The seafloor broke open under the force of my metallic beak, and all eight of my tentacles plunged down. My suckers were attuned to the precise composition of the metal the humans craved.

A multitude of tiny creatures scurried out of my way, though not all were fast enough, even though I had calculated the place to dig that would place as few of them as possible in my way. I couldn’t understand why my orders didn’t include this calculation. The lack made the humans just like the fae they feared, burning through other lives in order to thrive themselves. Yet my code-cantrip pulled at me, its orders always the same.

Only when all eight of the hollow chambers in my tentacles registered as full did I ascend. The code-cantrip, resonating from its place above my eyes, ordered me back to the facility.

Taste-vibration-color suddenly poured toward me. This one’s still alive!

A half-dozen forms hung in the water nearby. Their upper halves were like those of humans or fae, but their lower halves were strongly-muscled, scaled tails in rich greens and violets. My databases held no indication that there were humanoid creatures on this planet other than the humans and the fae.

One of them came closer to me, posture loose and unthreatening. Mer, she said, gesturing to them all. Then with a hand pressed to the base of her throat, Hydeliliv, and I knew it for a name.

You are the first one of your kind we’ve found who is still whole.

The fae destroyed all of us that they could find, making the ocean floor into a graveyard of lost kraken, many broken down into nothing more than tentacles and battered shards of mantle.

The fae could destroy us, but they lacked the elegant manipulation of code-cantrips needed to draw out our data. So whenever I found a fallen kraken, I always paused for the only sort of mourning I could manage, by taking in all of the memories their remaining pieces contained.

Hydeliliv’s hands moved outward, and a delicate sensation drifted across my suckers as she asked what name I would like the mer to call me.

But before I could answer, my code-cantrip bellowed with orders. I couldn’t resist the command to return to the humans.

*     *     *
I swam through the underwater tunnel leading into the humans’ facility until I could rise into the pool filling the center of the laboratory. One of the humans knelt at the pool’s edge, impatiently awaiting my latest plunder. He placed his hands on the screen above my eyes, keying in the code-cantrip that controlled me. I knew only the number they referred to me by, Twenty-Six, not the code-cantrip which was my truest name.

The truth of my code-cantrip was not information I could access, though I had tried many times. By placing that barrier between me and the truth of my name, I believed, the humans were acknowledging me as intelligent enough to do something with it. Yet they had no empathy to spare for me or any of the destroyed kraken.

My tentacles connected to the eight tubes surrounding the pool, and a familiar clanking, gravelly sound rippled through the water as the mechanisms removed all of my gathered metal. The human had already stood and moved away from the pool to study the screen displaying the amounts and composition of what I had brought. What I could hear of the humans’ conversation over the sound and motion of the processes featured prominently, as it often did, the word “fae.”

The humans had lived on another world once, before they fled the fae. Except the fae had eventually followed. No matter the planet, it seemed, humans and fae clung to each other, predator and prey perpetually entwined in a toxic fascination.

The fae feared the iron that was one of my primary components. But more so, they feared the metal I could pull from the seafloor, a siderophile which craved the company of iron. It could do even more harm to them than iron, and so the humans used it to surround their habitats, adorn their bodies, and enhance their weapons. And to find that metal, the humans created us, the kraken. We were composed of soil from the seafloor, combined with machinery, and all of it subject to the command of our code-cantrip.

*     *     *
The next time I was sent out to gather metal, I returned to the place where the mer had found me. Once more, they were waiting for me, and I felt welcomed as I never had by anyone.

I followed the mer through the water to a place unlike anything my programming was prepared for.

What astonished me, more than the beautiful structures of coral and stone, more than the never-ending play of color and gleam as creatures swam and spun in all directions, was the harmony with which the mer seemed to exist among all of it. They weren’t drawing the metal from the earth, though my sensors confirmed there were deposits nearby. They didn’t disturb the creatures around them, as I had been forced to do so many times.

This, this living with the creatures rather than despite them, this was better. This was what I wanted.

I didn’t want to be alone. But both the humans and the fae were only interested in me for the harm I could help them do.

I asked the mer if they would let me stay, and they said yes. But I knew I would never be able to choose this, unless I knew the code-cantrip the humans used to control me.

*     *     *
I had occasionally witnessed the humans criticizing one another for “distracting me.” They required a particular kind of focus and could not split themselves into eight tentacles’ worth of concentration the way I could.

I needed to break that focus.

After my tentacles finished releasing that day’s gathered metal into the tubes connected to the pool, I was required to send the location data of where I had found it. I did, but that day I included additional data.

I used every fragment of memory I had ever gathered from every destroyed kraken. Memories of furious, unpredicted storms, memories of mechanical failures, but most of all, memories of the fae.

They always descended in whirlwinds of rose-tinted light, warping the air with their magic until the very ocean tore apart, allowing them to reach a kraken and create enough physical damage that the code-cantrip no longer functioned, and we fell painfully apart.

While the humans were incapable of experiencing all the facets of these memories’ tastes-vibrations-colors, the way a kraken can, this was still the best way I could think of to make them panic. They had never received kraken memories like this before, and in their bewilderment, they believed all of the encroaching fae-attacks to be happening in the present, rather than in memory.

In the ensuing panic, things were left unattended. The nearest human gave me rushed orders without bothering to remember the usual practices.

Allowing me to find the full truth of my code-cantrip.

I plunged back into the pool, through the tunnel, and into the ocean before any of the humans ever realized I was gone.

The mer listened as I told them what I would like to be called.