This is a really weak paint-by-numbers article. Unless there’s something I’m not getting, it’s a coral reef that has hive-mind and telekinetic properties which is able to absorb and/or adapt to anything it has assimilated.
Getting my pet gripes out of the way: Every paragraph starting with the numerical designation is always a pet peeve of mine, and the containment procedures are quite generic and don’t really do justice to the Keter designation. Something that takes enormous resources to contain and is extremely dangerous deserves a little more than a measly paragraph that boils down to “watch it from space and shoot torpedos if it moves.”
That being said, my specific issue with this piece is that it really lacks imagination and detail. There’s an expansive reef with supposedly diverse wildlife but the only details we got are that it turns purple/orange when it’s distressed and there are starfish and plankton.
There’s so much more you could do there! Then there’s things like the divers being communicated with telepathically that never gets elaborated on.
The worst of it is that at the very end we get some of that weird unique detail when it grows legs and walks off but it’s confined to a mere sentence and is so far out of left field that it leaves the reader bewildered.
I’m certain this idea could be done well but this is mediocre at best. It’s starved of anything unique that would truly make it memorable. -1
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