September 2nd, 2026
The sun scattered its light across the sea until the water shimmered like a blanket woven from countless stars. Richard Perez a 39-year-old fisherman was out using his new rig as the waves rocked his boat gently. He now was a great distance northeast of the Philippines when he came to a halt and set up shop. Thirty minutes into waiting Richard got up to fumble around his bag for the tuna sandwich he packed, mumbling to himself. “Ohh k where is that. Come on I.” A metallic clack echoed across the deck as the rod holder shuddered.
“Haha!” He gleefully shouted, dropping his bag and dashing to the starboard rail. The reel squealed as line disappeared into the sea, vanishing beneath the swaying swells. “Ugh, COMMAA!” Richard grunted with frustration as he struggled fighting and reeled against the staunch resistance. After the seven minutes that felt like an hour for him, Mr. Perez tasted success looking over the edge curious as to what would emerge. What looked like a large silvery grey octopus lifted its skinny tentacles shifting them in all directions, came floating into his line of sight.
It took every bit of strength for Richard to lift the bizarre-looking ocean dweller up and over onto the deck, sending the fisherman falling backwards. “OOF!” He responded bracing for impact landing on his side. Mr. Perez’s eyes widened as he looked up at the fruits of his labor. A shark unlike any Richard had ever seen before was something that looked fresh out of a Sci-Fi flick. Thick pointed limbs matted down over the top of its head hanging downward like a mop top made of living tissue.
It flailed slowly in a way that made Richard uncomfortable. Popping and locking into different positions appendages all moving independently. After his mind had a moment to process what he was witness to, Richard pulled himself to his feet. Grabbing his smart phone out of his pocket he started to film. “Hi guys. As you can see, I got some kind of deformed shark. Umm, Oceanic white tip I believe.” As the fisherman yammered on the shark behind him began to split its own jaw open like someone parting scissors dropping the hook.
Through his phone he noticed something that silenced his rant. Many stiff pale white limbs like sharpened bamboo extended out of the sharks under belly rising it up into the air. Richard turned and ran after tucking his phone into his jacket’s side pocket. The sight of this monster fish stopped Richard in his tracks halfway to the boat’s edge. By the time he made it to the starboard rail Richard could hear the splash of the creature as it returned to the sea descending deeply. “What the hell was that!” He cried out slamming the edge of the boat with his right fist.
Oct 30th, 2026
The aftermath of Richard Perez’s viral video of a grotesquely altered shark had recently gained worldwide speculation. Being taken down and scrubbed from the internet as well as having his Instagram deleted Mr. Perez persisted on. Regardless of various threats against him he refused to stop posting the video to any platform or message boards he could. The reactions ranged from skeptical to horrified, with the mix of responses you'd typically see online.
“Whatever that thing is, it stopped being a shark a long time ago.”
“Everyone saying "AI" has clearly never looked at deep-sea biology… but this?”
“It opened its mouth and there was another mouth inside it. Nope. Absolutely not.”
“Bro evolved on hard mode.”
“Did anyone notice the water around it wasn't moving normally? That's what freaked me out the most.”
“This is why we leave the ocean alone.”
“Thirty years fishing offshore. If I ever hauled that thing onto my boat, I'd cut the line.”
“Does anyone think the teeth look human??”
“Fake until proven otherwise.”
“The skin looks like scar tissue wrapped around exposed muscle obviously, Ai :/.”
u/UnknownDepths “We know more about the Moon than the deepest parts of our own ocean.”
“It looks sick like something happened to it?”
“I came for a shark video. I left questioning whether the ocean should stay unexplored forever.”
February 27th, 2028
The ocean had undergone change deep beneath the surface far out of sight from any probing gazes. There was a new predator that outperformed anything in its domain. Whether it be strength, speed, or intelligence, nothing came close to matching its superiority. A ROV streaming an ordinary live broadcast caught sight of something astonishing. What seemed to be a colossal squid wrapped around an adult sperm whale revealed itself to be something at first glance, unrecognizable.
