The colonists had accepted. They’d moved to Croatoan Island, integrated with the native tribes, and began their new lives. The word carved into the tree wasn’t a distress signal. It was a signpost telling other colonists where to find sanctuary.

The journal contained entries from multiple people spanning decades. Each Tide Keeper had added their testimony before descending, and none had returned.

****

Sarah read with growing recognition.

I am Thomas Dare, grandson of Eleanor. The call came to me in my twenty-eighth year. I go willingly for my children and their children after.

I am Rebecca Dare Cooper. The ocean has sung to me since childhood. Tonight I answer.

The entries continued through the centuries. Dare, Cooper, Lawrence, Hayes, Hawthorne. Sarah’s breath stopped. Hawthorne. Her grandmother’s maiden name had been Dare. She pulled up her phone and accessed the photos of her grandmother’s old family Bible. She zoomed in on the family tree, following the maternal line backward. Every name from the journal.

Her grandmother had died when Sarah was twelve, drowning during a solo swim at dawn. They’d found her clothes on the beach, her body never recovered. Sarah’s mother had been devastated, but her grandfather had been strangely calm. “She went back to the water,” he’d said.

Sarah had thought it was poetic grief. Now she understood.

Through the porthole, the water began to move in impossible patterns. Bioluminescent organisms gathered, pulsing in rhythmic circles. The current swirled clockwise, then counter-clockwise, then settled into a figure-eight. It was deliberate. The entity was here.

Sarah pressed her hand against the cold glass. The bioluminescence intensified, forming shapes that almost resembled words. She felt something at the edge of her consciousness. Not words, but impressions. Welcome. Recognition. Question.

The entity knew her. Had always known her. Had been waiting.

****

Sarah grabbed her research tablet and began writing notes. The diving bell accident. The seal that had been inspected just yesterday. The support vessel’s mechanical issues. The storm that had come up so suddenly. Each event, in isolation, was plausible. Together, they formed a pattern.

The entity had called her, and the universe had conspired to answer. Now what?

Trying to gather her thoughts, she pulled up her recent messages on her phone. Her sister’s text from three days ago included a photo of her niece, Maya, on the beach. Fifteen years old, with the same dark hair and gray eyes that marked their maternal line. She’s become obsessed with marine biology. Wants to spend every moment at the ocean.

Sarah’s own obsession had started the same way. The dreams had come first. Dreams of drowning that weren’t nightmares but something different. Dreams of breathing underwater, of becoming something vast and ancient. The dreams had intensified every year until she’d finally chosen marine archaeology, trying to understand the pull she’d always felt.

If Sarah refused the call, Maya would be next. Maya would start having the same dreams. She would feel the pull growing stronger until it became unbearable, and she wouldn’t understand why. She was brilliant and young and had her whole life ahead of her.

Sarah looked back at the journal, at the final entry written in her grandmother’s hand: I am Margaret Dare Hawthorne. The ocean calls me home. I will go willingly.

Her grandmother was chosen and had accepted. She had left this journal here for Sarah to find.

****

The lights outside the bell pulsed, and Sarah felt the communication more clearly. Images flooded her mind: the coast as it had been 400 years ago. The colonists, desperate and starving. The entity, vast and ancient, maintaining the balance of these waters for millennia. It needed the Tide Keepers to anchor it, to help it remember what it meant to care about individual lives.

The entity showed her what awaited: permanent transformation. Her body would adapt to the depths. Her consciousness would expand, touching every current and creature in the sound. She would feel the sharks hunting, the crabs scuttling, the ancient sturgeon migrating. She would sense approaching storms and guide fish into nets. She would prevent disasters and protect the ecosystem.

She would not be alone. The entity would be there, vast and patient. And the echoes of every Tide Keeper who had come before. Her grandmother was there, waiting.

But she would never return to human form. This was not seven years of service. This was forever. The entity needed her permanently, and in exchange, it would spare Maya from the dreams, from the calling, from the inevitable pull.

Snapping from the visions, Sarah heard the rescue vessel’s engines through the water. They were coming. In less than an hour, they would haul her to the surface. She would return to her life, continue her research.

