Dystopic Clams

The clams arrived on the shore, clotting up vast tracts of Earth’s beachfront like luxury high-rises. They were also massive, with a texture similar to porcelain but porous like pumice stone. Soon they migrated further inland, tearing through downtown metropolises like rampaging kaiju.

They were the normal sort of clams you’ve seen, not physically different, except they were thousands of times larger in size. Perhaps the only other difference worth noting was that these larger clams seemed able to survive without being entirely submerged in water.

It was a matter of adaptation at first. The clams had done so and thus it was necessary for human beings to adapt as well. They hollowed out spaces inside the clams to live, harvesting the meat for human consumption.

Naturally, having to live in giant clams was not ideal, especially for those with shellfish allergies and those who simply didn’t want to live with the constant smell of aging sea protein in general. But this sort of discomfort was a situation humans had become strangely adept at resolving (at least in a manner of speaking), as changes to the world had been increasing at a steady rate for years, beginning with incrementally higher annual global temperatures.

Unlike those rising global temperatures, though, the cause of the clams’ Brobdingnagian growth wasn’t hotly debated. It had been willed by various supernatural forces of the universe. Everyone knew it. There was no point investigating it any further. Instead of obsessing over causes, people were left to live with the clams for as long as they could.

Property owners, of course, claimed ownership of the clams on whose land they ultimately resided. Vance Lock was one of those property owners. Most property owners were happy to have new spaces to rent out to those who could afford them, and Vance was no exception.

He moved his young wife, Melinda, to the top floor of his tallest clam, which itself had been given the misnomer The Tiny Silver Oyster Apartment Homes. The heat — and thus the fetid scent — wasn’t quite so bad in their penthouse, but they still needed nose plugs most of the time. They wore the most fashionable plugs on the market, diamond studded. They were sparkly and impractical, because of how they cut the nostrils of their wearer with diamonds as sharp as razor blades.

“The bloody noses aren’t so bad, though, really, especially when compared with the cost of the plugs,” Melinda said, sounding silly because of her plugged nose.

“They complement your eyes,” Vance Lock said. “In fact, I’d say you’re just about luminescent.” He didn’t really believe in all the hokum about women taking on a glow when they’d become pregnant, but then again Melinda had seemed to shine since they relocated inside of the clam. Maybe her body really was producing an excess of oils and that was making itself visibly evident in her complexion.

“I think I’d know if I were pregnant, Vance,” she said, as he grilled her about the prospect. “It’s not as though I haven’t been testing regularly.”

He realized he might be getting ahead of himself as some form of subconscious enthusiasm related to being a father — though he’d never known himself to care all that much about fatherhood. That didn’t mean he wasn’t, on some level, feeling such yearning. It might have been connected to the sense of responsibility he’d cultivated in most other aspects of his life, such as earning, dividends, and advancing ahead of others competitively – all of which he felt duty-bound to achieve.

And were those not traits of the world’s best fathers and leaders?

For instance, like a father watching over his child, Vance was always helping his people out of jams. Lately they were ones caused by his clams. He called those jams his clam jams.

Lock’s most recent clam jam involved the lower levels of some of his clams. They were experiencing a strange phenomenon, especially the ones nearest to large bodies of water.

“People are getting electrocuted,” one of Lock’s clam managers explained over the phone.

“Why and how?” Lock demanded. He wasn’t well known for his patience.

“Our experts are telling me it’s symbiotic algae. It’s growing all over the wet parts of the clams. It’s generating an abundance of energy. I think we better find a way to scrape it off the shells before it kills more people,” the clam manager advised.

“Hold on, you have been given what is essentially a free supply of sustainable, clean energy and you want to get rid of it, like so much cancer? No, I care too much about the environment to let you do that. Find a way to make it safe,” Lock said.

“But it’s like a live wire covering the whole exterior of the building, sir,” the clam manager said, a smidgen of protest to his words. “Everyone living in these clams is at risk.”

“Make it a dead wire then. I don’t know about wires. I know about clams, and I know about energy, and I know about things being free. And they’re all pretty good for the environment these days. Don’t you love the environment, too?” Lock said. “Don’t you care about things being free? Don’t you care about freedom?”

A lot of people ended up injured or dead as a result of Lock’s approach but eventually the algae’s energy was more or less safely harnessed. The media reported about the deaths but also spent a lot of time showing images of the exteriors of the clams, which were brilliantly lit in a wide variety of colors due to the chemical composition of the algae. It proved distracting and concern for the deaths was lost in this spectacle.

Melinda seemed to be scintillating more and more with each passing day. It was no wonder, though, that Vance hardly noticed when she’d stopped speaking to him. He hardly let her speak at all when something was on his mind, and something was always on his mind – like further energy production from the algae he’d been harvesting.

