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milt

by Victoria N. Shi

The others believe there’s no pulling Yobé out of his depressn. He’s convinced the second cataclysm is coming, worse than tsunami or algae bloom. He’s the most brilliant of us. We know he may be right. Still, it’s been five days since he debarked the NRV CHINOISERIE, which usually I understand because his dedication is righteous, his skin better with dry air and his hands more graceful with touchscreens than the rest of us.

But, then, he missed spawning. Not just any mating night, but our annual poisson d’avril, most cherished for its play. He no-showed.

I didn’t know until I’d already waited two hours in the reefs, touching my back again and again, hoping to find a starfish, le poisson of ritual, tacked there. I ignored all other broodstock calling for me to flash my fins and let down my papilla—none of them have ever been able to handle me.

Longingly, I looked toward the CHINOISERIE’s hulking shape until the mixture of coral and mer gametes clouded out the moonlight, the salty fruit of le petit mort trembling the water along with cries of ecstasy. When I finally realised he wasn’t coming, I hid my humiliation outside the atoll, weeping.

Then I picked a fight with him about it. Not to be a rotter, but I could have anyone. I didn’t say that, but I did tell him I don’t have to cry over him.

Yobé apologised first, because he loves me. My mouth, my embrace. The food I hunt, forage, and prepare for him. The jokes I tell, the mosaics I dedicate to him on the sea floor. He loves me. ‘But,’ he says, ‘you just can’t understand.’

Because it’s ‘humn nature’ and I don’t have enough of it.

Maybe he’s right. I barely have fingers. My eyes hurt in full sun. No matter how much I study, the technologies and languages don’t come to me as fluently. I’m not the most fish of us, but closer by far than Yobé, who’s unlocked more secrets of the NRV CHINOISERIE than generations before. Secrets that have driven him to despair.

‘The end is coming,’ he moans, his beautiful head in his twig-shaped hands. ‘Quel cauchemar. I can’t protect you. I can’t save our people, our way of life. I’ve sent out teams for relics. I’ve looked through all Doctr Lau’s archives. I’ve examined every map. Something’s hidden right under our bow, waiting to go off like a sea mine, but I can’t find it, mon cœur. And I can’t spawn, play, or laugh until it’s found.’

‘Let me help you,’ I say. ‘I’m sure there’s some way I can help you.’

He considers it, but his methods involve so-nar and cordinats, and I lose him. He gets angry I haven’t memorised the terms. He doesn’t want to explain. He claims he can’t.

I don’t feel stupid, exactly. We’ve always been different.

Yobé doesn’t know I found another wreck, years before we got together. I’ve never told him about it because he’s already chosen his obsession with humn relics over me. So many times. Tonight, our conversation kindles hope my discovery could bring us together… but I’ll need to check it out again first.

I love exploring. I’m skilled and resilient. On Yobé’s search team, I would’ve delivered.

I swim over blue boulvards and rusted cars, over the jagged ruins of forcefield generators and rubbled sea walls, under the lip of the continental shelf. Down, down, down.

Into the black water where my vision wakes, in a rare moment, to full capacity. Around my eyes, small muscles relax. The constant headache I tolerate in the shallow reefs and the CHINOISERIE’s lights finally falls away.

My scales glow dimly in bands down my hips and dorsal fins, providing a frequency of light that overlays prettily with my infrared sensors. Red fish clear away. I’ve grown much bigger than I was on my last visit, as fry, but it’s still easy to get through the rift cave.

No one else comes here. The radiation is far less now, but years ago, it burned the gills of my friends. Half-buried ruins reflect the soft glow of my flukes, until…

Here. The RV ARK.

RV means Resrch Vessl, but there’s no N for Na-to. No idea why. Though the block lettering and naming structure are semi-familiar, this relic’s overall shape is different. The NRV CHINOISERIE has big columnar legs, like a man, built to settle then move, rebalance with seismic shifts and sea level fluctuations. This one is rounded and long like a minnow, to cut through water. I spot the same door as before, eels and crabs shying from my approach.

Like my long ago visit, the entry light turns green when I move near it. I place my webbed hand on the panel. The door slides open. So far so good.

Flat floors and walls appear unchanged, except for some barnacles, motes, tiny shrimp. I swim deeper this time, checking every doorway. I seek computrs. Yobé loves computrs. Unfortunately, I now float over only defunct bots, similar to the NRV CHINOISERIE’s scrubbers, as I drift toward the biggest room.

