Red Ink: Human versus Squid

Learning Too Soon

"I did (try to help him). He just... wouldn't take it. Said he needed to stay for reasons he couldn't explain to me." - Marina Ida/Chapter 9

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Mark's Point of View.

I awoke to the sound of garbled voices. I couldn't understand their muddied language and my body was sluggish. Where's... Amelia?

"Wh-where is she?!" I coughed up, my throat burning.

When my vision finally cleared, I saw the pinnacle of evolution. A lone female humanoid, looking almost exactly like us, bit atop her head in place of hair was an array of silver tentacles.

Was this... the angel of death? Had I died in the cryopod?

As I laid on the ground, coughing up the remaining gas from the cryopod's freezing process, she held her hand out to me.

I... took it, and my new life began from there.

I wasn't sure if they had recovered Amelia or not. My stomach was turning at the thought of my only remaining family being six feet under. I couldn't bear the thought of Amelia being dead...

They'd given me some kind of cell to stay in. I was sitting on a very stiff bed, the mattress almost as hard as rock. The girl of evolution stood in front of me, putting on a strange earpiece and gently tossing up an oval-shaped device that simply floated there. It must've been both a microphone and a speaker, because when she spoke into it, I could finally understand her.

"You're a human," she said in a captivating voice. "An extremely rare find. Can you understand what I'm saying to you?"

"Y-You're the species that replaced us, aren't you?!" I concluded. "If I'm such a rare find, then... my kind is gone, am I right?!"

She stared at me, as if she didn't know how to affirm my assumption. "There was an accident, we assume," she said. "We discovered trace amounts of radiation in the southern pole of the planet. I'm sorry, human. Your kind is gone."

"We thought as much," I said with my heart beating faster. "Where's my sister?!"

She seemed surprised. "You have a relation to the girl? We deemed her unfit for experimentation. She wouldn't survive what we had initially planned. We found that leaving her behind would be... merciful."

"I want her here," I said sternly. "I won't go through any tests of yours until I know she's safe."

With a tilt of her head, she had a strange smile on her face, almost like it was mocking me. "My, my... You're very worked up over your sibling. An interesting trait."

"You don't try to care for your own?" I asked her.

"I have no family," she said. "I was born in a pod, cloned and altered to fit a purpose."

I was taken aback. "What kind of civilization took over?"

"One that can't reproduce," she replied. "Not by natural means..."

"...Do you have a name?" I asked. "What does your kind call you?"

"Ophelia," she answered with a soft smile.

"Well, Ophelia, where I come from, we take care of our family no matter what," I said to her. "Take me to see my sister."

She stepped closer and I flinched, thinking she was about to attack. Those eyes of hers stared into mine and... admittedly, I felt calmer. She seemed to be studying me. "Humans don't abandon specific individuals based on relations? That's... intriguing. It's like inkling behavior."