The grain pulsed in my hand, a tiny, golden heart beating a silent duet with my own. The pestle nudged my wrist. Mr. Fin loomed. The audience watched. I had a pet blob, a broken mortar, and a mandate to scream into the void.
But first, I had a more immediate problem.
Floating in the thick air between me and Mr. Fin's snout was a block of shimmering, seaweed-green text. It looked like it had been written by a drunk glow-worm. The letters kept shivering, as if unsure of their own shape.
I squinted at it. "What is the thingy that says… STAUST? In front of me?"
The gelatinous blob, still holding the grain's shell, shuddered violently. Its surface rippled, bulged, and distorted. For a second, it formed a crude, screaming human face—mouth a wide, silent 'O' of terror—before melting back into smoothness. The green text in the air shivered again, stubbornly re-solidifying as STAUST.
Mr. Fin's dorsal fin twitched in a sharp, irritated jerk. His obsidian scales, in that moment, reflected the sickly green pulse of the cracked rice yolk, making him look momentarily diseased. "Status, you unseasoned mollusk," he growled. His tailfin slapped the sand with a CRACK that was less a sound and more a localized seismic event. A fossilized crab claw, unearthed by the impact, skittered across the sand and came to rest against my ankle.
The blob flinched at the shark's correction. One of its pseudopods, still connected to the main mass, suddenly stretched. It elongated like warm saltwater taffy, thinning until it was a glowing, gelatinous thread. It zipped through the thick air and pressed its tip gently against my sternum, right over my heart.
A cold, tingling sensation spread through my chest. When the pseudopod retracted, it left behind a faint, glowing imprint on my hoodie: a simple icon of a fork and knife crossed over a bowl. It hummed with a low energy.
The floating green text dissolved in a shower of emerald sparks. New letters, clearer but no less ominous, coalesced from the sparks directly above the icon on my chest:
STAUST: STARTER INGREDIENT ASSIMILATION - 0%
AUDIENCE PATIENCE: CRUMBLING LIKE A DRY CRACKER
I blinked. Then a slow, vindictive smile spread across my face. I uncrossed my arms just to point a triumphant finger at the text. "See, Mr. Fin! It says STAUST! NOT STATUS! I was right!"
Mr. Fin's gills emitted a sound that had no earthly equivalent—a strangled, metallic SCHK-KSHHHHH like a malfunctioning airlock on a dying spaceship. A puff of briny steam shot from them.
The gelatinous blob, caught in the crossfire, spasmed as if I'd plugged it into a socket. It extruded three new pseudopods in a panic. They flailed toward the floating text and began frantically rearranging the letters.
STAUTS.
SUTATS.
TSUATS.
Each rearrangement was more desperate and less pronounceable than the last. Finally, with a sound like a sigh, the blob dissolved its pseudopods and slumped into a defeated, iridescent puddle on the sand. A new scent rose from it: unmistakably, the smell of badly burnt popcorn.
The shark's left eye developed a minute, furious twitch. Its obsidian scales seemed to drink the ambient light, darkening to an even deeper, more absolute black. It exhaled, not at me, but upward. The plume of mist condensed, froze, and formed a new line of floating, icy text that hung between us like an indictment:
"SEMANTICS ARE FOR ENTITIES WHO STILL HAVE A VOICE."
As if to punctuate the point, the cracked whalebone mortar gave a final, agonized groan. The fissure running down its center widened with a sound like a ship's hull giving way. The two halves fell apart, spilling their contents—the half-crushed, spore-covered remains of the rice grain—into the sand.
But the grain wasn't dead. As it touched the luminous seabed, it moved. It sprouted three thin, stalk-like appendages. Each stalk grew a single, milky-white eye at its tip. All three eyes swiveled in their sockets, found me, and blinked.
Blink.
Blink.
Blink.
In perfect, synchronized disappointment.
I ignored the ocular rice. My victory was too sweet. "Hahaha! I was right! Admit it, Mr. Fin! You were wrong!" I was almost giddy with it. In a place where I understood nothing, I had won a argument about spelling with a cosmic horror. It felt better than a warm meal.
The giddiness made me brave. Reckless. I took a step toward the immense, darkened shark. "Can I… pet you?"
Mr. Fin's dorsal fin, which had been twitching, went perfectly rigid. It straightened into a sharp, vertical blade that caught the faint light and fractured it into a thousand prismatic shards—a brief, beautiful display of offended cosmic dignity.
My hand, fueled by idiot courage, reached out. My fingertips grazed the space just behind his pectoral fin, where the scales looked slightly smoother.
The moment I made contact, the universe hiccupped.
Mr. Fin's entire body didn't move away. It distorted. His mass, his solidity, his thereness seemed to vibrate at a frequency that bypassed physical law. For a split second, he wasn't a shark next to me; he was a sensation inside me. A freezing, geometric blueprint of vastness phased through my bones, my marrow, my very cells. It was the feeling of being X-rayed by a glacier, of having the void itself look at your skeleton and find it quaint.
Then, with a wet, heavy THUD that shook the seabed, he solidified again. The recoil of his return to normal space shoved me backward. I landed hard on my backside in the whispering sand, the breath knocked out of me.
"PETTING?"
