Devil in the Deep Blue Sea

by A. J. Markam

  “I can see you are excited, no? Even my Naga freends are becom-eeng engorged.”

  What?

  ‘Engorged’?

  What the fuck was he talking ab–

  Then I saw.

  The tips of the Naga’s tails were becoming, shall we say… bulbous.

  Like the swollen head of an erect penis.

  THOUSANDS of swollen green penises on the ground around me.

  I have never had a nightmare nearly as disturbing.

  “OH GOD!” I yelled in panic as I jerked my right leg up and stood crane-style on one foot. The Karate Kid didn’t have shit on me.

  The Nagas themselves were quite bashful about it. Some of them were trying to curl up their tails into coils so nobody could see. Others were stuffing their tail tips in the sand. Most tried to go unnoticed.

  Trust me when I say that the Nagas’ state did not go unnoticed by the nymphs.

  The female warriors stared down at the Nagas’ tails like they reaaaally wanted to sit down on the ground. In specific places. Like, RIGHT there on that one spot. Again and again and again for five or six minutes. And then maybe go over there, over to THAT spot, and do it all over again.

  But Zali wasn’t finished.

  “You would like to touch the art, no?” he said in a seductive voice. “You would like to reach out and pet the art, no? To USE the art, no? To feeeel eet deep inside you, no?”

  The queen was definitely in that camp. She kept reaching out for incubus dong, then drawing her fingers back at the last second like No, no, I really can’t do that, no –

  But then she would reach out again, only to pull her hand way at the last second.

  “But I know what you are theenk-eeng,” Zali said. “You say to yourselves, ‘But Zali – weel thees not compromise the integri-tee of the art? ZALI – weel thees not invalidate what you have striven to achieeeve?”

  I was pretty sure nobody was thinking that, but whatever.

  “But today, art shall bring us together. For one day, and one day only, we shall have – PERFORMANCE ART!” Zali thundered. “Yes – PERFORMANCE ART! You may fuck anytheeng in the garden, and it may fuck you, eef you so desire! I releeease you for one day, my creations, my een-cubi, my succubi! The fuckeeng shall be the art, and the art shall be the fuckeeng! FOR I – AM – ZALI!”

  He threw his hand up in the air like a matador and just froze there in his pose.

  Nobody noticed.

  I have never seen 2000 bras and panties come off that quickly, ever – cotton, spandex, or bronze.

  Thus began the strangest orgy that has ever been contemplated in all of history. And I’m even counting that final scene in Sausage Party.

  Nymphs jumped on Naga warriors, who immediately began inserting their tails between the nymphs’ legs – and both of them absolutely loved it.

  Plus the demons were free now to do as they pleased.

  Incubi fucked succubi, nymphs, each other – didn’t matter.

  Succubi fucked Naga, nymphs, each other – didn’t matter.

  Everybody was fucking everybody.

  Nagas pumped away at nymphs, cramming their big thick tails up inside the women as both nymphs and Nagas came.

  Succubi and incubi and nymphs writhed in a tangle of bodies, with fingers and tongues and cocks going everywhere. All available holes were filled.

  The princess jumped two Naga at once and got one tail up the baby chute and another up the poop chute. She couldn’t have been happier.

  The nymph queen grabbed an incubus dong and stuffed it in her mouth. Another incubus lifted up her black gown, discovered Her Highness liked to go commando, and two seconds later we had a green Hawaiian barbecue on our hands. The wobbly H, you might say.

  A naked nymph started chasing Stig around the courtyard, but he just ran away on all fours like a dog as he yelled, “CHILL, BITCH! SOMEBODY TELL THAT BITCH TO CHILL!”

  A thousand orgasmic voices echoed throughout the sculpture garden.

  Mine was not one of them.

  I just stood there in shock.

  Zali waddled over next to me and crowed, “YES! YES! THE FUCKEEENG! EET IS GLORIOUS, NO?”

  I couldn’t answer. I was rendered absolutely speechless.

  I had tried to orchestrate a war and bring down my enemy… and instead I’d instigated a Guinness Book of World Records attempt at ‘biggest interspecies gangbang.’

