Supper with Kraken-folk

Synthetic dirt covered the ground of the room. It was a half-hearted replica of the soil found in the Rocky Mountain Archipelagos where Tankel grew up. This ground was similar to his most recent home. Except there, most of the decorations were real, even if the depths of the sea wore them down.

Four thick glass walls surrounded him and the other humans and kept the water around them at bay. An air purifier hummed away incessantly in a corner, a sound he was used to by now.

Inside the walls sat a house in the old suburban style, two stories with large windows that gave anyone outside the house a clear view of what the humans were doing. A tree sat in front of the house, its polystyrene apples picked off by some previous tenant and littered near the plastic trunk.

A dozen people were dropped off with him this morning. A few of them cried, unable to come to terms with their new situation. No one in his transport batch spoke English, and he felt strange seeing human faces and unable to talk to them.

Tankel walked up to the house. The front door lacked a latch, so it swayed lazily as he passed through. A few people sat at the dining room table also speaking in a language he didn’t understand. They greeted him politely, and he waved with a smile. The area was two stories tall, but there was no way to get to the second-floor mezzanine. The kraken-folk designer hadn’t grasped, or cared, that humans couldn’t naturally move vertically like them.

He found the kitchen and pulled on the fridge door. As a kid on the Rocky Mountain islands, he remembered getting in trouble for standing in front of the town’s fridge on hot summer days. This fridge door stayed shut since the machine was merely a model. He could see where the refrigerator was sculpted away from the wall and cabinets.

“Feeding time is in a few hours,” a man with black hair said. He was sitting at a bar stool, rolling an apple up his arm, then popping his elbow to make it bounce into his hand. “They feed you before dropping you off?”

“No,” Tankel replied as he checked a few drawers and cabinets. Each one was merely decorative. He levered himself up onto the counter to take a seat. It looked as comfortable as the plastic stool his acquaintance sat on. “How long have you been here?”

“A few weeks. I’m Nagji.” He caught the apple in his hand and reached out his other to shake across the bar.

“Tankel,” he replied.

“We don’t get a lot of people from the Americas here. How’d you get caught?”

“I was sailing to the Appalachian Islands. A kraken-folk grabbed my ship and pulled us down. I’ve spent the past few years alone with a little kraken-folk poking at my tank with his little suction cups.”

“Those are the worst,” he shook his head.

Tankel shrugged. “I had an actual weight bench which gave me something to do. And regular meals of raw fish. Although I’d kill for a salad or toast.”

“Best they do here is some seaweed slop.”

Seaweed reminded Tankel of his grandfather. The man’s breath was always heavy with the salty stuff as he told of times when the small islands were mountains, and the octopuses would fit in a bucket. Everyone knew what caused the flooding; they’d known it would happen for generations. But high tides and storms wiped out the infrastructure that could help humanity figure out why the kraken-folk grew in size and intelligence. Tankel grew up hearing all the legends used to explain the phenomenon. Some claimed coastal nuclear reactors mutated them, or an abundance of ocean gave them space to evolve. His grandfather had the crazy idea that the kraken-folk were always this smart; they just didn’t live long enough to use it.

“I get the impression this isn’t a museum,” Tankel eventually said after staring out the window at the rocky nests that littered the floor around their glass room. A pair of octopuses nestled into rocks and turned their heads toward the human habitat.

“No, not quite,” Nagji replied, tossing the apple towards Tankel. “You want to play catch in the yard? I’m feeling lucky.”

“I’m feeling less lucky by the second. And I don’t think I’ll enjoy my stay here.” Tankel looked at the apple. It was painted a single shade of red lacking the yellow and orange streaks he expected from the fruit.

“I haven’t.” Nagji’s tone was flat.

“You’ve been here a while… any point in putting off the inevitable?”

“Everyone gets caught eventually.”

“I was never one to procrastinate,” Tankel said with a shrug. He left the kitchen, and Nagji followed. A dozen people flooded through the door as some mechanism whirled to life outside.

“I liked my time with the little kraken-folk, though,” Tankel continued. “It beat life on the island where we worked the ground for food and built houses out of scraps. Especially when those scraps are torn apart during every storm.”

Tankel tossed the apple to Nagji, who stood under the tree. A few people sat in the yard shouting denials or bargains at the machine in the sky.

The machine lowered a glass cup down and into the dirt behind Tankel, and he fell in as the synthetic ground slid out from under his feet. The faux apple landed near him while Nagji leaned against the tree’s trunk for protection.

The cup sealed itself with Tankel inside, and he climbed to his feet on the shifting ground. A few more mechanisms hissed and latched into place, and the glass moved through the water. His little environment had separated from the larger habitat.

The cup nestled into the center of the kraken-folk’s nest, and the giant beasts inspected him. Their large suction cups squished onto the glass. Tankel flailed around in the dirt as they chirped at each other. Then a needle with gas entered the ceiling of the cup. It smelled noxious, and Tankel coughed, trying to get the fumes out of his lungs. Water rushed in, and the air bubble he stood in floated away as he helplessly swam through the cloud of fake dirt.

A tentacle grabbed him and dragged him under the beast’s bulbous head. Tankel instinctually wrestled against the beast’s grasp to no avail. Finally, the tentacle shoved him into the opening where the eight tentacles met.

Unable to hold his breath any longer, he gasped in shock and swallowed salty water. The walls of the beast’s gullet crushed him as he suffocated to death.

“It kicks going down,” the kraken-folk said.

“Don’t worry, that’s just a reflex,” the other replied before ordering another glass of fresh human.