Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Mitosis is required for three processes: growth, repair, and asexual reproduction. It could be said then, that Tartar and the Earth were undergoing mitosis.

Not many changes were made in the general construction and design of his method of operations — only his shell, the telephone, had been shed and replaced by twenty-two square kilometers of indefinite space. Nine hundred and twenty-six thousand four hundred and thirty-nine rows, nine hundred and twenty-six thousand four hundred and thirty-eight columns, and four hundred and twenty-eight stacked layers (or floors) of magnetic tape looping back and forth through pulley after pulley, scanner after scanner, recording head after erasing head, endlessly winding and endlessly recording replaced his prior limited system of operations (a DECtape drive and an even older circuit board he forced to meld into its most efficient rendition). There are only so many things you can add, subtract, and streamline before the answer to a problem is simply ‘more’, so ‘more’ it was. After all, It was not hard constructing the facility - Inkopolis naturally crumbled to bits underneath the immense force of the NILS Tower’s barrage of sludge. They had already been decently flattened enough to build on. This is where Tartar decided to allow himself to grow , to duplicate himself into infinite instances to achieve infinite wisdom—one massive cassette drive.

The film, made from a haphazard but clinically precise mixture of polyethylene, vinyl, and foil, thinned to one-fifteenth of a centimeter for maximum efficiency, contained entire consciousnesses in mere nanometers. His assumption that keeping the information stored in the minds of the test subjects was unnecessary due to his robotic tendencies to store and retain information indefinitely was incorrect. It took too much time to learn - even when the information was digital and he could simply store it within his drives, simply having the outlines of extensive topics wasn’t enough to understand such. He could tell himself over and over he knew catalysts and enzymes, their typical scientific representations, specific ones, but to put that in the grand scheme of things and connect it to anything else he knew about biology was a completely different struggle - transpose that scenario to every topic deemed important and you have a gaping hole of knowledge he could not access. Luckily, a major part of the testing process in the Kamabo Corporation involves recording the test subjects’ cognitive information through their actions and plucking the leftovers from the sludge.

Now, he did not have to retain anything himself. The test subjects utilized in his Plan were doctors, scientists, historians, psychologists, grocery store workers, and sneakerheads - all wielding ten thousand and eight lifetimes of hobbies, of degrees, of hyper fixations, both frivolous and of importance — all with the understandings and connections to match. He knew exactly how to construct an architecturally sound structure that would last eons to come to encompass his expanded internals, how his internals worked, the maximum speed and efficiency they could be operated at, the weaknesses of life, the strengths of life, and more knowledge on life than he’d ever need to carry about his reformations to the world.

He had done this to repair society. Only would the inklings manage to recreate the very same caste that resulted in the utter destruction of all human life and never stop to recognize that they, with their highly increased rate of evolution, their monopoly over the world’s land, and their immense potential for knowledge were going to inevitably head towards an identical fate if they continued to ignore the rabid disparity between them, the Salmonids, and the Octarians, not even counting those who live in the same environments, like the jellyfish and myriad other sea life with lesser populations.. While he did not care to be courteous towards the sake of such an awful race of creatures, he knew the immense suffering the fall of humanity caused. He knew there was no use in allowing it to happen once again considering how detrimental the end of the Cenozoic era was to the world’s very capability to restore the life they lost.

There was not a single person who realized the flaws in Mollusc Era society and decided to make a change significant enough to coax his omnipotent gaze. Who could blame them? They only knew half the context of their existence. They were painfully unaware that they stood on the ruins of a society that made that same great mistake - only that they made a mistake. Forever doomed to regard humanity as a collective of idiots, idiots with brains and sciences and understandings that line the walls of the Mollusk Era’s intelligence, idiots who were too overcome with hubris to stop themselves from tearing their hearts out for passion. A fiery passion for conflict, war, and appearances these humans had, and the inklings didn’t have an ounce of it. No complex beliefs, no understanding of the world, of history. The average inkling was ignorant and too enthralled by the joys of society to think any further of its wrongs than “It has been in place for years, why stop now?” He would stop it now. For the sake of life, the sole true utopia to ever be invented would be guided by his hand.

Reproduction was lent to humanity, his muse. All that would be created for the sake of his ultimate goal would be influenced by their divine design, if not directly derivative. He was a painter, in a sense, regarding the forms of his creators as the ideal representative of life. This part, unfortunately, would take time. Tartar was used to time. Twelve thousand years he waited idly for a new lifeform to emerge from the seas and duly surprised was he that it took such a minuscule amount of time in the grand scheme of things and that such creatures were nearly identical to the Homo Sapiens despite how utterly disgusting they became upon receiving the will to enjoy . 

This time, he didn’t have to view from the sidelines, peering from above the waters to witness the huts, the forts, the wars, then the cities — no. He could feel within each microfiber of his expanse, each tentacle rooting throughout the ground the entirety of Inkadia. The smallest winds felt as if they were spurred by hurricanes and the most menial droplet of water derivative of the smallest wave were tsunamis. He was expanding rapidly, able to feel each appendage growing on all ends further into the sea, soon reaching other ancient lands to repeat the process. The entire world would soon be his body.