Upon zooming in the ROV displayed the whale sinking slowly as its shape started to change. Hundreds of pointed tendrils that resembled a barrage of flailing tape worms projected up and tore out of the whale’s spout. As this occurred the large animal drifted sideways exposing the underbelly. On the bottom right side, a patch the size of a mattress revealing smaller luminescent tentacles that produced a white, blue glow gently swayed with the current.
The mouth snapped backwards as the largest set of tentacles came ripping out and folding the jaws backwards as if something was trying to get out. Turning itself inside out so that the body of the whale now anatomically relocated to the creature’s underside. Convulsing in a neon blue light, what floated in front of the ROV, was equally outlandish as it was an offensive phenomenon. While still adjusting its form the hellish mutation took off into the deep dark distance.
June 17th, 2028
Across the entire world a strange occurrence began to affect an alarming and growing number of people. On social media victims who suffered from nightmares regarding the ocean would share their experiences. Stories of thousands of people expressing similar dreams of running water and something giant under the ocean. Family members recording their loved ones chanting drip, plop, plip. Richard Pererz’s video had exposed the horrific plague consuming the ocean as well as the rest of the planet.
14 hours ago,
“Is anyone else having trouble sleeping? Ive been having this recurring dream about being deep in the ocean and waking me up around the same time every night”. Many replies soon followed. Thousands of messages from people across the globe reporting the similar nightmare last night. All within a 24hr. period
245K 182K shares
The Public Comments Section
• Marcus Vance (London, UK): I literally woke up gasping for air. I was floating in pitch-black water. Couldn't see the surface. Couldn't see my hands. But I could feel something gigantic moving a few hundred feet below me. My fiancé told me she had the same dream.
o 14 hrs ago Like Reply o 2.1K Replies
• Elena Rostova (Vladivostok, Russia): u/Marcus Vance :0 Oh my god, yes. The pressure? You could feel the density of the deep water pressing into your ears. I looked down into the deepness and saw a faint blue glow.
o 13 hrs ago Like Reply
• Marcus Vance (London, UK): u/Elena Rostova YES! The pulsing light! It wasn't a creature moving, it was like a single part of something way bigger. o 13 hrs ago Like Reply
• Hiroshi Tanaka (Tokyo, Japan): Translation: I had this exact dream except I didn't just dream it. The water was completely still, and then a massive eye opened beneath me. It was wider than a city block. It didn't look angry, just alien?
o 12 hrs ago Like Reply
• Amara Okafor (Lagos, Nigeria): My whole family woke up at the same time last night. My 8-year-old daughter ran into my room screaming about the "breathing ocean." She said she floated face to face with that monster. :/ o 11 hrs ago Like Reply
• Sarah Jenkins (Miami, USA): I'm too scared to go back to sleep tonight.
What if we all go back down there?
o 4 hrs ago
January 13th, 2029
Confusion turned into anger and paranoia throughout the world. Confusion as to why people that had not come into direct contact or so they thought were being afflicted. Undeveloped countries like Cambodia and Liberia for example got hit the hardest collapsing entire regions within months. However, the more progressed nations were not fairing much better as the attacks on the United States and United Kingdom were noticeably the most violent incidents.
Heavily populated cities like New York City and Los Angelos ran rampant with integration as such the residents did not resist for very long. Whole neighborhoods were occupied within minutes now that the aggressors were so progressed along in their invasion. Ecosystems warped and twisted, reshaped into something utterly vile. Entire landscapes had become sprawling fields of life, truly a dark perversion of nature, every living thing fused together in a cruel and grotesque blending. Nothing that had been absorbed was extinguished; it remained alive, integrated into something greater, harmonized against its will malevolently.
March 6th, 2029
Sophie Bradshaw was a forty-two-year-old mother of three who had been feeling restless the entire previous night. Feeling quite ill, she was determined to get some Tussin DM when her decision to drive started to seem foolish. As she sweated profusely her head pounded and her vision blurred. Sophie decided that it was time to pull over, however her vision drastically tunneled as she passed out swiping into two vehicles before crashing into the motorway’s sound wall. Contorting her body Mrs. Bradshaw inhaled sharply wheezing.