Inside, two walls lined with mer-sized clear pods, like egg cases carved from thick, tempered glass. Within are strange faces, picked out with hair, bones tenting their corners, more like Doctr Lau’s portraits than mine.
Although machins probably control these containers, I find no interface. Bon sang!

The cockpit is boring and generic, seats overhead, steerage like diagrams from the CHINOISERIE. The bathroom, too. Not what I’m looking for. Until I finally come across the room with door marked: LAN AI.

That means love, I think, in one human language, but my spelling is poor.

Inside, a great huge computr rests in a cascade of cords and tubes. Yes! I swim over carefully, touching nothing. It looks like the NRA CHINOISERIE’s control centre. Hopefully, it still works. Yobé will love it.

Gratified, I finish my circuit and start for the door, when a wink of light catches my eye. Abruptly, a low pulse fills the room. Whoom whoom.

Oh, no.

The LAN AI door begins to slide shut, threatening to trap me inside. For a split second, I clench my flukes tight, terror burning through every nerve. Then I rip full strength through every muscle in my long tail.

I shoot out through the doorway, ricocheting off the wall at exactly the angle my body remembered. Keeping my arms pulled in tight, I rush down the long room as those doors begin to close too. I skim through an opening barely wider than my ribs, and feel a kiss of agony as the door slices my tail tip clean off.

On and on, I rocket toward the exit just around the—

SCREECH. The ceiling is the floor is the ceiling and a panel pops from the entryway just in time to clip my skull.
I black out.

When I wake, I am dry. So dry.

There’s an inch of water on the floor, but it’s running smoothly past my hands, fading in the deep red lectric light. The tops of my arms already feel tender and pinched. When I breathe, my lungs crackle. My head hurts, but worse is the violent ache radiating down my left side, from impact I don’t remember.

It’s too hot. I can tolerate far more radiation than most of my fellows, but not without water to suck in the heat.
I twist to check my injured tail. For an instant, I see the white cross-section of severed bone tips and frayed membrane. Then blood wells up.

Worst of all, my body is so heavy out of water. Looking up, I realise the ARK turned upside down while I was unconscious. A ramp now rises between me and the sealed exit, the hand wheel tantalisingly just within reach.

With effort, I shove myself half-upright, throwing my shoulder against the wall to balance, bracing my severed tail fin. Stretching as high as I can, I wrap webbed fingers around the black knob and pull.

It’s locked. Even when I wrap my other hand around it and yank, pulling my bodyweight against it.

Hysteria drives me to a stupid gesture—I strike the door with my tail. Clang! It doesn’t budge. The handle knob hurts me a little.

I have no choice. I must get to the pilot interface or die.

Slowly, I heave onto my stomach. Digging my elbows into the floor, I begin to drag myself down the hall. Heat stings my neck gills, but I try not to think about it, focusing instead on remembering the NRV CHINOISERIE’s console. The button will say… Opn hach. No. Open hatch.

I crawl past a dented bot, my scales rasping the remaining moisture off the floor. By accident, my bleeding tail swats one of the crumpled bots.

A fresh, keening whine fills the air, sending a shudder down my spine.

The bot rolls onto sharp, curved legs. It comes skittering toward me, moving like a crab, but with the unsubtle, unliving wrongness of then-built things.

Crying out, I fumble as fast as I can down the hallway. A patch of dried, fragile skin rips off my hip as I go, stuck tackily to the floor. Whipping my head around, I’m gratified—shocked—to see through my stringy black hair, two doors opening.

I throw myself through the nearest one.

LAN AI.

Suddenly, the floor moves, not from me but with me on it.

Disoriented, I wrap my webbed hands around the edge of the platform. Dried out, my eyes make out only a blur of arrayed lenses, a moment before I topple onto a sticky, skin-textured cradle.

Overhead, I hear a voice. ‘Activating adaptation protocol. Phase one: specimen analysis. Activation du protocole d’—’

In the haze of too-warm light, I hear a faint hum, and a bulky shadow descends to my face. There’s a spurt sound, and the faintest mist of moisture hits my face—barely a relief, but welcome all the same.

I blink and my vision clears in time to see a monstrous formation of devices above me. Round glass lenses screwing closer and further, filament wires sticking out sharp, nubby pieces spinning around and around.

I croak, ‘Hello.’

Bright white light clicks on, piercing the red ambience. Just as fast as moisture had kissed me, it’s gone. My dry skin feels too small, hands cramped like they’re bandaged. My chest pulls too tight for me to breathe right.

