Desert Shores
my entry for the Lunar Awards, Season 10, Round 3
Before we get into this week’s story, I have another one coming out soon, based on the works of Jules Verne, in an upbeat volume by Oddity Prodigy called Bright Mirror. Just to be pedantically clear, this is not that story, but in a strange coincidence their cover picture for the anthology works quite well here, I think.
What do you think?
This little short has been bouncing around the rejectosphere since August of 2023. Now I’m trying it out with the Lunar Awards.
There are some references below the story, somewhat in the style of Breaking Futures.
Thanks for reading!
Desert Shores
by Randall Hayes
They’re flooding Death Valley. Trying to lower sea level, or at least slow its rise. They’ve already sold the future beachfront lots, which went quickly. No one will insure the “real” coasts any more.
Never mind about the national park, or the endangered plants, or the pupfish that live nowhere else. Never mind about the Paiute claims on the land. Never mind about the sailing stones of Racetrack Playa, or the lost city of Shin-au-av. There’s money to be made, and spent. Yacht clubs to build. Local color to celebrate. Fruity umbrella drinks and microbrews to name. The Mule Train. The Father Crowley.
I protested. I filed injunctions. They were ignored. That was very stressful, and triggered me to do some things I don’t regret, things that got me arrested, and committed, and medicated. A violation of my rights, my worldview, my sovereign self.
Now I search the local cave systems for advanced technology that I can use against the dominators, on behalf of nature. It must be here. It was found before, a hundred years ago. The Internet said so.
Turn off your recording device.
The voices are back, but different this time. They don’t echo through the tunnels like my own voice, or like my scraping steps. Turn right, they say. Deeper, they say.
Then, in the white light of my LED headlamp, I see them. Floating in the crystal-clear water, their stubby legs hanging down, their feathery gills sprouting like pink ferns from behind their long jaws. Like tiny albino crocodiles, about the length of my forearm. Eyeless. Beautiful.
Cousins.
“You can talk?”
You can. Why not us?
“So you’re cousins?”
Siblings. Cousins to you, through Tiktaalik.
“You know Tiktaalik?”
Knew. He is long gone, though parts of him live on in us, and in you.
“You speak Inuit?”
You do.
“Well, no. Just that one word. It means ‘big fish.’ Beautiful word. Very spiritual.”
Words mutate and migrate through time. Like genes. We have had many names. Nagas, in Sanskrit. Lungs, in Chinese. Adderamim, in British. Olms, in German.
“‘Alms’? Like, gifts to the poor?”
Olms. Vocal folds, tongue, lips, teeth.
“Olums.”
Olm. Tongue, lips, smooth, continuous.
“Olms.”
Better, says one.
Give us blood, says the other, and we will show you wonders.
“Alms for olms?”
Not alms. Trade.
I happen to have a razor blade with me, in a cardboard sleeve, that I use for stress relief sometimes. Drops of blood hit the water, scarlet and viscous. They sink, leaving complicated curls in their turbulent wake. The olms, quick as snakes, intercept them and snap them up before they can touch the bottom.
There is little information, says one. The red cells are hollow.
It is enough, says the other. Then, to me, Come back tomorrow. Bring food. We have not eaten for years.
“Like, hamburger?”
No meat. Conflicting gene signals. I can feel them poking around in my memories. It feels like clicking hyperlinks to open new web pages, but dozens of them at the same time. Those links link to other links, and the whole thing continues to cascade, long after they’ve stopped actively doing anything. I feel like I’m having a stroke, or a seizure.
They just float there, waiting, until I pick myself up off the floor. Bring sugar, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur. Molasses, you call it.
“What do I get? Wonders, you said.”
Come back tomorrow. You will see.
The next day, two tiny, tailed women with webbed hands and red gill-hair anchored to their scalps float in the pool. “You’re human now? Human-ish? Humanoid?”
We have shaped ourselves using the information you provided. You express the male proteins, but also have the female genes inside your cells. They are turned off, but present, and accessible to us.
“You can shape-shift?”