“HUYUUNU!” Movement could be seen under her shirt. Something shifting around like she was smuggling a family of mice. Skin tore as she began to deteriorate into fleshy strands of fiber, moving freely out into the air. Within minutes she was no longer recognizable. Exposed muscle tissue visibly shifted back and forth changing color and texture. A greyish yellow that reflected light as if soaked in water slowly spread from the center outward. Distant sirens could be heard off in the distance of southern Dublin.
November 30th, 2031
The aggressive colonization of humanity was at hand as militaries across the world prepared to defend their people and remaining territory. Neighborhood sidewalks painted in blood, littered with corpses, and shredded pieces of hosts adorned along the streets. Early in the morning soldiers patrolled the outskirts of the Joint Base Anacostia Bolling when a voice could be heard shouting “Hey I got eyes on one!” What resembled a squid dog darted around the northern side of the secured perimeter wall attracting the attention of all the soldiers. As they chased after the target it came to a halt faced in the soldier’s direction. As they opened fire one of the men cried out “behind us!”
An identical scout ran in between the squad of eight exploding sending barbed entrails out in every direction piercing the troop like scalpels. One of the projectiles lethally connected with a soldier’s throat. “AHCK UH!” He cried out coughing out a large amount of blood. Upon realizing the gravity of the situation, they began to panic. One of two lucky enough to have avoided the assault pulled out his tactical radio to report the incident back to the others.
“Drop it!” Rico demanded as he raised his rifle in his direction. “NO OK!” he replied releasing his radio. “Put it down Rico!” two of the inflicted raised their arms in the soldier’s defense as the remaining two raised theirs up with Rico. Now a standoff the men demanded the opposing side to put their weapons down. After a few minutes Rico began backing up “I’M WARNING YA!” The men threatened when Rico fired on the opposing side hitting two of them. Chaos unfolded as gunfire erupted and the sound of a siren began wailing. On the other side of the base the soldiers were fighting for their lives as droves of infected infiltrated the perimeter pouring in and overwhelming the entire eastern section.
December 3rd, 2031
Violence corrupted the minds of the masses and entire governments began to fold under enormous pressure. It was at this time that something extraordinary happened. Far beneath the ocean deep mother began to rise out of her location, and up the massive prehistoric god surfaced at midnight parting waves. Its stunningly extensive tendrils towered to the black sky swaying freely.
Breaking the surface calling out to its children in the dark, urging them to return to the ocean. The cry traveled for miles upon miles across the open water—a low, ominous sound resembling a foghorn distorted beyond recognition. It reverberated through the darkness until the United States Navy detected it on sensitive sonar equipment. By the following morning, two pilots had been dispatched toward the distant target as the sun began to peak over the horizon.
“Rook, you seeing this?” “Affirmative. Raven, don’t get too close.” Break left Now.” “I see it.” “Raven, you’re drifting into it!” “I said I see it!” “PULL UP!”
“Shit—”
Raven’s transmission was cut short. From the ocean below, a massive appendage erupted from the water, rising over the aircraft and casting a dreadful shadow across the cockpit. For a fleeting moment, the pilot was completely obscured beneath it momentarily stealing his attention. A tentacle jutted out from underneath the aircraft. It struck with tremendous swiftness, detonating the pilot on impact.
Rook unleashed a barrage of missiles into the titanic goliath. Explosions tore across its immense flesh, leaving one of its appendages hanging limply from the enormous wound. Rook turned away, beginning his retreat. Then, as he circled back, taking one final look, he saw them. Far beyond the original target, more tendrils began to rise from the ocean.
One.
Then another.
And three more.
They appeared from what had seemed to be an impossibly distant point on the horizon, breaking the surface one after another as though something beneath the ocean was slowly awakening. Only then did the pilot begin to understand the scale of what he was looking at. The thing beneath the water was not merely gigantic. It was beyond anything he had ever imagined could exist. Numb pins and needles dizzied the pilot as panic washed over him. He abandoned the area and fled in the direction he came, returning with one less man. Based on the pilot’s report, the decision was made. Final Dawn was put into motion.