‘Flagging anomaly,’ the voice says. ‘Oral language detected. Activating local area networked artificial intelligence.’
‘Water,’ I reply. ‘Please.’

But it ignores me. The ceiling splits and yet another piece of equipment descends on a gleaming, striated metal arm. This new addition is an amalgam of the others: lenses and sensing probes, but also a screen with it, showing the angular, lined face of a land-dwelling humn man, hair as pale as quartz sand, his eyes ringed with those weird milky whites.

‘Bonne soirée,’ he says. ‘Are you conversant?’

I don’t remember that word from anywhere on the NRV CHINOISERIE. I stare at up at the screen. ‘I am mer.’

‘Very well, Merv. You appear to have regressed linguistic and physical development. How much time has passed since the Lohan’s temperature inflection point? Was the 2048 “red” estimate correct?’

I goggle at him. I need water but, at this point, obviously this machin man is too stupid to understand how to talk to people, and maliciously indifferent to my suffering.

A rattle echoes from my own lungs and I see the door. Screwing up my courage, I wrench myself up, twisting my body against the strange sticky seat, rolling back to the floor—

—only for a strap to snare my arm. Metal clamps down on my fish tail, brutally hard against the ragged flesh and puckered scales.

Startled and desperate, I squirm. Hiss. I’d spit, but there’s nothing in my mouth but my shrunken tongue. Abruptly, the prehensile screen shoves in close to my face.

‘You’re one of his, aren’t you? Dr Aramis Lau’s half-breed abominations.’

Despite my unignorable discomfort, those words break through. Doctr Lau. The original leader of the NRV CHINOISERIE, our earliest progenitor, a humn who could not survive the first cataclysm but valiantly fought so that the best of people—not humn people, but people—would survive.

Merpeople have many problems, from fast and frequent genetic drift to our slow progress with making machins to suit the sea, our numbers small, the transfer of generational skills and knowledge as precarious as the weather. But we are only alive to have our problems because of Doctr Lau and the way he understood human-ity to be more than humn.

‘I’m one of his children,’ I correct him, in my parched whisper.

‘Macabre,’ he hisses. ‘Your voice is masculine, but you are a hairless, mutated, effete little thing. I see no genitals. Are you fish or are you man?’

Ugh. My genitals are private. ‘We,’ I grit out, ‘are what remains of your kind. We survived.’

His eyes flash in rage, realistic in his passions, even though I recognise something lifeless about this image, this voice. The measure. The synchronisation.

‘Mankind has died. Unjustly. Dr Lau and those other perverted despots stole our resources. We had the technology. We would have repopulated, once we built our shielded cities—’

‘You tried,’ I force the words out. ‘Storms came. Walls failed.’

The LAN AI pauses, and the lens focuses closer, sensors crowding to examine my face, my shrivelling body. Then his eyes sharpen, deaden like steel.

‘Perhaps so, petit animal. But they won’t this time.’

The whirring arm draws him back. The other voice speaks of ‘master override’, and an acceleration to phase three, on the authority of the hed scintist.

I cry out, ‘What are you?’

‘I am Doctor Boucher! The greatest mind of humankind, immortalised forever in neural networks. I will bring my people back in the image they were intended, to master the Earth again.’

Only now do I realise: this is what Yobé feared.

This man, or the relic holding something of his hateful spirit and intentions—this is my darling’s enemy, the one who would doom us all to the second cataclysm because it’s his nature, and he knows nothing but to repeat the tragedy of the civilisation that he was part and party of killing before. I’m dying by the evil of my lover’s worst nemesis.

‘Drain it of its DNA,’ the Boucher says. ‘Log it. We will target the genome later. Vite!’

Long, shining needles descend toward me.

What to do? My mind goes white with panic. I could break my body off my pinned arm. Drag my tail out after, throw myself across the room with all the strength I had left. Take my chances with the bot and… and…

No. I’m not going to survive this by behaving like a fish. Or the kind of humn LAN AI once was.

Instead, I close my eyes. I think of my beloved, Yobé’s face pressed close in luminous moonlight. The tiny cutting plates of his pretty fingernails digging into my jaws, his teeth raking the delicate layers of my gills.

Instead of shrinking away, I ride the pain.

And my body does what it’s always promised Yobé it would do, quickening with want. Electricity pulses through the plaques along in my torso. My blood runs faster, brightening inside my veins, green.

