Rust Bucket
Sixty feet away, the Rotblatt came flubbering into the outskirts of the headlights. Carapace segmented, twitching in random flutters. Swirling water around its glistering fins. I reached for the light switch, but Becker held my arm back. “It can’t see. The noise will scare it.” We waited for it to maunder into the distance, unknowing, flip-flopping away till its silhouette was murky. Becker silently pulled the motor crank and The Bucket shuddered to life. Creak-crack, creak-crack. A low hum-buzz as he edged the throttle forward. Shrimpy particulates twirling in the water, drifting past us out the porthole. Flashing iridescence under The Bucket’s headlights. Becker’s eyes were glazed and unmoving. How many times had he done this before? Hunched over at the control panel at the front of the hull, head an inch from the brass egg-ceiling. I sat curled up behind him. In the faint red glow of the steam-lamp, I could make out black markings on his sweaty neck: lines etched with motorized precision. Sweat. Hot. God, it was hot. The fetor of metal and the air-taste of rust. We followed behind the Rotblatt as it floundered through the murk, keeping it at the edge of our headlights. No brain or blood. Writhing oxbow-spine. Rising and falling with the undersea currents. I asked Becker where it was headed. “Didn’t they brief you?” He turned slightly towards me. Enough to see his eyes gleam white, cogging and whirring in the darkness. Mine must have looked like that too. The operation was funny—when I blinked I felt little motors twitching. Cameras snap-snapping. The human panopticon. Them, the warden. “Don’t worry,” he said as he looked back to the porthole. “You’ve got nothing but time.” Hesitated. “It’s headed to The Rig.” The Bucket shuddered on cue. Somewhere, far out in the gape, The Rig had begun its cycle. A boiling scream of scraping metal, cogs grinding and clockwork slugging. Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa. We sat and listened to its moans. Rising in squeals and descending to bellows.We proceeded at a constant pace. Soon the water was thick and oil-black. A nebulous shape, blurred and looming, swelled from the gloom in front of our headlights. A support beam. Broad and swollen. Scabbed with gnarled cirripedes. Stretching down, reaching deep into the God-knows-where-blackness. We were in the outskirts of The Rig field. Miles away, the center hammered and drubbed. Thumpa-thumpa-thumpa. Rumble-rumble-rumble. The Rotblatt had stopped in front of the beam. Becker eased The Bucket’s motor off, and its mechanical whirring fell to faint burbles. Crimson in the steam-lamp glow, he pulled a fernglas from his satchel and unfurled it to full length. “Take a look,” he said. I held the lens to my eye and scanned out the porthole. The Rotblatt wavered for a bit, flubbering in the currents. Discerning the surroundings—don’t ask me how. Then, in an instant, it jerked its abdomen back in a gibbous curl. Unsheathing six grabby little pereopods. Ichthyic and poised. With a flutter of its hind fin, it latched onto the rusty surface of the beam, pinching down like a tick into flesh. I heard Becker in my right ear, grumbling in disgust. The Rotblatt hung tight on the beam. Its slick proboscis unfurled from under its rostrum. Prodded the surface a few times before rearing back and thrusting into the metal. It began to feed—clamped taut with scuttle-claws, proboscis waxing and waning like one of those rubber-hose cartoons. Through its translucent carapace I saw rust churning into its stomach. Thorax swelling as it gorged. “That thing will eat through the beam,” Becker murmured. I passed him back the fernglas. “It’s tiny.” “Maybe not alone. Maybe not at once. But imagine tens, hundreds of them, all slurping away at whatever mineral-nosh is inside. Like dropping sugar in a louse nest.” “What happens then?” “What, when they break through?” “Yeah.” “The beam cracks and buckles, I guess. Sinks into the deep. One of fifty supports gone.” “And The Rig—” “—Will be fine. As long as we do something about it.” “And if they all fail? If the whole thing collapses?” “Don’t know. But it sure as hell wouldn’t be good for anyone. Don’t forget—you have a duty now. You gave up choice on the surface.” “I know.” “So let’s do something.” He laced his fingers around the knob to the right of the control panel, sturdied his grip, and cranked down hard. A brief chunka-chunka noise, then a steam-hiss and silence. Outside the porthole the water stirred. Floodlights drawing shadows on the thing sucking and glubbing away at the metal. A hatch door on The Bucket’s outer shell flung open. Out extended a brass arm, dotted with rivets and stained with salt-corrosion. Quick, forceful, but somehow deathly silent. It unfolded its somites, twisting towards the gorging Rotblatt with calculated efficiency. The Rotblatt didn’t move. Latched on too tightly, or didn’t know what was coming, or couldn’t know what was coming. No brain, no blood. The final segment of the arm clunked into place a few inches behind the thing’s carapace. Warped prongs at the end unsheathed Becker’s hand floated to a button below the knob. I saw that funny white gleam in his eye. Whir-whir-whir of tiny cogs clicking and clacking in the iris. Sweat trickling down his graven neck. Finger twitches, nerves fluttering. In an instant, he reared back and slammed the button with a splayed hand. The Bucket moaned and convulsed and yellow sparks bloomed from the ceiling. The headlights flickered violently. In