And Maya would start having the dreams.

****

Sarah opened her emergency kit and pulled out the waterproof marker. On the journal’s last blank page, she wrote: I am Sarah Margaret Hawthorne. I am thirty-two years old. I have studied the ocean my entire life, and now I will know it truly. I go willingly, in gratitude, to honor the pact my ancestors made. I do this for Maya, for all who come after. I will keep the tides.

She dated it October 16, 2025, and closed the journal, sealing it back in its wax covering. She placed it in the collection chamber, then used the mechanical arm to return it to the wreck site, wedging it back between the timbers where she’d found it. The next Keeper would find it when their time came. In seven years or seventy.

Then she began to open the diving bell’s flood valves.

The water rushed in, shockingly cold. Sarah’s training screamed at her to stop. Instead, she opened them wider. Water reached her ankles, her knees, her waist. She took deep, measured breaths, oxygenating her blood one last time.

Through the porthole, the bioluminescence blazed like stars.

Sarah filled her lungs, let the water close over her head, and opened her mouth to the sea. There was a moment of pure animal panic. Then the water entered her lungs, and instead of drowning, she began to breathe.

The transformation took her gently. Her consciousness expanded outward, joining with something vast and ancient and welcoming. She felt her grandmother’s presence like a warm embrace. She felt every Tide Keeper who had come before.

And she felt the ocean, truly felt it, in all its terrible beauty and power.

****

The rescue team attached the lift cables ninety minutes later. The storm had passed, leaving the waters eerily calm. They hauled the diving bell to the surface with careful precision, expecting to find Dr. Hawthorne cold and frightened but alive.

When they opened the hatch, they found the bell flooded and empty.

Her equipment remained carefully secured. Her research tablet sat in its waterproof case. The collection chamber contained artifacts from the wreck, but nothing that would explain her disappearance. They found no body. No signs of struggle. The flood valves had been opened from the inside, deliberately.

Coast Guard divers searched the area for three days, but Sarah Hawthorne had vanished as completely as the colonists of Roanoke, 438 years before.

Her sister, Miranda, scattered flowers on the water where the diving bell had been recovered. Her niece, Maya, stood at the boat’s railing and felt something shift inside her. The terrible pull she’d been feeling for months suddenly eased, as if a burden she hadn’t known she was carrying had been lifted.

The ocean was calm. The tides ran true. And in the deep water off Roanoke Island, something ancient and vast kept its patient watch, no longer quite so alone.

Seven years would pass. And somewhere along the Carolina coast, another descendant would begin to dream of drowning. Another would feel the ocean’s call. The pact would endure, as it had for centuries.

But Sarah Hawthorne would not walk out of the surf. She had become something else entirely. She was the current and the tide. She was the guardian of these waters. She was the keeper, eternal and unchanging, woven into the fabric of the sea itself.

And in the depths, she was finally home.

“Mama, I’m thirsty.”

Her mother shared hers, tipping it to Saharah’s lips. Half the bottle, maybe less. Her mother’s hand shook.

“That’s all we have until the next checkpoint, Saharah.”

“When’s that?”

Her mother didn’t answer.

An old man collapsed ahead of them, his body crumpling like paper. The soldiers pulled him to the side of the highway. Saharah watched as they checked his pulse, shook their heads, kept moving. They didn’t have time for the dead. No one did.

Her father took her hand. His palm was slick with sweat.

“Don’t look,” he said.

But she did. She saw the man’s face, slack and grey. She saw the wet stain spreading across his pants. She saw the flies already gathering.

They walked for three days. At night they collapsed in designated rest zones, parking lots, fields, anywhere flat enough for thousands of bodies. The sky stayed grey, heavy with Zara’s outer bands. Rain came in sheets, warm as bathwater, and Saharah opened her mouth to it, grateful even as thunder crashed around them like artillery. The lightning turned the world white, then black, then white again. No one slept.

On the second day, a woman went into labour. The soldiers radioed for medical support that never came. The woman screamed for hours. Saharah pressed her hands over her ears but she could still hear it, that animal sound of agony. When the screaming stopped, the soldiers carried the woman away on a stretcher. Saharah never saw what happened to the baby.

