The weirdness begins at the start of December 2009. Jack Murphy walks by a tank of coral fish on his way to the seals, when he notices the coral fish are swimming alongside him in a specific pattern. The pattern seems unusual to Jack, and it itches at the back of his brain. He dismisses the event as a random occurrence, but it happens again a few days later. Jack sketches the symbol, and finds he is doodling it idly throughout his work shifts. The strangeness increases one day when Jack passes the shark tank – and sees every shark lined up in a neat row, watching him. He stops and stares at the sharks, and then moves. The sharks shift position to keep watching him, but not out of a sense of hunger, simply curiosity. He hears a tapping, and turns to see the octopus tank. The octopus is also watching him, and sketches a symbol in the water with its tentacles. Jack rushes on, and finds the seals are also watching him – not moving, not barking, just watching.
As the weeks pass, the oddities continue sporadically. The coral fish sometimes make symbols, the sharks sometimes watch him, and the seals will behave strangely at irregular intervals. Jack deciphers the first symbol, and it seems to be “Life.”
Talia Howell’s office is undergoing an end-of-year audit, but she’s not worried. Other than her mileage receipts, her books are straightforward and clean. However, one of the auditors, an older white man with craggy features and wearing an expensive, hand-tailored suit, gives her the creeps. She heads out to do her job, as the holiday decorations need to give way to First Night preparations. Talia checks out the various plant beds and covers those than need covering. However, in Wharf District Park across from the Boston Aquarium, she finds something very strange: a bright, tropical purple flower of unknown genus in one of the beds. She eyes it with confusion, as she knows she didn’t authorize this planting – or any flower like this. She carefully removes the plant, and finds an extensive root system. She re-soils the plant bed and eyes the unknown specimen; she has no idea how a tropical plant just appeared in the dead of a New England winter, or how it developed such a root system when she’s positive it wasn’t here last week.
After finishing the rest of her rounds, she returns to the home office and runs into the creepy auditor again. He eyes her unpleasantly, and Talia responds with a rude gesture as she passes him. She enters her office and sets the unknown plant down. She then starts researching it, and then loses track of time. She’s still going when the night janitor taps on her window in concern, and with a shock Talia realizes it’s just about midnight! She heads home, managing to catch the last train out to Somerville; she lives close to Davis Square. The next three days pass, with Talia getting more and more obsessed with identifying this damned flower, but she keeps coming up dry. By Thursday afternoon, she makes the conscious decision to step away; she has work to do that she’s been neglecting.
Talia arrives at work to find the creepy auditor is prowling the office. She ducks inside her lab to avoid him and then grabs her kit to head back out into the field. She does her rounds, but when she gets to Wharf District Park and comes up to the spot where she found the purple flower on Monday, she is stunned to see another purple flower in the same spot! She swears and starts working, but looks up to see another figure approaching. It’s a young man with pockmarked skin bundled up in full winter gear, which Talia finds odd until he starts speaking with a thick Georgian drawl. The transplanted Southerner is clearly unused to New England winters, and is concerned she’s vandalizing the park! She assures him that she works for the conservancy and is merely transplanting a flower that won’t survive the cold.
The Southerner watches intently as Talia works, but she realizes he’s genuinely curious, so they chat a bit and she explains her procedure as she frees the plant. Once she finishes, he waves goodbye and moves off. She packs the second plant away and finishes her rounds. When she returns to her office, she stares at the empty spot where the first flower was. After confirming no one went into her lab while she was gone, Talia places the second flower on the shelf where the first one sat – and is overwhelmed with the feeling that this is the exact same flower.
That evening, Jack goes out to dinner with his coworkers as part of a holiday party, and inadvertently breaks the cardinal rule: he orders seafood, although he’d meant to order the steak. He gets a few dirty looks, but some of his coworkers defend his freedom to order whatever he damn well wants and he says simply, “Hey, it’s not one of ours.” He enjoys the seafood, but craves raw fish. After a round of drinks, Jack slips away to a sushi bar.
