Fathomless Panthalassic Avarice

Xiangyao, former terror of the South China Sea. Xiangyao, whose bowels teem with wealth enough to shame empires. Xiangyao, kaijupolis beneath the waves.

Xiangyao, former terror of the South China Sea, which could never be put down by mere bombs. Xiangyao, whose bowels teem with wealth enough to shame empires. Xiangyao, kaijupolis sleeping beneath the waves. With what treasures will you bless us today?

It starts in the mines. By the strictest technical limit, Xiangyao’s intestines contain breathable gas. The oxygen content of K2’s summit, mixed with equal parts nitrogen, sulfur, methane, monoxides and dioxides, can keep a human breathing and working for maybe three, four hours before their lungs give up and their heart gives out. The respirator adds two more hours – enough to get a little deeper into the mine, into less-tapped veins nobody else has had the lung capacity or stupidity to go.

Here comes Yusri, twenty-seven years old, paid pennies on the day, dragging the pickaxe along the ribbed gut floor to conserve his strength, damn near naked but for the army surplus respirator strapped across his face. The respirator was pre-owned. He took the risk willingly. Could’ve taken the company issued ones and had to turn back a mile up like the greenhorns on his shift. They had to go back with bean-sized nodules, barely enough to cover the cost of filter changes in their respirators let alone add to quota. Yusri got a better one on credit. That’s what makes him a veteran.

His eyes light up when he sees it – a nodule of turquoise metal, the size of a man’s fist, embedded into the intestinal wall. Each orichalcum pearl will fetch as much as five dollars on the quota. Enough to feed his wife and three children for the week. Took Yusri three hours to get down here, one more to chisel the pearl from the wall. He’ll just take smaller breaths on the way out.

Not small enough. Xiangyao’s bowels churn. The walls quake and the air humidifies with digestive fluid. The respirator starts to dissolve. Yusri’s running now, pickaxe abandoned a kilometer back, all too aware of the plastic clock ticking down on his face. Takes a wrong turn – dead end! Doubles back – which way did he come from? Three possible tunnels, two death sentences. The walls pulse the colors of phlegm and bile. He picks one at random – realizes too late it’s the wrong one.

Yusri dies in stages: heaving into his mask as he prays, pissing in terror as he prays, realizing in horror that he shit himself as he keels over. Three hours later, a greenhorn from his shift, named Utami, finds his body and the pearl. The pearl she brings up for five dollars on the quota. The corpse she leaves behind.

Xiangyao has lurked beneath the sea for countless years. No treaty claims it. No navy patrols it. Into that vacuum, quietly, the Foundation moved. From the shadows, they tamed the city's worst impulses and kept its discontents in check.

Utami carries the pearl up through the gut mine into the gastric mill: a labyrinthine factory complex bolted to thick epithelial walls, dying a slow death over a vast lake of aqua regia. Fresh metal, machines, and men must be brought in daily to replace what the environment takes. Here at the mine entrance, where Xiangyao’s mucus-lined flesh meets corroding metal, the foreman waits to count the survivors. His name is Cielo.

When Cielo was fifteen, his cousin Christian fell through a hole in the catwalk, straight into the acid. At sixteen, his neighbor Alim lost both hands in one of the conveyor belts. The day he turned seventeen, a blast furnace broke off its hinges and cast his father, Miguel, in pig iron. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty. Killed each month by the machines; the air; the water.

At twenty-one, he’d had enough. He earned this spot by pushing his predecessor into the acid. Triads charged him a year’s pay to cover it up. They loaned him the first installment; he’s been paying off the interest for a decade now. Upon seeing the pearl in Utami’s hands, Cielo realizes that Xiangyao has offered a present. The first in his life, on his thirty-first birthday.

Before Utami can cross the mine’s threshold, Cielo pulls her aside and snatches the pearl from her hands. She protests, so he threatens her back down to refill quota. Doesn’t even care that her respirator needs changing; forget their quota, this will shave the next decade off his payment plan. He walks – doesn’t run – fast as he can. Knows how easy it is to take a shortcut through the mill and pay the toll in blood.