On the third day, her father stopped walking.

“I can’t,” he said, sitting down on the hot asphalt. “I can’t anymore.”

Her mother knelt beside him. “We’re almost there. Just a few more miles.”

“You go. Take Saharah.”

“No.”

“Please.”

Saharah watched her parents, not understanding. Her father’s face was red, his breathing strange and shallow. Her mother was crying without making any sound.

A soldier approached. “You need to keep moving.”

“He needs rest,” her mother said.

“There’s no rest. You keep moving or you stay here. Those are the options.”

Her father stood up. His legs shook but he stood. They kept walking.

2048

The Tennessee Valley Relocation Centre sprawled across what had been farmland outside Knoxville. Rows of prefab housing units, each one housing eight families. Communal kitchens. Communal bathrooms. Communal everything.

Saharah was eighteen now, thin as wire, her childhood softness burned away by years of rationing. The sea level had risen another metre since her last glimpse of the ocean. The Gulf Coast was gone. Florida was an archipelago. The Eastern Seaboard had retreated fifty miles inland, leaving drowned cities as monuments to hubris.

She worked in the camp’s vertical farm, tending hydroponic vegetables under LED lights. Twelve-hour shifts, six days a week. The pay was camp scrip, worth less every month as inflation spiralled. Food shipments from the Midwest had become unreliable as the breadbasket dried up, as the Ogallala Aquifer finally ran dry. Everything they’d been warned about came true with mathematical precision.

Her father had died two years ago, heat stroke during a work detail. Her mother had followed six months later. Pneumonia, officially. Grief, actually. Grief and exhaustion and the slow realisation that the world they’d known was never coming back.

Saharah lived alone now in a corner of a housing unit she shared with seven other families. She had a mattress, a blanket, a plastic crate for her possessions. The stuffed dolphin sat on top, its fur matted and grey.

The scrip ran out three weeks into every month. Always three weeks. The rations were calculated for survival, not comfort, and they assumed you had nothing else wrong with you, no extra needs, no medical issues, no bad luck.

Saharah had bad luck.

She got sick in March, some kind of intestinal infection that left her unable to work for a week. No work meant no scrip. No scrip meant no food. She spent five days in her corner, dizzy with hunger, watching the other families eat their rations and carefully not look at her.

On the sixth day, a guard named Torres stopped by her corner.

“Heard you’ve been out sick,” he said.

She nodded, not trusting her voice.

“That’s tough. Real tough.” He looked at her for a long moment. “You know, I could help you out. Get you some extra rations. Medicine, maybe.”

She knew what he meant. She’d heard the other women talking in whispers, late at night when they thought everyone was asleep.

“What do you want?” she asked.

He smiled. “I think you know.”

She thought about the hollow ache in her stomach, the weakness in her limbs, the way her vision had started to blur at the edges.

“Okay,” she said.

The first time, she left her body. That’s what it felt like. She floated somewhere near the ceiling of Torres’s quarters, watching this thing happen to someone else, someone who looked like her but wasn’t her, couldn’t be her. When it was over, he gave her a week’s worth of rations and a bottle of antibiotics.

She went back to her corner and ate half the rations in one sitting, her stomach cramping with the sudden abundance. Then she threw up in the communal bathroom, retching until there was nothing left.

She stared at herself in the cracked mirror. Same face. Same eyes. But something had changed. Something had broken or maybe just bent, reshaped itself to fit this new world.

She went back to work the next day.

Torres came by every week after that. Sometimes he brought food. Sometimes medicine. Sometimes just scrip. She stopped floating away. She stopped feeling much of anything. It was just another kind of work, another kind of survival.

At night, she climbed to the roof of her housing unit and looked south, towards where the ocean was. She couldn’t see it from here—she was still two hundred miles inland—but she could feel it. In the humidity that never broke. In the storms that came with increasing fury. In the news reports of new evacuations, new camps, new lines of refugees marching north.

The sea was coming. It was always coming.

2055

In July, the temperature hit 135 degrees Fahrenheit.

