Ice Ocean — Seafloor

  The thing that slid out of the darkness was a mermaid.

  My finger stayed hooked over the weapon safety, reflex more than thought, and I kept my breathing shallow while I read her approach. Down here, “humanoid” was enough to make my brain sprint through worst?case scenarios—an armed attacker, a lure for a trap, or some deep?sea creature wearing a shape I didn’t understand.

  The instant Copernic’s light caught her outline, I knew it was none of those.

  Her lower body was a scaled tail, the fin swaying in slow, idle strokes. Above the waist she was human-shaped, the line from chest to shoulders soft and almost… gentle. But the texture wasn’t biological. Her hair didn’t drift or tangle the way it should in water. Her skin had a glossy sheen, yet no pore shadowing. And her joints moved too smoothly—so perfect it looped back around into mechanical.

  I swapped sensor modes and checked for heat and bioelectric patterns.

  “…No organic signature. Heat profile’s wrong, too.”

  So. An android.

  More than that—the scan showed a mesh of molecular machines threaded through her internal structure. A self-repairing machine lifeform, the kind of technology you didn’t build unless you had centuries and arrogance to spare.

  My mind flashed to the guardian—the octopus-weapon that had tried to wrap Copernic like a gift.

  But this presence didn’t feel like it wanted me dead. It barely even felt wary. She was alone, yet there was no posture of threat assessment, no cautious standoff. If anything, she looked… excited.

  What threw me even harder was the resemblance.

  The “Malmo,” an alien species said to have gone to war with the Ancients and vanished alongside them, were described in old accounts with a very similar silhouette. The Ancients themselves looked more like fish-men—close enough that the parallel almost made sense, but still.

  The mermaid squinted briefly in my spotlight—then broke into a grin so wide it could have powered a city.

  ‘Woooow… you’re huge!’

  Of course. That’s her opening line.

  The support AI annotated the translation on my display: she was speaking the Ancients’ language. That raised more questions than it answered. Was she attached to the test vessel? A remnant tool? A caretaker? Why would something like this still be moving?

  While I hesitated, she fluttered her tailfin and drifted closer—fast, eager, restless. For a machine that shouldn’t care about water pressure, she swam like a kid splashing around in a pool.

  I backed Copernic up on instinct, maintaining distance.

  “Stop. Don’t get any closer.”

  ‘Huh? Is it dangerous if I get close? Oh! Are you a giant… um… a shark?’

  “No.”

  ‘Then a whale?’

  “No.”

  ‘Then… a Giant Person?’

  I closed my eyes for a second.

  This wasn’t a translation issue. Her classification system was just… painfully simple. We were kilometers under ice, and her threat categories stopped at “shark / whale / villager.” I felt my tension loosen by a fraction.

  If she were dangerous, the way the conversation failed would feel like an act. This wasn’t an act. We genuinely weren’t syncing.

  “I’m human. I came from the surface ice. Who are you?”

  The mermaid puffed her chest out. The gesture looked ridiculous underwater.

  ‘Elle! I’m Elle! Um, I’m the fastest swimmer around here! And I’m also the best at falling over!’

  “…Falling over?”

  ‘Yeah! Falling! Like—over there, on that rock, I went bonk with my tail again earlier—oh! Look, look!’

  She pointed proudly at the side of her tail. Sure enough, part of the scales showed a scraped patch. Either her self-repair hadn’t caught up, or she simply didn’t care about that level of damage. Subtlety clearly wasn’t her strong suit.

  I ran a surface scan, looking for ID markers. A tiny engraving sat near the base of her fin. The script looked like derivatives of the archaic Jarpukka, the name by which the Ancients called themselves, but it was too worn—and my font library was too thin—to read reliably. I probed deeper, mapping bundled artificial muscles and the molecular pathways.

  The engineering was sophisticated. The control algorithms, strangely, felt almost simple.

  As if the designer’s philosophy had been: don’t make her too smart.