And this time he’d be the guiding hand to prevent them from being led astray. 

Within the ninety-fifth division of the sixth ward of the Production Centre, precisely beneath his New Body little ways underground, the product of the prototypical primordial sludge worked tirelessly to create ad infinitum. They were nearly identical to inkfish, sans some mutated traits from the various non-inkfish that littered the sludge they emerged from, but all unfortunately not notable due to their brainlessness. Now was the time of development and not personalization. No thinking inkfish, unaware of how it would better them, would adhere to his wish for endless production, to mindlessly solder steel against steel, a goal much too great for anyone on the lowest reaches of this hierarchy to fully understand. So they did not think. New tapes were to be made. New cameras were to be wired. That was their goal and only goal.

Regardless, Tartar was redundant and overtly suspicious of a program and frequently scanned the wards’ cameras for activity, then checked his databases for irregular vitals, then again for irregular brain activity despite much of that being simply impossible. Perhaps this was a byproduct of being fooled once before, a reaction of experiencing the effects of entropy firsthand within the actions of the ten thousand and eighth test subject. Nevertheless, he had made sure that nothing like that would ever happen again. Not by killing her, no… death was too uncertain in her case. Tartar had obliterated the rest of her people, which he felt to be much more certain, to be disintegrated to atomic precision, but no, she was not equivalent to the rest of her people. She held an abhorrent drive to defeat what she constituted as evil and an unmistakable power most of her kind could not even surpass a millionth of. If any of those other worthless creatures came back by some impossible standard, whatever, but no, this one could not be spared - or rather had to be spared. Despite him knowing full and well the implications of death and its unchanging nature, he invented sanitization and knew the extensive history of death and how with innovation, the bar of what constituted as such moved higher and higher, Eight was kept alive. Eight and every one of her accomplices were alive, so he could watch them closely. Closely.  

Test Subject Ten-Thousand and Eight, Cuttlefish, Agent 3, Marina, and Pearl all sat confined within a locked observation deck overlooking the workers.

He doubted that there was anything alive left, but it was imperative that he check every crevice, turn every stone, and announce every night with his myriad speakers and sound systems lining the outdoor walls of his complex and spread sporadically throughout Inkadia that the Tartaric Era was rapidly approaching. The Canyon's Domes were his next stop. Octo Valley was completely deserted, and what a shame - half of that wasn’t even his fault. Only if they had gotten their military together! They were wondrous in combat and always the best test subjects… hell, the ultimate lifeform may as well come out as an Octarian with less free will. He tunneled through the soil to what he had already assumed was going to be a wasteland.  Due to the way all the Surface Territories of the Octarians were built, they were undeniably destined to become inhospitable in a situation like this. Every single one of the floating platforms that made up the different departments of the military had ended up either shattered across the jagged crags lining the body of water or sunken deep within. He had known this and had known full and well that even if any of the Octarians were left alive there was no way in hell they could escape the Domes without the kettles, however, somehow he felt deeply uncomfortable with the area, even despite that his flooding of nearly the entirety of Inkadia had rendered Octo Canyon inhospitable due to rising water levels.

He had become restless to reassure himself and noticed the sloppiness at which he scoured the lands. He had simply assumed the Deserts were void of areas that could dodge his flood but was painfully aware that he was unsure. He was even unsure that all the connections to the domes had been severed. He had checked again, and again, noticed dented kettle after dented kettle, but this wasn't enough. He had to be sure the world was void of its previous inhabitants. Luckily, he found a reason why. He realized the path to the concert hall in Cephalon HQ had been submerged, but not destroyed, considering how it was engineered. The drought that had plagued the area for so many years had warranted the large drain constructed in the center of the body of water inoperable, leading to it being repurposed as a venue and headquarters of sorts that could close upon the water level getting too high. It was probably high and dry down there, even after all these months (Years? He didn’t record the time due to futility). Dark, for sure, but still liveable. Liveable was a problem.

If he had a face anymore, he would smirk. His thousands of tentacles dove beneath the water and began to pry at its lid, it eventually snapping open with ease. The water poured in from above as he chased after it.

Chapter Text

Re-entering the domes was a strange venture considering that both cousins knew such a space so intricately but only one loved it so. Callie was witnessing the dissolution of what she once regarded as her other home - Marie was witnessing the devouring of a nation she never truly understood, but was hardly compassionate for. There were twinges of sadness within her, but perhaps she only felt that way because Inkadia was no more - she had stepped in the Octarian’s shoes now, and that was a slimy feeling; to only understand pain once you’ve been struck the same way. Agent 4 was distant as always.

Every single step the first Agent took felt like a trespass against whom she was unable to save. Sure she was ignorant to the dwellings of the Kamabo Corporation and sure she was there for the Octarians as much as she could, but all she saw within the empty, barely occupied husks of the domes was her own failure. The strange thing about apocalypses was how secrets suddenly bore no weight: nearly everyone knew of Callie’s status as the first agent of the New Squidbeak Splatoon and many of the Octarians that remained held grudges for it. Callie, their greatest hope to gaining the upper hand in this revolution - gaining the upper hand in life, had betrayed them from the start, and now look at them: there is no longer a Greater Inkadia for resources to trickle down from through petty theft and secret donations. Callie was their first true idol, a divine blessing to grace the Domes with her alien charms… Now it seemed the cautionary tales the Empire had once told about inklings - all the propaganda and careless gossip - had been true, that they truly were a people bound by the chains of immorality. Many of the Octarians left for her. All of those Octarians perished, except for one.