  There were no words.

  Stig had no words, either, once he finally escaped the horny nymph with an imp fetish. He just stared out at the debauchery and made sounds like he was puking in the back of his throat.

  Alaria?

  Alaria was totally into it.

  “Oh Goddess,” she said, her voice thick and guttural with lust.

  “Eee-an, you should join in,” Zali said kindly.

  “I… can’t…”

  The little hatchetfish warlock looked at me quizzically. “Can’t what?”

  “I can’t win. I tried fighting you fair and square. Didn’t work. I tried leveling up. Didn’t work. I tried a kraken – for fuck’s sake, I brought a KRAKEN to a FISH fight, and it STILL didn’t work. I tried seducing the daughter of your archenemy and starting a war, and instead I got… this.”

  I gestured out at the vast field of carnal degradation taking place in front of me.

  “Eet ees the healing power of art, Ee-an,” Zali whispered.

  “Or fucking,” Alaria suggested.

  “…or… fuckeeng,” Zali said like he would deign to consider the possibility, but didn’t really believe it.

  “Fuckin’ art,” Stig said in disgust.

  I watched for a few more seconds… and then I turned around and shambled away like a zombie, completely shell-shocked by my utter and complete failure.

  “Where are you go-eeng, Ee-an?” Zali asked in concern.

  “I have to get out of here.”

  “You do not weesh to partake in the art?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, what about the fuckeeng?”

  “No.”

  Alaria called out plaintively, “Babe, can’t we just – ”

  “No.”

  “Just for a couple of – ”

  “No.”

  “But… it’s an orgy, Ian – ”

  “No.”

  “But – Naga sex, Ian! NAGA SEX!”

  “NO!”

  I guess it was a sign of her love for me that Alaria took one last look at the vast field of naked bodies… sighed… and followed me out of the villa.

  “Come back whenever you weesh!” Zali called after us fondly. “I am sure they weel be fuckeeng all night long!”

  Alaria made a little whimpering noise in the back of her throat, but she followed me nonetheless.

  Stig took one last look back at the carnival of flesh and shook his head in disgust.

  “Bitches be crazy,” he muttered, then loped along after us.

  42

  “Well, look at it this way,” Desmond said as he ignored me and watched the reams of code flashing across his computer screen. “You finally ended the Naga-Nymph War.”

  I was standing in the farthest recesses of the Programming Department, a dim cave made of beige PC cases, dozens of monitors, and ten thousand cables snaking across the floor. The resident troll of this particular grotto was Desmond, the head of the AI programming department. He bore a striking resemblance to Gilfoyle, the snarky, deadpan coder on Silicon Valley – especially the long, greasy hair and disaffected attitude. Today he was wearing plaid flannel over a Dark Side of the Moon t-shirt. Really changing his wardrobe up, Desmond was.

  “Yeah, big consolation,” I moped.

  “Everybody says they want World Peace,” he said in an emotionless voice. “You just brought a little bit of it to a digital corner of OtherWorld.”

  “Ha ha,” I said without a trace of humor.

  “T.S. Elliot said the world would go out with a whimper. Well, the Naga-Nymph War went out with a bang. Lite
rally.”

  “You can stop with the jokes. They’re not funny.”

  “I thought they were hilarious,” Desmond said in his grumpy monotone.

  “Look, I need your help.”

  “No.”

  “Come onnnnn,” I pleaded. “Satish said that the AI is writing the scenario with Zali now, and you’re the AI guy, so – ”

  Desmond finally swiveled around in his chair to look at me. “Do you remember what happened the last time I helped you?”

  I did. It would forever be seared into my brain.

  I’d begged Desmond to alter Alaria’s programming to make her monogamous – basically to turn her into something she wasn’t. At the time, I’d seen it as a harmless alteration in a line of computer code, instead of what it was: a complete betrayal of someone I loved.

  The effect on her was excruciating. Her body and psyche rejected the change, and it made her question her own sanity. When she found out I had ‘interceded with the gods’ to change her behind her back, she freaked out and dumped me – and rightly so.