It is a simple question of turning genes on and off in the proper sequence. Your people have poured their minds outwards, into tools of stone and glass and metal. We have turned ours inwards. It is slower, but more effective.
“Can you teach me to do that?”
Eventually. Now we need to grow larger. Leave the jug. Bring another, tomorrow.
The next day I bring both molasses and two sticks of butter, which melt before I can get into the cool of the cave. They don’t care. They lick it off my hands, slowly, savoring it, and realize they need to ask for calcium, to build thicker bones so they can walk on land. I offer bring it in crystal form from the salt flats outside.
Semen contains calcium, they sing. They are the size of slender pre-schoolers. I freak out and leave their grotto at a run. I go back on my medication, willingly this time, and I don’t think about them anymore.
The solar pumps and wind turbines continue to spin, and the pipeline pours seawater from the distant Pacific into Death Valley. This contains all sorts of floating eggs and larvae, and the divers say an ecosystem is already forming in the shallows. It happened before in the Salton Sea, and now it’s happening here.
I am walking along the beach at dusk when I hear their siren voices in my head. I turn and look out to sea, and there they are, just their heads out the water, their eyes shining like sea otters.
“I am not coming in the water, you pedo kelpie bitches,” I say. I have no idea where I heard the word pedo — probably some standup comedian, or the Aussie bartender at the cabana bar that serves the pump workers, the biologists, and the construction workers. I’m not supposed to be drinking on my medication. But there’s this thing he makes with dark rum, which I’m just now realizing comes from molasses…
They walk out of the water, wearing swimsuits, as adult women, with actual hair growing on their heads (still red). And eyebrows. They look disturbingly like me.
“We still owe you wonders,” says one, speaking out loud, with her mouth. She reaches out a tentative slender hand, with no fingernails. I do not take it.
“Or at least a boon,” says the other. She steps inside my personal-space bubble. I step back, and then she steps back, smiling in what is probably meant to be a reassuring way. Her teeth are tiny needles. She should have a lisp but doesn’t.
“We have collected samples, for reference,” says the one. “We understand your illness now, why the mind-touch was such a problem. We can repair your genome.”
“You are not rewriting my DNA,” I say.
“We already have,” says the other, with surprising heat. “Who do you think made your ape brains suddenly expand, a million years ago? Who do you think gave you language, and art, and tools?”
“You turned on us,” says the one. “With fire, and fang, and bow, and blade. You cut out our hearts and ate them, hoping to learn the language of the birds. Not eventually, with slow growth and tutoring and training, but right fucking now, with magic.”
“You are the monsters here,” says the other. They turn on their heels and walk back into the water.
I need a drink.
The next months do not go well. I go off my medication again, move into the caves, so I can search for technology full-time. At one point I start building a wall across one entrance, trying to seal it off from the rising water, not thinking about all the other entrances.
One of them finds me, digging through a dumpster, arguing with a seagull that wants my French fries. He’s male now, like my own face looking back at me, but younger. The beard is neatly trimmed, and red, instead of ragged and gray and crusty. “Do you not know me?” he whispers. “I have a name now. I call myself An.”
I am too tired and hungry and sad to be frightened. I couldn’t fight him if I wanted to.
“But first, a bath.”
My mind clears over the course of several weeks. My anxieties fade, and even the cutting scars on my arms fall off, leaving healthy pink new skin beneath them.
I learn that the twins are now An and Ki, Sumerian gods reincarnated. They heal people in a tent down by the water. In between they live on a sailboat, gifted to them by a grateful patient. Being now as large as they want to be, they eat no food, sustaining themselves off the boat’s rechargeable batteries. Rumors of this feed their mystique, and they milk it, cobbling together bits of mythology and modern UFO folklore to create their cult of the Annunaki.
I still have to eat, though. Not just because they’re drinking my blood to maintain their forms without having to permanently rewrite their own DNA. They’re also feeding me their blood to rewrite my DNA, to fix whatever it was that made me more vulnerable to psychosis in the first place. Sort of a genetic information circuit between me and them. They monitor their changes, and then make changes to the changes, continuously. I ask them why they don’t just fix it, and they say these slow modifications are safer. I do feel better, most of the time.
