My love is pixelated letters and symbols made by keypads in a locked chatroom on an irc network so encrypted, even botnet overlords would not be granted admittance. My love is algae-rich pools in the courtyards of forgotten buildings waiting for demolition.
My love is in every body of water taunting me from puberty till the day I embraced my heritage and succumbed to the imperatives of my lack of humanity. I am consumed by my love, and by my hunger for love. The blood of puaka air infests my veins. Puaka air who lurk in pools that sprawl across abandoned tin mines. Puaka air, whose spectral limbs and corporeal hunger taint both folklore and the dreams of fishermen. Puaka air, who create widows out of wives and steal their children for dinner. Those water-demons who whisper songs to bedevil your mind when you are wading in the South China Sea, dragging you into the deeps to feast upon your entrails and the spore of your disappointments.
Folklore inhabits my arteries. Hunger rules my synapses.
But once, I was human.
I am only part puaka air, you see. My father was a soft-eyed government clerk who was not pulled down to his death because my mother could not bring herself to do the deed.
“My sisters told me to kill him, but he sang P. Ramlee songs so sweetly as he took off his shoes. I knew I didn’t need to kill him. He wanted to end himself. I couldn’t let him, not such a sweet man as your father was,” my mother said to me years later.
Instead, Ibu spirited him away to where her sisters could not find him.
Instead, they conceived me in a two-bedroom government flat furnished with hand-me-downs. Ayah blessed us with his singing, so much sweeter than the songs my puaka air aunts, grand-aunts, grandmothers, great-grandmothers and great-great grandmothers sing.
We lost my father to old age. And then I lost my mother to this gristly heritage that we share.
Once upon a time in that humble flat, I was truly loved, and I could pretend that all was normal. When Ayah died, Ibu disappeared into her family’s demesne, marked in this physical realm by that tin mining pool where she had nearly drowned him. She left me alone to stumble through various attempts at a human life.
I paid my filial visits to her and a host of other puaka air who thronged the waters of a pool even the foolhardiest of children would not brave. Leave the world of humans and of men who will not give you room to breathe, they whispered to me. Do not follow in your mother’s stead. These humans cannot live as long as you. Stop toying with your food. Come to the depths of this pool and you will see far more within it than what is seen from above.
But I needed more. I needed love, love as thick as sago pudding, and as treacly sweet as melted palm sugar. I needed a warm human embrace that reminded me of childhood cuddles and lullabies sung to soothe me into sleep. I did not want the slimy depths of an algae-encrusted mining pool. So I went looking for my love. And I found it in Chretien Han.
We first met on the day when he slammed his tray down opposite mine at the work cafeteria one lunchtime after he joined our agency. He talked to me about poetry, about courtly love, about operas – about all of the things that I love.
In those days, Chretien was my obsession. He became my love because he was there, and because he pursued me. The curve of his clean-shaven jaw, the grooves on either side of his mouth became intoxicating. His teeth, slightly yellowed, were made to nip at my tender skin, anchoring me in my humanity. He spoke as though words were jewels laced with sumac and arsenic. Loving Chretien, I told myself, was allowing me to become a real human woman. I adored the curls that fell onto his golden brown forehead, the veins on his forearms, his Chindian features. Everything about him was exhilarating and true, even the parts of him that were toxic and poisonous. But soon, the poison overcame his countless charms.
Chretien had a hunger for clever verbiage, the rhythms of speech, and the numerical order of clauses in some arcane laboratory in which he toils daily. He needed words more than he needed me. His greed for words was such that he would steal them out of the air, with your thoughts, with your experiences that he made his own. He would mock your wordsmithing even as he siphoned your thoughts. Perhaps he had the skills needed to be a creative director in an ad agency, after all. Often, those skills included an innate instinct for sadism.
Perhaps this was how he was promoted over me.
Chretien had black eyes and lips made for my curious teeth, my inquisitive tongue. His callused fingers were made to run through my long blue-black hair, three inches to the tip coloured in viridian and peacock blue as a half-mocking nod to my heritage. His words were targeted missiles, aimed to win the heart and the lust of any bookish and quiet woman. Any bookish and quiet woman who is not a monster, waiting to rip out your jugular, waiting to pounce on that one, unforgivable flaw.
Chretien felt real because he was not. Chretien was a simulacra created by another. Chretien was a cyborg, as inhuman and as fragmented as I was.
Viera Rahim is a foe I made in the dank, nether regions of IRC networks still running in the heady age of cloud computing. It had been a faceless duel with words and challenges. Logic puzzles, anagrams, and mathematical equations was a game for both of us. I was younger then, and delirious with the need to prove my cerebral mastery. I won; she lost. It was glorious, but I was careless. I jettisoned the battle after I had hacked into her computer, learning enough about her privileged existence. She bored me and was no longer sport. I did not know I left behind a brooding foe, anxious to ensure I would be divested of everything, to make sure her vendetta became mine. That she would become everything.