December 5th, 2031
Those who remained untouched were forbidden to leave. The Unites States had been placed under strict martial law, sealed away from the outside world for the better part of two years. However, sixty-five percent of the country was already seized at an alarming rate. governments cooperated secretly across advanced encrypted messaging software devising a plan for retaliation, Operation Final Dawn. Sharing the intel gathered in this final desperate attempt to strike back at this devastating conquest against the entire human race.
The bright minds associated with the resistance rarely slept, rather they spent their time learning the astonishing capabilities of this terror that went by many names. Scientists referred to it as AMHE-01 or adapted multi hostile entity. The government has been aware of the deep mother for some time and refers to the offspring as tide. And finally, intelligence agencies labeled the threat Pelagic 7.
These men and women read on in despair how AMHE-01 could break itself down into various forms of matter. Liquid, gas, and solids can travel by air land or water the organisms were genetically superior to anything with a heartbeat.
December 11th, 2031
The mass number of casualties was making the survivors afraid for their lives as well as desperate. The complete domination of their race had driven them like wild animals backed into a corner. The entire planet devastated in AMHE-01’s impact, and a thin miasma of particle sized parasites blanketed different regions of countries worldwide. Living amongst these micro sized variants was dangerous and not always completely apparent. But despite their best various efforts to protect themselves, this contamination was engulfing the planet. Not just by air but the rivers, the soil, and even the wildlife were spoiled and merged to a cellular level.
It was believed that nuking the colossal threat was the only possible chance of undoing all that had been exacted upon them. The risks of using nuclear weapons are always severe, however the assimilation of all life on earth was becoming an increasing possibility each day. The fear of being physically and mentally bonded drove many people to suicide. A fate with which they felt they finally had control. This fact was evident to everyone responsible for eliciting such a response and yet they were losing ground at a rapid pace. At 8:00 AM a B83 nuclear bomb was deployed detonating on impact with the deep mother. For one bleak instant the ocean became still, and the world seemed to hold its breath.
A white sun was born beneath the surface, the sea erupted upward in a cataclysmic column thousands of tons of water splashed up to the heavens as the prehistoric entity roared out an intolerable sound that seemed less like a shriek rather than the earth itself screaming. The creature’s vast form shuddered within the fire; its flesh reduced to a fleeting shadow against the intensity before the blast that consumed it. For miles, the sea boiled and churned beneath a sky turned white, while a colossal cloud climbed upward, dragging vapor, ash, and the remnants of something ancient into its towering crown. Approximately fourteen percent of this archaic resident of the ocean was cleaned away under light and water.
December 13th, 2033
The world’s environment and vast oceans were left, warped and grotesquely transformed. AMHE-01 was a living, thriving cancer constantly expanding and taking. Water darkened in enormous patches, not with oil, algae, or sediment, but with something that seemed to possess its own density. A crimson red and orange colored water could be seen from space. An infection that did not spread through every ocean but replaced it.
It hung beneath the surface in vast translucent sheets, monochrome at first, then gradually taking on hues that no natural ocean had ever produced—sickly violets, bruised reds, and colors that seemed to exist somewhere between blood and sewage. Then the organisms began to change. Fish were found merged in schools that were no longer schools, but single masses of living tissue. Paper thin shrouds of a multifaceted universe layered the sea for miles downward. Bustling with aggressive microorganisms such as parasitic microbes, fungi, and every other form of infinitesimal albeit dangerous tide particles saturated these descending flesh sheets.
Their bodies had developed into one another without seams. Scales melted across scales, fins became membranous veils, mouths opened inside other mouths. Eyes appeared where no eyes should have been, on occasion dozens of them, embedded beneath radiant layers of flesh all glaring in different directions. Gills multiplied and overlapped with each other until the creatures seemed to breathe through every exposed surface, nothing was merely consumed rather commonly relocated.
Membranes dispersed into one another. Nuclei divided and renewed. Genetic material appeared to pass without restrictions between unrelated organisms, as though the limitations separating species had become irrelevant. Muscle cells became nerve cells. The Oceans anatomy was made wild and unstable as bones began producing soft tissue. Blood vessels laced themselves through cartilage and shell. The organism did not seem interested in killing its hosts. It wanted their architecture.
