The watchseed is planted in a watery hemisphere of a watery world. The place spins around a yellow star, wearing its magnetic field like a proud little hat. It’s ridiculous with life.
Hence, a watchseed, with the best of intentions. Let’s give the seed-planters that much. They mean well. Crawling from star to star at not-quite-
This planet is rich in ingredients for misadventure. Down goes the seed.
Two hundred thousand solar orbits, more or less, pass quietly. Then the watchseed wakes up with the unmistakable taste of an atomic weapon in its mouth.
The explosion can’t have been close, but particles of strontium-90 (in the local parlance) must eventually drift down even into the saline blackness of the aphotic zone, twenty-four hundred feet (local parlance) beneath the Pacific Ocean (you get the idea). That isotope has no honest business in the natural world. Created as a fission byproduct, it’s as good as a signature on a confession.
Things begin to happen. Here’s some fine print: receptor polyps close on their activating specks of beta-emitting isotope like eyelids wincing shut over a piece of grit. Sleepy cellular machinery brews hormonal triggers. Pulses of neurochemical go-go-juice hit the ganglial centers of an organism that last twitched before the Great Pyramid was built. Clouds of polysaccharide mucous trickle into the lightless water, forming nutrient bubbles around expansion points. The dormant watchseed has long resembled twenty meters of undistinguished rocky pancake. Now it grows new mouths, strains at the sea, gains mass. The accumulation process will require some time. Then the mass will be used to get someone’s attention.
The seed-planters mean well. In the abstract, they love young thinkers. But young thinkers must be protected from their own worst impulses.
Protected good and hard.
The meeting is ad hoc, a fraction of the presidium. No minutes are kept. The ministers speak through a smokescreen. The tips of their cigarettes glow like airport landing lights in a heavy fog, and there is murmuring and whispering around the table even after the briefing begins.
“…bringing the total to six confirmed sinkings in two days. One American submarine, one American destroyer, two Japanese fishing vessels, and two cargo ships.”
“Comrade Minister of Defense, this is…with all due respect—”
“A waste of your valuable time, Comrade Minister of the Maritime Fleet? You would counsel disinterest?”
“Not at all.”
“This risk moves, comrade.”
“Comrades.” The Minister of Medium Machine Building is hoarse, his voice cracking like frost on a windowpane. “However severe these…incidents are, I hope I might be forgiven my skepticism that the cause is a sea monster!”
“Vyacheslav Aleksandrovich.” The voice of the new speaker is cultured, pleasant. Its owner could use it to curdle milk. All the whispering stops when the chairman of the new Committee for State Security speaks, and he continues: “Imagine your skepticism if someone had told you thirty years ago that an entire city might be destroyed by a single bomb. These days you build them.”
Dutiful chuckles around the room. Beria has been ten kilograms of black grit in a communal grave for nearly a year, but glad-handing the Lubyanka man remains a quality-of-life reflex.
“The American navy has photographs of the creature,” says State Security. “Reuters has film from the deck of one of the cargo ships. First Directorate is still working on securing a copy, but we are confident this footage exists.”
“Or we’re
“Yes, thank you, comrade, I do recall certain briefings on the fundamentals of disinformation, somewhere in my school days.” If it is possible to light a cigarette with dangerous languor, the chairman of the KGB now does this, perhaps using some kind of sorcery.
The Minister of the Maritime Fleet nervously sucks his own cigarette, tastes the smoke of a dozen others. Someone in the room smokes Gauloises. He wishes he knew who to ask for a favor.