the freezing waters, a blue corkscrew of electric discharge began to surge down the length of the arm. Untamed and dreadful. It reached the terminal prongs and crackled across the synapse, lighting the Rotblatt in a flare of kaleidoscopic wrath. Thunder-clap. Buzz-buzz-buzz. Then silence. The thing made no noise as it boiled away. No brain. The Bucket’s headlights flickered back to normal. Only salt and char lingered in the swirling currents. Later, we were sitting cross-legged on the plated floor, chewing pupae and spitting skins into the waste-drum. “How many cycles has it been for you?” “What’s my neck say?” Becker ran a hand behind his collar. “Sixteen. I saw earlier.” “Hm.” “And how many left?” “Depends on how fast I work. I’m quota-bound.” “I see.” Picked a scrap from my teeth. “You’re young,” he said. “What happened?” “I got three cycles—” “Three!” He laughed through chomping teeth. “So you stole a candy bar? What were they thinking, throwing you down here with me?” “Hey. You don’t know me. Times have changed since you’ve been up there. They don’t hull people for anything nowadays.” “Anything?” “I didn’t steal a candy bar. Worse.” “Oh, good.” He grinned and some pieces fell to the floor. “I’ve killed people.” “I see.” “And I do know you. At least a little. You’re out of your depth, friend-o.” “Oh yeah?” “Oh yeah. I can tell it from your talk. The way you drawww your ‘O’s’ and spit your ‘P’s’. You come from the North. But somewhere else too—you probably had a vacation house.”I didn’t know what to say, so I just stared. “Buying local from reed-farmers. Sundays for watching the big games with the family.” “Want me to apologize for being civilized?—” “Ever been down to Brinescrawl? Seen the sea-shacks? Hope you held your nose. You might’ve smelt me thinning oil in the streets.” My lips twitched and fingers pursed. He saw right through me. “Go on. You’re a tough man. Not a boy. North-boy. Hit me. Spit on me. Do something nasty.” I didn’t. Just stared, and he stared back. Ugly toad face. Beady white eyes. I’d thwack him right there and his jaw would spin. Becker suddenly broke with rip-roar laughter. “It’s too easy,” he cried. “God, I’m sorry. It’s just too easy. A little kid like you. Real tough. Oh, God.” “Fuck you.” But I didn’t really mean it. “Yeah, yeah. Listen, there’s no entertainment in this God-awful eggshell. Every now and again I need to rattle someone to make things less monotonous. Geniality becomes unbearable. I only sort of meant it.” “I’m glad.” “Sort of.” I changed the subject. “How much of your quota do you have left?” “Six thousand.” “God.” “Nine down.” “And how many Rotblatts can you purge? In one night-cycle.” He drew in breath. Canned metal air. “Maybe one or two. Sometimes none. I keep only to the west supports. That’s my territory.” “You never venture out? You might cover more ground. Reach quota faster.” “I do what I’m told.” Face clouded. “They tell me to stick to the west. I stick to the west.” We listened to the burbles of the ocean, the hisses of steam, the click-clack drumming of gears. “I know there are others down here,” he said. “Of course.” “I mean aside from people like you. Others out there in the sea. Sometimes another Bucket comes into my headlights. Always coated in rust. From some far away corner of The Rig field. I can never see inside. The porthole’s stained black.” “What do you do?” “Just stare. I can’t see them. They can’t see me. No way to communicate. Eventually the thing drifts away and there’s only dark again. Don’t know what happens to it.” His rumination was awkward. “Sometimes I wonder what kind of life they lived, you know? The other guy, trapped in that corroded exo-shell. What kind of things they’ve done to waste away in K-Corp’s bowels. Hundreds and thousands of night-cycles flying by on the surface, and the only indicator down here a little beep and analog number flick. What kind of person would face something holy and righteous, and end up here?” “A person like you.” “A person like me. “I didn’t take you for a theist.” “I’m not.” “Then K-Corp, God?” “What’s the difference?” “One’s worth reverence.” “Hah. Reverence got you far.” “It’ll matter when I’m up there. Not back on the surface: I mean when I’m gone gone. I’ve done bad things in the eyes of a corporation. You’ve done bad things in the eyes of The Lord.” “Omnipresent, all-pervasive, more-or-less infinite. The power to bless and to damn. The arbiter of good and bad: please it and be rewarded, wrong it and plunge into Limbo-realm.” Behind us, the alarm screamed a reminder of the time. “And my question still stands.” “I guess we’ll find out,” I said. “At least I will.” “I’ll be praying for you.” He leered. Hours went by. We had switched on the anchor system and The Bucket hovered in situ. Adjusting gyroscopically to each push and pull of the sea-current. It was Becker’s turn to sleep. Splayed on the cot in the back, breath shuddering up and down as he mumbled some woman’s name. Eyes open wide—cogs clicking and motors still burring behind those glazed lenses. You got used to it, apparently. I slouched, feet up on the control panel. Gazed out at the void. With the headlights off, the porthole might as well have been painted black. No quota had been fulfilled for a while—everything must have roamed somewhere further down. We could move once Becker woke. Nothing to kill but time. So I breathed hard, braced myself, and squeezed my eyes shut. Longer than a blink. One. Two. Three. Four— —Four and a half seconds, it took. For that