My “inefficient” digestive system actually requires mass to move through it, out of it, in order for it to work properly. They are fascinated by this, and demand to watch my bowel movements, to be inside my mind while they’re happening, so they can experience the sensations for themselves. This leads to a lot of other uncomfortable sensual experiments. Things they will then teach to their followers, their holy prostitutes.
They don’t trust their other followers the way they trust me, and reveal nothing of their true nature to them. It’s all smoke and mirrors, or sunlight and prisms. They reveal me as their cousin, a reincarnation of Abzu, who was more often called Enki, which we decided was too similar to An and Ki for branding purposes.
I’m lying on the deck of the sailboat, the Enlil, renamed for the god of wind, with An curled around me, while Ki swims in the dark water. They are very tactile. One of their favorite followers is a deaf-blind woman who is teaching them a touch-based language she learned up north. She has something called Usher’s Syndrome. They say they can heal her, but they haven’t done it yet.
I stare up into the moonless desert sky, into the dark between the stars.
There is no dark, only stars that you cannot see. My mind stills and fills with something like the longest Hubble exposure. Every dark space has not just a star out of focus behind it, but whole galaxies of stars.
“That’s so deep,” I say, not sure of what else to say. “Which one are you from?”
The barest flicker of annoyance, though I can’t tell which of them it comes from. Here, like you. We are older; our line stumbled upon sentience earlier, that’s all.
“And you said before that you made humans,” I say.
Modified. Tweaked. Catalyzed. Amplified a trend that was already happening, so that it would happen faster.
“Why?”
We were impatient.
And lonely, Ki calls from the water. At this An uncurls from around me, stands up, and dives over the railing into the sea. It doesn’t have a name yet. I think there’s actually a contest, trying to interest 8th-graders in geography or something.
I’m sort of like the high priest now. I hire the ghost writers, and talk to the publishers, and book the public appearances. I stand behind them while they do the red-carpet interviews, and I do the extended interviews myself. I explain why the healings always involve an exchange of bodily fluids rather than just a magical laying on of hands. It’s not the real explanation, just convenient nonsense about the sea being the mother of us all.
The healings are real, though. Spontaneous cancer remissions, sickle-cell, a hundred different flavors of cystic fibrosis. Those are easy, they say. Teaching the deaf to hear, and the blind to see, is more complicated than just spitting into their eyes like Jesus. Not just because the brain has to learn what all that crazy new input means, but because culture hates change. We get call-ins accusing us of trying to destroy the deaf community. Not to mention the Christians. Their god is a jealous god.
We open a retreat center right on the water in Death Valley, which we’ve renamed the Valley of Life. There are casinos up the street, and brothels. The mob asks us to launder money for them. We politely refuse, but provide them and their wives with some exclusive and very expensive healings, including unorthodox treatments for infertility involving milk, honey, and other fluids we’ve taken to calling melam. We sprinkle it with gold dust for that extra-special feeling.
Once the twins feel safe behind our walls of wealth and privilege, manned by ever-vigilant legal sentries, we start re-growing amputated limbs. This draws unwelcome attention from multiple governments and corporations, and now every third recruit is a mole, digging for information on how we do it. They see the giant iron-air batteries, the silver wires that trickle currents of electrons into the stumps, and they fail to understand. They steal shed scars out of the trash until the twins start eating them, and begin to grow again. They kidnap ex-patients and sequence their genomes, but all they learn is that the mutations are gone, replaced by standard human sequences. Specifically, my sequences.
Then we start giving the money away. Not to foundations, to individual people, randomly, by zip code. We share the amounts but not the names. One of them, out of thousands, turns out to be a state legislator. This leads to a lot of press, and a number of hacks. They assume we have political ambitions. But we aren’t maintaining any records of where the money went, ourselves. We are broadcasting seeds. Then we extend the program to other countries. This extra provocation flips some switch in some elite’s amygdala. We’re a threat now.
