Author’s note:
Following a quick poll on Substack Notes, I’ve settled with my idea to post excerpts of this series of stories as and when I write them. As a result, you may be reading something here which doesn’t actually make the final cut, or which slots in later into the story during final revisions. I might also repost newer, polished versions of some older chapters and scenes which proved popular the first time round.
I share these stories here, as they are, because I think you will enjoy them.
The full STEPHANIE GLITCH story looks like it will be told over several novellas, each ending with the end of an era of sorts. These will culminate in a big hardback book and a movie series, eventually, but at first will be released as eBooks and Paperbacks.
Of course I cannot share it all here for free for the same reason I don’t turn away paychecks at my other jobs; time = money, and writing these books (using only my human brain and no ‘AI’ (because I respect the time you put into reading the things)) takes time.
However, I will do my best to show you only complete scenes, so you are not left with accidental cliffhangers.
And, given it’s going to be a series of books now, the first one will be cheaper than the rest, to give people a taste of the action.
Here is what I think should be the start.
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The ammonite shunted itself backwards through the crags in the rock, expelling seawater from its hyponome. Once past the boiling volcanic vents, the spiralling creature secreted itself deeper in the rocks, hiding. Others had tried retracting into their shells, but it was not sufficient. Whatever parasites had escaped the leviathan from the Great Unreachable had no issue scooping live ammonites from their shells.
The leviathan was a parasitised thing from which the hunters emerged. Even as its spheroid body slumped through the ocean they burst forth, launching themselves at frightening speed through the seawater from holes chewed into the leviathan’s giant body. The ammonite had seen its hulking form sliding darkly downward into the deep black trench below the ocean, and for reasons it could not understand nor express, felt drawn to that black pit which became the leviathan’s grave, like slime mould to nutrients.
But the hunters had not all left the body, and now she was down here, the ammonite had no choice but to find refuge among the volcanic vents and cave networks that littered this ancient, living rock. And so she pressed onward, spurting another jet of water, her shell hitting a stone wall, her heart feeling the harsh thump as its casing slammed into the ends of the cave.
A light like a new sun erupted from one side. It was like the light from one of the vents, but stronger, whiter. It carried with it a coldness, not heat, and its movement was like that of a living being. The ammonite was afraid. The light swept over her, shining through the slim gap between the whorls of her shell, casting a spiralling shape against a far wall of the cave. She glimpsed this briefly with her right eye, noticing that this cave wall was flat, shiny, and that lines stranger than the sutures on her shell were woven here in intricate patterns upon the thing. To her ammonite mind, it seemed as though she was nestled against the striations of an unconquerable shelled beast.
One of the hunters screamed in the heat of a volcanic vent, its horrid voice resonating dimly out through the water until it reached the ammonite as little more than a memory of pain. She turned to face the dim noise, seeing it as a sheet of rippling white sound, and briefly saw the cumbersome form of the hunter as its pearlescent skin peeled away in the vent. Already, roving pairs of Coccosteus were satiating their curiosity by tearing up this flaking, silverish skin as it floated away. The ammonite felt a rumble somewhere deep below. She propelled herself back again, tilting her body, and slotting into a crevice where the surviving hunters could not find her. She angled her shell to fit. Here she waited for them to inspect their dead companion, and watched as their strange limbs struggled to propel them through the water. The hunters were long and slim compared to the ammonite, their heads protruding not from a shell but from a torso to which was attached four long limbs. From this distance, secluded in the grey rock, the hunters looked like deformed Ichthyostega, those four-legged, tentacleless creatures who had ventured into the Dry World beyond ammonite reach, and had returned with strange vegetation in their mouths and strange glances in their eyes.
But the hunters were not Ichthyostega; they were bigger, ganglier, and could create sunlight from strange lumps on their skins. Their heads, bulbous and impractical, held one solid compound eye of near-orange colour, beyond which was a strange luminescence. The ammonite kept watch with her left eye, trying to compress from these strange creatures a hint of their origin. Had the leviathan really fallen from above the Dry World, slipping into the oceans from the Great Unreachable? Was the waterless world the Ichthyostega found a gigantic air pocket, and beyond this, was there an ocean large enough to host the Leviathan? Could such an ocean exist?
The ammonite’s thinking was informed by the shining material at the end of this long cave, by the strangeness of it, and the unmapped depths of these volcanic vents. The Ichthyostega had spoken of the land above the land, and the rocks that fell from the Great Unreachable, but most ammonites did not believe these tales, not least because many did not have the capacity.
Their lives, for now, were filled with the basic processes of proliferating their genetic code. Vast incomprehensible things would remain vast and incomprehensible. But some ammonites noticed, and fewer of them remembered. Fewer still were curious, and only a handful were curious enough to find their way to the corpse of the thing which had fallen from the Great Unreachable, and to carry between their eyes thoughts of vast air pockets and oceans above oceans.
And only one ammonite was fated to figure out what all of this meant. Through coincidence or destiny or some other presently unknowable mathematical force, she was here, right where she needed to be.
Weird endnotes:
I am very pleased that Minecraft (the game I am now working on getting a job playing) has brought Nautiluses to the shores of our digital worlds. Stephanie’s world is set in 2016, so she doesn’t get Nautiluses in her Minecraft world… but I am seriously tempted to change that.