Rewriting Mendez

They’d shot her full of chronobullshit about it being routine. Nothing’s routine when they’re scraping around inside your skull with nanomachines. Nothing’s goddamn routine when they’re rewriting the you that makes you YOU.

Mendez knew this. Yet here she stood, in the sterile white hell of Thalassa Station, a trillion tons of crushing, suffocating water surrounding the fragile bubble of human arrogance they called a research facility.

“The procedure has a 89.7% success rate, Dr. Mendez,” said the smiling technician, his face a mask of practiced corporate reassurance. His name badge read NAKAMURA, but Mendez had already decided to call him Judas in her mind.

“And the other 10.3%?” Mendez asked, her mouth dry as Martian dust.

Judas’s smile flickered just enough to reveal the truth. “Psychotic episodes. Permanent catatonia. Nothing to concern yourself with.”

Rain beat against the plexiglass ceiling, each drop a tiny hammer on the anvil of her sanity. Mendez had never told the recruitment team about her hydrophobia. She’d falsified psych evaluations, bribed a med tech on Europa for clean neural scans. The xenobiology fellowship was too important—career-defining research on the semi-telepathic cephalopods native to this watery hell.

Worth lying for. Worth facing terror for.

“When do we start?” she asked, surprised at the steadiness in her voice.

“We already have,” Judas replied.

Mendez felt the first cold trickle down her spine—not water, but fear. Pure, uncut fear. The same fear she’d felt at age seven when her father had thrown her from a Lake Michigan pier, laughing as she nearly drowned. “What do you mean?”

“The nanites were in your welcome drink. They’re mapping your amygdala as we speak.” Judas checked his wrist monitor. “Fascinating case. Your fear response to water imagery registers higher than combat veterans with PTSD.”

The room seemed to tilt. “You had no right,” Mendez whispered.

“Clause 37-B in your contract authorizes pre-emptive medical intervention if the corporation determines it necessary for mission success.” His face was impassive, reciting a script he’d delivered to dozens before her. “We knew about your condition before you left Earth. Did you think the psychprofiles wouldn’t flag it?”

Reality fractured like cheap glass. Had she ever had a choice? Had they selected her precisely because of her fear, another lab rat for their experimental therapy?

“The Thalassan cephalopods are empaths,” Judas continued. “Your phobia would poison the research data. So we fix you.” He said it like he was describing a tune-up for a faulty appliance.

Mendez’s vision narrowed to a pinpoint. She remembered drowning, remembered the water filling her lungs, her father’s distant laughter as strong arms finally pulled her back.

“The first immersion test begins now,” Judas said, pressing a button on his console.

The floor beneath Mendez slid open. She didn’t even have time to scream before plunging into ice-cold water.

---

SUBJECT: MENDEZ, SARA A. SESSION: 7 STATUS: NANITE INTEGRATION 78% COMPLETE

They watched her through one-way glass as she stood trembling at the edge of the shallow pool. Subject’s amygdalar response reduced 43% from baseline. Promising.

“Activate the field,” Dr. Chen ordered.

Technicians manipulated controls, sending precise magnetic pulses to activate the nanites nestled in Mendez’s brain. On the other side of the glass, Mendez’s rigid posture visibly relaxed.

“Enter the water to knee depth,” came the instruction through the speaker.

Mendez obeyed, her eyes unfocused, movements mechanical. The water lapped at her legs.

“Fascinating,” murmured Nakamura, studying the brain scan holographs. “The nanites are literally rebuilding neural pathways in real-time.”

“Will she…” Chen hesitated. “Will she still be the same person?”

Nakamura shrugged. “Define ‘same.’ Her memories remain intact. Her intellectual capabilities are unaffected. We’re simply… adjusting an inconvenient response.”

On the monitor, Mendez’s face displayed an eerie serenity as she submerged herself to the waist.

“She’s doing well,” Chen noted.

“They all do well during active field manipulation,” Nakamura replied. “The real test comes afterward.”

Chen’s eyes shifted uncomfortably to the monitors displaying Sublevel C—the facility’s euphemistically named “Adjustment Ward.” Three previous subjects lay in specialized containment, their minds shattered by the rewrite process. Failed experiments, officially classified as “treatment-resistant.”

“Do you ever wonder,” Chen asked quietly, “if we’re playing God?”

Nakamura’s laugh was sharp as broken glass. “Playing? My dear doctor, we’ve long since taken His job.”

---

The dreams were different now. The water still surrounded her, but in the dreams, Mendez no longer feared it. Instead, she was becoming it—her body dissolving, consciousness expanding into the endless blue.