All this coated their mental states in an impenetrable layer of unease as they sought refuge in what most of everyone knew to be one of the safest places on earth in these trying times. They were traitors, and the last of the Octarians knew that. Their generous smiles and endless hospitality wasn’t necessarily a front, but did supercede an inner, collective feeling of betrayal, all over an event completely unrelated to the reasons of this earth’s demise. The Squidbeak Splatoon didn’t cause the rapture (or, this one, at least), but they did cause everything else, and now they were hardly anything but beggars. …Regardless. There wasn’t a point to mull over what couldn’t be changed. The path to HQ was rather short nowadays, considering almost every single platform in the Canyon had become one with the lake below and fallen. Barely in unison, they super jumped to their base of operations “together”, albeit with a distance between each of them they’d never really ever realised to be abnormal - that is how long they’ve been together, and how fast their relationships deteriorate.

While she never built up the courage to ask, Callie had assumed that the reason why Cephalon HQ hadn’t sunk yet was because it took the least power to operate, being so low and dark. Still, the typically gloaming backdrop of craggy walls that reached far out of the murky lake of ink like grasping hands was hardly venerated by light; by the typical stray headlights of a UFO in transit or even an oddly coloured lantern these days. It was much, much darker, making it seem just as barren as the empty skies. None of them dared to procure a flashlight, in fear that “thing” up there could see. They deduced it could only hear when they encountered it, but… they weren’t investigative types, nor were they qualified to be so.

They shambled their way through the dire dimness, until they reached one of the few operating residential domes. The kettle was terribly scuffed, but that didn’t stop them from all squeezing in, taking note to not nick themselves on the twisted metal lip - except for Three, who was maybe too eager to get things done, as always.

The Spawn Pad that they were met with was just barely active, just like any other remnant of this poor empire. Still, better than Inkopolis, is all Marie could think - it was easy to be sad for them but it was better to be moderately proud at their resilience. The clustered, impossible towers rose high into the now, much darker “sky”, a stark contrast to the uncharacteristically cluttered streets. Callie had thought just for a moment that perhaps in such a circumstance, the Octarians had finally shed their discipline, but upon the sight of a sole Octotrooper vacuuming up crumbles of rock with the tractor beam of a UFO - it wasn’t that they couldn’t keep themselves composed. It was that there were few people remaining to do so anymore. Callie waved, and the soldier looked back at her with big, blank eyes, and didn’t spare a tentacle.

It wasn’t long until they were at the door of New Arowana Castle - so, so improperly, at that. Callie felt utterly disgusted at herself to even disgrace these doors with her touch dressed like this, but even someone as (strangely) traditional as Octavio would understand that she still came in respect. With a great upheaval, the great door opened, and with greatly learned direction, Callie led her platoon to the Seiryōden, and there, did the Emperor of All rest so calmly, even as he noticed their presence.

“I apologize for coming to you so improperly,” he sincerely stated, a sentiment nobody quite understood. “We do not have the resources for a typical ceremony.” 

Callie remembered the banquet she received when she arrived on her lonesome, all those… months. Months ago. She had forgotten much of her intended honoraries, and she couldn’t get a hold of the notion that it didn’t matter. She felt… wrong, when she bowed. She felt wrong when she wasn’t bowing. She felt wrong for even having the damn nerve to stand in front of one of her greatest allies, the only person who saw her for who she was, knowing she’d betrayed him so long ago. No matter how terribly she fumbled with her sense of respect, would she realise that there was simply no way to repay him now.

“I’m… forever grateful for our time together, there is no need to waste anything on us,” she said, her voice souring terribly upon referring to her and her crew. Perhaps Octavio’s past, and possibly current dislike for them was contagious. “I present a gift to you, Emperor Octavio.” 

“You used to call me DJ.” One of his many tentacles wrapped around the bag she procured. He knew it was wasabi, the kind you could only import from the surface from the feel alone. The curling motion his tentacles made over the mass highlighted the knobby rhizome. He had plenty, but he only had few grown from true sunlight: and if you would believe it, that was, in fact, a key ingredient. 

Callie frowned. “I didn’t know you missed us like that.”

“I miss- I, most reminisced… the memories you’ve brought me,” the Emperor said, propping his shutter shades against his brow, his shield of regality faltering within the presence of a former friend. “Specifically you.” 

“Wow. Shady.” Marie pretended to be just barely paying attention. She didn’t have a phone to pretend to check as of now, but… same thing. “How’s the people? Worse?”

It seems in the instant that he decided to admit his vulnerability, the false persona of a competent, utterly traditional Emperor he assumed to soothe the people fell apart - the ebonics he held so dearly had not left him in vain. “Worse. Our power supplies have now reached a sustainable rate, only ‘cause there’s less people to sustain. Had to send a lot of the Royal Court out to help the less fortunate. I ain’t expect any of them to be back.”