He survives the journey across the production floor. Dodges unlicensed forklift operators, untrained electricians trying to fix sparking severed wires, children moving lumps of radioactive ore from belt to belt. Seen enough deaths every year from repeated exposure to each. Knows the ladder routes, catwalk shortcuts, and security codes to avoid and minimize every risk to his health.

Poor bastard forgot to check his email in the morning. Of course Xiangyao has the Internet – it has computers, cell phones, and cable television wired through the brute’s esophagus up into satellite dishes poking out the nasal cavities. But today was Cielo’s birthday. He didn’t wait around for the dialup to load; didn’t see the email notice of the gas leak in the morning; didn’t know about the faulty pressure sensors around the hatch to Xiangyao’s gizzard. He simply stood in the airlock for ten minutes then dropped dead of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Ask around long enough and someone will tell you about the week they can't remember. Or the cousin who went to work and didn't come home, no body, no funeral, just an empty bunk. Rumor says there's a Site hidden deep in the bowels, sealed in the meat. No-one's ever found the door.

It takes three hours before the airlock hatch swings open. Imran sees Cielo’s corpse first; Samnang the pearl. They look from one, then the other, then at each other. Neither is fast or fit enough to swing on their coworker, and they both know it. They’re also desperate enough to entertain the idea; it’s either that or spend the rest of their lives fixing hatches and pressure seals in secondhand Tyvek hazmat suits that can’t even keep water out.

They start arguing with each other instead. Bargaining, wheeling, and dealing on which of them will be brave enough to steal the pearl and which of them can fence it. Which of them should get the lion’s share. It’s practically performative. They know they’ll end up splitting it fifty-fifty. Forty-nine, forty-nine after they invest two percent in beer. Xiangtao lager makes life worth living. They’re still hungover from last night.

So hungover they forgot that a newbie came to the airlock with them. Her name is Gutspeaker and today marks her first full year in the refinery. She’d expected to be put in the mines. But she’d been her local Party branch’s quartermaster for a decade: kept the electricity running, the toilets flushing, the fuel flowing. Ensured the bookies got their odds, the constables their porn, the bureaucrats their cigars. When the raids finally came through, she’d accrued enough favors to escape with a slap on the wrist. Xiangyao can only spare the prison space for the truly antisocial. She got work-release as a cargo lift maintainer, then got promoted to mechanical technician. Longer hours, but protective wear. Easy tradeoff.

Gutspeaker has more ambition than Imran and Samnang combined. The pearl speaks to her. Tells her who to sell to, bribe, and buy off. It might be able to pay bail for the party’s other members – or lend her legitimacy, as not just part of the Secretariat Insurgent but as a chair of the Central Delta Committee. It offers hope that the beast calling itself Xiangyao’s Communist Party can be more than some miserable imitation of a Foundation none of them have ever heard of, more than a bunch of alcoholic Marxists smoking around mahjong tables. The pearl promises her the future of which she schemes and dreams, so she answers its call.

Her psychic shriek resonates with Xiangyao’s cells. While Imran and Samnang argue quietly with each other, the spores in their guts, immigrants from Xiangyao’s macro to their microbiomes, ferment the sugars from breakfast. Before they know it, they’re laughing with each other, dreaming of the life they’ll have once they’re out of this hellpit. What the pearl will do for their futures. They’re so giddy they’re practically drunk. The city converts their morning pandesal into Xiangtao, fresh from the source. Imran gets onto his hands and knees, searching for the pearl that must have rolled away into the corner. Samnang pokes at Cielo’s corpse, angry now that the dead man won’t wake up.

Moments later, they both black out. Gutspeaker whispers a silent thank-you, then asks their stomach biomes to stop autobrewing. It’s Xiangyao’s choice whether to listen; then again, he has always given her that courtesy. She makes a show of stepping into the airlock and being shocked that her colleagues have somehow gotten so drunk they not only took off their clothes but blacked out in a room with a dead man. It’ll be fine. She learned online that vodka protects from radiation. The pearl is worth it.

