Welcome back to the Atlas, friends.
It is late at night, almost 2:30am, and I should be asleep. Instead I have been obsessively narrowing down the word count for this story. My entry for the Power Up Prompts challenge by Bradley Ramsey, a Level 3 attempt that works with the genre of ‘Superheroes and Supervillains.’
Beneath the story of super powered beings, and nefarious causes, however, is a story about belonging, about ego, and about what it means to not be alone.
To read about the full prompt, check out the post here:
Now, let the story begin. Words: 2896 (Woops, slightly over this time).
The Salt in the Circuitry
My name is Cordie and I am the sea.
Its pulse is in my veins, its words in my ears, its whisper on my lips. I stood high on the city wall breathing in its infinity. Water stretched as far as the horizon and beyond in every direction. I felt it before me, and behind me. Above me and below me. Water was everything and everywhere. Except of course in Ethellion.
The waves crashed against the breakers below. When water reached the walls they fizzled and sparked like arcing electricity. Each time it hissed, the water screamed in anger. Its usual music was a deep vibration born in every atom like a note that described the universe, separated out into multiple layers. The high pitched frills of the sea spray. The low rumbling drones of the swell. They were complete and whole. But when the water hit the city, it turned into a cacophony of noise that only I seemed to hear. Discordant notes. Opposing harmonies. Screeching counterpoints. It was as if the two songs were species from different planets; no bridge could ever connect them.
A swell grew in the distance, the rumbling was getting more intense. A war drum being rolled in the deep, anticipation tumbled together as the momentum of the gathering water groaned into a deadly wave. These attacks happened often, an old hope that something would give. That the walls could ever be breached. I admired the water’s persistence.
Sensing the impending build up of energy, they came. Ethellion’s guardians. A small squad this time. They leapt across the city like chain lightning, pale turquoise, glowing soft bioluminescence. They had no more need of clothes than the wind, and they were far stronger. One landed near me and its shining amethyst eyes looked through me.
“Do not be concerned, we will keep you safe.” The guardian reverberated. I was not concerned, but it was a good show. Turning to the swell growing in the ocean beyond, the lead guardian and the two others nearby reached down and started to pour light from their hands into the city walls. The resonance of the wall grew and the outside layer started to shimmer like an insect’s wing in the sun. Beating a steady electric rhythm that seemed to vibrate like a propeller. Other people on the wall began to clap and cheer. I only watched, mourning the inevitable outcome. I was not concerned. While the Guardians existed, nothing would change. No, my chief concern first and foremost was in making sure that some day, they did fail.
The sea collided with the wall and the guardians’ resonance held. My teeth were set on edge by the fury and rage being poured into the wall outside, to little effect. The songs were just as opposed as ever, and the splinter in the side of the ocean remained, to argue again with the waters wrath another day.
I walked back down from the promenade that ran along the perimeter and back into the city. Its great glass and steel structures stood like a forest about me. Gardens of all kinds lined the neatly arranged roads. Effort had been made to make the city feel natural. Its causeways wiggled and wound amongst verges and canals. Its buildings were jaunty and arranged in carefully planned randomness. What work had to be done in the city was managed by a team of autonomous robots that flitted about like silver hummingbirds, manicuring the illusion of nature. Above the city an energy field absorbed the ‘toxic’ rain of the ocean, cleansing it, and gently letting it fall as soft drizzle. To my ears, the process of cleaning the natural rain was as you might imagine the sound of a small creature being vigorously and unceasingly exfoliated by a sharp food grater.
Beneath my feet I felt the pulse. The artefacts of pained screams, the remains of fear. Sometimes I would feel it directly, most of the time it was just a memory of a headache that scratched at the edges of my mind. The pain was mappable and I had spent the last five years memorising its routes. All roads led to the Ethellion tower in the centre of the city. The tallest structure, a twisting elegant shell-like shape that tips its scalp to the protective shield above, wearing it like a hat. The epicentre of a complex web of hidden piping that permeated every corner of the city in a spiderweb of misery, culminating in that building of guardians.
That was my target. Unfortunately there was only one way in.
The next morning, a scientific-looking woman analyzed my documents.
“You are qualified,” she said, her tone skeptical. “But why would someone so young volunteer for a shortened life?”
“My parents died protecting this city,” I said. “I want to finish their work.” It was the truth, from a certain point of view.
“Very well, Cordelia -”
“Cordie.” I interjected.
“Cordie. Follow me.”
“Hello Cordie.” He said efficiently.
“My name is Mac, and I will be conducting your birth today.” he said, checking the harnesses binding me to the table. I lay naked, shivering.
“Do not be concerned, you are not a prisoner, no, it is simply to make sure that as the serum purges your body and grants you your new powers, you will not lash out accidentally. As you are purged of your life and your ego, you will be like Eve before the snake. Clothes will lose their meaning”.
