at their history.

Problem was, they weren’t behaving to type. When I looked more closely, I found that the Drylanders had begun helping the Adapteds to construct reservoirs and move to safety. When one of these was breached, the Evolveds suddenly showed up and introduced everyone to their own reservoirs, constructed from materials no one had seen before. The Evolveds and the Adapteds moved in together and started sharing technologies. Now I was sweating a bit. Maybe I should have passed the sonar intel up the line. Maybe they should have left me a line.

     Let’s be clear about my job here. My job was to follow procedure and process the eradication of a dangerous species, but while everyone else was being important and tinkering with star systems, leaving me to twiddle my thumbs in a backwater, the little nuisances changed their MO. Against all the odds, not only were they more technologically adept than they had any right to be, but they were using it to be nice to each other. I was supposed to turn up the heat, evaporate the water, scorch the land masses and rid us all of an irksome species with a death wish. I wasn’t supposed to deal with ethical dilemmas caused by some primitive species raising its game. They were going down; Management said so and that, as far as I was concerned, was that. Not my business if there’s a glitch. Especially not when I’ve been LEFT IN CHARGE WITHOUT BACKUP. I cranked up the pumps; the sooner this was done, the sooner I could turn on the heaters and get back to civilisation.

     With that bit of extra juice, the water chugged up and out in double quick time, and left the Adapteds and the Evolveds scrunched up together in their pokey, polluted reservoirs. I dropped a new tube into one of them and the walls collapsed, spilling them all out onto the mud and leaving them flapping in the sun. Extinction came a little early for this batch, I guess. I pulled the tube out and aimed it at another reservoir but when I dropped it, the whole shebang fizzed and spluttered and started waggling around like a worm on a hook. At this rate, it would foul up the whole system. I tried to pull it back but they had hold of it. Down there in that microcosm of spectacular insignificance, a bunch of Drylanders was wrestling with the anchoring field to aim the tube at the desert. Some were being sucked up but they hung on, pushing it further away from the Aquatics still floundering in the murky dregs of their old ocean.

     We should salinate the aquifers. Interesting.

     But then you’ll die. That would save me a job, so thank you.

     You’re more important. No they’re not, we are.

Next thing, the entire planet seemed to be full of holes. They were hauling up fresh water, processing it through filter beds and channelling it into the reservoirs. I kept the pumps on. They got better at diverting them. I threw down more. They blocked them with their invisible fizzing domes. Where had they got energy fields from? Then while I was watching one day, pulling a tight focus on a batch of evacuees being shifted to a new tank, I noticed something. Whether it was the sonar or colour shifting, the fish stuff or the mammal stuff, or some of that extraneous DNA, I don’t know, but they were definitely different. For a start, they were looking more translucent than I remembered, and they had a kind of wired feel, as if they were networked. Then there were the odd-shaped constructions snaking out from reservoir to reservoir, blinking and glowing and humming and pointing up at the spouts. Frankly, their technology was looking as weird as they did with their fins that morphed into fingers, and feet that could be flippers, and those rippling skin tones. In the dark, the whole lot was luminescent, like the entire planet was hooked up and lit up, and it thrummed with low frequency pulses.

     Then the structures pointing up at the spouts dropped inwards and rotated – like an iris closing. The luminescence spread up into the base of the spouts and started them vibrating. You could hear the sonics right inside your head. Were they trying to fracture the up-link? Did they know what that would do to the whole business of propagation of life and equilibrium and the order of things? Did they know –

Neurophilic bacteria. They improve communication, you should try them.

These are the moments that shouldn’t happen. Not just the jumping so far out of your skin your atoms have a job catching up; the two-way dialogue with inferiors. They knew I was here?

You better believe it, Quantum Boy. Now, what do you say we make a start putting jump leads on these tubes and enlightening the multiversal masses about your self-serving, bureaucratic, cosmic dictatorship?

Suzanne Conboy-Hill, unpublished.

Image by DALL-E.