The Anomura Anomaly

by Aditya Sundararajan

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“What did you do to me?” The caller sounded scared, confused, and angry all at once. “Am I dead? Is this… is this some sick joke?”

Pallavi sat unfazed at her terminal. Such calls were getting more frequent, an expected outcome given the recent changes in her employer’s operating plan. Stirring from her afternoon stupor, she tapped her right temple twice. Her neural implant connected her to the heads-up display on the terminal. “Thank you for calling Grasshop Inc. customer care, sir, I’m —”

“I know damn well who I’m calling. Just fix this glitch right now.”

The man’s baritone surprised Pallavi. It was a strange vocal signature to pair with his avatar filling the right quadrant of her HUD vision: frail build, freckled brown skin with auburn shoulder-length hair wearing a tweed jacket, corduroy shorts, and sneakers.

So familiar, yet so generic.

She spun up a subroutine to parse his avatar’s schema, generate hash, and authenticate it to ensure the caller was who he claimed to be. “Could you be more specific about your issue, sir?”

“Your dumb machine turned me into a crab,” the man snapped, his voice shaking.

Pallavi smiled. “Excuse me, sir?” She emulated surprise and deployed a specially curated voice, sweet but unassuming, the I-am-your-best-friend-not-your-mom kind. Callers liked it when she empathized, so she added a flourish of concern. “Sir, are you alright?”

“Do I look alright?”

People were jerks, but it wasn’t Pallavi’s job to mirror them. Instead, she held a mirror so that they’d realize it themselves. “Unfortunately, that’s not how this call works, sir.” She adjusted the sleek wafer-thin frame of the HUD that interfaced with the implants in her throat, temples, and eyelids. “You’ll have to pay extra for a video call subscription.”

Having authenticated him, the HUD’s gray canvas populated the caller’s details. Jay Panno, fifty, male, a Grasshop customer for twenty-five years and a resident of the Faraday District. That was half an ecosphere away, but the HUD pinned his current location at Tesla where she worked.

So close, yet so far.

Pallavi frowned at her straying thoughts. She’d guzzled a cup of coffee before taking the call. She might as well have popped in a focus-enhancer while Jay spent a few more minutes outwitting bots and waiting in a fake queue.

“I stepped into this… thing!” said Jay, reeling her attention back to the call.

“It’s called a Hopper, sir. You own a Third Generation.” In fact, a beta version, the latest rollout of Grasshop Inc.’s signature product. Many had tried their hands at teleportation, but the Hopper’s assembler and disassembler pods were a class apart.

“I don’t give a fuck what it’s called. I entered it, but I came out as a crab.” He hissed and inhaled sharply. “I’ll sue your asses to the beginning of time if you don’t fix it now.”

Pallavi stared into her HUD’s field, at the watermarked logo of a grasshopper carrying a blue planet on its back. Grasshop and its parent corporate, AmfiBio, bore the weight of this dying ecosphere. Pallavi couldn’t care less about her job. It was merely her means to live decently. People worked filthier jobs for a dignified existence, which wasn’t asking for much. But she’d have quit sooner had it not been for AmfiBio’s larger mission that went beyond profits.

The implant in her eyelids commanded her to blink to avoid her eyes from drying up. How could she not care for a company that put such thought into its bioware?

“If you can tell me your specific issue,” she lied with rehearsed calm, “I’m sure I can help.”

Pallavi dug into Jay’s profile. Within the HUD, it was all a graph of nodes and edges. She focused her gaze on a node annotated as his subscription history. Detecting her intent, the software charted the closest path to the next subroutine, and she navigated this graphical cyberspace.

“Are you dim up there?” Jay said. “I want to speak to your manager. I’ll get you fired.”

His shaky breaths flooded her ears like static as she scanned his stats. He’d last used his Hopper thirty minutes ago at his origin in Faraday, wanting to teleport to Tesla.

“Please,” he said. “I’m sorry, didn’t mean to be rude… don’t hang up on me. Surely you can understand my situation. You can help me, right? Please, say yes.”

“Please bear with me, sir, as I locate the issue with your Hopper to fix it.”

“I don’t care about fixing your machine. Fix me. Make me human again.”

“The only solution is to teleport you back to your source pod at Faraday, Mr. Panno.”

“Alright, I’ll try it right now.”

“Not yet, sir.” Pallavi wanted to raise her voice, to sound stern at Jay’s lack of composure and increased… crabbiness. But her throat implant clenched her muscles, refusing to let her stray from the prescribed script. She stifled a cough. “We can’t risk having you hop if the pods have a glitch. Please give me a moment as I ping the pod at your end to ensure I can remote into it.”

Jay bought her fancy lie, let out a huff, and waited. A series of clacks and snaps filled her ears. She studied his spending history. He’d owned the First Generation Hopper that’d teleported people’s packages. Pallavi fondly recalled the commercials she used to watch with her dad when she was little. She’d been an AmfiBio fangirl ever since.