fevered singe of pain to begin swelling from the back of my skull. My eyelids instinctively flew open and it ceased as quickly as it began. Damn it. Control yourself. Closed them again. One. Two. Three. Four— It was an artificial pain, galvanic. Only a warning at first, designed to trigger the autonomic nervous system. —Five. Six. Seven— Squeezed my eyes harder still. The pain got worse. Uncoiled from the back of my skull, tendrilled across and pummeled my frontal lobe. Pound-pound-pound. The wardens, lashing my eyelids, banging at the door, pleading for their kidnapped sight. Anything could be happening behind that wall of tissue. Disobedience, roguery, rebellion. Something terrible. Felt the little gears and heard the cogs rattle in a lurchy, turbulent frenzy. Ululating with clicks and clacks. I chomped down on my lip and felt it swell with blood. —Eight. Nine. Ten— Couldn’t take it anymore. Vomit burbled in my gut and my eyes flung open. That counterfeit pain, those throes of fire, they scuttled back into their pothole and left me to slump down on the control panel, gasping for soup-can air. Becker stirred behind me but didn’t wake. His eyes gaped emptily. Later, Becker showed me the ropes. “Pull up on the hand-crank. Hard.” I followed his instructions as he crouched over my shoulder. Ca-chunk. “Twist left till you feel it snap into place.” Creak-creak. Snap. The Bucket jerked and a red light indicator on the ceiling blinked twice. Its gyroscope disengaged. “Now you’ve got full control,” Becker said. “Ease the crank forward. Real slow, or you’ll burn out the motor.” It whirred rhythmically before the ship stooped down and began to drone forward. “Good job. There’s a drift to the left in the rudder, so you’ll need to adjust as you steer.” I grasped the helm and twisted it right. The Bucket moaned and reared accordingly. Twisted left. It worked, but barely. Like a wounded animal. “This is a piece of shit.” “Yeah, it’s a piece of shit. It’s pre-war.” “Don’t they ever send down repairs? You’d think it would make the whole operation more efficient.” Becker just laughed. I must have cranked too hard. The motor lurched and shuddered into silence. “Shit, sorry.” “Nah, it happens. Give it a few minutes.” “I’m happy to let you do the driving.” “No, no. You’ve gotta learn. Or else we’re only quota-filling when I’m awake, and you’re down here for no reason. Just another thing to break the peace and quiet. “You’d rather me gone? I thought our relationship had started to flourish beautifully.” “Oh, you’re good for some things.” Becker smiled. “A change of pace from the fare I’ve been munching for so long.” He theatrically licked his lips. “Better watch out, North-boy.” “How riotous.” “Always happy to entertain.” Ca-chunk, buzz-buzz, as I engaged the motor once again. The Bucket resumed its amble into the wake. “There’s a beam up ahead.” Becker scanned with his fernglas. “Do you ever feel bad?” “What?” “About the Rotblatts.” “What are you talking about?” “I… nothing.” “Stop the motor.” I obeyed and The Bucket slumped into immobility once more. Headlights still blazing, but swallowed up before they could explicate anything from the murk. An allusion of the vast black tubing of a beam. “Let’s get a little closer.” I started for the motor-crank. “Wait. Don’t.” Becker held my arm with one hand, the other keeping the fernglas poised. “I can’t see shit.” He passed me the tool. Eyes twittering, neck craned forward. “What is that?” I held it to my face and stared through the fish-eye lens. Feculent contours of dark and darker. Impossible to distinguish, to me at least. “A support beam. Like you said.” “No, no.” Snatched the fernglas back. “On its side. Look, there’s something on its side.” Maybe he had been fitted with oculars—his eyes were buzzing and clicking a great deal. “I can’t see,” I said again. “We should move closer.” The sea responded with a sway from some distant current. It drifted The Bucket forward, causing bow-side shadows to bloat and curdle. Silhouettes shed their blackness. Outside the porthole, our headlights finally graced the object with their crimson glow. “What the fuck—” The Rotblatt hung to the beam like a chancroid. Slopping and glutting. Carapace glassy, umpteen jelly-organs seething underneath its exoskeleton. The proboscis, quivering and swelling in rhythmic glubs, siphoned minerals into its tangled network of stomachs. How hideous it was! Blistered nails raking at the metal, twitchy protein-growths protruding from its clam-shell hide, keratin fins flip-flopping and thrashing and churning the water black as it gorged— “I never saw one that big,” Becker whispered. He was right, I realized. The thing seemed nearly the size of The Bucket. Two ovoid shapes, afloat in interminable waters—one of brass and one of flesh. “Never, ever. It doesn’t happen.” “We’re further down. I’d think the environmental differences—” “Kid, I’ve been deeper than you could imagine. I’ve had to boot up the auxiliary pressure field to not get pulped. They don’t look like that. Never have.” Even through the stew of oil-water, through the meter of hull and haze of bottled air, you could almost hear the thing’s wet smack-smacking, smell its clotted marrow, taste the ichor from its cankered thorax. “Disgusting fucking thing,” Becker spat. “Thought the little shrimpy ones were bad enough. Whatever the fuck that is…” The Rotblatt belched some ropy discharge. “Eating itself sick. Oh, just you wait. I’ll make it fry.” He reared back his hand, button red and glinting