Saharah was twenty-five and looked forty. She’d survived two cholera outbreaks, one riot, and countless nights of hunger. She’d learnt to fight for her rations, to sleep with one eye open, to trust no one completely.

The heat wave lasted three weeks. The power grid failed on the fourth day. The cooling centres went dark. People died in their sleep, their bodies simply giving up. The camp had protocols for heat emergencies, but protocols meant nothing when the infrastructure collapsed.

Saharah survived by going underground, into the maintenance tunnels beneath the hydroponic farm. It was cooler there, maybe ninety degrees instead of 135. She brought water, food she’d saved, a torch. She stayed for five days, listening to the rumble of trucks hauling bodies away.

When she emerged, the camp had changed. Half the population was gone. Some dead, some fled. The soldiers were fewer now, their uniforms dirty, their eyes hollow. The government was retreating to the Canadian border, to the northern territories where it was still possible to live. The centre couldn’t hold.

Torres was gone. Most of the guards were gone. The system that had exploited her had collapsed, and she felt nothing about it. No relief. No satisfaction. Just the same hollow numbness she’d felt for years.

She packed what little she had, some clothes, a water bottle, a knife she’d traded for. She left the dolphin behind. It belonged to a different person, a different world.

She walked north because there was nowhere else to go.

2071

The march through the drowned South took two years.

Saharah moved with a loose group of survivors, the composition changing constantly as people died or split off or simply disappeared. They followed old highways, now cracked and overgrown. The South was emptying out, becoming uninhabitable. Temperatures regularly exceeded 120 degrees. The humidity made breathing feel like drowning.

They passed through what had been Chattanooga, water up to their waists, moving through streets that had become canals. Fish swam through living rooms. Snakes coiled in trees. The sea had reached Tennessee, pushing inland through the river systems, turning the landscape into a vast delta.

Saharah tried to remember that day on Miami Beach, tried to recall the beauty of it, but the memory was corrupted now. The sea wasn’t beautiful. The sea was a monster, patient and inexorable, swallowing everything.

They ate what they could find. Snakes, mostly. Rats when they were lucky. Sometimes nothing for days. A woman named Running Bear taught her which insects were safe to eat, which plants wouldn’t kill you. Running Bear had been a botanist before, in the world that was. Now she was just another refugee, her knowledge worth only slightly more than ignorance.

“You ever think about before?” Running Bear asked one night as they huddled under a highway overpass, rain hammering the concrete above them.

“No,” Saharah lied.

“I do. All the time. I had a garden. Roses. Can you imagine? I spent hours worrying about aphids.” Running Bear laughed, a sound like breaking glass. “Aphids.”

“What happened to your family?”

“Dead. Yours?”

“Dead.”

They sat in silence, listening to the rain. In the morning, Running Bear was gone. Saharah never saw her again.

The group reached Kentucky after eighteen months. They’d started with over a hundred people. Twelve remained.

The Kentucky camp was worse than Tennessee had been. Overcrowded, undersupplied, violent. Warlords controlled sections of it, demanding tribute for protection. The soldiers who remained were indistinguishable from the warlords. Everyone had guns. Everyone was desperate.

Saharah found work in the medical tent, such as it was. No real medicine, no equipment, just people dying of diseases that had been eradicated a century ago. Typhoid. Dysentery. Measles. She cleaned wounds with boiled brown water, held hands as people died.

The sea level had risen three metres since her birth. The maps were redrawn constantly. The coasts were gone. The river valleys were flooded. The Great Lakes had expanded, swallowing cities. Chicago was Venice, then Atlantis.

She was forty-one and felt ancient. Her hair was grey. Her teeth were loose from malnutrition. Her lungs were scarred from breathing smoke, the fires came every summer now, massive conflagrations that burnt for months, turning the sky orange, the sun a dull red coin.

She left the camp when the food ran out completely. Just walked away one morning, heading north with nothing but the clothes on her back and the knife in her belt.

She didn’t know where she was going. Just north. Always north.

2087

Saharah found herself in what had been Ohio, though borders meant nothing now. The government had collapsed completely. There were warlords, petty kingdoms, zones of control that shifted like the weather.