Jack goes to work in the morning and starts his rounds. The sharks stare silently at him, and then the seals sit quietly. He mutters, “Did you guys talk to the sharks?” and steps back when they nod. They continue to stare silently at him, so he mumbles, “OK, this is weird. Do some tricks or something.” A few roll on their backs and favor him with expressions that clearly say, “Happy now, asshole?” He shakes his head, grabs some fish, and feeds the seals. He then retreats, passes the shark tank which seems normal, and checks the logs for last night. No unusual behavior is noted down, and Jack knows the closing person is meticulous, so he is now worried.
Jack leaves the office and passes the sharks – and finds them calmly watching him. He stops and sighs before grousing, “And did you guys talk to the seals?” They bob their heads and one shark swims to his eye level and stares at him. He steps closer, and sees right into the shark’s black orb of an eye before stepping back. He makes a comment deriding the octopus, and then hears angry tapping behind him. He sighs and ignores the octopus tank as he returns to the seals. The seals give him one derisive bark – in unison – and then they resume playing. They seem fine, so Jack heads back inside. He passes the octopus tank again, and the creature swims to him and twists its tentacles to resemble a middle finger.
Jack shakes his head at the bizarre and surreal occurrences, and then the octopus disentangles its limbs and motions for him to come into the tank. Jack stares at the animal, and then shrugs as he yields to the madness. He suits up in a diving suit and climbs into the tank. He sinks towards the bottom, and then the octopus swims up to him and gently lays a tentacle over his head. It pushes down, and Jack continues to sink deeper and deeper – far deeper than the tank actually is! Within seconds, Jack is totally submerged and surrounded by water, and sees the sharks swimming towards him! Jack goes still, hoping the sharks won’t notice him, but then the octopus slaps his helmet – and cracks the glass!
Salt water pours into his helmet and Jack panics! The sharks reach him and each grab a limb. Jack prays for a quick death, but the sharks rotate, so Jack is facing down, and then they dive! Jack sees an ancient tower half-buried in silt, and then the sharks release him. Jack then feels the gills on his neck open to admit water – and then he registers the fact he has gills. The sharks circle above him, so Jack swims into the tower. He sees glyphs scrawled into the rock all over the place, and identifies the symbol for Life. He sees the other symbols and realizes the symbols represent various ocean-going animals – but more importantly, they represent the very concepts of those animals. He stares in wonder as he floats within the tower, and then the octopus joins him and gently pushes him to a blank spot on the walls. He sees names half-encrusted with silt, so he reaches out and puts his finger on the stone. It gives, and he scrawls his name. In that instant, Jack Awakens – and finds himself back in the octopus tank in the Boston Aquarium!
His boss George Ducharme is staring at him quizzically on the other side of the glass, but the crowd of people next to him is watching intently. Jack ascends and climbs out of the tank. He strips out of his suit and meets George; he claims he spotted the octopus acting strangely and wanted to do a visual check. George nods as they walk into the breakroom, and Jack is hit with sudden insight: he knows the other man will be dead from lung cancer soon, and can see the lump growing! Jack sits down, and George notes he looks feverish. Jack claims he needs a few moments to catch his breath, so George leaves. Jack groans and then has another flash of insight: he can sense the microorganisms all over his body, working together in a harmonious micro-ecosystem.
Christmas week brings in a rush of business on top of Gloria Webb’s headaches of moving the store and planning a reopening sale for January 2nd. By mid-morning, Gloria is flagging, but luckily her Dunkin Donuts hookup, the pierced employee Amanda, swings into the shop with coffee and food. Gloria thanks Amanda profusely – after she downs half the coffee and becomes human again; Amanda gets the employee discount and no judgmental looks. There is a lull in business, so Gloria leaves Jill, her head clerk, in charge for a few minutes while she slips into her office for five minutes of peace, quiet, and food.