in its path. “Wait, wait, stop. What are you doing?” “What’s it look like, friend-o? My duty to this modern workplace, that’s what I’m doing.” “You said it yourself. That one’s not normal.” “Yeah, it’s not. And? How much extra are they paying you to care? I see an exoskeleton, I see fat quivering underneath it, I see six grabby little bug-legs and a foul sawtooth mouth—I smell quota in the water. You should too.” “I’m telling you, let’s hold off for a second and—” “And twiddle our thumbs while that thing glubs its way through the beam? Fuck that. You’ve got some nerve.” “Becker!” “What?” “I’m serious. Look at the size of it. How do you know the charge will even be enough for vaporization? “I knew a guy in mechanics on the surface. He said sometimes a green-faced recruit would brush against an old Bucket’s synapse in the junkfield. All rusted and unused, dripping in sargassum. You’d hear a thunderclap from across the yard, and in the morning they’d have to scrape him from the ground to mail to his family. Yeah, the charge’ll be enough.” “You’re being a fool.” “Say that again, North-boy. I dare you.” Eyes suddenly locked on my neck. I held my tongue. “Now let go, or I’ll let your spine breathe some fresh air.” He shoved me off and I slumped back into my seat. “Enough of your whining. Let’s parboil the fucking thing.” His hand flew to the button once more. It went click-clack and the electro-sequence started. The Bucket grumbled and embers sputtered from the ceiling. The segmented arm shot out from the trapdoor, slithering towards that crustaceous lump of viscera, of keratin, of nerve-cells, of crab-claws. The shock was on its way, it was coming fast, and Becker fluttered his lips with orgasmic anticipation. But the blue crackles never arrived in the synapse; the thunderclap never rang in our ears; the waters never turned boiling and stormy; the thing never bloomed into atoms of indetermination. No—when The Bucket’s arm snapped into place, transistors waiting for that buzz-buzz-buzz, the Rotblatt made a sound—it made a sound—and spun around in the water with alarming poise until its underbelly faced the porthole. Snapped its legs back, body a rigid curl, and from a fissure between its appendages spewed a blinding ray of light, followed by an electric, sonic crack. For a moment I saw daybreak, or something like it: The Bucket was ablaze, and its shadows dissolved into a brilliant white-scape as electrical discharge enveloped the hull. A newborn star raging in trench-black seawater. Then the red-blue-green splotches of screaming, damaged rods as we shot into darkness. “Fuck. Fuck fuck.” The white noises of the ship had slowed to a halt. I had tuned them out before, but now their absence was startling. The lights were off, the hum of the motor was off, the steam-spritzes of the air-processors were off. Everything was off. Fuck indeed. “Becker!” “There are flash-lamps on the back wall.” “What?” “Jesus, on the wall! Grab them!” I spun around and groped till I felt the light resting in its socket. “There’s only one.” “What?” “There’s only one flash-lamp.” “Shit!” I tore it out and shook it violently to start the chemical reaction. It cast a feeble neon glow across the cockpit, just enough to see Becker’s panicked eyes and haggard skin. “All the systems are fried,” he said, flipping levers wildly. “It was a TED.” “A TED?” “Transient electromagnetic disturbance. The Rotblatt, it used some kind of electric pulse.” “Nope. I’ve never seen it before. They don’t even have fucking brains.” “Maybe not, but right now our ship is dead and floating in the water because you got trigger-happy. So if you want to talk about brainless—” “Enough!” His voice cracked. Then he took a deep breath. “Let’s not lose our heads.” “Of course. I’m the one who should stay calm.” “The air-processors are hooked up to the main power.” “I don’t hear them anymore.” “Yeah, they can’t recycle carbon with a fried fucking battery.” “How much do we have in the meantime?” “No idea. Could last us hours. Could be minutes. No huffing and puffing, alright? We have to stay relaxed.” “I find that difficult, knowing we’re already dead.” “Already dead? No. We’re not. We just need to give this piece of shit a jolt.” Becker got down on his knees and started knocking the ground with his knuckles. Thump. Thump. Thump. Clang. A patch of tin floor rang hollow. He dug his nails under the tile and pried it open. A little compartment—and inside sat a sleek, double-barreled instrument with a coiled lead cell hanging off its back grip. “You thought K-Corp wouldn’t be prepared for something like this? “I suppose I didn’t.” “They’d be losing Buckets left and right,” he said as he held the device up to the flash-lamp like a relic. “It’s a defibrillator. We can jump-start the battery. We’ll be okay.” “You can’t access the battery from the hull—” A grinding bellow careened through the water and sent us tip-turning. A foghorn, or a war-cry, or the scraping of chains in the darkness. The Bucket trembled violently—and there was the sudden sensation of vast upwards motion beside us. Out there in the deep, movement. “Wait,” I said. “Becker.” We rattled in the wake of some great stirring thing. “Not from the inside hull. We’ll have to—” “Becker.” “What?” “Becker, look.” I was holding the flash-lamp up to the porthole. He came over and pressed his face against the pane. The water, thick and glimmering neon-green, lapped against the glass with each roll of the current. “I don’t see anything.” “Yeah. Where’s the