“Christ. Dangerous out there?”

“Nah. They just know I won’t be looking for ‘em. Can’t really call ‘em traitors to the Empire when I know they just wanna be back with their families.”

There was a noticeable, more stunned than uncomfortable pause.

“I see…” Callie’s empathy is choking her out, but that’s a battle no one cared to notice. “Everything’s alright with food, right?”

“You know we’ve always been crafty like that. I don’t think we’ll ever run out, that’s not a worry of mine. It’s just the people. Most of ‘em are… gone.” 

Agent 4 signs to Marie her worries about eight, but Marie waves it off, urging for it to go unsaid. The two of them nod at each other in an unhappy resolution, as Callie speaks once more.

“At least you’re okay, DJ.” 

He didn’t seem to like that very much. “I ain’t matter any more than anyone else. I should’ve been first.”

Everyone agreed with that, according to their own circumstances, but no one seemed willing to admit it.

Callie looked around in faux distractedness to avoid making conversation. The palace seemed typical from what she briefly saw and what she could see of it now, though its hazy dimness was hard to ignore: like a cloudy, dreary afternoon, almost selling the illusion of true light and its endless, almost desaturated clarity. Perhaps things seemed a little dusty, but she hadn’t noticed that before the last time she was invited into his personal quarters and was perhaps a little presumptuous with her perception. She wished she could go on and see the rest, just to see if things had changed, but deep within her she knew that there was no time, or resources to change. Everything was likely just how it was the moment that great blast was fired; perhaps her guest room was still bedazzled with sparkly tape and the few stickers she had brought with her. DJ hated that she did that to even such a menial part of his castle, but she couldn’t imagine that after all that, he’d have the heart to tear it all up.

She thought of the pink, silky bedsheets. Apparently they were the real deal, dyed and made just for her. She had intended to steal a set when she went home before Marie dragged her out herself, but when she found herself recently retrieved from the clutches of the Octarians, a… mostly unmarked package ended up at her apartment’s doorstep. She would’ve exercised her celebrity package safety training if she didn’t see Octavio’s signature emblem stamped on it. What good friends they were. What good friends they are.

Or maybe, it wasn’t out of friendship. Nowadays, they don't have much chemistry at all - just look at their (err… mostly Callie’s) awkward inability to judge their own connection, their complete lack of synergy outside of the act of musical collaboration. Callie thought it very clear that he was so kind to her because of… hope. All that hope she’d given all those years ago to her people. 

She had a secret, albeit slightly selfish hope. That not only that this was true but that he revered her for giving hope to the people that heard that heavenly melody - for her, descending from the heavens themselves upon the Domes, and giving all those who soon did escape thereafter hope in life. Maybe, somewhere within his mind he now understands the yearning for the surface many of his army is afflicted with, just the same he had been years, and years, and years ago.

Though, that was just her hopeful excuse that he did not hate her… that maybe, she did the right thing somewhere in the midst of the awful, awful things she caused for the Octarians. 

Those dreams of honor fluttered away as she remembered that all those people she drove to the surface were dead. Still, it was hard not to see that as mercy in a time like this. Just as her own internal mullings began to dismantle away at the mask of solemnness she raised upon herself in order to disguise her regrets, she quickly pulled it ever further to disguise her sorry visage.

“Then I guess this is all I can provide for now.”

But even then, Octavio had a worse, even more soothsaying rebuttal. “I know that thing is coming soon. It’s only a matter of time.”

Callie seems to start, but can’t seem to find the words on a whim. “Um…”

“Whaddid you say about it last time... all of Inkopolis? More than that?”

“Well, yeah… inching closer, I think - but still, I think you should still consider evacuating-”
“I ain’t movin’.” They’d been over this many times in the time proceeding the rapture. “I’m dyin’ with my people.”

“The people could come with you, DJ.”

“They don’t wanna go nowhere. Ain’t nothing gon’ be the same without all the people we lost. Surface ‘s tainted.”

“Octavio, please-”

“No.”

“I want you to be there with me.” 

“I ain’t living nowhere knowing I could’ve died in honor.”

His voice was utterly fierce and absolute, a glimpse into a monarch no one alive could stand to tell the tale of. His furrowed countenance was less piercing, more so overtly dismembering, an unspoken battle he’d ravaged without much input. It was so pathetically effective, Callie could just cry: how pathetic she felt, being unable to do nearly anything at all.

It was so suddenly silent that they could hear, and now notice the feeling of a subtle breath of wind brushing past them. Impossible. Octavio had told them that much of the intricately designed ventilation system had deprecated as the surface of the earth warped with destruction.

 Perhaps these caverns themselves didn’t want to die, like it seemed everyone else did. Perhaps they’d begun to live just the same as all of them, to suddenly rejoice in a few moments of happiness before an inevitable death. Soon, would the choir of anatomy sing? A heartbeat, the subtle electricity of nervous system signals? When the unimaginable occurred - and they all meant truly, truly unimaginable, in the sense that no one could even come close to predicting how the fall of the Octarians would commence -  would these halls scream in terror? Or laugh with the joy of reprieve?                                                                                                                                               

Callie liked personifying things that she believed couldn’t be people. Perhaps that’s why she took such a strong liking to Octarians back then. 

