The Contract

In the dark of night, a herd of floating bloats has a visitor.

Between immense bodies dipping long sinuous necks beneath the sea and gobbling greens, a shifting, clicking mass of millions glides over the water like a shadow. Fat and floundering forms, seemingly without hope of escape, lay unawares all around. Just a single one could yield enough food to feed the colony for many months, and they lay in the ocean by the thousands like fruit on the sea’s tree, ripe for the picking.

A tendril emerges, twenty thousand individual insects working to form a singular arm, and reaches out to touch a young bloat calf. A nightbiter is disturbed before it can settle and feed, scuttling quickly across the poor creature’s back like some huge gangly insect before fluttering off silent in the dark. The bloat shudders, lets out a bleat, and moves slowly away toward its mother, but the hoard has surrounded it. A grisly end should await it at the many gnashing jaws of a deadly sea shoggoth, a vicious, stinging superorganism of ants that come together to function as a single large predator. Certainly innumerable other defenseless animals, young and old, have fallen prey in a similar way to the sea shoggoth and its ancestors for millions of years. The shoggoth is a formidable predator, able to subdue anything it can catch up to.

But the shoggoth doesn’t sting the bloat, even though it could. Moving across its body like a sinister cloak, it doesn’t attack or even seem to take notice of the calf. It passes by and soon goes on its way, leaving the bloat unharmed.

Why?

How does the bloat, helpless and huge, survive in a sea infested with shape-shifting, flesh-eating sea monsters?

~~~

It is midmorning, a cool and cloudy day. The sea shoggoth has come to rest in a dense tanglewild within a thick cover of floating seaweed, clinging to the support with a billion tiny clasping legs so that it becomes nearly invisible. All above flocks of seabirds are swarming in agitation of something, filling the air with shrieks and shrill cries. And soon the reason becomes apparent - not far away several daydreamers are towing something in their direction. It is the remains of a bloat, carved out on a raft, piles of loose meat tossed in heaps. Well-picked of desirable organs and muscle cuts, trimmed of all fat, and with the bones neatly cut out and the hide stripped, what remains is about three tons of viscera and a smattering of dead or nearly-so internal parasites - massive worms and pale, blood-sucking crustaceans, some as big as basketballs. It is the undesirable remnants of a kill that was distributed to feed thousands for many miles around, now reduced to the scraps and the offal and remnants of its disease. Nobody wants to eat what is left, so the daydreamers have towed it to the dump. They come to the edge of the tangle and flip the raft so that the spoils spill out into the water. Guts and chunks of sour meat and the limp bodies of huge bugs that were never meant for the cold world outside their host churn into the sea, and the birds descend upon it all rapaciously. Fish and fish-birds dart in and take what they can from below. Coming in shortly after, dozens of sea shoggoths begin emerging from the fog, assembling their amorphous bodies into serpent-like undulating forms, and converge upon the daily offering. They come from all around and soon the sea churns with their movement. Once they cover the surface the seabirds disperse, their brief window to feed having closed. The ants’ stridulatory clicks and pops, the language by which they communicate like synapses firing between neurons, fills the air until it forms a collective rumble like distant thunder. Within an hour nothing is left.

The sea shoggoth, once a mighty predator feared by all, is now a garbage disposal. Yet as dishonorable as it sounds, the arrangement is mutually beneficial. The sea stewards produce a regular supply of food waste, as well as occasional dead bodies, all of which becomes more difficult to dispose of the more populous the sea becomes. In the past it was not unreasonable to simply leave their trash and their dead to drift away on the tides and be forgotten. Now such things would drift down busy avenues and come to rest in someone’s lawn, covering them with rotten guts, or traumatizing their children as the sharkbirds gather and pick out grandma’s eyeballs. So specified waste dumps became necessary, places where the current would not carry them far and where no one would do any business, where the sea could clean up the mess on its own time and without disturbance. Scavengers would come in, eat all traces, and so leave the waters clean. Whenever there is something to dispose of, it is towed to these special thickets. And these thickets are where the sea shoggoths have since made their homes. They have learned over their long co-evolution with the sea’s people that they do not need to hunt for their own food if it can be expected to be provided to them free of charge. Millions of years of interaction has already removed the most overtly aggressive colonies from the population - shoggoths that wantonly attacked anything they could, targeting livestock, resting daydreamers or gravedigger villages without distinction from any other food source were quickly destroyed, smashed and drowned or even doused in grease and set on fire. Only those more practical would survive, those better able to strategize, to tell what is and is not safe to feed upon. To learn and adapt. For millions of years the stewards of the sea have lived in relative peace with the shoggoth. So long as it is kept fed, it will leave them alone. It isn’t vicious for its own sake.

But it has not forgotten what it is. The daydreamers and gravediggers and greenskeepers are well aware that they have not tamed the beast. They have only made it smarter. The sea shoggoth will always choose the path of least resistance to survive - it has no inherent need to kill if it knows it will find food anyway. It could risk its life if it chose the wrong target and faced retribution from the only animals organized enough to rival its strength. So it leaves the bloats alone, and it keeps its distance from the people, and waits passively for offerings of garbage. But if ever the pipe runs dry… it will not hesitate to do whatever it needs to survive. So the sea shoggoth cleans up what it is asked to and in turn keeps to itself… but this is not a friendship. It is not capable of social bonding and certainly it has no concept of morals. This is a business agreement. To stay out of everyone’s way, it expects regular payments… and they had best always come in on time.

Lest the contract be terminated.