beam?” “The beam?” “We haven’t moved,” I said. “The Rig support. It’s gone.” He checked again. Nose flattened up against the glass like a pig. No shapes swam in eyeshot. “Maybe the pulse sent us wheeling somewhere else.” “I don’t think so. We would’ve felt the pressure change.” “We gotta get this defibrillator up and running.” “You didn’t hear that noise?” “It’s the ocean. It’s The Rig field. Nightmare-sounds are like the twittering of birds.” “But—” “Frankly, I’m more concerned about the fact that we’re running out of fucking air. You’re white-faced because you think you heard a ghost.” The Bucket shuddered and groaned. That sonorous bellow again, this time echoing from somewhere above us. I pushed up against the wall to balance myself. Steady, steady— —something cut through the water. Meters from the ship. Its fissle and whoosh racked the hull. I stumbled to the other side and held up the flash-lamp again—and in the chemical-green flare, through the window-fog from where Becker pressed his meaty head, outside of our dwarf, brown, decaying bubble of waning air, crawling under the pressure of a hundred thousand pounds of ink-stained sea, The Rig’s support beam shot across our field of view. Becker let out a stifled “yuh!” and careened back from the porthole. Knocking over cans of crusted soup and mineral-blocks. What was once a rusted, fixed rail, immovable and moored to some far-down seabed, swam and writhed in front of our eyes. At each rivet, the metal—was it even metal?—fissured, and each segment moved back and forth in its joint, synchronizing into fluid, organic movements. It wasn’t a support beam; it was some biomechanical tentacle, or black iron snake, or a living noose searching for something to choke. It moved and curled and stretched out from the murk, and if it was true that somewhere, far out in the deep, the beam held up the body of The Rig— I imagined, miles away, that vast thump-thump-thumping shadow heaving its gnarled body across the seafloor. The beam-tendril swam and curled, then spanned downward into the void and went taut again, fastened onto some solid surface down there. “That’s an animal,” Becker said. “See that? It’s a fucking animal. It’s moving, it has nerves.” He looked down at the defibrillator clasped in his white hands. “An animal!” “Look. Look at the rivets. It’s made of metal.” “It’s got skin.” “No it doesn’t. It’s metal. Corroded steel.” “How the fuck is it moving?” “I don’t know. But it can’t be an animal.” Something came towards it from the blackness. Another Rotblatt flubbered across our field of view. It stopped at the tentacle-thing and began its carnal dance. Latched onto the surface and started to swell. I saw Becker’s face hollow. “It’s feeding them,” he said faintly. “I know.” “No, no. It’s feeding them.” “Yeah, I know—” “They aren’t parasites.” “What?” “Not parasites. They’re not eating away at it. It’s feeding them something.” I think he was right. Through the translucent exoskeleton, the Rotblatt was shining a faded blue as it gorged. Swirling, bioluminescent stuff, sapping out from the beam, dripping into its gut.“Calf to a cow,” Becker said. “Bee to a bloom.” The Rotblatt belched. “That’s why it had the TED. That’s why it was so big. That stuff is giving them superpowers. Cramming battery-acid down their gullets.” “And why would it do that?” “Protection? A bulwark of shrimpy flesh. Hundreds of thousands of brainless things floating around in an endless sea—so you turn them into cannon fodder. Make an army.” “You came up with this theory just now?” I said. Jesus. Spiraling into mania. “Snap out of it.” “By all means, offer a more plausible explanation. Give it a whirl.” “They sent us to purge Rotblatts. If you’re right, why would K-corp want them dead? Kill off what’s protecting the thing they created? Silence. “Created?” Becker spoke softly. “We just saw that ‘machine’ turn organic.” “And? Spit it out.” “Maybe The Rig isn’t K-corp’s design.” “We’re down here to stop little leachy fuckers from ripping a hole—” “You have no idea why we’re down here. It’s feeding them. Feeding them. You still think K-corp wants The Rig preserved?” “I…” “This isn’t for protection. We’re meant to wipe out its defenses.” He looked so small. Head sticking out the brass rim, neck waning into the cavity of the Dropsuit. You almost wanted to laugh—but the fear in his eyes would have soured your conscience. The great arms of the suit hung down and channeled into thick rubber gloves. Defibrillator clutched tight. Inside that hulking shell was the skeleton of a very scared man. I heaved the helmet off the floor and jacked it up with my knees. Becker didn’t break eye contact as I swung the fifty-pound sphere over the suit. It swallowed his head, click-clacking into place with a belch and a steam-hiss. Standing there now was an unholy figure—shoulders broad and armor-plated, welded brass rivets and copper lugs bulging, thick fetal tubes roping into the back of the suit and spurting some cocktail of air and nutrient-gas into its chamber. Rhythmic wheezes. Cak-shhhh, cak-shhhh. The Dropsuit helmet stared at me with its cyclops eye and all-too-big head. Becker’s voice was tinny and far away. “The orophone transmits straight to my implant.” He produced a little earpiece and head mount. I fastened it to the side of my head. “I won’t be able to see out there. Even if I had a flash-lamp, the helmet blocks out all light.” The cyclops swayed, trying to balance under its own crushing weight. “I can disengage the battery-latch with