  I spent the next month in an alcoholic haze of self-loathing and grief, wallowing in the worst parts of myself until I finally clawed my way out of my pity parade and put myself back together, more or less. Just in time, too, because Alaria came back to find me, and we worked things out.

  It all turned out alright in the end, but I can’t rightly say I dodged a bullet. Not when it pierced my heart. And not when I was the one who fired the gun on myself.

  No need to go into all that with Desmond, though.

  “Yeah,” I said quietly. “I almost lost Alaria.”

  “No,” Desmond said, “I got written up and suspended without pay for two days. So go fuck yourself.”

  He turned back to the computer screen.

  Glad I didn’t bare my soul to the fucker.

  Still, I needed to persuade him to help me.

  Given his Pink Floyd t-shirt and his John Lennon glasses, I decided to try the counter-cultural route.

  “That was ‘the Man’ who suspended you, not me,” I pointed out. “Fuck the Man, right?”

  “‘The Man’ signs my paychecks,” Desmond said as he went back to his code. “You just annoy me. So fuck you, not ‘the Man.’”

  “This time’ll be different. I don’t want you to do anything to Alaria – ”

  “No, you just want me to bend the space-time continuum so you can defeat a boss in a videogame. No thanks. Go away.”

  “Come onnnn – think of it as playing God.”

  “As far as OtherWorld’s concerned, I am God. I don’t have to play God.”

  I knocked on the computer tower closest to me. “Are you there, God? It’s me, Ian.”

  “Go have your period somewhere else.”

  I sighed. “You don’t understand.”

  “I understand you’re a whiny little bitch.”

  I gritted my teeth and plowed onwards. “Have you ever been trapped in a situation where you just… can’t… win? And it never ends?”

  “Yes. This conversation.”

  “Well, can you at least give me some advice, then?”

  Desmond swiveled back around to face me again.

  Progress.

  “You know what your problem is?” he said.

  “Other than being a whiny little bitch?”

  “Myopia.”

  “You’re the one who wears glasses, dude.”

  He pointed at the computer screen. “Being God is hard on the eyes. But I meant figuratively, dumbass.”

  “I know what you meant. You’re saying I have blinders on.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You’re saying I can’t see the forest for the trees.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re saying I need to think outside the box.”

  “You can stop with the clichés now,” Desmond said as he turned back to his computer again.

  “But what the fuck does that even mean?” I said in an irritated voice.

  “It means you’re so far inside the box, you don’t even realize there’s a box anymore.”

  I paused.

  “…the box being the videogame?”

  “No, Alaria’s box.”

  I glared at him. “Not funny.”

  “No, it’s still hilarious,” he said in his deadpan voice. “Yes, of course the videogame. You’re so focused on this one aspect of it that you’re ignoring everything else.”

  I frowned. “So what should I do?”

  “You ever thought that this might be a Kobayashi Maru scenario?”

  I pondered that for a second. “A no-win situation to see how I react?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Kirk beat the Kobayashi Maru,” I pointed out.

  “So James Tiberius Kirk that shit,” Desmond said, still intently focused on his code.

  “You know…” I said, leaning over the computer tower conspiratorially, “he did it by convincing the green chick to reprogram the computer.”

  What followed was the first time I ever saw Desmond show real emotion.

  Anger.

  Lots of anger.

  He whirled around in his seat, scowled, and pointed his own Finger of Doom at me. “NO, that was in that J.J. Abrams abomination. As plainly stated in The Wrath of Khan, Kirk did it his own damn self. Besides, do I look like a female Orion Starfleet cadet? No. I do not.”

  Desmond swiveled back to his computer screen all in a snit.

  Damn.

  I frowned. “I thought the reboot was okay.”

  “You would. Jesus H. Christ, all those lens flares… the real enemy wasn’t the Klingons or the Romulans, it was J.J. fuckin’ Abrams and Photoshop.”

  I thought back to Wrath of Khan, which I hadn’t seen in years. “Didn’t Kirk actually do the Kobayashi Maru simulation three times?”