‘What are you doing?’ Boucher demands. His image flickers in the screen, and the overhead light gutters too. ‘S-s-stop. You’re outputting too much rad-d-diation.’

Thrashing against my binds, I let out a long, high keen. Around me, stitches crack and glass pops.

‘What i-i-is that?’ Boucher stutters in light and sound, unable to look away. ‘Silen-le-le-lence!’

No. I will not be silent. I am loud.

‘Activate-ate-ate evacuation proto-c-c-col!’

I think of fingers scoring my back. The coarse bite of seabed gravel tumbling against me, a burn that bends the boundary of pain into pleasure. Yobé holds me tight. In despair. In hope. The silver bubbles out of his gills would boil and sting their way right into mine, while the flexors of his iridescent hips bend me like he’s trying to burst through. Oh, he loves me. His body loves my body, even though we are imperfect, different, too much the same. Even in his grief for the derelict paradise he’s terrified to lose.

If I must die, I will do it with the pain I didn’t choose—and the pleasure I make of it.

In the screen, Boucher stares into my throes of indulgence, his pixelated pupils huge, mouth slightly slack.
I arch off the sticky skin chair.

And release.

Energy erupts out of me, electricity searing through the air and into the delicate instrumentation of the steel and glass above, leaping from sensor to antenna, melting the needles. Through the leather, the floor, I unleash wave upon breaking wave of radiation. The machin man’s single lens flares wide as the light eats through it.

Again, I drift into welcome darkness.

When I open my eyes, the sun shines down, but I’m deliriously damp. Foamy sea spray comes over the low-riding edge of the wall, which unfolded into a raft of some kind, just floating atop the water. Red emergency light floods the lower deck, but I am up here, sitting in the same chair, though now covered in thick syrupy gametes that not even the waves have wiped away.

Merfolk shouts cascade through air. Others break the surface to see me.

Yobé’s face emerges, approaching fast, lanky arms driving into the blue. His voice reaches me first, familiar both in register and the choppy cadence of his sobs.

But this time, he weeps from joy. ‘You’re here. Oh, I thought you died, mon destin!’

‘Juste un petit peu.’ After all, I am not dead now.

Weakly, I sit up, eager for his affection, his aftercare. Around me, the great, floating relic seems overall intact, but the screen is dashed on the floor below. I grab it and hoist it high. It’s not le poisson, but a gift, a beginning, all the same.

‘I’ve brought you the head of your enemy. And I love you.’

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Host Commentary

And we’re back! Again, that was milt, by Victoria N. Shi, narrated by Tatiana Grey.

About this story, Victoria N. Shi says: I both love and fear the sea. As someone raised on nature documentaries, there is something anti-fascist about the way nature is organized. This is sometimes worth contemplation, even when we are busy and sad. It might even bring solace.

And about this story, I say:
I really liked how alien Shi made the future merpeople feel, both in their culture and in their physical transformations. I also liked how they were not simply a homogenous unit, but a mix of different mutations along a spectrum of change. And now I say alien, but also Shi did a great job mixing the unfamiliar with the familiar — I liked that their language has evolved from this mix of French and English, and I liked the shortening of words (something it might be harder to hear in the narration, but which is visually apparent on the page.) And I always like stories where future people are discovering ancient tech that is still in our future, and the way you can use that as a writer to give clues about the timeline that has brought them to this point.

And let me also alert you to the fact that if you liked this story, Shi has another 2025 story, “Patient Was the Doctor”, which is free to read online via Analog or shiwritesprose.com. Shi described this story as “also gay and oceanic,” so check that out.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please, go forth and share it.

How do you share it, you ask? Well! In addition to your social media of choice, consider rating and/or reviewing us on podcast listening sites, such as Apple or Google. More reviews makes for more discoverability makes for more Escape Pod for you.

Escape Pod relies on the generous donations of listeners exactly like you. And remember that Patreon subscribers have access to exclusive merchandise and can be automatically added to our Discord, where you can come chat with other fans as well as our staff members. I always like seeing what people have to say. So! If you enjoyed our story this week then consider going to escapepod.org or patreon.com/EAPodcasts and casting your vote for more stories that bring their lovers the head of the enemy.

Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from Edith Widder in her fascinating book about bioluminescence, called BELOW THE EDGE OF DARKNESS, who said, “Believing that the world was designed to have us in it and therefore everything is going to be all right is a dangerous folly.”

Thanks for listening! And have fun.