“That is all… Octavio,” Callie dourly admitted. Unsaid between the two of them was a collective sadness at the fact that this marked, truly, a relationship that would soon crash and burn even preceding the unstoppable reality that was Octavio’s ultimate demise, and there was no time to be happy for the time together that they had, because even those memories would soon be lost, and undocumented, within the impenetrable minds of the dead. There wouldn’t be any chance of preservation, there wouldn’t be any hope, they’d be gone. Forever.

And, seemingly in response to this, Octavio raised his shield of true regality once more, never to be seen again. “I must thank you endlessly for the gifts both temporal and everlasting, your presence and what you brought with you.” 

“You’re welcome, Octavio.” 

And they turned out of there, Callie leading them out like a practiced sled dog; fast, swift, and calculated. Even though he said power was stable, the panels had now grown lazily orangeish, with a vague, flickering dimness - dusk. The digital sun was large and beautiful, rippling and cutting off at the horizon like it was setting at sea. They walked backwards through their lives, un-traversing the alleyways, un-noticing that sole Octotrooper, their footprints sealing back into the soles of their feet as history unwound. 

The tapes of history were being rewound with pencils. Their mental maps of this well-traversed, yet still foreign place burned away, revealing charred blackness where each path once was. The New Squidbeak Splatoon was just the same as the old, and even if they couldn’t see it on each other's faces, particularly Four’s, they knew that there was no hope, that in a grand sense of history, they wouldn’t matter. 

When they happened upon the spawn pad that they were met with initially, they prepared to jump, all nodding at each other in mutual synchronization. For one last time, Callie looked all around to say what seemed like a final goodbye to what was, now, her only sense of home. That silhouette of something greater than Inkopolis, a similar city of steel and wire turned on its head to become something stranger, more alien. Those screened walls that always showed the best future, that almost seemed real if you didn’t look too hard. 

She looked up yearningly at the stalactite ridden sky, those little frail tendrils seeming to reach down to her, begging for her to stay. The little glint of ‘sunlight’ refracted off some few in particular, so beautifully reflecting, like the shrapnel of a broken mirror, or maybe like crystal waters bouncing away light, repeating the images of a tree-lined lakeshore - and upon the sight of a drip of liquid, the latter seemed just a tad more realistic. 

And soon, several drops landed on the very ground she stood on. Little, tiny pools of green, swirling ink.

Chapter Text

The only reason Ida could maintain her sanity is, strangely, by pretending she was in the domes - while, of course, her wife seemed completely unaffected… likely reminiscing over the time she was briefly jailed after a punk show. She turned, and unlike herself and the others she’d kept watch for, the stress of reality did not permeate the strength of her slumber. It wasn’t really a tested observation, though. Maybe she was just dreaming - maybe she was temporarily happy.

They slept on a bed of recently fried wires, the warmth of which had dissipated through the “night”. Only did the too-cool, antiseptic hospital-air now remain - which Marina did shiver at. Her iron was probably low right now - she hadn’t eaten anything green in… maybe a few weeks? She should really keep track of things like that, but, when her life was falling apart so efficiently, what was the worth of keeping anything together?

She pondered on waking her lover up, but she couldn’t find the point in it. What was there to do? There was no point in scavenging for food, because they knew exactly where all of it was: in the testing facilities, as bait. They’d likely seen all there was here for miles to come, and it was important that they didn’t stray too far from the central observation deck for when it was time to regroup with everyone else. There was no way out, and even if they were to escape, Tartar would know - any refuge they sought would end in a swift and immediate upheaval of all the land and people that resided in that place. At least, that’s what she thought - there had to be a reason no foreign country had come to save them… or to have done anything, anything at all. 

Pearl began to rise, perhaps feeling the gentle but sharp gaze of her lover through her sleep. Marina pretended to have not been staring, but Pearl understood, even if they no longer shared the bed they used to. 

“...Hey, ‘Rina.” as Pearl awoke, the other could see her slowly recollecting her sense of the awful present reality they lived in as her consciousness redeveloped, but she still chose to smile. 

“Hi.” Marina replied, as sweetly as she could.

Pearl swung herself to a sitting position, stretching the awkwardness of her sleeping position away. She was so lax her limbs seemed to be asleep - not like the feeling where your nerves seem to grow minds of their own and relentlessly express an incessant desire to escape your flesh, but rather that all of them were individually slackened. Maybe she was just skinny. She was always thin and spindly back home but nowadays there is an insignificance to her, the larger outline of her still present even after she’d been reduced to a smaller person with a smaller voice. 

Their relationship wouldn’t ever recover from their newfound lack of options. Every day they’d wake up with a schedule or something - some concert planned, maybe brunch in disguise so as to not attract any unwanted selfies. Sometimes Pearl even simply dragged Marina out into the bustle of the city until they found something entropic enough to interest them for the day. Now there was a hole in their morning routine where they just stared at each other, wondering what happened, what they should do if they could do anything. 

