“Keep pulling, godammit!”

Murdoch stood from the open cabin of his fishing trawler, barking orders to his employees in rapid succession. He had never hooked anything this big before, especially in this area, where the water grew deep and blue and unfamiliar. Surely some vast treasure awaited him and his crew; something so grand that they could finally leave Blackpark and go somewhere which offered greater opportunities for fishing, and not monotonous, depressing scavenging. His old eyes widened as he began to see bubbles slip up onto the surface of Moray Firth, indicating that his fortune was only a couple more meters from the skin of the water.

“This is the biggest thing we’ve gotten! Put in your all or I’ll have all your damned heads on a stake!”

His loud, gravelly voice carried over the water for what seemed like kilometers. Despite the dreary grey weather and poor temperature, Murdoch was the most excited he had been for decades. Finally, something became visible through the water; something white and capped. A million thoughts rushed through his head in a single moment. What could this possibly be? A cache? A safe? The several men on deck slowly and agonizingly inched themselves across the boat, knowing that a single slip-up could cost them their monthly stipend from Murdoch, they groaned as the hulking structure slowly crept into vision through the murky blue water like a massive white whale. Murdoch scrambled down from the cabin and onto the deck where his men shuffled backward and tipped his head over the backside of the boat to get a better view of what they were pulling… He was clueless; it had no indicators or characteristics which reminded him of anything he had ever seen. This thing, which was propped crudely against the stern of his trawler, was alien. He staggered backward and pivoted to face his exhausted men who were themselves scrambling to secure the pulley cables to something sturdy enough that would hold the unusual behemoth structure.

“...Start the ship up and take us to Blackpark.” Murdoch yelled to the first mate, who was still in the cabin, “I want to see what this damn thing is for God’s sake!”.

————

“The Deacidification Ecological Learning Marketplace Algorithm/Databank, otherwise known as DELTron A-D.”

The grizzled sailor looked at the straight-faced town official holding a small manilla folder filled with documents with a blank stare. The well-dressed man swiveled in his office chair to another, smaller desk and resumed talking.

“It’s in the city’s pre-flood files... One of the few things we actually managed to recover, surprisingly…”

The official looked back to who he understood to be Max MacMurdoch, captain of the Sheller — a fishing trawler which dredged up an antediluvian databank off the coast of Blackpark. The official didn’t particularly understand why the sailor had come to the Blackpark City Council for guidance; other than the financial incentive that returning these kinds of pre-flood constructs could net independent MacDonald’s. But the official wasn’t interested in giving Murdoch any kind of money for this useless object; it was fruitless to even try and disassemble a database like that unless you had the patience and knowledge of a God, and perhaps the lifespan of one, too. He had briefly studied the schematics of a databank similar to DELTron — one off the coast of the Upper Hebrides which was buried so deep underwater that it wasn’t worth investing the resources to extract; these things were massive and confusing and unknowable. The official could only think of one place it could be sold to, but he wasn’t about to explain what was happening in Aberdeen to a walnut-brained sailor whose sentience had visibly been stunted by alcohol for a very, very long time.

“What can I get outta this, sir?” The sailor asked in an inquisitive voice. Murdoch may not have understood what this thing was, but he knew the value of its contents based on the tone of speech of the town official.

The town official swiveled back to Murdoch and shrugged lightly.

“It’s worth whatever someone’s willing to pay for it. There are a few boys in the Lowlands that wouldn’t mind looking through one of those things, I hear...”

The sailor nodded slowly and distantly. Murdoch tipped his hat and headed for the office’s door.