She survived by scavenging through the ruins of drowned towns, pulling copper wire from walls, finding tinned goods in attics that had become ground floors. She traded what she found for food, for water, for safe passage through territories controlled by men with guns.

The world had become mediaeval, brutal, short.

She travelled alone now. Companionship was a liability. People would kill you for your shoes, for a tin of beans, for nothing at all. She slept in trees when she could, in abandoned cars, in culverts. She kept moving.

The sea level had risen four metres. The ocean had pushed up the Mississippi valley, turning it into a vast inland sea. The Appalachians were islands now, their peaks jutting from the water like broken teeth. The coasts were memories, stories told by old people like her, though there weren’t many old people left.

She was fifty-seven. She’d outlived almost everyone she’d known from before.

One day she came across a settlement, twenty or thirty people living in what had been a shopping centre, now half-submerged. They had a garden on the roof, rainwater collection, some semblance of order. They let her stay for three days, fed her watery soup, asked her questions about the outside.

“Is it true about the Rockies?” a young man asked. He couldn’t have been more than twenty. “That the rich people are up there? That it’s like paradise?”

“I’ve heard that,” Saharah said.

“You ever try to get there?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

She looked at him, this boy who still had hope in his eyes, who still thought there might be something better somewhere else.

“Because they’d kill you before you got within a hundred miles,” she said. “The military protects them. Drones, automated guns, minefields. You can’t get there. Nobody can.”

The hope died in his eyes. She felt nothing about it.

She left the next morning.

The jet stream had collapsed years ago, and now storms came from impossible directions with impossible fury. The temperature swung wildly scorching heat that killed in hours, followed by freak ice storms as the climate system spasmed and convulsed. Nothing was predictable.

Saharah kept walking north until she reached Lake Erie.

The lake had merged with the ocean, saltwater pushing inland through the drowned river systems. The sea had reached the Great Lakes. The sea had won.

She found a shack made of scavenged materials on what had been the shore, now just another piece of the endless waterline. No one lived there. She moved in.

She was too tired to move anymore. Too tired to care.

2094

She was sixty-four and starving.

There was no food. The fish were gone, poisoned by the warming water, by the pollution, by the toxic algae blooms that turned the sea green and made the air smell like rot. The birds were gone. The insects were gone. Everything was gone.

She’d eaten the last of her supplies, a handful of dried beans three days ago.

Today she’d found nothing.

She sat on a piece of concrete that had once been part of a building, watching the water lap at the shore. It was higher today than yesterday. It was always higher.

Her body was failing. She could feel it shutting down, system by system. Her vision blurred at the edges. Her hands shook. Her heart beat irregularly, skipping and stuttering. She was cold despite the heat, her body no longer able to regulate its temperature.

The sky was yellow with smoke from fires burning somewhere to the west. The air was thick, hard to breathe. Her chest rattled with every inhalation, a wet sound that reminded her of her mother’s last days.

She thought about that day on Miami Beach, sixty years ago. The blue water. The warm sand. Her father’s hand on her shoulder, heavy and reassuring. Her mother’s laugh, bright and unselfconscious. The taste of salt on her lips.

The water had been beautiful once.

She tried to remember her father’s face but couldn’t quite grasp it. The details had worn away, leaving only an impression. Kindness. Worry. Love.

Her mother was easier. She’d looked like Saharah, or Saharah had looked like her. The same eyes. The same stubborn chin. The same hands.

Saharah looked at her own hands now, skeletal and scarred, the skin hanging loose. These weren’t her mother’s hands. These were a stranger’s hands.

She watched as a wave rolled in, higher than the last, reaching for the concrete she sat on. The sea was still rising. It would never stop rising. It would swallow everything eventually—the ruins of cities, the bones of billions, the memory of what had been.

Another wave. Closer now.

The water touched her feet.

It was warm, like bathwater, like tears.

Her heart stuttered, paused, beat once more.

The water rose around her, patient and inexorable.

Saharah’s heart beat its last, and she let the sea take her home.

“Quickly now,” she urged them. Her meaty mocha hand maintained an iron grip on the door’s lever handle, lest the gale tear it away, as she stepped aside to let them in before muscling the portal closed.

