34

Enraged, it flailed through the shower of dispersing garbage, grabbing random bits of flotsam and gnashing at them, as if violence would somehow force them to yield nutrients they did not contain.  A few pieces were nourishing, but very few, only enough to make it yearn for more.  Most were worthless, and there was no way it could tell one from another.

Its gills labored, clogged with alien things that lodged in the flaps and impeded motion.

It had chosen wrong, following scent rather than instinct.

It propelled itself slowly to the surface and waited for its eyes to adjust their focus on the shore.

Empty.  The living things were gone.

They were there, however, somewhere, in company with many more.  It knew that.

It knew, too, that they could be brought within reach.

But another decision would be required, a decision for which it had been programmed, but one for which the implementation was — or so the creature sensed — beyond its abilities.

It allowed itself to drift downward again, and it rested on the mud bottom, lolling like a corpse among the ribbons of kelp while it probed the recesses of its brain for long-lost keys to long-hidden locks.

Its brain was dim but not slow, out of condition but not disabled, and the more it demanded of the brain, the more the brain responded.

One by one, the keys appeared.

At last, it knew what it must do, and how to do it.

Energized by new promise, it crawled along the bottom that sloped up into the shallows.  When its back was nearly out of the water, it crabbed sideways into the shelter of some boulders, and it waited, scanning the shore until it was confident it was alone.  Even then, it waited a few moments more, rehearsing the steps it must take, reluctant to leave the safety of the world it had known — for how long?  Forever, as far as it knew — but certain that its life depended on the course it had chosen.

It ducked down, immersing its head and gills, and pumped water through its system, flooding its blood with oxygen like a diver preparing for a record plunge.

It raised its head, pulled itself to its feet and began to walk.  The muscles in its legs were weak — they had not borne weight for half a century — but they supported it, and with each step they gained an iota of new strength.

It needed shelter for the exercise it was programmed to perform, and it needed it soon.  Because it had no sense of time, it did not know what soon was, but it knew that its blood would tell it:  as oxygen was consumed, more would be demanded, and the brain would lapse into crisis.

Soon.

*          *          *          *          *

The streets were empty, doors closed and windows curtained.  Still, it felt exposed, and so it lurched for the comfort of the shadows between two buildings.  Its ears could now — they did not only record pressure changes — and they heard raucous sounds not far away.

It passed more closed doors, turned down another dark street, saw more closed doors and was about to turn again when, in a niche near the end of this street, it saw an open door.  It staggered toward the door, trailing a smear of slime, beginning to feel the first alarums from its brain, demanding oxygen.

The door was large, and broad, and the space inside was dark and empty.

The creature looked upward and saw what it needed:  large crossbeams supporting the roof.

It could not leap up to the beams, and there was no rope or ladder for it to climb; it probed one of the walls with its claws.  The wood was soft — from age and rot and humidity — and its claws pierced it as if it were wet clay.

Its claws sank deep into the wood, and it scaled the wall like a panther.

The effort sucked oxygen from its blood, and by the time it reached the first crossbeam the alarums in its brain were urgent.  It swung its legs over the beam and hung upside down, a dozen feet above the dirt floor, its arms dangling beneath its head.  Out of its mouth a trickle of liquid oozed and dripped onto the floor.

It waited for a moment, monitoring the metabolic change:  The metamorphosis was too slow:  before its system would be cleansed, before its motor could be stopped and restarted, the brain would have begun to die, starved for oxygen.

And so, as it had been taught to do fifty years before, as it had done once in practice, it balled its fists beneath its rib cage and snapped them upward.

Green liquid gushed from its mouth like vomit.  The first spasm encouraged a second, and a third, until a cycle of convulsions began that pumped water for the lungs and flushed it through the trachea.

A fetid pool of green fluid formed in the dirt below, a miniature swamp.

It took only a few seconds for the lungs to empty and the chest cavity to contract.

When it was done, the creature hung motionless, its eyes rolled back in its head, eggshells of perfect white.  Droplets of slime made their way down its steel teeth and fell like emeralds.

Its life as a water-breather was over.

Clinically, it was dead.  Its heart had not begun to beat; the fluid in its veins lay still.

But the brain still lived, and it commanded itself to send one final burst of electricity across the synapses that would restore life.

The body convulsed once more, but this time it expelled no liquid.

This time it coughed.