my eyes closed. But I sure as hell can’t insert the defibrillator blind.” “What should I do?” “The proximity indicator.” Becker pointed to a black analogue screen on the control panel. “Only part of the ship powered by hydro-cycling. Switch it on, and you’ll see how close the defibrillator is to the terminal socket. You’ll need to guide me through the orophone.” “Fuck. I can’t do this. You’re going to die.” “It’s in your best interest to make sure that doesn’t happen, North-boy,” the cyclops said. “Maybe I’ll be pulped, but if I’m gone, you’ll be smacking on dwindling air till your head pops. What’s the better way to go?” I didn’t respond. The Dropsuit was a shadow against the neon-green walls. Legs shoulder-width apart and arms splayed out. The Vitruvian Man. Hunkered in the little closet-room at the back of the hull. “Okay. Seal the hatch.” I cranked the drop-pod door shut and locked it with a twist of the gearwheel. Procedure was a-go. I heard the bottom hatch crack open, The Bucket wallowing to the ocean’s chorus of burbles, and through the little window the closet-room flushed with black water and oil as Becker plunged out of sight. Alone, for the first time in forever. And somewhere below my feet, an utterly blind man began to fumble his way across the exterior hull. Soon I saw the underbelly of the suit pass across the porthole. Half floating, half clambering up to the top of the ship. Dull whumps as each gloved hand pressed against the metal. “Can you hear me?” I tapped the orophone on. Indistinct burbles, static hums. “Becker, can you hear—” “Yeah, yeah, I can hear you.” The transmitter spat and yowled before settling to a bearable volume. “I’m at the battery-latch now—I can feel the handle.” I flipped a switch on the control panel and the analogue screen flickered to life. Nothing displayed—then a flashing green dot began to blink as I heard Becker rip the sheath off the battery compartment. “I see the defibrillator,” I said. An oval shape marked terminal appeared on the left side of the screen, unmoving. The blinking green dot wavered on the right. 0.79 meters, the screen beeped. “0.79 meters from the socket, it says.” “High? Low? I can’t see at all.” “A little high.” “Okay.” The blinking dot shifted down in response. “A little more.” Settled to the correct latitude. “That’s it. Right in line.” “You’re sure?” “Uh. Yeah. Yes.” “Okay. I’m insert—” Another wail from the orophone and a sputter of electro-interference. Something heavy clattered the outer hull and metal-soot rained from the rivets up above. Clang-clang-thump-thump. The flashing green dot on the monitor blipped out of existence. “Motherfucker!” Becker’s voice cut through the static. “Oh God. Something fucking hit me.” “What was that noise?” “I got slammed into the hull. God damnit. Did you see anything?” “You didn’t drop—” “No, no. Jesus, no. The defibrillator’s fine. I think.” I pressed my face up against the porthole and craned to get a better look. Just oil-blackness. Particulates sparkling green as they floated near the porthole’s glass. “Did you see what knocked me over?” Voice cracking. “I can’t see shit.” But then I could. A shape, blooming into focus from the ink. It was a Rotblatt. Body curled and shrimpy, organs sagged and quivering, claws poised and whetted, bumbling from the darkness into flash-lamp’s glow. Big as a truck. Fifteen, twenty feet of no-brain, no-blood, fat corpuscular stuff. Vile thing! “A Rotblatt, Becker!” “Where?” “Port side. That’s what hit you. It’s coming again.” It spun back to face The Bucket. There might have been hundreds of pygmy claws, flit-fluttering below that keratin-shell. “Shit. Becker, you need to hit it with a shock.” “From the defibrillator? I’m blind.” “It’s almost on you again. Turn and shove the prongs forward and you’ll hit flesh. It’s here!” “Where?!” The massive thing reared up out of sight. Back to the top of the ship where Becker flailed. “Port side! No time! Fry it!” “Gnaah!—” A blink of white and a sonorous clap. Squealing, squealing. Ee-ee-ee. The Rotblatt pinwheeled back into the inkwell-wake. “Holy shit,” Becker gasped. Alone again. “It’s gone?” “I think so. Hurry up—there could be more.” “They’re trying to kill us. They’re soldiers.” “Get the defibrillator back in place.” “I can hear them burbling in the distance. I’ll die out here.” “No you won’t. Just jump the power and get back inside.” “Okay.” He sniffled, pulling himself back together. “Yeah, Okay. I’m trying again.” The green blip on the monitor resumed its flashing. 0.96 meters. “A little farther up,” I directed. “Good. Now insert it slowly.” 0.54 meters. 0.26. 0.1. A stifled cry of relief from the orophone. “I felt it lock. It’s in the socket.” Becker laughed. “Fuck, we’ll be alright.” “Fire it up.” “Will do. Shocking—” And then there was another sound. And my ears bled. Head rolled down onto my chest and let out an ‘”ungh” as my vision went all swimmy and fucked up. I collapsed on my hands and knees and felt warmth trickle down my cheeks. Painting the tin floor crimson. The whine of tinnitus. Hum in the drum. A sound of scraping metal, of retches and wails, of twisting bones and sloughing flesh. No. It was nothing like that. Decibels are just numbers. Noises are just waves. It was the sound of nightmares and sin and anguish and bane. What clangor reverberated through the water made my head fry and my thoughts go black and wretched. Oh God. Oh my God. The shriek of The Rig. That’s what it was. The shriek of The Rig. It stopped for a moment. I heaved