SINGH: Axum 3

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Field Notes, Udal Singh. Think I’m about to die again.

Listening to that thing pick through the wreckage of my Tadpole. I think it’s having fun.

Humanity exterminated most land-based megafauna before we scratched our first letters into clay. But the Axum never cleared their oceans. They made it all the way to digital computers while coexisting with predators that could eat them like cocktail shrimp.

Why? Is it something about the ocean? Just too big and deep?

Or did the Axum have a different relationship with nature? I can already hear you sneering, Iso. “They’re lobster aliens, not elves. Don’t turn them into a parable.”

Imagine you evolved in an ocean full of leviathans like Grabby out there. Hundreds of generations with those tentacles strangling your nightmares. Then one day you invent the explosive-tipped harpoon and you can fight back. Wouldn’t you go out and kill them all? Like we killed the sabertooth tiger and the…I don’t know, the automobile?

So why didn’t the Axum do it? Why is Grabby still here to pull my Tadpole to pieces?