The twins are about twelve feet tall, and spending more and more time in the water, because of their weight, when the soldiers finally arrive in the dead of night, wearing black fatigues and body armor with no insignia, ninjas with assault rifles and night-vision goggles. An puts up more of a fight than they were prepared for, and they shred his torso with high-speed bullets. Ki goes down after being hit with a high-intensity taser, but when four of them drag her ashore, they are disappointed to find that she is also dead.
They arrest me and confiscate what’s left of the assets. There is a lengthy trial, which generates even more press, but by the time they depose me, I have been off my An & Ki “meds” for days, then weeks, and the stress of being locked up has me in a bad and — to them — paranoid place. I understand now that this was the plan all along, that they shat their scaly little dragon bodies, or something like them, out into the nameless sea during the firefight. That was why they got big in the first place, to hide their growing olms, or lungs, or whatever. And while they’re off touring cenotes in the remote Yucatan or something, waiting for us to destroy ourselves, they’ve left me to take the fall. Just like the serpent in the garden. Classic.
I tell my captors all of this, without reservation, hoping they will let me go, and of course they do not believe me. So now I’m this mad genius who cloned myself for organs, or tried to genetically engineer myself a non-schizophrenic body to upload myself into, with no scientific training whatsoever, and built a cult to finance the project. I’ll spend the rest of my natural life chemically chained to corporate consensus reality, being asked technical questions I can’t answer until people forget about me. Or else I’ll slowly go insane despite the medications and die a mystery.
I’m not the one you want, I say over and over again. It’s the salamanders from beyond the unseen stars. Which is half bullshit and half true, which is the absolute best kind of lie.
I can’t be too mad at An & Ki. They did the experiment. They tried. We don’t want healing. We don’t want abundance, equally shared. We want privilege, and slaves. I don’t blame them for not wanting to be chained up, and carved up, and turned into a “resource.”
Better luck next life.
The quote about unseen stars came from the menu marketing text for a beer of that name from Wise Man Brewing in Winston-Salem, NC, which is nowhere near an ocean — yet. Inspiration does not respect our categories.
REFERENCES / FURTHER READING
Thomas Pueyo has a neat series of articles about seaflooding, a form of geoengineering that creates artificial seas.
https://www.legendsofamerica.com/ca-deathvalleyundergroundcity/
Death Valley may be richer in stories than it is in mineral resources.
OLMS
https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/amphibians/olm-salamander
“All animals produce a weak bioelectric field from nerve impulses, muscle contractions, and so on,” continues Boxshall. “The olm is able to sense when its own bioelectric field is disturbed by an interaction with the field of an approaching creature, such as a shrimp, and can then catch its prey.”
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/the-dragon-chronicles-introduction/4517/
PBS Nature funded a comic book by Rick Veitch?
https://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/amgg/index.html
“Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses,” with a top 50 out of hundreds or thousands; individual entries written by PhD students
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anunnaki
Much beloved by conspiracy theorists (more on this next week)
and by Robert E. Howard
https://www.pbs.org/video/protactile-a-language-of-touch-1u5hgv/
American Masters segment on the deaf-blind language Protactile
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/science/universe-uncovered/hubble-deep-fields/
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/iron-air-battery-renewable-grid/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_O._Becker
I read The Body Electric some years ago. It was full of diagrams of his experiments with salamander limb regeneration.
This is really great, man. Compelling and smart but ridiculous in the best possible way. Tons of great lines— “Her teeth are tiny needles. She should have a lisp but doesn’t.”, “Not just because the brain has to learn what all that crazy new input means, but because culture hates change.” “spend the rest of my natural life chemically chained to corporate consensus reality”
The story itself is “the absolute best kind of lie”.
Coincidentally super-cool! #AmphibianWeek
"The axolotl, represented here by the Mexican axolotl Ambystoma mexicanum, has the ability to regenerate its brain. In this issue, a group of four papers profiles amphibian and reptile brain neurons with single-cell transcriptomics. Analyses lend insight into why the axolotl brain retains regenerative capability that the mammalian brain has lost as well as how structural brain innovations arose during evolution."
https://www.science.org/toc/science/377/6610