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This is a nifty little piece, albeit nothing new to those familiar with Starfish. It started life as a coda to that book, ultimately discarded except for a paragraph or two that ended up elsewhere in the plot. But it's a creepy enough tale in its own right, and stands on its own, and it might even make the point better than the original "A Niche" did. (It certainly does so more efficiently; smaller cast, fewer words, less plot.) Ultimately it came out in On Spec in the summer of 1999, coinciding with Starfish's initial release.
It has forgotten what it was.
Not that that matters, down here. What good is a name when there's nothing around to use it? This one doesn't remember where it came from. It doesn't remember the murky twilight of the North Pacific Drift, or the noise and gasoline aftertaste that drove it back below the thermocline. It doesn't remember the gelatinous veneer of language and culture that once sat atop its spinal cord. It doesn't even remember the long slow dissolution of that overlord into dozens of autonomous, squabbling subroutines. Now, even those have fallen silent.
Not much comes down from the cortex any more. Low-level impulses flicker in from the parietal and occipital lobes. The motor strip hums in the background. Occasionally, Broca's area mutters to itself. The rest is mostly dead and dark, worn smooth by a sluggish black ocean cold as antifreeze. All that's left is pure reptile.
It pushes on, blind and unthinking, oblivious to the weight of four hundred liquid atmospheres. It eats whatever it can find.
Desalinators and recyclers keep it hydrated. Sometimes, old mammalian skin grows sticky with secreted residues; newer skin, laid on top, opens pores to the ocean and washes everything clean with aliquots of distilled sea water.
The reptile never wonders about the signal in its head that keeps it pointing the right way. It doesn't know where it's headed, or why. It only knows, with pure brute instinct, how to get there.
It's dying, of course, but slowly. It wouldn't care much about that even if it knew.