  “He did.”

  “He lost the first two times… but he reprogrammed the computer before the third, right?”

  “Third time’s the charm.”

  “So… you’re saying I should try reprogramming the code myself?”

  I got the Finger of Doom again.

  “You touch my code, I will kill you,” Desmond said as he stared at me with cold, dead eyes. “That is not a threat. That is a legally binding contract.”

  Then he turned back to his computer screen.

  “So what should I do, then?” I complained.

  “For starters, step away from the game for a while. Go home and take a shower. You reek.”

  When a self-imposed social outcast like Desmond tells you that you have grooming issues… you have a problem.

  I sniffed the pits of my t-shirt and realized, yeah, I was a little fragrant. I mean, it had been over a week since I’d been back to my apartment.

  “Alright, point taken,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”

  “Please don’t.”

  The last thing I heard as I left the cave was Desmond muttering to himself.

  “Camera flares… Jesus fuckin’ Christ…”

  43

  It was just after five when I clocked out, grabbed my jacket, and left the building. As soon as I walked out of the lobby, though, I was confronted with something I wish I could have left behind in OtherWorld:

  Protestors.

  Throngs of them stood outside Westek, just like their digital counterparts in Fathmos. Except these guys weren’t lobster people – just white-bread.

  Well, mostly. There were a few token Asian chicks and black people, but 95% of them were WASPs.

  They were carrying the same cardboard signs and hollering the same lame chants as the ones in the game.

  Too bad I couldn’t cast Darkfire or Hellstorm on them.

  Actually, they had a new approach I hadn’t heard before: a modified version of ‘Jesus Loves Me’ they sang as a group.

  “Jesus loves me, this I know

  “But to Hell you’re gonna go

  “If you play this video game

  “Sin and We
stek, all the same.

  “Yes, Jesus hates it;

  “Yes, Jesus hates it –

  “Yes, Jesus hates it!

  “No more sex inside the game!”

  All I know is if I were seven years old and heard that song in Sunday School, I would have immediately gone out and tried to get the Adult Expansion Pack. It would have become my new mission in life.

  I passed by the cordon of cops holding back the protestors, muscled my way through the fringes of the crowd, and cold-shouldered the mouth-breathers trying to force Chick tracts on me.

  Yes. ‘Chick tracts.’ Little cartoon pamphlets originally drawn by John Chick, all of them telling you how you deserve to burn in Hell and how you’re responsible for Jesus getting beaten to a bloody pulp and crucified on the cross and how He cries every time you touch yourself.

  Go Google it. Chick.com.

  Not the kind of ‘chick’ website I’m normally looking for on the internet.

  My fundamentalist aunt and uncle had a bunch of Chick tracts strewn around their living room and den. They gave them out at Halloween instead of candy.

  Yeah. They were that house. The one all the kids avoided.

  “If there has to be a holiday dedicated to the Devil,” my uncle was fond of saying, “at least we can use it to save a few souls.”

  You see?

  I come by my dislike of religious fanatics honestly.

  Anyway, once I got past the protestors, I tried to figure out what to do.

  I could call an Uber and go home, but I probably had nothing to eat but frozen dinners and Kraft Mac ‘n Cheese. Now, I like me some Kraft Mac ‘n Cheese, but I figured I needed something a little more substantial.

  Like a beer.

  So I crossed the street, walked over to the shops and restaurants that had sprung up to accommodate Westek and all the other businesses in the area, and went into O’Shaughnessy’s for Happy Hour.

  O’Shaughnessy’s was a faux pub where you could order nachos and burgers instead of anything remotely Irish, but they had pretty cheap Happy Hour specials, and that was good enough for me.

  The place wasn’t hopping yet since it was only a quarter after 5. But I knew that a slew of Westek employees would be coming in shortly.

  I didn’t really want to socialize, though. I just wanted to decompress and relax, so I chose a booth in the very back and ordered a beer and some cheeseburger sliders when the server came by. Then I pulled out my phone and opened Google to see what had happened in the world while I’d been away.