{"id":11633,"date":"2026-04-10T13:06:34","date_gmt":"2026-04-10T21:06:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=11633"},"modified":"2026-04-10T13:06:36","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T21:06:36","slug":"periscope-depth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=11633","title":{"rendered":"Periscope Depth"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A minor fiblet for something I’m allowed to talk about. Just to prove that I’m still alive.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

More substantive posts, hopefully, to follow.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lest she backslide into complacency\u2014lest, after so many cycles spent alone, she start to forget that she isn\u2019t\u2015Aki watches those last few moments Viktor recorded before Abaddon vanished into Eriophora<\/em>\u2019s broken depths. There it was, finally exposed: something that could barely be bothered to imitate, something whose haphazard humanoid shape was more obscenity than accommodation. A plastic slime mold walking on legs that weren\u2019t legs; arms that weren\u2019t arms extending into Eri<\/em>\u2019s guts like invading mycelia. It watched the approaching \u2019spores with all the concern of a shark eyeing a minnow, manifested that impenetrable wall of spines far too fast for the eye to follow. It seemed to extrude those needles almost as an afterthought\u2015like someone swatting reflexively at a fly without even consciously registering the fact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She replays it, a masochistic ritual, whenever she’s about to sleep. This is what you\u2019re up against<\/em>, she reminds herself. It doesn\u2019t hate you. It doesn\u2019t hunt you. It doesn\u2019t even know you exist, and the truly terrifying thing is it wouldn\u2019t matter if it did. You are nothing to it. It could step on you like a bug without noticing\u2015or, noticing, it wouldn\u2019t bother to scrape you off its heel. This is what Viktor Heinwald has put you up against. <\/em>Eriophora is nothing but fodder for this thing, an instrument wielded in service to an agenda you can\u2019t begin to understand, and you\u2019re the only thing standing in its way.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, hey. Good luck with that.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

* * *<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She catches Chimp talking to it sometimes. He\u2019s talking to it right now<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s possible they converse all the time, of course, exchanging petabytes in the blink of an eye. More likely the monster interrogates and Chimp merely answers like an obedient dog, serving up whatever projections or telemetry Abaddon is interested in at any given moment. They might never stop talking around her, down silent tightbeams, through networks of fiberop infesting the walls like capillary beds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But sometimes Chimp talks aloud in the darkness, at merely human speeds, in some tongue no human ever spoke. It may have been English in the distant past\u2014now and then Aki catches syllables that might once have been kilopascal<\/em> or isograv\u2014<\/em>but if so, it\u2019s long-since metastasized into haunting sibilant gibberish. It echos down unlit corridors where convenient pickups send it upstream to her lampreys. It talks over the hums and hisses of working machinery in parts of the ship finally coming back to life after uncounted centuries offline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And now\u2014statistically impossible as it may be, that the only two ships in this endless labyrinth might just happen to pass in the night\u2014the Chimp speaks in tongues on one side of a bulkhead while Aki cowers on the other, mere centimeters away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She crouches frozen, terrified that even the slightest motion might give her away. She breathes small fast breaths that barely touch her diaphragm; she swears her knees are rattling loud as castanets. Telemetry bundled with past recordings has occasionally reported a transient drop in air temperature\u2014a rolling atmospheric chill, as if Chimp were following some frozen ghost drifting through the catacombs\u2015but here, now, the sensors insist the temperature is rock-steady. They must be malfunctioning. Aki\u2019s blood is freezing in her arteries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wetness trickles along her thigh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eventually the Chimp fall silent. Abaddon does not answer. Aki has never heard Abaddon answer. Maybe Chimp isn\u2019t talking to it after all. Maybe he\u2019s hallucinating. Maybe this isn\u2019t even anything new, maybe it\u2019s just how he\u2019s always passed the long lonely ages when no one\u2019s on deck. Maybe Chimp has an imaginary friend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe he\u2019s just going insane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Much later, of course\u2014after five or ten kilosecs, when she screws up enough courage to pop the panel a crack and slip a periscope through the grille\u2014there\u2019s nothing there at all. She crawls back to her lair and plays Heinwald\u2019s sizzle reel a dozen times over, to atone for her cowardice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A minor fiblet for something I’m allowed to talk about. Just to prove that I’m still alive. More substantive posts, hopefully, to follow. Lest she backslide into complacency\u2014lest, after so many cycles spent alone, she start to forget that she isn\u2019t\u2015Aki watches those last few moments Viktor recorded before Abaddon vanished into Eriophora\u2019s broken depths. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[27],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11633"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11633"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11638,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11633\/revisions\/11638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}