“It might save the planet, Melinda, when we’re done. Anyway, I’m off. I’ll see you this evening,” he said, and didn’t even bother to give her a solitary gentle peck on her cheek goodbye.

Melinda felt as hollowed out as the clam whose confines she now dwelled within. Metaphorical pockets of space once belonging to her, and her alone, had now been cleared for someone else. Her limbs felt literally fastened to her body. It had been hard for her to move.

It was difficult to articulate any of this to Vance, who rarely seemed to be listening. Even when Vance was at home, he wasn’t there. She knew he was still wondering if she was pregnant and purposefully not telling him, the kind of toxic distrust that was often fatal to a marriage.

Outside, Melinda saw the growing crowds of unhoused, who couldn’t afford Vance’s rent. They were the ones most likely to be shocked to death by symbiotic algae now. She used her limited sway to instruct clam management to make space for as many of them as they could, regardless of their ability to afford it, which made her feel a little less hollow. She found that making others more comfortable was a comfort to her, too.

Vance wasn’t aware of any of what Melinda had done. He was still making money by the truckload and really was busy with the clams. Another of Vance’s clam managers came to him with a brand new clam jam.

“Uh, so this one is even weirder than the algae but now everything is pearling? Everything and everyone, really,” the clam manager said over the phone. “You might want to come down here and see this.”

Vance Lock sighed, because there really was no end to his labors. He couldn’t even take a single day to rest inside his own clam, with his own wife. But that was life in the big city with just a ludicrous number of gigantic clams spilling into every open space and many spaces that weren’t exactly open, too. 

Lock was led through a ground-floor apartment that was full of pearls.

“Have you noticed this substance?” the clam manager said, extracting a greenish white substance from a clam wall with two gloved fingers. It was highly viscous, having the consistency of tar. “It’s called nacre. Everything in these clams is regularly coated in it,” the clam manager explained.

“Why?” Lock asked, not caring terribly much.

The clam manager rubbed his chin. “Well, it’s more or less an immune response. The clam meat in here is defending itself from the objects in these apartments, including the people. In order to survive, it’s turning everything and everyone into pearls. Using this excretion of nacre, or mother of pearl, if you prefer. I really can’t emphasize enough that it’s pearling human beings.”

“And these pearls, they’d be worth an awful lot on the open market, I presume?” Lock said, rubbing his own chin, but in a loftier manner than the clam manager had.

“Um, sure. But, again, the people.”

“Right, right. We will, we will see if there’s a cure. We will do something. Think of how this could change the world for the better,” Lock said, waving his clam manager away.

Instead, most things got visibly worse, as a direct result of so many people transforming into pearls, and thus a lot more very large pearls were settling all around without enough bodies left to move them (or operate machinery capable of doing the same). It was beautiful, though, almost as beautiful as Melinda, Vance Lock, thought, carrying his idea of her with him.

When he arrived home that evening, Melinda – and all of their worldly belongings – had finally, fully, become pearls as well. Upon his arrival, Vance Lock didn’t notice anything amiss, preoccupied as he was. Then, after going to peck Melinda’s cheek but this time being greeted with a fully formed pearl instead, he said, “Ah, shoot, and I don’t think anyone came up with a cure yet.”

“Who am I talking to? Myself, I guess,” and Vance understood that that had probably always been the case, maybe his whole life if he were being really honest. And he felt an emptiness grow inside himself, too.

He put on his coat and wandered around for a bit in this world he was instrumental in making. It was the clam jam of clams jammed, but it was also extraordinary. His waxy reflection stared back at him from all of the pearls he passed by. Sometimes, he swore he could see through to the people who made up each pearl’s core. He realized these were the ones who had given their lives to make something wonderful.

It’s uncertain if he had an epiphany, realizing none of his clam managers were going to answer his calls, but Lock eventually made his way back inside The Tiny Silver Oyster Apartment Homes.

He probably should have been thinking it was only in that space, tucked inside the clam, that the best version of himself could ever hope to be forged, but there’s really no reason to believe that he thought anything like that at all.

He may have wanted to be a pearl, but that was not to be. Whatever the mechanism of selecting detritus for pearling was in these oversized clams, it never deemed him a worthy entity. Not an ounce of nacre was excreted for him.

Eventually, he would die as he lived, and of course, no one would mourn him.

The clams, for their part, pushed still deeper across the land, filling every cavity, every ploughable corner. They pushed the excavated pearls along with them, a new form of glacial erratic.

It was possible, one day, an arm of surviving humanity or some entirely different form of sentient life would look upon these pearls, these clams, and wonder what had made any of it so.