  “Elle. This area is dangerous. My sub was attacked by a guardian machine.”

  Elle blinked twice, then laughed.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  ‘Ahhh, the octopus guy? Yeah, he shows up sometimes. When he pulls my tail, it makes me so mad!’

  “You’ve been attacked before?”

  ‘Yep! But if you run away, he gets bored really fast. I think… the octopus hates studying!’

  I made a sound that was half cough, half involuntary disbelief. Her reasoning was sloppy, but the pattern matched what I’d seen. The guardian prioritized capture and identification. If the target was deemed low value, it broke off.

  If Elle was still alive—still here—then the guardian didn’t consider her an elimination target.

  “I’m looking for a large metal ship on the seafloor. Have you seen it?”

  Elle stopped dead.

  Then her face lit up like I’d offered candy.

  ‘The temple? Oh, I know that!’

  Temple.

  The word clicked in my head with an uncomfortable elegance. Religion had no business this deep. But if there was something huge, incomprehensible, and dangerous enough, people would call it a temple. Names came first. Meaning followed.

  “Can you guide me?”

  ‘Sure! I can! …Oh—but can you swim, Giant Person?’

  “I’m not swimming down here. I’m walking.”

  ‘Walking!? In water!? That’s amazing! Okay! Elle will swim the “road” and show you! Follow me!’

  She spun in place and kicked off with so much enthusiasm that she immediately slammed her tail into a nearby rock. I didn’t hear it—sound at this distance was muted by systems and pressure—but I saw the collision in the way her scales flashed under my light.

  She froze for one mortified beat.

  Then, as if the universe had politely agreed to forget it happened, she started swimming again.

  ‘That one was… um… the rock’s fault!’

  “It looked like you rammed it.”

  ‘Nope. The rock suddenly decided to be there!’

  I exhaled a short breath. I almost laughed. Almost. My nerves had been stretched tight since the guardian attack, and Elle’s absurd excuse loosened something in my chest. Not the danger. Not the stakes.

  Just the loneliness.

  We moved out across the seafloor.

  Every so often Elle would dart in a completely wrong direction, then yelp, ‘Not that way!’ and loop back to cut in front of me again. I followed in Copernic’s walking mode, logging terrain and locking in a reliable route.

  Her guidance was messy, but it wasn’t random. The landmarks she used weren’t what my sensors prioritized: tiny depressions in the sediment, places where marine snow collected thicker, a particular crack pattern in a rock wall.

  A resident’s map.

  Eventually a chain of cave mouths emerged from the darkness. Multiple entrances. My scan showed tunnels connecting them into a network. In front of the caves lay a series of shallow, rectangular pits, arranged like farm plots. Marine snow drifted down and accumulated neatly inside them.

  I dimmed my lights and observed.

  Several merfolk hovered around the “plots,” scooping the pale particles and bringing them to their mouths. Food, or at least nutrition.

  The scene was… strangely peaceful. Too peaceful for a deep ocean under ice.

  That’s when the unnaturalness hit me again.

  There was a resource cycle here. A system for collecting external fall, planned and maintained. Someone—or something—had fixed a lifestyle in place over a long time.

  Elle did a little spin in front of the caves.

  ‘Here! This is Elle’s village! Um—village, cave, hole… anyway, here!’

  “Does the village have a name?”

  ‘It does! Probably! …Um… I forgot!’

  A headache tried to form behind my eyes. It wasn’t ignorance so much as chaotic storage—like her priorities were scrambled. Important things fell through. Useless trivia stuck.

  At the edge of the “fields,” a male merfolk—maybe a farmer—looked up at Copernic and went rigid, mouth hanging open.

  Maybe my light had been too bright. I lowered illumination quickly, but it was already too late.

  ‘This person here is a super important scholar guy, and he came all the way from the ice on top!’ Elle announced at full volume, in a thick, slightly rural accent of the Ancients’ language.

  “Scholar?” I muttered.

