Share Your Pain With The World (FICTOID)
For days the ruby floated over Iceland.
It was big, as large as a hot air balloon, and clearly a ruby.
Spectro analysis confirmed that.
At first it tolerated small drones flying up to take a look at it, but the thing about rubies is that they can serve as perfect transmitters of laser light, and after a few drones got too close and too annoying, the ruby obliterated them.
This prompted the Icelandic defense forces to take action.
It floated too high to be struck with conventional bullets, so artillery and anti-aircraft missiles were called into play.
The ruby saw them coming and exploded them harmlessly at a distance.
For several days as the Icelandic Althing debated what steps to take next, the giant ruby floated languidly over the country, eventually covering the entire country.
The military felt the ruby was scouting them out, but more pragmatic members of the Althing argued it really hadn’t done anything harmful or threatening and if it stayed around it would prove another boon to Iceland’s tourist industry and hey, doesn’t everybody like a little money?
The octopus guiding the ruby didn’t.
She squatted in a deep, dark hole hundreds of meters deep off the coast of Iceland, telepathically linked to the ruby, occasionally snatching inattentive fish as they swam by to feed herself while she carefully surveyed every square millimeter of the country.
She sought the man who speared her mate, her beautiful, beautiful mate with the undulating tentacles that flashed different colors to show his love and affection for her.
The man, a diver from a local fishing boat, was untangling a net.
The octopus and her mate knew about fishing nets and could easily squeeze through them when humans dredged to sea bottom.
But this time the net snagged and rather than cut it loose a diver came down and while disentangling the net from a rocky outcropping he saw the octopus’ mate floating by, eying him with curiosity, and the human diver for no reason other than a spur of the moment desire to kill something, speared her mate and that was that.
The octopus watched the fishing boat chug away, taking her still living mate with them. She and her mate represented a new jump in the order Octopoda, a mutation with heretofore unimagined mental abilities.
The new species sent by God and / or nature to replace the humans.
She remained mentally linked to him even as the crew gleefully chopped him up and ate him raw.
It took twenty years for her revenge to be complete. She scoured all the oceans of the world, looking for a weapon to use.
She finally found it in the form of a vast ruby that dropped into the oceans millions of years earlier from space.
Where the ruby came from and how she could manipulate it are fascinating stories but not necessary for this narrative.
She took control of it, learned to use it, and now guided it over Iceland.
Through her link with the ruby, she found the house where the man who took her mate lived. She drowned the other members of the fishing boat crew one by one years ago, luring each to their death, but the man who speared her mate only worked on the boat that season; he returned to his life inland after that.
Now the ruby floated over his house, and in a matter of moments she would extract not her revenge but her justice.
Her revenge would be what she did to the rest of the country, preparing the way for a new dominant species.
The giant ruby began to glow brightly…
© Buzz Dixon