Waking, she couldn’t tell if the treatment was working or if she was losing her mind.

Day 23. The observation deck. Three hundred and sixty degrees of ocean pressing in from all sides. Beneath her feet, massive Thalassan life forms glided through abyssal currents.

“How do you feel, Dr. Mendez?” Nakamura asked, watching her carefully.

“Like I’m someone else,” she answered truthfully. The fear was still there, but distant, as though it belonged to another person. A person who was rapidly fading.

“The nanites are 92% degraded,” he informed her. “What you’re feeling now is your new baseline.” He sounded proud, like a father whose child had taken first steps.

Through the transparent floor, something vast and tentacled rose from the darkness below. A Thalassan cephalopod, its massive eye structures focusing on the humans above.

“It’s time for you to meet your research subject,” Nakamura said. “Remember your training. Open your mind to its presence.”

The creature pressed a massive tentacle against the barrier. Mendez knelt, placing her palm against the surface. Something cold and alien brushed against her consciousness—a presence vast and incomprehensible.

Fear, it communicated directly into her mind.

“Yes,” she whispered. “I was afraid of the water.”

No. YOUR fear in ME now.

Mendez recoiled, staring at the creature. “What?”

The cephalopod’s skin rippled with colors no human eye was meant to process. The small machines. They took YOUR fear. Gave to ME.

Understanding crashed through Mendez like a tsunami. The nanites hadn’t eliminated her fear—they’d transferred it. The Thalassan creature was experiencing her hydrophobia, her panic, her trauma. A being evolved for aquatic existence, suddenly terrified of its own environment.

“Nakamura!” She turned, but the scientist was smiling.

“Remarkable, isn’t it? Cross-species neural transference. The corporation has been attempting this for years.” His eyes gleamed with the cold light of scientific triumph. “Your phobia was the perfect test case—intense, primal, deeply encoded.”

“You’ve driven it insane,” Mendez whispered, watching the creature thrash against the transparent barrier, its movements desperate.

“A necessary sacrifice for understanding interspecies consciousness,” Nakamura replied. “The cephalopod’s neural capacity is vastly greater than ours. It can process your fear without permanent damage.”

But Mendez knew he was lying. Through the newly formed psychic link, she could feel the creature’s growing madness—water was everywhere, inescapable, and it was drowning in terror.

Help us, it projected. Not singular. Plural.

Looking closer at the darkened depths, Mendez saw them—dozens of cephalopods, all pressing toward the station, all radiating the same desperate panic. Her fear, multiplied and spreading through their telepathic network like a virus.

“They’re connected,” she realized aloud. “What you’ve done to one, you’ve done to them all.”

Nakamura’s smile vanished. “Impossible. Their telepathic range is limited to—”

The observation deck shuddered. Warning lights flashed. Through the glass, Mendez watched as more tentacles—hundreds now—pressed against the structure.

“What are they doing?” Nakamura whispered, fear finally cracking his scientific detachment.

An alarm blared through the station. “Structural integrity compromised in Sections 7 through 12,” announced the calm voice of the station AI. “Emergency protocols activated.”

Release us, the collective consciousness demanded.

Mendez understood then. They weren’t attacking the station. They were trying to free her—the source of the fear that was driving them mad.

The glass beneath them groaned. Fracture lines spread like frost across its surface.

“Evacuate!” Nakamura shouted into his comm unit. “All personnel to escape pods!”

But Mendez stood motionless, watching the cracks spread, feeling the creatures’ desperation mingling with her own fading fear. The irony wasn’t lost on her—she’d come to study them, but they had revealed the truth about her own species. The arrogance. The cruelty disguised as progress.

“Come on!” Nakamura grabbed her arm, pulling her toward the exit.

Mendez yanked free. “No.”

“You’ll die!”

She laughed—a sound with no humor. “I died thirty years ago in Lake Michigan. What’s left is just the echo.”

The glass gave way with a sound like the end of the world. Water rushed in, a wall of unstoppable force. Nakamura screamed, scrambling toward the closing emergency doors.

Mendez stood her ground as the torrent engulfed her.

But she didn’t drown.

The cephalopods surrounded her, their tentacles creating a living bubble of air within the flood. Through their touch, she felt their collective consciousness enveloping her own.

We take you. We learn together. We heal.

As Thalassa Station collapsed around them, the creatures pulled her deeper into the abyss—not into death, but into a different kind of existence. The water that had been her lifelong nightmare became the medium of her transformation.

In her final human thought, Sara Mendez understood that she hadn’t conquered her fear after all.

She had become it.

And in becoming, transcended.