The word wasn't spoken. It was projected. His gills flared wide, and a torrent of bubbles, sharp as needles and smelling of citric acid and powdered china, shot out. They burst against my cheeks and forehead with tiny, stinging explosions.
"I AM NOT SOME RECALCITRANT OTTER."
The gelatinous blob, sensing a new tier of danger, recoiled into a tight, defensive sphere. From its center, it secreted a gout of viscous, quick-hardening paste. The paste shaped itself mid-air into a floating, bureaucratic-looking sign:
[PETTING PROTOCOLS: FORBIDDEN BY ABYSSAL BYLAW 47.9 - 'ON THE UN-SANCTITY OF COSMIC FORMS & MORTAL PRESUMPTION']
[PENALTY: TEMPORARY PHASING. SECOND OFFENSE: PERMANENT TASTELESSNESS.]
I sat in the sand, my face stinging, my insides feeling scrambled and frostbitten. The smugness had evaporated. Right. No petting the shark. Noted.
The pulsing icon on my chest felt warmer. I looked down. The AUDIENCE PATIENCE line had changed.
AUDIENCE PATIENCE: CRUMBLING LIKE A DRY CRACKER (NOW WITH ACTUAL CRUMBS)
Floating down from the top of the bubble membrane were tiny, black, ashy flakes. They drifted like sinister snow, dissolving with a faint hiss when they touched the sand or my skin. They smelled of ozone and impatience.
The three-eyed rice grain waved its stalks at me, as if urging me to get back to work.
Fine. No petting. Back to the impossible task.
I pushed myself up, brushing the strange ash from my arms. I looked at the STAUST display, then at Mr. Fin, who was still vibrating with indignation.
"Okay, STAUST," I said, addressing the empty air with as much authority as I could muster. My voice only wobbled a little. "I want to know how to make steamed rice. Tell me?" I turned in a slow circle, addressing the darkness, the membrane, the unseen audience. "STAUST? Hello?"
The blob, still in its defensive ball, gave a violent spasm. It was less afraid now, more… exasperated. Its pseudopods re-formed and began flailing, not in panic, but in a frantic, mimetic dance. They pushed and pulled at its own mass, shaping it. In moments, the blob had transformed itself into a crude, wobbling model of a rice cooker. It even extruded a thick, pulsating cord that burrowed into the sand like a root, presumably searching for an abyssal power outlet.
The STAUST text above my chest flickered, pixels scrambling. It dissolved and reformed:
[STEAMED RICE PRIMER: REQUIREMENTS]
1. COSMIC GRAIN (ASSIMILATED) - STATUS: CRACKED, SENTIENT, JUDGMENTAL.
2. ABYSSAL STEAM (PENDING) - SOURCE: GEOTHERMAL VENTS OF DESPAIR.
3. MORTAL HANDS (DETECTED) - CONDITION: CLUMSY, SLIGHTLY PHASED.
Mr. Fin let out a long, slow exhale through his gills. It was the exact sound of a pressure cooker releasing a build-up of steam, a weary pssssssshhhhhhhh.
"Oh, now she wants instructions," he muttered to the uncaring abyss. His tailfin gave a casual, dismissive flick. The gesture sent a ripple of force that slapped the blob-rice-cooker, making it jiggle violently before it stabilized into a slightly more professional-looking appliance.
The two halves of the broken whalebone mortar rattled, then levitated. They hovered in the air above the three-eyed rice grain, looking less like a tool and more like the jaws of a hungry predator.
The rice grain, for its part, seemed to sense the shift. The tiny, hair-like cilia covering its body stopped their random waving. They all oriented toward me, standing stiff. They began to pulse, not with light, but in a rhythm that perfectly matched the rapid, shallow pace of my own panicked breathing.
In. Out. In. Out.
The cilia pulsed.
Faster. Slower. Faster.
It was breathing with me. My panic was its tempo.
[SYSTEM NUDGE:]
Assimilation Progress: 0%. Method Detected: Sympathetic Resonance.
Warning: Ingredient is mirroring user's emotional state. High anxiety may result in: Anxious Rice.
Suggestion: Regulate breathing. Or proceed. Anxious Rice could be a novel texture.
I stared at the pulsating grain, at the floating mortar halves, at the blob's sad rice-cooker impression. Instructions were one thing. Execution was another.
I took a deep, shuddering breath, trying to slow my heart. The cilia slowed their frantic pulsing, just a little.
"Okay," I whispered to myself, to the grain, to the blob. "Okay. Step one." I looked at Mr. Fin. "Teacher. How do I get… Abyssal Steam?"
Mr. Fin's good eye (the one that wasn't twitching) rolled toward the bubble's membrane. "You don't get it, land-grub." A cruel, needle-filled smile spread across his maw. "You summon it. With a scream. Remember?"
He nodded toward the three-eyed grain.
"Scream into the ingredient. Season it with your intent. The steam… will come from you."
The cilia on the grain stood straight up, quivering with anticipation. Or terror. It was hard to tell with a grain of rice that had recently grown eyes.
I closed my own eyes. I had no idea how to scream into a grain of rice. But I was in the basement of reality, being taught by a shark, with a blob for a pet. Knowing how things worked was clearly overrated.
I took another breath, leaned over the pulsating grain, and opened my mouth.