“Welcome, intrepid friends,” she greeted them, beaming, as she tugged her hood back off her salt and pepper braids. In her free hand she grasped a stack of large index cards. “I’m Moana.”

“Moana …?”

“I promise you, I was Moana long before Disney cashed in on her.”

Liam laughed.

“Aloha, Moana,” Liam said. “I’m, uh, … Axel.”

“Of course you are,” she replied drily.

“Talofa!” she repeated to the three. “You’re my first visitors today. ‘Fe‘e and I are so honored and excited that you defied the tempest to meet us.’” She indicated with her hand the large cylindrical tank situated a few feet behind her.

“I thought his name was ‘Reefer,” Sadie said. “It says it right there on his tank.”

“‘Fe‘e is his Samoan name,” she replied with a smile. “Which I think of as his real one.”

“What does ‘Fe‘e’ mean?”

“Oddly enough, it means octopus,” she said with an infectious laugh.

Her three visitors laughed along.

“Reefer is the unfortunate result of a naming contest aimed at stoking the imaginations of local school kids,” she confided in a near whisper. “But it goes down a lot easier with tourists.”

The visitors introduced themselves by their aliases as they shook off their dripping rain gear, spreading it on a bench that sat against one wall.

Eager as they were to meet Fe‘e, they also wished to ingratiate themselves with his minder.

“With all due respect,” Sadie remarked, “I wouldn’t expect many more visitors. Pretty stormy out there.”

“Oh, you never know,” Moana replied cheerfully. “In any event, Fe’e is excited to have some visitors.

“We can get on each other’s nerves.”

Even Maria smiled.

“We were just working on a lesson.” She brandished the stack of index cards.

Lesson?

Affixed to the curving glass wall by its suckers, Reefer stared at them through his huge, narrowed eyes while employing three tentacles to work a large Rubik’s Cube.

Hallucinating. I’m hallucinating …

Liam tried to avert his eyes as the margins of a small octopus tattoo on Moana’s fleshy cheek slowly expanded across her moon face, which lit up when she eyed the hemp octopus dangling from a string about Maria’s neck.

“May I touch it?” she inquired meekly.

“Of course, tia,” Maria replied with a smile.

“Mamā,” Moana uttered in apparent awe as she fingered the hemp figure with apparent reverence.

Mama …?

“Pardon a lo‘omatua,” Moana said somberly. “Mamā in Samoan means something like ‘perfect’ in English.

“Like an American mama,” she explained with a smile, “might tell her precious daughter.”

Maria’s eyes moistened.

“You made this yourself?”

Maria nodded shyly.

“It is exquisite, teine.”

Tay-neh?

Liam tried not to gape as Moana’s tattoo continued its steady conquest of her physiognomy.

On the plane, Maria had shared with the group a video shot by a local news crew that she’d come across about Moana, an octogenarian volunteer who had almost single handedly rescued the aquarium from its planned closure.

A self-educated marine biologist, the old woman had managed the Tauese P.F. Sunia Ocean Center, a regional National Marine Sanctuary. She was one of thousands of Samoans forced to relocate from her home island of Tutuila as brine from rising seas contaminated the region’s dwindling groundwater.

That situation, in addition to other challenging factors, led to the American Samoa Rising Seas Relocation Act, better known to supporters as AmSamoRSReLoA and to its detractors as AmSamScamA.

Widowed and childless, with few kin to speak of, she’d latched on to the rare octopus, acquired when it was the size of a thumbnail, as a smart, lively companion. She spent most nights at the aquarium, sweeping up, cleaning the exhibits, whether they warranted it or not, and sleeping on a cot in a closet-size excuse for an office. The door to the office was nowhere in sight.

Flouting safety codes, she’d ridden out some big storms in scuba gear trying to protect the exhibit’s marine residents.

“Wouldn’t it be easier on everybody just to let all the fish go?” Tate had inquired on the plane.

“Please take the self-guided grand tour,” the increasingly cephalopodic Moana said with a chuckle as her arms morphed into orange tentacles and the octopus tattoo on her cheek expanded until it replaced her head with a bulbous morphology.

