The Big Mollusc

The first ones to feel the awakening of the big mollusc were the Icelanders. Unusual and very dangerous waves appeared from one day to the next, inundating the southeastern coastal region of the island nation. At first, scientists worldwide tried to pass it off as unusual seismic activity in the Atlantic Ocean, but shortly after, a huge object began to emerge from the bottom of the sea, seen by various satellites.

Google Earth aficionados went totally berserk when images of the gigantic object began to appear  about 60 kilometers southeast of Grindavik Iceland.  The object was the size of Manhattan, with a diameter of roughly 20 kilometers wide. It also had tentacles. It was alive.

It was moving to the surface of the water, causing huge waves all around it, but fortunately, it was sufficiently far away from any other city to cause more damage. Russia and the United States sent squadrons of warplanes immediately. The North Atlantic Fleet was mobilized.

Grindavik had to be evacuated. But before the evacuation could be completed, the thing left the Icelandic coast region and swam due southwest, towards the United States. Within a question of minutes, the thing moved 150 kilometers, deep in the Atlantic Ocean.

Submarines and other warships kept a respectful distance, and the best images came from the air, where a joint fleet of warplanes from NATO and Russia escorted the monster without taking action.  The President of the USA, who was on vacation in Vail Colorado, held a special emergency session inside Airforce One. 

It surfaced about forty minutes later, and for the first time, the world was able to see it clearly. It was a mollusc. A very big mollusc. A combination between a clam and an octopus, it had a hard shell out of which 88 tentacles came out, each one as wide as the Empire State Building and 5 kilometers long.

It had been sleeping in the Atlantic Ocean for thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years. And now it was awake, and it was moving... It was swimming towards Charleston, South Carolina it would take it less than three hours more to reach it.

Inside Airforce One, the President spoke to his Russian counterpart about possible scenarios. But the Russians were not too worried about a monster the size of Manhattan destroying the southern coast of the USA, so the Russian President told the American President to do as he wished. After all, it was just "a big fish".

Joan Comskinski, the greatest authority on molluscs was kidnapped by the CIA from her modest house in rural Maine and taken to a secure location where she was put into direct contact with the President via secure satellite transmission. A dozen or so military and scientific specialists were already there, studying all the data on the mollusc.

"Mrs. Comskinski, this is your President, speaking. You are the person best qualified to explain to us what is that thing, and what must we do about it."

"Mr. President, I believe that the creature is a kind of clam. A very big clam."

"Why is it swimming towards Charleston?"

"Either to feed or to reproduce."

"Can we kill it?"

"Mr. President, we are speaking about a new species that might have been dormant for thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years. We should try to study it."

"Just answer my question. Can we kill it?"

"It's very big, Mr. President. But I suppose it could be killed yes. It's just a clam."

One of the military authorities, a Four Star General pipped up.

"Mr. President, that clam might be big, but we have nukes that..."

"General... I do not want a Nuke going off on the coast of South Carolina." Said the President.

"Perhaps two or three subs with torpedoes..." Spoke an Admiral.

"My bombers would sink that thing without trouble."  Added an Airforce General.

Joan began to moan. All her life, she had loved molluscs. To such an extent was her love of the invertebrates, that she had spent all her adult life studying and cataloging them. The idea of murdering the single most incredible mollusc in the planet seemed like an aberration to her.

"Mr. President, if I may... the creature will probably not be a threat to anyone on the coast or at sea. Molluscs are bottom feeders, they do not "hunt" for prey, especially on the surface.  The creature is probably just looking for warmer waters to settle down and re-dig itself.  We should just let it be and study it. Just because it's big, it does not really pose a threat to us, the reason it caused tsunamis off the coast of Iceland is because it dug itself out of the bottom of the sea, and it's sheer size moved enormous amounts of water as it came up. If it stays off coast for at least 100 miles, it will not cause any damage to any coastal cities, and since it's so big, it can be easily avoided by merchant ships."

"I am not certain if I am comfortable sharing the world with a creature that could easily destroy a city just by sitting on it." replied the President. "But maybe you are right. Maybe we could wait and see what it does first."

"Mr. President, surely you are not serious." Said the Admiral.

"It's a monster. We have to kill it." Said the Airforce General.

"Mr. President. You must give the order to launch." Said the Four Star General.

"Mrs. Comsinksky, what do you reckon that thing eats?". Asked the President.

"I could venture to say that it eats what most other clams eat, plankton."

"You don't reckon it likes fish? Or even humans?".

"Clams don't have ... well, really, Mr. President, I don't know. We need to get closer to see what it eats. Its' pretty big... I mean... It's big.".

"Kill that damn thing, Mr. President. It represents a clear and present danger to our way of life, and the freedoms that our forefathers fought so hard to obtain." Said the General.

"Okay, Gentlemen. I want a plan of attack. Admiral, this is a sea monster, you are in charge."

The Admiral smiled and shacked his eyebrows at his counterparts of the air and land.

"We will have all my battleships converge and sink that damn clam back to hell, Mr. President... You couldn't have made a better choice.".

Joan moaned again.

The battle was furious and fast. Submarines, battleships and aircraft carriers surrounded the clam and shot everything they had at it. For several minutes, the clam sustained constant fire from bombs, missiles, bullets, torpedoes and even lazers. When the dust cleared, the Clam was utterly unharmed.

And then it was it's turn.