The deep-sea floor rose and fell in massive, imperceptible rhythms. Cracks gaped between continental shelves, exposing chambers lined with pale, glistening tissue. Something reminiscent of veins extended through the trenches, fading beneath kilometers of rock before emerging again hundreds of miles away. The Mariana Trench was no longer geological. It was anatomical. The deepest places on Earth had become cavities within something immeasurably larger.
And somewhere in that considerable bulk of fused flesh, bone, cartilage, shell, muscle, plankton, coral, and surface tissue, something began to think. The first indication was detected at the bottom of the Pacific. Then another appeared in the Atlantic. Then thousands. Then millions. A pulse traveled through the oceans faster than any natural current could carry it. From trench to trench. From coastline to coastline. Across every infected organism. Across the entire living ocean. The sea was no longer something that surrounded us. It was something that knew we were here.
January 5th, 2034
The biological warfare waged upon all life made even the more formidable, now being substantially airborne. That night the Tide flocked to the Deep Mother, resting far into the abyssopelagic zone. Assembling at the crater like wound of the deep mother, the tide welded and amalgamated the open tissue stimulating the damage until fully mended. Absorbing every drop of information the Tide had received throughout their domination of the surface.
Little of the entirety of earth was left unscathed. Even money couldn’t save a trillionaire buried in his multiple billion-dollar bunker that had become his glorified prison cell and eventual tomb. After years of hoping that he could somehow return to a world that now did not belong to his species, then the night came. Choking back tears, sobbing. The middle-aged elitist raised a colt cobra to his temple and squeezed the trigger. Collapsing in the darkness, the shot rang out.
January 7th, 2034
The last remaining international weather station continued to transmit despite having lost contact with every other station on the continent.
At 04:17 UTC, the station reported rainfall.
At 04:19, the rain stopped.
At 04:21, the technician noticed that the drops striking the windows were moving upward.
At 04:23, the technician began reporting a sound beneath the building.
Plip.
Plop.
At 04:31, the final transmission was received.
There was no emergency declaration.
No request for assistance.
No mention of the station.
Only four words were repeated incessantly until the broadcast ended.
June 24th, 2034
They had become part of something that had been waiting beneath them.
And somewhere beneath the black water, deeper than any vessel could descend, the Deep Mother stirred. She had always been there. Humanity, for all its sagas, its kingdoms, its wars, and its brief dominion over the surface, was hardly more than an infant beside the archaic divinity that had slept beneath the sea. It had existed long before mankind ever looked upon the ocean and imagined it belonged to them. Unknown to humanity it alone withheld the ability of immortality.
Within the Deep Mother's collective consciousness, ancient stirrings began to awaken. Beings that had once possessed minds of their own—ancestors of creatures long since forgotten, swallowed by ages beyond human memory—stirred within their vast mental prison. For eons they had existed as mere fragments within her, their individuality dissolved into something greater than themselves. Now, one by one, those buried remnants began to move again. Not as captives. Not as servants. But as pieces of something that had finally begun to remember itself.
The newly confined voices began to scream within the internal mental imprisonment of all the included. A cacophony of dogs barking, children wailing, chimpanzee’s screaming, birds chirping, and woman sobbing. The Deep Mother soothed her children calling out in a frequency that calmed and began to silence the cries of resistance. As the last unaltered upon the surface was suffocated in a thick quilt of Tide the ocean’s surface pulsed and shuddered in an alarming crimson glow illuminated by the full moon.
Now, after millenniums of silence, it had finally reclaimed what had always been its own. Its retribution was not born of hatred. It did not despise humanity, nor did it seek revenge in any way a human mind could understand. It simply was. And in being what it was, the Deep Mother had fulfilled the purpose that had existed within it since before mankind's beginning: the absorption of all life into itself. Mr. Johnson's fated encounter had been only the first domino to fall. What had once seemed like an isolated event had now come full circle, revealed as merely the first tremor of something perplexingly ancient. The ocean was never lonely. It had only been sleeping.
END
Source: r/TalesFromTheCreeps · by /u/Damien_Vann