I’m hallucinating …

The space’s rear walls receded as they proceeded to the tanks bolted to the floor that harbored a collection of native Gulf Coast marine life, including neon seahorses performing an exquisite ballet and schools of vibrantly colored fish shimmying rhythmically to a color-shifting strobe pulsi

WAS THIS A DISCO DANCE SONG? CHIC – LE FREAK (REACTION)

ng through the brine.

Stealing a glance at Reefer’s tank, Liam found the creature following them with his eyes. Extending a tentacle in Liam’s direction, its tip curled and uncurled toward its amorphous mass, as though beckoning him closer.

Unintelligible rune-like figures streamed across its now scarlet mantle.

I’m hallucinating …

Unsure of what he was actually seeing, Liam shrugged helplessly at Reefer, who comically appeared to ape the gesture.

It’s like he wants to meet us …

Falling quiet, Moana’s evanescent cheeks billowed as she reviewed the cards in her tentacles, now glowing eerily, as her guests scrutinized the aquatic life; each specimen, according to their accompanying interpretive, hand-typed index cards, represented a threatened species.

“It’s time you met the star of the show,” she said after a few minutes, apparently satisfied with the adequacy of their tour. “And don’t think for a moment that he doesn’t know it …”

An ancient metal office chair with a tattered seat cushion stood before Reefer’s tank, to which were taped still more cards offering insights into the creature’s biology, behavior, and conservation challenges. Within his enclosure were rocky crevices, coral, and an artificial cave. The LED lighting simulated ocean conditions, from dawn to the mesmerizing, bioluminescent glow of deep waters.

Reefer held court, as it were, in chameleonic fashion, holding the inquisitive stares of his visitors.

To Liam’s astonishment, a series of what appeared to be numbers and mathematical symbols flashed on and streamed like a chyron across Reefer’s protean, elastic mantle. He exchanged wide-eyed glances with his companions, who were equally rapt.

“He says hello,” Moana informed them happily.

“I believe it,” Sadie muttered in an awed voice.

“Are you being metaphorical,” Liam asked, “or do you actually understand those symbols?”

Moana proffered in a tentacle the index cards she still carried. “I’ve been teaching him, or he me, perhaps, to communicate using alphanumeric octal code.”

Octal code?

“What’s an octal?” Sadie inquired.

“It’s counting in base eight,” Moana replied matter-of-factly.

“Like in the video,” Maria noted.

“That’s right,” Moana affirmed. “Using the numbers zero through eight. In the octal system, each digit represents a power of 8, similar to how in decimal each digit represents a power of 10.”

Sadie’s gaze, Liam noticed, evoked that of a deer in the headlights.

“When Fe’e arrived here, I just fell in love with him,” Moana confided. “He’s the first giant Pacific I’d encountered here. I saw them all the time back on the Islands.

“The warming, shifting ocean currents pushed them up here.”

WAS THIS A DISCO DANCE SONG? CHIC – LE FREAK (REACTION)

The digits resolved to be intelligible, unintelligible, and then intelligible anew, as if the octopus was recognizing and correcting errors.

“He’s experimenting with forming the figures on his mantle.”

“Cephalopodic penmanship,” Liam ventured.

His companions looked at him blankly.

“Never mind.”

“When I worked at the Ocean Center in Samoa,” Moana said, “I learned that researchers were studying whether fe’es, having eight limbs, each with its own brain, and possessing an almost alien intelligence, might have the cognitive capability to grasp octals.”

“They tried all kinds of really elaborate codes, like they thought he was some kind of supercomputer or something.”

Moana had hired on as a technical consultant for “My Octopus School,” which required her to sign a nondisclosure agreement, only to quit after she was told to skew some data for dramatic purposes. She asked to speak with Mauritius to express her concerns, but his staff put her off, accepting and shelving, if not tossing, her recommendations.

She heaved a heavy sigh as the building’s spare illumination flickered.

“Been runnin’ on a generator since the power died,” she said. “Overhead on this little slice of marine heaven is breaking me.”

“You shell out of your own pocket to keep this place open!?” Liam exclaimed.

“Donations are voluntary,” she replied. “And I get a grant here and there as well.”