It sent a kind of psychic blast, a form of "soul-crying" that drove all the people around it mad. It was a kind of really bad psychedelically experience, the ultimate bad trip. It was a scream, not an audible, scream, but a mind-scream. It was so loud, so deafening, that it utterly fried the brains of all the people who were trying to hurt the mollusc. Pilots went catatonic on their cabins, sailors threw themselves into the ocean, commanding officers shot themselves. It was a slaughter. Within a few minutes of the scream, the entire NATO North Atlantic Fleet was decimated. Airplanes smashed into the waves, ships smashed into each other.

Airforce One was forced to land rapidly somewhere near Chicago for fear that another mind-blast could make the pilots of the airplane crash. The CIA and the Army took over an entire highway in rural Illinois and set up a command center to protect the Commander in Chief inside a local Waffle House. The President ordered bacon, eggs and black coffee.

"You need to authorize a nuclear strike, Mr. President."  It was the General who first spoke, digging into his own waffle. "That thing destroyed our entire Atlantic Fleet in a matter of minutes!".

"It's too close to the coast of South Carolina. The winds are due west and the radiation would cover most of the southeastern coast." It was the Admiral, who looked like a lost child after having lost all his toys.

The "mind-scream" had been heard from Alaska to Australia, but it had only affected people directly involved in trying to harm the clam. To all other humans, it was a simple cry of help in a weird but powerful voice that said: "Don't hurt me!". Somehow, the President and his men had been spared the insanity, although it was their decision to attack.

The "red" phone rang. It was the Russian President.

"Mr. President. Please don't try that again. I will have to make the clam a Russian citizen, and therefore you will not be able to attack it again."

"Vladimir, that thing is going to eat South Carolina!"

"You have plenty of other southern states, and we heard it crying all the way to Vladivistok."

"Vladimir, it's a matter of national security."

"That's it' Barack. The Clam is now officially a citizen of Russia. Don't hurt it any more! If you do, I will invade Germany!"

President Putin shut down the phone. And President Obama was left to eat his bacon and eggs but without much appetite.

It was then that the Clam spoke again. It spoke into the minds of the whole planet and it said:

"Bring me Daisy Rutherford McClintock!"

It took the head of the CIA about 21 seconds to find out using Google that there were 5 persons who responded to the name of Daisy Rutherford McClintock in the United States. Once the order was given, it took the combined efforts of the CIA, the Army and the State and Local Police to gather up the 5 Daisy's and take them to a secure location in Nevada.

Four of the Daisy's were actually grandmothers, which in itself was a weird thing. But the fifth was just a little six year old girl whose parents were not at all happy to have her kidnapped by the CIA, and who demanded that they too be taken to Nevada with her when the SWAT team in Charleston, South Carolina came to gather her up from her schoolyard.

Since the clam was heading for Charleston, and Daisy, (the little one) lived in Charleston, the CIA operatives in charge of kidnapping Daisy's decided it was very probable that it was she that the clam was looking for. So against her parent's wishes, they put the poor girl through a variety of tests and exams to determine her connection to the giant beast.

Sadly, they found nothing out of the ordinary about the little girl, or the other four Daisy grandmas.

What nobody knew at that time, is that the clam was actually Daisy's imaginary friend. She called "him" (although actually this particular giant clam was a hermaphrodite) Poopsy, and Poopsy spoke quite clearly to her. In fact, Poopsy had been speaking to Daisy for years, telling her about how the Earth was a living organism, and how he was a kind of "vacuum cleaner" for the Earth, and how his job was to "clean up" the parasites, and how Daisy was actually one of those parasites, but she was a nice girl, and so the Earth didn't want to clean her up, instead she only wanted to clean up the parasites that were hurting her and taking away her blood, which she called Petroleum.

Of course, when Daisy told this to the doctors and psychiatrists examining her, they simply though she had a very vivid imagination.

But then "Poopsy" reached the coast of Charleston, and using his tentacles to move out of the water, crushed the entire city, and began to crawl towards Nevada, where Daisy was giving her captors a blow-by-blow narration of what Poopsy was doing, including the destruction of Charleston.

President Obama had enough. He demanded that Daisy be taken to Charleston before "Poopsy" could destroy any more coastal cities.  Daisy and her parents were flown to Charleston rapidly, where they met the President in a special military camp outside the ruined city of Charleston, which now looked as if a giant clam had squished it completely (which is exactly what happened).

Then Daisy told the President that Poopsy was going to give her something. And that it would be best if they didn't try to take it from her. And that they should pull back all the tanks and airplanes and troops that were stationed around Poopsy because otherwise he would squish them too, and then scream so loud that everybody would go crazy.

And the President thought it was a great idea, so he had all his troops pull back and he took Daisy by the hand and they walked to where Poopsy was squishing Charleston. And when Daisy was close enough, Poopsy opened up his clam-shell wide open, and everybody could see inside, that there was a gigantic pearl inside of him, like the size of Central Park. And then Poopsy took the Pearl out with two of his gigantic tentacles and put it gently right in front of the President and Daisy. And then he closed his shell again.

And he told Daisy that he would come back and squish the rest of the cities unless her people stop digging for oil and for gold and silver and other things, because the Earth was tired of everybody digging out her treasures. And the Pearl was so that they would remember that.

Having said that, Poopsy dragged itself back to the ocean where it sank deeply just outside the coast of Charleston and then dug itself deep under the sand.