Viera has long midnight black hair that falls down her back like an eldritch waterfall. Her skin is soft. So soft. Her fingers are poised over keyboards to type poisoned sentences so precise, you could measure table placements with them. She assigns cyborgs with different faces – soldiers that have been infused with her thoughts. It is the latest KayanganCorp biotech brewed in the most heavily guarded and encrypted regions of South East Asia, encompassing physical locations and places deeper and darker than either the Dark Web or the Deep Web. They allow those who have inherited obscene amounts of money to control hybrid creatures through thoughts that have been positioned within biotech implants at the base of their neck.
But Viera was not just obscenely rich. She was ludicrously brilliant. A match, one might infer. A worthy opponent.
A lifelong vendetta is a dangerous thing in one who is affluent enough to have access to the latest technologies, to assign an army of cybernetics-controlled humans to dog the steps of imagined foes. But conversely, it is also dangerous to assign a cybernetic proxy to bedevil a hacker who is also part water-demon.
Chretien was sweet to me once in the recesses of privacy, where liquid desire and human want superseded the biotech imperatives lodged in his neck and in the small of his back. He was sweet to me until the day he was not.
Two months ago, I heard him laughing with his friends. He mocked the project that we worked on together. It was my brain-child, but he called it a childish venture. I was a child to him, baby-faced and soft-boned in my rubenesque harmlessness. My projects were childish, unsophisticated, performative in their earnestness, made for the metallic spines he injected into them, prodding and teasing out of them ad campaigns that hurt the brain with their flawless manipulations and glossy black-and-white treatments. Those ad campaigns would have been nothing without him, the way I would have been nothing without him. I heard him laughing while I held the tray bearing our drinks from the self-service counter, my knuckles bloodless under the strain of my chubby-fisted grip. I heard him laughing as he boasted that no one would remember my name, only his. Only his as he makes senior partner.
He really should not have done that. Was that at your behest, Viera? Or was that him naturally being his own downfall? Or were you both doing me a favour by causing me to finally let go of my death grip on my fading humanity?
You could not know I was a subject of horror stories and nightmares. You could not know how I adored every story I read of women who inhabited more temperate waters because they seemed so pretty, so tame, so lukewarm in comparison to the horrors from whom I am descended. Horrors who did not need to have their hearts broken by men before they became the powers that lurked in forgotten bodies of water.
I was an expert in foreshadowing before I ever studied literary theory.
Our love for enjambed clauses, for onomatopoeia, for poetry that tickles at the back of the mind pulled us together. Chretien was a run-on line. Chretien was an opportunist.
His love for wit and sentences that cut like well-sharpened blades artfully sliced at the bond. Sliced me away. But not enough. Not enough to dull my senses, to keep me from discovering the trail, from discovering the implant at the base of his neck as we indulged in languid foreplay. I planted in him something hidden that would lead me to you. I replaced the implant at the base of his neck while he was asleep one night with the ease of the skills you never understood were mine, were always mine. I was merely biding my time, because I did not want this to end.
Because I did not want to stop being human. And perhaps because I did not want this night to happen.
Tonight, I take off my clothes and bathe only in the sickly orange light of street lamps. This pool has been here for decades, long before gentrification took over this part of the Klang Valley, turning it into Desa Sri Hartamas, home to the affluent and well-heeled. I stand at its brink and whisper that I am ready. There is no fancy orchestra here, for the arias Chretien professed to love so well. There is only me, divesting my body of me, divesting me of his candied words, laced with poison that’s sweet as the aftertaste of cloves and aniseed. There is only this – the quickening, the transforming as other demonic women of this dark murky pool rise up to greet me with their many arms, to rain upon me their numerous advices, platitudes and directions as to how to devise a revenge sweeter than the love of newlyweds.
Tonight, there is only murder. Tonight is for vengeance. I have seen it all, seen all you have done through your machines that I have hacked, through your CCTV feeds that now feed directly into my own brain. Tonight, I call upon my own resources. I shed my skin of everything that is human. I became the rage of centuries of women transmuted into folk-horrors, inhabiting mining pools, and jungle ponds, inhabiting any body of water.
Inhabiting you, should you cross our paths.
The moon as round and as yellow as it always is on Wesak Day.
(But the night is All Hallow’s Eve in the Western Hemisphere. I chose my date of execution with care.)
