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This is a nifty little piece, albeit nothing new to those familiar with Starfish. It started life as a coda to that book, ultimately discarded except for a paragraph or two that ended up elsewhere in the plot. But it’s a creepy enough tale in its own right, and stands on its own, and it might even make the point better than the original “A Niche” did. (It certainly does so more efficiently; smaller cast, fewer words, less plot.) Ultimately it came out in On Spec in the summer of 1999, coinciding with Starfish’s initial release. This is also the only story to date that I’ve illustrated myself, although OS never used the illustration.

It has forgotten what it was.

Not that that matters, down here. What good is a name when there’s nothing around to use it? This one doesn’t remember where it came from. It doesn’t remember the murky twilight of the North Pacific Drift, or the noise and gasoline aftertaste that drove it back below the thermocline. It doesn’t remember the gelatinous veneer of language and culture that once sat atop its spinal cord. It doesn’t even remember the long slow dissolution of that overlord into dozens of autonomous, squabbling subroutines. Now, even those have fallen silent.

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