As she eats lunch, Gloria boots up Netflix on her computer to watch another few minutes of the classy British detective show she’s consuming in tiny chunks. The show is all posh and no sex, just as Gloria prefers. She thinks to herself, “The Internet is not for porn,” but then the main character in her show, a dapper British man with an impressive mustache and wearing fancy clothes and a bowler hat, turns to her on the screen and replies, “Of course the Internet is for porn!” Gloria slaps herself to wake up, and then she hears the British detective – behind her. She turns to see the character standing in her office, and he crisply informs her, “Come with me. I have something to show you.”
The detective leads Gloria out to her shop, which has subtly twisted and changed; iron bars brace the walls like a prison cell. Gloria finds the symbolism apt, despite the detective trying to convince her that her parents built this empire for her. He then insists they step back into her office, but when they do, Gloria finds herself on a beach in Yucatan – and sees her father enjoying the attentions of a woman half his age. She immediately turns away and refuses to look; the detective asks her, “Where would you go in the world, if you could?” Gloria immediately recalls a coffee house in Barcelona, where she went as a student when she spent some time studying abroad. Suddenly, she is there, in the coffee shop. She shrugs and gets a coffee. The detective is nowhere to be found, so Gloria sits and enjoys her coffee, fully convinced she is dreaming.
Her phone rings, and she answers. It’s Jill from the shop, and she’s wondering why she’s getting notifications for international calls all of a sudden. Gloria tells her she’s asleep in her office, but Jill replies, “I’m standing in your office. You’re not here.” She tells Gloria that they’ve received three extra boxes of toys; Gloria rattles off some plans for them, including a raffle for Planned Parenthood with the names of hated politicians. She ends the call, still believing this is a dream. She wanders Barcelona for a bit and takes some pictures that she posts to her social media. She gets an email form her mother, wondering why she’s reposting old pictures.
The detective reappears and tries to engage Gloria, but Gloria stops and stares at this massive iron citadel looming over Barcelona. She knows that structure doesn’t exist in the real world, but the detective cajoles her to go. She heads over, and enters the iron citadel without opposition. She finds a vast space with stairs leading up. She starts climbing, and stubbornly continues even as tiny barbs on the stairs tear her shoes to shreds. The barbs start shredding her feet as well, but Gloria derides them as tiny metal-studded dicks. As she climbs, the detective pesters her about what she wants, and she starts ranting about eco-friendly porn and fundraisers and running the business more efficiently. She continues climbing, but collapses to her hands and knees as her feet are ripped to bloody strips. She reaches a vast shadow that falls over the stairs, but keeps going. The temperature drops to freezing, but Gloria keeps going, refusing to quit, and continues ranting about her family and the curse of the business.
She finally reaches the far side of the shadow, and the temperature climbs dramatically. She rolls over and sees the shadow was cast by two massive statues of her parents, and then sees her blood streaming behind her. Her blood arranges itself to be her name on a clear patch of floor, and in that instant Gloria Awakens. She stands bolt upright – and is back in her office in Boston, but still cradling the coffee from Barcelona! She eyes her phone and finds the pictures from Barcelona are still there. She walks out into the store and finds it quiet; Jill looks up in shock. Gloria nods in thanks and divests some tasks to her – a rarity, but Jill appreciates the trust – and hint of financial reward for her increased duties. With some free time ahead of her, Gloria leaves The Treasure Chest and heads to Dunkin Donuts.
Gloria realizes something is off as she can hear the faint murmur of the pedestrians in her path – and their thoughts. Gloria walks in and is hit by the smell of seawater – coming from Amanda! Amanda stares at her in shock before crossing over from the back to the main dining room. She hisses to Gloria, “What the hell? A second one today?” Gloria has no idea what she’s talking about, but allows herself to be guided to a table. She tries to talk about her “dream” and how she signed her name, but Amanda shushes her. Amanda gets some whispered details, enough to groan, “Fucking warlocks,” before plopping Gloria down at table and telling her to stay put for two hours, until Amanda gets off duty. Gloria shrugs, but can sense Amanda will have answers, so she settles in and starts working. She pulls some files from her bag – files she subconsciously knows were left in her office when she departed.