The Second Gen model had been an upgrade ten years in the making, for it let people hop short spatial distances. Jay had even used it to visit family and friends in Faraday, to send his kids to school and do groceries. But that hadn’t been all. He’d also been in the ninety-seventh percentile among the users of the Hopper’s voyeur addon. She mined its usage history.

“How much longer?” Jay groaned meanwhile like an impatient child. But then, it could be the side-effect of his brain matter’s devolution into that of a crab.

A sickening crunch made Pallavi jump in her seat. Jay whimpered in response to, perhaps, a bone snapping under his morphing anatomy. Yet, despite her focus on the HUD, all Pallavi could think of was how he’d react if she laughed at this moment.

So awkward, yet so comforting.

“Boffin’s brains,” Jay swore. “What kind of customer service is this? I’m in pain!”

Pallavi blinked hard and rubbed her forehead, puzzled at her lack of concentration. She’d never behaved like this with previous callers, though she suspected it wasn’t Jay’s plight that was bothering her. What else was it?

“Please calm down, Mr. Panno,” she said, back to her sweet, best-friend-not-mom voice as she sifted his voyeur history. Jay had used it to sneak into the recent Olympics among other high-profile events she didn’t care about. What caught her eye instead were activities tagged as private. A smile played on her lips. “Good news. I can now talk to your pod.”

“You want a medal for it?” he slurred. His metamorphosis would soon finish; time was running out.

“We’re making progress. We’ll resolve your issue in no time. Now, please walk me through what happened step by step?”

Her tactic to keep him engaged worked.

“I upgraded to Third Gen only because you forced the firmware update. I was comfortable with Second Gen.” He was lying — he’d loved Second Gen. He’d used voyeur way more than Hopper. Unlike Hopper, voyeur let people visit locations in real-time without spatial teleportation. It was temporal, and hence guaranteed anonymity if one privatized their feeds. With large-scale spatial hops possible in Third Gen, AmfiBio had deprecated the addon. Yet Jay, an avid voyeur-user, had upgraded, even jumped at the chance.

“… and last step,” he was saying, “punch in the destination pod ID and coordinates. Did just that, tapped the green button. There was this blinding flash. I was expecting no pain. A Second Gen never had that trouble. This time, I felt a lot of heat. Like a nuclear blast or something.”

Not like, Pallavi wanted to correct. Once its core got entangled with that of the destination pod, the source pod would’ve vaporized him into his constituent atoms and packed them into information that the destination pod would’ve used for reassembly.

Sure, entropic losses often crept in, as nothing was perfect. People emerged a few grams lighter or a couple millimeters shorter. A customer once even said he needed to take an urgent shit, but post-hop, he found his bowels had cleared up. There were risks as with anything else. People like Jay didn’t pay enough attention to the commercials, nor did they read the fine print.

“Know I was to meet someone special today?” he said. “Now, all is doom.”

He sounded less coherent. Pallavi avoided glancing at his avatar. The first trait of a good customer care agent at Grasshop Inc. — don’t sympathize. Best agents didn’t even consider it an option. Yet, her mind flirted with the option.

“I’m very sorry to hear that, Mr. Panno, but please note, the source pod is programmed to start your disassembly only after you confirm the steps and sign the waivers.”

“You think I’m a moron?” His speech grew less clear as he went off on another tirade, but the HUD translated the signals for her.

Pallavi needed Jay distracted from his pain but engaged with her. Privacy laws had gotten incredibly strict; the only way she could steal his data was by fooling his data privacy provider into thinking it was him, not her, doing the search. For that, she needed Jay to stay online and keep lending his biometrics. Given his transformation, those signatures would change. She had to hurry.

His privatized voyeur feeds were to obscure destinations. She couldn’t glean coordinates or names from a simple search. Nor did she have the luxury of time, what with Jay’s devolution gaining critical mass. A better plan was to triangulate the routes he’d taken in his sessions.

That ought to suffice as enough proof.

Pallavi plugged the ping routes into the HUD’s graphical search engine and waited for the list of triangulated spots to pop up. Closing her eyes briefly, she paid mind to Jay’s rambling.

“… what will my family think if they see me like this?”

“Sir, please remember that even one misstep in the Hopper can have big side-effects.”

“Side-effect, is what you call this?” A series of rapid clicks sounded, like that of a critter.

So inhuman, yet never inhumane.

“I’m sorry, sir. I’m tracing each handshake between the assembler and disassembler pods.” She bit back the next question that danced on her tongue; she wanted to swallow it so that it’d join the coffee sloshing in her stomach, but it got the best of her. “Why did you hop to Tesla? It’s over half an ecosphere of distance.”

“Is that why the Hopper glitched? Did I push it too far?”

Pallavi didn’t have an answer on the ready. “Perhaps, Mr. Panno?”

“Use my name, please.” He sounded broken. “I’m afraid I’ll forget it.” Silence stretched. He sniffled. “I came to meet Akila. Oh, Akila. She lives in Tesla.”