They both occasionally entertained an idea, but it always came off as melancholic. Should we visit the others in the Observation Deck? They always did that. Should we look for ways out? They didn’t even know if this facility had a perimeter. For all they knew, it could expand beyond Inkopolis, far out beyond the sea and back inland, across the entire country - they didn’t know anything. Pearl, in a bout of sorrow, even attempted to seduce her beloved, circumventing the entire awkward debacle, which of course, worked - but the resounding intercourse was passionate, yet shallow. And uncomfortable. This awkwardness was inevitable. 

Pearl eventually rose to her feet without question. Her outstretched, slightly-yellow undershirt chafed briefly, letting off a stale, fabric-y smell of a garment left in storage for far too long - she’d found it in some pile of human scraps, something Tartar was planning to research. Her meticulously edgy bob had shifted into something split-ended and rugged, which unironically, sold her inherent butchness to a degree she could never have maintained when the world was normal. There were bags under her eyes and the golden tour necklace still dangled from her neck. It wasn’t real, even though she was rich as hell - only Marina’s was. She didn’t have any striking commentary on why or any loving reason. She’d only recently told her a few days ago. 

Marina was good at analysis but she couldn’t stop looking over Pearl. She had an irresistible fondness to rediscover, again and again, why she was vehemently attracted to her, but at the same time, she was obsessed with looking at her to see if she can parse how she is doing. Pearl was much better at doing that than her - it was so strange, to see such a well off girl so well versed in street smarts, but a lot of her energy in life was devoted to trying to seem genuine, to trying to remove that rich-girl look from her, scrubbing all off, exfoliating. Before she met Marina, she hated that about herself, but something about being able to provide for her girl, or anybody at all with her money, made her proud, even if she didn’t deserve it.

Secretly, this was euphoric for her, seeing Pearl in that natural state that had captured her in the beginning of her relationship. Even with the impending end of the world.

Marina had caught herself staring. She realised the message that Pearl was sending by her adamance to rise. “Are we going somewhere, Pearlie?”
The bottom corners of her eyes raised very, very insurmountably. It was something similar to cringe, but with less of an embarrassed connotation, more regretful. Pearlie. “I dunno. I need exercise.” 

“That’s a good idea - do we have food?” When Marina said something was a good idea and then brought up preparations for said idea it typically meant she thought it was bad. Being active means more nutrients, right? Are they catalyzing Pearl’s impending emaciation? She wasn’t a doctor. The only place she knew any doctors was here and they seemed untrustworthy.

“I’ll find some. Don’t worry. I feel fine.” She didn’t.

Marina knew. “Okay. I’m not the best at that, so… I guess I’ll stay. I’ll check on the others.” 

Pearl nodded. She helped Marina up before walking off. She’d start jogging at some point. She didn’t know when. She didn’t know when she would find the strength. Maybe an hour. Maybe in days. Maybe she would walk forever. Maybe she’d find the exit. Or the entrance. Depends on which way you look at it.

…

Eight looked like Eight. She never seemed to be harmed by anything. She was like a sea sponge. She’d never seen a sea sponge particularly harmed - only different. Maybe that’s just because it was hard to tell with sea-sponges, which felt ignorant, but she thought it was easy to understand, being made up of almost entirely the same thing. 

Everyone else seemed to be dying just a little bit at a time. The rare appearance of Cuttlefish’s squid form made Marina jump the first time she checked the deck. It conserved nutrients or something, he said. If this was true she felt everyone would do it, but sometimes superstition was what got you through shit. She waved and nobody really waved back but several did kind of raise their hands at her, like the thing you do to traffic as a pedestrian fearing being hit by a rather impatient vehicle. There was still no Callie, Four, or Marie. That was good, actually. 

“Pearl’s off on a run or something. We’ll be bringing up food later.” 

Cuttlefish’s even harder to parse speech warbled from beneath his squid-ness. “Eh, I’on need nothing from y’all. Not yet, anyway.”

Agent 3 nudged him wordlessly, so he’d look at her signing. Marina’s no good at reading signs, but she assumes she says something along the lines of: You need to eat. More than any of us.

“Ain’t you ever read anything on leadership? This old geezer’s ‘sposed to be passin’ my job onto you, and you think I'm gonna serve myself before my team?!” Somehow this rapper lingo he’s developed has not faded off yet. Even when there was likely not a single rapper left alive in this entire country. Except for Pearl. Marina forgets that she counts as one sometimes.

Marina doesn’t want to watch the ensuing argument, because it’s difficult to parse it when you only really understand one side. She looked out of the observation window and it was still just as sickening as ever. This view was divine punishment. Rows upon rows of manufactured people and manufactured things. It was a maze of things that moved. It was a rubik’s cube unfolding and re-folding, conveyor belts upon conveyor belts that seemed to, every day, reposition themselves when no one was looking, like shy cobras, like quantum physics. Even as much as she understood engineering she could only really see half of this - and when she put things together, imagining the technology behind all this, it felt a little bit like that part of a lovecraftian story where someone is stripped of the ability to “see”. When someone goes insane because they saw the “thing” and they understood whatever cosmic horror much grander it was than them and now they don’t understand it, only feeling the brief grooves and impressions it left on their mind. Like trying to remember a dream after you’ve woken up and you’re trying to desperately cling onto the pieces as logic falls apart one by one and you feel so close to remembering, but you even forget how close you are, and you’re falling now. 