  ‘Yeah! ’Cause you’re in a big box, and you look strong, and your face is all hard and complicated. That’s totally a scholar!’

  “That logic is… extremely rough.”

  ‘But Elle’s instincts are always right! Earlier I predicted the marine snow pile would collapse!’

  “That’s not ‘predicting.’ Didn’t you knock it over?”

  ‘Nope. The pile betrayed me!’

  Don’t argue with her logic, I reminded myself—then didn’t. She was saying it with perfect sincerity, which somehow made it harder to push back.

  The villagers stirred and drifted toward the cave entrance. Some eyes were wary, but curiosity outweighed fear. I powered down weapons completely and held position, palms open on the external cameras—body language as clear as I could make it.

  If we shared a language, the first move was always: I’m not here to kill you.

  “—Huh.”

  Among the gathering merfolk were fish-men.

  The same general silhouette as the Ancients.

  That stopped me cold.

  Records said the Ancients and the Malmo loathed each other—waged repeated large-scale wars. Some historians even claimed both species died out because of a superweapon used in those conflicts.

  Yet here they were, coexisting in the same “village.”

  If they were androids—machine lifeforms like Elle—that only deepened the question. Why preserve both? What was the point of this arrangement?

  While I was still processing, Elle puffed up again and declared proudly:

  ‘I’m taking him to the Elder! The Elder is the most important. And the scariest. But mostly… sleepy.’

  I had no idea how “sleepy” helped, but I nodded anyway.

  “Lead the way.”

  ‘Leave it to me! Elle knows the way! …Probably!’

  She swam off. This time she didn’t hit a wall.

  Following her, I felt the tight knot in my chest soften just a little more. The tension about the ruins remained. The danger remained.

  But it was no longer the tension of a man alone in the dark.

  I had a guide now—reckless, bright, and apparently allergic to shame.

  As we moved deeper, the caves stopped feeling natural.

  The farther in we went, the more the walls looked worked—flat planes carved into the rock after the fact. Corridors that held a consistent width. Turns placed at angles that didn’t “confuse” you.

  This wasn’t a random formation. It was maintained. Designed.

  Elle glanced back as if it were nothing.

  ‘It used to be way messier in here. But then the temple people cleaned it up.’

  “Temple people?”

  ‘Yeah! Temple people. They’re in the temple. Probably. Um… I mean… people say they are!’

  I recorded the line immediately. With Elle, the trick would be filtering signal from noise, but you couldn’t afford to miss the signal.

  At last we entered a wider chamber. There, seated with stillness that made the water feel quieter, was an old merfolk.

  Wrinkled skin. Dull, worn scales. But eyes—those eyes were clear in a way that didn’t match the rest of the body, like the glow of an intact lens in a cracked casing.

  Elle sidled close and whispered:

  ‘That’s the Elder. Also, the Elder knows everything about all the times I skipped homework. I don’t know how.’

  “You have homework?”

  ‘Yep! Like “count the marine snow every day” and stuff! Like, how am I supposed to count it? It falls from the sky forever!’

  I didn’t even know what to say to that. Either the Elder’s educational philosophy was broken, or Elle’s interpretation was.

  Possibly both.

  The Elder looked at me and his eyes widened.

  ‘Well now… a guest from the heavens. To think the old stories were true…’

  ‘…But if the temple people have noticed you, you shouldn’t have come.’

  “Greetings,” I said, and bowed as best as a man could from inside a walking submersible. “My name is Ahmad. I’m an adventurer—an explorer.”

  If I couldn’t make the situation normal, I could at least coat it in etiquette. Etiquette wasn’t a shield, but it could be a bridge.

  Elle hovered beside me, smiling like this was the most ordinary day in the world.

  I couldn’t tell if she didn’t understand the gravity of the moment—or understood it and simply didn’t care.

  Either way, the fact that we weren’t rejected on sight felt like the first piece of luck I’d had all day.