Noting Maria was staring raptly at the tank, Liam and his cephalopodic companion returned their attention to its occupant.

A sequence of numbers, 11014515416040155145, marched slowly across Reefer’s mantle.

I’m hallucinating …

Maria pressed her palms against the tank, while the octopus pressed the tips of two tentacles opposite her digits. Bowing her head, she rested her sloping, indigenous forehead against the tank.

Moana’s hallucinatory avatar stared at the repeating sequence in evident astonishment.

“How does that translate?” Liam asked.

“Oh my god,” Moana said. “It says …”

“ …Release me!” she and Maria cried in concert.

“I never taught him that!” Moana wailed as she fainted, her floppy octopus head splatting against a display tank behind her before she buckled to the floor, morphing back into Moana as she lay prostrate.

A sudden crash jolted Liam from his reverie; sitting bolt upright in his seat, he slid off his sleep mask, blinking rapidly and looking around him. Alarms blared. The craft yawed to the left, pressing Liam forcefully into his seat.

“Are you with me, Avi?” Fatima inquired calmly.

“I wanna play Candy Crush,” Avi replied in a girlish timbre.

“Oh, merde!” Fatima exclaimed.

WAS THIS A DISCO DANCE SONG? CHIC – LE FREAK (REACTION)

“What’d she say?” Liam asked.

“She said, oh, shit,” M replied grimly. “W’at up, Fatima?”

“We just got hit by lightning,” the pilot said. “Avi’s hallucinating.”

“Oh, shit,” Liam muttered, unrelieved to realize he was neither dreaming nor hallucinating.

“Left engine’s out, but we have enough juice to bring her in on the other,” Fatima reported. “Gonna be bumpy, though. Ground crews are preparing for an emergency landing.

“Hold on tight and keep your heads down. Que Dieu nous aide.”

The craft listed acutely to port before its nose plunged earthward. Liam grabbed a sickness bag as his stomach vehemently protested. The passengers all eyed each other nervously.

“If she said she’ll land this bird,” M shared with them, “I have absolute confidence in her. She’s a great pilot.”

“There’s a gremlin on the wing!” Ellie shouted, unexpectedly drawing laughs.

Maria appeared to remain in her trance.

The plane continued in what felt like freefall for a few more seconds that crept by like millenia before it gradually leveled off.

Liam and company took a collective deep breath and heartily applauded.

“Ladies and germs,” Avy suddenly announced, “please prepare for landing at Mara LaGaux Regional Airport. I trust you’ve had a pleasant flight.”

Fatima and her passengers guffawed.

Fiction Horror Science Fiction

Has the Dutch authorities seizing control of Nexperia’s management and ousting of its Chinese CEO, Zhang Xuezheng, set a precedent for other countries to follow?

Certainly.

What is a precedent?

An example-setting event.

This time, the dutch, population 18m, GDP $1.2t spending $23b on defense invokes wartime requisition provisions on Chinese interests.

I’ve not checked exhaustively but this is probably a first in the 21st century for the dutch, invoking executive control on corporate matters.

Put another way, the dutch are making adversaries out of another sovereign state that is not only an order of magnitude larger and stronger, but on a different CONTINENT.

You have to wonder at the nature of the existential threat to the Netherlands that warrants the invocation of wartime provisions. Especially when the dutch are taking on an UNSC P5 member at the center of the global mercantile trade, with Amsterdam 7,800km from Beijing as the crow flies.

The optics look worse when one considers the dutch are part of the EU.

What’s next, after expropriation of executive control? The seizure of assets? Oh wait, they already did that to the Russians.

There is war, and there is peace. Two paradigms. Peace builds, and war destroys. By signaling war, the dutch are taking a wrecking ball to their own economy.

Trust and confidence are hard-won, and ephemeral once lost.

A resolute, swift and sharp Chinese response will quell the sprouting of evil thoughts. Otherwise it is open season on all things Chinese, including Singapore diaspora and chinatowns everywhere. All one needs is a Chinese sounding name or yellow skin to be labelled as spies or Beijing foot soldiers.

We are entering the age of strife, and clear and present risks are mushrooming all around us.

Be careful out there.