Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. It is a draft; there are mistakes, many misspellings and sometimes long periods of no updates. copyright: ion fyr 2025
Pool
First the there were drips, sounds of water in the distance repeating a faint metallic echo, interrupting the slow rasp of breathing in the darkness. Somewhere further still a low hum and and even lower throb. Dull thuds and whalesong clicks.
He thought his eyes open, but could see nothing. He felt weightless and immobile. Something smooth and serpentine was in his mouth but he had no urge to gag or vomit. The darkness concerned him but he was in the comfortable embrace and warmth of his mother’s womb.
His imagination returned before his reasoning thoughts. Fantastical thoughts, dreams of mechanical men and thinking machines, gigantic leviathans beneath the cold dark seas, being intrigued but a prisoner on an island.
The warmth of her embrace–his mother–was so much better than the bitter cold of the dreams. His arms and legs could not move, only a twitch of an index finger came with an effort of what seemed like days.
The whirring gears, nearly silent of the clockwork men struck him as somehow beautiful, very much like the more boisterous clacking and clanking of the rooms of card-reading machines.
In his dream, he was startled, but not scared by the appearance of a similacrum. At first he thought he was looking in a mirror, but this was not a reversed image one would see as a reflection; it was off, how others would look upon him.
He looked at the smartly dressed, dapper self outside, through the glass and it looked back, observing him. His fingers could barely flinch and yet the similacrum moved with greater freedom. It smiled where he did not, though he smiled back, reacting to it from instinct. He wanted to jot notes in his fieldbook, but couldn’t move his limbs so couldn’t write even if he knew where it was.
Gradually, his head cleared and his reason returned pushing out the fantastical imaginings. As the dreams drifted away, flotsam in his waking mind he became more concerned about his situation.
While he could breathe, he had the sensation of being in a warm bath, submerged. The feeling of constant swallowing that ebbed and flowed in counterpoint to the rush of air in and out of his lungs, suggested artiface or machinery. That he did not gag from the tentacular probe passing through his lips and into his throught and lungs suggested narcotic suppressants. Indeed, he had no feeling of panic, and was comfortable.
The paralysis remained, however, and the greatest effort only resulted in a knuckle rubbing against a smooth concave surface like glass.
Over time–he had little sense of it due to the lack of light and hunger, blurred by the constant drip of nutrients into his throat–over time, he sensed a change in the environment, a change in the viscous bath that he hung suspended in.
As his conscoiusness returned, aided by the senses he still maintained, he was able to hear differences in the sounds, in the watery echoes and whale songs. While he, as far as he knew, had spent little time in the waters of the oceans (due to their deadly inhabitants), he interpretted their songs as, where before unconstrained by submerged obstacles, waves beneath waves, now they seemed buoyed by hidden objects, waters grown shallower.
With his awareness of the change of the ambient sounds, he also noticed a faint change in the particles of light. At first it was, pinpricks on his retina, a visual tingling at the back of his eyes and in his brain, but slowly, paced with the cycles of sleep and wakefulness, he found he could discern what he believed were day and night.
He might have been asleep when it happened, at least the first time. the dull glow had arisen just enought for him to make out the outline of is tank, his cage. It was glass-walled, cylindrical and full of a jell that kept him suspended.
He could make out the shadowy outline of a twined pair of tentacles–that’s what they looked like from his vantage point, two centimeters thick by his reckoning, coiling down from above, where he couldn’t quite see, from the shadows and from the hold the jell had on him. The entered his open mouth, violating him. One was narrower, and seemed rather static, while the other pulsed with his breathing, this one he could feel in his brachial tubes.
The glow, was bluish, he thought, and was certain he was underwater, and that the vessel he was imprisoned in and by, had been rising gradually to the strata nearer the surface–still deep, but rising so that light from above filtered down in a diffuse and murky way.
The area outside of his bell jar remained in shadow. He could make out an oval porthole of a sort directly in front of his cage, and another to the right, perhaps four meters away, on the same level.
He could still only move his eyes and blink, and not move his head side to side. This was frustrating, because he was feeling more and more trapped, though his situation had not changed; being aware that he was suspended and helpless and unable to investigate his surroundings was maddening.
There also was a perceptible change in the taste of the jell as it found it’s way into his mouth around the twin tentacles. He first observed it as a smell in the thick fluid filling his nostrils, but as it found it’s way into his mouth, it took on an uncomfortable taste, that of mothballs.
He slept and woke, painfully bored and trapped, and again lost count of days.
He awoke finally to a silent vessel, with aquamarine light, refracted and undulating, flowing in through the oval porthole. At last he could see his surroundings as more than simple light and dark and maddening shadow.
It looked like a laboratory. There was his tank–that is what it was–he was certain.
There were also workbenches or desks, not so much as strewn with tools, but cluttered with neat lines of them–as space managed by a uniquely and obsessively orderly personality.
He could not identify the tools, but discerned that that is what they were. Coils of tentacles–hoses, perhaps–just like his own invaders, were strung above, looped like ropes. there were pediments for absent cylinders beneath them.
It took him a while to notice the form of a man standing to the side, as he could still not turn his head. His captors must have given him some sort of paralytic narcotic to keep him immobile and placid. Even though his mind raced and struggled to find clues about his circumstances, he was not anxious at all.
It was the form of a man, but in the undulating light from the portholes, he could see it was a mechanical form.
His memory struggled to find a name for it, to place it. He had seen one like it before…More than one….
It moved and his eyes narrowed as best they could on its rigid metal form. He tried to blink away the jell but his eyelids were barely able to move [unconsciously] let alone willfully. Somewhere in his throat a raw gurgle emerged: the first utterance in what seemed like hundreds of years.
The sound of the mechanical creature’s footsteps on the apparent metal decking was painfully loud in his ears, even muffled by the jell insinuating itself in his canals.
It came to face him, standing before his enclosure, incapable of expression. It’s face was familiar, bronze and glass, the former, greened with corrosion, although worn by polishing. Veins of copper oxides intruded their filigree beneath a mirrored polish on all of the flat and smooth surfaces. The glass of the eyes was not as smooth, being somewhat abraded and pitted. The surface of the chest was marred by scattershot dents and nicks.
I never once spoke to him, and he knew that was its way. They did not speak, the mechanical men and their kind, not the kind here, where he had been (where had he been) but he knew of ones that did, made of light and bizarre, alien substances.
If I could only remember, he thought. Everything was a jumble and a fog.
The creature–the word felt odd to use about a clearly mechanical humanoid, an automaton–it was used by people, naturalists and philosophists to refer to the animals of the world–shambled over to him. He could hear the steps, obviously. They were loud, metal floor under heavy metal feet.
He reckoned that it weighted more than a man, at least two hundred kilos, perhaps even more than that. he could hear the creaks of worn joints as it moved, muffled by the jell of course.
It came and stood before him, separated by the concave cylinder of glass, and looked.
He could see the orbs of the eyes adjust in their sockets just as a person’s would have. Even the irises moved, adjusting for light levels. A marvel of engineering, if Pool had to say, if he weren’t being kept like a fish in a tank.
That…He was Pool. He was in a tank…
Ion Fyr 