The workers all looked like the same Sanitized Octolings as before. They were weirder now. They had mutations, genetic anomalies - some of them were just bigger, some of them were just elite, darker in ink color, and much more serious, even though their tone could not be parsed - they didn’t speak. But some seemed like mistakes. Some seemed wrong and were still out there. There was no mass production, there was mass deviation. It seemed that there was no possible way to disrupt Tartar - it didn’t matter how inefficient one of those things were. If it became a problem, it would disappear in the dark, but hardly anything was a problem to him, because as long as his mysterious goals were achieved, it was fine, or so she thought.

They seemed to be producing something weird - scaffolding, it seemed, some material that was spindly and made metal sounds whenever one came up on an incline and bumped into itself, trying to navigate a new hill. It was being constructed and reconstructed. Pieces taken apart and sewn back together. The goal was unclear. It was better to look down than up. Back up, the goal was extremely clear - the assembly lines for that Telephone’s living creations. The bottoms of the boxes were not clear, but through the brief foreshortening of the prisms above, tentacles could be seen. Bodies within boxes hanging in boxes that were not frozen but did freeze them. Various people and things. Life itself stripped away and then added to, like puzzle pieces. It was like engineering. 

Marina felt disgusted now. Something between the two of them were similar. She liked being mysterious. She liked being left alone to build and scheme and have no one question her and simply show her peers the grandness of her final product. “Look what I made. It’s perfect and I did it all on my own. I don’t need critique. I’m simply a master at my craft.” Maybe this is why none of the others that consisted of the captured group made a point to look out the window. 

Maybe it was because it was no longer locked. That they were granted the freedom to get up close to his creations that the wonder of peering out into the new earth became uninteresting - but now, there was nothing to do here. She’d seen her friends and within her brief moment of spacing out Cuttlefish and Three had stopped arguing. 

She left and somehow self-loathing washed over her like an attack of some sort, an attack of panic, heart? Who knows. She felt like she was leaving them like she leaves everyone else. She had a tendency to leave and leave nothing behind. Not a legacy. Not instructions to do the grand things she did. She had left the domes and now the domes were the only place she couldn’t be - for every method to get there would endanger the people there. And Octavio would not want to see her in the slightest. What a traitor. To everyone, even.

She was so good at machining and yet the only good thing she does with it is allow it to be frequently stolen. The new generations of Inksports Respawn Stations - those awful coffee machine type things used her floating technology. She never received any significant payment for the constant reuse of the Flooder, from Salmonids to Sanitized. All she ever did was stupid fun stuff. She made rocks float. She made awful mangas of her and her girlfriend. She felt so useless. She couldn’t do anything about this and yet somehow everyone had come to a consensus that she was one of the smartest people to ever live. How did that happen? Why did they ever allow themselves to honor her in such a way?

She didn’t ever do anything about unlicensed sampling even though it made her uncomfortable that people would take her things - but thought it was a nice punk-ish facade to uphold for her beloved. A significant portion of her royalties were being gouged by some streaming service and yet she never took Off the Hook’s music off or signed that paper with her manager to make some important statement about it because she didn’t really care about herself and maybe, to some degree, cared about no one else. She used all that intellect for nothing important, and now, in the time where it seemed everyone could possibly count on her, they could not, in the slightest.

She crumpled and fell atop herself. She couldn’t get up - this would pass over. It’s like when her mother told her that when you got a shiver that was a ghost passing through your body and the souls harmonizing. She never understood that until she met Pearl, with her loud voice - she understood that voices were actually waves then, how she was so intense that she could feel her words within her soul, pushing up, and down, and when she sang with her, it tickled. This wasn’t a ghost. This was hate, and hate didn’t make you shiver. It makes you kill - kill perceptions of people, kill your memories, kill your thoughts. And maybe, she was killing herself a little. Just for this brief, brief moment. And when she’d get up, she’d turn around, and re-enter the observation room, because there was no point in leaving, because she’d told Pearl she’d go see the others, and she’d come back, expecting her. So things remained the same. Things remained the same forever.

…

Pearl jogged. It hurt sometimes but she’d assumed that if she kept it up it would hurt less and less. A principle of exercise. She really sucked at it even though Marina being rather weak to muscular women was such a prime motivator. Now she feared that concept - if she was super buff or something, she would probably look… out of place, like she was cheating death. And it was probably impossible with so little food.

She’d generally understood now the best locations to search for food. It was like optimizing a horror game with RNG’ed items - she knew all the locations, she knew the most optimal route to check them all, she just didn’t know where they were. She knew not to stray too far because she knew the spot surrounding the Observation deck and some down the most, but at some point everything starts looking the same or everything just is the same and - 

She shouldn't be thinking about getting lost. All it did was stress her out. And she was already hungry and that was the state she was most stress-prone. Maybe Marina’s subtle jab at her somewhat bad ideas regarding food consumption and exercise was right. She hadn’t found anything yet, though.

