The Sensory Deception (34 page)

He sees it. A shadow flitting about the cover provided by the ocean floor. Even though it is more than half his length, over forty-five feet, were it not for the movement of the shell-hard hooks at the end of each arm, it would be invisible to him. Those hooks are the squid’s signature. Before the battle is concluded, the meal taken, those hooks will write on his back.

Moby-Bupin lowers himself to the seafloor. The squid doesn’t appear to have seen him. Now, knowing where to focus, Moby-Bupin can make out its features but has to reduce the volume of his sonar probes to avoid alerting the squid. Two flippers along its head, used for guidance, give it the shape of a giant arrow. It has the largest eyes of any creature on earth, eyes so large that it can see in the shadows under a mile of seawater. It uses its own jet propulsion system to zoom from one spot to the next in pulses of acceleration.

Moby-Bupin positions himself and waits. His primary weapon is his jaw, lined with six-inch teeth capable of tearing the rudder from a cargo ship. The enemy has hooks and suckers along each arm and tentacle. The suckers of past combatants left the circular scars across his back. In open sea he can outswim the colossal squid, but he can’t match its acceleration. To satisfy his hunger, Moby-Bupin must rely on guile.

A school of the strangely shaped fish native to these dark depths, their oversize mouths with large underbites full of
freakish teeth, swim past emitting tiny sparks of light that tickle his eyes. Ever so slowly, he coils his flukes, tightening the muscles below his spine degree by degree, readying his strike. As he waits, the coiled muscles threaten to cramp.

In a turbulent blast, the colossal squid emits a jet of water, shooting itself at the school of fish. Moby-Bupin uncoils his flukes and launches on a collision course. The fish detect him first and try to swim clear of his bulk, but to no avail. They bounce from his snout.

The squid pilots toward him, arrow-shaped head first, and then pulls up. It shoots a jet of water to the side, rotating about, trying to prepare its business end for battle.

Moby-Bupin spins to the side. His jaw opens like a sawtoothed switchblade. The squid has rotated far enough that Moby-Bupin misses its head and catches a mouthful of arms and tentacles. The thick, rubbery limbs flip about his jawbone and wrap around his head. A hook on one of the arms catches Moby-Bupin’s eye, tearing into the iris and unleashing a blast of pain.

His first reaction is to shake the squid free, but he is a veteran of these wars and calculation overcomes the instant of panic. Fighting the pull of tentacles, he tries to clamp his jaw shut. He crushes some of the arms, severing a few, but most of them yield between the teeth like so much gel.

The squid takes the offensive. Writhing into position, it buries its beak in the stout flesh of Moby-Bupin’s forehead. His forehead is the blunt-force weapon he’s used to hammer sharks and orcas into oblivion, and this assault infuriates him. He thrashes but can’t dislodge it. It pecks again and again. He snaps his jaw shut, cleaving and swallowing an arm of the squid, but still it won’t yield. The pecking digs a hole through the callused skin and then through the layer of blubber into the seven-hundred-gallon cavity of oily flesh that is integral to his
sonar-based form of sight. Losing an eye is mere pain, losing sonar is certain death.

Pumping his flukes, he propels himself forward and builds velocity. He calculates the precarious balance and then, heedless to suicide, he rams a boulder on the seafloor, crushing the head of the squid between the rock and the crown of his own head. His forehead compresses, and a jet of thick goo streams from the hole that the squid dug. The body of the squid goes limp. The suckers are still attached, but its beak bobs with the current. He twists about, positioning his jaw, and clamps down on the head of his prey.

The battle is won. The tally is the loss of an eye and a gash to his snout—two distinguished scars to add to his collection—and one fine meal.

As he ascends, he chews the great head of the colossal squid, swallowing chunks; when a piece falls to the side, he rolls over and retrieves it. He chews carefully around the shell-hard beak and then swallows it whole. The coarse texture scratches the hungry itch all the way down his esophagus. He rises to the depth where light penetrates and schools of fish join him in the meal. At the surface, he works the still-attached arms of the squid free and then eats them, piece by piece, continuing long after his belly is full.

He rests.

Moby-Bupin does not sleep. He doesn’t know sleep. His state is one of semiconscious relaxation, just awake enough to remember to breathe.

The eye is done. From now, the world will be dark on one side of his body. There is worse damage to his ability to visualize. The hole in his snout will be slow to heal, and until it does, his ability to project the high-volume sound rays necessary for sonar imaging will be inhibited in the direction immediately ahead of him.

With the sun low on the horizon, he sinks into the decadent rest of a glutton.

As he lingers in that state of semiconsciousness, the harmony of living on earth satiates him as much as his squid-stuffed belly. He feels a warm current and casts sonar rays in different directions by reflex—every direction but forward, damn blind spot. Nothing is moving but the occasional ice floe and a few schools of fish. It takes a long time for the question to form: Where have his gentle baleen cousins gone? Why are no other whales about?

As the question forms, the frequency with which he projects sonar increases. Is a pod of orca about? He nearly chuckles inside. With the trail of oily spermaceti still leaking from the wound in his head and the wisps of blood and ooze from his dead eye, he might appear ready for his orca death, but he still packs enough fight to take half a dozen orcas down with him.

But there are no orcas nearby. With the sea so empty, he’d hear their sonar, feel their gaze. He tilts his great aching head to the side so he can image the region before him—damn blind spot.

A star-bright flair ignites the sky above him, followed immediately by a thunderous crack.