Mac busied himself about my trapped skin and started to place needles beneath its surface. Each one a bite that sent shivers through me.
“The ocean you see outside is a pathogen. Were it not for the Guardians, it would consume everything it touches, like a potent acid, dissolving as it goes. We developed a vaccine for this pathogen, that vaccine is you. We sterilise the human vessel, changing its oil and upgrading its engine, so that it is a being of pure resistant energy. It is born of that pathogen, it is its antithesis. You will be part of this great city’s immune system. You will be a hero to the people.”
Before I could say anything more, the dialysis machines began to pump. A blue liquid started to filter into it, glowing as the guardians glowed. It hit. Wailing in my bones, a scraping, screeching, sawing sound that was every inch wrong. The time had come, I had prepared my whole life for this, but now that it was here, I was terrified.
Concentrating I put my mind into the state where I was at peak connection. I remembered my mother, her great blue body wrapping around the world. Her organs were the coral. Her heart was the life of the planet.
She studied them. She learnt about their biology. She drew into her the fertilising code and she bore me in her worldly womb. I felt her again now, my mother. The moment had come, the umbilical cord was going to be cut. Like I had been taught, I held in my mind the taste of her. Salt on my lips. I concentrated my entire being on that one sensation, and then wrapped it up tightly in a small box. I placed that box in a sarcophagus, and entombed that sarcophagus deep in my body where the serum would never find it.
The blue liquid moved up the tubes and entered my skin. The pain was incomparable. I felt it - ScrRgHHT -
Salt on my lips
ACkhyUISJM ARGGGHH!
Salt on my lips
KRttThT SCNNNtttttttk. What was left of me screamed and screamed like a sheet of metal being dragged across glass.
Salt on my lips
When my eyes opened again, they glowed blue as amethysts. Nothing remained, but in the corner of my mind a flower blossomed. Salt on my lips. A distant memory. Enough of a memory. It worked.
Three months passed like seconds. The life of a Guardian was first and foremost routine. At night, we slept, linked by our telepathic connection, and we would be force-fed nightmares. The ocean, a demonic maw, consuming everything in its path. We stood tall in front of this creature of ruin. For the others it was a dream almost as real as their waking life. But the salt kept me lucid. I played along, but I saw it for what it was.
During the day, we trained and we served. The pattern was only broken by the emergence of the ocean as it built for another attack, at which point, we held the line.
I was not sure what I was before, but I felt when I looked at the ocean that something was missing. I heard hissing in my ear, like a radio that had lost its frequency. It was like there was meant to be something there, but I couldn’t remember what. All I knew was that there was salt on my lips, and the ocean called it back.
I quickly moved up the ranks of the guardians and became a senior squad leader. Somehow this felt important. As if it was a path that had always been there in front of me. Footsteps felt like they happened in reverse. As if the shape of my feet in the sand appeared before I stepped into it.
I sparred daily with my team. They were good. Jonas was the best of them, stronger, but slower, and he was determined to win against me. He did not know I had an advantage. The salt meant that I could see into our telepathic connection. For the others, telepathy was reading a book. For me, it was riffling the pages, intuiting the story without reading the text. My opponents were like deja vu to me.
Jonas suspected me I think. He noted how I had this skill, and how it seemed different. A particularly deadly suspicion, as he was a zealot. The guardians were more than an occupation for him. I was certain he wished to not only protect the city, but expand it, to fight back against the water.
He looked deep into my eyes and mind.
“You are too quiet in there. Everyone else has some activity, something that gives them away. You… are almost invisible. How?”
I did not know. I just knew that I could taste salt on my lips.
I sensed a tremor in the belly of the city, a pulse wicked and strong. The scream in the pipes became deafening. Ordering my squad to the walls, I headed back to the Ethellion tower and descended into the subterranean levels.
The dark down there was illuminated by my glowing translucent form. The screaming grew louder in my mind. The tang of salt bit at my skin. I followed. I sensed Jonas trailing me in the dark, a shadow within a shadow.
The corridor ended in a blast door that was already open, as if the room beyond was too swollen with power to be contained. I stepped through, and the air immediately tasted of blood.
We were in a glass cathedral, devoted to destruction.
It was a vast, spherical chamber, there hummed a noise so deep it rattled my teeth. In the centre, suspended by gravity inhibitors, was the tank. A torture chamber. Swirling in a vortex of bioluminescent agony, were my siblings. I remembered them. They were not shapeless energy; they were faces, hands, simulacra of the ocean’s consciousness, caught in a centrifuge. Lasers dissected them, peeling away layers of their light to feed the city above. The scream I heard in the pipes was a wall of noise. It was a physical pressure. It pushed against my skin, begging to be let out. My moment of distraction punished me.
“Cordie!”