She holds the pearl in her hands, wrapped tightly in Imran and Samnang’s fatigues. She darts between pallets stacked with steel, bundles of recovered lead, rare earth ingots, and the piles of today’s casualties. Sneaks through the shadows of corrugated shipping containers under the roof of Xiangyao’s stomach a hundred meters up. Doesn’t stop to catch her breath until she’s crouched in the safety of the canal lock. Nobody’s ever had an answer for why it’s called a lock. It’s an elevator: one of a hundred enormous bone pistons, powered by the kaiju’s massive exhalations, that pushes cargo from Xiangyao’s gizzards into the Crop. Whatever it is, she loves it for bringing her back home.

In recent months, something changed. Nobody could say exactly when. Only that sightings of the men in black became less frequent, then stopped. That the lights in certain windows went dark and stayed dark. The Site, if it was ever there, was now empty. For the first time in ages, nobody was watching.

Officially, the working class inhabit the Lower Xiangyao District: thirty-six cubic hectares of space which can safely support up to a quarter-million human beings, each with a hundred square meters of dignity. Practically, the Crop is sub-habitable: pre-fabricated housing competes with the causeways through which commerce flows. The secondhand ventilation systems choke on exhaust from the spermaceti-fired power plants and heavy metal hearths. The plumbing and cabling are stripped from the ships that first beached themselves in Xiangyao’s maw.

It’s Gutspeaker’s favorite place in the world. She was born with Xiangyao’s heartbeat filling her ears. Who cares what color the sky is? Who could be satisfied with starlight after seeing the auroral bioluminescence of the Crop’s ceiling at night? Why climb trees when you could scale the high-rises that bloom and sprout and branch off in great spires that embed into the roof? Who needs soap when the lye rain exfoliates your skin? The oil squeezed from the creature’s meat staves off typhoid, dengue, and tapeworms. The beer fermented from its yeasts is the best on the planet. Her breath is timed to Xiangyao’s pulse; she’s never gone a day in her life without it lulling her to sleep.

She flares her nostrils to inhale today’s exhaust. Sticks her tongue out and tastes the oil in the air. Presses one ear to the ground, then the other, listening as gossip reverberates through Xiangyao’s flesh. She speaks every dialect of every stairwell, corridor, and guywire. They tell her which routes the constables are patrolling; who’s about to call for ron in the mahjong parlour three doors down; where to find Xiao Yazi, the Communist Party’s most reliable fence.

When Xiao Yazi bought his bodega, he had it remodeled to look like the Flatiron Building in New York City, and he’s damn proud of it. Even had the sewage and power lines dug into the ground rather than bolted to the sides. It cost so much he couldn’t afford to keep it looking inhabited. Aluminum sheeting covers the exposed wounds, where the original stone roof started dissolving as soon as the first lye rain hit. The air conditioning in the upper floors doesn’t filter the oil from the air but cooks it. Whatever material comprises the sewage pipes also poisoned the foundations. It sinks into the decaying, discoloured ground at a rate of five centimeters a year.

So what if only hitmen or their victims rent rooms here to hide and die? So what if the only business he gets is smuggling? It’s still his bodega. His pride and joy. Xiangyao itself blessed his space; in each mouth of the twin stone lions outside his door lives a worm cast from its flesh. Each would defend the Flatiron with its life and responds to intruders by stabbing at them.

Gutspeaker rubs their heads and knocks on the door. The viewing port opens, revealing a pair of beady eyes and a nose so swollen it threatens to break through the viewport. Yazi is not happy to see her and threatens to call for the constables. Then he sees the business opportunity in her hands. She listens as he spins the dials of the first lock (memorizing where its tumblers stop), pulls a key for the second lock (recalling the locksmith who made it), and enters the twelve-digit code for the third (mimicking the position of his fingers by the sound). He’s changed the dial lock and the passcode. Still uses the same key though.