A blast of adrenaline jerks Moby-Bupin wide awake. Time slows. He curses himself. The answer to that lingering question: a death ship. No whales for miles means death ship. It had always meant death ship. Even his stupid, plankton-eating cousins were savvy enough to disappear.

The rocket’s trajectory propagates from a death ship floating directly in front of him. Had it not fired, he’d probably have floated right into it.
Stupid!

The adrenaline washes the aches down his back to his flukes and away. He rolls to his blind side, exposing his remaining eye to the screaming-bright missile. The trail of white fire strikes
the water where he had been a half second before. He thanks the squid in his belly for taking his left eye; had he rolled the other way, he’d be dead.

When it hits the water’s surface, the grenade at the tip of the rocket explodes. The water boils in both temperature and sound. Flames burn his back, but that isn’t the worst of his wounds. The explosion deafens him, and his sonar is useless. Moby-Bupin is blind.

Another burst of adrenaline, but this one brings panic. His body is as long as the death ship. His brain is three times the size of that of the man who fired on him. He has lived almost a hundred years in these seas and has skirted the death ships a thousand times.

A thick line of rope trails the harpoon. When the grenade-tip explodes, the sleek rocket-shape expands in a set of barbs that cuts into but doesn’t grab hold of Moby-Bupin’s hide. As the harpoon sinks, the rope falls across his body.

Blind but pissed off, Moby-Bupin drives his flukes. With each motion up and down, his speed builds. It took hundreds of thousands of years to develop his mind into the most powerful imaging device on earth. Though he can’t see right now, can’t create new images in his mind, he has all the necessary data to calculate the position of the ship, still dead ahead.

As he accelerates, the rope attached to the harpoon catches his flukes, but rather than retard his motion, it excites greater anger.

What the image in his mind lacks is a measure of the robustness of the ship’s hull. When uninjured, he can easily determine whether a hull is sound or not. The death ships once reflected his projections with a sturdy echo indicating impenetrable solidity, but that was decades ago. Now they return the sound of dissolving iron, rust, and decay.

He reaches full speed fifty feet from the ship. This power and speed, the frothy wake against his flukes, the sensation of pushing water ahead, the streaming flow along his body, it is all his. He owns this ocean. His anger feels righteous and wonderful. He pulls his left flipper slightly lower. His body shifts a couple of degrees to port so that he can see his target. He retracts the flipper and, with one last, mighty thrust of his flukes, he collides with the center of the hull.

Seventy tons at thirty miles per hour slams against a rusted sheet of steel less than an inch thick.

Moby-Bupin’s final emotion is a paradoxical combination of satisfaction with his world and outrage at the incalculable injustice of evolution.

His last thought:
I am the world’s greatest predator, and this is not how I should die
.

It was only dark for a few beats of his heart.

The light returned, and he was floating in gentle water next to a beach. He looked at his hands, flexed them, positioned his feet on the ground, stood, and walked up the beach.

The sensory saturation chamber opened and Ringo helped Bupin sit up and pull off the VR helmet.

Bupin looked around but didn’t focus. Ringo and Gloria were talking to him. The distraction of his anger prevented him from discerning their words. Still righteously pissed off at the universe, he also felt small and insignificant and as alive as he had ever felt. Seconds ago he had been the most powerful being in the world, and now he was a man. Another man among the billions. Another man carrying evolution’s curse in both hands. The irony filled him with a yearning to return to the sea. He looked at each
thumb. He’d always believed that gray matter processing power was mankind’s providence, but evolution brought processing power to lots of the toothed mammals. It was nothing but folly.

Evolution had played a joke on this planet, a joke that would be funny were it not tragic. He stared at his thumbs, remnants from when his ancestors swung from tree to tree. Appendages that remained even after the strange apes left the safety of trees to run across the savanna. The apes that couldn’t see across the fields died. Just as whales evolved their processing power for sonar, humans developed gray matter for sight. The survivors could see farther and understand faster. But humans had the ultimate weapon: thumbs. He buried his face in his hands and put his thumbs over his eyes. He was just another man with the illegitimate power to slay any other animal on a whim.

He felt like a traitor.

Ringo and Gloria steadied him. Chopper offered a fresh cup of tea. Their touch was kind and generous, but he wasn’t ready.

Then Bupin cried. As the sobs overwhelmed his body, his heart and mind came to several realizations. He mourned the death of the arrogant man who had entered this chamber. That man was gone. Never again would Bupin stand on earth under the illusion that he knew the answers. His eyes focused through his tears and he took in the VirtExReality chamber and the room that contained it. His second realization was that this experience was a miracle. Then he felt shame. He had asked them for sex and violence.

He looked at the faces. There was Ringo: the small black man in the Spider-Man T-shirt. Yes, he was a modern superhero. He turned to Gloria and felt guilt. Gloria had done the right thing in joining this crusade, where he had wanted to disrupt an industry, a petty, trivial industry. Finally he regarded Chopper, still holding out a steaming cup of tea. Something altogether different
built inside him. The guilt and shame evaporated. His ego, now cleansed of arrogance, reassembled itself.

Bupin’s eyes met Chopper’s. Neither man looked away. Bupin started to speak. He had to clear his throat. He accepted the tea and said, “This is the purpose of entertainment. You have fulfilled the promise of every myth and every story ever told.”

And then Bupin wrapped his arms around Gloria and said, “This is the reason we are VCs.”