The mental shout hit me before he did. Jonas slammed into me, pinning me against the gantry railing. His eyes were blazing with the blue fire of the Guardians, his face twisted in grief.
“You led the water here,” he projected, his thoughts jagged shards of glass. “You want to lower the shields? You want to let the monsters in?”
He raised a hand, telekinetic energy gathering in his palm to crush my windpipe. He was stronger than me. He had fully embraced the role. I could not fight him with force; he was a boulder, and I was water. But water does not break rocks by hitting them. It seeps in.
I looked into his eyes. I did not block his mental intrusion. Instead, I opened the tomb in the back of my mind.
Salt on my lips.
I took the flower, that raw, stinging memory of my true mother and the pain of the beings in the tank, and I thrust it directly into Jonas’s cerebral cortex.
Jonas gasped, his physical grip faltering. His eyes widened as the discordant music flooded him. The truth cut through his mind like a surgical knife. He felt the lasers cutting into his own soul. He felt the grief of the ocean mother mourning her stolen children. The nightmare conditioning of the academy shattered like brittle ice.
He fell to his knees, clutching his head, weeping without sound. “We are eating them,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “We are eating them alive.”
“Step away from the recruit, Unit 7.”
The voice was dry, calm, and terrifyingly familiar. Mac stood on the upper platform, flanked by three heavy security drones. He looked down at us, adjusting his spectacles as if he had found a rounding error in a spreadsheet.
“A disappointing outcome,” Mac said, his voice amplified by the chamber. “But biological components are always prone to failure.”
“You’re torturing them,” I said, my voice trembling with fear, but also dancing with the vibration of the room. “You built paradise on a slaughterhouse.”
Mac sighed. “We built a garden in a hurricane, Cordelia. Do you think dry land is a right? It is a privilege. A privilege paid for in fuel. If we stop the extraction, the ocean erodes us in a day. I chose survival. That is the cost.”
He gestured to the drones. Their weapons whined as they charged. “Purge them. Then increase the extraction rate by forty percent to compensate for the loss.”
I looked at Jonas, broken on the floor. I looked at Mac, secure in his arrogance. And then I looked at the tank.
Mac was right. I could not defeat the drones. I could not fight the city with the city’s own power. My resistance energy was finite. But the ocean? The ocean was infinite.
I closed my eyes. I stopped resisting. I stopped holding onto the human shape I had worn for twenty years. I reached out with my mind, past the drones, past Mac, and I touched the glass of the tank.
Salt on my lips.
The water inside paused in its swirling. They heard me. They knew me.
I pulled.
CRACK.
It started as a hairline fracture, a spiderweb of white against the glass. Mac’s composure vanished.
“Wait,” he yelled, stepping back. “Wait, you’ll kill us all!”
The spiderweb spread. The song returned. It was no longer a scream. It was a roar of triumph.
The glass exploded.
There was no time to run. The wave hit us instantly, a wall of pressurized, glowing water. I saw Mac mouth a final, silent scream as the torrent engulfed him. The drones sparked and died. The water hit me mightily, blasting upwards through the ventilation shafts, towards the surface.
I opened my mouth to scream, but water rushed in.
I expected the choke. I expected the burning in the lungs that signifies death.
But there was only... relief.
The water touched my blood, and the resistance serum neutralized instantly. The chemical fire in my veins went out. The scratching dissonance of the city was silenced.
I was not drowning. I was breathing.
The current carried me up, up through the shattered spine of the Ethellion Tower. I burst out into the city streets, but the streets were gone. The shield had fallen. My mother had come home.
The city was submerged in a twilight blue. It was quiet now. The agonizing noise of the shield was gone, replaced by the gentle, womb-like thrum of the current.
I floated near the top of what was once a skyscraper. Around me, the citizens of Ethellion were drifting. They were not panic-stricken corpses. They were swimming in the water, glowing with a soft, internal bioluminescence. As the water permeated the city it integrated everything: animals, plants, and people. The hard lines of the buildings were already softening, barnacles and coral beginning to bloom on the steel.
The people looked confused, but peaceful. The fear, the ego, was dissolving, washing away into the vast, shared consciousness of the water.
A figure drifted next to me. Jonas. The blue fire was gone from his eyes, replaced by a deep, oceanic calm. His human body was restored. He looked at me, and I didn’t need to speak. I didn’t need to project a thought. We were part of the same chord now.
I looked up. The surface was miles above us, a shimmering ceiling of light. The scream was gone. The silence was gone.
My name is Cordie. And I am the sea.
And so Cordie makes it back to her mother. But that begs the question.
Was she right to do so? Did she have the right to choose for all those people the kind of conscious experience they should have.
Does it help to know that the humans were settlers on this planet?
Tell me your thoughts below.
Bradley often adds a song at the end of his posts, so as a sign of respect and admiration. I have included the same.