This time when Pallavi’s throat clenched, it wasn’t the implant’s doing. When she’d joined Grasshop, she’d promised herself to not be a good agent but the best, to bag that Performer of the Year award and the bonuses attached to it. Comforting a sordid middle-aged… crab wouldn’t get her any of that. The triangulation widget was still crunching numbers, consuming sixty percent of the HUD’s power. The best agent would let this silence stretch, but she needed to know.

“Akila, a long-time friend, Jay?”

“Girlfriend.” His voice warped to more clicks and claw-snaps. “We met online. She made me feel so alive and loved even when I was going through a rough patch. I like her laugh, it gives me the comfort of home. But now, what have I even become? I look hideous.”

“Akila sounds like a special person,” she said, almost out of habit, though she had to fight past the implant threatening to squeeze her throat shut.

The triangulation results rolled in, and she shook her head at the results: Jay had lurked at every event the CEO of AmfiBio had attended in the last year. At every keynote lecture and Press conference the richest technocrat had given, Jay had used the voyeur, taking copious notes of the CEO’s movement, the patterns of his security bots. Things Jay must’ve gathered before upgrading to a Third Gen Hopper for… a physical confrontation? An ambush? Worse, an assassination?

Why did he have to act so foolishly? He could’ve had a better, happier life.

“I feel so light-headed… these claws can’t hold anything. Can’t even recall my home.” He let out an ugly wail, a desperate prayer. “I’m an anomaly. Akila will forget me too.”

Pallavi didn’t need to look at Jay’s avatar to know why she’d been torn all along.

“Akila won’t forget you,” she croaked. It’d taken everything in her to force the words out even as the implant’s fist had closed in. Taking a strained gasp for air, she coughed, squeezing out a thin stream of tears from her eyes.

So much pain, yet so much yearning.

AmfiBio, and Grasshop by association, cared a lot about their customers, but Jay and others like him were commodities. Assets, to be polite. Third Gen was a revolution, but their CEO was now pushing for interstellar hops. In a relationship of give and take between corporate giants, self-made sleuths and whistleblowers like Jay had no place.

“How do you know she won’t forget me?” His voice was a near-garble.

Because Pallavi never used an alias twice. They’d met six months ago on a dating app. He’d only been a target then; she hadn’t accosted him for love. She’d been on a job, playing her role as bait to the prey, loyal to the hunter. And so, she’d woven a tale rooted in truth but covered in lies. She’d put in a sob story about a dead mom, an immigrant dad who’d braved hardship to raise her. The jobs he’d done, the boots he’d licked. Jay had listened. He’d laughed when she’d laughed, consoled her when she’d teared up.

And he’d done something none of the other callers had — he’d mourned for the grief she’d faked, cheered for the joy she’d forged, and yearned for someone who never existed.

Or did she? Perhaps at the absurdity of the question, Pallavi laughed.

It was brief, subtle, and quiet. Almost demure, but loud enough for Jay to catch, she hoped.

The HUD had gathered the data needed for its dispatch to AmfiBio. Jay’s role was done. Jay was done. The virus installed in Jay’s Hopper, patched through the Third Gen upgrade, had scrambled the atoms making up his brain matter; the rewiring was near impossible. AmfiBio’s operatives on the wait would whisk him to the sea. He’d do what crabs did best: scavenge the seabed and help revert the ecosphere’s carbon footprint. It was extreme, but it was the best way to combat overpopulation, bring back extinct species of crabs, and save the ecosphere all at once.

Not that anyone else would miss him. Anyone he’d ever known would eventually use a Second Gen. All a Hopper had to do was introduce entropic losses. If people could emerge a tad shorter or thinner or less full of shit after a hop, they could indeed emerge with an altered memory.

Jay spoke again, but his speech had degraded so much that the HUD failed to translate. She’d also lost access to his profile because none of his biometrics worked anymore. She still had data incriminating him, and her eyelid implant commanded her to dispatch them. With a glance at Grasshop’s logo in the HUD’s background, she dispatched his de-privatized feeds to her handler.

“I’m sorry.” The implant eased its grip on her throat. “Our technicians will soon be with you. They’ll take you to our nearest facility to reset the schema of your reassembled atoms.”

 Jay only responded in a sonorous, grating series of rapid clicks.

Pallavi left him with one truth. “You were never an anomaly.”

Tapping her left temple twice to end the call, she melted into her chair, one hand on her aching head and the other massaging the sore spot in her throat. The greasy, gooey, acidic remnants of coffee crawled up her throat. She puked on her terminal.

No sooner had she cleaned up her mess than the HUD blinked on again.

“Hello, can you hear me?” rasped a woman’s voice. “Help me, I’ve turned into a crab!”

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Aditya Sundararajan is a speculative fiction writer from India now living in the lush valleys of East Tennessee, where he works as a power systems researcher and explores his native culture through writing. He is an affiliate member of the HWA, and his short stories appear in Tasavvur Nama, Daikaijuzine, and elsewhere. He is on Twitter @AdityaSWrites and Bluesky @adityaswrites.bsky.social. Learn more about his projects here: https://adityasundararajan.com/.

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