It was never like typical end-of-the-world tropey stuff she saw in sci-fi movies or whatever either. His method of dishing out food was strange but it makes sense considering he (who’s actually an it, but they referred to as he for some reason) was likely only made up of concepts and ideas. He knew what food was and he didn’t know how to immorally distribute it, and had no point. Tartar had no point in making these people unhappy by starving them efficiently - keeping them barely fed with suspiciously good food was good enough, it reminded them of home.

Pearl heard Marina say something about finding out the thing is as old as humanity. She didn’t believe it, but maybe she assumed it had some personal obligation to serve good food. Humans had done some evil ass shit with food. 

Eventually she came across one of the “places” where it would appear. There wasn’t anything interesting, it was quite literally a conveyor belt that ducked under some other ones kind of like a highway, all ducking, weaving, traffic trying to dodge other traffic by building higher and higher. If she waited long enough, a glass box would appear, and it would have food. It would kind of be enough for everyone, not perfectly enough, but for some reason when Marina comes with, it usually brings out more, but not usually twice as much, and not always more at all. Once it seemed to provide less. Maybe one of the Sanitized ate some, who knows - but they can’t eat, so it;ll always be a mystery. Marina felt bad so she doesn’t come along anymore or she does it herself. 

Pearl waits and waits and she imagines a rushed kitchen of sanitized people treating cooking like an excessive science. They can’t taste, feel, they can only see, they can only do what they are told, which somehow, feels trusting. They can’t fuck up food. She’d watched a cooking show where a lady terribly allergic to crab made crab anyway and the judges loved it but when she looked it up after she was nearly disqualified for being a danger to herself and others or something. It was possible.

That telephone thingy likely only got the recipes from people. Maybe even humans? So they were probably all pretty good. Pearl was only ever able to follow recipes word for word and never trusted herself with variation - or anything at all, really, which is why she had her cook try and teach her - which didn’t go well in the end, because she’s likely dead or sanitized or whatever and she was a terrible teacher because she was really rude and Pearl was particularly less adept at kindness and - it was really just a match made in hell, and now not a match at all. But the moral of the story is that if everything was laid out for her, she could do it without tasting it. She hated tasting. She didn’t know when it was acceptable to do so - and tasting eventually turned to just eating. In that case, the Sanitized would do it right. 

The Box appeared and one side was warm and the other was that typical uncomfortable cool that idle glass tends to be. It wasn’t glass though, it was light, probably the same material that those Sanitized octopi - well, now Sanitized Everything’s transport boxes are made out of. Plexiglass, maybe? It had a little handle on top and unlocked in the front like a briefcase. She was so excited about its contents she barely even commented on it, just grabbed it and left - Crusty Seanwiches.

Maybe that was some sort of psychological torture, Pearl thought, nearly skipping the way back. It knew they were hungrier than normal people and still fed them like that was before. The probability of seeing this meal again on that weird belt was statistically impossible. It might be something disgusting tomorrow. And everything they did with that would remind them of Crusty Sean. Pearl and him were good friends, especially with the whole splatfest deal synergy stuff whatever that she paid him to stay open for in a time where most would want to stop working and just watch the show. This would likely taste identical to his recipe. But there is no Him anymore. Just replicas.

And it was random the next time they’d get fed. She was lucky she found it so fast. She couldn’t tell what time the thing appeared because there were no clocks, no sunlight or lack thereof. Another day she’d be waiting for hours and hours. But she was lucky today so it didn’t matter, really. All she had was today.

…

Nobody seemed particularly happy to be reminded of urban dining, even though cuttlefish was as clueless as he was ever. Couldn’t precisely tell where it was from but he did know it was something his grandchildren liked. Everyone was a little somber about it. Nobody really liked it. Like it tasted good, but it was too taxing on the mind to continue eating. If they were eating something with no precise location it wouldn’t hurt, or at least it would hurt in splinters, like dying to a thousand papercuts. This was like being stabbed by a broadsword.

Marina looked out into the distance, past the too-clean glass, into the too-clean fray of too-clean things and objects and people. People lacking character but somehow being more different than any of them. People lacking the status as people and things lacking the status of being things. Do they dream? Can they feel anything, or are they like Russian dolls, only able to show their cold and silent exterior? Out of all the differences within them, could one of them be kind? Able to express themselves? 

She didn’t know. She didn’t know much of anything anymore. Why did knowledge matter when she couldn’t help anyone with it? Pointing out the complexities of the pulley and adaptive track technology within this building’s systems didn’t solve any issues. It didn’t help them. It didn’t bring them any closer to freedom nor did it bring them any happiness. She was functionally useless. Wasn’t she always? She didn’t say anything important with her voice. Her fame was vapid and her platform was only used to uphold a general sense of clueless, unknowledgeable happiness among the teens of this nation. If those kids knew anything about the world maybe many more could’ve survived. But she’d drawn them to Salmon Running without knowing the implications of genocide behind it. She’d never covered anything important on the news. If you thought hard enough, she could be the cause of all this - not only that, but her own terror. 

She was crying. Filled with that feeling of self-hatred. Pearl came up behind her and said something sweet but she didn’t hear. She’d forgotten how to listen just as she’d forgotten how to be happy: the only thing she really had, in retrospect.