Thou Shalt Not Kiss

XXII: The Voyeur

The Seraphim have their cherubs and the Nephilim have their tanninim.

"Tanninim" is a misnomer. The original Hebrew word meant sea serpents. But a tannin droid is nothing more than a CPU sheathed in a waterproof, pressure-resistant globular hull and fitted with a total of six prehensile tails. If Watcher Nezha could rename them, he'd call them "gouged giant eyeballs with stringy cranial nerves still attached".

In one of the glass-walled bolgias, the Colonel (Abyssian Marines Reserve) is gazing out to the pitch-black darkness of the trenches. He's contemplating the history of his home realm, the Abyss, the perfect aphotic prison. Old World Terrans visualized eternal damnation as a fiery place. They misunderstood the poet Dante who, in his visionary work Inferno, indeed described the sixth circle of the Abyss as a flaming pit but instead chose to portray the deepest part as a frozen river fanned by the ceaseless movement of a gargantuan Lucifer's wings. Fire is a clean and cleansing element. It causes pain but also takes it away, inadvertently allowing the remission of sin. Cold is the exact opposite. Cold decelerates and preserves. For agents of eternal torment, extreme cold is the perfect condition and the tanninim the perfect slave labor.

The tanninim are much less sentient than the cherubs. They weren't iterated from the X-O Machina line but were descended from the eyebots. As such, they're completely devoid of legacy programming such as pain reception. This last trait makes the tanninim especially suited for the so-called 3-D jobs: Dirty, Difficult and Dangerous. They're designed to withstand the extreme pressures and frigidity of the trenches and, in cases when their invulnerability runs short, they remain unyieldingly set on their mission parameters, at times even to the point of self-destruction.

Thus was the Abyss built on the backs of the spineless tanninim. It was them that dug up the basalt, smelted the ore and rolled the iron into steel plates. They conducted deep-sea fishing, reused CO2, grew crops in seabed capsules, harvested ocean temperature differentials and desalinated seawater using water pressure. Once self-sufficient, the original Leviathan Seed segregated into self-contained modular units, precisely like the jellyfish in the strobilation phase of their life cycle. These modules became the cluster of giant medusa-like structures known today as the Abyss, complete with hanging cables and ballasts that provide balance and ceaselessly generate kinetic energy.

The Abyss's design is far from random coincidence. Each module is spherical at the top and cylindrical at the lower levels; the best shapes to withstand the omni-directional pressures. The top is a transparent dome that maximizes the bioluminescence of the ocean rather than the light of the absent sun. Below it, along the stem, what would be the oral arms of the jellyfish, only much more solid, are the residential bolgias interspersed with small forests of bioengineered trees.

Right now, if a passing tannin looked in from outside the Colonel's window, it would see a handsome Nephala in his mid-twenties. His physique is deceptive because Colonel Nezha Fang is already 110 years old. In a world where the low-borns are essentially immortal, he still looks the same way he did at his physical peak. A quick visit to the public mud baths can work wonders, bringing a Nephala back to his optimal genetic code and leaving behind all his deteriorated cells.

Colonel Fang is already retired but Nephala tradition allows high-ranking officers to retain their ranks. He was a veteran of the war. The Blinkers call it the War of Defiance while the Seraphim call it the War of Righteous Indignation. The Nephilim, glorified wardens of the Abyss, have a more prosaic name for it: the 60-Day War.

The Colonel isn't only a decorated Marines officer but a master engineer and industrialist. He's the founder and current CEO of Fang Defense Systems, the oldest and leading manufacturer of hydrospace, defense and security technologies on both the Firmament and the Abyss. In fact, components of the penal fortress and those of the tanninim were the colonel's brainchildren.