my head from the floor. Lunatic chorus warbling in my brain. On my hands and knees, I started to yammer through the orophone. Could barely hear myself through the blood clotting in my screaming ears. Becker, out there in the salt, without that protective meter of solid brass… “Becker… Becker, are you… fuck… are you there?” Nope. “Becker…” Stumbled to my feet. Vomited. “Becker, answer me!” Nothing. No, no, no. “Jesus, tell me you’re okay!” “Damn.” A single crackle of transmission. “Becker? Hello? What—” “Damn it.” “Are you hurt? That sound. That sound, it was—” “It’s over.” His voice was calm. Horribly calm. “This whole thing is done.” “…What?” The green dot on the analogue screen had stopped beeping. Just blipped out of sight. And I saw the white glint of the defibrillator in the water. Outside the porthole. Suspended animation, like a bad dream. Slowly sinking out of view. Swallowed by the brine. “I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry. It’s over,” the transmitter crackled. He had dropped it. Just like that, he let it go. A snap of your fingers and click of your heels, boom, bam, bop—the defibrillator was in his hands, and then it wasn’t. Soon it would be another piece of rusted mechanical bric-a-brac, littering the seafloor like cysts. Disgraced human achievement decaying millions of miles below our feet. “That noise. It was so sudden, I tried to hold on, I just… fuck.” In another life, crickets would chirp to fill the hollow silence and we would all laugh at the situation’s perfectly orchestrated turmoil. Like a bad circus-act. Another, kinder life. “There’s no backup?” There was no answer to my question. And that was enough. “It’s over.” “Well,” I said dumbly. “Shit.” The green glow of the flash-lamp was beginning to wane. I smacked it and it freshened up again. Wouldn’t hold much longer. “I’m scared. I haven’t been scared in so long.” Crack-crack-crack, spat the transmitter. I didn’t know how to respond. “The Rig. It’s here with me. It’s close, I can feel it. That noise… I’m gonna meet the thing that made that noise.” He was right. You could hear its presence. “Oh God, I’m so fucking scared. Gonna meet the thing that made that noise.” The sound of ancient movement surrounded us. Faint, but pervasive. Swimming to my ears from the oil-depths and making the walls shiver with pressure and echoes and dread. It had arrived. The body of The Rig. The plat de jour. Dragged itself towards us on its miles and miles of warped tendrils, tearing a path through undersea mountains and clambering in and out of chasms, screaming blight and fever like brimstones clashing together and flames erupting from their noxious sparks. The Rotblatts had fled, made way for their monarch. Oh Lord, here it comes, jaunting from the banks of the River Styx. Slinking across the red plains of oblivion. Hell-bringer, a fire in its eyes. If it had eyes. I held the flash-lamp up to the porthole again. Couldn’t see anything, and I didn’t know if I wanted to. “We’re expendable. To K-corp, at least. I know it’s true,” the transmitter said. “They want The Rig gone. They want it hurt. So we’re dropped into this black place to face the music. Chucking pebbles at the big bad wolf. No brains, no blood.” I’d heard that before. Where had I heard that before? “Wait, you said it yourself—you’ve seen other ships. Someone might find us. It’s just a matter of time—” Something that sounded like laughter, but warped past recognition. “What the fuck are you laughing about?” I yelled. “Keep praying, North-boy. Keep on a-praying.” “Becker!” “No brains, no blood. Fuck that. I’ve got blood. Sure as hell, I’ve got blood.” A sudden wail of garbled interference drummed in my implant. Just for a few seconds—and when it ceased, the white-noise crackle of static was gone. Total silence. The line was severed. He had ripped out the Dropsuit’s orophone. No, no, no. Thump-thump-thump from the top of the hull. The pitter-patter of gloved hands pushing off against metal, moving across the ceiling. Departing his perch at the battery-latch—AWOL. Soon I saw the Dropsuit drift into the porthole’s field of view. Untethered, free-roam, defying gravity and common sense, Becker floated away from The Bucket and towards the darkness where something abominable writhed. It was his eleventh hour. It was his last stand. I know, because there was something in his right hand. Clutched between gloved fingers, no bigger than a pen—a little stick with a boiling red cap. Thumb resting on its tip. Snaking from its backside, a thin wire disappeared into a pocket on the Dropsuit’s chest, like a pocket-watch. A pocket-watch that could raze a building, that could set fire to the sea, reduce organic stuff to tiny strands of disjoined carbon with a pop of a button and a prayer to God that it would be quick. Yeah. Just like a pocket-watch. K-corp’s final line of defense. Equipped on every Dropsuit they pumped from the factories. (Gee, looks like you’re in a real pickle, huh? Ship’s bust, floating in the ocean with something big and dark and desperate to turn your skin inside-out. You wanna be a patriot, huh? Go out with a… bang? Wink. We’ve got just the thing.) I know he couldn’t hear me, yet I screamed and banged on the porthole anyway. The idiot could kill himself if he wanted. But I knew from the briefings: the explosion radius was vast. The Bucket would rupture. Clap of light in the deep and two souls snuffed out. I banged and screamed, and the sound never reached Becker’s ears. (It’s easy! Unzip, flip, and