(This guest post brought to you by the amazing VM!)
Go as far out into the sea as you can and you will come upon a miners’ armada – a small fleet of sea-steads anchored seemingly in the middle of nowhere, heavily clothed workers milling about in the frigid weather and under a ceaseless drizzle, screaming orders at who you can’t tell, and almost always hauling ropes out of the water. This congregation is surrounded by larger vessels, all of which boast a gangplank stretching from the lower decks and going straight into the middle of the armada, for that is where most of the action is. There, like the eye of the storm, is peace. It is a false peace. If you were to dip your head underwater and open your eyes really wide, you would be able to see the ladder of iron and jute plunging down, down, down. If, like a fish, you could swim lower and lower with it, you would find yourself going all the way to the seabed, a journey of nearly 1,200 nautical leagues Earthward. And there, right at the bottom, you would come upon a scene like no other.
The sea-miners mine all sorts of minerals and metals from the pelagic depths but none is more precious, more valuable, than maafis, a nearly unbreakable metal to be found only on the sea bed. To mine it, dozens of armadas set out in the winter, when the storms have abated. But while they have done so for over four centuries, they have to this day not been able to clothe a single soldier in it. This is has been the sole handiwork of the damned glimmerworm.
Every winter, millions upon millions of glimmerworms, each no longer than a big cockroach, slide as one across the seafloor, congregating upon the same hydrothermal vents around which the maafis ore is deposited, casting themselves in the path of the superhot gases shooting out. Here and there, little fights break out as each nematode scrambles to be the first to kill itself. As they are exposed to the poisonous fumes, their bodies shatter in tiny explosions of tinier offal; as this happens millions of times over, all of the maafis ore is shrouded in an expanding dome of stinking rubbish that drives away all other fish in the area, disrupts hadal currents and renders the zone unplumbable for days to come. Nobody – not the sea-miners or anyone else – knows why the glimmerworms are so seasonally suicidal.
The tragedy is the glimmerworm’s own; it always has been, ever since they became able to inherit the memories of their ancestors. Every glimmerworm is born knowing which fish to befriend and which to avoid, when to rise into higher waters and when to lie low, which currents to follow and which to evade, and when their asexual bodies will inevitably multiply. For the absence of a pair of thumbs and perhaps an eye, the glimmerworm could have invaded the World and remade it in its deceptively harmless image – a world where knowledge is the one absolute telos, where younger civilisations simply build upon older ones sans interruption, and where the end is as impossible as the beginning has been forgotten. Why then do they seek to rid the World of themselves so compulsively, so thoroughly? The answer is simple. Imagine being the fifth or sixth descendant, imagine waking up one dark day knowing all there is to know as a glimmerworm at the bottom of the sea. Imagine the hopes of your mothers and their mothers before them throbbing alongside every thought you can manage to have, an unvanquishable migraine that reminds you every moment of all that has been yearned for and lost, of all that has been promised and abandoned. Imagine living with a nihilism that rests heavier upon your humble frame than all the water above you, and having nowhere else to go but to your death. What would you do?
Die. You would die, for that is the only journey that promises the perfectly unknown. And so the glimmerworms, most of them the seventh or eighth in line, for that is how far the memories last before they fade, crawl out of their narrow tunnels onto the seabed, their silent slither unnoticeable if not for the diminutive puffs of dust. They amass instead of going to their deaths alone so they may fight off any obstacles in their path, anything at all that might keep them from the greatest moment of their lives. It is said the other creatures of the blue abyss stay away with fearless deference for what they believe to be the ultimate reaffirmation of the value of life. It is said that this is why the sea-goddess of the sea-miners resembles a worm, that this is why the sea-miners find themselves trapped every winter between hope and hopelessness. But little is said of the glimmerworms themselves, except that they go to die, maafis and sea-miner be damned.
Inspired by roundworms (phylum Nematoda), which inherit the memories and knowledge of their ancestors across multiple generations.