The Reykjavik Disaster
It’s a dance. You hear it now, twining through the waveform running on your screen. Staccato beats crunching under indiscriminate feet, with melodic screams providing treble accompaniment.
Back for more, you big fucker? The mech pilot’s voice is hoarse, scratchy with distortion, but now that you’ve listened to this audio countless times, you can’t ignore the desire in it. May I have this dance, my lady?
The two first clashed in the Gulf of Maine. An untested pilot in a shiny new Longsword III, emergency-deployed against a skyscraper-sized leviathan harassing Portland. You rewind back to that first meeting. The first half of the file is the most damaged, but you can still feel the sparks fly between them, undampened by the cold Atlantic waters.
Listening now to the audio of the leviathan’s retreat from that encounter, it seems inevitable that he would follow. The first onset of infatuation swallows logic like a great wave, drowning it in hormones. Nothing his commanders said was going to sway him. Now that the immediate threat was dealt with, they wanted to wait for a more experienced pilot to get rid of it, or better yet, let it swim out of American jurisdiction and become someone else’s problem. But.
No, sir, I can do it. This one’s mine.
That possessiveness is something you’ve heard from a million macho men a million times before. Entitlement and some strange form of dissociated lust leading to the conclusion that it would be cheating for this creature to be defeated by another pilot.
(You later learned during the court hearings that his brand-new Longsword wasn’t so pristine after all, that he had wired sensory feedback patches into the neurological interface, and that he felt every tentacled punch translated through metal skin directly into his brain like a caress.)
So he gave chase, a flirtation that carried him far out of his jurisdiction, not that he cared.
They’re calling it the Reykjavik Disaster. Technically, landfall was in some small town on the southwest coast of Iceland that no one knows the name of, but you don’t mind the name. It communicates what it needs to. It communicates the scale of destruction, the reason why they have you picking through the auditory wreckage recovered from the Longsword’s black box.
Fuck, yeah, baby, that feels amazing.
The recording winds down to its garbled ending. The final noise is an orgasmic scream as something fleshy slams into what must’ve been the recording apparatus, and then it’s static.
You can imagine his final moments. The mingled euphoria and terror of self-annihilation as they tore into each other, unclothing bone from its curtains of flesh until they were too spent to do more than twitch together in their final embrace, surrounded by shattered detritus.
It’s not something you’ve ever wanted to experience for yourself, but that kind of passion is fascinating. Total mutual annihilation for its own sake. You admire the conviction, but it would be nice if they hadn’t taken a few hundred lives with them. The reality of those lives remains distant, though, while the primal noises of penetration on the tape are shockingly present.
You rewind again, telling yourself the wetness slowly growing between your legs is nothing more than sweat.
Just one more listen.
© 2026 Jay Kang Romanus
Jay Kang Romanus writes teratomas for the digital age; cystic capsules full of teeth and hair transmitted into existence inside you. His stories have been published in magazines such as PodCastle and Kaleidotrope, as well as multiple anthologies. You can find him online at his website jaykangromanus.com, @jelliclejaybsky.social on Bluesky, and @jellicle_jay on Twitter/Instagram.