click. You won’t feel a thing. Better than the alternative, huh?) I don’t know what his plan was. How he would know when to detonate. With the visor blocking his vision, he clung to blind faith alone. Drifting further into the wake, fingers caressing the bright red cap, itching for something to let him know it’s go-time. He was in the outskirts of my flash-lamp’s glow, but in the fading light I thought I could see his arms trembling, and I couldn’t tell if it was from fear or dread or the same kind of predatory anticipation he displayed when he turned Rotblatts to shrimp-mash. The Rig drummed and whirred. Still couldn’t make out its shape. “Fuck! Jesus, Becker, don’t!” He stopped drifting forward and oriented himself upright. Held out his right hand, thumb an inch from the button. “Becker!” There was no need for my cries. With horrible speed—freakish and teratoid and bizarre speed—the black tendril, once a barnacled support beam, lurched from the gloom. With a figure as reference, you could truly see its tremendous size: as thick as Becker was tall. Interlocking rivets and armor plates writhed, and I saw that in between the cracks was tissue, or meat, or some kind of corporal stuff. In an instant the beam was on him. Ropy feelers sprung from its tip. Tens or hundreds of them, all wrapping around the Dropsuit and spinning him violently, like a spider trussing a fly. Clenching him as tight as he held the detonator only moments ago. Because now the little red stick was floating next to him. It had been knocked out of his clutches. He couldn’t move. Couldn’t reach through the mass of throbbing tendrils gluing his arms to his sides and snaking across his chest and back. He had stopped spinning, but The Rig gripped him upside-down with its ‘hand’, just holding him in place. And I saw the background change. A distortion in the swelling darkness. (Drumroll please! Here we go!) The Rig came into the light with the weight of an ancient monument, pushing millions of tons of water out of the way as it unveiled its body from the thick of the sea. Becker remained still, locked in place. It wanted him to see. The thing was vast. Incalculably vast, incomprehensibly vast. I couldn’t tell where its figure ended and darkness began. It was all darkness. Just a cloud of abstraction and conglomerate of epic, indeterminate shapes, marred by hundreds of tentacle-things jutting from somewhere deep in its core and spanning miles and miles across The Rig field. It was real but it wasn’t, it was there but it couldn’t be, and I feared that if I tried to frame it in comprehensible thought my brain would go kaputt. I wondered what Becker was thinking. Blood pooling in his head. If he was still conscious. Its ‘head’ craned forward. I call it that only because of the eyes—I know they were eyes—two tremendous disks of light that flickered awake and illuminated Becker in a dazzling yellow spotlight. Like the head beams of a truck. Examining the scant scrap of meat clenched tight in its digits. Luminous rays hung in the water around Becker’s suit, dancing on the edges of his silhouette, his backside a pitch-black shadow. He looked like an astronaut facing the sun. Fire in its eyes. The tendrils gripping the Dropsuit began to tighten. Trembling as the suit’s rubber bulged and swelled between each coil. He was gone already. I closed my eyes. Couldn’t watch. I guess I forgot about the pain. In an instant those bruising lashes drubbed against my frontal lobe, crying out for light, pleading for me to return their vision. I tried to hold them off. I really did. Squeezed my eyes shut, harder still, until I could hear the implant rattling in my head with a frenzy of fevered agony-jolts. It was too much. All too much. I jerked open my eyelids. Just in time to see that the Dropsuit was hideously deformed. As the black feelers clamped tighter, Becker’s head ballooned and convulsed wildly. His limbs curled and writhed like rubber-hose cartoons. And I watched, I had to. Couldn’t look away. Pop goes the weasel. Couldn’t look away. Pop went the weasel, as the suit imploded. If there was a sound, I didn’t hear it. Red grease in the water. Rags and shrapnel and hair swirling in the icy currents. A teasing white glint of bone, poking from a flayed chunk of sinew. The beam-tentacle slunk back into the wake. And my flash-lamp let out a final, pitiful spurt of light before petering into total darkness. Fuck. I’m flotsam now. I don’t know how long its been. I can taste the air. It’s thin. The walls are cold to the touch. Sunlight reaches about a thousand meters into the sea before it’s snuffed out. A thousand meters—a fraction of the depth at which I float now. It’s not even dark. It’s just nothing. I don’t see black, I see nothing. And yet, I’m alive. A meat-pawn sent with a knife to a gunfight. K-corp’s trash. Fodder against an arcane enemy. Even they don’t know what it is. I’m sure of it. But I’m still here. Still kicking, still waiting. Waiting for those distant Buckets to grace me with their sunken headlights—to drift, from some far-flung latitude, into the porthole’s frame and flood my brain with something other than pitch-black thoughts. Waiting to be relieved from indeterminacy, from this mushy place, this Limbo-realm. A living man. A breathing man. A man who can pray. And I’ll keep on praying. Oh God, I’ll keep on a-praying. Credit: Inigo Hare Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on Creepypasta.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed under any circumstance.