The buttery-yellow moon paints the tops of equatorial raintrees with a halo that seems oddly holy for such an ignoble night. This night is made for retribution. I come for Chretien first. I come to take from him the phonemes, the morphemes of side-swiping glamour. I come to claim those lips, that jawline, those facial grooves. I will rain upon them the thick green ooze of the days, the nights since I left him there, left him in the square outside of that German pub in Desa Sri Hartamas, where he laughed with his friends, deriding my simplicity and my seemingly wordless devotion to him. Where he wove a malicious web out of glittering words meant to put me down in every way so I would remain subservient and faithful.
There will be no aria to sing when I reach for Chretien’s jugular. I will forget him, laying his cybernetic form aside for the lesser demons of the night to enjoy while I go in pursuit of my ultimate retribution.
And then, Viera, I come for you.
I come for you tonight, with the moss beneath my feet and the fungus that gushes from between my fetid lips. My body is translucent, but the gore it drips is very real. My fingers are black as though singed by hellfire or petrified by transmogrification.
My true love is the dark ooze of the night that will help me move closer. My true love is this freedom I feel as I divest myself of the need for human attachment and embrace the monster that I am. The monster I have always been.
I am nestled within the outer penumbra of your sight, Viera. Here in your darkened room, lit only by a computer screen, you talk to faceless souls through technology so elite, even the overstuffed coffers of banana republics could not pay for them. I can see the curve of your thigh and the contours of your face, long hidden, but never obscured from my preternatural vision.
Can you not sense me?
I wait here, dripping with effluvia. I lie in wait, ready to drag you into the pool of my ancestors. My hands are claws, waiting to rend you limb from torso, torso from limb. Nobody will hear you wail your reproaches to the elite technology that will fail to protect you from my final lovesong.
“Who’s there?” you ask, as your shoulders stiffen. Then I hear you inhale. “Oh, it’s you. You’ve come at last. At last, Maren.”
You turn to look at me, with a switchblade in your hand. Your cybernetic eyes glow green in the dark. Your teeth are fanged as you leap from your chair and onto your computer table in a half-crouch.
You face me, half-gloating. “Are you surprised, Maren? Did you think I was human?”
“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised,” I answer as I approach you in a half-sidestep, my claws testing the air. “I never thought you were human. Not with the extreme lengths you’ve gone to destroy me. But I didn’t think you were inhuman. Merely soul-less.”
“Maren, Maren. You’re still new to this. Still so innocent, my dear water demon. And so melodramatic. Destroy you? I was merely playing with you, my toy,” you say in a liquid voice. The loveliness of your voice is not marred at all by the fully extended fangs, but the nervousness of your mien tells me a different story.
You may be a pontianak with biotech enhancements but I am a puaka air, and in this battle, you have no hope against those of us who come from water. You should have known that.
“Perhaps you have overestimated your ability at playing, then. Or underestimated my capacity for retribution,” I say.
I extend my own fangs and release the length of my serpentine tongue from between my lips, flicking its envenomed tip carelessly against the powdery softness of your skin. It is sweet.
“Do you really want to do this, Maren? How tedious it is, a fight to the death. How very spaghetti western. Come, we should be allies. Shall we play another game, like we did once before?”
I grin. “I have nothing left to lose, Viera. Not really. And your idea of friendship is a bit of a laugh. Friendship through toxic mind games and mental subjugation? Really? Is that your idea of friendship? Is that your idea of love?”
“You have everything to lose. Everything. Don’t do this, Maren.”
You almost seem afraid of me, after all. Once, I could have loved you for the lengths you have taken to gain my attention. Once, before you transmuted me, changed me with your hideous games.
“Too bad. You have underestimated my desire for oblivion.”
“But I don’t want to be your foe, not forever,” you say, even as your voice catches. Even as I do not allow myself to be softened. Not again. Never again.
There is no mercy in my eyes as I advance. As I advance. I will not let mercy be my undoing.
We will fight till dawn then, Viera.
No proxies, no cyborgs who cannot decide whether to be lovers or fiends. Just two monsters, battling their way into the crevices of a murderous night.
Let us dance this dance well, for this will be my final lovesong. I have no more songs left because the sweetness of this revenge has consumed what is left of my love.
You watch me draw closer with a gleam in your eyes and smile as I lunge at you. We are locked in a death-battle that looks like a lover’s embrace.
With monsters, who could ever tell the difference between the one, and the other?
Anita Harris Satkunananthan is an author, poet, and postcolonial Gothic scholar who exists in a perpetual state of unheimlich. Anita writes Gothic fiction, cyberpunk, nerdcore post-apocalyptic fiction, planetary romance, and various other forms of hyphenated weird fiction. Anita’s publishing credits include Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, and The Dark.
Translunar Travelers Lounge 