In a back room, they argue back and forth on a price before settling on ten thousand American Dollars. Gutspeaker knows that’s a fraction of the pearl’s worth. But even that fraction is enough to buy a new identity. Then it can pay bail for the Secretariat Intelligence – at least, the members worth keeping around. Then pay rent in a new building for a year. Get new mahjong tournaments going. Get funds flowing. Get chaired on the Delta Committee. There’s nothing in her life that ten thousand dollars can’t solve.

The Foundation is gone, but they are not done. They have one last design for Xiangyao. A parting gift, addressed to the whole city, return address withheld.

It takes Yazi a week to organize the deal. First stop: a meeting with Umasankar, kebab hawker and President of K Directorate’s Xiangyao Poultry Planning Union. His cut will pay for the Union’s extended coffee breaks – forcing the constables to change their lunch paths and clearing a specific path to Xiangyao’s Throat. Customs and Migration through the Throat is maintained by the Oneiroi Corporation, but Yazi knows the guards on both ends of the twelve-twenty-five P.M. shift change, and how much to pay them off to break the scanners before the Throat’s cargo lift. Once they make it up the Throat to Xiangyao’s Harbor, the psychosecurity sweeps emanating from the Upper Xiangyao District will pick up an unrecorded lump of telekinetic deadener like a dirty bomb. Simple solution: the plush bears coming out of Wondertainment’s sweatshops are so packed with artificial love and joy they act as psychospiritual flashbangs. A few pounds of heroin, artfully distributed among the company’s shipping crew, ensures an unlocked container for Gutspeaker and the pearl to slip into.

She’s never traveled this high up in Xiangyao. She spent her first thirty years in its gullet and crop and would happily spend the next thirty years there too. But she has to see the pearl off. It’s the most wealth she’s ever seen in a single spot – enough to change more lives than her miserable connection to her home ever had. Instantly she feels guilty, heretical, anxious. Is it the bends? A heart attack? Divine punishment? All three? Perhaps if she bursts from the container to confess her guilt – no, the pearl says, stay, protect – flee, flee, flee, get out, get out, get out –

The feeling passes. She realizes she has just been psychoswept by the Xiangyao Dock Security. She has just made it to the Xiangyao Harbor. Elation sweeps through Gutspeaker – relief, faith, ecstasy – then she flushes and remembers her place. Losing control will get you killed, kid, warns the pearl.

Gutspeaker cracks the container door open and ducks out onto the harboryard, the pearl stuffed into her Tyvek uniform. She takes a moment to look up, through the semi-cloudy membrane that shields Xiangyao’s eyes and the industry within from the salt of the South China Sea. The sun casts its baleful gaze down at her. It’s the first time she’s ever seen blue water. Or sunlight. Makes her think of a hurricane’s eye. As if her experience of clouds, let alone hurricanes, isn’t just snuff footage of tornado chasers getting sucked up.

Soon she will trade away the pearl to her contact. Gutspeaker won’t look back. Can’t afford to look back. She pauses in the shadow of a receiving gantry to look up at the ocean and the ships resting on its surface. She wonders where the pearl will go. Who will buy it? Does it matter, so long as their money feeds the revolution?

Not even a little. That’s ten thousand dollars in her pocket and the rest of her life ahead of her. She knows she will be safe. Xiangyao would have warned her if she were being watched.

Neither could conceive, let alone suspect, that an electric eye is trained on her through a hundred meters of salt water and hyperfauna flesh. Its owner scrutinizes her.

“Minor anomaly detected, marking for potential cautery. Returning to primary target: Crude tanker Pangara. Heat signatures identified. Chaos Insurgency affiliations confirmed. All targets marked for execution. Ready to drop.”

Meet Onru. Her artificial eyes scan through every spectrum from infrared to spectral. Her current shell weighs two-hundred-fifty kilograms and stands two-point-five meters tall. She and her siblings are here to deliver indiscriminate death to the enemies of the Foundation. She couldn't be any happier.

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